Author: Steven D

Yesterday I posted about the lack of climate change coverage in the US media. In light of that, I can’t think of a bigger, and also more ironic story, than this one: an entire city of 80,000 people, a boom town in the heart of the tar sands production fields in western Canada, has been evacuated by the Canadian government because of massive and rapidly advancing wildfires brought on by drought conditions.

Here are excepts from the Globe and Mail report, which contain eyewitness testimony from the evacuees, people I consider climate change refugees:

“There was smoke everywhere and it was raining ash. I’ve never seen anything like it,” [Shams Rehman] said after his family reached an evacuation centre in the resort town of Lac La Biche, Alta. “I just wanted to get out of that mess. I just wanted to get my family to somewhere safe.” […]

“People were driving everywhere – it was absolute chaos in town. There were people stuck in ditches, driving across the grass and on sidewalks,” Mr. Bickford said at the Lac La Biche evacuation centre. “You just couldn’t see two feet in front of your truck through all the smoke.”

It took them two hours to cover four kilometres. As they pushed south, through bumper-to-bumper traffic, he said he looked in his rearview mirror and all he saw was smoke.[…]

Radhika Shukla fled her home in Fort McMurray’s Parsons Creek neighbourhood.

“In downtown, the fire was on both sides” of the street, she said, just before her crew was taken to the old retirement home in Lac La Biche. […]

Cassie White, 19, said she feared for her life as she tried to flee the area, only to be turned around near Gregoire, near the south end of Fort McMurray.

“On the left was a big gas station. The flames jumped over the highway and blew up the gas station. It was torched,” said Ms. White, who was making her way to Edmonton with her boyfriend. “People were driving on the shoulder. There were flames maybe 15 feet high right off the highway. There was a dump truck on fire – I had to swerve around it – and there was a pickup truck on fire as well. The entire trailer park on my right was in flames. Roofs were coming down.”[…]

Late Tuesday afternoon, municipal Councillor Allan Vinni said a significant portion of the Abasand Heights neighbourhood in Fort McMurray had been lost. He was in the area as the fire approached, trying to help an employee and her daughter get out.

He saw a wall of flames almost 12 metres high only a block away from his car. They were fortunate to get out in time.

“I’m covered in ash here,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s still burning like hell up there.

This is, once again, uncharted territory, reminiscent of the forced evacuation of New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina. The fires became so extreme and unpredictable that a Canadian wildfire information officer told reporters that, “it isn’t safe for firefighters to be on the ground.” And now, a prosperous boom town, largely thanks to the extraction of fossil fuels from local tar sands, is likely gone for good. It should be noted the oil and gas workers at those nearby tar sands facilities were part of that exodus.

Some oil and gas companies said they would reduce output and downsize their staffing plans in response to the blaze.

Suncor Energy Inc. (NYSE:SU), a top Canadian oil producer, said it was reducing production at its regional facilities to “allow employees and their families to get to safety.” The Calgary-based company’s plant is located about 16 miles north of Fort McMurray and is “in a safe condition,” it said in a statement late Tuesday.

Nexen, a subsidiary of the China National Offshore Oil Corp., was working on a modified staffing plan at its nearby Long Lake oil sands project, a Nexen spokeswoman told Bloomberg.

My what a measured response to what one resident described as like Armagedon. Of course, most of Alberta, a province roughly the size of Texas, was placed on a high fire alert two days ago, when a “total of 31 wildfires [were] burning across Alberta, with two considered out of control on Tuesday afternoon.” Oh, and did I mention the province is in the midst of a heat wave with temperatures in the mid 80’s F?

Perhaps the cable TV shows, between infomercials for non-stop coverage of Clinton and Trump, will find the time to report about this disaster. My guess is they might give it a 60 second spot during their non-peak viewing hours, since prime time is, of course, reserved for more important topics like whether Cruz voters can be convinced to hop on the Trump bandwagon, or why hasn’t Bernie Sanders just ended his damn campaign, already.

Odds are that if they do air any coverage of this story, they won’t bother to make the connection to global warming and climate change brought about by the very products that made Ft. McMurray a wealthy town before drought, high temperatures and high winds created the conditions for eradicating it yesterday. Which, as we all know, would be par for the course in America, the least educated, least informed nation regarding the ongoing climate crisis. Yay for American exceptionalism. Anywhere else in the world people are making the connection between these extreme events and climate change, even in the Vatican. Here? It’s just some more weird weather. God sure has a funny sense of humor, eh?

Why has the mainstream media continued to ignore the <a href=""http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/05/03/3774582/record-heat-india/“it’s happening now” climate change crisis during this election campaign, particularly whenever there is a debate between Democrats or Republicans running for office?

My answer? Oh, I don’t know, must be just a coincidence.

Many, including President Obama and Hillary Clinton believe that natural gas can be a bridge fuel to a cleaner energy future for the world, even if fracking technology is used to extract this resource, so long as we take the right approach and put in the right safeguards to prevent fugitive methane from escaping into the atmosphere. They couldn’t be more wrong. Let’s dive into the details, shall we, starting with the massive fugitive methane emissions caused simply by extracting the stuff.

You might recall that last summer, a Harvard study suggested that U.S. methane emissions “increased by more than 30 per cent over the past decade.” They could not at that time definitively state that this rise in methane emissions resulted from the rapid increase in oil and gas production in the United States, and many industry spokespeople disputed the results of that study and others that strongly suggested U.S. oil and gas operations were the culprit.

“The release of these partially revised numbers is misleading,” said the American Petroleum Institute’s vice president for regulatory and economic policy, Kyle Isakower, in March. “We have every reason to believe that the final data, when issued, will still indicate a significant downward trend in emissions even as oil and natural gas production has risen.””

I know, it’s hard to take that statement, or any statement regarding the environmentally clean nature of natural gas production, seriously, considering the recent Aliso Canyon disaster in California, where “97,100 metric tons of methane,” the largest in U.S. history were released by a storage facility operated by Southern California Gas Company, which is wholly owned by Sempra Energy, a Fortune 500 company with revenues over $10 Billion per year.

Now we have direct evidence that a significant increase in atmospheric ethane came from the Bakken shale formation, not even the largest shale formation where natural gas is being produced.

A recent study found that two percent (2%) of all the world’s ethane emissions into the atmosphere came from a single oil field, the Bakken Shale, primarily located in in North Dakota, Montana and Manitoba. This is the very region where oil and gas operations, which often include hydrofracking, operations have risen tremendously over the past decade.

Uh, ethane? Did you forget the “m” in methane, Steven? Actually, no, I did not. While methane typically makes up 95 percent of natural gas, ethane, a hydrocarbon compound in the same family as methane, makes up a small component of natural gas. Ethane can range from 1%-6% of natural gas, and is commercially viable by itself, either as a byproduct or as part of the gas sold to consumers. Ethane is also a greenhouse gas, and studies at the end of the 20th century showed a correlation between ethane levels and the level of methane found in the Earth’s atmosphere.

From 1984-2009, ethane emissions were declining. However, in 2010, a European mountain sensor noticed a sharp increase in atmospheric ethane. Researchers came up with the hypothesis that this was due to increased oil and gas operations in the United States. To test this, researchers flew over the Bakken Shale “in a NOAA Twin Otter aircraft, sampling air for 12 days in May 2014.” The data they recovered should disturb anyone who does not believe the oil and gas industry’s spin that natural gas production, including the means to extract it from shale formations, is clean and environmentally safe.

The researchers found that the Bakken Formation, an oil and gas field in North Dakota and Montana, is emitting roughly 2 percent of the globe’s ethane. That’s about 250,000 tons per year.

“Two percent might not sound like a lot, but the emissions we observed in this single region are 10 to 100 times larger than reported in inventories. They directly impact air quality across North America. And they’re sufficient to explain much of the global shift in ethane concentrations,” said Eric Kort, U-M assistant professor of climate and space sciences and engineering, and first author of the study published in Geophysical Research Letters.

This is the very region where oil and gas operations, which often include hydrofracking operations, have risen tremendously over the past decade. In December, 2005, there were 219 oil producing wells there. As of the end of February, 2016, that number had increased by 4,658 percent to 10,420 producing wells.

Now the Bakken field is primarily an “oil play,” i.e., natural gas production is a much smaller component of what oil and gas companies in the area are extracting from their wells. As of 2013, many wells were flaring (i.e., burning off) natural gas from their wells because the infrastructure to recapture it for commercial purposes was not fully in place, although major efforts to increase natural gas production from the Bakken formation are underway.

Now if ethane, a gas that makes up no roughly five percent(5%) of natural gas extracted from drilling operations in the Bakken Shale resulted in 250,000 tons of fugitive emissions, how much methane do you think escaped? Let’s do a quick calculation. Methane represents about 95% of natural gas. Even though methane has a lighter molecular weight than ethane, lets assume it would escape these wells in the Bakken Shale in roughly the same proportions as ethane does. Since the methane composition of natural gas is 19 times higher than ethane, by multiplying the tonnage of ethane released, we would arrive at a figure of 4,75 million tons of fugitive methane escaping into the atmosphere per year from the Bakken field wells, which, again, I remind you are primarily oil wells.

And the Bakken field is relatively small compared to the largest shale formations in which far more fracking and other drilling operations are ongoing, and where the main fossil fuel that is being extracted and transported away to storage facilities and refineries is natural gas.

The largest shale formations in the USA, and those where where natural gas is the primary reason for drilling, would be the Marcellus and Utica Shale fields located, for the most part, in Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York. Wells drilled in those shale formations, primarily in Pennsylvania, represent 85% of the growth in the natural gas production in the United States since 2012. Overall, the EPA has determined oil and gas wells in shale formations such as the Marcellus, Bakken and Eagle (in Texas) fields equals 56% of all the natural gas produced in the continental United States.

