Amid herculean competition, Saturday, February 22, 2020 will probably go down in history as one of the strangest and most embarrassing dates in the history of cable news. While the symptoms of a full-blown media crackup have undoubtedly been festering for weeks, Bernie Sanderss overwhelming victory in the Nevada caucuses turned out to be the proverbial levee-breaking moment, especially for the talking heads who populate what is supposedly Americas liberal cable network.

In a medium not exactly renowned for offering wisdom or insight, MSNBCs marathon coverage felt like a broadcast from another dimension; a parallel reality with a peculiar metaphysics of its own. At once painful, hilarious, and downright appalling, the networks unhinged response to Sanderss win doubled as a master class in everything wrong with cable news from reflexive deference to the corporatist center to pathological hatred of populist candidates who refuse to accede to the arbitrary rules set down by elite politicians and media executives.

Over the course of a single afternoon, or so it seemed, the self-serving narratives and rhetorical shibboleths that sustained an entire era of liberalism came crashing down, leaving many of MSNBCs star personalities and talking heads to respond with a mixture of denial, anger, and fear. As Risings Krystal Ball described it:

Faced with a choice between the man they have loudly proclaimed to be a cross between Hitler, Mussolini, and Benedict Arnold and a man who threatens the very lifeblood of their access journalism, personal self-conception, and class interest, what would they choose? ... As caucus after caucus turned in overwhelming results in favor of Bernie Sanders, the flummoxed anchors were left to cope with this singularly myth-exploding event in their own ways.

Thus, an incensed James Carville, somehow looking even more cadaverous than usual, came on to announce, The happiest person right now ... its about 1:15, Moscow time? This thing is going very well for Vladimir Putin, before waving hysterically at the camera and barking, How ya doin, Vlad? Reporter Chris Jansing could be heard audibly sighing as she reported with unconcealed frustration that the predominantly Latino voters caucusing at a location near the Bellagio were going overwhelmingly for Sanders. A furious Joy Reid, meanwhile, declared, No one else is as hungry, angry, enraged, and determined as Sanders voters before urging the Democratic establishment to sober up and figure out what the hell theyre gonna do about that.

In a rare moment of clarity that inadvertently seemed to sum up the whole afternoon, former George W. Bush communications hack Nicolle Wallace was finally forced to concede, I have no idea what voters think about anything anymore. The days undisputed champion, however, was MSNBCs carnival-barker-in-residence, Chris Matthews, who, fresh from imagining an alternate reality involving his own execution by Cuban communists in Central Park a few weeks ago, managed to outdo himself by equating Sanderss victory in Nevada to the Nazi Blitzkrieg of France in 1940.

Justifiably under fire for the remarks, Matthews has since apologized. But the moment may nonetheless be symbolic of something larger than the deranged outburst of a septuagenarian TV host raised on a noxious diet of Cold War propaganda.

Matthews is, after all, a creature of cable news to his very bones emblematic of a modern infotainment culture that has long prized deference to orthodoxy, empty provocation, and branded personality over any particular desire to enlighten or inform. A veteran of what is laughably called Americas national conversation (in practice, a hollow pantomime of political engagement in which overpaid people who are mostly neither very curious nor very bright theatrically spar for the cameras before meeting up at the bar a few hours later), hes been a fixture of the Washington political scene since his days as a staffer for Jimmy Carter and Tip ONeill.

Boorish, ill-tempered, and punctuated by a particularly repugnant streak of old-world misogyny, Matthewss schtick is virtually unwatchable unless youve already pickled your brain with a million or so hours of cable news. Having been described by one profiler as soothing like a blender, his voice sounds like a balloon perpetually stuck in the act of trying to deflate and never quite succeeding. The same writer would diplomatically call Matthews a whip-tongued, name-dropping, self-promoting wise guy of the sort you often find in campaigns, and in the bigger offices on Capitol Hill or K Street that is, one who graces interlocutors with incandescent insights like, Barack Obama is Mozart and Hillary Clinton is Salieri.

His biggest intellectual contribution, such as it can be called one, has been to articulate the art of Beltway social climbing as a kind of public philosophy: breaking through with the best-selling 1988 book Hardball (described by New York Times Magazine as a how-to guide to social and career climbing in Washington). Though Matthews got his TV start courtesy of Roger Ailes, it would be the 1997 debut of his show on CNBC (which carried the same title) and the ensuing Clinton-Lewinsky scandal that put him firmly on the national cable news map. As MSNBC attached its brand and its business strategy to the rise of Obama its prime-time audience would rise a whopping 63 percent in 2008 he would enter his heyday as a fixture of Americas media establishment.

Though a long-form profile published that same year tries its absolute darndest to find virtue in Matthewss loutishness and personal ambition (There is a level of solipsism about Matthews that is oddly endearing in its self-conscious extreme, even by the standards of television vanity), the portrait that emerges is largely that of a man obsessed with hollow status-seeking and the pursuit of fame for its own sake:

Matthews has an attuned sense of pecking order at MSNBC, at NBC, in Washington and in life. This is no great rarity among the fragile egos of TV or, for that matter, in the status-fixated world of politics. But Matthews is especially frontal about it. In an interview with Playboy a few years ago, he volunteered that he had made the list of the Top 50 journalists in D.C. in The Washingtonian magazine. Im like 36th, and Tim Russert is No. 1, Matthews told Playboy. I would argue for a higher position for myself.

None other than Jon Stewart exposed the moral vacuum at the core of Matthewss personal philosophy in a 2007 grilling of his book Lifes a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation, and Success (which channeled similar themes to 1988s Hardball). Catching Matthews off guard, Stewarts opening challenge was both pointed and lethal:

What you are saying is people can use what politicians do in political campaigns to help their lives? It strikes me as fundamentally wrong. It strikes me as a self-hurt book. Arent campaigns fundamentally contrivances?

Matthewss response, justifiably met with a bemused stare, amounted to a naked defense of amoral ladder-climbing coupled with the idea that everything about life should be treated like a campaign qua sales pitch:

Yeah, campaigns can be. But the way politicians get to the top is the real thing. They know what theyre doing. I mean, you dont have to believe a word they say. But watch how far they got. How did Clinton get there? How did Hillary get there? How did Reagan get there? They have methods to get to the top, and you can learn from those methods ... Do you wanna succeed? Do you wanna have friends? ... Everything about getting jobs is about convincing someone to hire you, right? Its about getting promotions. Its about selling products. Its always a campaign. Its a campaign to get the girl of your dreams. Its a campaign to do everything you want to do in life.

This strikes me as artifice, replied Stewart. If you live this book, your life will be strategy.

In an eerie parallel, Matthewss personal philosophy mirrors the acquisitive, market-centric amoralism of the modern Democratic Party with which hes become so intimately aligned. Albeit in different ways, both are products of a hollow liberal culture that values individual success over collective solidarity, toasts the endless triangulation of its elites as a marker of enlightened realism, and allows the twin idols of wealth and celebrity to be its lodestars.

In Bernie Sanders, this ecosystem and the apparatchiks who populate its gilded hierarchies have met their first real nemesis in decades: a figure whose popular support owes itself to explicit rejection of the politics of triangulation and craven self-interest they have so voraciously embraced. Thanks to a social and ideological base outside the clutches of the elite media, Sanders and the millions of people who comprise his movement may be totally alien to Chris Matthews and the culture that has produced him, but they also represent an existential threat to its primordial rites and sacraments.

Ever partisan for personalities rather than policies or principles, the Democratic Party and its media surrogates plainly expected a traditional primary contest auditioning competing centrist brands ahead of Novembers scheduled season finale. In Nevada, both collided suddenly and violently with the realization that their world may in fact be coming to an end; that huge numbers of Americans find their self-serving narratives unconvincing; and that their expectations of deference are now largely being ignored.

The cable news crack-up that crescendoed in Matthewss splenetic outburst was thus something more than a manifestation of conservative Democrats frustration at the prospect of a socialist insurgent winning his third electoral contest in a row. Beneath the layers of ugliness in the Hardball hosts execrable analogy could be heard the anguished cry of an elite liberal culture jarringly coming to terms with its increasing isolation and utter remove from the people for whom it has long claimed to speak.

In the weeks and months ahead, expect it to reach a fever pitch.

Luke Savage is a staff writer at Jacobin.

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The Agony and the Ecstasy of Chris Matthews - Jacobin magazine

In just five short months, the 2020 Olympics will get underway in Tokyo. While the mainstream news agenda will have its eyes on the medal haul of Australias Olympic hopefuls, success or failure at the Games will run far deeper for the sports themselves, where the consequences of under-performance, and failure to keep the pipeline of future fans and supporters stacked, could be felt long after the closing ceremony confetti has been cleaned up.

Right now, Olympic sport communications departments and social media teams are busy working on their Tokyo content plans, internal resource allocation and on-the-ground logistics mapping. A large part of that thinking will be spent figuring out how to make sure that if and when their medal contenders step onto the podium, the whole world will get to hear about it through a flurry of posts and press releases.

These comms strategies revolve around a legitimate compulsion to service a sense of community and belonging that permeates sport. But the Olympics is unlike every other major sporting event in the calendar. Rather than only watching a favourite sport, viewers abandon preconceived affinities in favour of whatever is being played or broadcast. In other words, most people drawn to the Games this July will be interested in the Olympics first and its composite sports second.

National sporting organisations that only have eyes for existing fans and followers will be missing a crucial opportunity to grow their numbers, and in turn increase their future revenue potential from both the Australian Sports Commission and lucrative sponsors. In other words, any sport walking away from the Games with the same type and tally of fans they arrived with will have failed.

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At the 2020 Olympics, news will find its audiences faster than communications departments will be able to serve them.

Being able to accept that the news will take care of itself, and fans will self-serve with updates, brings with it the potential to liberate comms teams from resource-heavy, reactive tasks, and in turn, provides them with the freedom to explore more constructive and ambitious brand and communications strategies.

The Olympics isnt business as usual. For anyone involved in the business of promoting the sports represented there, that means following a different set of guidelines, adjusted to meet the behaviour of a special kind of sports fan that emerges only once every four years.

Theres no silver bullet for achieving that and every individual sport needs to consider its unique DNA carefully before deciding whats best, but they should start by considering the benefits of occupying a space at the heart of the Olympic party, instead of a single-minded focus on trumpeting personal success.

That means finding a way into other peoples conversations and the special Tokyo Olympics zeitgeist. No matter what individual sports have to say about themselves, it will only ever represent a tiny and transient percentage of what the rest of the Olympics-invested community is talking about. So instead of expecting new fans to come to them, sports communications specialists should find ways to embed their brand with potential new fans on their home turf.

No matter what their podium presence proves to be, after the high of the Olympics, many Australian sports will be facing an almighty comedown as they return home.

How long that hangover lasts and what the future looks like in the sober light of day will depend on how well sports win not just in the medal tally, but in their comms strategies.

Lee Robson is founder and chief storytelling officer at Istories, with two decades experience working with sports brands and elite athletes in Australia and the UK

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To win at Tokyo 2020, sports need to look beyond the medal tally and at their comms strategies - MuMbrella

Kate McKenna and her Grampy Jack Wedge, circa 1992.

