https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz0RYJKByFs
Thursday, June 30, 2022
Wednesday, June 29, 2022
Tuesday, June 28, 2022
Holiday (1938, Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn)
https://www.d-archive.org/holiday-1938/
A young man falls in love with a girl from a rich family. His unorthodox plan to go on holiday for the early years of his life is met with skepticism by everyone except for his fiance’s sister.
The Mexico Option
https://popularresistance.org/the-mexico-option/
Mexico is fighting to regain sovereignty over its energy future.
And African Leftists would do well to look to it for some answers.
In the 2018 Mexican general election, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as “AMLO”) swept to victory. His presidential victory coincided with the historic collapse of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Barring losses in 2000 and 2006, the PRI had ruled Mexico uninterrupted since 1929 (under three different titles). In 2012, PRI’s Enrique Peña Nieto won the presidency with 39.17%; but by 2018, the PRI received just 16.4% of the vote compared with the 54.71% (the largest margin since 1982) received by AMLO’s Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (MORENA). The issue of corruption was front and center in this election, and AMLO explicitly framed it as a systemic byproduct of neoliberalism. While markets were initially rattled, capital was not in an outright panic; AMLO had broadly promised that “his government will not spend beyond its means.” In 2018, The Economist cited “uncertainty,” but three years later AMLO’s face was plastered on their print edition as “Mexico’s false messiah.”
The Economist alluded to various ruinous policies, but it is AMLO’s actions in the energy sector that justified the typical association of a leftist leader with proto-fascist figures such as Viktor Orban, Narendra Modi, and Jair Bolsonaro. AMLO’s energy reforms are geared toward reasserting energy sovereignty over an (increasingly foreign) private sector that owns most of Mexico’s renewable energy. The subsequent contestation has sparked national referendums, attempted constitutional amendments, and cases in the country’s supreme court. The market-led transition creates such contestations wherever it leads. It generally wins. Thus, the battle for Mexico’s energy sector offers an essential example for the left—and for South Africa’s especially.
The PRI And The Revolution In Development
Mexico offers a rich history of class struggle, from its independence to its 10-year revolution that ended in 1920. The postrevolutionary years saw a series of inter-elite violent contestations. In Origins of the Mass Party, Edwin Ackerman explains that the constitution of the PRI (then the Partido Nacional Revolucionario) was to “‘institutionalize the revolution’ by offering a vehicle for the circulation of the elite and [to] discipline ‘the revolutionary family.’” Irrespective of the needs of the elites, under President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940), the PRI—then the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana—followed the postwar Keynesian pathway of state-led development. The nationalization of Mexico’s oil in 1938 was, and remains, a source of great national pride after the unfettered foreign pillaging of its resources during the 31 years of the Porfirio Díaz regime (1877-1911). Then, Mexico was beginning what Christy Thornton calls its “revolution in development,” which sought “to devise new rules and institutions for managing the global economic systems.” Indeed, the World Bank was irked by this state ownership and refused to loan capital in the 1950s to the state-owned oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), although it did offer capital to partially state-owned power utility the Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE). The “revolution in development” even saw Mexico use foreign investment to nationalize the electricity sector and the CFE.
Eventually, the neoliberal turn set in, and Mexico’s foreign debt would supply ammunition to its spate of liberalizations under the PRI. Thornton reflects that the “revolution in development” had inadvertently been “used to dismantle the country’s state-led developmental project.” But the energy sector remained largely off the table, and capital would have to bide its time until the PRI returned to power in 2012 under Nieto. This return saw it continue on a path of liberalization, now explicitly targeting the energy sector through the Energy Transition Law of 2013. PEMEX was cleared to do business with private companies on exploration, which came with various modalities of privatizing reserves that were discovered. But it was the spate of reforms privatizing the power sector that drove the mass confrontation today.
To Liberalization And Back Again
The opening salvo in the war for Mexico’s power sector came in 1992 under former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, when gas companies were afforded power-purchase agreements (PPAs), locking the government into purchasing their power at agreed-upon prices for decades. Two decades later, former CFE officials are in court over awarding contracts to a US gas company “which had no previous experience in the energy industry.” Despite their lawyer’s connection to the Salinas family, these contracts were under Nieto, whom Sean Sweeney of Trade Unions for Energy Democracy calls the “poster child for ‘the standard model’ … power sector privatization.” Nieto’s reforma energética (energy reform), as is standard, empowered the market over the public sector. Private companies were allowed to produce and sell power for the first time, while PEMEX and CFE were demoted from state-owned enterprises to “productive state enterprises” with corporate structures. The CFE was to be “unbundled” and mandated to ensure “value creation” by “ensuring the country’s energy security.”