Yet, few studies have been done to determine the extent to which the increase in methane emissions is related to oil and gas extraction operations in these massive shale formations. That is why this recent study regarding ethane emissions from the Bakken field is so important. Ethane is essentially a good proxy for methane, as both hydrocarbon compounds are found together in fields where natural gas is produced.

Even the EPA has been forced to admit that its previously rosy outlook on methane emissions from fossil fuel extraction were grossly underestimated.

With EPA’s next annual methane report due to be published by April 15, early signs suggest that the agency is taking steps to fix the methane mismatch. A preliminary draft of the report revises the agency’s methane calculations for 2013 — the most recent year reported — upward by about 27 percent for the natural gas and petroleum sectors, a difference of about 2 million metric tons. […]

EPA’s reports don’t just misjudge the scale of emissions, they also miss the long-term trend, recent work suggests. EPA reported that U.S. methane emissions remained largely unchanged from 2002 to 2014. But researchers report online March 2 in Geophysical Research Letters that emissions of the greenhouse gas rose more than 30 percent over that period. The United States could be responsible for as much as 30 to 60 percent of the global increase in methane emissions over the last decade, the study’s authors conclude. “We’re definitely not a small piece of that pie,” says Harvard University atmospheric scientist Alex Turner, who coauthored the study.

Yet, natural gas, particularly natural gas from shale field operations, is still being touted as the bridge to a cleaner energy future by both the Obama administration, and by the leading contender for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton argued at last night’s Democratic debate that supporting fracking during her years as secretary of State was necessary to help wean the world from coal power and to assist Europe in getting out from under Russian pressure. The subject of New York’s own fracking ban never came up at the debate, but Sen. Bernie Sanders brought back attacks that Clinton fostered fracking in other countries, an issue he’s highlighted to the delight of his green backers. “For economic and strategic reasons it was American policy to try to help countries get out from under the constant use of coal, building coal plants all the time,” Clinton said. “So we did say natural gas is a bridge. We want to cross that bridge as quickly as possible … in order to deal with climate change.”

Except the experts don’t see natural gas, and fracking to extract it, as all that helpful in dealing with climate change. Quite the contrary:

“We cannot solely rely on abundant gas to solve the climate change problem. The climate change problem requires a climate change solution. Abundant gas could be great for any number of things, but it is not going to solve the climate change problem.”

This statement was made by Haewon McJeon, the lead author on a new study published last week by Nature magazine, which concluded that cheap abundant natural gas will actually delay any efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

Again, Hillary Clinton is a good proxy for many politicians in both parties. Before she formally began her presidential campaign, she spoke in favor of increasing fracking and other drilling operations to extract natural gas. Her are some of her statements in 2014 regarding natural gas and fracking which she delivered at the National Clean Energy Summit, when she was far more open about her enthusiasm for natural gas to solve the climate change crisis.

At Sen. Harry Reid’s National Clean Energy Summit, Clinton called climate change “the most consequential, urgent, sweeping collection of

challenges we face as a nation and a world.”

She also cited the potential benefits of producing and exporting natural gas and oil.

“Assuming that our production stays at the levels, or even as some predict, goes higher, I do think there’s a play there,” she said, noting it could help Europe and Asia amid continuing problems with Iran. “This is a great economic advantage, a competitive advantage, for us. … We don’t want to give that up.”

Unfortunately, the data is showing us that fracking and drilling for natural gas is not a good solution at all for transitioning to renewable energy, in light of what we now know about the increase in methane emissions since the fracking boom began in the U.S. and around the world. Methane is, after all, a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, eight-six (86) times more potent to be exact in the short term, i.e. over a twenty year period.

Then there is the entire issue of the damage these natural gas “plays” have on our fresh water supply. Using fracking to extract natural gas is extremely detrimental to our clean water supply.

The EPA estimates that 70 billion to 140 billion gallons of water were used nationwide in 2011 for fracturing an estimated 35,000 wells [22]. Unlike other energy-related water withdrawals, which are commonly returned to rivers and lakes, most of the water used for unconventional oil and gas development is not recoverable. Depending on the type of well along with its depth and location, a single well with horizontal drilling can require 3 million to 12 million gallons of water when it is first fractured — dozens of times more than what is used in conventional vertical wells [23]. Similar vast volumes of water are needed each time a well undergoes a “work over,” or additional fracturing later in its life to maintain well pressure and gas production. A typical shale gas well will have about two work overs during its productive life span.

Not recoverable means not treatable to make it safe for human consumption. In other words, not drinkable. Fracking for natural gas extraction is already having an impact in California, where it’s making the problems of drought even worse.

In California, where a drought emergency was declared last month, 96% of new oil and gas wells were located in areas where there was already fierce competition for water. The pattern holds for other regions caught up in the oil and gas rush. Most of the wells in New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming were also located in areas of high water stress, the report said.

The idea that we can avoid making climate change worse through methane emissions related to oil and gas extraction, even fracking, if we just put “the right safeguards in place” is frankly a myth. The EPA lacks the ability to enforce existing regulations, much less the ones President Obama is attempting to put in place before he leaves office.

What the latest data is showing us is that there are no right safeguards, short of turning away from fossil fuels and fracking altogether. All around the globe, people are discovering that fracking and drilling for natural gas is dangerous, both from the standpoint of ruining local groundwater resources, to an increased earthquake risk, to accelerating climate change due to the far great potency of methane as a greenhouse gas.

And guess what? After methane finally breaks down in the atmosphere, a large percentage of what it leaves behind is – Carbon Dioxide and water vapor, the two longest lasting greenhouse gases. So accelerating our efforts to drill deep underground to extract natural gas is accelerating climate change in both the short and long term.

So, why would anyone promote fracking around the world and celebrate the fracking boom in the US, knowing the devastation it is causing on both a regional and global scale? I mean, other than Big Oil whose appetite for profiting off environmental catastrophes knows no limits. It sure aren’t the scientists who are looking at ways to stave off the worst case climate change scenarios at this point.

Natural gas – and shale gas in particular – is not a bridge fuel when methane emissions are considered over an appropriate timescale.”

Dr. Robert Howarth, Cornell University

What we should be doing is taxing carbon with a steadily rising fee structure, as suggested by James Hansen, combined with efforts to increase the efficiency and viability of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power. But a carbon tax or fee is critical.

Hansen said that a president committed to halting climate change would implement a gradually rising fee for fossil fuel extraction, collected from the fossil fuel companies at the domestic mine or port of entry. In order to keep the policy revenue-neutral, the fee would be evenly distributed back to US citizens in the form of a tax dividend, completely offsetting the rise in energy costs for most consumers. Those with large carbon footprints – like the very rich, with multiple large homes, for example – would bear the brunt. In that way, market forces would be allowed to let renewables compete and lower the cost of clean energy.

Unfortunately, no one in either party is talking about that solution, while also protecting us from the deleterious effects of fracking. Oh wait. Nevermind.

Literally the other day, I walked into my favorite coffee house, where everyone knows my name (hey, I always tip – that helps), only to learn that one of the baristas who had been on unpaid sick leave for a knee replacement her insurance company finally approved (or maybe she borrowed money from family and friends, I don’t really know), had suffered a devastating loss. Her husband died unexpectedly this week after suffering a heart attack in his sleep. His kids found him in his bed because she was in the hospital. Imagine the horror of that. Really, take a moment and imagine it.

And now, she has lost not only someone she deeply loved, but also all the income he brought in. They weren’t wealthy people. His life insurance policy won’t even cover the cost of his funeral. Her co-workers had put out two cards for people to sign offering condolences. But that is not all she needs right now. She needs money to pay her bills and attempt to fund her kids’ college education, because you damn well know her kids won’t be going to any college if they don’t have some money set aside.

In short, she has been reduced to begging people to give her cash. I asked one of the baristas if she had a GoFundMe site set up, but the answer was no. This woman is middle-aged and not particularly active on the internet (she works two jobs when she is able to work). I suggested someone help her do that ASAP. One way or another, I will find a way to dig in my pocket to contribute something to help because I know her. She talked to customers like they were her friends, always smiled even when she was in pain from her knee, and has a great laugh. But she needs far more than a few handouts from customers and friends if she is going to survive this.

And this isn’t the first time I’ve come across a person begging for money because of a medical catastrophe this year. Back in March, at a local supermarket deli, where, again, I am a frequent customer (I’m known as the “egg salad guy” because that’s what I always order), I learned that the younger brother of one of the workers behind the counter has a rare form of cancer. This young man was only 29 when he was diagnosed. Despite having health insurance, the part of his medical bills for which he was responsible exceeded $50,000 and that total is likely to increase. He did have a GoFundMe site, so I went online and contributed. Now I have a friend for life in his older brother, just for making a meager contribution to help out.

This is what we have been reduced to doing in our country today. There are no longer any good jobs available for millions of people. The baristas and the deli section worker I know have told me they can’t get more than 30 hours a week (at wages well below $15 an hour). Why? Because then they would qualify for benefits from their employers, like, you know, mandated health care coverage under the ACA for “full time” employees. Go to any retail or food establishment and ask how many employees they have that are full-time (i.e., who work more than 30 hours a week or 130 hours in the aggregate a month). I’ll bet you’ll discover that very few have more than a handful who are considered “full timers,” usually only store managers.

