Dear Commons Community,

A few hours ago, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced  he will resign after a report from the state’s attorney general documented multiple accusations of sexual harassment against women.

The decision heads off his almost certain impeachment and conviction in the New York State Legislature.  As reported by NBC News.

“Given the circumstances, the best way I can help now is if I step aside and let government get back to government, and therefore that is what I’ll do, because I work for you, and doing the right thing, is doing the right thing for you,” Cuomo said in a televised address, at which he took no questions.

Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul, a fellow Democrat, will serve the rest of his term when the resignation becomes effective in 14 days. She will become the state’s first female governor.

Though Cuomo, 63, apologized to his accusers, he made it clear he did not believe he stepped over a red line requiring removal from office. Instead, he framed his decision as one necessary to avoid protracted argument and divisiveness that would bring the state’s government to a halt.

“It is a matter of life and death,” he said, referring to the immediate need to combat Covid. “Government operations and wasting energy on distraction is the last thing government should be. I cannot be the cause. New York tough means New York loving. And I love New York and I love you. Everything I have ever done has been motivated by that love and I would never want to be unhelpful in any way.”

Speaking to his three daughters, Cuomo said, “I want them to know from the bottom of my heart that I never did and I never would intentionally disrespect a woman, treat any woman differently than I would want them treated, and that is the God’s honest truth.”

“Your dad made mistakes. And he apologized, and he learned from it and that’s what life is all about.”

After he was first hit with sexual harassment allegations this year, Cuomo ignored bipartisan demands that he resign, and predicted the investigation that he authorized state Attorney General Letitia James to carry out would exonerate him. Instead, the report alleged that he’d harassed 11 women — nine of whom were state employees — and subjected some of them to unwelcome touching and groping. His office also retaliated against one of the women after she spoke out about how she was treated, the report alleged.

“Today, closes a sad chapter for all of New York, but it’s an important step towards justice,” said James’ in a series of tweets following the resignation, adding that the ascension of Hochul will help New York enter a “new day.”

In the wake of the report, the state Assembly began to organize impeachment proceedings. Local law enforcement officials also announced they were investigating whether criminal charges were appropriate.

On Tuesday, Cuomo apologized for his behavior, thanked the women who came forward, but insisted that he had not intended to harass any of his accusers.

“I do hug and kiss people casually, women and men. I have done it all my life. It’s who I’ve been since I can remember,” Cuomo said. “In my mind, I’ve never crossed the line with anyone, but I didn’t realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn. There are generational and cultural shifts that I just didn’t fully appreciate.”

The resignation caps a remarkable fall from grace for the third-term governor, who was riding high in public opinion polls last year after his public briefings about the coronavirus pandemic in his hard-hit state were lauded.

Cuomo intended to run for a fourth term next year, a feat his three-term governor father, Mario, was not able to achieve.

A number of fellow Democratic lawmakers lauded his resignation.

“I think the Governor did the right thing, and I just want to commend the brave and courageous women who came forward. That was not an easy thing to do,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., following the announcement.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said he’s already spoken with Hochul and has full confidence that she will “establish a professional and capable administration.”

“There is no place for sexual harassment, and today’s announcement by Governor Cuomo to resign was the right decision for the good of the people of New York,” he said in a statement.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who had a long-running public feud with Cuomo, said it was “past time” for the governor to resign.

“Make no mistake, this is the result of survivors bravely telling their stories,” de Blasio said. “It was past time for Andrew Cuomo to resign and it’s for the good of all New York.”

Cuomo’s reputation took a major blow in January when James’s office issued a report that found that the state Health Department had underreported the Covid-19 death toll in nursing homes by as much as 50 percent. A top Cuomo aide was then caught on tape telling Democratic legislators that the administration took months to release the full data about nursing home residents in part because of worries that the information was “going to be used against us” by the Trump administration.

The U.S. attorney in Brooklyn and the FBI began a preliminary investigation into how the Cuomo administration handled the data.

Cuomo was then accused in mid-February of having threatened to “destroy” a Democratic lawmaker who alleged that the administration “covered up” the nursing home numbers. Cuomo denied there had been any cover-up.

