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Candidates for U.S. Congress participate in a debate hosted by the Alaska Chamber, Alaska Miners Association, Alaska Oil & Gas Association, Alaska Support Industry Alliance, Associated General Contractors of Alaska, and Resource Development Council for Alaska, on May 12 at the Dena'ina Center in Anchorage. From left: Nick Begich, John Coghill, Christopher Constant, Al Gross, Jeff Lowenfels, Sarah Palin, Mary Peltola, Josh Revak, and Tara Sweeney. (Loren Holmes / ADN)

Industry experts say the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which Congress opened to oil development in 2017, is unlikely to play host to drilling rigs anytime soon if ever.

The refuge, nonetheless, has become a flash point among left-leaning candidates in Alaskas special U.S. House race, in which 48 people are seeking to replace the late Republican Rep. Don Young.

An offhand, pro-development comment from Democratic candidate Mary Peltola prompted a quick social media backlash, and a subsequent clarification. Another Democrat, Chris Constant, followed up with an 800-word blog post explaining his position: He supports drilling in the refuge only if theres broad local support and a realistic plan to ensure minimal impacts.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders-aligned Santa Claus his real name is threatening to peel anti-development votes away from Peltola and Constant with his own uncompromising position.

Im well aware of the intricacies and complications and different considerations, forces at play, who wants what and who is willing to trade off something for another. My personal position still is defend the sacred, protect the Arctic, said Claus, an independent, referencing the slogan often voiced by the Gwichin, an Indigenous group opposed to development in the refuge.

The candidates differences over the Arctic Refuge track with a broader divide between Alaska progressives over what kind of candidate they support.

[2 oil companies quietly spent $10 million to exit Arctic Refuge leases]

Some argue that taking firm progressive stances like opposing development in the refuge in a state where more than 60% of people support it makes it impossible to appeal to a broad enough swath of voters to win an election. Democrats make up just 13% of Alaskas roughly 585,000 registered voters.

Ted Stevens and Frank Murkowski spent 40 years making the refuge the holy grail, said Mark Begich, the Democratic former U.S. senator. Opposing development in the area may not cost a Democrat a win in the primary, he added, but a no makes you a disqualified candidate, I believe, at this time as a statewide candidate.

But others say that candidates who endorse drilling and other more centrist positions risk alienating liberal base voters.

Alaskans are willing to work for and donate to candidates who have principled positions, said Ed Alexander, a Claus supporter and Gwichin leader who lives in Fairbanks. If you have a milquetoast position on things, theres a bunch of those guys out there and whats the difference between those guys and somebody else?

[More coverage of Alaskas 2022 congressional races]

He added: I have to vote for the person I think is going to help Alaskans the most, and thats Santa Claus right now.

In this photo provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, an airplane flies over caribou on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeast Alaska. (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via AP)

For decades, the question of development in the refuge has fueled caustic debate between Alaskas pro-development politicians and nationally focused conservation groups.

National polls have shown opposition to drilling. But Alaska-based surveys show residents broadly in favor of the idea with support last year hitting 64%.

Congress and former President Donald Trump, as part of their 2017 tax package, authorized drilling in the refuges coastal plain the highest-potential area for oil and roughly 7% of the refuges overall area.

The nearest Gwichin community, Arctic Village, is on the far side of a mountain range from the coastal plan, also known as the 1002 Area. But residents are stridently opposed to drilling because the coastal plain doubles as the calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd and those caribou are a staple of the Gwichins subsistence-based diet.

Drilling enjoys more support in the only village inside the coastal plain, Kaktovik, whose Indigenous Iupiaq residents have access to whale harvests, in addition to caribou.

But many Kaktovik residents, including a former mayor, oppose drilling in the refuge, too.

From a practical standpoint, development in the coastal plain faces a near certainty of lawsuits and challenges connecting to distant, existing infrastructure.

[Voter guide: Alaskas 48 U.S. House candidates in the 2022 special primary election]

When the Trump administration auctioned off oil leases in the days before President Joe Biden was sworn in, just one small oil company and none of Alaskas major multinational producers bid on them, along with one other private group of speculators. Alaskas state-owned economic development corporation placed most of the winning bids.

