Rust Belt Midwest

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broaden to include flyover, see urban rural FARM

see ALecKoch-alypse

agribiz

SEE PESTICIDE CANCER BAYER GLYPHO, RuRAL HEAlth cut

is texas midwest? agric? beef?

oil resource curse that centralizes power/corruption?

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AN 3 26 FARM

'Lost all hope': Trump policies are crushing food industry in Republican heartland

Trump-loving farmers threaten 'to quit' as president’s war spikes fertilizer prices

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pesticide-use-and-cancer-risk-rise-together-across-americas-heartland

MANY PIX GFX NO LNX

Investigative / Enterprise:Health

Pesticide use and cancer risk rise together across America’s heartland

America’s farmers and farmworkers, their families and neighbors, are being diagnosed with cancer at rates higher than the national average. A growing body of research indicates that pesticides are partly to blame.

by Ben Felder, Investigate Midwest

February 18, 2026

Why you can trust Investigate Midwest

Lisa Lawler wasn’t surprised when diagnosed with breast cancer in 2025. Her mother had breast cancer and died in 2016. It seemed like cancer had become a common diagnosis for many of her neighbors and friends.

“With how many people seem to get cancer in our community, you just assume you will get it,” said Lawler, who lives in rural Hardin County, Iowa. “But no one really talks about what’s causing it.”

After 10 rounds of radiation and a surgery to remove the tumor, Lawler’s cancer was in remission. Last year, she took a test to determine if her cancer was likely genetic, meaning a high chance of recurrence, which could lead her to have her entire breast removed.

She was surprised by the results.

“The genetic test they ran for me was one that covered 81 genes that are typically related to breast cancer,” Lawler said. “After the test, they told me my cancer is likely not genetic, but likely environmental, based on these 81 genes.

“Your next thought is, then what’s in the environment that caused my cancer?”

Increasingly, pesticides are being blamed for rising cancer rates across America’s agricultural communities.

Hardin County, home to around 800 farms, has a pesticide use rate more than four times the national average and a cancer rate among the highest in the state.

Most of the 500 counties with the highest pesticide use per square mile are located in the Midwest. Sixty percent of those counties also had cancer rates higher than the national average of 460 cases per 100,000 people, according to an analysis of data from both the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Cancer Institute.

Last year, Investigate Midwest, in partnership with the University of Missouri, investigated the link between agrichemicals and cancer in Missouri, finding that many were rural communities that already lacked access to healthcare.

This story was produced as part of the Pulitzer Center’s StoryReach U.S. Fellowship.

Investigate Midwest expanded on that coverage by analyzing data across the country, along with interviewing more than 100 farmers, environmentalists, lawmakers and scientists as part of a partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s StoryReach U.S. Fellowship. The result was the picture of a nation at a crossroads in dealing with this public health crisis that has not just been ignored by state and federal health officials, but aided.

This story was also supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

“Cancer is everywhere and it’s an experience that is unfortunately all too common,” said Kerri Johannsen, senior director of policy and programs at the Iowa Environmental Council, a Des Moines-based nonprofit that has been studying the state’s growing cancer rate.

Agrichemicals have helped America become a crop-producing power, increasing yields of commodity crops — such as corn and soybeans — used for food, fuel and animal feed.

Sprayed from airplanes, drones, tractors and handheld devices, these chemicals can drift through the air or run off into nearby rivers and streams.

And for decades, some farmers and pesticide users have developed neurological and respiratory issues. Thousands of lawsuits have alleged that pesticides and the companies that make them were to blame.

Kerri Johannsen, senior director of policy and programs at the Iowa Environmental Council

Pesticide manufacturers often rejected those claims while sometimes concealing research by their own employees that raised similar concerns. These companies — such as Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva and BASF — have also spent millions to lobby federal and state lawmakers for laws that would limit their legal liability and continue to allow them to sell agrichemicals.

“This is one of the most transparently reviewed products ever,” said Jessica Christiansen, the head of crop science communications for Bayer, speaking about her company’s production of Roundup, a glyphosate-based pesticide. “This product is so well studied … been on the market for over 50 years with thousands and thousands of studies. There is no linkage to cancer, there just isn’t.”

Under the Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Agriculture have also hired dozens of former pesticide executives and lobbyists, some of whom have already pushed for deregulation of their industry. The Department of Health and Human Services has also altered its own reports to downplay the harm of pesticides.

