AI’s Energy Use – a View from Germany

ByThomas Klikauer

August 26, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


Perhaps such activities as simple as searching on the Internet or sending an email, artificial intelligence or AI depends on data processing centers. These are sizable factory- or better warehouse-like physical structures that house computing machines and other hardware equipment.

These are often camouflaged by appearing as ordinary looking repositories containing vital computing infrastructure that IT systems require. They process each and every email and every click on a website, at the very least.

These repositories house servers, data storage drives, network equipment, and stores any company’s and a private person’s digital data.

These are corporate data centers often regarded as the ‘brain of the internet’ that house your bank data, your Amazon online shopping list, etc. Like the human brain, they need a lot of energy. And when spiced up by artificial intelligence, they need even more energy.

The electricity that these roughly 11,000 global data centers use ultimately generates heat which must be removed.

To do this, data centers must use energy – a lot of energy – in its cooling equipment. Put simply, both the running and cooling of a data center consumes a lot of energy. Internet leader USA has about 5,400 data centers.

The USA is followed – in sharp contrast – by Germany with 522 and with Frankfurt outshining the rest of Germany.

Next are the UK with 517, China with 449, Canada with 336, France with 315, Australia with 306, Netherlands with 300, Russia with 255, Japan with 219, Italy with 168, Mexico with 166, Brazil with 163, India with 152, Poland with 143, etc.

In the debate whether these are either energy spenders or rescuers of the climate, they seem to be on the side of creating energy demands.

Yet, nowadays, nothing works without a supercomputer – not even as simple as reading an online article like this one. Beyond that, artificial intelligence is making this worse.

To put AI into perspective, a single ChatGPT query requires 2.9 watt-hours of electricity while 0.3 watt-hours is used for a Google search. Not just with AI but the overall energy use of the internet is estimated to be between 84 to 143 gigawatts of electricity every year.

By comparison, Switzerland uses less than half of that. In other words, the Internet can power two Switzerlands. Globally, the Internet uses between 3.6% and 6.2% of “all” electricity. AI will crank up these numbers.

In other words, artificial intelligence is causing huge CO2 emissions. Therefore, scientists advocate a so-called ‘life cycle assessment’ of AI’s energy consumption.

The boom in AI – especially since the introduction of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 – requires more and more data centers to be able to handle these processes. And in turn, they use more and more electricity. But that is just one side of the story.

On the other hand, AI can also be used to reduce the environmental and climate impact in many areas – including the energy industry.

The goal of such a technology assessment, for example, is to ensure that the positive aspects, such as energy saving, prevail and that negative developments like the stratospheric energy use of data centers and AI, are slowed down.

Intelligent software applications have been used for many years from sorting out spam mails, to route planning in navigation systems, product recommendations based on previous purchases on the Internet and even compiling favorite playlists based on listening habits.

However, AI has accelerated this rather sharply in recent years. Meanwhile, the power requirement of AI is between three and ten times as high as in a simple Google search.

One of the reasons is that “machine learning” uses very large amounts of data to train themselves. Worse, the overarching AI maxim is: the more data used, the better the outcomes.

As a consequence, AI also requires parallel computing processes – bigger machines with more powerful microprocessors that demand more energy. Virtually all of this means an increase in the power consumption of Internet servers located in data centers.

Unsurprisingly, ChatGPT alone consumes a multiple of electricity compared to a normal Google search. It might be as much as three times.

The International Energy Agency in Paris (IEA) even calculated a factor of ten. If AI functions also make their way into normal office applications such as text and image editing programs, their power requirements will increase significantly – during both the training and the operation of the AI systems.

The training of ChatGPT (version 3) alone has an estimated 500 tons of the greenhouse gas CO. By 2026, AI may well be one of the main drivers of electricity consumption.

At the end of 2023, there were more than 8,000 data centers worldwide – most of them in the USA, followed by Germany, the United Kingdom and China as mentioned above.

Currently, their consumption is estimated at 2% to 3% of global electricity production. This could increase from 460 to up to 1050 terawatt hours by 2026.

This marks an increase that is higher than the total electricity consumption of an energy-hungry country like Germany (2023: 516 terawatt hours).

On AI’s extraordinary electricity consumption, the energy market experts at the US investment bank Goldman Sachs, for example, expects that the boom in data processing will increase the demand for electricity more than the switch to electric mobility in transportation.

The IEA calls the recent boom in data centers – that has been triggered by AI – a challenge for the power system.

Tech-historian Dan Yergin called it a hungry caterpillar that generates an insatiable demand for energy. In fact, the expansion of AI networks is hardly keeping pace with the skyrocketing demand for server capacities in many places.

In the US’ state of Virginia, for example, – one of the global hotspots of the server industry with around 500 of these giant facilities – a settlement freeze has therefore already been temporarily imposed.

Meanwhile, growth could also reach its limits in Germany’s number one region for data centers: the greater Frankfurt region with its European Internet node and its around 80 data centers.

The AI industry already consumes around 20% of electricity today, and the demand for additional capacity remains high.

German industry representatives complain that the waiting times for a grid connection in Germany are too long with some being up to five years.

German network operators have a lot to do because Germany’s transition to green energy is also increasing the demands on the grid. An ever stronger energy grid is badly needed as more heat pumps and charging stations for electric cars are coming online.

Quite apart from the massive energy consumption of AI, there are also positive potentials associated in the transition towards AI. For example, there will be a more efficient use of renewable energy. And there are additional positive potentials that come with using AI.

AI’s algorithms can be used, for example, to use the fluctuating wind and solar energy. This would make it more efficient.

It also makes it possible to optimize technical processes, such as, for example, the production, maintenance, use and recycling of products.

AI could also contribute to saving energy and resources and promote the circular economy. Yet, it is still open for debate whether the positive effects compensate for AI’s disadvantages.

But there are also new approaches on how to measure the climate footprint of AI. And for this, three levels might be distinguished: Directly: Firstly, it is about the “direct effects” that can be directly assigned to digital technology – for example, the production and use of end devices, data lines, and data centers.
Indirectly: The second topic are the “indirect effects” related to the use of digital applications or AI. In the case of online purchasing, for example, it is about packaging and delivery, while the optimization of production processes is about reduced energy requirements.
System: Thirdly, it is about “systemic effects” that affect society as a whole, such as the AI-supported changes in mobility behavior through car-sharing, and the change in the world of work generated in this way.

One might demand a more holistic life cycle assessment of AI applications. On that, society might dislike just letting technical development run its course. Under free market capitalism, this can – very quickly and very easily – go into the wrong direction.

A technology assessment and regulation based on such considerations are indispensable. Undesirable AI developments should be detected at an early stage before they become uncontrollable.

In other words, life cycle assessment of AI applications is, therefore, much needed. With a classic life cycle assessment, researchers examine the entire life cycle of a product, from raw material extraction and production, to transport and use, and eventually, to disposal.

This methodology can also be applied to digital applications, such as software and AI.

In this way, a reduction in energy consumption can then be organized in the second step. More specifically, scientists advocate that environmental product information should be provided with every digital service, for example in the form of a small data package with information on energy and resource consumption as well as emission.

The advantage: Whoever uses it – especially if it is the companies and corporations – can then use the respective CO2 evaluation of the environmental impact and such other environmental impacts.

Armed with that, the AI industry can take appropriate measures to improve the life cycle assessment and perhaps make AI environmentally sustainable.


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Thomas Klikauer

Thomas Klikauer has over 800 publications (including 12 books) and writes regularly for BraveNewEurope (Western Europe), the Barricades (Eastern Europe), Buzzflash (USA), Counterpunch (USA), Countercurrents (India), Tikkun (USA), and ZNet (USA). One of his books is on Managerialism (2013).

The Military-Industrial Complex Is Killing the American Dream and Hopes for World Peace

As long as official Washington clings to the illusion that arms racing is the magic key to peace, stability, and global dominance, we will waste large sums of scarce resources while increasing the risks of unnecessary conflict.