Bidens administration has since suspended the leases, and major banks and insurers are increasingly committing not to back oil projects in the Arctic.

The odds of ANWR ever being developed are minimal, said Larry Persily, a longtime observer of Alaskas oil and gas industry. Yes, prices have gone up significantly. But that doesnt change the economics of ANWR, or the fact that the companies have really shied away from these megaprojects that can take a decade or more to develop.

But opponents of drilling say that candidates positions on the coastal plain double as a litmus test on the broader issue of climate change: At least one major plan to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C and avert the largest risks of climate change makes no room for new oil developments.

Peltola, in her follow-up statement after the debate, said she supports possible exploration in the coastal plain which she described as a small sliver of the refuge based on what she described as studies showing minimal impacts to local subsistence species and huge benefits to the local economy.

Alaskans have consistently supported exploration in this area, Peltolas statement said, adding that shes committed to letting local people decide which projects move forward on their lands.

[As Texas school shooting reignites national debate on gun control, many Alaska politicians are leery of limits]

Asked how she reconciles that position with the Gwichins opposition to development, and the mixed views among Kaktovik residents, Peltola, in a phone interview, said she supports development because its written into ANILCA. Thats the landmark Alaska lands bill Congress passed in 1980 that left the coastal plain outside of the Arctic Refuges wilderness area.

Since 1980, that little area has been a set-aside for exploration and possible development, Peltola said. In the 2017 tax package, GOP U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski advanced the proposal for lease sales in the coastal plain, Peltola added, so, technically speaking, it is the law, right?

Constant, in his blog post, described development in the refuge as an uphill battle, and cited division on the issue among villages and communities in the area. But he said he supports responsible resource development thats endorsed by local communities, if it comes with jobs and environmental protections.

If, one day, there is a realistic and safe plan for some level of drilling in ANWR with minimal environmental impacts that was supported by the vast majority of communities and organizations in the region, I would likely support it, Constant said. Until then, I think we are better off spending our time and energy leading the way to a more sustainable energy future.

[in a special U.S. House race, Alaska Democrats see opportunity]

Claus has aligned his anti-drilling position with the Gwichin and, after a recent phone interview, sent a photo of himself holding a defend the sacred/protect the Arctic Refuge sticker in front of a Gwichin Nation sign.

He said he defers to the Gwichins position, rather than that of pro-development Indigenous residents in Kaktovik, because the kind of drilling that some people seem to support is unnecessary.

There are plenty of other options, and the oil in this case companies dont seem interested in exercising those particular interests, Claus said.

Another candidate whos appealed to progressive voters in the past, independent Al Gross, said he supports development of the coastal plain that he believes can be done responsibly and safely.

I think you have to make compromises with all parties involved, including the Gwichin and the oil companies, he said in an interview.

Claus, Peltola, Gross and Constant all say they support actions to address climate change, though only Claus gave an unqualified endorsement of the Green New Deal a Democratic congressional proposal that calls for dramatic action from the federal government to phase out fossil fuels and boost clean energy industries and jobs.

Im not a cheerleader for it, but Im a big, strong supporter of Roosevelts New Deal, and I like anything thats bold and helps move us towards our goals, Constant said in a phone interview.

Peltola said she doesnt know enough about the Green New Deals particulars to say whether she supports it, but she added that she likes the concepts it contains. The government has already supported the oil industry with investments and tax credits and all those things, she said.

I do think that we need to be pursuing renewable energy pathways, she added.

Gross said he supports renewable energy everywhere and anywhere.

I dont support the Green New Deal per se, he said. Im just a strong advocate for renewable energy.

See the original post here:
Oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge faces long odds. It's still dividing progressives in Alaska's US House race. - Anchorage Daily...

The two most powerful politicians in Washington, D.C., are President Joe Biden and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).

Our checks and balances system built into the Constitution limits the power of each of the three branches of government, especially the presidency. Indeed, James Madison and his colleagues were preeminently concerned to vest power in the legislature and prevent the kind of autocratic power associatedwith the British Crown and European monarchies in general.

President Biden needs Congress to advance virtually any major agenda item he has, and Congress given its current composition can be prevented from passing major legislation if one U.S. Senator refuses to side with 49 other U.S. Senators from his own party.