To know my Grampy was to love him.

My grandfather, Jack Wedge, died from cancer in 2016. He had been omnipresent in my life, never missing a graduation, holiday or birthday party.

I travelled home to Prince Edward Island from Quebec for his funeral.

I figured it would be a small gathering to celebrate his life. Instead, there were hundreds of people, from many walks of life.

I was amazed. I asked my mom who they were. Many of them, she guessed, knew him from Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) a fellowship he'd been part of for more than 30 years.

It was then that I realized I had only known a small part of my grandfather.

I made a mental note and filed it away for the next two years.

In 2018, I quit drinking.

I was nervous about my relationship with alcohol. I had started noticing I'd go out with friends and have three pints while everyone else was having one. I'd work till midnight, then stay out till morning. I felt myself slipping into a bit of a spiral.

I swore off booze altogether in May. The watershed moment came after a brutal professional disappointment. After that bad day at work, my first impulse was to crush a bottle of wine. Such a blatant urge to self-medicate set off alarm bells in my head.

The next morning, I woke up and emailed two close friends, saying I was finished with drinking forever. I said it kind of flippantly, but their earnest reaction made me think that maybe my drinking had worried themtoo.

My dear friend Dave Atkinson persuaded me to find a therapist. I followed his advice. After doing a questionnaire-style test, the therapist determined that yes, my drinking was probably problematic, and yes, I should probably stop drinking forever.

Lord, it was brutal, but I did it. I slipped up once, a month in. As of writing this, I've been sober for more than 19 months.

Nobody warned me, but my body reacted when I quit drinking. I was not a vodka-on-my-wheaties-type drinker, but I still noticed changes.

Some good better sleep, weight-loss and clear skin.

Some weird. People in early recovery will talk about the vivid dreams they have, where they relapse in some way. I didn't know that was coming and would wake up in a cold sweat.

I also felt my emotions thawing. In my job and in my life, I had a reputation for emotional toughness. In hindsight, I had medicated away any bad feelings with alcohol.

Once the booze was gone, I'd feel random spurts of intense sadness or happiness. Once I was walking to the bus stop and started weeping because of some long-buried memory of high school gym class.

But I kept going with the sobriety, numbing my body into submission with a punishing regime of very early rising, CrossFit and marathon training. Those activities, combined, gave me a good excuse to skip out on after-work drinks. I artfully dodged further questioning by telling people I was on antibiotics and couldn't drink.

And it was fine. Until I hit the worst realization of early sobriety.

As someone recently said to me: a drunk horsey is still a horsey. You can quit the booze, but it doesn't magically fix all the parts of you that you don't like.

All of my pre-existing bad habits I could be selfish, inconsiderate, and an impulsive ass at times stayed with me. And what do you do when you have nothing to blame?

Despite my best efforts, I couldn't hide from this question. Faced with no options, I was dragged into introspection.

That's when I started thinking about my grandfather again.

I wished I could go back in time and ask my grandfather for his advice on sobriety. But since he was gone, I decided to do the next best thing: speak with those he had helped, glean his wisdom from beyond the grave.

Taking a break from my Montreal life, I flew back to Charlottetown for a month. I wandered around, feeling raw and uncertain.

The obvious place to start was with my grandmother, Phyllis Wedge. We call her "Mama."

Mama loves to talk about her family. She can rhyme off her children's birth weights and her grandchildren's occupations, beaming, as though they're markers of her own personal success.

While she raised eight children, Grampy worked as a garbage man. They didn't have many extras, but they were upright and proud.

She told me about his drinking. One night, she told him not to come home because he'd had too much. The next day, he quit outright.

He was sober for 36 years.

Mama knew Grampy attended Alcoholics Anonymous a few times every week. But, like me, she didn't realize just what that meant until his wake. Over and over, strangers came up to tell her stories of how Grampy had helped them. He even did things you're not supposed to do in AA, like loaning them cash.

She didn't know many of the people, given that AA is anonymous. But she did have two names for me: Margaret Arsenault and a man named Greg.

Margaret and Grampy worked at a home for people with addictions later in my grandfather's life. His job was to hang out with the patients, playing cards and helping them with their day-to-day activities.

When we met, Margaret said Grampy loved hanging out with the people staying in the home.

I pressed her for any advice he may have dispensed at that time.

"Mostly, he listened," she said.

She said he only really had one piece of advice: show up to AA meetings.

I had hoped for something more specific, maybe more philosophical, but I filed that away and went to meet Greg.

Grampy met Greg soon after Greg first got sober.

Thirteen months later, Greg fell off the wagon and somehow landed at the local Legion.

Grampy showed up and hauled him out of there. Greg said Grampy had a look in his eye that told him not to fight.

Grampy put him in the back of his truck and drove him to a meeting; then he drove him to detox.

Greg said it was one of the first times anyone had ever shown him unconditional love. For him, it was a defining moment.

Greg has been alcohol-free ever since more than 30 years.

I wanted to know: what was it about Grampy's intervention that was so compelling that Greg quit drinking for good?

"It was the meetings," Greg said. "Just go to the meetings."

Working the program was the most important thing to my grandfather.

I'm not sure what I was hoping for, advice-wise, but it wasn't that.

Lord, if there's one thing I didn't want to do, it was AA. To me, AA meant cold black coffee and despair, in a church basement.

In my early days of sobriety, my therapist suggested I try it.

I looked up meetings in Montreal. My work schedule is weird and none of them were convenient. Once, I walked around the block near a meeting location, willing myself to go inside, but I never did.

I just felt I didn't need it. I quit by myself, white-knuckling my way through it. Honestly, I've never been much of a joiner.

It may have been a case of cognitive dissonance, but I told myself I had a bit of a drinking problem, but I wasn't a problem drinker. I didn't want it to become my identity.

But now I had no choice. I was on the Island, with the sole purpose of seeking out and then applying my grandfather's wisdom. I had to attend a meeting.

I still didn't want to, at all. So I called my buddy Dave to discuss.

"It's almost so obvious that it's unglamorous," Dave said.

Yeah. That's exactly it.

"You sought lessons from your grandpa expecting it was going to be X and it ended up being seven," he said. "He was like, 'No man, go to the meetings. There's some community that can help you out.'"

As usual, Dave was right.

This whole journey was inspired by my want or need to connect with my grandfather on this thing we had in common sobriety.

His ghost dragged me across the country so I could find some community and walk this road with some support.

The obviousness of the whole ordeal smacked me in the face. Grampy came through for me. Of course what I needed was community, and AA was it.

Now all that remained was to attend a meeting.

The first two attempts were a wash. There were a couple of brutal snowstorms. I waded through a metre of snow, knocked on the church door and walked away when I found it locked.

When I was 20 metres away, a nun poked her head out the door and yelled "YOU LOOKING FOR ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS?"

"Jeez," I thought. "Cool it lady, now all of Charlottetown knows."

I attended and introduced myself as an alcoholic. It was one of those surreal life experiences you don't ever really think will happen to you when you're sketching out your five-year plan.

The meeting was good. People were nice. A woman roughly my age followed me out and welcomed me, giving me the low-down on which meetings were the best and letting me know she was around if ever I wanted to talk to somebody.

Leaving the meeting, I wondered if I'd been dishonest with myself about the extent of my problem. Maybe it was worse than I thought. Maybe I was still a "horsey" who had quit drinking through sheer will but never dealt with the underlying reasons for why I drank in the first place.

I resolved to attend a few more meetings and see if it stuck. To date, my attendance has been spotty because life is bouncing me around to different provinces and countries.

I will, eventually, go back.

My grandmother told me that near the end of his life, Grampy worried his alcoholism would be passed down through the family. To some extent, that has proven true.

But that's not his legacy.

Through his quiet patience and unconditional love, he taught us that life is easier and better when you work through it with others.

He taught us that letting people into your life requires courage, but it will pay back dividends.

Something my grandfather understood better than most is that we are put on this planet to relate to and serve others.

And if I take anything from this experience, it will be that.

Kate McKenna is a Montreal-based journalist and author. She's been reporting for CBC News for the last six years and has covered major stories including the Quebec City mosque shooting, allegations of sexual misconduct at Concordia University and the 2019 federal election. Her work has aired on the BBC, NPR and CNN. Kate tries to tell complex stories with simplicity and humanity.

This documentary was produced and edited with Kent Hoffmanand made through theDoc Mentorship Program.

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How my Grampy is helping me stay sober from beyond the grave - CBC.ca

The following is an excerpt from Branko Marcetics forthcoming bookYesterdays Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. You can noworder a copy of this important new bookdirect fromJacobin for only $10, with free shipping.

They are not dealing with George McGovern. They are dealing with Joe Biden and Bill Clinton.

Joe Biden on the GOP and the issue of crime, 1994.

By 1993, for all intents and purposes, Joe Biden had won. Sure, his 1987 exit from the presidential campaign trail had been humiliating. But he had survived a near-death experience, returned to the Senate with renewed purpose, been sent back to Congress for another six years by the people of Delaware, and, with three terms and a prestigious committee chairmanship under his belt, was now one of the Democratic Partys most influential and powerful lawmakers.

Whats more, the party had moved exactly where he had been urging it to go. In 1992, Democrats nominated Arkansas governor Bill Clinton to be their presidential nominee, a business-friendly Southern Democrat who antagonized the partys left wing, held conservative stances on criminal justice and the role of the government, and connected with those same conservative, white, Reagan-backing voters who Biden was convinced needed to be the beating heart of the party.

Since 1989, Clinton had been the chairman of the DLC, the conservative, Southern-dominated group determined to push the party rightward for which Biden had spent 1986 touring the country. Clinton had taken away many of the same lessons from his political career that Biden had from his. After becoming the countrys youngest governor in 1978 and challenging the states major industries, he had been unceremoniously tossed out of office two years later. He roared back in 1982, winning reelection and governing as a very different kind of politician one far more accommodating to business interests and conservative views. He won the 1992 election not just by tapping into his preternatural charisma and empathy but by showing he could be just as ruthless and right wing as any Republican: he publicly scolded Jesse Jackson by misconstruing the words of an African American rapper attending his Rainbow Coalition convention as racist, and he flew home from the campaign trail to oversee the execution of a lobotomized inmate.

Clintons guiding light was the philosophy of triangulation, otherwise known as the Third Way. Instead of going left or right, the theory went, Clinton would tread a path somewhere down the middle, much as Biden had spent his years in the Senate doing, voting largely as a Democrat but abandoning the party or taking conservative stances on key, consequential issues. In practice, this meant that Clinton and Biden, together with a cowed Democratic Party reeling after three consecutive presidential election losses, would spent the next eight years working with newly energized congressional Republicans to continue what Reagan had started: shrinking the size of government, rolling back protections for civil rights and liberties, cutting social programs and key regulations, and generally undoing the progress made under the New Deal and Great Society. He made clear he represents a new generation of leadership and government alone cant do it, and that is a new message from a Democrat, Biden said of Clinton as he prepared to take the oath.

