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But the overarching theme of his speech, and the argument for his candidacy, I heard over and over from people who were there, was change. He could make that case partly because of something his friends had called The Proposal.

I remember there being a faction, said Heather Woodruff Grizzle, naming Sitaraman and Warrenand Joe Green, too, the gregarious, Hawaiian shirt-wearing roommate of then unknown Mark Zuckerberg. And then there was Buttigieg. Peter, Ganesh and Previn came forward with The Proposal, a student who also was heavily involved with the IOP told me.

This proposal advocated essentially for more open, less cliquish elections and ramped-up student say-so and power within the structure of the IOPless busywork and fewer administrative chores, more reading and writing and assisting staff and professors on research. The manifesto, which had circulated to acclaim from some but the exasperation of others, contributed to the reputations of its authors. Ganesh, Previn and Joe were all sort of agents of change, so to speak, said Jason Semine. And Buttigieg, I was told, was with them.

As much as he was aligned, though, with the ringleaders of this reform effort, Buttigieg wasnt seen as an agitator. He was lauded by nearly everybody at the IOP, then and now, for his deliberative, understated nature. He was, though, a believer in a more head-down inside game. In the run-up to the vote for leadership of SAC, Buttigieg displayed his talent for that inside game by approaching Seminethe forum committee chair who by virtue of that role had a relationship with a lot of underclassmen. In other words: persuadables. And he wasnt hiding the ball here, Semine said of Buttigieg. He was pretty clear: Hey, Ive got this election, I need to drum up votes For Semine, who knew Buttigieg well, it was unexpected, and pretty savvy, he said.

This, people thought, was pretty savvy, too: When it came time to pick a running mate, Buttigieg pivoted away from the lefty, rabble-rousing connotations of The Proposal. Betsy Sykes was a Republican. The cross-party-lines pairing wasnt that unusualthese were nonpartisan elections, and Tuckers vice president was Woodruff Grizzle, also a Republicanbut what else Sykes brought was her status as the chair of the fellows committee, another one of the primary leadership feeders. Having Betsy as his running mate I think very much helped, said Jonathan Chavez. Now, in the rough contours of this tight-knit electorate, Buttigieg had the votes to his leftplus more than he would have had to his right.

Buttigieg, too, was liked by the staff. The adult professionals who ran the operations of the IOP didnt have SAC votes. But thats not to say their approval didnt carry some weight. And Buttigieg could be a measured intermediary between the two groups.

You had all these really smart kids around you who had every idea in the world, and he was always somebody I could go talk to, to try and get a good read on what was accurate and what was not accurate in terms of what we were likely to face.

- Dan Glickman, former Kansas congressman and director of Institute of Politics in early 2000s

You had all these really smart kids around you who had every idea in the world, and he was always somebody I could go talk to, to try and get a good read on what was accurate and what was not accurate in terms of what we were likely to face, Dan Glickman, the former congressman from Kansas who by then was the director of the IOP, told me. Cathy and I used to talk about that, said Glickman, referring to Cathy McLaughlin, then the executive director of the IOP, now the executive director for the Biden Institute. Whenever we had an issue, shed say, Well, go talk to Pete.

Buttigiegs opponent in the election, meanwhile, was Caroline Adler, kind of like a Hillary Clinton type, said Houseintelligent, industrious, ultra-prepared. Tracy Flick, said Chavez. Since Harvard, Adler, now Adler Morales, has worked for Clinton (on her 2008 presidential campaign and in the State Department) and for Michelle Obama (in the White House and still as her communications director). In December 2002, she was the favorite going in, Tucker said. But Buttigieg won, and Adler, according to a close friend, was devastated. Her allies stewed about unjust gender dynamics at work. She was ambitious, and showed it, and that was and remains, they said, dicier for a woman than for a man. Buttigieg, they said, along with pretty much everybody else I talked to for this story, was equally ambitious. He was just more subtle about it.

His first full month in his new position, at a forum with Senator Ted Kennedy, Buttigieg again approached the standing mic. Forum regulars had come to expect from Buttigieg a certain something.

I was responsible for a thousand graduate students, said Joseph McCarthy, a Kennedy School dean at the time, but I still noticed Peter, which is rare. He would ask very searching questions and yet do it very respectfully and thoughtfully and seemed older than his years.