By William Hartung

August 25, 2024

Source: Responsible Statecraft





America’s commitment to arm Israel and Ukraine while attempting to stockpile large quantities of weapons for a potential war with China is putting strains on America’s weapons manufacturing base, leading many influential policy makers and corporate officials to suggest measures that would supersize this nation’s already enormous military-industrial complex.

This argument is taken to the extreme in a new piece in The National Interest by Arthur Herman of the arms contractor-funded Hudson Institute, entitled “Three Cheers for the Military-Industrial Complex.” The article repeats many of the stock arguments of current advocates of higher Pentagon spending while throwing around misleading statistics and dubious assumptions along the way.

Myth number one routinely put forward by today’s proponents of throwing more money at the Pentagon is that the U.S. military has somehow been neglected over the past few decades, and that therefore we need to inject hundreds of billions of dollars in additional spending into the arms sector to restore our defenses to an acceptable level. This argument has appeared in a recent report by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) on the need for a renewed policy of “peace through strength,” as well as in an analysis from a congressional commission charged with assessing the state of America’s defenses.

Both reports—as well as Herman’s article—are based on a false premise.

The Pentagon budget is rapidly spiraling toward $1 trillion per year, one of the highest levels since World War II. And once other military-related items are taken into account—from military aid and veterans’ affairs to the nation’s vast intelligence gathering network—the figure for total national security spending is more like $1.5 trillion. This comes after a decade in which the Pentagon received well over $6 trillion, roughly the same as was spent during the 10 years that included the peaks of the Iraq and Afghan wars.

The above-mentioned numbers are mind-boggling, but the main point is that recent and proposed spending is far more than enough to defend the United States and its allies, if it is spent more wisely and managed more effectively.

The bottom line is that the Pentagon needs more spending discipline, not more spending. For example, it is the only federal agency that is unable to pass an audit, a sad state of affairs that means that the department doesn’t even have an accurate count of how much equipment or spare parts it possesses, or in some cases even where these items are being stored.

Nor, according to former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, does the Pentagon know how many private contractors it employs, although rough estimates suggest that the number is well over half a million people. These management failures waste untold billions of dollars, year in and year out.

source of waste is the Pentagon’s penchant for building dysfunctional weapons systems at exorbitant prices. Cases in point are the F-35 combat aircraft and the Littoral Combat Ship, systems that are so riddled with flaws that they frequently can’t carry out basic functions. Both systems have required billions of dollars in expensive retrofits and have spent large chunks of time out of commission due to needed downtime for repairs and maintenance. The two systems are the poster children for what is wrong with the Pentagon’s system for developing and buying new weapons, from seeking extreme and overly complex performance characteristics to giving away the store to contractors in negotiations over price and performance.

In the meantime, the most expensive element of the Pentagon’s $2 trillion, three decades-long nuclear modernization plan, the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, has undergone cost growth of 81%in the past few years alone.

These weapons development fiascos do absolutely nothing to promote the defense of the United States, but they still manage to enrich the major weapons contractors charged with building them, whether or not they are effective or affordable. Absent reforms in the system that produces these dismal outcomes, simply giving the Pentagon more money is no guarantee of more defensive capability.

Poor management is one thing, but the real pressure to spend more on the military-industrial complex is America’s overly ambitious, outmoded view of the global role of the U.S. military. Current U.S. strategy calls for the ability to beat Russia or China in a conflict; project decisive force against adversaries like Iran and North Korea; quietly continue a global war on terrorism that involves dozens of overseas operations by U.S. forces every year; a massive program to build a new generation of nuclear weapons; and a surge of investment in high-tech, high-speed, pilotless weapons that incorporate artificial intelligence and can operate with little or no human input.

A truly realistic defense strategy would scale back current plans to be prepared to fight wars in any corner of the globe on short notice, pursue a deterrence-only nuclear strategy that would eliminate the need for a costly nuclear modernization plan, and limit military aid to nations engaged in defending themselves or holding off aggressive neighbors.

On the aid front this would mean continuing to arm Ukraine while exploring a diplomatic resolution of the conflict there. But it would involve cutting off assistance to Israel, whose brutal war in Gaza has gone far beyond any reasonable definition of defense, killing 40,000 people in an operation that has involved the commission of numerous war crimes which, according to a growing number of independent human rights and international law experts, may amount to genocide.

It is notable that many proponents of making America a garrison state have little to say about the non-military challenges we face, from climate change to epidemics to political and economic inequality, much less how to address these problems. And if they reference diplomacy at all, it is often as an adjunct to the use or threat of force, not a tool for preventing conflict in the first place.

Advocates like Herman need to step back and question the basic assumptions underpinning their calls for a new military buildup. First, we need to craft a viable strategy. Only then can we have an intelligent discussion about what size budget is required and what sort of manufacturing base is needed to sustain it. But as long as official Washington clings to the illusion that military buildups and arms racing are the magic key to peace, stability, and global dominance, we will waste large sums of scarce resources while increasing the risks of unnecessary conflict.


William Hartung is an American political scientist and author. He is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, where his work focuses on the arms industry and U.S. military budget.

France’s Left Still Needs to Broaden Its Base

France’s elections in July handed a surprise first place to the New Popular Front, which is now demanding the right to govern. To really change the country, it needs to broaden its base of support among nonvoters and the working class.

By Julian-Nicolas Calfuquir

August 26, 2024

Source: Jacobin





France’s parliamentary elections went better than expected for the Left. While polls predicted victory for Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, her defeat in the July 7 run-off votes was a relief for the left-wingers who rallied against her. Their Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) alliance took 193 seats in the 577-member National Assembly, against 166 for President Emmanuel Macron’s allies and 142 for Le Pen’s supporters.

Seven weeks on, the picture is hardly rosy. This is partly because of the basic numbers: the Rassemblement National was still the biggest party by vote totals, and had already in June’s European election surpassed ten million votes. In the French parliamentary election, voters from the center and the Left rallied against the far right and denied it a majority. But this, and even the NFP’s ultimate first-place finish, was more a “dam” against Le Pen’s party than a real show of mass support for the Left.

Moreover, even after Macron’s incumbent prime minister, Gabriel Attal, promised to resign, his government remains in place. The Left had an important moment at the polls. But with many challenges ahead, this looks more like a reprieve than a real victory.
Alliance of Circumstance

Formed after Macron called snap elections in June, the NFP was an alliance of circumstance between the left-wing parties, from Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise to the Greens, Communists, and Socialists. Yet if this was crucial to resisting the Rassemblement National, there are still many uncertainties about the NFP’s future.

After days of conflict-ridden talks following the election, the NFP nominated Lucie Castets, an activist for the defense of public services, as its candidate for prime minister. However, with the Paris Olympics, the stalling of negotiations, and president Macron’s pushback, it seems that an NFP-led government is becoming ever-less likely.

Recently, the president received the leaders of the NFP parties and Castets. But it seems that he is stubbornly refusing to appoint her as prime minister, to even try and implement the NFP’s program. Since the pretext for this is a refusal to allow France Insoumise to enter government, this weekend Mélenchon said that his MPs could support a Castets-led cabinet even without directly joining it. This exposed Macron’s real agenda — stopping any prospect of a left-wing government committed to a rupture with neoliberalism.

Yet there are deeper problems. While the NFP has the largest number of MPs, it has neither an absolute majority, nor even the biggest share of voters behind it. This also raises the question of how to broaden the left-wing bloc into a majority that can govern.

One approach means breaking up the NFP. Indeed, the alliance’s more centrist elements have floated a pact with Macron’s own camp — an idea promoted by more right-wing figures in the Parti Socialiste such as former president François Hollande, former prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve, and the liberal-left’s rising star Raphaël Glucksmann. Such an alliance would exclude only “the extremes” of Rassemblement National and France Insoumise. Recently, this idea was proposed by current premier Attal, who wanted to form a government ranging from the Right to the Communist Party.

