The Left won't stop if Joe Biden is elected President

[RVonse]

The Left should push for a new generation nuclear power plants.

For a couple reasons, one it is a logical direction to head in, two to watch the right-wing swing hard for renewable power.

What would need to be pushed on private electric companies that they can not already do by themselves? More local permits to build? Less lawsuits? If so, aren't the Republicans the side who generally favors less regulation for private companies?

Otherwise, why push one clean technology over another one. Just let the market decide what to generate the cheapest way.

 

[bilby]

The Left should push for a new generation nuclear power plants.

For a couple reasons, one it is a logical direction to head in, two to watch the right-wing swing hard for renewable power.

What would need to be pushed on private electric companies that they can not already do by themselves? More local permits to build? Less lawsuits? If so, aren't the Republicans the side who generally favors less regulation for private companies?

Otherwise, why push one clean technology over another one. Just let the market decide what to generate the cheapest way.

Wholesale electricity markets are about as 'free' as death row prisoners. By FAR the largest single contributor to profitability (or its absence) for all generators, is government subsidies, regulations, incentives, and policies.

Like it or not, governments pick who wins or loses in the electricity generation industry.

 

[Elixir]

i agree with TV&C that ideally the agenda list could be accomplished without freaking out the dullard contingent.
But right now, I'm not so sure. It might be a better idea to take the two years (if they get them), and run roughshod over all the shit Trump has piled up.
Pack the courts, dismantle ICE & SBP (hell I'd be all in favor of getting rid of DHS as an umbrella Department altogether), restore balance of power, stamp out the teabaggers, clamp down on corruption and face the music two years later.
Maybe the hindsight of horrors provided by the Trump Crime Family would suffice to keep the pendulum from taking another wild swing.
That gamble might be a better bet than letting the remnants of Trumpism remain and fester within what's left of America's democratic institutions.

 

[Shadowy Man]

The Left should push for a new generation nuclear power plants.

For a couple reasons, one it is a logical direction to head in, two to watch the right-wing swing hard for renewable power.

That would make way too much sense! Create new high paying jobs for the middle class, clean energy, safe energy, help the country move to electric cars, and save the planet!

The only problem is that most left-wingers seem to be against nuclear power.

Yes. The same leftists who are crying most loudly about climate change are also crying loudly about the solution to climate change. So. They would have to admit they were wrong, but that might get them outcast from the far left for not being virtuous enough.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The Left should push for a new generation nuclear power plants.

For a couple reasons, one it is a logical direction to head in, two to watch the right-wing swing hard for renewable power.

What would need to be pushed on private electric companies that they can not already do by themselves? More local permits to build? Less lawsuits? If so, aren't the Republicans the side who generally favors less regulation for private companies?

Otherwise, why push one clean technology over another one. Just let the market decide what to generate the cheapest way.

What I would like to see: The opposition gets only one bite at the apple, same as we do in court. Once the plans have been approved that's it, unless you can show bribery or the like in the approval you can't challenge them down the road. You can't get things like the nuke plant is completed and then denied an operating permit for no good reason--and the utility is made to eat the whole cost, they can't even get compensation for an improper taking. Think any private company is going to want to build a nuke plant in a regulatory climate like that?? (And, yes, I'm talking about a real incident.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I had a thought here: How about we make the effects show up directly in people's power bills? Everyone is offered to fill out a ranking of where they want to get power from. Utilities list every source of power they have access to and instead of buying the cheapest they buy according to the list. Your power comes from your first choice unless no more power of that type is available, then it moves down the list until enough power is available. Your power bill comes with a listing of how many KWhs came from each type of power.

 

[laughing dog]

Since Mr. Biden is a centrist and always has been, there would be no reason for "the Left" to stop if he is elected because he is not going to embrace the agenda of "the Left". Nothing in his platform will or history would satisfy "the Left".

 

[J842P]

The only problem is that most left-wingers seem to be against nuclear power.

Yes. The same leftists who are crying most loudly about climate change are also crying loudly about the solution to climate change. So. They would have to admit they were wrong, but that might get them outcast from the far left for not being virtuous enough.

In my experience, the younger generations are more persuadable when it comes to nuclear energy vis a vis climate change.

I think the well is thoroughly poisoned for older generations.

 

[Shadowy Man]

The only problem is that most left-wingers seem to be against nuclear power.

Yes. The same leftists who are crying most loudly about climate change are also crying loudly about the solution to climate change. So. They would have to admit they were wrong, but that might get them outcast from the far left for not being virtuous enough.