You could hear the commas and the semicolons, said McCarthys wife, Marina McCarthy, a Democratic consultant.

Sen. Edward Kennedy during the Sept. 2003 dedication of the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum of Public Affairs at the Harvard JFK School of Government. | Getty Images

Here Buttigieg faced Kennedy. It feels like a lot of your colleagues have adopted a posture of being for whatever the Republicans are for, only less, he said (around 51:30). The tax cutsjust a smaller oneand the warjust maybe not quite as quick as the Republican war. And then there are voices like your own, which are more forceful in opposition. I wonder if you see this as a split in the Democratic Party, and how you think, politically speaking, in the next few years your partys going to sort out what it thinks the meaning of opposition is.

Well, Kennedy responded, I would certainly expect that those differences would be clearerI think they are getting cleareras time goes on, certainly with regards to the involvement in Iraq.

That certainly was true for Buttigieg. Opposition to him on this front meant standing up and speaking out. In the middle of March, a week before the invasion of Iraq, he gave a speech to some 350 people in front of the Science Center at an Emergency Anti-War Rally.

Major events during Buttigieg's junior year at Harvard: the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the fall of Saddam Hussein. | Getty Images

Bush wants us to remember American security but forget that there might be consequences to American security if we alienate all of our allies, Buttigieg said, according to coverage in the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper. He pointed to the signature spire of nearby Memorial Church, where names of alums killed in action are carved in marble. They remind us of a time, he said, when we had to take up arms against another nation, and there may be a day we have to again, but that day isnt today.

It was a riskparticularly, perhaps, for anybody at all interested in a future run for elected office. It was not a consensus view on the campus, Semine said. A lot of our peers shared it, but it was not consensus.

What it was, too, was another something neweven for the people who knew Buttigieg the best.

That was probably the first time I saw him speak in public, roommate Pete Schwartzstein said. And he definitely took on a different personalike a very commanding tone.

The thing he could do, which most of the sort of intellectuals at Harvard couldnt, was that if he ever needed to give a speech, or summon himself for a public moment, he was just extraordinarily good at it.

- Brian Goldsmith, friend of Buttigieg at Harvard

He was able to kind of straddle two worlds, said Brian Goldsmith, a friend who was a year younger than Buttigieg (and popped up the other day on his list of bundlers). One world was the very academic, intellectual world but then the other thing he could do, which most of the sort of intellectuals at Harvard couldnt, was that if he ever needed to give a speech, or summon himself for a public moment, he was just extraordinarily good at it.

It was, thought Previn Warren, a watershed moment.

The summer before his senior year, Buttigieg was a research assistant for Harvard Kennedy School professor David King for a paper that would run in a book called Lights, Camera, Campaign! When I look back on the students I have had, King said when I met with him recently in his office, he stands out as one of a handful. Like its a very, very, very small number. Truly outstanding. Really something. And you knew it within the first few days of spending time with him. The paper Buttigieg helped King with dealt with Gores campaign in 2000 and specifically a whistle-stop bus-and-boat trip he took down the Mississippi River. Buttigieg crunched numbers from polls and campaign finance data that showed it helped Gore win Iowa and Wisconsin. Kind of interesting, King said with a smile, that we wrote a paper about traveling through Iowa and generating votes.

On and around campus that fall, Buttigieg and his roommates downed bottles of Sam Adams while rooting for the still-cursed Red Sox as they almost beat the hated Yankees in the baseball playoffs. At the same time, Buttigieg and his IOP mates followed along intently as Democrats mounted runs for president.

Onstage at a 2004 Democratic primary debate: former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, retired Gen. Wesley Clark, Al Sharpton, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. John Edwards, Sen. Joe Lieberman and Rep. Dennis Kucinich. At right: Kerry and President Bush shake hands during a debate in the fall of 2004. | Getty Images

That years accelerating Democratic primary was not dissimilar to this years, a big, unwieldy fieldalbeit with only nine candidatesvying to oust an Oval Office occupant who had lost the popular vote and was seen by party aspirants and their supporters as inept and unfit. Buttigieg watched all the candidates come through the IOP for televised sit-downs with MSNBCs Chris Matthews, from John Edwards to John Kerry to Al Sharpton to Dick Gephardt to Howard Dean. Buttigeg asked Gephardt a question about the youth vote. He lamented in conversations with King in his office the mealy-mouthed way in which Kerry had talked about his faith in a debate. In spite of that, though, and even though his stance on the war might have made him more simpatico with Dean than with Kerry, Buttigieg opted nonetheless to support the Massachusetts senator.