France Insoumise’s idea of expanding the NFP’s support instead looks to future elections, based on the idea of using a radical discourse to win over current abstainers — the so-called “fourth bloc” apart from the Left, the Macronites, and Le Pen’s base. There are also those like François Ruffin — an MP who recently broke from France Insoumise — who insist on the need to win back the parts of the working-class electorate most likely to vote for Le Pen, especially in rural and small-town France. The claim that these voters can be won back on the basis of their class interest will likely be among the more controversial debates on the Left in coming months.
On the Ground

For several years, the question of the Rassemblement National’s electorate has been a recurring theme in debates on the Left. More specifically, the question of how to broaden the left-wing electorate is posed in a moment when it is conspicuously absent from whole swaths of national territory.

Following the initial warning that came from the 2022 parliamentary elections, several scholars have examined these gaps in the left-wing electorate. Firstly, the Institut Jean Jaurès, under the direction of Thibault Lhonneur and Axel Bruneau, carried out an analysis of the so-called “France of the sub-prefectures,” referring to areas far from the major cities, with significant social divides, which today provide key support for Le Pen’s party.

Then, economists Thomas Piketty and Julia Cagé produced an analysis of voting in France since 1789, and put forward the idea of “socio-spatial” class. They spoke of a new electoral dynamic molded by voters’ place of residence (smaller or bigger towns, richer or poorer areas) combined with their more strictly economic position. On this reading, the fundamental difference between the Rassemblement National’s working-class electorate and the one that backs the Left lies in the different kinds of areas they live in.

Still, a criticism often leveled at this approach is the lack of consideration given to questions of identity, which have become decisive for the far-right electorate. Recently, sociologist Félicien Faury published a book based on his research on the Rassemblement National’s middle-class electorate in southeastern France. One of his key findings is the primacy of issues of identity and racism as a driving force behind the Rassemblement National vote.

This gets to the heart of the current debate on the Left, which can be roughly described as a clash between Ruffin and Mélenchon, even if it also goes beyond these two figures. The question is: Is racism producing an antagonism between the working classes in the suburbs of the main cities and the “white” working classes — and is such a conflict really inevitable?

As French politics divides into a three-cornered contest, questions of identity are surely playing a key role in shaping the political map. This is particularly true of the working classes, whose worldview can be radically different, depending on their material living conditions (income, place of residence, etc.), and who take clearly different stances on questions of identity.

The current electoral map includes both center-left voters who themselves embrace the neoliberal paradigm, and working-class people who vote for the far right. The prospects for expanding the NFP’s base into either group, without breaking up the left-wing bloc that exists already, are surely complicated.
Minority in Society

The left-wing electorate is clearly a minority in society. Despite the unprecedented mobilization ahead of the recent election, and the increased turnout, the NFP scored 28 percent in the first round — only slightly more than in 2022. If it won more seats than its competitors, it is still far from a stable majority. The Left achieved significant scores among certain sectors of the population, but which are unrepresentative of France as a whole: mainly centered in the large cities and the working-class suburbs, among young graduates, public employees, and working-class immigrants.

This also contrasts with the “de-toxification” of Le Pen’s party, which is today allowing it to reach into parts of the electorate that had previously presented it with difficulties, for example, the economic elites. Its ideas, its talking points, and its worldview are not only shared by many French people (presumably including many of its ten million-plus voters) but are the basis around which media-political debate has been framed for all too long now. Outside of markedly left-wing constituencies where it still struggles, the Rassemblement National voter increasingly looks like any other kind of voter.

We may then deduce that the primary challenge is to get away from the Rassemblement National’s chosen themes, instead framing politics around the Left’s favored social issues. It’s common for social crises to accentuate identity crises among populations feeling economically or culturally insecure. The Left, then, has to find ways of reassuring these populations. This isn’t just about having a program that responds to social problems — something the Left already has. Rather, it has to use this moment to shift the political focus to these problems rather than eternal polemics around Islam and immigration.
Crisis of Democracy

France is in many ways living through a slow-motion version of a crisis that other European countries have seen already. With the weakening of parties’ traditional roots, and a democracy that mobilizes a shrinking share of the population, France’s institutions are engulfed by an increasingly tense battle in which no party or even coalition can claim a majority.

However, even faced with a crisis like this, it would be a mistake to think that the party system cannot stabilize itself on new bases. This is what has happened in other European countries undergoing similar political crises. In fact, France is currently one of few exceptions (along with Belgium and Ireland) in which this stabilization has not already taken place to the detriment of a marginalized left, no longer able to mobilize en masse.

The Left has an often disastrous penchant to divide and quarrel. But it’s also important to define clear political limits. The hope of the reemergence of a loosely progressive liberal left is an especially dangerous illusion, inconsistent with the political conflicts that would be needed to pursue a transformative policy within the neoliberal EU framework. Moreover, although the Left is a minority in society, it also needs a certain coherence in order to advance among a volatile electorate that may easily turn to abstention if it is disappointed. So, it is essential to maintain a clear and consistent approach.

At present, no single left-wing party or figure can claim hegemony over the left-wing bloc. In this regard, it would be useful to create a genuine space for debate within the NFP rather than just add together its member parties at election time. However, the competition among these parties makes this difficult to achieve in practice. Another hope lies with the social movements, and the trade unions in particular. The parliamentary elections in fact brought a historic first as the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) called for a vote for the NFP, in a country where unions have always strongly guarded their independence from politics.

Faced with a still-rising far right and a media system that is preparing the ground for Le Pen, the Left has a historic responsibility. It would be a trap to ignore the cultural antagonisms among various parts of the population, including within the working classes, that make it difficult to reconcile them on the ground of a common class interest. At the same time, it’s just as illusory to believe that the Left has a sufficient base to govern, with an at best temporary majority.

These are two sides of the same dilemma currently facing the Left. To win, it will be essential to create an electoral dynamic, to build the political contest around its own chosen themes, and to form a bloc in which a majority of French people — from the suburbs or the small towns — can each identify.

One first proposal is set to be published by the Institut de la Boétie, a foundation close to France Insoumise. It will advocate a strategy centered around radical social program and a cultural battle against racism. This seems to fit into a more long-term war of position — and supposes that cultural divides can eventually be overcome. This is surely open to debate, given the depth of such antagonisms within French society. Above all, there’s a lot of work to do to counter the far right — and turn around the effect of decades in which the Left’s strength has declined.

Julian-Nicolas Calfuquir is an economics PhD student at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle and a former national official for the Parti de Gauche.

Academic Climate Science Funding Has a Big Problem

By Veronique Carignan

August 26, 2024
Source: Jacobin


The science is clear. Scientist Rebellion joins protests outside the North American Gas Forum in Washington, D.C., in October 2023.

Record-breaking temperatures and billion-dollar climate disasters occurring every three weeks in 2024 have even climate skeptics in the United States scratching their sweaty heads. Climate change is claiming lives and land: fires in New Mexico have burned over seventeen thousand acres, extreme heat caused an estimated 175 deaths in Phoenix in June, and Beryl became the earliest hurricane on record to hit the Atlantic United States in a calendar year. To address the crisis, Americans depend on interactions between government and academic science. But the truth is that those interactions are woefully inefficient, leading to delays in climate change mitigation and deepening public distrust in scientific climate research.

The greatest expertise in climate science resides in academic institutions, where professors and their graduate students toil away in university departments and labs. They address climate change both by educating the next generation and by producing knowledge through research. That knowledge then mitigates climate change through government action. “I’ve always seen [government] grants, especially federal basic research grants, as a critical part of the scientific fabric,” says Dr Adam Subhas, professor of oceanography at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the nonprofit ocean science arm of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In climate science, research grants come from a variety of government branches, reaching as far as the Department of Defense and Highway Administration, but the National Science Foundation (NSF) is primarily where academic scientists go to fund basic research. This basic research sets the foundation for our understanding of how the climate works and ideally informs policy.

Government and academic science thus operate mutualistically to address climate change: academic scientists depend on government funding to conduct research, and the government relies on academic scientists to determine necessary courses of action. However, government granting agencies like the NSF are increasingly at the mercy of climate-denying wings of the US Congress and operate on timelines that are ineffective at dealing with the urgency of climate change and that delay climate action.