In my experience, the younger generations are more persuadable when it comes to nuclear energy vis a vis climate change.

I think the well is thoroughly poisoned for older generations.

Then perhaps this will change on generational timescales. It's unclear whether that is fast enough.

 

[TV and credit cards]

The only problem is that most left-wingers seem to be against nuclear power.

Yes. The same leftists who are crying most loudly about climate change are also crying loudly about the solution to climate change. So. They would have to admit they were wrong, but that might get them outcast from the far left for not being virtuous enough.

In my experience, the younger generations are more persuadable when it comes to nuclear energy vis a vis climate change.

I think the well is thoroughly poisoned for older generations.

I don't think it is so much a left/right issue as it is as J842P indicates, a generational one.
There could be an educational campaign. Older generations are poisoned by fear of the unknown and bad movies. The radioactive boogieman never came. While an educational campaign is going on, the federal government could be footing the bill to build the manufacturing facility for Small Modular Reactors and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission could be updating their licensing requirements.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

The Left should push for a new generation nuclear power plants.

For a couple reasons, one it is a logical direction to head in, two to watch the right-wing swing hard for renewable power.

The problem with nuclear energy is that it does not require large tax increases, vast expansion of bureaucracy, and government micromanagement of our lives.

The problem with nuclear energy is that it needs lots of subsidies to make money And then there is the problem of what to do with nuclear waste. The 30 year battle of Yucca Flats shows the government has not been able to run dirt. Build a long term nuclear waste storage system on an active earth quake fault. Sure! Why not? And nothing could stop that. because stupid is what nuclear energy is all about. And it is not like the nuclear industry solves it's own little problems. Or tells the Congressional morons to stop being morons.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The Left should push for a new generation nuclear power plants.

For a couple reasons, one it is a logical direction to head in, two to watch the right-wing swing hard for renewable power.

The problem with nuclear energy is that it does not require large tax increases, vast expansion of bureaucracy, and government micromanagement of our lives.

The problem with nuclear energy is that it needs lots of subsidies to make money And then there is the problem of what to do with nuclear waste. The 30 year battle of Yucca Flats shows the government has not been able to run dirt. Build a long term nuclear waste storage system on an active earth quake fault. Sure! Why not? And nothing could stop that. because stupid is what nuclear energy is all about. And it is not like the nuclear industry solves it's own little problems. Or tells the Congressional morons to stop being morons.

It doesn't need subsidies. Rather, it needs a sane regulatory climate.

1) One standard approach to killing nukes is requiring unlimited liability insurance. Such a beast doesn't exist. Nobody else doing dangerous stuff is required to do that. When something goes up in a major boom they just go bankrupt, why is nuke treated so differently?

2) For the most part sanity applies to our safety rules. They are evaluated based on the expected spending per life saved. In general, most anything up to the low 7 figures is mandated (although the rules are often lower when the state is footing the bill--say, road safety), almost nothing above the low 8 figures is mandated. Some safety rules for nuke plants go well into the 10 figures and beyond. (And in some cases it's probably counterproductive--pile on too many safety systems and you can find failures in the safeties actually increasing the risk.)

What we need to do is pick a value and a formula to change it every year (a good starting point would be to index it to per capita GNP) and tie the rules to that. The state would have no power to decide on safety rules--they would follow from the cost analysis. Any proposed safety rule would be analyzed for cost/benefit, if it's below the cutoff it must be imposed, if it's above the cutoff it can't be imposed. Any disputes are over this analysis. Third parties could propose rules to the regulators, such a proposal requires paying the costs of doing the analysis. If the rule is found to be under the threshold the payment is refunded. Proposed rules that come in not too far over the limit have their expected cost updated by the inflation rate every year, if they cross the threshold they must be reanalyzed to see if they should now be implemented.

3) Waste is a non-issue. The fight over Yucca Mountain is political. I live less than 100 miles from it, I'm not worried if they start putting waste there. I oppose it but on other grounds: I don't believe we should be storing it away so tightly. Put it in an old salt mine so you can go bring it back out when we come to our senses about reprocessing.

As for the radioactivity of a nuke plant: A tidbit about the Palo Verde nuclear plant in Arizona. They had to get an exemption from the NRC because their wastewater was too radioactive. The problem is compliance is impossible--they are using cleaned-up sewer water for their cooling and the water is coming into the plant at above permissible radioactivity levels. The actual cause is nuclear medicine. The docs catch the most radioactive waste but most of it just goes down the toilet normally.