Biden and his Capitol Hill allies will take another stab at passing some version of the Build Back Better Bill,even as the Russia-Ukraine War and the likely prospect of Roe v. Wade being overturned dominate attention in Washington.

The saga alsoillustrates how you can come from one of the smallest, least economically powerful states in the country and be one of the most powerful politicians in the country: Delaware and West Virginia are two such states.

Only in America do we see such a wide distribution of power and only in America do we see a federal government as incapable of implementing major change. In parliamentary democracies, the executive and legislature are, in most cases, from the same party. When they want to move left, they do; when they want to move right, they do.

Democrats in Washington todayare still fighting over whether to be moderates or progressives:They are stuck.Some prominent swing state U.S. Senate primary races such as Pennsylvania and North Carolina have seen progressive rather than moderate candidates elected, but no one knows if this will pay off in the general election, especially against Trump-aligned Republicans.

On Capitol Hill,insidershave beensaying that prospects of a Biden rescue of core elements of the Build Back Better Bill, including extending the child tax credit, child care subsidies, and lower prescription drug costs, are slim. This is the caseso long as Manchin,whose popularity in conservative West Virginia soared 17 percent during the last year as he blocked the Biden agenda, has a vote in the U.S. Senate. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) is also an impediment, but less of a challenge.

Its time forSenate Majority LeaderChuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to advance one or more bills that will transcend the moderate vs. progressive battle.The national Democratic Party needs to be reset, even though most individual races will lean progressive or moderate. At some point, the entire party needs to move forward toward a new center for the entire country.

If the party cannot heal itself, it cannot heal the nation.

One place to start is family policy. Democrats want paid parental leave and major child care subsidies. Republicans have not budged.Democrats need togive in: Give the Republicans something that would interest them, notably a tax credit for stay-at-home parents.Give hard-working middle-class parents a choice between such a tax credit and child care subsidies after a period of paid parental leave.

Providing this option would speak to the massive cultural conflict in the country that is typically submerged in family policy debates: the side that wants to give women the path back to work after giving birth, and thesidethat wants parents toreceive the choice to have one of them to stay home for several years with a newborn, actually mom or dad, or one of the moms or dads if it is an LGBTQ family.

Since the 1980s, Democrats have failed to pass paid parental leave and major child care subsidies at the federal level;its time to adopta different strategy.

Even if offering the tax credit for stay-at-home parentsfails to convince Manchin, it would help many of the Democrats running in November get reelected or elected for the first time because there are millions of voters who would respect a candidate who wanted to offer them or their adult children this choice.

It could help Democrats running for office begin to transcend the moderate vs. progressive battle within the party.

Dave Anderson is the editor of Leveraging: A Political, Economic, and Societal Framework (Springer, 2014). He is also the author of Youth04: Young Voters, the Internet, and Political Power(W.W. Norton & Company, 2004) and co-editor of The Civic Web: Online Politics and Democratic Values (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). He has taught at George Washington University, the University of Cincinnati, and Johns Hopkins University. He was a candidate in the 2016 Democratic Primary in Marylands 8thCongressional District.

View post:
Democrats need to break out of struggle between moderates and progressives - The Hill

President Biden may be a lot of things, but Extremely Online isn't one of them. In fact, his allies have often boasted that he won the White House precisely by ignoring progressive chatter on the internet.

"There is a conversation that's going on on Twitter that they don't care about," a Democratic strategist said during the 2020 presidential campaign. "They won the primary by ignoring all of that. The Biden campaign does not care about the critical race theory-intersectional Left that has taken over places like the New York Times." This attitude, the argument goes, went on to serve them well in November.

But some of the people who have gone to work for Biden care a great deal about the Twitter conversation, in which they are enthusiastic participants. And it keeps getting them in trouble.

New White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre may be a subdued presence in the briefing room, but she certainly popped off a good bit on Twitter (and a handful of MSNBC appearances). Those tweets about stolen elections and the alleged racism of a network she now takes questions from got attention. Perhaps someday someone will even ask her about them!