Scientists deciding the fate of grant funding at the NSF are bound by the limitations of working with Congress, explains Dr Taylor McGlynn, an ecology professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills. “The central challenge is that there are climate change deniers in Congress,” he said, adding that the NSF has to make complex scientific research digestible to those climate-denying lawmakers in order to minimize negative interactions with them. This often results in the oversimplification of climate science and can cause research projects that are not central to solving the most pressing issues of climate change to receive funding. Worse still, the less than 25 percent of Congress that denies the climate change reality pushes misinformation about climate science, while continuing to subsidize fossil fuels at the expense of funding for solutions to climate science.

The pace of government funding is also problematic. It takes a few years — and up to ten — to fund an idea through the NSF, depending on the scale of the project. Yet the research itself has to produce results relatively swiftly, often in three- or five-year increments, explained McGlynn. That leaves little room for creativity or collaboration. What’s more, while short-term goals are well suited to the cycles of Congress, such structures prevent climate researchers from examining the big picture. After all, climate change, while accelerating rapidly, does not occur overnight. And science relies on long-term datasets to properly incorporate seasonality and large-scale global processes like the Polar Jet Stream or El Nino Southern Oscillation.

The struggling relationship between government and academic science is pushing climate science into new territory. Climate scientists are now looking to funding sources outside of government grants. Subhas explains that more transformative climate science in recent years has been “spearheaded by foundations and philanthropic groups in a way that none of the federal agencies have had an appetite for.” These foundations will often fund riskier technology, move faster than the government, and speak louder when it comes to results and outcomes. This thrust toward exploratory technological adaptations is also being seen in venture capital groups and start-ups entering the climate change space.

And so, with more money have come more problems, as the adage goes. “All this money has started getting directed toward start-ups in this capitalist way: we’ll seed a bunch of companies, they’re probably going to fail, and something will come out of it,” Subhas said. This new venture capitalist climate research, via competition within and outside of academia, can speed the pace of science, but it can also have its problems. Dr Subhas explained that “it’s really challenging to have any sort of scientific community input and consensus in the same way that the peer review process operates for government agencies like NSF,” and as a result, while some areas of climate science are taking off quickly, they aren’t helping to mitigate the crisis.

One example of this is kelp farming, which has been lauded as an atmospheric carbon mitigation strategy. Now highly incentivized by the US government, it has taken off wildly as an industry in the private sector.

The basic idea is that via photosynthesis, kelp will draw down atmospheric carbon dioxide and store it within the aquatic plant’s organic material. The part that most people miss is that as the kelp decomposes — either on land or in the ocean — the supposedly sequestered carbon dioxide is released straight back into the atmosphere.

That means that even if we farmed all available US waters with kelp, it wouldn’t even make a dent, explains aquaculturist and citizen-scientist Dr Dan Ward. “It’s just stoichiometry,” Ward said. He continued, “When it comes to these solutions being put forward by industry and start-ups, there’s no path. The people that understand how these things work on global scales know that there is no path for kelp, but the people running the start-ups don’t. The people funding this, be it NSF or venture capitalists, they don’t know either.”

Kelp farming raised $130 million in venture investments in 2023, but in peer-reviewed academic science literature, it has been found that “any carbon removal capacity provided by seaweed farms globally is likely to be offset by their emissions.”

Ask almost any climate scientist and they will tell you that the solutions to climate change are in hand. The bottom-line solution is to stop using fossil fuels, stop emitting greenhouse gasses, and dismantle rampant consumerism, especially surrounding plastics. The United States is wildly behind all targets to address any of these objectives and is projected to spend $18 billion on oil and gas in 2024, compared to $1.2 billion in funding for projects that reduce air pollution. As Ward says, “We’re bailing out a boat, but the water is flowing in faster than we’re pulling it back out. We need to equalize that equation first.”

By targeting Congress-friendly climate research, government-funded academic science effectively distracts the public from actual solution-driven work. With technological solutions as its carrot, academic science draws funds — government, philanthropic, venture capital — away from initiatives centered around changing behavior. Instead of funding projects centered around flashy technology or promising large datasets, government funding and privately funded science initiatives need to be more socially minded (despite the fact that the social sciences are notoriously disregarded by funding agencies).

At this point, we don’t need massive innovations in science to change climate, but massive shifts in mindset. To do that, academic science needs to get out of the weeds and onto the ground so that scientific minds can begin to mend the broken trust this funding circus has created.

Veronique Carignan is an environmental chemist and former professor of chemical oceanography based on Cape Cod.

Morocco: Popular Anger Against Israel’s War on Gaza Spills into the Streets, Posing Dilemma for Rabat

By Mohamed Jegham

August 27,  2024

Source: Informed Comment

Tens of thousands on the streets of Rabat on October 15, 2023 in solidarity with Palestine. Photo: Democratic Way

The Palestinian question has been a central topic for the Arab world for many decades now. Over the years, Arab leaders have used the Palestinian cause as one of their talking points to gain support from the populace. Over the last decade, however, the topic began to lose steam, especially thanks to the Abraham Accords that led to some Arab countries following Egypt and Jordan in normalising diplomatic relations with Israel.

Against opposing voices and detractors, to explain their new-found ties with Israel these nations provided the excuse of seeking peace and stability in the region and a peaceful way for securing a Palestinian state.

But the recent war on Gaza has reignited the importance of ‘the Palestinian question’ and reinvigorated Arabs’ passion for this cause leading to many protests and demonstrations against their countries and against normalisation with Israel.

Over 40 Moroccan cities, including Fez, Marrakesh, Agadir and Tangier, saw regular demonstrations in favor of Palestine this summer. In early August, the Israeli assassination of the head of the civilian Hamas politburo provoked large crowds to come into the streets. Earlier, in Tangier, Morocco, thousands of protesters had filled the streets chanting “Gaza is not alone” in protest at an Israeli ship docking in Tangier. The Israeli newspaper Globes revealed that “The new Israeli Navy landing ship INS Komemiyut docked at the port of Tangier, Morocco, for supplies while sailing from the United States to Israel,”

Not long after, this incident escalated into a full-on demonstration in Tangier where Moroccan anti-normalisation activists condemned the government’s silence and accused the country’s officials of being complicit in the genocide in Gaza.

The normalisation of diplomatic ties with Israel dates back to 2020 when Morocco officially established relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords. The biggest incentive for the Moroccan Kingdom to sign this deal was to gain official recognition from the US for Morocco’s sovereignty over the Western Sahara territory, a territory that’s been under dispute for a long time. While an economic and diplomatic gain for Morocco, no doubt, this deal was not without its difficulties. Morocco and other countries that established relations with Israel had to stifle their own citizens by harassing, censoring and undermining any voices opposing the deal.

However, after the 7th of October and the current state of war in Gaza, Morocco alongside other Arab countries, had to show solidarity with Palestinians despite their involvement with Israel. In the case of Morocco, Rabat officially denounced the war and called Israeli actions “flagrant violations of the provisions of international law”. Yet, the absence of any talk about reversing the Abraham Accords revealed the truth that the leaders of Morocco are walking a tightrope trying to please both their enraged citizens and salvaging relations with The US and Israel. Despite the government’s attempts to play both sides, the streets haven’t been quiet. Since the war on Gaza started, dozens of demonstrations in Morocco erupted in support of Palestine.

The Moroccan government has not been happy about these demonstrations. For instance, on May 15th during Nakba day Rabat local authorities stopped a Pro-Palestinian march from happening over ‘logistical issues.’ Mr. Saied Hannaoui, a leading figure of the Moroccan opposition to normalisation, spoke out about this ban, calling it “a backward authoritarian decision. It reflects the continued tyranny that imposes normalisation on the Moroccan people.”

The crackdown on pro-Palestinian protests is nothing new to Morocco or the region. According to Amnesty International, in recent years, countries like Morocco with close ties to Israel have been wary of any dissent towards their deals with Israel. This led these countries to practice censorship, make arrests and institute a ban demonstrations and any anti-normalisation voices.

However, despite the government’s attempts to restrain its people, Moroccans have expressed their dissatisfaction with the government’s policies and their support for Palestine throughout the war in Gaza.

