October 6, 2020 |
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The explosion of charter schools in the U.S. is allowing individuals, corporations, and organizations to use public funds to secure their own financial gain and private profit—often at the expense of the common interest they claim to serve, a new policy brief from the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder finds.
Released Thursday by Rutgers Professor Bruce Baker and Western Michigan University Professor Gary Miron, the report argues that charter school policy promotes “privatization and profiteering” via the following channels, as quoted from the report:
- A substantial share of public expenditure intended for the delivery of direct educational services to children is being extracted inadvertently or intentionally for personal or business financial gain, creating substantial inefficiencies;
- Public assets are being unnecessarily transferred to private hands, at public expense, risking the future provision of ‘public’ education;
- Charter school operators are growing highly endogenous, self-serving private entities built on funds derived from lucrative management fees and rent extraction which further compromise the future provision of ‘public’ education; and
- Current disclosure requirements make it unlikely that any related legal violations, ethical concerns, or merely bad policies and practices are not realized until clever investigative reporting, whistleblowers or litigation brings them to light.
In a blog post on Thursday, education policy analyst Diane Ravitch argued “this is an important report because it lays out the specific ways in which charter operators have gamed the system for the sake of lucre.”
A report summary offers one example of charters siphoning off public funds. “[C]harter operators working through third-party corporations can use taxpayer dollars to purchase buildings and land,” the summary states. “The seller in these purchases is sometimes the public school district itself. That is, taxpayer dollars are used to purchase property from the public, and the property ends up being owned by the private corporation that operates or is affiliated with the charter school.”
“This particular type of transaction is usually legal and it can be very logical from the perspective of each of the parties involved. But we should be troubled by the public policy that allows and even encourages this to happen,” said Baker in a statement released Thursday.
Miron added that “less than arm’s-length leasing agreements and lucrative management fees are extracting resources that might otherwise be dedicated to direct services for children.”
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The findings of the brief have broad implications for the future of education in the United States. “Charter schools are now the most rapidly growing form of schools in the nation’s education system, but surveys show Americans generally don’t understand what charters are even if they tend to favor them,” noted Jeff Bryant of Campaign for American’s Future in an op-ed published Thursday.
Studies suggest that this knowledge gap is system-wide. An in-depth investigation published in October by the Wisconsin-based Center for Media and Democracy found that “the public does not have ready access to key information about how their federal and state taxes are being spent to fuel the charter school industry since the 1990s.”
Thursday’s report follows other studies which find that the expansion of charter schools is worsening racial inequalities in education. For example, a Duke University study released in April found that the charter school boom is worsening racial inequality in K through 12 education across the state of North Carolina.
What’s more, an analysis released by the Minnesota Star-Tribune in February found that public schools are outperforming charters across the state, and that the latter fail to adequately support minority students.
As Bryant noted, “Reports of charter schools financial misconduct are now so numerous that it seems every day brings a new revelation of how these schools misappropriate and misspend public money.”
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October 6, 2020 |
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The father of the three-year-old Syrian boy whose lifeless body washed up on a beach in Turkey—the powerful photo of which captured the human tragedy of the refugee crisis—will deliver a Christmas message in which he urges the world to have sympathy for those fleeing the ravages of war.
Abdullah Kurdi, who, in addition to losing three-year-old Alan, also lost his wife, Rehanna and five-year-old son Ghalib when the boat bound for Greece they were on capsized, will deliver the remarks in this year’s alternative Christmas message on the UK’s Channel 4. An excerpt of the message and transcript have already been released.
“We Syrians leave our country due to war. We all are afraid for our children, for our honor,” Kurdi says.
“I want to help children because they know nothing about life except for laughing and playing. That’s all they know. So it’s a problem for children if we don’t look after them and take care of them.”
“My message,” Kurdi adds, “is I’d like the whole world to open its doors to Syrians.
“At this time of year I would like to ask you all to think about the pain of fathers, mothers and children who are seeking peace and security.”
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He adds, “We ask just for a little bit of sympathy from you,” and ends by saying, “Hopefully next year the war will end in Syria and peace will reign all over the world.”