 

[bilby]

The Left should push for a new generation nuclear power plants.

For a couple reasons, one it is a logical direction to head in, two to watch the right-wing swing hard for renewable power.

The problem with nuclear energy is that it does not require large tax increases, vast expansion of bureaucracy, and government micromanagement of our lives.

The problem with nuclear energy is that it needs lots of subsidies to make money And then there is the problem of what to do with nuclear waste. The 30 year battle of Yucca Flats shows the government has not been able to run dirt. Build a long term nuclear waste storage system on an active earth quake fault. Sure! Why not? And nothing could stop that. because stupid is what nuclear energy is all about. And it is not like the nuclear industry solves it's own little problems. Or tells the Congressional morons to stop being morons.

The biggest obstacle to a solution for the nuclear waste problem, is the absence of any actual problem with nuclear waste.

The nuclear waste "problem" is a propaganda tool.

The fact is that we already have a completely safe storage system in place - on site storage in dry casks has been used for sixty years without anyone ever being hurt.

It's already far safer than the waste from any other power generation technology.

It's not 'green goo' - it's a boring grey ceramic solid, heavy and insoluble. Even if a cask was broken open, the materials inside aren't going to go anywhere; as long as everyone stays back a few metres, nobody's going to get hurt.

And these casks are inside the perimeter fence of nuclear power plants. Nobody's casually going to stroll up to them uninvited.

Of course, it's only hazardous because it's energetic. So the best option is to use it as fuel in fast reactors.

For example, the Elysium MCSFR (as well as various other fast reactors currently in development) can use this 'waste' as fuel, leaving a tiny amount of radioactive material with a lifespan of about three centuries before it decays to background - and then you can just landfill it.

How tiny? Well, currently a lifetimes supply of energy for an American can be generated with an amount of fuel the size of a soda can - and produces the same volume of "waste".

To get a lifetimes supply of energy from a MCSFR, you need an amount of fuel with the volume of four chocolate m&m's.

The waste is bit more - about seven m&m's for an American, over his entire life of energy use. But it halves in activity every thirty or so years, and in three hundred, it's barely radioactive at all.

Every electricity generation technology has a toxic waste problem. Only nuclear power has solved that problem.

 

[lpetrich]

That issue aside, I've found this: Bernie Sanders’s supporters are rallying behind AOC and other Congress members on the left - Vox - “It was never Bernie’s army. It was the army that got behind Bernie.”

Sanders has served as the North Star for progressives in recent years, but his exit from the presidential race does not mean the energy behind him disappeared. Now, his supporters, volunteers, and even staff are branching off to focus on advancing an array of progressive issues, many of which Sanders helped bring to the forefront of the political conversation in America, such as Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal.

...
The climate-focused Sunrise Movement, which officially launched in 2017 with a plan to back candidates focused on combating climate change, is emerging as an increasingly powerful force on the left, making hundreds of thousands of calls for progressive congressional challengers, such as Jamaal Bowman and Charles Booker.

After suspending his presidential bid in April, Sanders has also leveraged his platform to get Joe Biden elected president and to draw attention to down-ballot races and causes Sanders cares about. And he is already positioning himself to continue to push his priorities forward once the election is over.

Krystal Ball on Twitter: "Bernie reveals plan for his own 100 day agenda to rival Biden's.

Also says he's prepared to back primary challenges against ANY Democrats who don't move to a progressive agenda.
"You're damn right I am." (links)" / Twitter

No one else on the left — not even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is still building out her operation — really rivals his reach. Much of AOC’s online influence is less formal and is still based on her ability to fire off a viral tweet or shoot an Instagram Live video from home. According to data from social media content tracker NewsWhip, Sanders’s posts on Facebook have generated tens of millions more interactions on Facebook than Ocasio-Cortez over the past month, and he posts much more often than she does.

And as a prominent presidential candidate before his exit from the race, Sanders and his campaign committee has still vastly outraised Ocasio-Cortez.

AOC has a sizable history with BS. She campaigned for him in early 2016, and late that year, she was recruited to run by Brand New Congress, a PAC created by some other BS campaigners from back then. Late last year and early this year, she campaigned for BS in this year's Presidential run.

BNC has a spinoff PAC with similar goals, Justice Democrats, and Our Revolution and Local Berniecrats were also founded by BS campaigners.