Neera Tanden's nomination for Office of Management and Budget director was withdrawn in no small part because of mean tweets that offended various lawmakers. She now must confine her employment opportunities to parts of the White House that do not require Senate confirmation.

Tweets, and comments about Twitter, played an outsized role in the ouster of Nina Jankowicz and the shuttering of the government disinformation board she ever-so-briefly helmed.

Generations of Democrats from the age of 45 on down are going to have plenty of controversial opinions that they have painstakingly preserved on social media. It will be easy for their opponents in Congress and the press to track them down. It will come back to haunt them as surely as that college Facebook picture of a keg stand that is now being viewed by a consulting firm's human resources department.

Republicans are not immune from this trend either. Some Trump appointees ran into a version of this problem too, though usually lower-level ones. The former president's real-time Twitter habit was a constant source of controversy until his pre-Elon Musk ban. But younger people will hold higher positions in the next GOP administration and see their profiles scoured for wrongthink.

Blue checks won't be allowed to go unchecked.

Link:
A reckoning is coming for blue-checked progressives - The Week

The post-9/11 war on terror was a disaster for Muslims and immigrant communities in the United States. Patriotic, law-abiding Muslim Americans were treated as foreign enemies and hundreds of immigrants were rounded up, detained, and deported. Americans constitutional rights were trampled while a sprawling system of mass surveillance took shape. Those brave enough to shine a light on its abuses were, at best, spied on and treated as criminals or, at worst, hounded into the poorhouse and even imprisoned and tortured. The only minor saving grace was that, technically, this war was never waged officially within the United States, where it couldve led to even more alarmingly authoritarian outcomes.

That now seems to be changing under the Biden administration, which, ever since last years Capitol riot, has bit by bit ramped up a burgeoning domestic war on terror aimed at criminals and dissidents at home. The latest escalation in this budding campaign cleared the House on Thursday and, horrifyingly, received the wholehearted backing of the congressional left.

The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022 sailed through the House on a strict party-line vote, with not a single Democrat voting against and only one Republican, Illinois representative Adam Kinzinger, voting in its favor. Opposition to the bill was presumably considered politically toxic on the Left, as it was sold as a response to the racist mass murder committed in Buffalo last week, which is presumably why every single member of the Squad voted for it.

The legislation takes a tack similar to previous domestic anti-terrorism bills, making incremental additions to the terror-fighting strategy of US security apparatuses. The focus of this strategy now appears to be aimed at ostensibly homegrown extremists. The bill does not opt for the kind of sweeping overhaul we saw after the September 11 attacks.

The bill creates domestic terrorism offices within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Justice Department, and the FBI. These offices are all set to sunset in a decade. The heads of all three agencies must regularly issue a joint report on domestic terrorism threats, incidents, and arrests and prosecutions. The offices will direct their resources toward the threat categories with the highest number of instances. The bill also requires that they review and investigate hate crime charges with an eye on redefining or connecting them to domestic terror incidents.

The most defensible part of the bill is a section authorizing an interagency task force to analyze and combat white-supremacist infiltration of the armed forces and federal law enforcement. The effectiveness of this directive, however, remains to be seen. Although the bills language uses the term combat, it fails to spell out what this means. Its only specific details are in regard to the reports that federal agencies will be required to submit.

If the bill passes, it will represent at least some progress on a very serious and largely unaddressed problem. On the other hand, it also exposes the contradictory nature of progressives, particularly the Squads, position on matters of civil liberties.

Joe Bidens fledgling domestic war on terror has proven a tricky matter for left-wing lawmakers to navigate. The Lefts historical opposition to bigotry of all kinds made it somewhat less fraught for elected progressives to push back against the original war on terror, given its tendency to demonize and target Muslims and immigrants.

But ever since the national security state shifted its public-facing rhetoric around terrorism from Islamic extremists to far-right ones and with progressives now tending to frame issues around the concept of white supremacy more and more the congressional left has become increasingly quiet on the issue. After all, what progressive wants to look like theyre soft on literal Nazis?

But there are good reasons they should push back. For one, the leading progressive concerns about the license granted to the state by the original war on terror remain with this version of the bill. The powers authorized by this legislation can easily be turned on anyone not simply the odious groups that are invoked for the bills passage.