The war in Syrian has already uprooted more than 4 million people, and the International Organization for Migrations said this week that the number of fatalities of refugees or migrants just off Greece or Turkey this year has surpassed 700, including children and babies. In the latest such tragedy, at least 18 migrants drowned Thursday when their boat headed to the Greece sank.
António Guterres, outgoing head of the UN Refugee Agency, warned this week, “If the conflict does not end quickly, this might be the end of Syria as we know it.”
Channel 4 has broadcast an annual alternative to the Queen’s Christmas Day address to the UK since 1993. Last year’s was given by British Ebola survivor William Pooley, who said, “Christmas should focus our minds on our kinship with people in all corners of the globe. We are all brothers and sisters. I’m sure we would all help a brother or sister in need.”
The message in 2013 was given by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who said that “a child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all,” and that the kinds of surveillance outlined in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four “are nothing compared to what we have available today.”
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October 6, 2020 |
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Dark money groups have spent $143 million on the 2016 U.S. presidential election since last July—nearly four times as much as the candidates’ own campaigns, Politico reported in a new analysis on Tuesday.
The origins of most of that funding will never be revealed, while some of it will be made public at midnight on January 31, just hours before the Iowa caucuses, writes Politico‘s chief investigative reporter Kenneth P. Vogel.
With federal regulators struggling to navigate the election landscape in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision, outside groups are having an increasingly powerful influence over the proceedings, Vogel found.
“Every day, we learn more and more about how super PACs and other outside groups are working extremely closely with federal candidates,” said Federal Election Committee (FEC) member Ann Ravel.
While the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision opened the door to unlimited campaign spending by outside groups like corporations and super PACs, the blame is also shared by the FEC itself, which has been criticized for its toothless approach to regulating the flow of dark money, Ravel said.
In the intervening years since they handed down the decision, it’s become clear justices “did not understand what the implications were going to be of what they did,” she continued, adding that enforcing transparency and preventing coordination between candidates and their supporting groups “are the two issues that are the most frustrating, because the court was very clear about it and the law is very clear about it, but it’s clear that this is not the reality in the 2016 election.”
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Some candidates are reaping more rewards than others. Vogel reports:
According to Paul S. Ryan, an executive at the election finance watchdog group Campaign Legal Center, that tactic is a “misunderstanding of the law”—specifically, a section which defines coordination as “expenditures made by any person in cooperation, consultation, or concert, with, or at the request or suggestion of, a candidate, his authorized political committees, or their agents.”
Elsewhere on the campaign trail, groups supporting Jeb Bush have reportedly spent a whopping $61 million on advertisements for the former Florida governor, culled through fundraising dinners where the candidate himself appeared—before and after declaring his run. And Marco Rubio’s backers have launched a nonprofit called the Conservative Solutions Project, which has reportedly spent $9.5 million on ads for his run. The group is registered under a 501(c)(4) tax code, which allows it to hide its donors’ identities.
All of the major candidates—with the exception of Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side and Donald Trump for the Republicans—has the support of at least one outside spending group dedicated to their election, Vogel said.
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Following a warning from the World Health Organization that the mosquito-borne Zika virus is likely to spread to all countries across the Americas except for Canada and Chile, the U.S. director of National Institutes of Health (NIH) on Tuesday called for intensified efforts to study the link between Zika infections and birth defects in infants.
In a blog post, Dr. Francis Collins cited a new study in the journal The Lancet, in which infectious disease modelers calculate that the virus has the potential to spread across warmer and wetter parts of the Western Hemisphere as local mosquitoes pick up the virus from infected travelers and then spread the virus to other people.
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“The study suggests that Zika virus could eventually reach regions of the United States in which 60 percent of our population lives,” Collins wrote. “This highlights the need for NIH and its partners in the public and private sectors to intensify research on Zika virus and to look for new ways to treat the disease and prevent its spread.”
Since November, Brazil has seen nearly 4,000 cases of microcephaly—a neurological condition in which the head is very small because of an abnormally developed brain—in babies born to women who were infected with Zika during their pregnancies. So far, 46 babies have died. There were only 146 such cases in 2014.
As CNN reports, “Other Latin American countries are now seeing cases in newborns as well, while in the United States one Hawaiian baby was born with microcephaly after his mother returned from Brazil. In Illinois, two pregnant women who traveled to Latin America have tested positive for the virus; health officials are monitoring their pregnancies.”