He was liberal, Brian Goldsmith said, but he was an institutionalist. And he was pragmatic. And I do remember him thinking Kerry would be a much better choice for Democrats than Howard Dean in 2004.

In classrooms and libraries, Buttigieg worked to cap what would prove to be his Rhodes-worthy rsum, earning a perfect score on a project in professor Alyssa Goodmans class, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. The title of his project? Young People and Politics. Goodman remembers Buttigieg well. Very serious, she told me. Very disciplined.

Read more:
How Harvard Made Pete Buttigieg the Moderate That Progressives Love to Hate - POLITICO

2019, it must be said, has been a pretty poor year for progressives, and given the need for action on climate change and to counter racist nationalism, it was a pretty poor one for the planet and for humanity.

The recent loss by Labour in the UK election has everyone scrambling to look for lessons that can be translated elsewhere such as to Australia and to the US for next years presidential election.

Mostly this involves very little logic and a lot of confirmation of previously held beliefs.

For Australians looking at the ALPs loss in the 2019 election things are pretty grim, and the standard talk about needing to reconnect with the centre is thrown around pretty easily. That Bill Shorten was never actually a left-winger or ever had a reputation for being overly progressive is just dismissed with a shrug. The centre shall hold!

For my part, the election only reminded me of the two rules of Australian federal elections governments win the close ones, and when a party starts trying to make it a contest between opposing frontbenches, they are lost.

Since the 1949 every time the opposition won whether Menzies, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, Howard, Rudd or Abbott they won big.

Aiming to win 76 seats might seem to be the way to victory, but it never has been the case for an opposition no opposition has ever won power with less than 54% of the seats (or at least 80 in the current parliament).

If youre not hearing the words the swing is on early in the broadcast, every time since the second world war that has meant the government has been re-elected.

And if you need to give your leader cover by trying to compare ministers, you are dead because barely anyone outside their immediate family knows who the minister for health is, let alone the shadow minister.

So get a leader who people like, and who has policies people like, and who is able to sell those likeable policies well.

Maybe that means go for the centre; maybe that means embrace an issue which has the most passion and which gets people excited.

But among the many problems for progressives is the need to also deal with the river of racism that now flows through our politics.

Conservatives here and in the UK and the US have decided white nationalism is the way forward and so devoid of soul are those within the conservative side of politics in the English speaking world that for the most part they care next to nothing that such an approach has racists viewing them as the best suited to lead.

For the philosophy of the conservatives is no longer of free markets or even traditional values; it is of annoying the left.

Ram a bill through parliament without debate? Use parliamentary committees to pursue a fraudulent partisan campaign? Do we care that such things are contrary to all established conventions that conservatives purport to hold dear? Pfft. If it annoys the left, then go for it. Even better if it involves picking on the powerless.

What this year has made clear is that there is no longer an actual political debate in this country, and barely one in the UK or US.

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This years election was not a contest of ideas, it was a contest of the ALPs polices and the Liberal partys lies about them.

Donald Trump showed that the media is helpless against a bald-faced lie proudly stated, and the Liberal party under Scott Morrison has applied the lesson so well you would almost suggest that lying was an innate ability of those within the party.

Tim Wilson told the ABC that it didnt matter that the ALP did not have a policy of a death tax, it was fair game because there are people within the party who want that policy.

The conservatives have realised such lies will be spread by the media, ever worried about being balanced, where every claim, no matter how discredited, deserves some debate even if it just to let it be debunked.

All the while on Facebook the lies are being spread, as some powerful journalists think their balance will provide any sort of counter.

And so, for example, we ask not which policy will best address climate change but which will cost the most, regardless of the impact on emissions.

To be honest, when you look at this year, you can understand why lying is a key part of the conservatives armoury it makes up for a lack of ability and achievement.

Take the now ongoing lie about best economic managers.

This past year the economy has been an utter cesspit. Just six times out of the 110 quarters since the 1990s recession has annual GDP growth been below 1.8% and half of them occurred this year.

There has not been a quarter of GDP trend growth above 1% since December 2011. That is nearly eight years. Before 2011 we used to average five such quarters of strong growth every three years.