The major demonstration in Tangier earlier this summer provides an excellent case study of how volatile the situation is in Morocco and other Arab nations. The demonstration, which was organised by the Moroccan Front, saw leftist parties and Islamist movements come together in support of Gaza’s Palestinians and against the continuation of Morocco’s ties with Israel. The choice of the coastal city of Tangier is relevant as reports claim that an Israeli ship coming from the US had docked at Tangier in June to restock. The fact that Morocco had agreed to have an Israeli ship dock at one of its ports escalated tensions between the people and the government. “Allowing the Israeli warship to dock is, unfortunately, a participation in the genocide of the Palestinian people, and support to the Israeli aggression on Gaza,” said Mohamed El-Ghafry, coordinator of the Moroccan Front Against Normalisation.

In a press release, the Front saw that “turning a blind eye to the passage of such ships” as a “violation of the International Court of Justice’s decision following South Africa’s lawsuit against Israel” and “a compromise of our national sovereignty.”

Despite the people’s attempts to sway the government’s opinion on its diplomatic ties with Israel, Morocco seems to see benefits in having these ties with Israel. One anonymous source from the Moroccan foreign ministry insisted in March to Reuters that these ties hold benefits for furthering the cause of the Palestinian people. Whether these claims have merit or not, the people of Morocco do not seem to be swayed by this rhetoric and instead are pushing more and more for Morocco to cancel the Abraham Accords.

The Moroccan government, alongside other Arab countries, is attempting to be supportive of the Palestinian cause while at the same time remaining cordial or even more than cordial with Israel. In light of these recent developments in the country’s streets, is the government’s way of handling this very delicate situation any longer sustainable?


Mohamed Jegham an Informed Comment regular, is from Tunisia. He has degrees in English and Cultural Studies.

Work to Rule and Open Bargaining Back Down Kroger Warehouse Bosses

By Alexandra Bradbury

August 27, 2024

Source: Labor Notes


Image by Teamsters Local 13

Teamsters in an Indiana grocery warehouse scored big this year with a contract campaign like never before.

They organized in five languages and sported a multilingual union button. They opened up bargaining sessions for any member to come observe—on the peak day, 150 showed up. They even pulled off a daring work-to-rule action the week before bargaining kicked off, to start from a position of strength.

The final night, June 30, negotiations came down to the wire, stretching past the midnight contract expiration deadline. Some members were itching to walk. The employer, grocery giant Kroger, had prepared for a strike too—it had 300 scabs waiting in a hotel.

So why did management yield on the union’s top issues, averting a strike?

“I honestly believe they knew it was a fight they were not going to win,” said Greg Gorman, who has worked in this warehouse for 24 years and been a steward for most of them. “We were not going to give, and we had all the backing we needed.”

The Teamsters won a ban on any further outsourcing, wrested back some previously outsourced jobs, and for the first time won the right to honor strikes by other Kroger Teamsters.
LONG WAIT

This warehouse in Shelbyville, where 500 Teamsters work, is part of Local 135—one of the biggest Teamster locals in the country, with 12,000 members across three states.

In 2012, the previous leaders of Local 135 pushed through a 12-year agreement just before Indiana’s “right-to-work” law took effect, to postpone the loss of union shop. (Right-to-work laws, meant to weaken collective power, encourage workers to individually opt out of paying dues.)

Since then, the company has outsourced 80 formerly union jobs—the porters, who clean up spilled milk and smashed strawberries while the warehouse operates round the clock. During the 12 years of the contract, management of the warehouse changed hands twice—plus the pandemic hit and inflation soared, yet workers didn’t get back to the table to renegotiate their raise or anything else. Until this year.

Meanwhile Local 135 President Dustin Roach and the rest of the Members First reform slate, backed by Teamsters for a Democratic Union, swept local elections two years ago, pledging to mobilize members in powerful contract campaigns.
FIVE LANGUAGES

What did that look like on the ground? Many hours standing in the parking lot—getting sunburned or rained on—catching co-workers on their way in to ask about priorities and explain plans.

The warehouse has three shifts, each with staggered start times, so to reach everyone working on a given day, union activists had to be there from 4:30 to 7 a.m., then again from 12 to 4 p.m., then once more from 7 p.m. to 12 a.m. Repeat the next day to catch anyone who was off.

Plus, it took a team to cover all the languages. The warehouse workforce includes English-speakers from the U.S.; Spanish-speakers from Mexico and elsewhere; immigrants from Myanmar who speak Burmese or Chin; and the newest group, Haitian-Creole-speakers.

Over the years, stewards have established a culture that the union stands up for everyone who works here, immigrant or not. That wasn’t always a given; decades ago it was the central issue in a hard-fought chief steward election, and once they had to force out a steward who opposed the union’s program of defending immigrants.

Two years ago Mario Martinez walked into work and saw a Spanish-speaking co-worker pushed to sign a disciplinary write-up he couldn’t read or discuss, with no interpreter present. This finally convinced him to become a steward, after 15 years on the job and multiple requests from Gorman.

“That day I was like, you know what, let me get a voice,” Martinez said.

Martinez, a Texan with the drawl to prove it, speaks English and Spanish. His efforts to learn Burmese and Chin have been fruitless so far, but he relies on a network of bilingual co-workers to interpret.

For instance, to translate into Chin, “there’s a guy we call Tupac,” because in Burma he learned English by listening to the rapper Tupac Shakur. And to translate into Burmese, “there’s a guy we call Rockstar, because he plays electric guitar in the church.” Martinez is working on Tupac to become a steward.
STILL IN STREET CLOTHES

The week before bargaining began—which also happened to be the week of Memorial Day, a big grocery holiday—members organized an action on the job.

On a typical day, most workers get to the warehouse early and put in unpaid time getting ready: changing into a snowsuit (this is a refrigerated warehouse), lining up to check out scanners and headsets, trying to get dibs on a decent forklift. Then they clock in for the shift meeting—ready to work as soon as it’s over.

So the action was: don’t do all that. Clock in for the meeting in your street clothes and your union button. Wait till you’re getting paid to change clothes and pick up equipment.

Participation was high. Management panicked, once they saw how far it was setting them back (30-45 minutes), and tried pressuring workers, especially on the large second shift. Workers saw each other stand strong—an effective demonstration of unity across the language barriers.

“They got a bit of pride out of that,” Gorman said, “like it wasn’t just something the stewards have been preaching—we really are one group.”

When long lines formed, the company also tried to get the workers who hand out equipment to open up another window.

“We didn’t,” said one of them, Monika Spears. They’re also now Teamsters—one of two previously excluded groups in the warehouse who organized over the past year.
BIG BARGAINING

In the past, stewards at this warehouse were on their own to bargain with the company—they got little help from local officers.

But this time Roach, the new president, brought new ideas, including opening up bargaining. When he suggested that negotiations be held at the union hall, Kroger management must have had no idea what it was agreeing to: large numbers of spectators.

As more Teamsters started showing up, the company’s bargaining team hid out. Sessions were scheduled to start at 9 a.m., but the management side would arrive hours late, waiting until workers had to go clock in.

The disrespect was glaring—but so was the shift in power, in who was afraid of who. “Those spineless people,” Martinez said. “They didn’t want to face all those members.”
WHAT THEY WON

Management had made noises about worsening the health care and 401(k), but backed off those efforts by the time bargaining started, admitting members wouldn’t accept it.

A sticking point, though, was the attendance policy—the union had won an unusually strong one in arbitration, and wanted to secure it in the contract. (The annual limit is 6.75 attendance penalty points. Points roll off after a year, but also each month of perfect attendance allows you to “buy back” 0.75 points and accumulate two hours of paid time off.) Kroger’s reluctance to put it in writing strengthened workers’ suspicions that the company planned to come after it. The union won.

On outsourcing, what the union won, though not complete, is big: no further outsourcing, and the Teamsters got back 20 percent of the 80 jobs already outsourced. “The goal for the next contract is to keep pushing on that, and try to get them all back eventually,” Gorman said.

