Bosses winning

As Congress moves to shore up the already drained funds for SBA's Paycheck Protection Program loans, *some* Democrats have tried asking if they could also maybe do something to prop up the state and local governments whose budgets have been cratered by the crisis and shut down.  But, guess what.

Democrats have been pushing to boost funding to cash-strapped states and local governments whose revenues have cratered. They had proposed $150 billion for the effort, but GOP leaders stood hard in opposition, at least regarding the current package of COVID-19 aid.

Guess your school and streets and sewers and buses aren't as high a priority as these large publicly traded companies who have been looting the "small business" aid.   Or, you know, coal. Coal is very important right now.

A coal company based in Indiana received $10 million from a federal loan program intended to rescue faltering small businesses from the economic ravages of the coronavirus pandemic.

But Hallador Energy has several hundred more employees than the standard firm awarded money under the $2 trillion stimulus bill. And it has at least two important ties to the Trump administration: Scott Pruitt, the former Environmental Protection Agency administrator, was hired last year to lobby for it; and the company’s former government relations director now works at the Energy Department.

The Nagin Presidency

I dunno.. I thought that might be a catchy descriptor a year ago.  But the comparisson isn't really so close anymore.  I mean, it's true the hillariously brazen corruption of the Trump people is somewhat reminiscent of what it was like here under Nagin.  But the scale of the damage left in its wake is too grand now for that to make sense.

The only true analog to Trump era licentiousness is the Bush Administration.  The Trump record is almost that bad.  He still hasn't matched the Bush gold standard by starting a catastrophic war that murders and endangers untold millions of people for generations. But give him time. He might get there.

In the meantime, another cartoon villain is jettisoned for being even too ridiculous for this level of unreality.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has resigned after months of ethics controversies, President Donald Trump tweeted Thursday.

"I have accepted the resignation of Scott Pruitt as the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency," Trump tweeted. "Within the Agency Scott has done an outstanding job, and I will always be thankful to him for this."

Pruitt's resignation follows months during which the EPA administrator has been embroiled in one ethics controversy after the next.

As over-the-top as Pruitt's pile of "ethics controversies" had gotten, it still pales in comparisson to the actual policy damage he was able to do during his short time in the post.   If anything it shows us just how openly and stupidly corrupt you can be in this government as long as you're handing over protected forrests, waterways, skies, etc to polluting industry.   Is there even anything left for Pruitt's successor to sell off? 

The day he truly became President

Here is a chilling thought.

With tariffs done, Trump’s sights are now on the Iran deal—and, possibly, the Russia investigation. “The president is finally realizing he is the president,” a former White House official told me. “He’s just making these decisions on his own.”

Which, okay, maybe. But what does it mean? That article talks about the possibility of firing Sessions and replacing him with Scott Pruitt who we can presume will be replaced at E.P.A. with a literal bag of coal. This might be an improvement, actually.

All of that is amusing to a certain degree. But I feel sorry for people whose job it is to parse some sort of strategic policy direction from Trump's constant personnel shuffling.  Currently there's a consensus forming around the notion that making a crusader ideologue Secretary of State, putting the torture lady in charge of CIA, and trying to figure out how to place a crazy war hawk as National Security of Advisor indicates a deliberate rightward shift in foreign policy.  The shoes all fit so maybe. On the other hand it could just be that he's finally coming around to Bolton's mustache.

Anyway, maybe Trump really is starting to feel his oats in the presidenting chair.  Or maybe someone will write the same thing when everybody is fired again in a few months.

"The E.P.A. is acting"

Trump put out a wresting tweet this morning. Everybody is talking about it. There's nothing new about that except that it involves a 7th grade level degree of video editing skill that we all agree is beyond the President's capacity. So the revelation here is that the unhinged tweets are not simply Trump acting alone.

Maybe that isn't significant but it does lend credence to the "distraction" theory popular among Trumpologists. I have been and am still skeptical of going too far in this direction. But the general admonition is that we (we being the entirety of the popular and media observation) are too focused on the carnivalesque antics of the President while teams of evil geniuses working behind the scenes quietly dismantle civilization.  I'm most often skeptical of this analysis where it regards the Russia investigations. 

Conspiracy theorists of the "radical center" apply this mode of reasoning to Russia when they should be using Occam's Razor.  They construct grand narratives about secret agents working to undermine freedom when what they're actually looking at is a story about corrupt international business dickheads and their ethically conflicted relationships.  The enemy here isn't a shadowy state conspiracy. It's just mundane everyday global kleptocapitalism. Not that that's necessarily better. It's just different and less fantastic.