Two states — North Dakota and Georgia — recently passed laws limiting their residents’ ability to sue pesticide companies, and at least a dozen other states will consider similar laws in the coming months.

“We’ve gotten to a point in the U.S. … where we’ve stopped treating pesticides as if they are dangerous tools,” said Rob Faux, who manages a small Iowa farm and has advocated against pesticide liability shield laws. “Instead, these companies tell these stories that these pesticides are completely safe and we are encouraged to use them anytime. We’ve been convinced that we must use them or we are not going to have enough food to eat.”

In Iowa, a state with heavy pesticide use — 53 million pounds last year — and the nation’s second-highest cancer rate, doctors and health officials have been sounding an alarm for years.

The state has become ground zero in the fight to limit the impact of pesticides on health and the environment. Farmers have gathered at the state Capitol to advocate for increased laws and funding to address the rising cancer rate. That advocacy likely helped defeat a bill last year that would have protected pesticide makers from some lawsuits.

I call myself a Republican, but this is not about politics; this is about money, about the almighty dollar.”

Bill Billings, a resident of Red Oak, Iowa, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2024

“I believe the groups wanting this (bill) to go through didn’t expect any substantial resistance, but there was enough resistance,” said Faux, who also works for the Pesticide Action and Agroecology Network, a nonprofit advocating for less agrichemical use.

The Iowa bill was strongly opposed by environmental and health organizations, which have traditionally been left-leaning. But there was also strong opposition from many conservative residents and farmers.

“I call myself a Republican, but this is not about politics; this is about money, about the almighty dollar,” said Bill Billings, a resident of Red Oak, Iowa, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2024.

Initially, doctors told Billings, then 61, he would likely be dead in a matter of months after discovering lymphoma in his lungs. A health enthusiast and hospital administrator, Billings had been a regular user of Roundup, the popular Bayer pesticide used on farms and residential properties.

“The cancer specialist said, very directly, (my) cancer is a result of being exposed to chemicals,” Billings said. “In my records, it literally says that I have cancer as a result of exposure to Roundup and agrochemicals.”

Billings was prescribed a five-drug regimen, along with chemotherapy. In September, he was declared cancer-free.

Last year, he hired a lawyer to file a lawsuit against Bayer.

“The irony is … Bayer Pharmaceuticals makes one of the drugs that treated my cancer,” Billings said. “It’s disturbing to find out you are in this financial circle — not only as a consumer, but as a patient.”

Bill Billings, his home, and surrounding neighborhood in Red Oak, Iowa, photographed Jan. 21, 2026. photos by Geoff Johnson, for Investigate Midwest

Research increasingly links pesticides to growing cancer risk

Cancer is a complex disease and can be caused by numerous environmental and genetic factors. Some links have been clear — such as smoking and lung cancer — while other forms can be impossible to trace back to an original cause.

But scientific research linking pesticides with certain types of cancers has been growing.

“Our findings show that the impact of pesticide use on cancer incidence may rival that of smoking,” scientists wrote in a 2024 study, which was published in Frontiers in Cancer Control and Society.

The study linked pesticides to prostate, lung, pancreas and colon cancers. Pesticides have also been associated with lymphoma and Parkinson’s disease, the study claimed.

Many doctors in agricultural communities say the link with pesticides is hard to deny.

“Iowa has a super high rate (of cancer) and when you look at all of our modifiable risk factors … tobacco, obesity, too many calories, highly processed foods, lack of physical activity, alcohol consumption, getting vaccinated for HPV, sun exposure, and so on, Iowa doesn’t really stand out dramatically at any of those,” said Dr. Richard Deming, medical director at MercyOne Cancer Center in Des Moines. “But one thing that distinguishes Iowa from other states is our environmental exposure to agricultural chemicals.”

Richard Deming, medical director at MercyOne Cancer Center in Des Moines

Deming and other health experts also point to Iowa’s high radon levels, a naturally occurring radioactive gas produced by uranium and radium.

The state also has high levels of fertilizer-derived nitrate in its water, which has been associated with increased cancer risk.

“But we use tons of ag chemicals that make it quite likely that the volume of these chemicals is contributing to what we’re seeing in Iowa in terms of the increased incidence of cancer,” Deming said.