And even if you are a student graduating from college with a marketable degree, unless you’re going to work for a hedge fund, big bank or investment firm, your salary isn’t going to go very far to cover you housing costs, other expenses and student loan debt service. Millions of people are one calamity away from plunging into the depths of poverty. We have social mobility all right, but for most young people its downward mobility, unless they were born into wealthy families with connections. They can’t save money because expenses and debt eat up most of what they earn – they have no rainy day fund set aside should their life suddenly hit a rough patch. And the same thing is true of a large section of the “working class” whether they wear blue or white collars. Indeed, how many people you know who truly fit within the so-called middle class?

In my youth, middle class families were larger, there was usually only one breadwinner (Dad, of course), and yet all the kids managed to get a decent education, most who qualified could afford college, and most who got a degree were able to get a decent paying job. Even non-college grads could get decent jobs. The people I grew up around were not rich, but they had “nice things.” Many bought new cars every five years or so. They had their color TV’s and washing machines and refrigerators and what not. Hell, I even had a summer job between my sophomore and junior years in college (a union job I might add) that paid me $6.78 an hour for being a janitor at a candy factory. This was in 1976. After adjusting for inflation (using the Social Security wage index) I was effectively earning $34.15 an hour in 2014 dollars. Know any college kids earning that kind of money for janitorial work today?

And that was when the minimum wage of $2.30 an hour, i.e., effectively $11.58 in 2014 dollars. My son, who at 27 is living at home and cannot find a full-time job despite two degrees, makes a little over $9.00 an hour. He worked, until recently, only 20 to 28 hours a week, tops. You do the math. Unless he lived with us, he couldn’t afford an apartment, food, clothing or pay for basic utilities.

His saving grace? He has no student loans to pay off as he had a full tuition scholarship and his grandmother paid all his other expenses. Oh, and grandmother gave him her old car (newer than mine by nine years, actually) when she decided she didn’t like it. The gifts we give him at Christmas and his birthday? Cash. His biggest expenses are gas and car insurance. He pays us some rent for living here and for food, but he has managed to save a little money – mostly because he doesn’t drink, hit the bars on the weekends, doesn’t date and lives very frugally. His healthcare changed to Medicaid in April, 2015 (thank-you NY for accepting Medicaid expansion) when he timed out of our family coverage upon turning 26. Oddly, that was a relief, since now if he has a medical emergency that might run into the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, it’s fully covered. Under our family policy, we would have been on the hook for 20% of the cost, after meeting our yearly deductible, of course.

And this is the new normal for so many people his age. That deli worker I spoke to you about, the one with the brother who has cancer? He’s married but he and his wife are still living with his parents. My daughter’s best friend from high school is making under $9.00 an hour working for Goodwill while living at home. But at least they have jobs. The effective unemployment rate among individuals 18-29 years of age is 12.8 percent, and even higher among minority youth. And despite the ACA, tens of millions of Americans still have no healthcare insurance coverage. Of those who do, many have crap policies with high deductibles ranging anywhere from $3000 to as much as $12,000 or even higher before the insurance will cover anything. Not to mention what those health insurance policies do not cover.

Which brings me to what I’ll be doing this evening. I will be escorting my wife to a charitable event dinner. Here’s why. In 2016, my wife was treated for pancreatic cancer. Luckily, they caught it early and she survived the cancer. Not so fortunately for her, however, she suffered severe brain damage as a result of the then standard chemotherapy treatment she received. I’ll let her explain it in her own words, words that she will be repeating tonight on stage at the charity gala for the Hochstein School of Music where she receives music and dance therapy rehabilitative services.

My brain did not bounce back. In fact, as months progressed, I became less and less able to function in my environment. I could not read without great difficulty, I could not follow favorite TV shows, I could not remember a thought or idea from inception to expression. I could not multi-task in the sense that ignoring an irrelevant noise AND maintaining a coherent thought was multi-tasking. I could not process the normal goings on in my home with husband and two teenagers. I could not keep up with real time. Everything that I logically knew should not be threatening, was terrifying. I was like a cornered animal whose instinct was to freeze, flee, or fight. I was unpredictable to others, volatile and explosive. I felt myself sinking into insanity, and I had to protect my family from myself.

I essentially lived in my SUV for over two years. I left home before sunrise and returned to be fed and to sleep. I sat by Irondequoit Bay, or in favorite snow covered park. I listened to WXXI AM, and I wrote incessantly. I could not read what I wrote, but I kept writing – as if the words on the page were validation of my continued existence. My doctors kept assuring me that I was not going insane, but I felt that if I were not already insane…. I would be driven to it by my cognitive existence.

It was during this time that Mark Noble and his team at the U of R Medical Center published groundbreaking research on the effect of a chemotherapy agent I took, and how it can cause delayed onset brain injury through demyelination of brain neurons, with the corpus callosum as a major target . This was incredible news! In 2009, I underwent comprehensive neuropsychological assessments, which confirmed that though I retained my intellect, my cognitive processing had been catastrophically slowed, amongst other findings. My reading rate had dropped to the first percentile, despite my comprehension remaining at premorbid levels. […]

In 2013, my husband heard Maria, Hochstein’s Chair of the music therapy department, on WXXI. He spoke to her on the show, and as a result I found Hochstein. After my initial work with Maria, I began taking both piano and dance lessons. I had, in my younger years been a pianist, and a decent dancer. The work that I have been doing with [redacted], and [redacted] has not been to specifically play piano better, or to dance better, but to re-ignite /trigger / develop dormant or inaccessible but functional pathways within my brain to enable those to strengthen and compensate for what I have lost. Both activities have helped me to be able to multitask at an exponentially greater level. Consider the act of dancing: One must count beats, move feet, move body, move hands, and remember to breathe, simultaneously with some modicum of grace. When I started with Maria, we were counting [the] number of steps I could take before faltering while I also focused on my breathing. We celebrated when I reached double digits. When I started with Maria in 2013, I would have been unable to enter this room without becoming completely overwhelmed, disoriented, and in need to run from the barrage of stimulation that is here.

So, why will my wife, in what will be a very emotionally stressful environment for her, be up on that stage talking to hundreds of strangers, providing intimate details of her life and her medical condition to them? Why will she bare her soul to what will be essentially an audience of wealthy, financially secure people, people in the upper one percent or wealth or higher? Because the Hochstein School will be using her as a prop to beg for donations from the upper crust of my city’s society, that’s why. She has a compelling story to tell, and a reason to tell it. Here’s the last question my wife will be asked on stage tonight and her answer:

HOW HAS FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE AT HOCHSTEIN HELPED YOU?

I have been at Hochstein for 3 years, and I have been able to do what I do here only as a result of its generous financial assistance. Health insurance does not cover cognitive rehabilitation, and I am on a fixed income. Hochstein is my “magic pill,” and I hope to continue my journey here. I thank you for making that possible.

Health insurance does not cover cognitive rehabilitation, or at least ours does not. So, she’ll be begging, on her own behalf and on behalf of all the people Hochstein serves. Begging rich, powerful, well-connected people, almost all of them likely Republicans or wealthy conservative Democrats, no doubt many of them deeply religious, to give what amounts to a pittance – (tickets for the gala cost $175, and suggested, but not mandatory, donations range from $2,500 to become a “Friend Sponsor” up to $25,000 or more to be designated a “Platinum sponsor”) – in order to benefit the relatively few people to whom Hochstein provides financial assistance, all of them poor, disadvantaged and disabled children and adults.

This is what we are now as a country. A begging bowl society.

A society that the establishments of both major political parties have worked tirelessly to create over the last 30 years as we have seen our social safety net shredded rather than strengthened. A society that can afford a single payer health care system such as the one that exists in many other developed nations, one that would have reigned in rising costs, but whose politicians chose to placate the pharmaceutical and insurance industries and protect their profits, instead. A society where online donation sites like GoFundMe have exploded in growth over the last few years to meet the needs that once upon a time our social safety net, and a generally robust economy where good paying jobs were plentiful, provided. A society where large multinational corporations evade paying taxes on trillions of dollars of profits while ordinary people who suffer catastrophic emotional and financial losses through no fault of their own must rely on the kindness of wealthier strangers (who of course get to write these donations off as charitable deductions on their income taxes).

A society of beggars and debtors effectively ruled by the wealthiest .001 percent. Our betters.

And people wonder why an relatively unknown, 74 year old, self-described Democratic Socialist, with little if any major media coverage, with a campaign that relies on small donations instead of millionaires and SuperPacs funded by billionaires, was able to challenge so successfully the most well-financed and deeply-entrenched presidential candidate the Democratic Party establishment has ever produced.

My wife asked me if I thought telling her story tonight would make the people in attendance want to give money. I said I didn’t know, but it would make me want to contribute if we could afford to do so. What else could I have said? We are all too often at the mercy of people who must be wined and dined and chatted up and made to feel important and extra super-special and morally superior simply for doing the right thing. Simply for doing the only decent thing.

In the words of Kurt Vonnegut, so it goes.

Update. Last night my wife received a standing ovation for telling her story at the Hochstein charitable gala. I was extremely proud of her since I know how difficult this was for her to compose and then present to an audience of hundreds of people in a crowded ballroom. A presentation that would have been impossible for her to pull off as little as two years ago, without being overwhelmed with stimulus overload to her brain, a likely panic attack and the very real possibility of a meltdown on the stage, or her fleeing the room as fast as she could. I want to thank her dedicated and hard working music teacher, dance instructor and musical therapist who have done so much to bring about this progress in the recovery of her cognitive function. Even though she will never fully recover fully from the brain trauma she suffered, the benefits of their work have been truly astounding and vastly improved the quality of her life. And of those who love her.