The stickiest sticking point of them all, settled in the final minutes of bargaining, was the strike language. The previous contract allowed no sympathy strikes. This one allows these workers to honor the picket lines of other Kroger Teamsters—of whom there are not many in Local 135, but plenty around the country. Extending picket lines nationwide has become a major point of leverage in recent Teamster fights, for instance at US Foods and DHL.

In the next contract campaign—which isn’t far-off, since this deal is only two years and eight months long—the union may push for the right to honor secondary picket lines, where their own employer is not the direct target. Local 135 includes members at various third-party Kroger suppliers like Zenith (whose chief steward sat in on this bargaining), Transervice, and Quickway.

One inevitable step backward in this contract, because of Indiana’s right-to-work law, is that workers can now opt out of union membership. But the Teamsters I spoke with haven’t seen anyone drop out so far, and don’t expect to. The union is more active than ever, and people have a fresh confidence and pride in being members.

Getting to observe bargaining firsthand “opened a lot of people’s eyes,” Spears said. “Some of our senior guys that used to badmouth the stewards and say, ‘Oh, you got us a crappy contract,’ their outlook definitely changed.”

Would a Harris/Walz Administration be Economically Progressive?

By Chris Green

August 27, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Chsdrummajor07, Creative Commons 4.0

My answer to the question posed in this article’s headline is: probably not to a significant extent. I will explain further below.

As a presidential candidate, Kamala Harris has been forced to contend with the conflicting interests of different factions of the Democratic Party. On the one hand much of the Democratic base–and the American population in general–supports such social democratic policies as Medicare for All and a guarantee by the federal government of a job for every American. On the other hand, Harris and the Democratic Party in general are funded by big business. Democrat Party business donors want to see economic policies that will enhance their control over the American economy; they want the government to minimize, if not entirely eliminate any policy that might redistribute wealth toward the working class or regulate business in the public interest.

The contradictions inherent in attempting to appeal to both business interests and poor, working class and environmentally conscious voters is the most likely explanation for the oft-repeated criticism that Harris has been vague, silent or incoherent in her public policy stances. During her time in the US Senate (which coincided with her first run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019), she supported Medicare for All, a federal job guarantee and a ban on fracking. In the face of pushback from powerful business interests and concerns about potentially alienating certain sections of “moderate” voters, she has reversed herself on all three issues.

For her presidential platform, there have been indications of support for building upon the Keynesian measures implemented by the Biden administration to stabilize the American economy after the Covid pandemic. Often many aspects of her platform have lacked specific details. Harris’s supporters have framed her policy positions as aiming to create a “care economy”: the spurring of federal government investment in securing greater housing, educational, child care, elder care and health care access for ordinary Americans. She has called for raising the national minimum wage–but has not suggested by how much. She has called for federal government subsidies for new homebuyers; an expansion of the earned income and child tax credits; and called for action to fight price gouging on groceries. She has said she supports passing the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would make it easier for workers to form unions.

One barrier in passing Harris’s proposals remains the US Senate’s filibuster. Since the Obama era the Republicans have repeatedly abused the filibuster, making it necessary for a 60 vote supermajority to pass many Democrat backed bills. One way to avoid the filibuster is the budget reconciliation process whereby legislation related to the federal budget can pass the US Senate with a simple 50 vote majority. The budget reconciliation process was used in early 2021 to pass the Biden Administration’s American Rescue Plan Act. To the latter, Democrats attempted to attach a measure instituting a national $15/hr minimum wage (the federal government raised it to its current rate of $7.25/hr in 2009). However, the Senate parliamentarian advised that a minimum wage measure did not belong in a budgetary bill–contradicting the argument of other experts that minimum wage legislation did affect the federal budget and thus was not improper to include in a spending bill. Harris, acting as president of the Senate in her position as Biden’s vice-president, agreed to drop the minimum wage provision based on the parliamentarian’s recommendation.

The Senate parliamentarian has no legal authority. US Senators have no obligation to comply with the parliamentarian’s recommendations. When the Senate parliamentarian objected to tax related legislation early in the administration of George W. Bush, Senate Republicans simply fired him. But as representatives of the “left” party in the American political system, Harris and her Democratic colleagues are in a special predicament. They are in a forever struggle to show the business community that American capitalism is safe in their hands. In trying to pass even the most mildly redistributive measures like the aborted minimum wage hike, it has been common for Democrats to try to demonstrate to the business community that they are proceeding with the utmost caution, that they are not moving “too far to the left.” For Democrats, demonstrating that caution includes respecting the conservative guardrails of American politics like the Senate parliamentarian and the filibuster.

When American Prospect executive editor David Dayen brought up the possibility of eliminating the filibuster with multiple Democratic US Senators at the recent Democratic National Convention(DNC), almost all seemed reluctant to talk about the subject. Democrats have indicated that if they retain their 50 seat Senate majority in November’s election, they will enact rules to eliminate the filibuster for two areas of legislation: to expand voting protections and to encode abortion rights. Apart from those exceptions, Democrats will continue to refrain from exercising their ability as the majority party to completely eliminate the filibuster, thus allowing Republicans to continue to derail Democrat backed legislation. By doing so, Democrats are attempting to show the business community that as they advocate for mildly redistributive measures like an expanded child tax credit, they are fully respectful of all the conservative guardrails of American politics.

Should Democrats retain their simple 50 seat Senate majority in November’s election, the Republican abuse of the filibuster will provide them with a convenient excuse to shelve legislation which they formally support but for which they hold little real enthusiasm: for example the PRO Act.

Democrats and Corporate Power

As Michelle Goldberg recently observed in a New York Times piece cheerleading calls by Harris and speakers at the DNC to fight price gouging and other abuses by corporate monopolies, a perfect ally in that fight would be Lina Khan, the Biden appointed chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Khan has used her position to pursue vigorous antitrust enforcement against corporate monopolies. Khan has faced strong opposition from many Republicans but has also gained notable support among them as well. Republicans who view themselves as representing medium sized and small business against corporate behemoths like Google–such as Donald Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance–have expressed support for Khan.

However in July, two billionaire Harris donors–the media mogul Barry Diller and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Reid Hoffman–publicly called for Khan to be fired. One of Harris’s spokespeople, Maryland governor Wes Moore, indicated in a CNBC interview that the Harris camp was ambivalent if not in outright disagreement with Khan’s antitrust approach. Moore suggested that a Harris administration would have friendlier antitrust policies for “large industries.”

The broad outlines of Harris’s economic policy have been formulated by figures from the corporate world. Two such leading figures are Brian Deese and Mike Pyle, both former Biden White House officials and top executives at Blackrock, the global asset management giant. Another leading advisor is Deanne Millison, until 2023 Vice-President Harris’s chief economic advisor and currently a lobbyist for the Ford Motor Company. Harris has particularly strong links to figures from Silicon Valley. Her brother-in-law Tony West, recently took unpaid leave from his position as Uber’s chief legal officer to serve as an advisor to her presidential campaign. Prominent Google lawyer Karen Dunn has also been advising Harris in her presidential run–after the Biden/Harris administration successfully sued Google for having an illegal search engine monopoly and is potentially weighing the option of breaking Google up into smaller companies.

Tim Walz

For many in the Democrats’ left-liberal base, Kamala Harris’s strong corporate connections have been more than offset by the appointment of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. As Minnesota governor, Walz signed into law a bevy of progressive reforms: enhanced abortion rights protections; 12 weeks of paid medical and family leave for Minnesota workers; universal, free breakfast and lunch provision for the state’s public school students; a program to assist low income Minnesotans to obtain insulin; crackdowns on safety violations at Amazon warehouses in the state; a 20 percent wage boost for Uber and Lyft drivers in the state.

Left-liberal commentators gushed over Walz. Robert Borosage, in The Nation, declared that the Walz nomination was yet another sign that Democrats were moving back towards Keynesian policies since Joe Biden assumed the presidency: “waving goodbye to the neoliberal consensus”–deregulation, job killing free trade deals and fiscal austerity–that constituted the Party’s priorities under Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton. In Jacobin, Branko Marcetic celebrated the nomination of the “unabashedly progressive” Walz as evidence of the growing influence of Bernie Sander supporters on the Democratic Party. The Democratic Socialists of America took credit for exerting its influence to have Walz picked as Harris’s running mate over the arch-zionist neoliberal Pennsylvania Democratic governor Josh Shapiro. Meanwhile labor sociologist Barry Eidlin told Jacobin’s Alex N. Press that “Walz is a clear example of a middle-of-the-road politician who is open to listening to movements.” According to Eidlin, with Walz as vice-president and his track record of dialoguing with social movements, such movements would be able to influence the Democratic Party.