Unbundling is a preliminary step towards liberalizing a power sector. Traditional power utilities’ generation, transmission, and distribution divisions are “unbundled” into separate companies. In the case of CFE, its generation was further separated into six entities to compete alongside private generators. These generators were granted PPAs for as long as 20 years with CFE’s transmission and distribution division. But they could also simply bypass the CFE by forming direct contracts with qualified private end users. In Mexico, these PPAs and other contracts were awarded via auction. The first round saw 18 proposals accepted from 11 companies (three from three Mexican companies), while the second round saw 36 proposals accepted from 23 companies spanning 11 countries.
These private generators could count on significant support from the state. Fixed transmission charges were scrapped, and the extensive transmission infrastructure required to connect renewable energy projects was also covered by the public. Companies were also afforded depreciation-based tax breaks. This was justified on the basis of climate commitments, since solar and wind projects dominated the auctions. As is so often the case, Mexico adopted the “privatize to decarbonize” mantra. It was therefore able to further justify these projects as they expropriated the lands of local communities and deepened their inequality. But such matters are apparently not worth considering. AMLO’s battle with private generators is simply reversing “positive trends in Mexico’s energy industry” in favor of its “dangerous addiction to fossil fuels.”
Portrayals of AMLO as anti-climate and pro-fossil fuels (in his support of PEMEX) have gone beyond the business press to garner condemnation from Bill Gates and Mexico’s North American trade partners. Seemingly, all his critics have chosen to ignore the dire state of the energy sector he inherited. The Mexican government could do little when the Texas blackouts of last year came their way. Northern Mexico receives up to 80% of its power from private generators that answer to nothing but their bottom line. While the national electricity demand never exceeded 47 gigawatt-hours (GWh), Nieto’s auctions had granted enough projects to take the supply to 84 GWh. Another reality of renewable energy that is consistently ignored is the impact of its intermittency. The existing Mexican grid could not handle the surges and drops in supply that accompany changes in the weather, and private generators refused to support the upgrades necessary to ameliorate them.
In a landmark memorandum to energy officials, AMLO described the CFE as “almost in ruins: indebted, with its productive capacities reduced [and] subject to regulation that privileges individuals in the implementation of the energy reform. The deep-rooted vices of inefficiency, corruption and waste were preserved.” He further laid out his own plan “to implement the new policy to rescue Pemex and CFE it may be necessary to propose a new energy reform, we do not rule out that possibility; that is to say, the option to present an initiative for constitutional reform.”
In 2021, AMLO’s reformed Electric Industry Act (EIA) was signed into law, outraging international investors. Since its passage, AMLO’s energy ministry has canceled various transmission expansion contracts, demanding that private generators cover these substantial costs that are perennially excluded from total production costs in favor of just marginal costs. The piggybacking of large businesses’ “self-supply” on the grid, described as a mercado negro (black market), was also canceled. Given the dire state of the CFE under Nieto, AMLO’s reforms, pilloried by some as “(counter)reforms,” are better characterized by Sweeney’s description of a “wall of resistance.”
Nieto’s reforms locked the CFE into a subservient position to private generators, whose power got priority. This leaves the CFE in the position of having to back up the intermittency of these generators at a loss. Last year, the CFE reported that its dealings with private producers had cost some 20 billion US dollars through subsidies, exchange rate and inflation risks, irregular supply of power, and rising rates. Instead of leaving the CFE to continue to waste away, AMLO’s law guarantees its central position in supplying the nation’s power. And contrary to critiques of fossil addiction, it is the CFE’s emission-free hydroelectric plants that get first priority, and whose underutilization had previously caused floods.
But the private sector has fought back and taken the government to court. After various losses in local courts, the EIA survived the country’s supreme court, despite a majority of justices voting against key sections such as the prioritization of CFE. AMLO has also attempted to write the law into the constitution through congress. He held a referendum on his presidency in the buildup, and while he won with 93% of the vote, only 18% of eligible voters turned up. It all made little difference during the vote on constitutionalizing the reforms to the EIA, where ALMO’s bid fell well short of the two-thirds majority required in the lower house. Seemingly undeterred, AMLO simply nationalized Mexico’s lithium reserves (a critical mineral for clean energy) with a simple majority two days later.