The result was devastating for the US working class, as hundreds of thousands of Americans saw their jobs disappear, with only an increasingly frayed social safety net to fall back on. The march toward a repressive prison state sped up, while the gap between the rich and poor inflated. As these trends became more extreme, an ever-larger share of the voting public would conclude there was little point in taking part in the political system anymore.

The Reagan years may have been over, but their politics lived on. Biden, who like Reagan had spent the 1980s obsessed with federal deficits and cutting spending, would spend the next decade going even further in this direction.

Biden emerged from his 1990 reelection slightly bruised by a scandal that showed yet again the peril of his and the rest of the partys increasing reliance on big-money donors. During his earlier presidential run, Biden had forged a friendship with David L. Paul, a Florida-based savings-and-loan executive and major Democratic fundraiser known to lend his private jet to politicians. Paul, his family, and his companys foundation had given generously to Biden, a fact seized on by his Republican opponent in the wake of the ongoing savings-and-loan crisis and after CenTrust, the bank Paul founded, which regulators charged he had used as his own piggy bank, collapsed, costing taxpayers more than $1 billion. It would later come out that, after being personally lobbied by Paul, Biden had successfully weakened the criminal penalties for bank fraud proposed in a pending bill to reform the sector; he had tried and failed to recruit Strom Thurmond for the effort.

Whether it really was corruption wasnt clear: Paul had lobbied Biden to weaken a different part of the bill, Bidens chief of staff said, and the penalty reductions had actually been requested by smaller thrifts and banks. But Bidens financial and personal connections toa man of, in one regulators words, insatiable vanity and greed who worked in an industry Biden was meant to be keeping in check wasnt a good look. It was a taste of what was to come.

Having locked down reelection, Biden, together with the DLC and other centrists, served as something of an ideological policeforce to keep an eye on Clinton, who they feared would govern as a New Deal Democrat. Though he had built a career kowtowing to right-wing forces, Clinton at heart still fancied himself one of Roosevelts heirs, bitterly complaining to Democrats in 1993 that were Eisenhower Republicans standing for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isnt that great?

After the election, Biden warned Clinton not to let his administration fall under the sway of liberals, singling out Bernard Nussbaum, the man who would become Clintons general counsel, for particular attention never mind that Nussbaum was a wealthy corporate lawyer. When a right-wing firestorm erupted over Clintons nomination of civil rights lawyer Lani Guinier to head the Justice Departments Civil Rights Division, partly as payback for the Thomas hearings, Biden joined the pile-on about her past academic writings, leading Clinton to cut her loose. His patience with liberal activists worn out by the previous decades judicial battles, Biden lashed out at the idiotic groups out there, like the XYZ Group for American Values, or the QSY Group to Save All the Women in the World.

Biden wasnt responsible for Clintons failure to reform US health care, but his lack of enthusiasm for the task didnt help. While behind the scenes, independent Vermont Rep. Bernie Sanders who had parlayed his success in Burlington into a successful congressional campaign tried pushing Clinton to pursue a single-payer health care system, White House officials and party leaders privately viewed Biden as noncommittal and someone who would take extra effort to be won over to even Clintons piecemeal reforms.

Internal documents noted Bidens reservations about Clintons plan, his private warnings not to load up any health care bill with too many bells and whistles, and his concerns that the benefit package may be too generous and would negatively impact small businesses. He has been one of the few Democratic members who have declined to sign Senator Woffords universal coverage letter, read one memo written for First Lady Hillary Clinton, then leading the health care effort, adding that Biden had previously said he opposed single-payer. Biden himself later boasted that he had refused to sign on to Clintons plan even after being beckoned to the White House.

As in the case of the CenTrust scandal during his 1990 reelection campaign, Bidens position may have been driven by powerful interests back home. One White House memo noted that DuPont, which Biden privately said controlled the Delaware Chamber of Commerce, would be key in his decision. Yet the company was advocating for national health insurance at the time. Maybe more key was the over $150,000 that Biden had got from health insurers over fifteen years. In any case, the reform failed, sunk by the White Houses own mismanagement.

While running full tilt away from anything hinting at liberalism, Biden gave Clinton full-throated backing as he continued Reagans legacy. He proposed early on to have business experts advise Congress on how to streamline government agencies and endorsed Clintons plan to lay off 252,000 federal workers. Putting the customer first will ensure that taxpayers get the service they deserve, he said, echoing the language of the era that cast government as a business and the public as its patrons.

Ultimately, in Clinton, Biden finally found a Democratic standard-bearer as passionate about attacking the deficit as he was. Despite polling showing the public was vastly more interested in job creation, Clinton upset his political advisers by kicking off his presidency with a deficit-cutting budget that slightly raised taxes on the very wealthiest while taking a big chunk out of government spending through federal layoffs and entitlement cuts. Clinton was fully conscious that this would block the ambitious social agenda he had actually campaigned on. The measure, which passed with only Democratic votes in the Senate, began a years-long campaign of deficit-cutting that culminated in the first balanced budget in decades. While universally lauded in media and political circles, the true significance of the balanced budget lay in further rolling back the New Deal. By the end of Clintons two terms, federal spending fell to its lowest level since 1966, and the federal workforce accounted for the smallest percentage of overall employment since before Roosevelt took office.

Biden cheered him on all the way. He told a constituent that Clintons first budget was our best chance for deficit reduction and introduced his own six-year plan for balancing the budget. Even as Clinton accepted painful spending cuts dictated by the GOP, Biden proclaimed that we are approaching an historic moment and that Americans would enjoy real benefits from a balanced budget.

Which Americans though? Back home in Delaware, where federal money made up a large chunk of the state budget, Bidens constituents felt the sting. The states Democratic governor Tom Carper warned in 1996 that his government would have to tighten its belt as a result, with a variety of programs, including scholarships, services for the elderly and disabled, drug and alcohol prevention, and emergency relief shelters, drastically cut back or wiped out, even as the number of homeless kids in Delaware had tripled over the previous decade. Delawareans pled with the states finance committee to save vital programs on which they relied. While Biden continued earning top ratings from environmental groups, the cuts he supported imperiled Delawares rivers and beaches and weakened the states environmental programs and federal Environmental Protection Agency enforcement.

Bidens zeal for cutting government broughtpreviously untouchable targets into his crosshairs. He had cruised to reelection in 1990 through his tried-and-true playbook of outraising and out-Republicaning a mediocre opponent. His proposals included a freeze [on] all government spending until we get it in order, which would require the straight-up courage to cut everything even Medicare and Social Security.

This is largely how it was for the rest of the decade. Biden repeatedly spoke out against GOP attempts to cut the big three Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security and commended Clinton by the end of his presidency for making the protection of Social Security and Medicare our highest domestic priority. Yet he also insisted that something had to be done about Medicare, pushing fraud prevention as a way to soften any future cuts, and he gave a tacit endorsement to a Medicaid reform plan put out by the National Governors Association in 1996 that would have given states discretion to deny benefits. On Social Security, he suggested raising the retirement age by one year and voted to repeal an earlier increase in benefits. This was in sharp contrast to his treatment of business: Biden had been first out of the gate to pressure Clinton to sign a bill in 1993 creating an antitrust exclusion protecting certain ventures from high damage awards.

Well never know whether Biden would have defended these programs or folded to right-wing pressure to cut them: Clintons plan to close out his presidency by reforming entitlements was derailed by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But Bidens willingness to even rhetorically put these popular programs on the chopping block foreshadowed a new, more strident phrase of his antipathy to government spending.

This antipathy found its most radical expression in the form of the balanced budget constitutional amendment, which Biden had viewed as laughable and dangerous in previous decades. Now he was warming up to it. Its opponents viewed it with alarm: making a balanced federal budget a constitutional requirement would not only hamstring the government during times of emergency but require even during economic downturns, when most economists advised more government spending and when spending cuts had historically plunged countries into even greater misery the government to sharply raise taxes or, more likely, make drastic cuts to core, often life-saving programs.

To the relief of progressives and hundreds of economists, the amendment never passed under Clinton. But with the help of a wavering Biden, it came perilously close.

With the backing of its chairman, the Judiciary Committee started the decade by endorsing the amendment two years in a row. A 1991 report Biden issued warned that the spree of deficit spending by our federal government must be curbed. All the while he acknowledged it would be a disaster. This is a lousy amendment, he said in 1991. Its not a good idea except I cant think of any other idea except maintaining the status quo. And the status quo stinks. Biden was, he explained, prepared to take what I consider radical medicine to tackle deficits.

Had the constitutional amendment process been less onerous, the balanced budget amendment may well have passed several times in the mid-1990s. In 1994, Biden stayed undecided until the eleventh hour, when he and several other Democrats, including future presidential nominee John Kerry and future Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, came out against the amendment, causing it to fall four votes short of the sixty-seven needed to pass. Biden instead voted for a doomed alternative offered by Reid that insulated Social Security and construction projects from any painful cuts.

That sweetener was gone from the version that made it to the Senate floor the start of the following year, under a very different Congress and in a distinctly new political landscape. In between, the United States had experienced something of a political revolution, as a cadre of right-wing radicals, fed up with what they saw as the GOPs timidity and feebleness, took over the House, leaving both chambers of Congress in the Republicans hands for the first time in forty years. In many ways, this was a more significant victory for the conservative movement than Reagans had been in 1980. After all, it was Congress that shaped and passed legislation, and Reagans vision had been largely stifled by Democratic control of the House throughout his presidency.

The George Washington of this victory was Georgia representative Newt Gingrich, who fancied himself the most serious, systematic revolutionary of modern times and called for large-scale, radical change. It was his Contract with America, a ten-point legislative plan that aimed to finish what Reagan had started, that victorious Republicans had signed and campaigned on. A balanced budget amendment was one of its key planks.

With the political calculus now altered, the Clinton administration toned down its opposition to the amendment. Even as Alice Rivlin, director of the Office of Management and Budget, warned that the amendment would exaggerate the boom-bust cycle, engineer worse recessions, and make for bad economic policy and bad constitutional policy, the White House made clear that it had lost the appetite to fight. Gingrich left a meeting with Clinton with the impression that he was not going to engage in an aggressive campaign against the measure.

Gingrichs confidence was likely rooted in the fact that many Democrats had become devoted converts. The 1995 version of the amendment, which required the prohibitively high threshold of three-fifths of both chambers of Congress to either raise the debt limit or pass a nonbalanced budget, was sponsored and championed by Illinoiss Paul Simon, one of the Senates stalwart liberals, and backed by prominent Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle and, of course, Biden.

Something is going to come bouncing out of here and sent to the states [to be ratified], Biden said. The amendment had real flaws, he repeated, but vowed to back it because we need something. After several Democratic attempts to make it more forgiving failed, Biden and the rest of the committee, on a 153 vote, once more sent the amendment to the Senate.

Some of us tried to make this a better proposal, he said as he prepared to vote for it. But he was faced with a choice of an imperfect amendment or continued spending, and he had sufficient confidence in our citizens and in our political institutions that we will confront any challenges from its many flaws.

What those flaws and imperfections would mean in practice was stark. To make the spending cuts a balanced budget demanded, countless programs that Americans relied on would have to be cut or eliminated: low-income housing, heating assistance, federally funded school lunches, mass transit, even the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funded hundreds of TV and radio stations around the country, not to mention the big three entitlement programs. It would be a disaster for working people, for elderly people, for low-income people, Bernie Sanders had warned.