A direct correlation can be difficult to determine, as cancer development times can range from months to decades. Overlaying cancer rates onto a map, however, highlights the nation’s top crop and vegetable growing regions, where pesticide use is highest.

The Midwestern states of Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska and Missouri — leading corn-growing states — had the highest rates, while rates were also high in California and Florida, high fruit-growing states.

Lawler, who developed breast cancer in Hardin County, grew up on her family’s 400-acre farm, where her father grew corn and used 2,4-D, a pesticide made by Dow Chemicals. She and her siblings moved out of state after high school, but Lawler returned in 2010.

Pesticides have become indispensable in farming, Lawler acknowledged, but she wishes more people would ask questions about the risks.

“We change products all the time when we learn about the health impacts,” Lawler said.

These family photos show Lisa Lawler with her mother and siblings over the years. Lawler was recently diagnosed with breast cancer; her mother later died after a cancer diagnosis. The family believes years of farm pesticide and herbicide exposure may have contributed. All photo provided by Lisa Lawler.

As lawsuits mount, Bayer pushes state laws to limit liability

In early 2022, Rodrigo Santos had just been promoted to the head of Bayer’s crop sciences division, a prestigious position within the German-based chemical company. But a global pandemic, climate change and a pending war in Ukraine were disrupting the global production and sale of crops — a direct hit to the company’s pesticide sales.

“The global food system is in crisis,” Santos wrote in a column for the World Economic Forum, going on to say that the world needed to grow more food without a significant increase in the amount of land devoted to crops.

But beyond the pandemic and war, another crisis presented an existential threat to one of the company’s top-selling products. Roundup, the glyphosate-based weed killer produced by Monsanto, which Bayer bought in 2018, had been blamed for causing cancer in thousands of lawsuits.

In 2019, a California jury ordered Bayer to pay $2 billion in one lawsuit (the amount was later reduced). Since then, more than 65,000 lawsuits have been filed against the company, according to Bayer, and the company has agreed to pay more than $12 billion in settlements.

Since purchasing Missouri-based Monsanto, Bayer’s stock price has dropped more than 90% over five years.

This investigation looks at the relationship between pesticide use and rising cancer rates across the heartland. It’s the first in a series and part of a larger reporting effort that takes time, data, and sustained work.

In recent years, Bayer executives, including Santos, openly discussed discontinuing glyphosate production. We are “evaluating all the alternatives that we have for the business,” Santos told investors last year when asked about a possible sale of its Roundup division.

But while Bayer publicly said it was reconsidering its glyphosate business, a review of lobbying disclosure statements, campaign finance records, state legislative records and other documents reveals the world’s largest pesticide company remains committed to expanding its sales.

Under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, the EPA regulates the warning labels on pesticide products. While state-level lawsuits have claimed that federal labeling is insufficient, pesticide companies, including Bayer, have argued that federal regulations should trump state laws.

Bayer, along with other corporate agriculture groups, has pushed for bills in more than a dozen states that would codify the view that federal labeling regulations are sufficient warning, effectively voiding state-level lawsuits.

Jessica Christiansen, head of crop science communications for Bayer

Christiansen, the head of crop science communications for Bayer, disputed that these laws will stop lawsuits and said courts have yet to begin interpreting those that have passed.

“Folks can still sue a company, and they should if there’s a problem,” Christiansen said. “But the litigation industry has a lot to lose with these (bills) that are out there.”

Founded by Bayer, the Modern Ag Alliance has lobbied for these bills and promoted opinion articles downplaying the health impacts of pesticides.

“If farmers lose access to crop protection products because of misguided ideological agendas, U.S. agriculture would be upended, potentially forcing many family farms to shut down and driving up food costs for every American,” said Elizabeth Burns-Thompson, executive director of the Modern Ag Alliance.

The Modern Ag Alliance has spent more than a quarter of a million dollars on state lobbying since 2024.

In Idaho, the organization spent one in four lobbyist dollars last year. In Iowa, Bayer has spent $209,750 on lobbying since 2023, double what the company spent in the previous decade.

Most of the bills came up short in 2025, but Georgia and North Dakota passed liability shields that will complicate local lawsuits.

Georgia’s Senate Bill 144, which took effect Jan. 1, received some bipartisan support but was mostly approved by the Republican majority and opposed by Democrats.

Similar bills have been filed in at least 10 states for this year’s legislative sessions.