Hochstein raised over $41,000 last night for their financial assistance program, which helps provide these services to around 1000 students and patients, young and old. It’s a small drop in a large ocean, but it was something. Just not good enough for an exceptional society, though, don’t you agree?

In Nashville, Tennessee, it took a white male juror to expose the most insidious form of white privilege that continues to exist – the privilege that in many jurisdictions black defendants are still judged more often than not by all white juries. White juries that result from the deliberate exclusion of eligible black jurors by prosecutors.

He stood up and told the judge he did not think it was right for two black men to face a jury with no black members on it.

The juror’s words to Criminal Court Judge Cheryl Blackburn earlier this month — confirmed by attorneys and others present in the courtroom — led to the delay of a trial and brought Nashville into a growing national discussion about the diversity of juries.

For days, the relatives of the two African American defendants had been outraged by what they saw as intentional exclusion of all potential black jurors by the prosecution. Both men had been in jail for 18 months awaiting trial, but when their trial was finally scheduled, five potential black jurors, the only ones called from the jury pool, were peremptorily excused from serving on the jury, i.e., they were automatically removed from consideration without any reason being given.

Now it is standard practice in most legal jurisdictions for each side in a criminal trial, the defense and the prosecution, to have a number of such peremptory challenges that allow them to strike potential jurors from consideration without offering any reason. And for many years, the diversity of jury pools has been an issue in cases that involve minority defendants. It’s not just some bygone discriminatory practice that the Civil Rights movement ended back in the day, as this 2010 American Bar Association journal article makes crystal clear.

And of you think that black defendants can get a fair trial by all white juries, well, the fact is you would be fooling yourself. All white juries, even in our post-racial era, are far more prone to convict black defendants than racially diverse juries.

Duke University released a study [in April, 2012] that examined the impact of race in jury pools in Florida, and there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that, according to the study, which looked at 700 cases between 2000 and 2010, all-white jury pools are significantly more likely to lead to convictions of black defendants than white ones. The good news is that a single black juror in the pool can alter that dynamic. […]

Two particularly salient points from Duke’s summary of the study:

— In cases with no blacks in the jury pool, blacks were convicted 81 percent of the time, and whites were convicted 66 percent of the time. The estimated difference in conviction rates rises to 16 percent when the authors controlled for the age and gender of the jury and the year and county in which the trial took place.

— When the jury pool included at least one black person, the conviction rates were nearly identical: 71 percent for black defendants, 73 percent for whites.

So you can understand why the grandmother of one defendant and the mother of the other, despite the delay a new trial will cause, were delighted that this single individual spoke out against what he viewed as a judicial process that was fundamentally unfair.

They lamented another delay in the case. But they said they do not think the first jury would have been fair.

“There was an angel in the courtroom that day,” Steele said of the juror. “Good for him for speaking up.”

Angel or not, his action was the right one to take. It’s all too clear in America that African Americans do not receive the full benefit of their Sixth Amendment constitutional right to a trial by an impartial jury of their peers, when only white people sit in judgment upon them.

George Will still has a job at the Washington Post. They certainly aren’t paying him by the word. Perhaps they’re paying him for the lies he’s willing to tell in defending the indefensible. Take a look at his latest screed, which makes the astounding argument that Exxon Mobil, and the legion of climate change “skeptics” that Exxon and other fossil fuel behemoths have funded over the years, are all victims of an Orwellian assault by hordes of progressive authoritarians seeking to criminalize their speech.

Authoritarianism, always latent in progressivism, is becoming explicit. Progressivism’s determination to regulate thought by regulating speech is apparent in the campaign by 16 states’ attorneys general and those of the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands, none Republican, to criminalize skepticism about the supposedly “settled” conclusions of climate science.

If you are wondering what the hell he’s talking about (since George was too lazy to provide any sources for his claim), it’s probably this report regarding a joint statement by, yes, the Attorney Generals of sixteen states and the U.S. Virgin Islands that they will cooperate with one another on possible litigation against entities that seek to fraudulently mislead the public regarding the science of climate change.

The group … said it will pursue climate change litigation. Massachusetts and the U.S. Virgin Islands officially joined an ongoing investigation into potential fraud by ExxonMobil, and all the states committed to working together as “creatively, collaboratively, and aggressively” as possible to combat climate change.

Sounds sinister, doesn’t it? Well, in George Will’s mind it’s positively one of the worst evils imaginable. Here is how he characterizes this “agreement” by the top law enforcement officials in their respective states.

The epithet “climate change deniers,” obviously coined to stigmatize skeptics as akin to Holocaust deniers, is designed to obscure something obvious: Of course the climate is changing; it never is not changing — neither before nor after the Medieval Warm Period (end of the 9th century to the 13th century) and the Little Ice Age (1640s to 1690s), neither of which was caused by fossil fuels.

That’s right, George Will goes full Godwin, all to defend one of his best friends, a multi-national corporation under investigation for its deliberate and long term effort to suppress information about the effect its main product, fossil fuels, has had in changing the Earth’s climate for the worse.

The New York attorney general has begun an investigation of Exxon Mobil to determine whether the company lied to the public about the risks of climate change or to investors about how such risks might hurt the oil business. […]

The investigation focuses on whether statements the company made to investors about climate risks as recently as this year were consistent with the company’s own long-running scientific research.

The people said the inquiry would include a period of at least a decade during which Exxon Mobil funded outside groups that sought to undermine climate science, even as its in-house scientists were outlining the potential consequences — and uncertainties — to company executives.

George Will, in his defense of Exxon and climate “skeptics,” makes a pathetic attempt to raise the issue of our cherished 1st Amendment right to free speech to obscure the lies of Big Oil and their well paid propagandists. Conveniently he fails to mention that the first government litigation regarding climate change was brought against climate scientists, such as the effort to intimidate climate researchers by then Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, in the lawsuit he brought against the most famous climate change scientist not named James Hansen, Michael Mann. Mann was also subjected to further legal harassment when he was investigated by his own University, Penn State, on the charge that he manipulated his data to prove the existence of global warming, though he was cleared of all charges by the investigating committee, which found by a unanimous decision that:

Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities.

This came after Rand Simberg, a scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is a conservative think tank funded by Exxon well known for attacking climate change researchers, compared Dr. Mann to Jerry Sandusky, a Penn State football coach convicted on numerous counts of of sex with young boys. But hey, free speech. Climate Change science research is the equivalent of pedophilia. All’s fair in business and war.

So, does Will have a valid point when he claims Exxon is being unfairly targeted for its statements denying the risks that fossil fuels are related to climate change? Well, not exactly. In fact, not at all. You see, major corporations whose shares are traded publicly are required to disclose all known risks associated with an investment in their company. And last year, reports surfaced that Exxon knew that fossil fuels were associated with climate change as long ago as 1977, but that it actively suppressed that information, particularly after James Hansen’s testimony before the Senate in 1988 tying human activity, including the burning of fossil fuels, to global warming.

In their eight-month-long investigation, reporters at InsideClimate News interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists and federal officials and analyzed hundreds of pages of internal documents. They found that the company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered a sobering message on the topic. “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” Black told Exxon’s management committee. A year later he warned Exxon that doubling CO2 gases in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by two or three degrees—a number that is consistent with the scientific consensus today. He continued to warn that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.” In other words, Exxon needed to act. […]

[E]xperts agree that Exxon became a leader in campaigns of confusion. By 1989 the company had helped create the Global Climate Coalition (disbanded in 2002) to question the scientific basis for concern about climate change. It also helped to prevent the U.S. from signing the international treaty on climate known as the Kyoto Protocol in 1998 to control greenhouse gases. Exxon’s tactic not only worked on the U.S. but also stopped other countries, such as China and India, from signing the treaty. At that point, “a lot of things unraveled,” Oreskes says.

Exxon used precisely the same strategy and tactics to deny climate change that the large tobacco companies employed o muddy the waters when researchers linked use of their products to increased health risks of cancers, heart disease and COPD.

[In April, 2014], the so-called Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) released its fifth report “debunking” the findings of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

According to the NIPCC report, which was published by the conservative think tank the Heartland Institute, global warming is nothing to worry about. It’s just a natural process that’s happened hundreds of times before. If anything, the report concludes, global warming could be a good thing because extra CO2 in the atmosphere means more air for plants to breath. […]

The Heartland Institute, the think tank that published the NIPCC report, is largely funded by the fossil fuel industry and its allies. In fact, it’s received around $67 million dollars over the past thirty years from donors like Exxon Mobil, the Koch Brothers, and the Scaife Foundation. All stand to get very, very rich if we continue pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

The NIPCC report’s leading authors, meanwhile, are a virtual who’s who of the climate denial industry. Dr. Fred Singer, the group’s founder, has been pushing the lie that global warming isn’t a big deal for decades now, and fossil fuel companies have helped him out all along the way. Another author, Craig Idso, actually used to work for coal giant Peabody Energy.

Shocking, I know. But that isn’t the worst of it, from a legal standpoint anyway. A study of Exxon’s mandatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows that the company own 10-K reports include lies of commission and omission regarding the risks and liabilities it faces as a result of its products’ contribution to climate change.

[W]e have reviewed all of the 10-K forms ExxonMobil has submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) from 1993 (the furthest back these forms are available online) to the present, in an effort to better understand how this oil giant has addressed the climate change threat — a threat Exxon itself has been shown to fully grasp going back four decades, despite its rhetoric to the contrary. […] From what we see in the 10-Ks, each over a hundred pages long and requiring, on average, 2,000 hours to complete, Exxon has done a masterful job of hedging its bets, both by omission and commission: omitting mere mention for many years, and then grossly understating, the vast array of direct and indirect risks it faces as a result of climate change. Even worse, Exxon has overtly and flagrantly overstated possible financial and economic risks associated with regulating carbon and other GHGs, both here in the US and in nations around the world.