And on Tuesday, the Arkansas Department of Health said a person who recently traveled out of the United States has tested positive for the Zika virus.
Meanwhile, authorities in Brazil, Colombia, Jamaica, El Salvador, and Venezuela were urging women to avoid getting pregnant altogether.
“Think about that,” environmentalist and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben wrote at the Guardian on Monday. “Women should avoid the most essential and beautiful of human tasks. It is unthinkable. Or rather, it is something out of a science fiction story, the absolute core of a dystopian future.”
Warning of “an emerging epidemiological apartheid,” McKibben argued the Zika outbreak—which has been blamed at least in part on climate change—is evidence that “we need to face up to the fact that pushing the limits of the planet’s ecology has become dangerous in novel ways.”
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Faced with an overabundance of underused coal plants, what has today’s coal industry decided to do?
Keep on building new coal plants—to the tune of a whopping $981 billion.
Those are the findings of a new report (pdf) put out by environmental groups Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and CoalSwarm. “New investigations detailed in the report revealed that while the coal industry continues to push for the construction of more coal-fired power plants, in reality, coal plants are increasingly sitting idle in all of the world’s four largest markets, and global coal consumption is declining drastically,” the groups noted in a press statement.
The non-profits’ report, Boom and Bust 2016: Tracking The Global Coal Plant Pipeline, explores the perplexing trend:
“Coal use keeps falling off a cliff and plants are sitting idle, yet more money is being wasted on misguided attempts at locking in this dirty, dangerous fuel,” said Nicole Ghio, senior campaigner for the Sierra Club’s International Climate and Energy campaign. “The hundreds of billions being thrown at coal could instead go toward the booming clean energy sector, helping more than a billion people get access to the clean, reliable electricity that fossil fuels have failed to deliver.”
China in particular is struggling to fight a looming overcapacity problem. “China alone is housing the largest power market investment bubble the world has ever seen,” observed Lauri Myllyvirta, senior global campaigner on Coal and Air Pollution at Greenpeace.
In fact, the country’s coal consumption and output are both projected to fall by 2 percent, according to the Australia Financial Review. In an effort to combat the bubble, the government last week ordered the construction of 250 coal plants to be halted and suspended permits for new coal plants in 13 provinces.
But even after those sweeping changes take effect, Myllyvirta noted that “the country could still bring over 500 new coal-fired power plant units online while power generation from coal is falling precipitously on clean energy growth and slower power demand.”
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And unfortunately coal “still accounts for the bulk of Chinese electricity generation, and will probably continue to do so for years, if not decades, to come, because power plants can operate for half a century,” Foreign Policy reported last week.
The news wasn’t all bad: the report discovered that 2015 “saw India’s first drop in annual [coal project] installations after continuing growth since 2006,” and its authors predict an even steeper drop in 2016 in that country. In fact, the report observes that around the world, coal plants are shuttering at a record pace—led by closings in the U.S. and Europe.
“In the United States, we’ve hit the point where coal is in a structural decline, and I think globally we are getting there as well,” Maura Cowley, director of the international climate and clean energy campaign for the Sierra Club, told Foreign Policy last week.
Last week marked the closure of the last remaining coal plant in Scotland, and earlier this month the last coal mine in the U.K. was permanently sealed. And in the past several months, the American coal industry was dealt harsh blows with announcements of pending bankruptcies for two of the country’s largest coal companies, Arch and Peabody Coal, pointing to the severe financial risks of investing in coal today.
So why are some investors still funneling so much money into coal projects around the world?
“Much of today’s overbuilding,” the report says, “is defended on the claims that newer plants are more efficient than older ones. However, even adding so-called efficient plants is counterproductive because it locks in large, long-lived carbon emitters, interfering with the need to fully decarbonize the power sector by 2040 in order to limit warming to 2°C.”
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Even without an additional $1 trillion worth of new coal projects, the report warns that “emissions from current coal plants will still be 150 percent higher than what is consistent with scenarios limiting warming to 2°C—meaning that most operating and new coal-fired plants will have to be phased out well before the end of their planned lifetime.”
Indeed, while “this research has revealed hundreds of billions being squandered on unneeded coal plants, there’s more at stake here than money,” as CoalSwarm director Ted Nace argued. “In terms of climate safety, the clock is ticking on the transition to clean energy. There is no time to waste.”