Under the Liberal party, mediocrity has become the average, and previous averages have become mythical sighting ever over the horizon, like wages growth over 3% something we havent seen since March 2013.

The April budget did promise wages would get back to 3% growth by June 2021 but, as with every wage prediction made under this government, that was again pushed out, in this weeks midyear economic and fiscal outlook, to June 2023.

But hey, theyre going to deliver a surplus.

Woo. Hoo.

This year, real household incomes did not grow at all. OK, Im exaggerating they grew 0.05%. Enjoy.

Yes, household disposable income grew 0.9% due to the tax cuts. But that one-off hit is done, and given household consumption grew by the slowest amount since the GFC, its pretty clear were not feeling all that confident that the good times are about to start rolling.

And given the prospects for next year are so poor that the market currently is factoring in a 40% chance that by this time next year the Reserve Bank will have needed to cut the cash rate twice to 0.25%, people are right not to feel confident.

But we will probably have a surplus.

And we will endure yet another year of being told that the surplus matters, even as our living standards barely rise at all.

But let us not be too down-hearted. The fight continues. We shall continue to call out the lies, and we must remain willing to keep up the fight for better wages, better share of the national income and for action on climate change.

The 2010s were not a decade that will be looked back on fondly as a time of economic joy. Progressives must in the decade ahead be strong in acknowledging that this meagre allocation of joy is a purposeful outcome of the conservatives economic policies. They aim for weak wages growth, they prefer a larger share of income going to company profits and they continue to pretend a budget surplus matters, when really it is all about trying to reduce government services.

The 2010s was for the most part a decade lost for progressives in Australia, but we cannot allow the next decade to be surrendered.

Greg Jericho writes on economics for Guardian Australia

Read more here:
It's been a lost decade for progressives and for the planet but the fight goes on - The Guardian

Imagine it is 2024 and Boris Johnson is running for another term as prime minister. He is up against the fourth Labour leader to try to win an election since Tony Blair resigned 17 years before. A combination of boundary changes and the loss of Labour heartlands in Scotland give the incumbent an edge. But why is everyone certain that the Conservatives are going to lose?

The answer is a united opposition, not just of Labour politicians but of people across the centre and left of British politics. United by agreement on a package of democratic reforms, including an elected second chamber with proportional representation (PR) as the cornerstone of a transformational agenda. This wouldnt be simple expediency but a reaction to the divisive, bickering politics of the Brexit years that had been fed by dark money and the manipulation of social media. It would give the Electoral Commission sharper teeth and enable electoral law to catch up with the digital age.

Its a dream, but a good one.

According to a new YouGov poll, three quarters of Labour members want the party to support PR, but it is yet to be mentioned in the run-up to Labours leadership election. This seems odd given that Johnson ended up with a massive parliamentary majority despite barely getting more votes than Theresa May in 2017. At the moment, Labour contenders are quickly unpicking the compromises of their Brexit policy and shifting blame one way or another, while ignoring the fact that most of the electorate voted for parties in favour of a second referendum. If we had PR, then that is what our new government would be organising right now. First past the post (FPTP) distorts the outcome of elections but those on the left have held on to the expectation that their turn will come.

So why is Labour the only socialist party in the developed world that supports FPTP? Some are worried it would mean no more majority Labour governments, and therefore an end to the advancement of equality and the redistribution of wealth. Except we are 32nd in the OECDs rankings of income equality, way behind the rest of western Europe, where all countries have PR. Of the top 39 countries on the OECD list, only Canada and the US share our love affair with FPTP. The US has awful extremes of rich and poor, while Canada does manage to come ahead of us in 19th place. Yet Canada has never had a majority socialist government. Meanwhile, progressive governments in Denmark, Norway, Germany, Iceland, Finland and Sweden have almost never been the result of a single socialist partys majority, but are made up of leftwing coalitions and they do OK.

As weve seen, the argument that FPTP delivers strong and stable government is nonsense. I know from my own experience on the London assembly, elected via a system of PR, that a more consensual and positive politics is possible. We fought each other in elections and then worked together between them.

PR doesnt guarantee that things will get better, but it enables us to generate a consensus about the direction of travel, whether that is ending austerity, stopping the NHS being privatised or ending domestic violence. As Friends of the Earth has pointed out, the electorate favoured parties who take the climate emergency seriously yet we have ended up with a government that doesnt. This is a failure of FPTP.