If you really want to dig down deep into the black pit of lies and deceit Exxon and other fossil fuel companies employed to benefit themselves at the expense of our species future, please read The Climate Deception Dossiers, which was compiled by The Union of Concerned Scientists. It provides decades worth of internal memos and research proving the big oil companies knew about the effect burning fossil fuels would have on the environment. It also provides details regarding the actions they took to hide that information from the public while also funding disinformation campaigns and attacks on any and all research produced by climate scientists that linked use of fossil fuels to global warming.

In addition to federal securities law violations, there are many other statutes, both civil and criminal, that make lies and false representations actionable offenses under state and possibly federal law. Suffice it to say, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, and the sixteen other Attorney Generals who have agreed to cooperate in investigating the fossil fuel industry’s massive propaganda efforts promoting climate change denial, have more than enough justification to investigate potential avenues of legal action that may be taken against Exxon and others for the harm they have caused. Which makes Will’s protests of some metaphorical boot of totalitarian progressivism being ground into the face of one of the largest and most profitable industries in the world all the more farcical.

The attorney general of the Virgin Islands accuses ExxonMobil of criminal misrepresentation regarding climate change. This, even though before the U.S. government in 2009 first issued an endangerment finding regarding greenhouse gases, ExxonMobil favored a carbon tax to mitigate climate consequences of those gases. This grandstanding attorney general’s contribution to today’s gangster government is the use of law enforcement tools to pursue political goals — wielding prosecutorial weapons to chill debate, including subpoenaing private donor information from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. […]

The leader of the attorneys general, New York’s Eric Schneiderman, dismisses those who disagree with him as “morally vacant.” His moral content is apparent in his campaign to ban fantasy sports gambling because it competes with the gambling (state lottery, casinos, off-track betting) that enriches his government.

… These garden-variety authoritarians are eager to regulate us into conformity with the “settled” consensus du jour, whatever it is. But they are progressives, so it is for our own good.

These silly ad hominem attacks Will is forced to fall back on to defend the immensity of Big Oil and Coal’s immoral actions would normally make me laugh, if the issue wasn’t so deadly serious. But then, I don’t have the sinecure and financial security accorded to Will, who will have a job as a columnist at the Washington Post for as long as his brain can put two semi-coherent sentences together. All in the interest of being fair and balanced, of course. Enjoy your dirty money Georgie Boy. I’m sure your “friends” think you’ve more than earned it.

Lani Guinier was right when she argued our electoral system is deeply flawed. Though we don’t have a Tyranny of the Majority so much in America, as a tyranny of two minority parties, who have blocked access to any attempt to wrestle away their hold on political power. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Who is this Lani Guinier person of whom you speak, Steven, and what, if anything does she have to do with the Clintons?

In 1993, Lani Guinier was already a distinguished Harvard Law Professor, and a well regarded civil rights attorney, when President Bill Clinton nominated her to be the first African American woman, and the “first practicing civil rights attorney” to head the US Justice Department’s Civil Rights division. Her nomination was a pretty big deal at the time. She would have been the chief lawyer for the federal government charged with enforcing civil rights laws “on employment, education, housing and voting.”

Guinier was also a close personal friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, whom she met when they all attended Yale Law School together in the early seventies. In fact, both Bill and Hillary attended her small, very private wedding to her husband, Nolan Bowie. After graduation, she served as a law clerk for a prominent African American Court of Appeals Justice, then as the special assistant to the assistant Attorney General in charge of civil rights enforcement during the Carter administration. Later, she worked for the NAACP Defense Fund, losing only two of the many cases she brought and eventually rising to become the head of its Voting Rights project. She was a perfect choice to head up the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

However, on April 23, 1993, she was unfairly attacked by Clint Bolick, a former Reagan justice, in a deceitful op-ed hit piece in The Wall Street Journal, “Clinton’s Quota Queens,” because of law articles she had written that promoted proportional voting as a better electoral system for a democracy than our current winner take all system. In fact, Guinier was an opponent of racial quotas as a means to ameliorate past discrimination. The other lie spread about her, that she favored creating special districts to ensure African American representation in state legislatures and Congress, was also demonstrably false.

One of the most prominent themes of the attack on Guinier was her supposed support for electoral districts shaped to ensure a black majority – a process known as “race-conscious districting.” An entire op-ed in the New York Times — which appeared on the day her nomination was withdrawn (6/3/93) — was based on the premise that Guinier was in favor of “segregating black voters in black-majority districts.”

In reality, Guinier is the most prominent voice in the civil rights community challenging such districting. In sharp contrast to her media caricature as a racial isolationist, she has criticized race-conscious districting (Boston Review, 9-10/92) because it “isolates blacks from potential white allies” and “suppresses the potential development of issue-based campaigning and cross-racial coalitions.”

Another media tactic against Guinier was to dub her a “quota queen,” a phrase first used in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (4/30/93) by Clint Bolick, a Reagan-era Justice Department official. The racially loaded term combines the “welfare queen” stereotype with the dreaded “quota,” a buzzword that almost killed the 1991 Civil Rights Act.

The problem is that Guinier is an opponent of quotas to ensure representation of minorities. In an article in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review (Spring/89), she stated that “the enforcement of this representational right does not require legislative set-asides, color-coded ballots, electoral quotas or ‘one black, two votes’ remedies.”

Nonetheless, Bill Clinton, rather than defend her, or allow her to defend herself, withdrew her nomination. Indeed, some very familiar liberal Democrats, including Senators Ted Kennedy and and Carol Moseley-Braun demanded Clinton place her head on the chopping block to appease not only Republicans but conservative Democrats.

Thus, that master of triangulation, the “Big Dog” himself, folded like a cheap lawn chair to the drumbeat of media and Republican pressure by withdrawing her nomination. However, instead of allowing her to gracefully bow out, Clinton made a point of blasting her for having anti-democratic views. He never gave her the chance, which she requested, to defend her views at a public hearing before the Senate. He discarded her as one would a worthless piece of trash.

Give me a shot at a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, [Guinier] pleaded. Let me defend myself.

Can’t do it, [Clinton] said. Won’t do it. […]

And when they parted company, and she slid into the back seat of the limo that sped her away from the White House, she did not know her fate for certain. […]

After the 75-minute meeting had ended, Clinton called both Guinier and Attorney General Janet Reno to inform them that he was withdrawing her nomination …

In short in an act of political cowardice, he abandoned a highly qualified attorney in civil rights law, and his personal friend. He essentially allowed her critics on the right to savage her as a radical leftist and racial agitator in order to protect his reputation as a “New Democrat.” Strangely enough, one of Guinier’s most vocal defenders was a Republican lawyer and businessman who served in the Eisenhower administration and later was a cabinet member during the Ford administration.

“The loss of Lani Guinier as Assistant Attorney General for civil rights is a grave one, both for President Clinton and the country. The President’s yanking of the nomination, caving in to shrill, unsubstantiated attacks, was not only unfair, but some would say political cowardice.

“Although Ms. Guinier does not advocate forcing cumulative voting plans upon local jurisdictions, she suggests that some localities may prefer a race-neutral plan to a race-conscious plan. This idea is hardly radical. During the Bush Administration, the Justice Department approved alternative voting systems in at least 35 different jurisdictions.”

• William T. Coleman Jr. (Secretary of Transportation under President Ford), June 4, 1993 NY Times column supporting Lani Guinier’s nomination

So, what terrible “anti-democratic” views had Lani Guinier proposed in her legal writings? We know she opposed majority African American districts to ensure black politicians would be elected. We also know she argued against the use of racial quotas, a classic racist dog whistle still used by Republicans and conservatives today to appeal to the basest instincts of white voters. Well, it was nothing so “horrendous” as that.

In her much demonized and derided legal writings, she argued that our winner take all electoral system is at its heart undemocratic because it limits our voting rights as citizens. In almost every election, voters are presented with only two options, the candidate of Party A (i.e., the Republicans, at present a radical far right wing party) or the candidate of Party B (i.e., the Democrats, who for the most part offer up a paler shade of conservative economic dogma). Guinier argues, instead for a new system of voting to allow a wider range of political views to be represented in government. What she proposes is a system in which “every citizen has the right to equal legislative influence.”

What does that mean? It means she wants elections to offer voters more choices through procedural adjustments both in how we choose elected officials and in how certain decisions by legislatures are made. For example, she once suggested that laws that would unduly effect minority populations (however you wish to define minorities) should require more than a simple majority to pass. In effect, such super-majority requirements would operate much like the filibuster in the United States Senate does, forcing opposing sides into a dialogue by offering those in the minority a veto power over laws they view as aimed at their constituents, whether that be pot smokers, bicycle riders, or more traditional minority groups such as those based on racial, ethnic and gender lines.

The proposal to which she has devoted most of her academic effort, however, has to do with the way in which we vote. Guinier was, and remains, an advocate for what is often referred to as cumulative voting (see, also, Proportional representation). This is not a radical idea by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it is currently employed by any number of large and small for profit companies to ensure that minority shareholders are able to elect directors to a corporation’s board to represent their interests. Here is how the SEC describes cumulative voting procedures:

Cumulative voting is a type of voting system that helps strengthen the ability of minority shareholders to elect a director. This method allows shareholders to cast all of their votes for a single nominee for the board of directors when the company has multiple openings on its board. In contrast, in “regular” or “statutory” voting, shareholders may not give more than one vote per share to any single nominee. For example, if the election is for four directors and you hold 500 shares (with one vote per share), under the regular method you could vote a maximum of 500 shares for each one candidate (giving you 2,000 votes total—500 votes per each of the four candidates). With cumulative voting, you are afforded the 2,000 votes from the start and could choose to vote all 2,000 votes for one candidate, 1,000 each to two candidates, or otherwise divide your votes whichever way you wanted.