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October 5, 2020 |
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The Montana Republican now facing charges for allegedly assaulting a reporter took a page from President TrumpDonald John TrumpSenate advances public lands bill in late-night vote Warren, Democrats urge Trump to back down from veto threat over changing Confederate-named bases Esper orders ‘After Action Review’ of National Guard’s role in protests MORE’s playbook, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) charged Thursday.
She said Greg Gianforte’s alleged assault on a Guardian reporter Wednesday is “outrageous” and urged Montana voters to reject such behavior when they head to the polls Thursday.
“I viewed that as a mom and a grandmother. You know, we try to have some level of dignity as to how we treat people and who we are — the behavior we expect from our own families,” Pelosi said during a press briefing in the Capitol.
“And to see this person who wants to be the one representative into the House of Representatives from Montana be sort of a wannabe Trump — you know, use language like that, treat people harshly like that — that’s his model. Donald Trump’s his model. And we’ve really got to say, ‘Come on, behave, behave.’
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“That was outrageous.”
Trump, on the campaign trail last year, was frequently critical of the press, often attacking the media and energizing crowds during stump speeches. In March of last year, Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, was charged with battery for allegedly yanking the arm of former Breitbart reporter Michelle Shields — a case that was ultimately dropped. And since taking the White House, Trump has repeatedly accused the nation’s media outlets of peddling “fake news,” particularly when it pertains to stories about potential collusion between Russia and his campaign.
Trump’s approach has energized a conservative base that’s long accused the media of holding a liberal bias. But critics, including a long list of Republicans, have warned that the president’s constant attacks on the press will fuel public distrust in the very institution best suited to check the executive branch.
“It’s a tactic, to attack the press,” Pelosi said on Thursday. “And we really have to say this is about the Constitution of the United States, and behavior that creates alternative facts and fake news, and all these other mischaracterizations, do a disservice to our democracy.”
Montana law enforcers charged Gianforte with misdemeanor assault Wednesday evening, just hours after an encounter with Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs. Jacobs says he approached the GOP candidate at his headquarters in Bozeman and asked a healthcare question when Gianforte snapped and slammed him to the floor.
Gianforte offers a very different account, saying Jacobs was overly aggressive with his microphone and the pair became entangled, crashing together to the floor. Eyewitness accounts and Jacobs’s audio recording appear to support Jacobs’s version of events.
The episode is the latest headache for Republicans on Capitol Hill, who are already struggling to defend Trump amid the ever-evolving Russia investigation. Under Trump and Attorney General Jeff SessionsJefferson (Jeff) Beauregard SessionsMcCabe, Rosenstein spar over Russia probe Rosenstein takes fire from Republicans in heated testimony Rosenstein defends Mueller appointment, role on surveillance warrants MORE, the Republicans are pushing a tough law-and-order agenda that aims to rein in violent crime in the name of public safety. Sessions last week issued guidance to the nation’s law enforcers to prosecute crimes to the furthest degree.
Asked about Gianforte on Thursday, however, some Republican leaders were much more lenient.
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“I think he should apologize,” Speaker Paul RyanPaul Davis RyanBush, Romney won’t support Trump reelection: NYT Twitter joins Democrats to boost mail-in voting — here’s why Lobbying world MORE (R-Wis.) told reporters.
Pelosi emphasized that the Republicans’ approach to Gianforte “is really up to them.”
“But I hope it would be up to the people of Montana to demand a higher standard of behavior … for the sake of our children,” she added.
“How do you explain that to children? You ask a question, I’m going to strangle you? I mean, really.”
Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), former head of the Democratic Caucus, suggested Gianforte might need some anger-management courses.
“Maybe the guy needs to seek help,” Larson said. “I don’t know him, but that suggests some deep-seeded anger.”
October 5, 2020 |
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Newly released documents show that, in back-room talks, European officials assured ExxonMobil that the pending US-EU trade agreement would force the removal of regulatory “obstacles” worldwide, thus opening up even more countries to exploitation by the fossil fuel empire.