 

[lpetrich]

“We don’t want to lose all that great energy that went into electing Bernie,” said Georgia Parke, digital communications director and press secretary for the campaign committee.

Sanders has endorsed many candidates and groups, including Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, Mondaire Jones, Ilhan Omar, AOC, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, and tapped into his grassroots fundraising network to help many of them raise money.

“The reality is he still has a huge audience; he still has a huge amount of followers on social media. So there’s no reason not to use that audience and continue to engage them with content that goes along with the senator’s message,” said Armand Aviram, a senior media producer for Sanders.

...
“I don’t think that you have an online following that is engaged that just disappears overnight,” said Julian Brave NoiseCat, vice president of policy and strategy at progressive pollster Data for Progress. “The question would be who can come around and pick them up — either encourage them to start doing more coalition work or just direct their frustration at the party in productive ways.”

Failing to do so was Barack Obama's big mistake in 2009. He got elected with the help of a huge grassroots campaign organization, but he let it wither away when he was in office. He had to rebuild it for his 2012 campaign.

 

[lpetrich]

The Presidential primaries got all the attention early this year, but when Joe Biden emerged as the winner, BS's campaigners did not rest.

Waleed Shahid, communications director at Justice Democrats, a group that backs progressive primary candidates in an effort to pull the Democratic Party further left, said he believes that candidates such as Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush ousted incumbents in their primaries in part because of momentum from Sanders’s campaign. (Sanders also endorsed both candidates.) That is likely true for candidates who had primaries in the spring and summer, including Mondaire Jones, who won his congressional primary in New York.

Then about support for Ed Markey, someone supported by these activists against a much younger challenger, Joe Kennedy III. One might expect these activists to have preferred JKIII to EM, but JKIII was firmly aligned with the Democratic establishment, and EM was willing to work with AOC.

“The secret is there are actually a lot of Ed Markeys in Congress, and if you can get people to embrace the progressive side of themselves that they’ve been told for 30 years they shouldn’t show to people ... then the progressive movement doesn’t just have to elect the AOCs and the Jamaal Bowmans,” said Josh Miller-Lewis, the former digital communications director for Sanders. “You can actually grow much faster by electing the Ed Markeys of the world.”

Part of it will be showing that their careers will still be supported if they embrace the Left, that they don't have to embrace some supposed big population of centrist voters just because that's what gets them money. Voters who supposedly love employer-dependent healthcare plans and who supposedly love fossil fuels.

Then a bit of history.

Shahid compared the Sanders left to the Barry Goldwater right in 1964 — the Arizona senator lost his race back then, but the ideas and people who came out of his campaign shaped the Republican Party in the years to come. “Over time, these organizers and strategists and operatives will become a greater and greater influence in the party because the future of the party looks a lot more like AOC than it does Joe Biden,” Shahid said

 

[lpetrich]

Biden Camp: AOC Won’t Be Disappointed by ‘Incredibly Progressive and Aggressive’ Agenda

Asked by NBC host Chuck Todd whether the New York progressive would be “disappointed or not when she sees the agenda of the Biden administration in the first six months,” Biden’s campaign communications director Kate Bedingfield answered in the negative.

“No. I think that Vice President Biden campaigned on an incredibly progressive and aggressive agenda,” Bedingfield responded Sunday on NBC. “Take a look, for example, at his climate plan. It’s the boldest, biggest climate plan that’s ever been put forward by a nominee running for president and now a president-elect. He’s going to make good on those commitments. He spent time during this campaign bringing people together around this climate plan.”

“It’s a big, aggressive plan,” she continued. “It’s the perfect example of the kind of big effort that he is going to make to meet this moment and meet these crises we’re in.”

To me, it seems almost too good to be true.

 

[Politesse]

Biden Camp: AOC Won’t Be Disappointed by ‘Incredibly Progressive and Aggressive’ Agenda

Asked by NBC host Chuck Todd whether the New York progressive would be “disappointed or not when she sees the agenda of the Biden administration in the first six months,” Biden’s campaign communications director Kate Bedingfield answered in the negative.

“No. I think that Vice President Biden campaigned on an incredibly progressive and aggressive agenda,” Bedingfield responded Sunday on NBC. “Take a look, for example, at his climate plan. It’s the boldest, biggest climate plan that’s ever been put forward by a nominee running for president and now a president-elect. He’s going to make good on those commitments. He spent time during this campaign bringing people together around this climate plan.”