This doesn't negate "distraction" theory entirely, though.  Trump's absurdities, intentional or otherwise, can take attention away from the real damage his administration is doing. In some cases they can even mask a dangerous competence at work.  Take, for example, Scott Pruitt's E.P.A.

Mr. Pruitt’s supporters, including President Trump, have hailed his moves as an uprooting of the administrative state and a clearing of onerous regulations that have stymied American business. Environmental advocates have watched in horror as Mr. Pruitt has worked to disable the authority of the agency charged with protecting the nation’s air, water and public health.

But both sides agree: While much of Mr. Trump’s policy agenda is mired in legal and legislative delays, hampered by poor execution and overshadowed by the Russia investigations, the E.P.A. is acting. Mr. Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general who built a career out of suing the agency he now leads, is moving effectively to dismantle the regulations and international agreements that stood as a cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s legacy.

“Just the number of environmental rollbacks in this time frame is astounding,” said Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard. “Pruitt has come in with a real mission. He is much more organized, much more focused than the other cabinet-level officials, who have not really taken charge of their agencies. It’s very striking how much they’ve done.”

The problem Trump presents doesn't have anything to do with his own perceived lack of "competence."  This is a chaotic and often bumbling administration. But often enough it's an active sort of bumbling that has real and dangerous consequences.  In Naomi Klein's words, it's important not to underestimate how good Trump is at being an idiot.

“I think he is a showman and that he is aware of the way that shows can distract people,” she says. “That is the story of his business. He has always understood that he could distract his investors and bankers, his tenants, his clients from the underlying unsoundness of his business, just by putting on the Trump show. That is the core of Trump. He is undoubtedly an idiot, but do not underestimate how good he is at that.”

Beyond that he has, presumably wittingly, “surrounded himself with some of the world’s most expert crisis profiteers”. Men who have made billions out of meltdown and financial crisis, such as Wilbur Ross, the “king of bankruptcy” who is now secretary of commerce, or the various crash-plutocrats recruited from Goldman Sachs and elsewhere. (“In any other moment,” Klein says with a laugh, “the very fact that the CEO of Exxon Mobil is now the secretary of state would be the central scandal. Here we have a situation where there is so much else to concern us it is barely a footnote.”)

And, of course, Pruitt fits into that group well. They're getting a lot done. Even while it seems like their boss is falling apart.

America was not great

It's only March 2017 but the T-P is already deep into something called "300 for 300." It's a nostalgia kind of like what they did when they spent a year remembering the 10th Katrinaversary. Only this time we are remembering the 300th anniversary of the founding of the city... which in a lot of ways is the reason we had a Katrinaversary in the first place so it's appropriate. 

Today they take us on a trip down segregation lane with separate but equal features on the history of the Pontchartrain and Lincoln Beach amusement parks. The times, they were bittersweet.

There's no way around the fact that Lincoln Beach, while separate, was far from equal to the white-only Pontchartrain Beach across town. That, after all, was the hallmark of America's segregation area. "We would drive by Pontchartrain Beach and marvel at the Zephyr roller coaster since Lincoln Beach's was much smaller," former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial told The Times-Picayune in 2014. To that extent, it was a cruel reminder of the status quo at the time. Still, for a decade Lincoln Beach was a place of fun, sun and family memories for countless New Orleanians -- even if those memories were often bittersweet.

The times, they were also toxic. 

Two in-ground pools were constructed in the park in the 1960s so patrons could still escape the heat when Lake Pontchartrain had a high pollutant count.

But thanks, in part, to the creation of EPA in 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1972, the Lake Pontchartrain basin and similar water systems nationwide have made slow but steady progress. For example, EPA helps support efforts of local government agencies and NGOs like the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation  to manage and monitor water quality. Recently, EPA's Urban Waters Partnership has helped create projects that ensure the lake's sustainability while enhancing public access and recreation opportunities.

But maybe that's all about to go away. President Trump's budget proposal announced this week proposes a 24 percent cut to EPA overall. During the campaign, Trump actually called for abolishing the department altogether. And the man he chose to head the agency has spent much of his career in government working to roll back its authority. 

It's all part of the plan to "Make America Great Again." But America has not been particularly great. And making it even the slightest bit more tolerable a place has always been and will always be a struggle. Perhaps if Tump's opposition in 2016 had been the least bit honest about this and not barked empty crap at voters about how "America has always been great," then maybe we wouldn't be in this mess. Oh well. #BernieWouldaWon, though.