Mexico is taking back its energy sovereignty, and it has tasked CFE with the job. In doing so, it is laying the groundwork for a potential public pathway towards decarbonization. Irrespective of its much trumped low cost, renewable energy is still not profitable enough. The market-led transition is failing us. We need public investment divorced from the necessity of profitability. We need what Matt Huber and Fred Stafford call “Big Public Power.” AMLO is fighting for big public power, but it is not clear whether decarbonization is a pillar of his agenda. He did recently assert that “Mexico is going to show how it is one of the biggest producers of clean energy,” but did so in the face of a report by his own energy ministry that they are falling short of their targets as private renewables are curtailed. This has been enough for green and climate organizations such as Greenpeace to sue the government over the EIA. It is a far too common occurrence that in its desperation for decarbonization, the climate movement lines up behind renewable capital against relatively fossilized public utilities.
Lessons For South Africa
The similarity between the Mexican and South African situations is uncanny. Mexico can be viewed as perhaps a few years ahead of where South Africa is now. South Africa is set to embark upon its own self-supply “Wild West” pathway which will no doubt bring about the same problems as it did in Mexico. The combination of the land requirements of renewables, the track records of private generators, and South Africa’s land question creates a ticking time bomb. Eskom (South Africa’s national power utility) has been unbundled just like the CFE was, although the process is not entirely complete. The South African government’s renewable energy plans are almost entirely reliant on private capital through auctions producing long-term PPAs. The priority of the power supply from Eskom’s generation division will almost certainly be downgraded by its future “Independent Transmission System and Market Operator” in favor of clean private generators, but it will have to keep its plants running to fulfill its ultimate purpose to back up the grid.
That Eskom intends to dramatically increase its gas-power capacity seemingly confirms this. The case of the CFE under Nieto demonstrates that this arrangement will not be economically feasible without significant tariff hikes and continued bailouts. But the plan has always been for Eskom to be sidelined. Like with the CFE and PEMEX, Eskom has also been steadily corporatized, its procurement and provision of services outsourced. Cheap renewables and climate change have made the final blow of unbundling appealing beyond capital. But these play second fiddle to perceptions that Eskom is beyond saving. With South Africans constantly in the dark, such perceptions are hardly unwarranted. This is where the Mexican and South African situations diverge. There is no AMLO, no MORENA, in South Africa.
I have argued elsewhere that given the choice between capital and the vanguard of state capture, the former is preferred. But it should not be accepted. To reject this binary, the left needs to go beyond putting credible options on the table (many already have) to building a political entity capable of delivering it—and taking back the defense of Eskom from those who would continue to loot it. MORENA has centered its politics and much of its policies on tackling corruption—this is an absolute necessity for any prospective South African formation. Of course, AMLO did not magically appear in 2018; he had received over 30% of the votes in the previous two elections. But making the South African public pathway credible does not necessarily require taking the reins of government. AMLO and MORENA have demonstrated an alternative, and the South African left would do well to look to Mexico for some answers.
Union Demands Respect And Dignity For Disciplined Workers
https://popularresistance.org/union-demands-respect-and-dignity-for-disciplined-workers/
Minneapolis, Minnesota – On June 22 union leaders from AFSCME Local 2822, representing 1300 clerical workers at Hennepin County, crashed the State of the County Address demanding, “Stop retaliation against union activists now! End racism, sexism, ageism at work!”
While managers patted each other on the back and reconnected after two years of hiding at home, union leaders confronted public officials with signs and informational flyers. Workers are demanding the bosses stop targeting union stewards and activists.
Bosses began targeting three union leaders in January 2022.
The first was Irish Gauna, a single African American mother of five who was fired in late January for allegedly violating the county’s COVID testing policy. Irish, a rank-and-file leader, became active in the union after organizing Black women and others in a successful campaign to get paid leave for parents and caregivers during the COVID pandemic. Irish spoke publicly throughout the union’s recent contract negotiations, including at a press conference in early January about why workers voted to strike.
The second was Sue Olson, a 31-year employee at Hennepin County who had no issues at work until she became the only union steward for support staff in the probation department. In the past two months Olson received a three-week suspension without pay for petty issues, including reporting a broken door to facilities instead of her supervisor. The disciplines came shortly after Olson informed human relations that her supervisor was over three months late in issuing raises. Most of the retaliation stems from manager Jen Belde.
The third was DJ Hooker, an executive boardmember of AFSCME 2822, and an associate librarian at North Regional Library. DJ Hooker is a beloved community activist as well. Hooker was issued a written reprimand and one day suspension without pay after a white manager accused them of “reverse racism.” The accusation was related to a conversation with manager Michael Boe where Hooker asserted the need to hire more Black and Latino workers at their library. North Regional serves a predominately African American community on the North Side of Minneapolis. Boss Boe asserted that Hooker’s advocacy for a diverse workforce created a hostile work environment for their white co-workers. None of Hookers co-workers filed any complaints about the incident.