I hope that the Labour leadership will not only start discussing PR, but also debating how best to work with other parties to beat the Conservatives next time. Although I find compromise with other parties very hard, I didnt enjoy the constant battle of wills on social media about tactical voting between people who were all keen to see the Tories gone from government. The Greens, Liberal Democrats and Plaid did show that it is possible to work cooperatively, but while Labour was invited to talk, it wouldnt engage.

The other side did it better: the Brexit party stood down in Tory marginals and then split the Labour vote in the north to open up the red wall and allow a Conservative victory. The lesson is clear, if progressives want to win a FPTP election then we have to get our act together.

The only two things I can predict with certainty about 2024 is that the climate emergency will have got a lot worse and that the Conservative government will have done relatively little about it. To rekindle the politics of hope, progressive politicians need to talk about what we can agree on. When the Green partys Caroline Lucas and Labours Clive Lewis brought a bill to parliament to launch the green new deal, I felt real optimism that we could create something that is both popular and also radical enough to begin to solve the climate crisis. Lets do the same with renewing our democracy.

Jenny Jones is the former chair of the Green party and a former deputy mayor of London

Read more from the original source:
First past the post warped the election. Progressives need to fight it together - The Guardian

Debbie Wasserman Schultz has launched a bid for a coveted congressional post: the chairmanship of the all-important House Appropriations Committee.

Two months ago, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz hosted a panel discussion on Venezuela policy in her South Florida district. To her right sat the most powerful woman in the United States, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Also in the room, other members of Congress, Venezuelan community leaders and a platoon of media.

Wasserman Schultz surged in the spotlight, transitioning from the nuances of immigration policy to firing salvos at Republicans, deriding fellow Floridian Rick Scotts plan as "full of bull crap." Scotts spokesman returned fire accusing Wasserman Schultz of the "same old partisan nonsense we've heard from her for years."

It was vintage Wasserman Schultz equal parts policy wonk and combative firebrand. The very mix that catapulted the Broward County Democrats political career from the Florida Legislature to Capitol Hill to chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee.

>>READ: South Florida lawmaker leaned on mentor Elijah Cummings: He had do the right thing in his DNA

On Nov. 21, Wasserman Schultz launched a bid for a coveted congressional post: the chairmanship of the all-important House Appropriations Committee.

Fellow House Democrat U.S. Rep. Darren Soto of Winter Haven said it is time for a Florida member to sit in a leadership post.

"We are the third most populous state in the union, and yet we dont have any folks in leadership," said Soto, who believes his Florida colleague has the right mix of experience and youth for generational change compared to her rivals, who are in their 70s.

>>RELATED: Speaker Pelosi in Weston calls on Trump, Senate to give Venezuelans temporary protected status

Wasserman Schultz, 53, is currently a member of the committee, along with two other South Florida congressmen, U.S. Rep. Lois Frankel, D-West Palm Beach, and U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Miami.

Provided Democrats retain control of the House after the 2020 election, the desired leadership position would become available because of the announced retirement by current chair Nita Lowey, D-New York, who has served on Capitol Hill for 31 years.

Its expected Wasserman Schultz will be competing against two other rivals: U.S. Reps. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio and Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut.

"I think that Debbie Wasserman Schulz has built consensus wherever she has gone," said Florida Democratic supporter Mitchell Berger. "I think its a wonderful idea. I think it will be good for the nation, good for Florida."

>>PRIOR STORY: Protesters shout Shame on you! at Debbie Wasserman Schultz at Florida delegate breakfast

A stumble on the path for leadership

There was a time when Wasserman Schultz appeared to be on a fast-track to a top U.S. House committee chairmanship. One word changed that: WikiLeaks.

The trove of emails leaked during the summer of 2016 included communications that suggested DNC officials were favoring nominee Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders during that years Democratic presidential primaries.

As the chair of the DNC, and someone that Clinton herself had described as a "longtime friend," Wasserman Schultz took the brunt of progressives and Sanders delegates ire. When she appeared at a Florida delegate breakfast at the convention site in Philadelphia, Wasserman Schultz was loudly booed.

"All of a sudden, quite a number of folks in the room went up in the front, so it blocked my view," remembered Clinton delegate John Ramos, who was in the room when Sanders delegates successfully disrupted Wasserman Schultzs speech. "They were chanting and just made it difficult for her to speak."