“It’s a big, aggressive plan,” she continued. “It’s the perfect example of the kind of big effort that he is going to make to meet this moment and meet these crises we’re in.”

To me, it seems almost too good to be true.

I guess we'll have to "elect him to see what's in him".

 

[lpetrich]

It was either Biden or Trump. AOC said some months back that she expected it to be easier to lobby Biden than to lobby Trump.

No Senate? No problem, progressive group tells Biden. - POLITICO - the think tank New Consensus

New Consensus, a left-wing think tank led by Ocasio-Cortez’s former chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti, Justice Democrats’ co-founder Zack Exley, and organizer Demond Drummer, argues that Biden could team up with the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department to provide trillions of dollars of low-interest loans to build the “industries of tomorrow” and help small businesses suffering because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Demond Drummer appeared in AOC's Green New Deal national town Hall in the spring of 2019. He was the gentleman with a bare head and a beard.

New Consensus: Building Back Better with or without Senate Majority
That document proposes three I's: industries, infrastructures, investments.

New Consensus’ memo calls on the president-elect to take several major steps to make that a reality: First, create a “National Development Council,” which includes the Federal Reserve chair, Treasury secretary and Cabinet members, to craft an economic development strategy and identify projects that advance it.

Second, form a “National Development Bank” — or use the existing Federal Financing Bank — to make financing plans for those proposals. And then, they said, regional Federal Reserve banks should be empowered to administer the local projects in their backyards, instead of having the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or Boston managing everything.

Also, doing projects in every congressional district in the nation.

 

[lpetrich]

Inside the Left’s New, ‘Mature’ Political Strategy - POLITICO

For decades, nobody was harder on Joe Biden than the political left. He was too cozy with Republicans, in bed with credit-card companies, too hawkish on foreign policy and far too quick to embrace law-and-order politics.

Then something unexpected happened in November: In one swoop, Biden became president and the left gained a significant foothold in Congress. And suddenly, to progressives whose agenda now depends on his administration, he doesn’t look so bad.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren praised the victorious Biden for “running on the most progressive economic and racial justice platform of any general election nominee ever.” His choice of Ronald Klain as chief of staff was “excellent,” Minnesota Congresswoman and “Squad” member Ilhan Omar tweeted. And each of his Cabinet nominees, noted The Intercept’s Ryan Grim, is “more progressive and less entrenched with Wall Street” than their predecessor under President Barack Obama.

Except that progressives were involved in helping him draft some policy plans some months back.

The article mentions Saikat Chakrabarti, cofounder of Brand New Congress (AOC's recruiter) and its offshoot Justice Democrats, then Chief of Staff for AOC, and now head of progressive think tank New Consensus.

He wrote a recommendation to now Pres-elect Biden, Building Back Better Without The Senate about getting around Mitch McConnell. He goes into more detail in building-back-better-without-the-senate.pdf
From his first link,

In the same way that Presidents Bush and Obama collaborated with the Federal Reserve to lend out between $7 trillion and $29 trillion to banks during the 2008 financial recession, Biden could work with the current Federal Reserve to make trillions in low-interest loans directly to productive businesses and projects. In order to keep this money from being used simply on speculative trading or stock buybacks, the plan suggests creating a National Development Council that would be tasked with defining what these productive investments are by turning Biden’s Build Back Better plan into an executable national economic development strategy. And to ensure that these investments are based on real needs in local economies, the plan recommends returning the Federal Reserve to its initial mission of developing the American economy by empowering regional Federal Reserve Banks to invest in their local economies.

Politico then had an interview with SC.

Like, the stuff that we’re proposing — the “Green New Deal” — it’s sort of basic economic development, which is not a partisan thing in any other country. It became a “progressive” thing to suggest Hamiltonian economics, which is weird loop of the brain, but whatever.

Referring to Founder Alexander Hamilton. He wanted to to make his new nation into a great industrial power. His great opponent was Thomas Jefferson, who preferred a society of small farmers.

We’re proposing this as kind of a unifying thing for the country. My approach — speaking just as myself — has always been: We’re going to present a solution. We’re going to show there’s no reason not to do the solution. And then, if leaders don’t do it — with no excuse — we have to pressure them. Then, of course you have to do sit-ins; you have to show that they’re not doing it, because then they’ll at least get embarrassed into doing it. I hope they don’t have to be embarrassed into doing it; I hope they will lead.

I think Biden has a historic chance to be an FDR-style leader who isn’t just relying on pressure to do the next bit.