In the end, a sufficient number of Democrats were spooked by the threat posed to Social Security and other programs to defeat the amendment, including Daschle and even Californias conservative senator Dianne Feinstein, both of whom had had been on board with the idea in 1994. But the decisions of Biden and two other Democratsto switch their votes in favor of the amendment brought it a mere two votes shy of the two-thirds majority needed for passage.

Bidens support became even more determined as a result of his 1996 reelection contest. Once more, Biden faced an opponent who sought to paint him as an overly liberal flip-flopper. But businessman Ray Clatworthy was not only considered too far right by the Republican he had beaten in the primary; he was the first rival in Bidens career who could match him in fundraising. Despite political experts stressing his seat was one of the countrys safest borne out by his eventual 22-point margin of victory Biden, per usual, moved right. While campaigning for reelection, he became one of just twelve Democrats to side with a near-unanimous GOP to again bring the balanced budget amendment within two votes of passage.

Even after his reelection, Biden stayed the course. This time, with Clintons second term in the bag, the measure faced stronger Democratic opposition. As the ground was readied for yet another vote in 1997, the White House lobbied key Democrats to reject the balanced budget amendment, and Clinton trashed it in his State of the Union speech, calling it unnecessary and unwise and warning that it could cripple our country in time of economic crisis. Biden, for his part, played unconvincingly coy. His spokesman told the press Biden would use his vote as leverage to make improvements to the measure, such as exempting Social Security but then quickly added that Biden would vote for it no matter what, undermining any leverage he might have had.

Whatever economic motivation Biden may have had to support the amendment was undercut when more than one thousand economists, including eleven Nobel Prize winners, signed a letter pleading with Congress not to adopt it. One economist, Nobel laureate James Tobin, cautioned it would put the federal government into a fiscal straitjacket during economic crises; another compared its insistence on keeping spending strictly below revenue to telling the Atlantic Ocean not to cross a line in the sand.

Despite dithering in the days leading up to the vote, Biden voted for the third straight year to approve the amendment that even he along with just about everyone outside of antigovernment, right-wing circles, including his local newspaper had warned would bring economic catastrophe. He joined all fifty-five of the Senates Republicans and just ten other Democrats. The amendment failed by just one vote. Against Bidens best efforts, disaster had been averted.

But if the American working class narrowly avoided the economic calamity of a balanced budget amendment, the same could not be said for a host of other measures passed by Biden and the Democratic Party during the 1990s.

The first came in 1991, as President George H W. Bush began working on what would come to be the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Despite a decades-long political career heavily underwritten by organized labor, Biden became one of a small group of Democratic turncoats that gave Bush fast track authority to negotiate the deal. AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland bitterly noted his disenchantment that on a great issue that affects the livelihood and survival of our constituents, the Democrats had deserted labor.

NAFTA would ultimately be ratified under Clinton, who during his campaign had done a careful balancing act, backing the agreement to prove he could stand up to unions but pledging to improve it once in power. The improvements Clinton secured did little to assuage labors fears, and Democrats like Biden were forced into a similar balancing act. Biden agonized over the decision, claiming in September 1993 that if I had to vote today, I would vote no, but also insisting he thought labors theory that NAFTA would lead to an exodus of jobs to Mexico was flawed.

He stayed undecided until the very day of the vote two months later, ultimately charting a course that was vintage Biden. In his floor speech, he launched into a spirited attack on critics of unions: How dare we tell these people not to worry? he shouted. If you saw your future decimated, you would have every reason to be frightened. This is not a false fear. He then dismissed the arguments on both sides of the issue as vastly overblown, claiming labor only opposed NAFTA because they have nothing else to criticize. After only briefly explaining his support, he declared the agreement the best deal we are going to get now. With his vote and that of twenty-six other Democrats, NAFTA passed the Senate.

Biden turned out to be grievously wrong. The deal not only caused the loss of nearly 700,000 US jobs, many of them in the countrys manufacturing centers, but it further weakened the power of unions. It became a gift to unscrupulous businesses who used the threat of offshoring jobs to Mexico in some cases, purposefully loading equipment into trucks headed south of the border in full view of disgruntled workers to push employees into accepting worse wages, hours, and benefits, and to undermine unions bargaining power. As Sanders had warned during the House debate on NAFTA, it was indeed a bad deal for American workers. Politically, the consequences would be just as grievous, as the loss of power for unions pushed the Democratic Party further into the arms of corporate donors, and Democrats saw an exodus of blue-collar support over the betrayal, creating a future opening for the party to be outflanked.

Next came the euphemistically named welfare reform, what Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott later termed the Holy Grail of [the GOPs] legislative master plan. Conservatives had fantasized about dismantling the welfare system for decades. Reagan had memorably lobbed verbal broadsides at it during his 1976 presidential run, conjuring racialized images of a woman in Chicago scamming tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars and a strapping young buck using government handouts to buy a T-bone steak. Such deeply rooted caricatures had little relation to reality in fact, the welfare queen stereotype was based on a career con woman with a much more complicated personal history but they were potent images that seemed to confirm what many white Americans uncharitably suspected. More importantly, they were tied up with a centuries-old stereotype of African Americans as lazy and a post-1960s one of the poor as black and, as a result, lacking moral character.

Welfare had never been a big focus of Bidens. He had gestured at vaguely doing something about it during his first campaign, but other liberal golden calves had always taken priority for him. By the late 1980s, however, he started to echo long-standing right-wing attacks on the system. We are all too familiar with the stories of welfare mothers driving luxury cars and leading lifestyles that mirror the rich and famous, he wrote in 1988. Whether they are exaggerated or not, these stories underlie a broad social concern that the welfare system has broken down that it only parcels out welfare checks and does nothing to help the poor find productive jobs.

The legislation Biden was writing about, the Family Support Act, was a somewhat progressive measure. It strengthened the collection of child support, forced states to set up education, training, and job programs for people on welfare, and expanded childcare and Medicaid for families going from welfare to work. But by penalizing parents who either didnt take part in those programs or turned down any job offer, it chipped away at the welfare system in ways that would only intensify.

There are some things, dammit, we have to change on, he told a group of Iowa Democrats in 1992. I dont know of a single person who says that welfare, the way it is, we like it. Biden kept using this language throughout the 1990s. He claimed that too many welfare recipients spend far too long on welfare and do far too little in exchange for their benefits, called for Congress to require all welfare recipients to sign a contract in which they agree to work in exchange for their benefits, and insisted they should have a limit of just six months to find a job before they lost their benefits.

By 1995, all the pieces to make this happen were in place. A radically right-wing, Republican-controlled Congress had just swept to power on the back of a promise to take on welfare. The Democrats were under the thrall of the DLC, which put welfare reform at the center of its policy goals. The president had promised to shrink the size of government and campaigned on ending welfare as we know it, and he had just hired a political operative whose grand strategy was to fast-forward the Gingrich agenda.

This was an agenda that, at least publicly, horrified Biden. He had thought about retiring, he told the 250-strong crowd at the annual Sussex County Democrats spring dinner in 1995, but the GOP takeover of Congress had changed his mind. Its going over my dead political body that they succeed, he said, drawing the nights only moment of spontaneous, passionate applause. Newt Gingrich has energized Joe Biden. Im looking forward to beating the hell out of the Republicans.

The core of the Republicans vision of reform involved taking responsibility for welfare out of the hands of the federal government and putting it in the hands of the states in the form of block grants, funding packages they would be given complete discretion over. Biden understood some of the potential issues with this approach; he had attacked Reagans 1982 proposal to turn over social and economic programs and the taxes behind them to the states, charging that the states, because of their own budget problems, are not going to fund these programs. Nevertheless, in September 1995, the newly energized Biden voted with fifty-two Republicans and thirty-four other Democrats to make the radical welfare overhauls that Gingrich had made the cornerstone of the Republican agenda. Generations have made welfare their way of life, he wrote in the Wilmington News Journal. This must end. It is simply unacceptable to me and most hard-working Americans.

The Senates overwhelming passage of this measure sparked three months of pressure by progressive Democrats and activist groups to discourage Clintons support for it. Come December, when the House and Senate versions were reconciled into what Democrats decried as far too cruel and punishing to children, all but one Senate Democrat voted against the final version, which Clinton vetoed. But Democrats were not going to quit, Daschle pledged in the votes aftermath, and would continue to try to present alternatives.

Far from beating the hell out of Republicans, what ultimately passed in 1996 was a poster child for the bipartisanship Washington so often celebrates. As Bidens fellow Delawarean in the House, Republican Michael Castle, teamed up with a Democrat to put forward a version of welfare reform supported by Clinton, Biden linked arms with another Republican, Arlen Specter, to introduce an identical version in the Senate. Castle thanked the two senators for lend[ing] credibility to our proposal. Delaware governor Carper (who is today a senator) said the proposal demonstrates that Democrats and Republicans can work together in the Congress.

For his part, Biden declared, It is time to say we do not care who gets credit for reforming welfare. It is time to just do it in a bipartisan fashion for the sake of the American people and for the sake of the people on welfare.

The Senate ultimately rejected Biden and Specters bill for one that William Roth was pushing. But as Roth explained, Congress wasnt acting in the spirit of partisan competition. Were all working toward the same goals, he said. What has been lost in the shuffle and shouting of the last 10 months is that there is a great deal of common ground on welfare reform, affirmed Biden. When it came to a vote, six of the seven Democrats up for reelection that year, including Biden, helped send the bill to Clintons desk with large bipartisan majorities even as angry protesters stormed the halls of Congress.

Clinton signed the bill on August 22, 1996, in the White House Rose Garden, surrounded by a bipartisan gaggle of delighted lawmakers. Lillie Harden, a black former welfare recipient from Clintons hometown of Little Rock used by the bills proponents as a living, breathing argument for the supposedly debilitating effects of welfare, stood by Clintons side. Biden, who seven months earlier had said the Rush Limbaughs who got elected had got his juices going and strengthened his resolve to stay in Congress, was one of the small number of elected officials confirmed to attend.

But as the presence of protesters suggested, not everyone was happy. Ted Kennedy said that calling the measure reform is no more accurate than to call the demolition of a house remodeling. Three of Clintons assistant secretaries at the Department of Health and Human Services resigned in protest. Bernie Sanderswould term the law the grand slam of scapegoating legislation. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York Democrat who had jumpstarted Lyndon Johnsons war on poverty, called welfare reform ruinous and grotesque, warning it would throw between one million and five million children into poverty.

The predictions were largely accurate. The numbers of Americans living in deep poverty climbed to well over two million by 2005, with single-parent families with kids hit the hardest. Twenty years on, the number of households living on less than $2 a day had doubled. State governments, increasingly controlled by Republicans and free to do what they wanted with welfare funding, drew on those block grants to plug their own budget deficits while virtually eliminating the welfare programs they so despised. Across the West and South, the welfare safety net virtually disappeared. In Bidens home state, the bills freezing of welfare funding at 1994 levels kneecapped the Delaware governments welfare policy of putting more money into health care, day care, and job training. Meanwhile, Lillie Harden, who had had a stroke in 2002, died twelve years later at the age of fifty-nine, unable to get on Medicaid she had been while on welfare. Asked about the low-wage work shed taken up that supposedly marked her successful transition from welfare dependency, she said: It didnt pay off in the end.