Anyway, as a companion to this morning's nostalgia pieces from the T-P, here's a look at what America's Great Cities were like before EPA. Presumably, Trump will make them that way again.

We're never going to fix this

Bren Hasae is head of Louisiana's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. Today, in Baton Rouge, he presented the latest version of the state's coastal master plan to an oversight board. The talk, in recent years, tends to emphasize the "Protection" aspect of the agency's mission rather than "Restoration." As Haase told the committee as much once again.

“We’re never going to get back to the coastline we had in 1930s," Haase said in an interview after presenting the draft plan for the first time to the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority board.

That’s provided $50 billion can be found, which it has not. About $15 billion to $18 billion is “plausibly” available from a variety of sources, including the federal government, settlements from the BP Deepwater Horizon incident and the state, Haase said. Probably $150 billion is needed, but that’s not as realistic as finding $50 billion, he added.

We're never going to restore the coastline. And even given what we think we can do, we still aren't committed to paying for it.

Meanwhile... 

Marking another milestone for a changing planet, scientists reported on Wednesday that the Earth reached its highest temperature on record in 2016 — trouncing a record set only a year earlier, which beat one set in 2014. It is the first time in the modern era of global warming data that temperatures have blown past the previous record three years in a row.

The findings come two days before the inauguration of an American president who has called global warming a Chinese plot and vowed to roll back his predecessor’s efforts to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases.

Is it a Chinese plot?  We know industrialization in China has contributed to global warming just as it has in the West. On the other hand, China's move this week to cancel over 100 coal plants is the latest indicator of its effort to slow that trend. Although, much like the CPRA, China's climate policy isn't anywhere near what we would call the "Restoration" phase.

That said, there are a whole bunch of important asterisks here. First, Beijing has only ordered the provinces to cancel the plants. The provincial governments still have to actually comply. (And we’ve seen some provinces defy Beijing on overcapacity cuts before.)

Second, even under the new cap, Chinese coal capacity still has some room to expand going forward — which is why environmental groups like Greenpeace are calling on the government to go even further and cancel the rest of the dozens of new coal projects still in various stages of planning. 

Third, while any slowdown in Chinese coal demand is good news for climate change, it’s not great news for climate change. If the world wants to avoid drastic global warming — typically defined as 2°C or more — then it’s not enough for China’s CO2 emissions to simply plateau. They have to fall, very drastically. Doing that will require more than simply canceling any future coal plants. It will mean either retiring existing coal plants and replacing them with cleaner sources (as the United States is currently doing) or retrofitting the plants with carbon capture technology and burying their emissions underground.

 And that brings us back to the point.  Nothing anyone is doing right now has anything to do with "fixing" climate change.  Politics doesn't work that way.  The disaster is coming... actually is already here. All politics can do for us is determine who among us will bear the greatest costs of the disaster (and who might even benefit.)  As usual, the world's poorer classes are losing that fight to its ruling elite.

Don't expect that to change under a Trump Administration empowered by Trump's absurd (and inconsistent) proclamations to sound almost rational by comparison even while maintaining a policy of denialism.

Scott Pruitt, for his part, said that climate change is "subject to continuing debate and dialogue" (a meaningless truism that’s often used to stonewall any discussion of actual action). The most he would say about what he would do was: “I believe the EPA has a very important role to perform in regulating CO2." This is an accurate summary of what the law says, although given that Pruitt has sued to block every concrete step Obama’s EPA actually took to regulate CO2, it’s wildly unclear what he means by “regulating.” His track record thus far suggests he’ll do as little as humanly possible about climate change.

As my colleague David Roberts noted the other day, the term of art for this stance — which Tillerson, Zinke, and Pruitt all share — is “lukewarmism.” A lukewarmer is someone who won’t be so crass as to argue that climate change is a hoax, and doesn’t really want to fight over whether climate change is actually happening, but certainly has no intention of supporting serious emissions reductions anytime soon and will usually quibble endlessly about the extent and severity of global warming.

 At Pruitt's confirmation hearing today, Senatore Jim Inhoffe was playing his role in the farce.

Starting to hint towards UN conspiracy. Also talking about EPA conspiracies

— Zack Kopplin (@ZackKopplin) January 18, 2017

Clearing the way for everyone else to "teach the controversy" so to speak. But the temperature keeps rising and the ocean is coming to get us. As long as the friends and backers of Trump, Pruitt, Tillerson et al can continue to maximize profits in the meantime, then those men will have done their job.