The Biden administrations official domestic counterterrorism strategy explicitly makes no distinction based on political views and name-checks supposed domestic terrorists motivated by a range of ideologies, including animal rights, environmentalism, anarchists, and anti-capitalists. In practice, the FBI has already imprisoned one Florida anarchist over what amounted to a series of public social media posts. Domestic terrorism prosecutions have exploded since 2020, now far outnumbering cases defined as international terrorism, and many of those have been racial justice protesters that the Biden administration has continued to prosecute as terrorists.

Even if, despite all this, one believes that a Democratic administration can be trusted to responsibly pursue a domestic war on terror, we would do well to remember that the United States is a two-party democracy where power regularly changes hands. Are progressives happy to hand ever-growing national security powers to Donald Trump, who mobilized the DHS for a campaign of repression against the George Floyd protests? Would they be comfortable entrusting them with Ron DeSantis, who just passed yet another law attacking protest rights, this time banning pickets outside private homes? Do they trust GOP-appointed federal agencies not to fudge the numbers and steer prosecutions toward threat categories that arent related to the far right?

Beefing up law enforcement and security powers is an understandable response to horrors like Buffalo, but theres not much evidence that the increase of these powers will succeed as measures of prevention as the bills sponsor claims. Attacks like this are happening on a depressingly regular basis even though the United States is already operating the largest, most expensive national security bureaucracy in its history. Such attacks have continued, even in the teeth of the countrys vast surveillance state that effectively sweeps up and stores information about the private activities of most adults. This is the very same surveillance state that has already given the FBI sweeping authority to go after whoever it defines as extremists which it has mostly used to, again, go after racial justice activists. This is largely why only a few years ago, both leftists and liberals rejected the idea of passing a domestic terror statute in the wake of the horrific El Paso shooting.

Given the long record of the FBI and federal agencies like the DHS targeting vulnerable communities, activists, and dissidents more generally and given the Bureaus copious recent use of far-right extremists as informants to target left-leaning protesters does it really make sense to believe theyll use these new authorities as progressives intend? Its a bit of a glaring contradiction that the same bill that treats federal law enforcement as the leading instrument against far-right extremists is also concerned with its infiltration by white supremacists.

The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022 is not as bad as it could have been. To some extent, its lucky that Bidens domestic war on terror has so far been fairly incremental. But as more tragedies like Buffalo pile up and as politicians continue to do nothing about the availability of guns or the root causes that drive people toward this kind of hatred and violence in the first place pressure will build to ramp things up.

Right now, progressives like those of the Squad may find it politically easier go along with something that, judging by their past public statements and positions, they quietly know is a bad and dangerous idea. But at some point, theyre going to have to take a stand. And if they dont, theyll risk hurting the very communities and political movements theyre fighting for.

Read this article:
Progressives Need to Resist the Domestic War on Terror - Jacobin magazine

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Natsha Nandabhiwat

rds La rhallsdttir, the head of the list for the Reform Party in Reykjavk, posted on Facebook yesterday that her party will not only ally with her compatriots in the previous majoritythe Social Democrats and the Pirate Partyshe is also inviting the Progressive Party to join this coalition.

Einar orsteinsson, who leads the Progressive Party list for Reykjavk, has called for a party meeting this evening in Reykjavk to discuss the matter.

rds Las announcement drastically reduces the number of options available for a possible majority in the 23-seat Reykjavk City Council. As reported, she had initially said she was open to working with the Independence Party and the Progressives. That meant a coalition on the right and the left were equally possible.

With this announcement, however, a coalition of the Independence Party and the Progressive Party would still need two seats to form a majority. The Peoples Party has only one seat, the Left-Greens, who also have one seat, have said they will refuse to be a part of any majority, and the Socialist Party, while having two seats, are very unlikely to support a coalition led by conservatives.

Nevertheless, Einar has emphasised that the matter needs to be discussed in detail with other members of the party before any decision is taken on formal talks.

This is a demand within the Progressive Party, he told reporters. We just need to assess how we can best achieve our goals over the next four years and how we can make changes in the city.

Go here to see the original:
From Iceland City Hall 2022: Progressives In Reykjavk To Meet This Evening - Reykjavk Grapevine