Heavily redacted documents pertaining to an October 2013 meeting, obtained by the Guardian and reported on Tuesday, reveal that then-trade commissioner Karel de Gucht met with two officials from ExxonMobil’s EU and U.S. divisions to address the benefits of the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
As the Guardian notes, the meeting was held at a time when countries in South America and Africa were “tightening regulations on fossil fuel companies for the first time in a decade, despite ExxonMobil’s ambitions to open up shale gas fracking wells in North Africa, Asia and South America.”
A briefing paper summarizing the key points of meeting reportedly stated: “TTIP is perhaps more relevant as setting a precedent vis-a-vis third countries than governing trade and investment bilaterally…We think that this third country element is in the interest of the energy sector, and especially globally active companies like Shell or Exxonmobil. After all, companies like Shell or Exxonmobil face the same trade barriers when doing business in Africa, in Russia or in South America.”
Or, as Guardian reporter Arthur Neslen phrased it, the commission effectively told the oil giant “that once the trade deal was in place, other countries outside it would be progressively forced to adopt the same measures, making it easier for companies such as ExxonMobil to expand into their markets.”
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The revelations underscore criticisms that trade agreements like the TTIP constitute a “race to the bottom” for environmental, public health, and labor standards. They come a day after Greenpeace activists set up a blockade outside of negotiations in Brussels to call attention to the environmental threats posed by the corporate-friendly deal.
“What the Commission calls barriers to trade are in fact the safeguards that keep toxic pesticides out of our food or dangerous pollutants out of the air we breathe,” said Greenpeace TTIP campaigner Susan Jehoram Cohen on Monday. The negotiators, Cohen added, “want to weaken these safeguards to maximize corporate profits, whatever the costs for society and the environment.”
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Indeed, Tuesday’s revelations are not the first to expose the collusion between European trade negotiators and the fossil fuel industry. Other documents released in November showed officials going so far as to ask industry leaders for “concrete input” on the text for the TTIP’s energy chapter.
After the latest report, Nick Dearden, director of the UK-based social justice group Global Justice Now expressed resounding dismay at the TTIP text and negotiation process, tweeting: “Can this deal get any worse?”
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The Bernie Sanders campaign has said it has broken its own fundraising record by bringing in more than $5 million just since the Vermont senator’s landslide win over Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary.
According to a statement posted Wednesday by the campaign,
That amount, the Wall Street Journal reports, “is a quarter of what Mr. Sanders raised in the entire month of January, when he outpaced Mrs. Clinton’s fundraising for the first time.”
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As BuzzFeed News explains, “The Sanders homepage was converted to a New Hampshire–oriented fundraising page Tuesday evening in advance of what aides hoped would be a good showing for the Vermont senator.”
After claiming victory Tuesday night, Sanders sent supporters to the site, telling the crowd, “I am going to New York City tonight and tomorrow, but I’m not going to New York City to hold a fundraiser on Wall Street.
“Instead, I’m going to hold a fundraiser right here, right now, across America,” he said. “My request is please go to BernieSanders.com and contribute. Please help us raise the funds we need, whether it’s $10 bucks, $20 bucks, or $50 bucks. Help up us raise the money we need to take the fight to Nevada, South Carolina, and the states on Super Tuesday.”
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The campaign has already boasted that it had the highest number of contributions for a White House bid, breaking the record held by President Barack Obama in 2011.
Sanders and Clinton will square off again on Thursday in Milwaukee for their next debate, hosted by PBS and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel‘s Bill Glauber describes the debate as
The debate being held in Wisconsin is significant, Politico reports, because it’s “one of the country’s most politically divided states, having elected a very conservative governor three consecutive elections, but also going for President Obama twice and liberal Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin in 2012. The state has been a focal point of several thorny political issues: labor disputes, public education, and voter ID law, among others. For now, Clinton is maintaining a slim lead in polling in the state. Her campaign has also amped up its attacks against Sanders; Bill Clinton took to the stump this week to thump Bernie’s campaign for alleged hypocrisy.”
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Hillary Clinton’s national lead over Bernie Sanders shriveled to single digits on Tuesday, denoting a tight race as voters in Michigan and Mississippi headed to the polls for Democratic primaries.
The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll has Sanders within seven points of the frontrunner, with 42 to 49 percent, marking the smallest margin yet between the pair in this particular poll.