The push for welfare reform had revealed a fundamental truth of US politics: even as partisan gridlock and dysfunction began to take hold of the US political system during the 1990s, the American ruling class was more than capable of coming together to get things done as long as it flattered the interests of the countrys most powerful and its victims were the working class. Just as with NAFTA, Biden and the Democrats support for all this would in the long run further sever their link to the partys working-class base and swell the ranks of the disenchanted and politically disengaged.

At the same time Biden was helping conservatives continue their assault on the American working class, he was going to bat for Delawares corporate sector.

Over the course of the previous decades, Delaware had transformed into a bankruptcy haven, one whose lenient bankruptcy courts, known for hustling cases through at twice the speed of the rest of the country and favoring bankrupted companies over creditors, helped attract a rush of major corporations or at least the legal papers incorporating them. Thanks to this and a package of corporate-friendly state banking laws passed in 1981, more than 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies were incorporated in the state by the end of the 1990s, though you would be hard-pressed to find any of those companies stores or offices in Delaware. Bankruptcy was big business: the year before, 86 percent of bankruptcy filings by companies with $190 million or more in assets had been in the state, pumping money into local law firms and the surrounding economy. But the beneficiaries were chiefly suburbanites who commuted into Wilmington to occupy the citys proliferating white-collar jobs.

The rest of the country had taken notice. By 1998, the National Bankruptcy Review Commission, a panel of judges, lawyers, and professors formed in 1994, recommended a proposal given the moniker The Delaware Killer in legal circles to bar companies that didnt physically operate in states where they were incorporated to file for bankruptcy there.

Biden was outraged. I cannot comprehend what purpose would be served by diverting cases from a court with such an accomplished record, he said, vowing to oppose the measure when it came to the Judiciary Committee. His and the rest of the Delaware delegations outrage meant the measure never made it into a bill. It looks like Delaware has won the first round, Bidens state director said. Calling it a prestige thing for the state, Biden threatened one year later to filibuster a bill that tried to do the same; its author admitted defeat over Bidens intensity on the issue.

But when it came to easing the burden of bankruptcy on working Americans, Bidens intensity went the other way. As the decade came to a close, a coalition of banks and credit card companies began pushing a bill described by the Associated Press as the most far-reaching overhaul of the nations bankruptcy laws in twenty years. With personal bankruptcies rising 300 percent since 1980 to hit an all-time high of 1.4 million eighteen years later many of them due to credit card debt that banks were exacerbating by luring customers with high spending limits the industry-favored legislation aimed to make it harder for ordinary Americans to file for bankruptcy. Biden swiftly became one of its champions.

The episode was a classic case of a politician protecting a local industry. Delaware at the time was home to no less than ten credit card banks employing 20,000 people, including MBNA, the second largest in the country. But there was more to it than this. MBNA, which complained it lost $1 billion a year under the existing bankruptcy regime, was by far the largest campaign contributor to all three of Delawares members of Congress. By 1999, Biden had received $67,100 from its officials since 1991, less than his two colleagues but enough to earn him the label of the senator from MBNA. The connections went deeper than donations, too. Biden had sold his house for twice its value to one of those donors, MBNAs chief marketing officer, and his son Hunter had been hired straight out of law school in 1996 as a lobbyist for the company, zipping up the ranks to become senior vice president two years later.

Biden backed the bill, introducing an identical version of what had passed the House, even as consumer groups lined up against it and Democratic lawmakers warned it would hurt families and children. Democrats attempted to derail it, while a Harvard professor named Elizabeth Warren personally lobbied First Lady Hillary Clinton to get her husband to veto it. The pushback succeeded, and the threat of Clintons veto sunk the bill.

Or at least it did for a time. The lending industry continued pushing the overhaul well into the new millennium, this time under an industry-friendly Republican president and with Biden still its loyal soldier. He would vote again and again with Republicans to advance the legislation while taking tens of thousands of dollars more from MBNA, which by this point was paying Hunter, who had left the company in 2001 to become a lobbyist, a monthly consulting fee.

Simply put, too many people are finding it too easy to walk away from their legitimate obligations by filing for bankruptcy, Biden said, explaining his support for the bill. Warren, in a 2002 New York Times op-ed calling the legislation a quiet attack on women, charged that Biden had agreed to vote with Republicans on almost all the issues that were holding up the bill. The two would finally meet face to face three years later at a Judiciary Committee meeting, where Biden accused her of making a mildly demagogic argument and insisted her real problem was with interest rates, not bankruptcy.

But if its not going to fix that problem, you cant take away the last shred of protection for these families, Warren shot back. I got it, okay, Biden replied, chuckling. Youre very good, professor.

Biden and the lending industry won; he and seventeen other Democrats voted with yet another lockstep Republican majority for the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, signed into law on April 20, 2005. It was another disaster for the American working class: even as households remained buried under mountains of debt, fewer filed for bankruptcy, deterred by the bureaucratic hoops and higher costs ushered in by the law. Credit card fees, interest rates, and prices, all of which the bills proponents swore would drop once the law went into action, kept on climbing, bringing record profits to the industry on the order of many billions more a year. The law swiftly came to be hated by a cross-section of bankruptcy judges, furious at having to dismiss cases where the filers didnt know they were required to take credit counseling classes first. Unquestionably, this is the most poorly written piece of legislation that I or anyone else has ever seen, said one. Another accused Congress in a written opinion of working with the credit industry to make more money off the backs of consumers in this country. Of course, all of this affected Hispanic and black families the most; they were two and three times more likely to file for bankruptcy as white families, respectively.

All this had happened in no small part through Bidens efforts. He provided cover to other Democrats to do what the credit industry was urging them to do, Travis Plunkett, legislative director of the Consumer Federation of America, would later recall, saying Biden had provided a veneer of bipartisanship that helped the industry sway other Democrats. Warren remembered it similarly. The Senate was evenly split between the two parties, but one of the bills lead sponsors was Democratic powerhouse Joe Biden, and right behind him were plenty of other Democrats offering to help, she charged in 2014.

This was a pattern with Biden. At various times, he voted against a measure banning double charging for ATM transactions, an amendment strengthening protections for bankrupt Americans who had large medical debts or served in the military, a provision to shift responsibility from debtors to the predatory lenders who had drove them into bankruptcy, and a requirement that credit card companies warn consumers of the consequences of making only minimum payments. It is little wonder that Warren, coming off her own political conversion from being a Republican, would view Biden as everything wrong with the Democratic Party.

But even all this paled in significance compared to a virtually ignored vote Biden cast at the close of the 1990s. After Citigroup was formed in 1998 out of a merger that was, strictly speaking, illegal, Robert Rubin Clintons former Treasury secretary who, unbeknownst to anyone, was in talks for an executive position at the new bank worked his influence in concert with Citi lobbyists and Clintons banker-friendly advisers to retroactively legalize its creation. They did so through a bill repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era law separating commercial and investment banking passed to prevent another epochal crash. Voting against it in the House, Bernie Sanders warned it would lead to more mega-mergers and the further concentration of economic power in this country. Biden, once more with a unanimous GOP and a large contingent of Democrats behind him, voted to make it law.

I think we will look back in ten years time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota said after the vote. That which is true in the 1930s is true in 2010.

Just as in the 1980s, there was one aspect of the federal government and its purse strings where Bidens budget-cutting obsession not only didnt apply but went in the opposite direction: crime and drugs.

The end of that decade set the pattern for what followed. In September 1989, President Bush had delivered a speech outlining his National Drug Control Strategy, calling for harsher punishments for drug dealers, nearly $1.5 billion toward drug-related law enforcement, and more prisons, more jails, more courts, more prosecutors at every level throughout the country. At the time, the right-wing Heritage Foundation gushed that this constituted the largest increase in resources for law enforcement in the nations history. Decades on, its remembered as a key moment in the escalation of the war on drugs, with Bush putting forward an expansive bill based on the strategy the following year.

But for Biden, it was a half-measure. Quite frankly, the Presidents plan is not tough enough, bold enough, or imaginative enough to meet the crisis at hand, Biden said in a televised response to Bushs speech. In a nutshell, the Presidents plan does not include enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, enough prosecutors to convict them, enough judges to sentence them, or enough prison cells to put them away for a long time.

Just as Biden spent the 1980s chiding Reagan for being insufficiently pitiless on crime, he would spend the 1990s leading the Democratic Party in an ongoing contest of one-upmanship against the GOP on the issue. The stakes were high. Bush had won the presidency in 1988 by successfully tarring Michael Dukakis, his centrist Democratic opponent, as a wimpy liberal who put law-abiding Americans in harms way by being too soft on criminals. Neither Biden nor the rest of the party would let themselves be outflanked on the issue again.

Partisan wrangling over tough-on-crime legislation occupied most of Bidens time and energy for the first half of the 1990s. Biden and the Democrats tried again and again to pass a major, extreme new crime bill, eager to prove to the voting public they could be just as harsh and unforgiving to criminals as the GOP, if not more so. In 1991, Biden boasted that his much bigger version of the crime bill included the death penalty for no less than fifty-one offenses five more than Bushs bill. What do we have to do, put half the country behind bars? Bernie Sanders said on the House floor.

A wag in the newspaper recently wrote something to the effect that Biden has made it a death penalty offense for everything expect jaywalking, Biden joked.

These efforts were roundly criticized at the time. The NAACP and other groups lobbied against the bill. In a letter addressed to senators just a few days before the vote, three ACLU lawyers called the legislation far worse from a civil liberties perspective than any that has ever been considered by the Senate. Lawyers and federal judges including the latters official policy-making body warned the law would overwhelm the judicial system and widen its already broad inequality. As the different versions made their way to Bushs desk, the Washington Post condemned them as rotten and an exercise not so much to combat crime as to convince the public that legislators are tough on criminals.

Occasionally Biden would oppose a particularly extreme Republican measure, though in typical style, only after accepting the premise and watering it down somewhat. So when Republicans tried to get rid of the exclusionary rule that is, allow the use of illegally seized evidence in court as long as it was illegally seized by authorities in good faith Biden argued forcefully against it on the floor, then put forward a proposal that allowed the use of evidence seized in good faith under an improper search warrant. Civil liberties advocates looked on in horror as dubious measure after dubious measure made its way into the bill, while one embarrassed Democratic senator shook his head at the crass political contest over who hated crime the most. No one will deny this is an extremely tough bill, Biden said.

The legislation failed, but only because of the GOP. Its gun control provisions inspired pushback from the National Rifle Association, andRepublican senators subsequently blocked it. When that didnt stick, Bush, afraid of handing the Democrats a win on one of his key issues so close to an election, vetoed it, claiming it was too soft. The process would repeat itself again the following year, when Republicans filibustered that edition because the severe limits it placed on habeas corpus, or prisoners right to appeal, werent severe enough. I just cant believe Republicans would kill a death penalty bill, said Biden.