The idea behind cumulative voting is to do a better job ensuring that legislative bodies include representatives who owe their allegiance not just to a single party (which may or may not fairly represent the widest range of views held by constituents) but to the people who cast their ballots specifically for them. It would empower and give a voice to people who support positions on issues that are often underrepresented in our current winner take all system.

At present, our two party duopoly limits the options presented to voters, eliminating many candidates who hold views the party establishments, for various reasons (including not wanting to go against the interests of their major financial backers), do not and never will tolerate or accept.

Their are a variety of ways in which cumulative voting procedures could be implemented. In our history, cumulative voting methods have been used in the past to elect members to the Illinois state legislature (1870-1980) and to elect members to many local boards such as city councils, and various elected commissions. In fact, there is a good argument to be made that cumulative voting leads to less partisan divide, a process that is crippling Congress at the moment.

From 1870 through 1980 we elected three state reps per district. In Republican-leaning districts, voters usually elected two GOP reps and one Democratic rep. In Democratic-leaning districts, the reverse was true. But every person in the state was represented by both political parties in Springfield.

In the greater Rockford area, liberal E.J. “Zeke” Giorgi was routinely elected as the Democratic rep. From 1971 through 1980, one of the two GOP reps was W. Timothy Simms, a conservative Republican. Simms believes that multi-member districts were better because the House was less partisan then, and more work got done collaboratively.

I’m not suggesting that cumulative voting is a panacea for all that ails our current political system, one awash in the stink of legalized bribery. However, it is far from being a radical or anti-democratic notion, as Bill Clinton sanctimoniously proclaimed as he threw his now former friend, and one of the most highly qualified lawyers on civil rights law (irrespective of the fact she was an African American female) under the bus merely because of his concern for how supporting her against the ill-founded, demonstrably false, and patently racist attacks made by a few conservative Republicans might make him look to white voters. In short, his decision was all about Bill Clinton and had little to do with the character or quality of Lani Guinier or her views in voting rights:

… Clinton, pounding the White House briefing room lectern with his fist, said he would have stuck with Guinier even if no senator voted for her, had he not disagreed with some of her views.

“The problem is that this battle will be waged based on her academic writings,” he said. “And I cannot fight a battle that I know is divisive, that is an uphill battle, that is distracting to the country if I do not believe in the ground of the battle. This has nothing to do with the political center. This has to do with my center.”

While praising Guinier’s integrity and work as a civil rights lawyer, Clinton admitted that he had not read her articles in depth until Thursday. “I have to tell you that, had I read them before I nominated her, I would not have done so,” he said.

Remember, this was at a time Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate (where they held 57 seats). Bill Clinton didn’t have to back down because of these scurrilous attacks on Professor Guinier. He could have stuck by her, and at the very least given her the opportunity to respond and address the baseless charges made against her in a formal hearing before the Senate.

Instead, he told her of his withdrawal of her nomination over the phone. And afterwards, he and Hillary cut off all contact with their former friend.

Although Guinier says the Clintons were her friends and even attended her small wedding, she has not had even a phone call from them since her nomination was withdrawn:

“I think this is a friendship that has been put in jeopardy by politics.”

Something to remember, when you hear how loyal and devoted the Clintons are to the Black community. That loyalty, at least when it came to one African American lawyer who was their close friend and law school classmate, only went one way. And when it came time for Bill Clinton to show his true colors, he flinched and attacked his own friend at the merest hint of a threat to his political reputation. Why? Because the Wall Street Journal and one former Reagan official out for revenge against “liberals’ for the way serial sexual harasser, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was treated in his Senate confirmation hearings, lied and defamed her.

Amazing, isn’t it, how little it took to cause Bill Clinton’s white privileged Presidential sphincter muscle to tighten up. The mere possibility that standing up for his friend and supporter might make him look like a [ugly racial slur deleted] lover to the white electorate was all it took for him to savage her reputation and career to the exigencies of keeping him in good standing with the good old boys in the Beltway Establishment.

Oh, it is a wonderful economy if you are in the top one percent. It’s not even all that terrible if you are in the upper 20% (though it isn’t great, either). But when you look at people in the lower 80 percent of the income range, there is no cherry on top of their sundae from this so-called economic recovery.

We’ve seen the statistics that show the mortality rate for non-Hispanic, middle-aged white Americans is now rising for the first time in decades. And this decrease in life expectancy has affected poor, less-educated white women the hardest.

And while the reasons postulated for this reversal in life expectancy among the group that has generally fared the best in the past are as numerous as there are pundits on cable TV shows to pontificate on it, let me suggest that one particular factor may play a significant role. Guess which one. Yes, that’s correct. It’s the economy stupid. Particularly the economy that has done little for those who are not among the upper strata of wealth and income in our great land of the free, and home of the brave.

In the ten years between 2004 and 2014, median income (i.e., the level of income that splits the top half from the bottom half) fell 13 percent. What’s worse, is that household expenditures increased by roughly 14 percent. Indeed, since 1996, “[t]he typical household saw its expenditures grow by more than 25 percent, from $29,400 in 1996 to $36,800 in 2014,” (after adjusting for inflation) with the majority of that increase coming from spending on basic necessities such as food, housing, transportation and health care. Here is a nice chart from the recent PEW issue brief, “Household Expenditures and Income,” that shows the growing disparity between what poor and middle class Americans pay for basic necessities versus their ever declining incomes.

As you can see quite clearly, income for most people continues to trend downward, while expenses for the typical family have risen even more sharply, despite the much heralded economic recovery proclaimed by President Obama and the media in January. In truth, this issue is the one that that establishment politicians and the media have done their best to avoid discussing whenever possible: that for many, many people around the country the recession never ended. Arguably, for most of them it has gotten worse. Take a look at this graphic of data compiled by PEW study that shows how much more typical household costs eat into a family’s income in 2014 compared to 1996.

Even after adjusting for inflation, it’s clear that increases in the cost of housing, food and health care have placed a significant financial burden on middle class and poor families following two decades of the neo-liberal economic policies that have been promoted and adopted by both Republican and Democratic administrations, beginning with President Bill Clinton. Is it any wonder that a neo-fascist clown such as Donald Trump is well ahead in the Republican Presidential race. Though he rabidly pushes racism and appeals to bigotry, he is also the only Republican candidate who loudly proclaims that trade deals such as NAFTA have harmed the working class.

In many speeches he makes a point of declaring that he will raise high tariffs on goods imported by companies that shut down manufacturing plants in America and shipped jobs overseas. Other than Sanders, no other major candidate in either party is pushing this populist theme as hard, one which appeals to many of the very people who have suffered the most over the last twenty years as they’ve watched any financial security they might have once have enjoyed wither into nothingness.

Most of the data in the latest [Federal reserve] survey, frankly, are less than earth-shattering: 49 percent of part-time workers would prefer to work more hours at their current wage; 29 percent of Americans expect to earn a higher income in the coming year; 43 percent of homeowners who have owned their home for at least a year believe its value has increased. But the answer to one question was astonishing. The Fed asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency. The answer: 47 percent of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something, or they would not be able to come up with the $400 at all.

Yet, it seems the establishments of both major parties have no real incentive to change their current views on trade or the economy, as the vast majority of the funds that fuel their campaigns come from contributions bundled by industry lobbyists, or in unlimited amounts of cash contributed directly by multinational companies and billionaires to Super Pacs that favor incumbents at every level of government who vote to maintain the status quo. Just as supposedly only Nixon could thaw relations with Russia and China at the height of the Cold War, we now see Democratic administrations successfully work to push through trade deals favorable to large corporations at the expense of our own workers and the environment.

Perhaps surprisingly, or perhaps not, economists have done little research on the issue of financial insecurity that so many of us deal with on a daily basis. As one economist recently said, it’s a “new area of research” for many of them.

David Johnson, an economist who studies income and wealth inequality at the University of Michigan, says, “People studied savings and debt. But this concept that people aren’t making ends meet or the idea that if there was a shock, they wouldn’t have the money to pay, that’s definitely a new area of research”—one that’s taken off since the Great Recession. According to Johnson, economists have long theorized that people smooth their consumption over their lifetime, offsetting bad years with good ones—borrowing in the bad, saving in the good. But recent research indicates that when people get some money—a bonus, a tax refund, a small inheritance—they are, in fact, more likely to spend it than to save it. “It could be,” Johnson says, “that people don’t have the money” to save. Many of us, it turns out, are living in a more or less continual state of financial peril.

Sanders and Trump have made opposition to unfair trade agreements a major part of their economic platform. Bernie has gone even farther, of course, seeking to increase social security, provide free college education, raise the minimum wage to $15, propose massive infrastructure investment, and provide single payer health care for all as a universal right. I think it is safe to say that his campaign has forced Hillary Clinton to respond by moving in his direction regarding these matters.

When you go to the issues page of Hillary Clinton’s campaign website, she has no specific topic devoted to her positions on improving the lives of the working class. You have to do some of digging to tease out what she says she will do to improve the economy for people outside her own class. For example, here’s what her “Plan to Win the Global Competition for Advanced Manufacturing Jobs” states as its main goal regarding trade agreements:

Set a high bar for trade agreements, ensuring they create good American jobs, raise wages, and advance our national security.