The outcry forced Wasserman Schultz to resign as DNC chair and, as punishment, she was not allowed to publicly lord over what would have been a crowning achievement: Presiding over the first political convention to nominate a woman for president in the cradle of the countrys founding documents.

Whats more, Wasserman Schultz returned from the political torching in Philadelphia to face, for her, a serious, unprecedented primary challenger in that falls 2016 congressional election.

Wasserman Schultz survived that political disaster. But even after Democrats took control of the House in the 2018 blue wave, others got committee chairmanships. Meanwhile, The Squad, including U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, took center stage on setting the tone and influencing the direction of the party.

Wasserman Schultz and her allies on the Hill say the 2016 controversy will not factor into her bid for the Appropriations chair.

"I think its water under the bridge as far as the members are concerned," said Soto, praising the congresswomans "larger-than-life work ethic" and reputation. "There is a big concern right now about having new blood in leadership."

The congresswoman says she will compete on her merits.

"I wouldnt have made the decision to run if I didnt feel confident that I could be competitive," she said last month after speaking at an anti-Trump rally in Sunrise organized by the Florida Democratic Party. "I spent a month before I made a final decision on whether I was going to seek the chairmanship, talking to my colleagues, asking their opinion, getting feedback."

One Florida progressive leader said he is less enthusiastic about seeing her in a House leadership position unless she acknowledges key facets of the progressive agenda.

"If people felt that in your previous position as DNC chair that there was a lack of transparency, youre now trying to be in charge of all this money. You would hope that there would be, like, this exercise in the utmost transparency," said Dwight Bullard, a former state senator and political director for the progressive group New Florida Majority.

Ramos, in his third term as state committeeman and first term as DNC member, put it more bluntly.

"They really hold their grudges," he said, adding that he does not believe many progressives have forgiven Wasserman Schultz, even though she has the experience and connections for the powerful position. "Its not going to be an easy path."

Then there is another issue, in the 15 years since Wasserman Schultzs first election to Congress, the Democratic Party has shifted. The 2018 wave election ushered an era of progressive fervor embodied by The Squad. Thats been evident in the early stages of the presidential race among Democratic rivals, and in the five debates since June.

So, Bullard said, the issue isnt just a question of "forgiveness."

"Really the question of capability or forgiveness has everything to do with a recognition by Congresswoman Wasserman-Schultz that this is where we are today as opposed to the narrative thats framed around what shes done in the past," said Bullard, a 2016 Sanders delegate.

That will include addressing issues like burdensome student loan debt, high healthcare costs, climate change and sea level rise in the face of government spending on endless wars and subsidies to fossil fuel companies, he added.

"AOC and some of the more progressive names that have popped up, theyre naming these things all the time theyre kind of screaming it from the rafters," he said. "There are people out there who live on the struggle bus every day, trying to make ends meet and thinking and hoping that someone will take an actionable step to give them some sense of relief ... Thats not a pie-in-the-sky kind of thing, thats real life."

Bullard, who served with Wasserman Schultz in the Florida Legislature, believes that she speaks out on issues important to people outside of her district and demonstrates that she has overcome past transparency problems, she could win the leadership position.

Ramos said he encourages the various factions of the Democratic Party to "play nice" especially headed into the crucial 2020 election year.

"Youre going to have discord, it comes with the territory. And since were a big tent party, it gets messy," he said. "Its sad because we need 2020 is so important and its all hands on deck."

Ramos said he is supportive of the congresswomans bid for the House Appropriations leadership job.

"You just have to walk away from that and just nod your head," he said. "Theres that saying, We eat our own."

At the end of the day, however, the decision will be made by House Democrats, if they retain their majority.

A steering and policy committee composed of about a third of the House Democratic caucus will recommend a candidate, and then the full caucus of Democrats will vote on the pick.

In her letter announcing her candidacy for the post, Wasserman Schultz stressed knowledge, experience and a commitment to reforms in the appropriations process so not to continue operating from continuing resolution to continuing resolution.

"We need to bring the appropriations process into the 21st century," she said. "You never take any election for granted. I have to seek and secure the support of my colleagues and Ill be working on doing that over the course of the next year."