By 1993, however, things had changed. Bush had been replaced by Clinton, who, facing down a surprisingly ferocious right-wing campaign, had every reason to make his party look tough on crime. Whispering in his ear was adviser Rahm Emanuel, a right-wing fundraiser who assured Clinton it would poll well. Whispering in his other ear was Biden, who privately urged the president to seize control of the issue by upping the ante and demanded rapid enactment of the Biden/Clinton crime bill to maintain crime as a Democratic initiative.

While Clinton gave the effort his full backing, Biden put his famous skills at Senate wheeling and dealing toward passing what was essentially a conservative Republican bill. On television, Biden offered Texas Republican senator Phil Gramm a deal: if Gramm dropped his opposition to the bills gun control measures, Biden would support Gramms mandatory minimum sentences, which at least one newspaper described as vague and almost uniformly bad. This was despite saying that same year: I think weve had all the mandatory minimums that we need. We dont need the ones that we had.

In went Trent Lotts amendment setting up a three strikes provision for violent felonies, something Biden had called a wacko amendment one year earlier but now voted for despite laying out his concerns about it at length. Same with an amendment to make carjacking a federal offense, potentially punishable by death. Even the extreme things Biden voted against, like prosecuting kids as young as thirteen as adults, didnt dampen his enthusiasm to get the bill passed.

There is a mood here that if someone came to the floor and said we should barb-wire the ankles of anyone who jaywalks, I suspect it would pass, he said in November 1993. I think weve gone overboard already.

As he explained on the Senate floor, he was fine with what he called barbed-wire amendments because while they make sense and they are useful, they also didnt mean anything of consequence. The real meat of the bill, he said, was the extra $21 billion being pumped into law enforcement, funded by almost the exact amount of savings ($22 billion) Biden and the rest of Congress had made by approving Clintons earlier slashing of the federal workforce. We are trading, in effect, in this bill, bureaucrats for cops, he explained.

This was far from an outlier in the Clinton years, when the money cut from public housing and welfare budgets was diverted instead toward building the carceral state. As sociologist Loc Wacquant pointed out, slicing $17 billion from public housing while lifting prison funding by $19 billion in these years effectively made the construction of prisons the nations main housing program for the urban poor.

On August 25, the bill cleared the Senate for the final time. Bidens relief was obvious, went one account of the vote. He gave a thumbs-up sign to a reporter in the press gallery. He chatted with his Democratic colleagues. He stayed unusually quiet in the floor debate. And he smiled. Often. Dianne Feinstein kissed him on the floor. Maine senator George Mitchell declared him the one person most responsible for passage of this bill and the most effective legislator in the Senate, bar none. I hope my mom was listening, Biden replied.

The bill whose passage Biden and the rest of the Democrats were celebrating like it was V-E Day wasnt necessarily viewed so favorably outside of Washington. Around the country, newspapers deemed the congressional bidding war that produced it a creation of hysteria, pointing out, for example, that mandatory minimums, which had helped to triple the prison population in fourteen years, were disastrous. Even in Washington the feeling wasnt unanimous, with the Congressional Black Caucus voicing wide-ranging objections. Bidens own words on the Senate floor described the skepticism: that Congress was simply trying to show everybody how tough we are.

Indeed, just as in the previous decade, Biden had actively cultivated this hysteriaeven while crime had in fact sharply dropped since a decade earlier. When the Justice Department released a 1991 report showing a decrease since the previous year, Biden called it flawed and urged no one to believe the epidemic of crime in America has been broken. That same year, he claimed that rural America was suffering a plague of violent crime, drug trafficking and drug abuse, even as the per capita rural crime rate was dwarfed by its urban counterpart. He charged that the whole country had just undergone the worst crime epidemic in its entire history and that demographics namely, a growth in violent teenaged gangs had led to this record carnage. As he steered the bill toward passage, he assured audiences that the victimization of America is greater than the statistics suggest, and that FBI figures showing a fall in crime over 1992 were misleading.

But as Bidens private and public rhetoric made clear and as was widely understood at the time the legislation had always been about securing political cover. As Biden put it on the Senate floor:

The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties.The liberal wing of the Democratic Party has 70 enhanced penalties.The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 125,000 new state prison cells.I would like to see the conservative wing of the Democratic Party.

I hope the president would maybe take the politics of crime out of the upcoming elections, Biden had said after an earlier version passed under Bush. When the bill finally became law in 1994, he made it the centerpiece of his 1996 reelection campaign, touting it and his support for the balanced budget amendment to the New Castle County Chamber of Commerce, which gave him a standing ovation. When neoconservative commentator Bill Kristol told the GOP leadership to keep attacking Democrats on the crime bill, Biden responded: I would like to be running and have someone use the crime bill against me. I hope to God that Bush attacks us on crime, he said on the eve of the 2000 election. I think we would eat them alive.

Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act into law on a sunny fall day in September, as Biden proudly looked on and a large, bipartisan crowd of officials applauded. By the time Clinton left office, the United States had the worlds highest incarceration rate, and two decades after the bill passed, the federal prison population had more than doubled. Even the bills few laudable measures like the Violence Against Women Act, which Biden had pushed for intensely and which motivated even critics like Sanders to vote for it, further fed incarceration rates while doing little to bring down domestic violence and even exacerbated it in some cases.

It is little surprise that prominent figures involved in the laws passage would come to regret their roles, including the Clintons and Sanders, who later admitted he was not happy I voted for a terrible bill. Not Biden, though. For more than a decade afterward, he touted what he called the Biden crime law as one of his proudest accomplishments, claiming as late as 2016 it had restored American cities. Perhaps he had a point: evidence suggests that by locking more people away and taking them from the labor pool, mass incarceration artificially depressed official unemployment numbers, letting Clinton and his neoliberal policies take credit for a supposed economic miracle.

But the 1994 law was not the end of Bidens overzealous crime-fighting efforts. For the second half of the decade, he turned his attention to juvenile delinquents.

Warning of a youth arms race, he sponsored a bill in 1996 loosening the rules around imprisonment of minors, letting local jails keep juveniles locked up for three times as long in certain circumstances and relaxing the requirement that they be kept out of sight and sound of adult inmates. For the next three years, he worked with Republicans and Democrats to write and rewrite a massive juvenile crime bill, which at various times included provisions creating special juvenile gun courts, putting $1 billion toward jails for violent juveniles, and building on the 1994 crime bill by generally expanding the size and powers of law enforcement.

What prompted and justified such severe measures was one criminologists racist 1995 prediction that the country was on the brink of an outbreak of superpredators: fearless, remorseless, violent youth criminals who didnt know right from wrong. The prediction seemed to be proven true by a spate of school shootings. The theory, which its author later retracted, would become infamous during the 2016 election, when a twenty-year-old video of Hillary Clinton, now the Democratic presidential nominee, espousing the idea ignited outrage. At the time, though, Biden echoed this language, charging that his 1996 bill would apply very forcefully to that category of children who are predators, whom he placed in a separate category from at-risk kids.

See the article here:
Joe Biden Is the Forrest Gump of the Democratic Party's Rightward Turn - Jacobin magazine

New property investors sometimes let the cachet of owning a rental property cloud their ... [+] decision-making process, preventing them from objectively assessing alternatives to buying real property.

Owning real estate can certainly pay off, but to say its unequivocally a better investment than putting money in the financial markets is short-sighted. Over the years Ive spoken with numerous investors who ended up renting their home when they moved instead of selling, buying an income property just because thats what their parents did, or buying a rental unit because they werent sure what else to do with their money and the income property narrative made sense.

Real estate is a very emotional category for many investors, which can create issues when investors arent able to objectively analyze the merits of a purchasing decision. Due to the specific risks associated with real estate investing, it doesnt make sense for every investor. Even when it is appropriate, its important to consider diversifying outside of real property.

Its impossible to adequately compare the returns of privately held individual real estate investments to the broad-based stock market. Even when some data is available, geography, taxation, cash flow, purchase price, expenses, and other factors all weigh heavily. From a purely price-appreciation standpoint, the Zillow Home Value Index is a helpful resource.

The chart below shows the Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI) from 1997 to 2019 for all home types, which includes single family residences and condos.

Source: Zillow Home Value Index (1997 - 2019)

Using four of the top ten geographic markets by size, its clear theres a lot of variability from the U.S. as a whole and the regions themselves. Over the 23-year period, Chicagos cumulative return was by far the worst, at 47% while prices in the Boston market appreciated the most at 185%.

Kristin McKenna, Darrow Wealth Management

Comparatively, the S&P 500 achieved a total return of 552%, including dividend reinvestment, during this same period.

Of course there are limitations on the comparison between Zillows data on home price appreciation and the actual returns investors can achieve with an investment property. Most notably, it doesnt account for the potential of ongoing cash flow from an income property or how a mortgage can provide leverage to boost investment returns. On the flip side, the data also doesnt account for any cash investment in the property, expenses, selling costs, and so on.

Individuals dont always realize they can gain exposure to the benefits of owning real estate without the biggest risks of being a landlord. Real estate investment trusts (REITs) offer just that. Like other publicly traded ETFs and mutual funds, REITs come in many flavors depending on your investment goal. You can purchase a rental property REIT that invests in specific geographic areas or a broad-based fund that invests in commercial property around the U.S. or around the world.

Using the S&P United States REIT Index as a comparison, over the last 10 years (ending 2/20/20) the index returned over 12.50% on an annualized basis while the S&P 500 was up over 14% (annualized) during the same time (for comparative purposes, S&P Dow Jones Indices bases data for both indices at 100). Though real estate is generally a more volatile asset class due to its sensitivity to interest rates, the returns are at least suitable for comparison.

The stock market has several advantages over real estate from an investment standpoint: little capital required to participate, losses are limited to your original investment, readily available data to compare investments and assess risk, liquidity of financial markets provides an easy out when you need to cash out and the value of your asset is constantly updated so you always know where you stand (at least for today).

Owning a rental property can provide ongoing income and help protect against inflation, but its also cash-intensive and highly illiquid. Aside from the upfront capital needed to buy the property, youll need to keep enough cash to pay for any emergency repairs that arise, special assessments in a condo building, or cover the mortgage and maintenance if you have a vacancy. Over time youll need to make improvements to the property to command higher rental income or prepare for a sale, which generally costs 5% - 6% of the sale price in commissions. The opportunity cost of sidelining all that cash is quantifiable and should be estimated in cash flow projections when analyzing a possible investment.

Much like the stock market, there are many factors outside of your control when youre a landlord. Perhaps the areas largest employer moves their headquarters, or an influx of new luxury rental units flood the market, driving rental prices down.

As a landlord, you must be responsive to tenants as problems ariseeven when its inconvenient. Paying a property manager can alleviate much of your workload, but unless you have a large profit margin or sizable real estate portfolio, the cost of doing so could leave you in the red. Your physical distance from the property may require you to pay on-site managers.

Investing in publicly traded mutual funds and ETFs, on the other hand, can be done from anywhere. Unlike real estate, where hiring a property manager is really just a cost center, a financial advisor may be able to save you time and improve your bottom line through planning opportunities and a risk-adjusted investment strategy.