That was followed by a string of sexual harassment allegations, including by some former aides. The first to speak out was Lindsey Boylan, who wrote an essay on the website Medium that described being subjected to “pervasive harassment” in her years of working for the governor.

Boylan said Cuomo made numerous inappropriate comments to her in front of other people, including once asking her to play “strip poker,” and said he once kissed her on the lips when they were alone.

Cuomo’s office called Boylan’s claims “quite simply false,” but they led to numerous other women stepping forward to say they’d been mistreated and to a flood of Democratic lawmakers calling for his resignation, including the vast majority of New York’s congressional delegation.

Fighting for his political survival, Cuomo authorized James to investigate the harassment claims and predicted the probe would exonerate him — but it wound up substantiating all the claims against him in a blistering 165-page report.

In one case, he allegedly groped an executive assistant under her shirt, and in another, he fondled a state trooper, the report alleged. The governor “sexually harassed a number of current and former New York state employees by, among other things, engaging in unwelcome and nonconsensual touching, as well as making numerous offensive comments of a suggestive and sexual nature that created a hostile work environment for women,” the report alleged.

Cuomo addressed the accusations from the female trooper, who accused him of touching her inappropriately while they were in an elevator.

“I didn’t do it consciously with a female trooper,” Cuomo said. “I did not mean any sexual connotation, I did not mean any intimacy by it. It was embarrassing to her, and it was disrespectful.”

A most difficult decision but the right one!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Fox News commentator, Juan Williams, has a guest essay in The Hill that calls Donald Trump’s Republican Party, a giant scam.   Williams comments that “Trump raised a whopping $82 million in the first six months of 2021.  The total money raised is “extraordinary for an ex-president who has been booted off social media.”

“Trump has continued to vigorously solicit donations from supporters, based mostly on false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election.”

In Congress, Trump’s success in raising money with lies has led to shameless imitators following his road to the gold.

In the first six months of 2021, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a former QAnon supporter, raised more than $4 million.”

Williams’s entire essay is below.  He is absolutely correct in labeling Trump a scam artist but then again those of us who have seen and witnessed his behavior in New York have known that for decades.

Tony

The Hill

Juan Williams: “Trump’s GOP is a giant scam”

Scam alert!

Former President Trump and his disciples in the GOP are really putting the “con” in modern conservatism these days.

According to filings made public last week, Trump raised a whopping $82 million in the first six months of 2021.

The total money raised — even if it did include some transfers from old Trump accounts — is “extraordinary for an ex-president who has been booted off social media,” The Washington Post noted.

“Trump has continued to vigorously solicit donations from supporters, based mostly on false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election,” the Post added.

In Congress, Trump’s success in raising money with lies has led to shameless imitators following his road to the gold.

In the first six months of 2021, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a former QAnon supporter, raised more than $4 million.

Greene is raising money despite being stripped of her committee assignments earlier this year because of her penchant for extremism. Greene in the past has endorsed the idea of assassinating Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and engaged in antisemitic nonsense about space lasers causing wildfires to the benefit of the Rothschild banking family.

In the same period, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) raised about $1.8 million. Her appeal for GOP dollars centers on her bragging that she carries a gun.

And then there is Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.). He also raised $1.8 million so far this year.

His pitch is to distort Biden administration efforts to get people vaccinated with a door-to-door outreach effort. To Cawthorn, this is the precursor to a plot to take Bibles and guns away from Americans.

Trump’s grifting game is also being mimicked by powerful, well-funded conservative donor networks.

As The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported last week, those groups are also relying on Trump’s “Big Lie.” They tell donors they need money to uncover voter fraud.

And when they fail to find any fraud, these dark-money organizations then tell donors they need more cash for more probes in search of fraud. They never find any and so they ask again.

It is a never-ending pitch.

These conservative groups also attract money for voter suppression.

“Leaked records of their internal deliberations,” Mayer disclosed, show these groups “have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote.”