Tim Walz: A Darker Side

Some progressive Minnesotans have views of Tim Walz different from those held by the likes of Marcetic and Borosage. Minneapolis/St. Paul African American American community organizer Rod Adams told Sarah Jaffe of In These Times that Walz as governor was “super beholden to corporations.” In 2023, Mary Turner, president of the Minnesota Nurses Association, accused Walz of “siding with the profits and power of corporate executives over the rights and needs of patients and workers.” She added that “Governor Walz has made clear to Minnesotans that their democratic process does not work for them, but for the wealthy and powerful few.”

Turner’s denunciations were inspired by Walz’s succumbing to pressure from the Mayo Clinic and other hospitals and derailing legislation requiring hospitals in Minnesota to form committees (with nurses given a leading voice) to determine appropriate nursing staffing levels at their respective worksites. Mayo had threatened to withdraw billions in planned new investments from Minnesota if the legislation went into effect.

Then there are the views of indigenous and environmental activists who see Walz as a tool of fossil fuel industries with his backing of the Line 3 tar sands pipeline in Minnesota. After running for governor in 2018 as an opponent of the pipeline, once assuming office he gradually transitioned into supporting the project, appointing oil industry friendly persons to key state regulatory agencies and deploying law enforcement to violently repress activists peacefully protesting the pipeline.

The Minnesota Model: A Blueprint for National Action?

The suite of progressive reforms signed into law by Walz has been lauded by progressives as the “Minnesota Model,” providing a potential blueprint for Kamala Harris to implement her vision of the “care economy”at the national level. What gets lost in celebration of this model is that in passing progressive reforms, Walz was responding to pressure from numerous social justice movements in the Minneapolis/St. Paul region. These movements have been built up over the course of years through patient and arduous effort by working class activists. The movements–focusing on labor issues, police brutality, immigrant rights, housing, education and health care–are the real embodiment of the Minnesota model, not Tim Walz himself (as some progressives seem to think). Walz has been described as a progressive firebrand; however he doesn’t have a long track record of being so. Representing a Republican leaning rural district in Congress for 12 years (2007-19), he mainly showed himself to be a relatively cautious centrist.

Walz has benefited as governor from a relatively strong Minnesota economy and a large state budget surplus: in the neoliberal era, under such conditions, political and business elites have often been willing to tolerate greater social spending and other modest concessions to ordinary people.

It will be considerably harder to implement any parallel to the Minnesota Model at the national level. For one, the US president and Congress are particularly vulnerable to pressure from Wall Street to rein in fiscal deficits; thus any increases in social spending by a potential Harris/Walz administration will probably be modest, at best.

The administration of Bill Clinton provides an instructive example as to how a Harris/Walz administration might evolve if elected. Clinton campaigned for the presidency in 1992 on a proposal for federal government spending on infrastructure as a way to stimulate the economy and provide jobs. According to Bob Woodward’s 1994 book The Agenda, after winning the presidency Clinton was subjected to a series of lectures from US Federal Reserve Bank officials about the need to discard his infrastructure spending proposal and instead concentrate his entire presidential agenda on implementing Wall Street friendly budget deficit slashing policies. Clinton reacted with dismay according to Woodward: “You mean to tell me that the success of the program and my reelection hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?” Subsequently, Clinton’s infrastructure plan was forgotten; he significantly expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit for America’s low income population but otherwise spent nearly his entire presidency cooperating with Republicans to significantly slash budget deficits (in the interests of Wall Street).

Woodward portrayed Clinton entering the presidency as a starry eyed progressive idealist, looking to harness the power of the federal government to benefit ordinary people. According to this portrait, it was only after becoming president that Clinton realized he would be forced to orient his entire presidency around bowing down to Wall Street’s power. Alexander Cockburn, writing in the Los Angeles Times in 1994, argued that Clinton was probably nowhere near as naive as Woodward portrayed him. Clinton’s campaign in 1992 showed plenty of signs that he was aligned with Wall Street. His proposal for infrastructure spending during the campaign was paired with caveats about such new spending being contingent on cutting spending elsewhere in the federal budget. Like many of the noises today emanating from the Harris/Walz campaign in support of the “care economy,” Clinton’s infrastructure proposal was substantially vague–it was probably offered not with the intention of seriously trying to implement it but only as rhetorical fluff during the campaign to mobilize progressive voters. The Clinton team’s probable intention all along–from the 1992 campaign to the assumption of the presidency–was to serve Wall Street. As Christopher Hitchens wrote in his 1999 book No One Left to Lie To: “the essence of American politics” is “the manipulation of populism by elitism.” Rhetorically–especially during election campaigns–politicians present themselves as populists operating on behalf of ordinary people; meanwhile, behind the scenes, their actual policies are molded to enhance the power of economic elites.

But then again Harris/Walz face somewhat different conditions in 2024 than those faced by Bill Clinton and Al Gore in 1992. In current times (as during the 1990’s) one hears frequent warnings from Wall Street elites, politicians and media commentators about the urgent need to rein in federal budget deficits. However, at the same time, the Covid pandemic and the evolving geopolitical and economic rivalry with China has encouraged sections of elite policymakers and business leaders to support considerably greater federal government spending and economic intervention in order to strengthen the domestic American economy. Both the Biden and Trump administrations significantly expanded tariffs to protect American manufacturers against Chinese competition. A visible portion of congressional Republicans supported the Biden administration’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill in 2021 as well as Biden’s $280 billion CHIPS Act of 2022; Republican governor Gregg Abbott of Texas indicated support for the CHIPS Act’s underlying principle by signing into law Texas’s own $1.4 billion investment into semiconductors. Also recent Democratic legislation to expand the Child Tax Credit passed the US House with a strong majority of the body’s Republicans supporting it.; however the measure failed in the Senate with heavy Republican opposition.

Many Republican politicians and media commentators have denounced the increased spending policies of the Biden administration as evidence of the latter being communist. However, beneath the surface of such stupid demagoguery, it is clear that there is a modicum of symmetry between both parties about the need for an industrial policy to strengthen domestic American business (especially in the context of rivalry with China). It is within that context that one expects the greatest chance for elements of Minnesota Model type policies to be passed at the national level: greater government investments in health care, education, child care, expanded child tax credits, a higher minimum wage and similar measures justified to make American workers more productive in economic competition with China.

Robert Borsage was wrong to write that the nomination of Tim Walz represents the Democratic Party “waving goodbye” to neoliberalism. Democrats are still fundamentally neoliberal even if they have taken a slightly Keynesian turn in recent years. It will be up to social movements of the type which successfully pressured Governor Tim Walz to sign Minnesota model policies into law to keep up the pressure on Democrats if there is any chance of them moving further away from neoliberalism.

Why Do So Many (WHITE) Workers Love Trump?

Racism and xenophobia are a part of why so many ordinary workers were won over to Donald Trump, but that's far from the whole story. A careful study breaks down how Trump spoke to economic grievances and personal experiences.

By Jared Abbott

August 25, 2024

Source: Jacobin

In the wake of Teamsters chief Sean O’Brien’s remarks at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July, liberal commentators were aghast at the very idea of a labor leader validating Donald Trump’s popularity with American workers.

Writing in the Atlantic, for instance, David Graham describes Trump’s working-class appeals as the “Fakest Populism You Ever Saw,” while Rolling Stone summed up July’s RNC as an attempt to court “the working class with hollow, populist rhetoric.”

On one level, there is obvious truth to these assessments. While Trump can point to a few examples where he helped save jobs and project American workers as president — such as his partial success in saving jobs at an Indiana Carrier plant and his renegotiation of NAFTA to include stronger labor protections — overall his record on labor hardly inspires confidence.