Reporting contributed by Hannah Morse

The rest is here:
Wasserman Schultz seeks top House post, will progressives back her? - Palm Beach Post

Working in different locations presents various logistical problems for companies a problem Progressive TSL aims to tackle.

The company has been around since 2004 and focuses on various systems finance, procurement, inventory management with a focus on upstream companies.

What makes us unique is that we do everything around it as well. We have IT capabilities and weve got consultants who really know the oil and gas business, who understand the challenges. Companies often come to us when carrying out acquisitions when theyre looking at process challenges and having controls that are enforced, Progressives CEO Chris Walcot told Energy Voice. We have a vertical knowledge of the sector.

The nature of Progressives work has changed in response to the cycles in the oil prices. Before the crash, more of the companys work was driven by transactions, acquisitions, divestments, the CEO said. Progressive was able to provide an understanding of data and how to migrate information.

As prices fell, the company found it was more in demand to help companies make cost savings. This manifests in areas such as inventory and procurement control. When the oil price was $110 per barrel, some companies saw the solution to everything as being to write a cheque. When the crash came, everyone was suddenly very focused on maximising the effectiveness of expenditure.

With prices stabilising, companies must focus on how to hold on to those lessons that have been learnt. Organisations need to keep controls when expanding and managing it effectively this time, Walcot said.

Areas

The company has a rough 50:50 split between the UK and Africa, bringing knowledge of regional operational challenges to its work.

There are certainly different challenges in almost every location, Walcot continued. Regulatory burdens on UK operators have increased over the last 10-20 years. The challenges are there for good reason, with increased focus on health and safety, he said, while working in some remote areas in Africa poses its own difficulties.

There are unique challenges around working in deserts, for instance, environmental challenges, data connectivity, all those things have a unique aspect. Some countries have challenging regulatory requirements, things like complex tax requirements, which you need to be able to address and address effectively. If youve not done it before, that can be very daunting.

Progressive, Walcot notes, has largely done it before. Were able to take the learnings from previous project and reuse them and it means we can do them to a high quality but also be able to deploy systems and new processes and controls quickly.

Timing

Such speed is particularly useful when working towards a major event such as an IPO. While, ideally, companies begin working with Progressive early on sometimes opportunities dictate otherwise.

A variety of companies come to Progressive for assistance, with Walcot saying the sweet spot was the small to mid-caps. Putting in place the right processes early on helps companies as they go through that initial growth period, he said, helping with the various transitions along the way.

Often a company going through a period of change will seek particular assistance. Seplat Petroleum, for instance, came to Progressive about 18 months before listing. Nigeria-focused Seplat wanted to be able to demonstrate that it had the required systems and controls in place before making its pitch to the market.

We helped them initially to put a finance system in place and, as theyve evolved, weve helped them move through a series of other stages, with procurement and inventory management, Walcot said. We get engaged at different stages but we aim to get involved as early as we can.

Maurel et Prom signed Progressive up in September to provide finance and asset management work, in Paris, Gabon and Tanzania. Maurel, which is majority owned by Pertamina, has a stake in Seplat. Maurel is making sure that they have the things in place to help them with their future growth plans.

Not all companies have the ability to work with Progressive over the long term. The company worked with Chrysaor on its $3 billion acquisition of a package of assets in the North Sea, from Shell, which completed in 2017. This type of work has much tighter deadlines, with Walcot saying there is a date in the diary when it has to be completed and you have to make sure what they have to make sure that everythings in place.

Complexity

Companies are becoming more and more aware of the amount of data that can be produced from operations and, with this, is a new awareness of how this is stored and owned. If a company outsources its operations and maintenance (O&M) to a service provider the ownership of the data that comes from that work is an important note.

Companies we work with want to hang onto the data that a provider is using. If, in three or five years time, you want to change supplier, and you dont have that data, you have a problem. If you have the data and theyre accessing the data on your systems and you want to change your supplier, you could just change your supplier. Theres not so much pain around transition, Walcot said. Having that data, having access to it and being able to analyse it is critical.

The industrys ability to adopt to new technology is a challenge, the Progressive CEO said, but even more is that of changing peoples behaviour. Having a system can be great, and theres amazing things that can be done with artificial intelligence for instance, but if no one is going to use it, it doesnt change anything.

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Making progress with Progressive TSL - News for the Oil and Gas Sector - Energy Voice