The union members declared that these acts of harassment, intimidation and retaliation must end. They called on Hennepin County commissioners to “Stop the retaliation against union activists now! End racism, sexism, ageism at work!”
Meet The Appalachian Women Facing Down The Mountain Valley Pipeline
https://popularresistance.org/meet-the-appalachian-women-facing-down-the-mountain-valley-pipeline/
Across Years And Several Southern States, These Organizers Have Helped Drive The Massive Gas Pipeline To The Brink Of Defeat.
I have met so many people through this fight,” says Nancy Bouldin of Monroe County, West Virginia. “If you look at any benefits of all this, it’s the people and the connections that have been made.”
When Bouldin says, “all this,” she refers to the years-long battle communities across West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina have waged against the Mountain Valley Pipeline and its proposed Southgate extension.
When Bouldin and fellow organizers Lynda Majors and Donna Pitt met for a discussion via Zoom in March of 2022, the MVP’s prospects seemed dim.
Originally priced at $3.7 billion, the MVP’s costs have ballooned to over $6.2 billion, the project is over three years behind schedule and has faced millions of dollars in fines for violations of clean water protections. A number of recent legal setbacks
have set the pipeline back further, but years of experience have made these organizers cautious.
“Victory is when they cancel the pipeline,” Majors says. “Until that happens, in my mind, there is no victory. We stay vigilant. And then [after the pipeline’s defeat,] our attention turns to restoration.”
As the women explain their history with the effort to defeat the MVP, the camaraderie among the three is apparent: They finish each other’s sentences, laugh at shared experiences, and collectively recall memories from nearly a decade of organizing around this issue.
And their stories also gesture to a robust network of others — friends, neighbors, leaders, family, landowners, and diverse networks of people who might otherwise have remained strangers.
“There are so many people who have been and are involved in this effort,” Bouldin says. “It seems somehow not quite right to be one of only three interviewed for this piece.”
Majors adds, “I am so grateful for whatever involvement people have — every single one of them is important. It takes a coalition.”
Pitt agrees, “This experience brought the community together, neighbors who didn’t know each other now do.”
Bouldin, Majors and Pitt may not see themselves as exceptional in the MVP fight, but each is extraordinary in her persistence, contributions and commitment to this resistance movement.
The Big Picture
As we discuss the origins of their activism against the MVP, each woman pinpoints the moment she became engaged.
“It was the fall of 2014,” Bouldin says, and they all agree. “It’s really depressing to do the math on that,” she adds. “It’s been an all-consuming piece of our lives for all that time.”
“It was the shock of a lifetime,” Pitt says. “When we looked at where the pipeline was going — it was right through the middle of our farm, which we had spent the last 40 years building, preserving, stewarding. Coming within 50 feet of the house. And when we talked to neighbors to the right and the left of us who are on the same route, it was like, ‘We’ve got to get together and fight this!’”
Beginning in the fall of 2014, Majors, Pitt and Bouldin began working in their respective communities to build awareness among landowners and concerned residents about the proposed MVP. But soon, they recognized the power-building potential in forming broader coalitions.
“We first met as the POWHR coalition was forming,” Pitt says. Today the Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights coalition describes itself as “an interstate coalition representing individuals and groups from Virginia and West Virginia dedicated to protecting water, land, and communities from harms caused by the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure, including the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP).”
“The group that would become POWHR started coming together when Mountain Valley Pipeline and [the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission] held some open house hearings along the pipeline route in 2015,” says Bouldin. “There were people from our county [Monroe County, West Virginia] who traveled down to Virginia because they wanted to hear what was going on in these open houses and in so doing, they started meeting people from Virginia and there was a core group who were saying, ‘We need to be connecting!’”
“There were birth pains with what eventually became POWHR as there are birth pains in many organizations,” Bouldin adds. “Within every county there were organizing challenges — but over time, these connections made a difference.”
“POWHR brought the big picture to everybody,” Majors says.
Part of Your Heart
When considering the paths that brought each of them to anti-pipeline activism, Pitt, Majors and Bouldin all articulated a deeply rooted connection to environmental stewardship.
“I grew up on a farm in northern Virginia with a mother who was a New Englander and an activist. My dad was an engineer and believed strongly in stewardship of the land,” Pitt says. “We farmed and I grew up with livestock. That’s where I got my relationship with the land.”
Pitt lived in North Carolina and Canada before moving to the Blacksburg, Virginia, area when her husband, Joe, began teaching at Virginia Tech.