In 2024, the Iowa bill was passed by the state Senate with a 30-to-19 vote. Ahead of a vote in the House last year, farmer and environmental groups lobbied against the bill.

The session ended without the House taking up a vote. The bill could return in 2026, but Faux, the Iowa farmer, said he also worries about it being “snuck into” another bill or budget agreement.

“I don’t think we can just assume this fight is over,” Faux said.

In other states, backlash seemed to stop liability shield bills before they got started.

Rep. Dell Kerbs, R-Oklahoma

In Oklahoma, Rep. Dell Kerbs, a Shawnee Republican, authored a pesticide liability shield bill he said was meant to end “frivolous” lawsuits against pesticide makers.

“What’s happened in our country is we have … judges that have decided they need to be in the labeling business,” Kerbs said when introducing his bill at a Feb. 11, 2025, hearing of the House agriculture committee.

State Rep. Ty Burns, another Republican, asked Kerbs why he chose to author the bill.

“I was first approached by Bayer,” Kerbs responded.

“But this is a labeling bill; it is not an immunity bill. It is just clarifying on EPA labeling regulations,” Kerbs added. “There is nothing that prevents a lawsuit from any single person. This is not giving a free pass to kill people. This simply is saying that a frivolous lawsuit to potentially pad the pocket of somebody who was not reading the label is not a justification to add that to a label through a state district court.”

But when Burns asked Kerbs about opposition to the bill, especially from many farmers, Kerbs denied receiving any complaints.

“That is hard to believe,” Burns told Kerbs, “because I have been bombarded.”

The bill was never presented to the House for a vote.

After early promises, MAHA walks back pesticide oversight

While liability shield laws have been largely advanced by Republican lawmakers, the push to further regulate pesticides has transcended partisan lines.

Both left-leaning environmental groups and conservative health movements, which have targeted agrichemicals and some vaccines, have called for reducing or eliminating the use of pesticides.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been a longtime critic of pesticides. In a May 2025 report, his Make America Healthy Again commission linked pesticide overuse to children’s health issues, which drew praise from both political camps.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. makes remarks at an event announcing the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) Commission on May 22, 2025, in the East Room of the White House. photo by Joyce N. Boghosian, The White House

George Kimbrell, co-executive director of the Center for Food Safety, which has advocated for stronger pesticide regulations, called the initial report a “baby step” forward and said he was encouraged after decades of inaction by the federal government.

“Going back my entire career, 20-plus years now of doing this work, it doesn’t matter if it’s a Democratic administration or a Republican administration, they have been beholden to and done the wishes of the pesticide industry,” Kimbrell told Investigate Midwest last year. “So, this is a unique moment where … there’s a chance that there could be some positive change in terms of responsible oversight for these toxins.”

Corporate agriculture groups heavily criticized the report, including the American Farm Bureau Federation and CropLife America, a national organization representing many large agrichemical companies, including Bayer, Corteva Agriscience and Syngenta.

Many of those groups and companies had been large financial backers of Trump. But Kennedy downplayed any concerns that the president would avoid taking a hard position against pesticide companies because of that support.

“I’ve met every president since my uncle was president, and I’ve never seen a president (like Trump), Democrat or Republican, that is willing to stand up to industry when it’s the right thing to do,” Kennedy said at a May 22, 2025, MAHA commission meeting as the president sat smiling to his right.

Three months later, Kennedy’s MAHA commission published its final report, which contained no calls to further regulate pesticides. In fact, it called for the federal government to work with large agrichemical companies to ensure public “awareness and confidence” in the EPA’s current pesticide regulations.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment from Kennedy.

MAHA-Report-The-White-House

Many of the groups that expressed optimism over the initial report were outraged over the change.

“This report is … a clear sign that Big Ag, Bayer, and the pesticide industry are firmly embedded in the White House,” said David Murphy, the founder of United We Eat and a former finance director for Kennedy’s presidential campaign.

The Trump administration has employed several pesticide executives, researchers and lobbyists at the EPA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Kyle Kunker, who was a registered lobbyist for the American Soybean Association, an organization that has advocated for the legal liability shield laws at the state level, was hired last year to oversee pesticide policy at the EPA.

Three weeks later, the EPA recommended expanded use of dicamba-based herbicides, which federal courts had previously restricted. The EPA proposal was closely aligned with the position of the American Soybean Association.