To take just a few examples: Trump stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union corporate lawyers and failed to deliver on his promise to bring back significant manufacturing jobs to rust belt states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio. He threatened to veto the union-friendly PRO Act (which, by the way, none of the MAGA Republicans in the senate, including J. D. Vance, voted for), and he pushed through regressive tax cuts that were massively skewed toward the rich and failed to deliver broader economic benefits for ordinary Americans.

While Trump did increase import tariffs with the goal of bringing back American manufacturing jobs, there is no evidence that this policy had a net-positive effect on American jobs.

Given Trump’s less than stellar record on jobs, is his strong support among working-class voters (especially, but far from exclusively, white workers) simply a reflection of his shrewd capacity to get these voters to forget their own economic self-interest by doubling down on appeals to their worst xenophobic, sexist, and racist tendencies? Many liberal commentators are absolutely certain that the answer is yes. Writing in Vox shortly after Trump’s surprise 2016 victory, German Lopez boldly asserts “Trump won because of racial resentment,” while NPR’s Rich Barlow asserted that “Racial Resentment, Not Economics, Elected Trump.”

While there is little doubt that cynical, fear-based appeals to the worst impulses of working-class whites are an important part of the story, if we look at the content of Trump’s appeals to working-class voters, we see that a narrow focus on the darkest aspects of Trump’s rhetoric belies consistent and often quite powerful appeals that tap directly into decades of economic dislocation experienced by millions of American workers.
A Careful Study of Trump’s Rhetoric

My analysis of Trump’s 2016 campaign speeches and statements reveals that, however disingenuously these messages may have been deployed, he talked a lot about bread-and-butter issues many working-class Americans care deeply about and feel that Democratic and Republican politicians alike have been ignoring for decades.

Let’s start with a 30,000-foot view of Trump’s rhetoric on the 2016 campaign trail. To get a basic sense of how much Trump focused on different kinds of rhetorical appeals during the 2016 campaign, I collected all available Trump campaign statements and speeches from 2015 until election day on November 8, 2016. I then identified the number of times Trump mentioned key words and phrases to capture different policy bundles and rhetorical styles.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, it was jobs and trade — and not immigration or any other divisive social or cultural issue — that had top billing in Trump’s 2016 rhetoric. On average, Trump invoked jobs and trade (“jobs,” “manufacturing,” “unfair trade deals,” etc.) 10.3 times per statement or speech, compared to the 8.3 times he invoked immigration (21 percent fewer average mentions) and the less than one time per statement or speech he referenced controversial social issues (excluding immigration), from abortion to trans rights and Black Lives Matter. Indeed, Trump used pro-worker rhetoric nearly three times as often — and anti–economic elite rhetoric more than twice as often — as he brought up controversial social issues.

There were certainly speeches where candidate Trump focused more on immigration than anything else, and predictably these speeches were littered with hateful vitriol against immigrants. Among many other blatant falsehoods, he lied about immigrants and their children being convicted of terrorist activities in the United States; he falsely claimed Hillary Clinton wanted to spend hundreds of billions resettling Middle Eastern refugees in US cities; and he erroneously claimed that Clinton would implement an “open borders” immigration policy.

But even in these speeches, Trump spent as much time connecting immigration to the economic well-being of American workers as he did demonizing undocumented workers per se, as in a June 2016 speech when he claimed that “Hillary’s Wall Street immigration agenda will keep immigrant communities poor and unemployed Americans out of work. She can’t claim to care about African American and Hispanic workers when she wants to bring in millions of new low-wage workers to compete against them.” Regardless of whether Trump’s controversial claims were empirically true or false, the point is that his remarks framed immigration in terms of protecting American workers, not in overtly bigoted terms based on the condemnation of an entire class of people.

Trump’s discussion of jobs and trade focused on three key themes: mass job loss due to bad trade policies, life getter harder and harder for American workers, and blaming elites for doing nothing to stop the decline of the working class.

First, Trump regularly invoked the harm free trade policies have had on American workers. In a series of speeches the month prior to election day in 2016, Trump repeatedly argued that “we are living through the greatest jobs theft in the history of the world.” In an October 16 speech in New Hampshire, for instance, he explained that “the state of New Hampshire has lost nearly one in three manufacturing jobs since NAFTA. . . . Since China entered the World Trade Organization . . . 70,000 factories have shut down or left the United States. That’s fifteen factories closing a day, on average. . . . If I win, day one, we are going to announce our plans to renegotiate NAFTA. If we don’t get the deal we want, we’ll leave NAFTA and start over to get a much better deal.” These remarks could just as easily have come from Bernie Sanders or AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka and are consistent with legitimate research on the negative impacts of trade policies on American manufacturing jobs in the 1990s and 2000s.

Next, Trump focused his remarks time and again on how it’s become harder for working Americans to keep their heads above water economically than in the past. In an October 18, 2016, speech in Colorado, he again sounded indistinguishable from Bernie Sanders, exhorting that “many workers are earning less today than they were eighteen years ago, they are working harder and longer, but making less. Some of them are working two, three jobs but still taking home less money.” This, again, reflects the actual experiences of millions of working-class Americans since the 1970s who have seen their wages stagnate or fall, their share of America’s wealth drop precipitously, and their chances of achieving a higher standard of living than their parents crater.

After identifying and empathizing with the economic struggles facing working Americans, Trump consistently put the blame for “a wave of globalization that wipes out our middle class and our jobs” squarely on the shoulders of large corporations and “elites in Washington”:


The political establishment has brought about the destruction of our factories and our jobs. . . . Just look at what this corrupt establishment has done to our cities like Detroit and Flint, Michigan — and rural towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, and across our country. They have stripped these towns bare and raided the wealth for themselves and taken away their jobs.

Finally, Trump not only invoked classic economic populist messages to call out elites for their role in shattering the American dream for so many, but he also raised up the inherent dignity of working Americans and stressed that they needed more voice in Washington. In a speech in Michigan that August, for instance, he told listeners that his campaign was “going to be a victory for the people, a victory for the wage earner, the factory worker. Remember this, a big, big victory for the factory worker. They haven’t had those victories for a long time. A victory for every citizen and for all of the people whose voices have not been heard for many, many years. They’re going to be heard again.”

And even though it may sound absurd in the abstract given his superelite class background, Trump managed to identify with workers on a personal level, as in a speech in Eerie, Pennsylvania, on August 12:


I grew up, you know they say, “You know you’re really rich. How come you sort of relate to these [working-class] people?” Well, my father built houses, and I used to work in these houses and I got to know the electricians. I got to know all these people. I got to know the plumbers, the steamfitters — I got to know them all. And I liked them better than the rich people that I know.

He reprised this theme a month later in Asheville, North Carolina:

While my opponent slanders you as deplorable and irredeemable, I call you hardworking American patriots who love your country and want a better future for all of our people. You are mothers and fathers, soldiers and sailors, carpenters and welders.

Taken together, these appeals make it pretty clear why so many disaffected working- and middle-class voters — who either experienced these economic crises directly or, in the case of many comparatively more affluent Trump voters, saw it all playing out in their communities — would find Trump appealing. Unlike virtually any politician they had ever heard before, Trump not only spoke over and over again to the economic pain felt by so many working-class Americans but also called out the elite culprits by name, something that traditional politicians typically shy away from.
Know Your Enemy

Nearly a decade later, progressives once again ignore the economic foundations of Trump’s working-class support at their own peril. Yes, of course, it’s too late to reach most Trump voters, whose loyalty to the former president has become a core feature of their identities. And yes, of course, shameful appeals meant to activate latent racial and xenophobic proclivities were a key tool in Trump’s electoral playbook.

However, many past and likely future Trump voters saw something unique in his brash economic populist message and rewarded him for it. Progressives can and must compete for these voters by making the same kinds of economic appeals. But in sharp contrast to President Trump, they must deliver on that rhetoric by implementing policies that will actually help workers rather than the 1 percent.

It’s been eight years since Trump first won the presidency. If progressives want to keep him out of office, they should start by taking his working-class appeal seriously — right now — before it’s too late.