She also says that, regarding trade and economic policies, she will pursue the following as President:

Make trade enforcement and leveling the playing field for American workers and businesses a critical presidential priority.

Crack down on currency manipulation and work with labor and business to take tough actions against unfair trade practices and the theft – physical and virtual – of America’s inventions, both by using the laws we have and seeking new authority where existing rules aren’t enough.

Boost resources to vigorously and consistently prosecute trade violations, for everything from investing in the latest technology to hiring trade analysts, subject-matter experts, and translators.

If you can tell me what that entails regarding specific proposals and actions she’ll take as President regarding existing trade agreements, or those, such as the TPP, which may yet be approved by Congress before the next President assumes office, you’re far more clairvoyant than I. Nonetheless, for your edification and mine, her are a list of many of the main components of her plans to revitalize our economy from links found at her campaign website:

Tax relief for communities hardest hit by the loss of manufacturing jobs.

Tax relief and support for research and innovation in America, particularly at smaller businesses and startups.

Appoint a “a new chief trade prosecutor reporting directly to the president, triple the number of trade enforcement officers and build new early-warning systems so we can intervene before trade violations cost American jobs.”

Close loopholes and end tax write-offs for companies that ship jobs overseas.

End inversions – a tax avoidance scheme that lets US corporations park profits offshore to avoid the corporate earnings tax.

Get tough with China.

Invest in infrastructure.

Support working families through:

Strengthening unions and protecting worker bargaining power.

Raise the minimum wage and strengthen overtime rules.

Support equal pay, paid family leave, earned sick days, fair schedules, and quality affordable child care.

Help students by:

Encourage proven, high-quality training and apprenticeships – including a $1,500 tax credit for every apprentice hired through a bona fide apprenticeship program

Allow federal student aid to be used toward high-quality career and technical training programs with promising or proven records—including traditional career and technical education, and innovative, flexible online programs.

Promote “public-private partnership that helps smaller American manufacturers compete.”

Provide tuition-free community college, and reduce student debt by allowing students to refinance their loans.

It sounds impressive, until you realize how many moving parts are involved, and that the only “bi-partisan support” for any of these goals will probably focus on the tax relief aspects of it. The Republicans in Congress will oppose everything else. And many of her statements I found are rather vague and lack specifics as to how her proposals will be funded. In short, assuming she does indeed tend to make the economy a priority, her goals seem to me no more achievable at present than those suggested by Sanders, and she seeks to do far less than he does. To make any headway, she’s going to need a victory in the November election that brings in a wave of Democrats who will support her in Congress and make the case for her agenda.

So far, Clinton’s campaign has not chosen to emphasize her economic plans and policy proposals very often. Instead, it has been quick to criticize Bernie’s proposals and, of course, go negative by attacking his character and integrity – he’s racist, he’s sexist, he doesn’t care about minorities, and of course, my favorite, that his supporters are all vile Bernie Bros who are spreading right wing talking points about her.

For the most part, she’s chosen to promote herself – her experience, her judgment, her electability – far more often than she’s chosen to make the case for her agenda; her vision for improving the lot of millions of ordinary Americans, many of them independents who are quite cynical regarding the real motivations of both parties, people who are desperately struggling to keep their financial heads above water.

So, yes, her website does provides links to lists of bullet points regarding her economic “plan” that, to be fair, are no more or less or detailed than one would expect from any candidate in the middle of a hard fought campaign for the Presidency. But at some point, she needs to go beyond attacking her rivals, Democratic and Republican alike. She needs to make the case to all those people who are struggling that she has a vision for an economic recovery that includes them at its core. In my view, her ability to convince those people that she can be and will be their champion will determine whether she can win the support of independents and Sanders supporters who are drawn to him not because of who he is or his charisma, but because of the power of his populist message.

If Clinton truly wants those votes, which I believe will be crucial to making gains for Democrats in Congress, she will need to do more than stick to the standard, and by now tired, Democratic message that voters must choose her because the Republican candidate is so much worse. She must inspire the same enthusiasm for her candidacy that Sanders did with his supporters, and that Trump, for so many ugly and despicable reasons, has inspired among his.

Whether she can do that will go a long way to determining how well she does in the general election. Her ability to help elect down ticket Democrats to the House and Senate requires a positive message that appeals to people who feel that they have been abandoned by both parties. Assuming she wins in November (and at this point one would have to rate her the favorite, if not yet a prohibitive one), her administration will ultimately be judged as successful or not depending on if she is seen as the President who restored our economy to one that it works for everyone, and not just the few at the top.

Well, the results from the New York primary are in, and it’s safe to say that Hillary Clinton will be the nominee of the Democratic Party. I’m not going to make excuses for the Sanders’ campaign. They lost a state in which they desperately needed a Michigan style upset to remain relevant. Whatever happens going forward with the movement that made Bernie Sanders their symbolic leader is impossible for me to predict. Martin already has a post up that analyses where the progressive alliance that supported Sanders’ candidacy this election season goes from here, and he has examined those possibilities far more effectively than I could hope to do.

In light of Trump’s overwhelming victory last night, it seems apparent that he will be the Republican challenger to Clinton. And I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that means Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States come Inauguration Day, 2017. Yeah, I’m not taking much of a risk there. Regardless of the strengths and weaknesses of Hillary as a candidate, the Donald out trumps her in the flaws category by a very large margin.

But that is the end of my predictions for this election cycle (I know, famous last words). However, I am honestly interested in learning what the Frog Pond readership here think will happen with respect to Hillary Clinton, both in the immediate future, and also looking ahead to the next four years when she will be the first female President to sit in the Oval Office.

So, please, let me know your thoughts regarding the following:

1. What effect on down ticket races will the Clinton have, especially with regards to Democratic hopes to regain a majority in the Senate?

To be honest, this may be as much a matter of the Trump effect as anything that Hillary brings to the table, but regarding the contingent of anti-Trump voters (and I expect a lot of them), what will happen when they look beyond the Presidential candidates to the Senate and House races? Will Clinton seal the deal with those folks to get them to vote Democratic in other races, or will the votes she receives from the “Anyone But Trump” brigade be limited to a vote for her and her alone?

2. What will young and independent voters do?

I, frankly, have little clue, despite the “Bernie or Bust” types one hears about. We do know that President Obama turned out large numbers of young and independent voters in both 2008 and 2012. Clinton has done less well during the primaries with younger voters, and, in open primaries she has not fared as well with independents, either. Will they turn out for her in the Fall or not?

3. What will be Clinton’s major domestic policy focus during her first two years in office?

Financial reform? Health Care reform, i.e., improvements to the ACA? Reform the current justice system that has resulted in the US having the largest prison population on earth? Immigration reform? Upgrading our failing infrastructure (electric grid, roads, telecommunication advances, etc.). Climate change? Income inequality? Passage of trade agreements such as the TPP? Something else?

4. What do you foresee as the biggest challenges she will face in foreign policy?

The list here is almost endless, but let’s start with the Middle East. How will her administration approach Iran and Saudi Arabia, the two major powers in the region? What about the ongoing wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan? What will she do in partnership with the EU to address the horrific refugee crisis. Will her foreign policy be more or less hawkish than the Obama administration regarding terrorism and the use of military force around the globe? And what about relations with Russia and China?

As they saying goes, I am curious.

I’ve finally come around, after seeing so many diaries on Daily Kos extolling her deserving qualities and virtues, to realizing that Hillary Clinton really is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known. Laugh all you want, but I can prove that she possesses each of those in abundance.

Kindness

She’s extraordinarily kind, for one thing.

“We have to send a clear message, just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean the child gets to stay,” she said. “So, we don’t want to send a message that is contrary to our laws or will encourage more children to make that dangerous journey.”

Clinton said the main reason minors are coming is to escape violence in their home countries, predominantly Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.

Ah, yes, isn’t it sad so many parents feel they have no choice but to send their children away on a dangerous journey to the United States to escape violence in countries like Honduras. If only someone in a position of authority could have done something, anything to prevent the rise of this murderous, criminal regime which illegally ousted the democratically elected government, and replaced it with an ongoing horror show:

Honduras suffers from rampant crime and impunity for human rights abuses. The murder rate was again the highest in the world in 2014. The institutions responsible for providing public security continue to prove largely ineffective and remain marred by corruption and abuse, while efforts to reform them have made little progress.

If only someone in our government, rather than sending “$50 million in security aid” to these monsters from 2010-2014, had stood up to these gangsters and mass murderers and said this shall not pass! Alas, there was no one willing to fight for the poor people of Honduras.

A number of Clinton emails show how, starting shortly after the coup, HRC and her team shifted the deliberations on Honduras from the Organization of American States (OAS) – where Zelaya could benefit from the strong support of left-wing allies throughout the region – to the San José negotiation process in Costa Rica. There, representatives of the coup regime were placed on an equal footing with representatives of Zelaya’s constitutional government, and Costa Rican president Oscar Arias (a close U.S. ally) as mediator. Unsurprisingly, the negotiation process only succeeded in one thing: keeping Zelaya out of office for the rest of his constitutional mandate.

Such a pity.

But I digress.

Bravery

I don’t want to just refer to Hillary Clinton’s self-acknowledged personal bravery under fire. That has been well documented. I’m talking about political courage to stand by what you truly believe even in the face of risking everything you care about most.

And then, of course, there is the issue of her moral courage, which she demonstrated in abundance when she defied the majority of Democratic members in Congress to grant President Bush the authority to go to war with Saddam Hussein’s cruel and evil regime in Iraq.