Aside from property upkeep, owning a rental property also requires you to find and vet tenants, navigate state housing laws in the event of property damage or tenant issues, and resolve problems that may arise with neighbors or homeowners associations.

Time is money, especially for busy professionals. As youre running the numbers and quantifying the opportunity cost, make sure the expected cash flows are enough to justify your time-weighted return.

As with any investment, diversification is one of the best ways to manage your risk. Real estate can be a great part of an investment portfolio for the right investor who knows what theyre signing up for when becoming a landlord. Before getting wooed by the idea of becoming a land baron, talk to someone who owns a rental property and run the numbers. For busy professionals, it can be difficult to find a property with enough upside and ongoing cash flow to justify the time and hassle of being a landlord.

Read this article:
Is It Just A Myth That Real Estate Is A Better Investment Than Stocks? - Forbes

Published: Feb 26th, 2020 - 12:39pm (EST)

Updated: Feb 27th, 2020 - 3:45am (EST)

LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WTHR) Subaru of Indiana Automotive will be adding 350 new jobs to its Lafayette plant.

The company announced on Tuesday a $158 million investment to add a new service parts facility and a transmission assembly shop on the plants 820-acre campus.

We are proud to continue investing in Indiana, said Scott Brand, senior vice president of administration and quality. We also appreciate the tremendous support these plans have received from the state, Tippecanoe County, and the city of Lafayette.

Subaru has not yet said when a job fair will be held to fill those positions.

In November, the plant held a job fair to fill 250 production jobs.

In 2017, a $140 million investment in the facility led to 200 new jobs.

Around 50 percent of Subarus sold in North America are built in Indiana.

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Subaru investment to create 350 more jobs in Indiana - WTHR

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Project Syndicate) The emergence of COVID-19, a new coronavirus, is a tragic public-health emergency. The disease, one hopes, will be brought under control quickly, but the International Monetary Fund is already warning that economic growth in China may slow.

As we watch the situation unfold, three broader risks to the global economy are also becoming more apparent.

The first risk is obviously in China itself. While the precise origins of the disease remain unclear, it is hard to take a definite view on whether outbreaks of this kind could be avoided for example, by better control over hygiene in food markets. But it is painfully obvious that a lack of transparency in China has contributed to fear and even signs of panic around the world.

As financial markets demonstrated in 2007-2008, when the precise incidence of big risks is not well understood, people tend to assume the worst. Rapidly falling asset prices may not contain much information except that there is not much information to be had.

What is the exact mortality rate associated with COVID-19? Why does mortality, supposedly, vary significantly across localities? What explains the ease with which this virus seems, sometimes, to travel great distances? What are the precise effects of quarantining people in a building, a makeshift hospital or a city?

The Chinese authorities surely do not have all the answers at this point, but their inclination to suppress data and interpretation is tremendously unhelpful.

Read: Coronavirus fatality rates vary wildly depending on age, gender and medical history some patients fare much worse than others

Second, the lack of American leadership is more painfully apparent every day. The United States has the strongest medical-health system in the world, with capacity for research and development (government and private) that is second to none. Yet President Donald Trumps administration seems to be concerned primarily with playing down the risks, while keeping the virus out of the U.S. a nearly impossible task.

The private sector is working hard on a vaccine, and this is commendable. Unfortunately, over a longer period of time, the lack of a consistent market for such vaccines has undermined investment in this sector. By creating the worlds largest market for many drugs, the U.S. effectively supports research across a wide range of ailments but only those for which there is large and steady demand in the US.

Even the most fervent believer in Trumps America First must be willing to concede that it is not in Americas interest for the rest of the world to become sick. These are U.S. allies, friends, and customers. Also, like it or not, few diseases will stop at Americas borders. Indeed, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said that the question is not if, but rather when, COVID-19 spreads domestically.

The third risk is in emerging markets and developing countries. Poorer countries are ill-equipped to deal with this kind of disease, as seen in African countries refusal to airlift their citizens from China.

The news that the coronavirus has reached Italy has shaken world financial markets, but Italy is a relatively well-organized and rich country. A vibrant democracy ensures that people (inside and outside the country) will quickly understand if containment and treatment measures are working.

We should be much more concerned about other countries, where nutrition is worse, housing standards are weak and disease transmission can occur much more readily. If these countries health systems come under pressure, the U.S., Europe and others should step up quickly with technical assistance and essential supplies. But here, too, there is so far a worrying lack of leadership.

It seems unlikely that this disease will prove to be as deadly as some of those that our ancestors experienced. Medical practice and public health have advanced a great deal. The CDC is an outstanding organization, and the World Health Organization has a strong track record when the chips are down. Private-sector groups of dedicated doctors and nurses have performed extraordinarily well under the most difficult circumstances, such as dealing with Ebola, when they are given a chance. We are fortunate to live in an age that has so many heroic people.

More from Project Syndicate: The global economy is much more vulnerable to the coronavirus now than during the SARS epidemic

Still, this coronavirus is a warning. Societies neglect access to health-care systems and reduce investments in R&D at great peril. Diseases are always evolving, and we must continually increase our capacity to understand and fight newly emerging threats.

The best way forward is by strengthening science, training more scientists, and building more labs. Countries that are able to do this like the U.S. should share ideas and knowledge as widely as possible.

Investing more in science is an appealing economic proposition. Given very high rates of social return, basic research across a wide range of activities more than pays for itself.

But this is not about the economics. More likely than not, one day a scientist will save your life or the life of a loved one because his or her previous work produced a drug, treatment or just an idea that made a critical difference. We should invest in scientists to save ourselves and our neighbors. And we must remember that we have neighbors all over our deeply interconnected world.

Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the IMF, is a professor at MIT Sloan and an informal adviser to Sen. Elizabeth Warrens presidential campaign. He is the co-author, with Jonathan Gruber, of Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream.

This was first published on Project Syndicate Coronavirus and the Global Economy

View original post here:
The other warning from coronavirus: Invest more in science - MarketWatch

Angus Taylor will use a speech on Friday to put some flesh on the bones of the Coalitions technology roadmap to reduce emissions by 2050. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

The Morrison government will on Friday signal plans to shift investment from wind and solar to hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, lithium and advanced livestock feed supplements, as part of a bottom up strategy to reduce emissions by 2050.

Angus Taylor will use a speech to an economic thinktank to put some flesh on the bones of the Coalitions much-vaunted technology roadmap. The emissions reduction minister will also declare Australia will take a technology-based long-term emissions reduction strategy to the United Nations-led climate talks in Glasgow at the end of this year.

While not ruling out adopting a specific emissions reduction target, Taylor will contend the top down approach of countries proposing emissions reduction targets in the global climate framework has failed because countries are not delivering on their commitments.

According to a speech extract circulated in advance, Taylor will say the government intends to roll out a series of detailed pieces of work between now and the United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow, known at COP26, in November. Taylor will say Australia wants to lead the world on a new approach to laying out domestic abatement plans.

As well as the roadmap, the government is reviewing its much-criticised emissions reduction fund and the operation of the safeguard mechanism, and is working on an electric vehicles strategy, despite blasting Labor during last years election, claiming measures to drive the takeup of EVs were a war on the weekend.

Taylor will say the looming technology investment roadmap will form the cornerstone of the governments 2050 emissions reduction strategy, providing guidance to the public and the private sector on what future energy and emissions-reduction technologies the government will prioritise.

He will say the government has already invested $10.4bn into clean technology projects with a value of $35bn, but declare we are coming to an end of the value of these investments.

Wind and solar are economic as a source of pure energy at least, and the government should not crowd out private sector investment, the minister will say. We must move our investments to the next challenges hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, lithium and advanced livestock feed supplements to name a few.

Taylor will say the roadmap will include measurable economic goals for technology that will allow us to assess the cost curve for technologies and to give a clear signal for when a technology is commercial.

The government will be a player in investing in emerging technology as both a market signal and leader but the objective will be to generate significant private sector investment.

To be successful from both a portfolio and from a technology perspective we must track how much private sector and other investment in R and D and early deployment follows our own investment, Taylor will say.

To measure the success of the overall portfolio I think we should be aiming for a four or five time multiplier. That is for every dollar invested I want to see four or five dollars from the private sector following over the course of our investments.

It is unclear from the speech extract what policy mechanism will drive the new investments and who will administer the research and development, and it does not address why the government is looking at technology such as carbon capture and storage, or CCS.

Most low emissions scenarios for the future consider CCS a potentially important technology if the world is to keep global heating to 1.5C about pre-industrial levels, but only when used with biomass, not fossil fuels. The technology has not proved commercially viable with fossil fuel power generation despite being promised billions in taxpayer support through initiatives such as the CCS flagships program.

There are fewer than 20 CCS projects across the globe in the industrial sector. Chevron last year announced a $2.5bn CCS project at one of the countrys largest liquefied natural gas developments, in the Pilbara, had finally begun injecting carbon dioxide underground after three years of delays.

Taylors speech flags a consultation paper to inform the design of the roadmap.

The tone of the speech extract suggests the government is reluctant to adopt a target, having blasted Labor since the opposition adopted a net zero target by 2050 in its first major climate policy announcement since losing the 2019 election. But it is not definitive.

On Thursday, the Liberal MP Trent Zimmerman continued his call for the leadership to embrace net zero. I think it is a target we need to look at, the member for North Sydney told the ABC. We have a good target for 2030 but we need to look beyond that as we head into Glasgow.

Taylor will say on Friday: If I could stand up today announce a target and see the CO2 reduce then I would.

If setting a target today would lower emissions then today would be a short speech. I wouldnt have to outline our plan and I wouldnt have to outline all the work that has led to today.

Guardian Australia revealed on Thursday new analysis by ClimateWorks Australia suggesting Australia can achieve a transition to net zero emissions by 2050 with known technologies, but the deployment of low emissions options will need to be accelerated significantly.

The rest is here:
Angus Taylor to announce shift in climate investment away from wind and solar - The Guardian

The company said it is massively accelerating its investments to shape a fully climate-powered business model.

We believe that we have reached a tipping point where our brands will be incredibly stronger if climate is an ally and not an enemy, CEO Emmanuel Faber explained. This year is pivotal towards this shift.

Danones commitment to action on climate change is nothing new, Faber noted.We've been pioneering and making pretty bold commitments to transition to low-carbon economy for a long time.

In 2009, the company initiated work to improve the carbon profile of its business. It aligned with the 2015 Paris Climate Change agreement, signed up to the 2 degrees Science Based Targets in 2017 and then updated to the 1.5 degrees pledge. Danone also set the goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050 with an ambition to reach peak carbon emissions by 2025.

The company revealed this week that it has already hit this target, five years ahead of schedule. Twenty-seven million tons is going to be our peak, that was last year, of carbon externalities, Faber reported.

Faber views this progress in the context of what Danone calls the food revolution, a shift in attitudes to the food system that is disrupting established operating models.

As part of its Danone 2020 strategy, launched in 2014, the group invested heavily in areas like improving trust (with a focus on brands becoming B Corp certified); efficiency and discipline; and the adoption of planetary diets as well as natural and local trends. Big moves in this space included the 2017 acquisition of WhiteWave Foods, which brought with it plant-based brands such as Alpro in Europe.