In 2025, the EPA also hired Nancy Beck and Lynn Ann Dekleva, both of whom worked with the American Chemistry Council.

Last month, a coalition of MAHA supporters called for the removal of Lee Zeldin, administrator of the EPA.

Lee Zeldin, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, testifies during his Senate Environment and Public Works confirmation hearing on Jan. 16, 2025. photo by Tom Williams, CQ Roll Call via AP Images

Recent EPA decisions around pesticides “will inevitably lead to higher rates of chronic disease, greater medical costs, and tremendous strain on our healthcare system,” the group stated in a petition circulating online.

Several prominent MAHA influencers have joined the petition, posting anti-pesticide messages on social media under handles such as The Glyphosate Girl and the Food Babe. “The EPA is acting like the Everyone Poisoned Agency,” wrote Kelly Ryerson, on her Glyphosate Girl Instagram feed.

As the EPA advances pesticide use, the Trump administration has also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that federal labeling laws invalidate state-level lawsuits.

“After careful scientific review and an assessment of hundreds of thousands of public comments, EPA has repeatedly determined that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic in humans, and the agency has repeatedly approved Roundup labels that did not contain cancer warnings,” Trump’s solicitor general wrote in an amicus brief with the Supreme Court.

However, one of the studies the EPA has often cited in claiming pesticides are safe was recently retracted due to concerns about its authorship and potential conflicts of interest.

The report, published in 2000 by the scientific journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, claimed Roundup “does not pose a health risk to humans.” The report has been the foundation for numerous other studies, court cases and policy decisions.

The journal retracted the study last year, noting that court cases had revealed that Monsanto employees had contributed to the study. “This lack of transparency raises serious ethical concerns regarding the independence and accountability of the authors of this article and the academic integrity of the carcinogenicity studies presented,” the retraction stated.

“This is just one example of how the current process of certifying these chemicals is broken in the U.S.,” said Colleen Fowle, water program director at the Iowa Environmental Council. “At the very least, we’re hoping that this (retraction) eliminates this specific research article from being cited in the future and concentrates more on independent peer-reviewed research as our basis to determine the safety of glyphosate.”

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an 1 25

In the 2024 presidential election, Democratic strategists and Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign were hoping that their "Blue Wall" in the Rust Belt — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — would shield them from a Donald Trump victory. But President-elect Trump won all of those states after losing them in 2020.

While Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin have fluctuated between Trump and the Democratic nominee in presidential elections, Ohio has been Trump's strongest Rust Belt state: He won Ohio three elections in a row.

In an article published on January 13, The Guardian's Andrew Gumbel examines the loyalty that many Rust Belt voters have had to Trump even though he didn't bring about the manufacturing revival he promised in 2016.

READ MORE:['Fascist ideology': Veteran actor slams 'orange idiot' Trump for 'nonsense' claims about LA wildfires

A resident of the Youngstown, Ohio area told The Guardian, "We feel left behind. People who've lived here all their lives are working two or three jobs just to pay their bills."

Sonja Woods, a former General Motors worker and a United Auto Workers (UAW) official, told The Guardian, "We've been lied to, let down. It’s disappointing…. Nobody showed up in Youngstown this time, not Trump or Kamala. There are a lot of bitter people, and I'm one of them."

Gumbel explains, "Trump…. comes across as someone who doesn't pretend to be anything other than what he is, and that perceived authenticity counts for more with many Youngstown voters than his character flaws or even his policy positions. They'd rather have his gut instincts, ugly as they often are, over the carefully scripted messaging of a Democrat like Kamala Harris or even a mainstream Republican."

Dave Betras, a former Democratic county chair in Ohio, believes that his party has a major image problem in the Buckeye State.

Betras told The Guardian, "American voters have a unique ability to smell b------t, and they smell b------t with the Democrats…. Most Americans think the system is rigged. And Trump shuffled the deck on us. Not only does Trump say this thing is rigged, but he says: 'I know, because I rigged it. I was part of the rigging.'"

Tim O’Hara, a former UAW president in Lordstown, Ohio, agrees that Democrats have let the working class down in the Rust Belt but stresses that supporting Trump is not the answer.