[A] sizable majority of Democrats in Congress voted against the authorization to invade Iraq the following year.

There were 21 Senate Democrats — along with one Republican, Lincoln Chafee, and one independent, Jim Jeffords — who voted against the war resolution, while 126 of 209 House Democrats also voted against it. Bernie Sanders, then an independent House member who caucused with the Democrats, voted with the opposition. At the time, Sanders gave a floor speech disputing the administration’s claims about Saddam’s arsenal. He not only cautioned that both American and Iraqi casualties could rise unacceptably high, but also warned “about the precedent that a unilateral invasion of Iraq could establish in terms of international law and the role of the United Nations.”

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, stood among the right-wing minority of Democrats in Washington.

The Democrats controlled the Senate at the time of the war authorization. Had they closed ranks and voted in opposition, the Bush administration would have been unable to launch the tragic invasion — at least not legally. Instead, Clinton and other pro-war Democrats chose to cross the aisle to side with the Republicans.

And she didn’t back down from the position that her vote on Iraq was the right one, even after the Bush administration’s dubious claims that Saddam Husein’s Iraq supported Al Qaeda and was chock full of weapons of mass destruction, just waiting to blossom into mushroom clouds over America, was proven absolutely, positively to be pure, unadulterated horsepucky.

Even many months after the Bush administration itself acknowledged that Iraq had neither WMDs nor ties to Al-Qaeda, Clinton declared in a speech at George Washington University that her support for the authorization was still “the right vote” and one that “I stand by.” Similarly, in an interview on Larry King Live in April 2004, when asked about her vote despite the absence of WMDs or al-Qaeda ties, she acknowledged, “I don’t regret giving the president authority.”

I don’t care what you say, that took guts, a true profile in courage.

Warmth

Perhaps her best quality, however, is her undisputed charm and grace, and the welcoming, compassionate way she has with ordinary people. For example, just watch her in action, taking the time to generously offer advice to this young woman:

Or how about the time she calmly and patiently dealt with adversity when confronted by an hysterical, foaming at the mouth eco-terrorist nutjob?

What grace under pressure! But she has always shown compassion and empathy for the plight of others, especially those so different from herself.

“I’m not a ‘super-predator,’ Hillary Clinton,” Williams said. “Can you apologize to black people for mass incarceration?” Williams asks while brandishing a sign that read, “We have to bring them to heel.” […]

Clinton seemed audibly and visibly irritated, saying she would answer if allowed to speak and then, even more notably, “that no one had ever asked her that before.” Then, Clinton essentially moved on with her regularly scheduled fundraising program. There was no accounting, partial or full, for her 1996 position nor how she arrived at her 2016 stance on criminal justice reform. Moving on.

It just – I don’t know – brought a tear to my eyes when Hillary, after it was finally brought to her attention, did the right thing, and apologized for calling young black youth “super predators.” I know some might say that she acted only out of political expediency, and her apology came 20 years too late considering the mass incarceration of so many people after her public support and advocacy for her Hubby’s “tough on crime” bill, but such people don’t know the Hillary Clinton I know. Her own words say it far better than I.

Clinton said she has devoted her life’s work to helping underserved children, too many of whom, she said, are in African-American communities.

“We haven’t done right by them. We need to,” she said. “We need to end the school to prison pipeline and replace it with a cradle-to-college pipeline.”

How can anyone object to that? Her life’s work – helping the most underserved children in America? It just goes to show you that Hillary Clinton really is the most …

Wonderful Human Being

on the planet.

Remember when Hillary said, “We need to end the school to prison pipeline and replace it with a cradle-to-college pipeline.” Well, the minute someone pointed out to her that some of her political contributions came from the for-profit prison industry, which has grown exponentially over the last 20 years, she cut them completely out of her life.

“When we’re dealing with a mass incarceration crisis, we don’t need private industry incentives that may contribute — or have the appearance of contributing — to over-incarceration,” campaign spokesperson Xochitl Hinojosa told ThinkProgress, explaining that Clinton will donate the large amount she has already received from these sources to a yet-to-be-named charity.

How great is that? Sure, she took her time reaching that decision, but to be fair, she had to balance the interests of everyone involved. You can’t just make a knee jerk reaction to every little criticism that comes your way.

[Her] decision came after months of pressure from civil rights and immigrant justice groups, who launched online petitions and interrupted Clinton’s public events, demanding she cut ties with the private prison industry.

“Our message was, ‘You can’t be pro-immigrant and still have this blemish on your record,’” said Zenén Jaimes Pérez with United We Dream, one of many organizations that teamed up to press Clinton. “She had [campaign donation] bundlers who worked for the Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group, which run most of the immigrant detention centers in this country. For me, it was a big deal, because my dad was detained in a Geo facility. She was taking money from a group profiting from my family’s suffering.”

Yet, in the end the money went to a good use – charity. Which charity? I don’t know. Maybe her own. Does it matter? After all, she has promised to end the $7 billion to $8 billion private prison industry forever, and her word is her bond.

And speaking of charity, no one does charity better than Hillary, primarily through the Clinton Foundation, one of the most largest and best charitable organizations in the world, which bar none, knows how to deliver the goods to the people who need their help the most.

ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: Soon after the Haiti earthquake in 2010, the U.S. ambassador at the time—WikiLeaks documents showed this—wrote a cable essentially saying that a gold rush is on, a gold rush meaning for U.S. corporations and others. […] The solution that the Obama administration gave for Haiti, pushed by Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton and Chelsea Clinton, their daughter, were industrial parks—essentially, places that Haitians can get underpaid and not trained to make cheap clothing for Gap and Wal-Mart that you and I maybe, hopefully, won’t buy in the U.S.

[T]he legacy of the Clinton Foundation—and I examine this deeply in the book—is utterly appalling. There are example after example of the Clinton Foundation funding a number of centers that have been infected by chemicals, which also, I might add, the Clinton Foundation were investing in failed things after Hurricane Katrina, as well, here in the U.S. Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and others—I mean, they’re one example—their solution has primarily been industrial parks.

Who wouldn’t want to work at an industrial park, especially one heavily supported by the Clinton Foundation?

Haiti’s Caracol Industrial Park—the U.S. State Department and Clinton Foundation pet project to deliver aid and reconstruction to earthquake-ravaged Haiti in the form of private investment—is systematically stealing its garment workers’ wages, paying them 34 percent less than minimum wage set by federal law, a breaking report from the Worker Rights Consortium reveals. Critics charge that poverty wages illustrate the deep flaws with corporate models of so-called aid.

The failure of the Caracol Industrial Park to comply with minimum wage laws is a stain on the U.S.’s post-earthquake investments in Haiti and calls into question the sustainability and effectiveness of relying on the garment industry to lead Haiti’s reconstruction said Jake Johnston of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in an interview with Common Dreams. […]

Then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former U.S. President Bill Clinton attended Caracol’s opening ceremony a year ago. “We’re sending a message that Haiti is open for business again,” Hillary Clinton declared upon the announcement of the opening.

It’s the type of thing I would expect from Hillary Clinton. Her service to others continues to amaze me. She is always willing to help out a friend in need.

Well, I hope you understand now why I felt it necessary to reveal what I know about the true heart and character of Hillary Clinton. The New York primary is tomorrow. We sure wouldn’t want anyone confused about Hillary Clinton’s record as a humanitarian and all around do-gooder.

Opposition leaders “said all the right things about supporting democracy and inclusivity and building Libyan institutions, providing some hope that we might be able to pull this off,” said Philip H. Gordon, one of [Clinton’s} assistant secretaries. “They gave us what we wanted to hear. And you do want to believe.”

Her conviction would be critical in persuading Mr. Obama to join allies in bombing Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. In fact, Mr. Obama’s defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, would later say that in a “51-49” decision, it was Mrs. Clinton’s support that put the ambivalent president over the line.

The consequences would be more far-reaching than anyone imagined, leaving Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven, a place where the direst answers to Mrs. Clinton’s questions have come to pass.

Whenever push came to shove, Hillary always chose to do the right thing, no mater how difficult the choice:

[A]s union leaders and human rights activists conveyed these harrowing reports of violence to then-Secretary of State Clinton in late 2011, urging her to pressure the Colombian government to protect labor organizers, she responded first with silence, these organizers say. The State Department publicly praised Colombia’s progress on human rights, thereby permitting hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid to flow to the same Colombian military that labor activists say helped intimidate workers.

At the same time that Clinton’s State Department was lauding Colombia’s human rights record, her family was forging a financial relationship with Pacific Rubiales, the sprawling Canadian petroleum company at the center of Colombia’s labor strife. The Clintons were also developing commercial ties with the oil giant’s founder, Canadian financier Frank Giustra, who now occupies a seat on the board of the Clinton Foundation, the family’s global philanthropic empire.

The details of these financial dealings remain murky, but this much is clear: After millions of dollars were pledged by the oil company to the Clinton Foundation — supplemented by millions more from Giustra himself — Secretary Clinton abruptly changed her position on the controversial U.S.-Colombia trade pact. Having opposed the deal as a bad one for labor rights back when she was a presidential candidate in 2008, she now promoted it, calling it “strongly in the interests of both Colombia and the United States.” The change of heart by Clinton and other Democratic leaders enabled congressional passage of a Colombia trade deal that experts say delivered big benefits to foreign investors like Giustra.

Let me put it this way. When New Yorkers go to the polls tomorrow, we don’t want them making the wrong choice because they were misinformed about what Hillary Clinton stands for, and what values, like integrity in public service, and transparency and open government, she holds most dear, do we?