“We thought we’d move on, as academics often do,” says Pitt, “but when we got here, well, my husband had an officemate with experience building houses.” Pitt laughs. “So we built this house with our own hands.”
Virginia was not an academic pitstop. Donna Pitt made a career at Virginia Tech where she was a galvanizing force in the creation of the school’s Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine. She retired after three decades working as an executive assistant for four different deans of the veterinary school. The house that she and her husband built is her home. “We’re still here and we’re not going anywhere,” she says.
“I grew up in southern New York near the Pennsylvania border where I ran free with the dogs and a gun,” Lynda Majors says, laughing. “Dogs and being outside have always been important to me and still are!”
“I always knew I wanted an outside job,” she says. “I went to Cornell University and had various jobs over the years. I met my husband in Arkansas, then we went to the University of Wisconsin where he did a veterinary ophthalmology residency and then we moved to Virginia where we’ve been for 34 years.”
“I feel very centered here in my community,” Majors says. “I want to stay because this is my fight. This is my land.”
Nancy Bouldin agrees. “People will fight for what they love deeply. For most people around here, their land is not a real estate investment. It’s their home, their history, their heritage. To watch that land taken by eminent domain and turned over for someone else’s permanent use and control — that’s a wound that can’t be healed by any amount of money.”
“I grew up in New Jersey, but my husband, Wood, was born and raised in West Virginia,” Bouldin says. “We both did graduate degrees at WVU. But then we moved up near Philadelphia in the late 1970s and didn’t move back to West Virginia until ‘retiring’ here in 2008.”
“I really don’t think I would have become as committed to the pipeline fight if it hadn’t been so clear how deeply attached people here are to their homes and farms and to special landmarks like Peters Mountain — and to a way of life not dominated by industrial development,” says Bouldin. “There’s a strong sense of stewardship, of taking care of the land and passing it on to future generations. You can’t put a cash value on that attachment. It’s like telling someone ‘I’ll pay you $20,000 to take away part of your heart.’”
Take Action
Despite the significant obstacles facing the MVP at the time of our conversation, Pitt, Majors and Bouldin were concerned about statements from West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin championing the pipeline as a domestic energy resource in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“I think we are at a very critical point right now with the Ukraine situation because we have people like Sen. Manchin saying that the Mountain Valley Pipeline must be completed,” says Bouldin.
Majors interjects: “It’s so ubiquitous in the press — ‘the MVP is 95% complete, let’s just finish this one last little bit up.’ And that’s just not true. It’s nowhere near complete.”
All three women are concerned that legislators who favor expanding natural gas will use the geopolitical crisis in Ukraine to advance MVP construction, even though analyses have found that the natural gas industry can boost natural gas exports this year and beyond without any new infrastructure and accelerated European investment in energy efficiency and renewables may mean increased gas exports are unnecessary.
“Our elected representatives have presented us as ‘they’re just cranks,’” says Pitt. “So we have been betrayed by those who are supposed to represent us all the way along the line from county, state to federal. But that’s why we keep at this: because it’s wrong.”
When asked how they have sustained themselves and their advocacy without getting discouraged, Majors gets fired up, “Discouraged? No! Don’t say that word! I don’t get discouraged. I get angry and motivated!”
Pitt acknowledges that it can feel grinding at times. “People burn out doing this work for their communities — some people for health reasons, depression — it does have a dragging effect,” she says. “You have to have something to keep you going: It’s either fury or eternal optimism. I personally feel that if I don’t keep going, how do I expect that anybody else will?”
Bouldin agrees. “It may sound trite, but I have grandchildren — I feel we don’t have a lot of time left to make changes and there’s something that needs to be done. I get tired, but it’s the coalition: it provides enormous energy. The coalition has kept everyone going.”
The women acknowledge that bringing more young people into the coalition is both challenging and necessary for the future of the fight.
“I understand that younger generations feel like they don’t have political power — that sense of a lack of security and disenfranchisement not felt by older generations,” Majors says. “But this is important. You have a responsibility to something bigger!”
Bouldin describes the importance accountability among fellow activists has played in her work. “All of my work has been done in super close collaboration with Judy Azulay, a founding member of the Indian Creek Watershed Association,” she says. Just like our coalition of groups across West Virginia and Virginia has helped build and sustain each other over time, I would never have stayed in the fight or tried to do as much without Judy. I don’t know how many times we stuck it out for ‘one more thing’ just because we don’t want to let down each other.”
For Pitt, motivation is in plain sight. “What motivates me is that I look out my window and I can see the damn thing,” she says. “If you can’t fight for your property and your water, then you don’t deserve it. At some point, you just have to take action.”