O'Hara told The Guardian, "I never liked Trump even when he was only a builder in New York.… because he stiffed union workers and he generally seemed like a douchebag. One thing I wasn't then and I'm not now is a racist, misogynistic, uninformed dips--t who enjoys supporting a rapist, felon, traitor.… These people have no clue yet what they've done, but they will find out."

prolly belated

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alternet-no lnx

Home | Republicans have been lying to their voters for years — and now those same voters are dying

Thom Hartmann June 14, 2024

This is a climate change story that fossil fuel billionaires and their GOP lackeys would rather you didn’t know.

As more and more people are killed by extraordinarily severe weather in places where it used to be unusual it’s going to get harder and harder to keep Red State citizens from finding out how badly they’ve been screwed by the unholy alliance between Republicans and oil barons.

Severe weather in the United States is not only getting worse, it’s moving.

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to run for office?

There’s a reason L. Frank Baum placed his 1901 novel The Wizard of Oz in Kansas: the worst and most frequent tornado activity in the world at that time was in the American Great Plains states — particularly Kansas.

Now that’s changing, as weather extremes are moving to the Midwest and the South. Recently, deadly tornadoes — some with wind velocities in excess of 200 mph — have ravaged Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, Illinois, Georgia, Ohio and Indiana.

This new burst of unusually extreme weather is driven by global warming and its impact on the Arctic, our oceans, and the Gulf of Mexico.

And it’s going to be America’s new normal, although in all probability this is just the beginning and over time it will get a lot worse.

America has always had the most extreme weather of anyplace else on Earth, according to Susan Cutter, director of the Hazards Vulnerability and Resilience Institute at the University of South Carolina.

China has more people and a larger landmass than we do, but, Cutter told ABC News, “they don't have the same kind of clash of air masses as much as you do in the U.S. that is producing a lot of the severe weather.”

The severity of America’s Great Plains states’ historically extreme weather was the result of geography.

While there’s a massive amount of land on either side of the European/Asian land mass, the United States is bracketed by two giant bodies of water, the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. We also have a huge mountain range — the Rockies — that helps determine where turbulent air from the west ends up, particularly as it encounters colder air from the north and warmer air from over the Gulf of Mexico.

As North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello told ABC News, it’s because of “where we are on the globe,” adding, “It’s truly a little bit ... unlucky.”

But now, as the Gulf of Mexico is heating up faster than the oceans on either side of us, combined with “bomb cyclone” cold weather coming down from Canada because melting ice in the Arctic is making the Jet Stream less stable, that severe weather is moving to the Midwest and South.

This appears to be one of the most consequential outcomes of climate change, severe weather-wise, for the United States.

As Victor Gensini, associate professor in the Earth, Atmosphere and Environment Department at Northern Illinois University, told The Chicago Tribune, the Midwest and South are replacing the Plains states as the epicenter of severe weather.

“That’s a really, really big deal for human exposure and vulnerability,” Gensini told Ezra Maille. “A tornado that goes through a wheat field in Kansas is not a big deal, but a tornado that goes through southern Cook County is a huge deal.”

He added that the Great Plains will probably continue to experience more and more severe drought while tornado activity is shifting toward the East and South.

The fossil fuel industry has known with a high level of certainty how severe weather was a probable outcome of America’s dependence on their products ever since the 1970s.

Yet for the fifty years since then — and continuing to this day — they fund phony “science” and shills to deny climate change or try to spin it as a positive, all while pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the campaign coffers and personal bank accounts of mostly Republican politicians.

We’re at least 40 years behind where we should be in dealing with the fossil fuel/global warming crisis because giant oil companies have run massive disinformation campaigns while funding the political careers of hacks in Congress willing to lie to the public for them.

President Jimmy Carter declared a national crisis in 1979 and proposed legislation to create “this nation’s first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20 percent of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000.”

FDR had sold bonds to the public to fund a government corporation that would develop synthetic rubber for fighter plane tires back in the day, and Carter wanted to do the same to end our dependence on fossil fuels:

“Just as a similar synthetic rubber corporation helped us win World War II,” Carter said, “so will we mobilize American determination and ability to win the energy war.”

In that same July 15, 1979 speech, he proposed the government issue bonds that would fund:

“[T]he creation of an energy security corporation to lead this effort to replace 2-1/2 million barrels of imported oil per day by 1990. The corporation will issue up to $5 billion in energy bonds, and I especially want them to be in small denominations so that average Americans can invest directly in America’s energy security.”