Meanwhile, small donors keep opening their wallets because they are being primed to do so by constant harangues on right-wing talk shows about “socialism,” “cancel culture,” and the “stolen” election.

The hosts get their cut of the riches from the Trump grift game by creating an angry, paranoid audience sending dollars to fight a purported invasion of younger, more educated, racially diverse people likely to vote for Democrats.

These right-wing media rants lack facts. But there is no disputing their business model.

Entertaining people with scary conspiracies about a stolen election and mocking Democrats jacks up advertising revenue and puts more money in their bank accounts.

Now big corporations, apparently fearing they are being left behind, are joining the game.

After the Jan. 6 riots, many companies pledged to stand up for democracy and halt campaign donations to the 147 Republican lawmakers who voted not to certify President Biden’s election.

But as The Associated Press (AP) reported last month, most of those companies have now basically reversed themselves. They are circumventing their pledge by giving money to PACs that support those lawmakers instead of giving directly to the lawmakers.

“When it comes to seeking political influence through corporate giving, business as usual is back, if it ever left,” the AP reported, citing Walmart, Pfizer, Intel, General Electric and AT&T as companies that have resumed donations.

“The companies contend that donating directly to a candidate is not the same as giving to a PAC that supports them … a distinction without a difference, according to campaign finance experts,” the AP wrote.

The corporations are worried about loss of clout with Republicans in Congress because the politicians increasingly rely on money coming from small donors excited by Trump’s lies.

“Donald Trump is a one-man scam PAC,” Paul S. Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation with Common Cause — not to be confused with the former Speaker of the same name — told The Guardian.

“Bait-and-switch is among his favorite fundraising tactics,” Ryan added, pointing to Trump’s Save America PAC which told “supporters he needed money to challenge the result of an election he clearly lost, and then wound up not spending [anything] on litigation last year.”

Trump is largely unrestricted in how he can use the PAC money. He can use it to travel on campaign trips to raise more money. He can use it to raise his political profile by backing candidates of his choice in the upcoming midterm elections.

Trump’s fundraising haul exceeded the sums raised by his party’s House and Senate campaign groups. As an individual, he was basically on pace with the Republican National Committee.

The old saying in Washington about campaign finance used to be “he who pays the piper calls the tune.”

Trump is calling the tune for a frightening game of grifting that has robbed the GOP of its principles.

Where is the Republican willing to call out this scam?

Dear Commons Community,

The United Nations issued a 3,000-plus-page report yesterday from 234 scientists that provides  dire predictions for the climate change that is occurring on our planet. Earth is getting so hot that temperatures in about a decade will probably blow past a level of warming that world leaders have sought to prevent what the United Nations called a “code red for humanity.”

“It’s just guaranteed that it’s going to get worse,” said report co-author Linda Mearns, a senior climate scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.”  As reported by the Associated Press.

The authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which calls climate change clearly human-caused and “unequivocal” and “an established fact,” makes more precise and warmer forecasts for the 21st century than it did last time it was issued in 2013.

Each of five scenarios for the future, based on how much carbon emissions are cut, passes the more stringent of two thresholds set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. World leaders agreed then to try to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above levels in the late 19th century because problems mount quickly after that. The world has already warmed nearly 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since then.

Under each scenario, the report said, the world will cross the 1.5-degree-Celsius warming mark in the 2030s, earlier than some past predictions. Warming has ramped up in recent years, data shows.

“Our report shows that we need to be prepared for going into that level of warming in the coming decades. But we can avoid further levels of warming by acting on greenhouse gas emissions,” said report co-chair Valerie Masson-Delmotte, a climate scientist at France’s Laboratory of Climate and Environment Sciences at the University of Paris-Saclay.

In three scenarios, the world will also likely exceed 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times — the less stringent Paris goal — with far worse heat waves, droughts and flood-inducing downpours unless there are deep emissions cuts, the report said.

“This report tells us that recent changes in the climate are widespread, rapid and intensifying, unprecedented in thousands of years,” said IPCC Vice Chair Ko Barrett, senior climate adviser for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

With crucial international climate negotiations coming up in Scotland in November, world leaders said the report is causing them to try harder to cut carbon pollution. U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken called it “a stark reminder.”