According to managements assessments, these efforts have paid off and Danone enters 2020 ahead of the new normal when it comes to trust and sustainable, natural diets. Investment behind these pillars will therefore remain level through to 2025, the company noted. Danone already has a very solid plan to invest a further 5bn in plant-based by 2025.

However, there are areas that Danone believes there is clear opportunity to do more to reduce its carbon footprint and align with consumer trends, particularly around packaging and digital innovation. And it is here that Danone will focus the bulk of its 2bn investment from 2020.

We see 2020 as the moment where we need to interrupt the fifth year and final year of our 2020 plan, because the industry is undermined, our categories are undermined, by either visible or invisible challenges. - Faber

Faber said opportunities for Danone are related in one way or another to climate and the perception of climate in social norms. We need to really anticipate, to fully meet these opportunities and stay ahead of the curve in 2025.

While it was on the radar, packaging was less of a priority for Danones 2020 strategy. Clearly here, we are caught off guard - as I think frankly everybody else was, Faber conceded.

Around half of Danones investment in climate innovation will be focused on packaging innovation, souring and value chain to enhance the groups value proposition and deliver superior competitiveness.

According to Danones assessment, packaging is a hot topic in markets like France, Germany and the UK and this is putting a strain on its brands. People don't want to be seen with a plastic bottle anymore, Feber observed.

For its water business, the group aims to move away from virgin PET by 2025, switching to rPET in Europe. In April, rPET water bottles will be rolled out across most formats in France, the full range in Germany and all on-the-go Evian formats in the UK.

The Evian and Volvic brands will both become climate neutral this year.

Other innovations include the introduction of metal bottles and cans for brands like Evian and Bonafont and a switch to tetra for Volvics kids range.

Home and new on-the-go models are poised to completely change the paradigm of water packaging, Faber predicted.

While the groups water business might be a high profile plastic user, Danones boldest commitment can be seen in yogurts where it aims to move to zero polystyrene packaging by 2025 globally and by 2024 in Europe.

The shift will see Danone move to PET and rPET as soon as possible, with sourcing of polylactic acid or polylactide (PLA) and other bio-sourced materials starting in 2020.

And progress is already under way. Faber elaborated: Les 2 Vaches, [our] leading organic yogurt brand in France has already bio-sourced starch-based polymer packaging.

In the UK, the company will launch its first ever reusable glass pot as part of the Loop programme.

By 2021, the plant-based Alpro brand will move out of PS to paper cups and plant-based drinks cartons.

We believe that we will reaccelerate our brand competitiveness on packaging, which becomes a clear factor of choice for consumers.

To drive further progress, Danone also announced the creation of a packaging transformation accelerator with the intent of investing up to 200m by 2025 in co-designed new business models, new materials and recycling solutions.

Elsewhere, Danone plans to invest in digital innovations that it believes will strengthen its omnichannel reach and end-to-end value chain.

On omnichannel, Faber said that the companys ability to compete everywhere is not there yet. Danone has set itself the task of doubling e-commerce sales by 2020. It is a matter of execution, processes and systems. Likewise, Faber continued, on the end-to-end value chain we are not there yet either.

There's clearly a need for acceleration, he suggested, adding that the company needs to get much more radical on its use of digital and data technologies.

Danone is therefore kicking off a big project that will but data are the core of its business model, end-to-end sourcing and omnichannel. Fundamental to that is the pursuit of our sourcing model in climate-efficient sourcing for planetary diets and regenerative agriculture We need to be much better in terms of our climate resilience and overall execution in the business model, end-to-end value chain and omnichannel. And this will be enabled by the fact that we are starting a big project on putting data at the core of what we do.

Danone will drive a transformation of its value chain that will allow it to be more flexible and precise in demand planning, cost reduction, waste reduction and climate reduction, Faber elaborated.

Danone has digitalised its baby food factory in Opole, Poland. The facility has seen investment in new technologies that have enabled it to go 100% paper-free.

The move has delivered a 10% increase in cost efficiency, a 12% reduction in CO2 emissions, and a 6% increase in batch size flexibility.

Danone believes there is an opportunity to leverage its factory footprint in dairy by creating hybrid capabilities where plant-based products are manufactured in the same facility.

It is also rolling out next level integrated business services powered by data and AI. Over 3-4 years, the company believes the investment will enable it to move to a lower cost base.

If Danone is to successfully drive down its carbon footprint, the group will have to maintain its focus on agricultural efficiency. Currently, 95% of its carbon emissions fall into scope 2 and 3 emissions, which are indirect activities. Agriculture along accounts for 60%.

When we speak about regenerative agriculture, we're really talking about the core of what is at stake for the future of our business in terms of both financial business and values.

Carbon in agriculture is not an externality for us. It's not about the planet, it's not about the next generation, it's really about our business.

However, Faber said this does not mean there will be a meaningful acceleration in regenerative agricultural investment because the company has already put a lot of the building blocks in place to drive change.

Danone has identified soil erosion due to an over-reliance of chemical pesticides and fertilisers as a core issue. You cannot have healthy soils which will support the agriculture of tomorrow, if we do not put carbon back into the soil through regenerative practices, Faber argued.

The company says it has identified solutions that both reduce the immediate and longer-term costs linked to degraded soils.

The availability of water is another concern that the agricultural sector will have to adapt to.

Looking to the domestic market, Faber provided an example: In France there will not be a possibility to continue to farm corn in the south part of France, where it is today because there won't be water enough anymore which corn relies a lot on and temperatures will be too high. So that's a challenge. It means that that part of agriculture has got to change.

But on the contrary, the temperature elevation is also creating opportunities. For instance, we've been able to start programs with our cattle raisers in Normandy for our dairy products and brands here, where they are growing soy locally, so we are producing in Normandy, instead of importing soy from Brazil.

Supporting regenerative agriculture, and being transparent about its efforts, is already paying dividends for Danones brands, Faber contended.

In France, the group invested 40m over the last two years a spend that Faber said has allowed its baby food brand Bledina to regain consumer preference. In just two-and-a-half years the brand has become a close number two, nearly number one in the French organic baby food segment, which is growing at 35%.

This is thanks to the program of regenerative agriculture transparency. The 5% of sales on this product range that are being invested every year in regenerative agriculture [are] driving consumer preference.

Read more here:
Danone's 2bn climate-smart innovation investment: 'Our brands will be stronger if climate is an ally - FoodNavigator.com

Inaugural cohort of female-led companies to have access to an expert Strategic Mentor Network comprised of industry leaders and seasoned entrepreneurs that will enable a more equitable tech sector and reduce unconscious bias

MARKHAM, ON, Feb. 27, 2020 /CNW/ - Today, ventureLAB, a leading technology hub in Markham, York Region, announced its inaugural cohort of companies and Strategic Mentor Network for Tech Undivided, a new initiative aimed at supporting women and underrepresented persons working in tech founders and industry leaders alike. Tech Undivided bridges inclusivity gaps by creating gender-balanced networks with diverse representation, and works with founders, investors, and companies to prepare them for business and investment success by reducing unconscious bias. The Government of Canada supported the Tech Undivided program in August 2019 with a $1.7-million investment through the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) as part of the Women Entrepreneurship Strategy (WES).

Since 2011, ventureLAB has supported over 100 female-led tech companies that have raised over $6 million in investment and generated over $17 million in revenue.

Tech Undivided Inaugural Cohort

In fall 2019, ventureLAB issued a call for female-led tech companies with breakthrough products that have the potential to significantly impact society to participate in Tech Undivided. The seven selected companies, listed below, will work with industry experts, investors, and seasoned entrepreneurs to prepare them for Seed or Series A funding.

Tech Undivided Strategic Mentorship Network

The Strategic Mentorship Network is a diverse and curated list of high-caliber business leaders, seasoned entrepreneurs, academic professionals, investors and industry experts who have committed their knowledge, resources and time to supporting the growth of the Tech Undivided companies. The mentorship network is gender-balanced and diverse, and brings together leaders with broad expertise.

Tech Undivided Launch EventPlease join us for the launch of Tech Undivided on Tuesday, March 3, at ventureLAB from 9:30AM - 12:00PM. Hear from the team that made Tech Undivided a reality, the inaugural cohort, the strategic mentor network, and local dignitaries, followed by hors d'oeuvres and refreshments.

Date: Tuesday, March 3, 2020 Time: 9:30am-12:00pm Location: ventureLAB, 3600 Steeles Ave E., Markham, ON *Media interviews will be made upon request.

To learn more about Tech Undivided, visit http://www.venturelab.ca/tech-undivided.

Quotes"Our goal with Tech Undivided is to ensure all founders and people working in tech receive the same opportunities for funding, success, and advancement in the workplace. Tech Undivided goes beyond supporting women working in tech, but aims to remove unconscious bias in the industry and beyond. ventureLAB is located in the City of Markham, Canada's most diverse city, making it an ideal location for this initiative. We look forward to pushing the boundaries towards a more equitable tech sector and workforce." Melissa Chee, President and CEO, ventureLAB

"We recognize the importance and the wide-reaching benefits of supporting women entrepreneurs. That's why we are so pleased to support ventureLAB to help provide access to financing, advice and networks for women entrepreneurs in Ontario. With this investment, through the Women Entrepreneurship Strategy, we are taking another step toward breaking down barriers to success, and doubling the number of women-lead businesses in this country. We look forward to seeing more and more women entrepreneurs thrive with this support." - The Honourable Mlanie Joly, Minister of Economic Development and Official Languages

"Supporting women in business is not just the right thing to do, but it is good for the bottom line. We have witnessed the accomplishments that ventureLAB has had on this community and look forward to the success that Tech Undivided will bring to women entrepreneurs in and across the York region." The Honourable Mary Ng, Minister of Small Business, Export Promotion and International Trade

About ventureLABventureLAB is a leading technology hub located in Markham in York Region, Canada's second largest tech cluster. Through its programs focused on capital, talent, technology, and customers, ventureLAB has supported over 2,000 tech companies and entrepreneurs, including 100 companies that have raised over $100 million and created 3,500 jobs. ventureLAB's innovation hub is a 50,000 square foot facility that is home to over 45 tech companies and partners that employ more than 300 people. At ventureLAB, we grow globally competitive tech titans that build-to-scale in Canada. http://www.venturelab.ca

About TECH UNDIVIDEDTech Undivided's vision is to build an inclusive tech ecosystem that is not biased or divided by gender. By focusing on and supporting diverse and underrepresented women-led tech companies while working with women and allys, Tech Undivided removes unconscious bias faced by women and underrepresented persons.

About FedDev OntarioFor more than 10 years, FedDev Ontario has actively worked to advance and diversify the southern Ontario economy through funding opportunities and business services that support innovation and growth in Canada's most populous region. The Agency has delivered impressive results, which can be seen in southern Ontario businesses that are creating innovative technologies, improving their productivity, growing their revenues, and in the economic advancement of communities across the region. Read more about the impacts the Agency is having in southern Ontario.

SOURCE ventureLAB

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ventureLAB's Tech Undivided Initiative Prepares Emerging Tech Companies to be Investment-ready in Six Months - Benzinga