A second poll, conducted by NBC News/Wall Street Journal, on Tuesday showed Clinton ahead by nine, with 53 to Sanders’ 44 percent.
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The ABC survey, which sampled random adults from March 3-6, found that Sanders “continues to draw strongly from younger adults,” with Clinton losing 13 points in that demographic since January. Sanders has also gained 16 points among men since January, while Clinton lost 12 points, marking “the first time in ABC/Post polls that [Sanders’] led among men.” The results have a margin of sampling error of 3.5 points.
The NBC/WSJ survey of 410 Democratic primary voters revealed similar trends, with the Vermont senator leading Clinton among independents (59 percent to 35 percent), self-described liberals (56 percent to 42 percent), and people younger than 50 (60 percent to 38 percent), Politico reports.
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In Michigan’s open primary, the challengers are vying for 147 Democratic delegates, 85 of which are “district-based” and are thus awarded proportionally based on local results. Mississippi, where Clinton is favored to win, has 36 Democratic delegates.
As Sanders currently holds 459 pledged delegates, compared with Clinton’s 663, a good showing in Michigan could tip the scales in his favor, especially after his weekend victories in Maine, Nebraska, and Kansas.
“If we want to change the same old, same old, we have to understand politics is not a football game. … Politics and democracy mean every single one of us has to be actively involved,” Sanders told a crowd in Dearborn, Michigan on Monday. “If there is a large voter turnout, we will win.”
The Detroit Free Press has live primary results from Michigan here.
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Bernie Sanders has made climate change a central pillar of his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president, and he is adamant that nuclear power has no place in his vision of the nation’s cleaner future.
Hillary Clinton, to the contrary, believes “nuclear energy has an important role to play in our clean-energy future,” Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s policy director, told the local Idaho news source Magicvalley.com on Monday.
Sanders argues for “a moratorium on nuclear power plant license renewals in the United States,” on his campaign site.
“Bernie believes that solar, wind, geothermal power and energy efficiency are proven and more cost-effective than nuclear—even without tax incentives,” his platform goes on, “and that the toxic waste byproducts of nuclear plants are not worth the risks of the technology’s benefit.”
When it comes to the candidates’ climate proposals, Magicvalley.com observed that Sanders’ “biggest contrast with Clinton is on nuclear energy.”
Clinton has switched her answer several times on the question of nuclear power. She was pro-nuclear power in 2007, when she began her first campaign for the Democratic nomination, changed her mind in the midst of that campaign in 2008 and stated that she was against it—”I have a comprehensive energy plan that does not rely on nuclear power,” she declared that year.
Clinton continued to argue against nuclear power until this most recent election season. As of February 2016, her campaign platform states that she is once again in favor of it.
The Democratic presidential hopefuls are currently focusing campaign efforts in Western states such as Idaho, which holds its Democratic caucus on Tuesday. The state is also home to the Idaho National Laboratory, a federal research facility that focuses on nuclear energy, which employs “thousands of Idahoans,” as Magicvalley.com noted.
Sullivan told Magicvalley.com, “The Idaho National Laboratory would be an important institution to promote our clean-energy policy.”
Clinton’s renewed pro-nuke stance may meet resistance from voters nationwide, who are against nuclear power in greater numbers than ever before. Indeed, a new poll shows that a majority of Americans now oppose nuclear energy, Common Dreams reported last week.
And nuclear power is not the only energy issue on which Clinton’s stance has recently pivoted. Just last week, she walked back statements she made arguing against coal at a Democratic town hall. In a “head-spinning reversal,” Grist reported, only a day after the town hall the Clinton campaign “released a statement saying, ‘Coal will remain a part of the energy mix for years to come.'”
Sanders has long been against both coal and nuclear power, and has often critiqued the nuclear power industry. He has harshly condemned the U.S. government’s subsidies of nuclear energy companies as well as the nation’s failure to maintain its dangerously aging nuclear reactors.
As a U.S. senator, Sanders also battled federal regulators for the right of his home state of Vermont to determine its own energy future in its struggle to shut down the problem-plagued Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) “has no right to tell us what kind of future we will have,” Sanders proclaimed on the floor of the Senate back in 2011. “The people of Vermont believe, and I agree, that our future lies with energy efficiency and sustainable energy.”
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