The report said warming is already accelerating sea level rise and worsening extremes such as heat waves, droughts, floods and storms. Tropical cyclones are getting stronger and wetter, while Arctic sea ice is dwindling in the summer and permafrost is thawing. All of these trends will get worse, the report said.

For example, the kind of heat wave that used to happen only once every 50 years now happens once a decade, and if the world warms another degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), it will happen twice every seven years, the report said.

As the planet warms, places will get hit more not just by extreme weather but by multiple climate disasters at once, the report said. That’s like what’s now happening in the Western U.S., where heat waves, drought and wildfires compound the damage, Mearns said. Extreme heat is also driving massive fires in Greece and Turkey.

Some harm from climate change — dwindling ice sheets, rising sea levels and changes in the oceans as they lose oxygen and become more acidic — is “irreversible for centuries to millennia,” the report said.

The world is “locked in” to 15 to 30 centimeters (6 to 12 inches) of sea level rise by mid-century, said report co-author Bob Kopp of Rutgers University.

Scientists have issued this message for more than three decades, but the world hasn’t listened, said United Nations Environment Program Executive Director Inger Andersen.

For the first time, the report offers an interactive atlas for people to see what has happened and may happen to where they live.

Nearly all of the warming that has happened on Earth can be blamed on emissions of heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. At most, natural forces or simple randomness can explain one- or two-tenths of a degree of warming, the report said.

The report described five different future scenarios based on how much the world reduces carbon emissions. They are: a future with incredibly large and quick pollution cuts; another with intense pollution cuts but not quite as massive; a scenario with moderate emission cuts; a fourth scenario where current plans to make small pollution reductions continue; and a fifth possible future involving continued increases in carbon pollution.

In five previous reports, the world was on that final hottest path, often nicknamed “business as usual.” But this time, the world is somewhere between the moderate path and the small pollution reductions scenario because of progress to curb climate change, said report co-author Claudia Tebaldi, a scientist at the U.S. Pacific Northwest National Lab.

While calling the report “a code red for humanity,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres kept a sliver of hope that world leaders could still somehow prevent 1.5 degrees of warming, which he said is “perilously close.”

Alok Sharma, the president of the upcoming climate negotiations in Scotland, urged leaders to do more so they can “credibly say that we have kept 1.5 degrees alive.”

“Anything we can do to limit, to slow down, is going to pay off,” Tebaldi said. “And if we cannot get to 1.5, it’s probably going to be painful, but it’s better not to give up.”

In the report’s worst-case scenario, the world could be around 3.3 degrees Celsius (5.9 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than now by the end of the century. But that scenario looks increasingly unlikely, said report co-author and climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, climate change director of the Breakthrough Institute.

“We are a lot less likely to get lucky and end up with less warming than we thought,” Hausfather said. “At the same time, the odds of ending up in a much worse place than we expected if we do reduce our emissions are notably lower.”

The report also said ultra-catastrophic disasters — commonly called “tipping points,” like ice sheet collapses and the abrupt slowdown of ocean currents — are “low likelihood” but cannot be ruled out. The much talked-about shutdown of Atlantic ocean currents, which would trigger massive weather shifts, is something that’s unlikely to happen in this century, Kopp said.

A “major advance” in the understanding of how fast the world warms with each ton of carbon dioxide emitted allowed scientists to be far more precise in the scenarios in this report, Mason-Delmotte said.

In a new move, scientists emphasized how cutting airborne levels of methane — a powerful but short-lived gas that has soared to record levels — could help curb short-term warming. Lots of methane the atmosphere comes from leaks of natural gas, a major power source. Livestock also produces large amounts of the gas, a good chunk of it in cattle burps.

More than 100 countries have made informal pledges to achieve “net zero” human-caused carbon dioxide emissions sometime around mid-century, which will be a key part of the negotiations in Scotland. The report said those commitments are essential.

“It is still possible to forestall many of the most dire impacts,” Barrett said.

We need to help our planet – it is the only one we have!

Tony