But it all came crashing down 43 years ago when the fossil fuel industry’s candidate, Ronald Reagan, replaced Carter, killed the solar bank and the bond program, and even took Carter’s solar panels off the roof of the White House.

The big question now is how long the GOP will be able to keep up their climate change denial in the Red states currently being hammered by extreme weather before their citizens catch on to what’s happening and demand action to reduce our carbon emissions.

As Dr. Michael Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media (PCSSM), told me yesterday:

“It is rather ironic that many of the states that are seeing the worst climate change impacts—Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida—are red states, with governors and legislatures that are far more interested in doing the bidding of polluters than representing the people they’re supposed to be representing.

“Unsurprisingly, these states are all among the lowest when it comes to per capita spending on public education. The alliance of rightwing politicians and polluters prefers a poorly educated electorate, ignorant of the environmental health damage being done to them.”

So, what can be done other than offering subsidies for electric cars?

Number one on the list is to put a price on carbon, which will bend market incentives toward green and renewable energy as a replacement for fossil fuels.

According to the World Bank, there are currently 70 carbon pricing programs in place around the world, covering a bit over 23 percent of all emissions. Some are outright carbon taxes, typically with a rebate program to low- and average-income consumers, and some are cap-and-trade type programs (like President George HW Bush put into place to deal with sulfur dioxide emissions).

Canada’s carbon tax, which they put into place in 2019, is working so well that they actually sped up the process of implementation this year.

The original plan called for the initial $10/ton carbon tax to go up $10 every year until it hit $170/ton. The money collected is then recycled back to low- and average-income consumers to compensate them for the extra costs they’ll incur driving and heating their homes. But the program has been such a success that Canada’s government announced this week they’re raising the carbon tax by a full $15 this year.

They can pull this off because the rebates represent, for most Canadians, far more money in their pockets than the cost of the carbon tax. The brunt of the tax is instead borne by Canadian businesses, which is the group that's been designed to push toward green -- and tax-free or even green-subsidized -- energy sources.

An average taxpayer in Alberta province, for example, now gets a $386 check or bank deposit from their government every three months. It’s $340 quarterly in Saskatchewan, $328 in Newfoundland, $248 in Nova Scotia, and $264 in Manitoba.

This is a system that could work very well here in the US, if only there was the political will to make it happen. And, as we cut emissions and figure out new and better ways to pull existing carbon out of the air and oceans, we may be able to dial back on the increasing severity of storms that are ravaging Red states.

The obstacle to pricing carbon in the US is widespread ignorance of how severe our problem is and its origins in fossil fuel emissions. Fully 58% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters say climate change is “not an important concern” and a mere 17% believe human activities like burning fossil fuels “contribute a great deal to climate change.”

Hopefully the deadly disasters sweeping Red states now will wake up Republican voters and motivate them to demand their Republican politicians stop taking money from fossil fuel billionaires and do something now to stop climate change from getting any worse.

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an kos 2 23

The GOP continues to sling whatever trash they’ve got at President Joe Biden in the wake of his historic trip to Kyiv, Ukraine, and his total dunking on them about the debt ceiling, Social Security, and Medicare. They’re taking their talking points from Tucker Carlson, keeping up the narrative Biden is responsible for the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, because he hates white people.

Here’s the repugnant Sen. Josh Hawley doubling down on that, and throwing in some antisemitism for the heck of it: “My message to congressional Republican: you can either be the party of Ukraine & globalists or you can be the party of East Palestine & the working people of American.”

[twt w tukr]

Let’s talk about the working Americans of East Palestine, Ohio, and who is really helping them. The population of the town is 4,761 as of the 2020 census. It’s in Columbiana County, population 101,877 in 2020. In 2021, the last year statistics are available from, there were 32,077 people in the county who were enrolled in Medicaid, the joint federal/state funded health insurance program for low-income individuals and families.

So, yeah, that’s about a third of the population of the county—the smallest geographical area for which Medicaid data is available. Ohio as a whole saw a nearly 28% hike in Medicaid and CHIP enrollments during the pandemic. (CHIP is the program for children’s health.)

More than 7,500 households in Columbiana County were receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, or food stamps, in November 2022. That’s 14,407 people, including 5,421 children.

This is not a prosperous place. The median household income for the county was $49,265 in 2021, the latest figures available. That’s $12,997 lower than the median Ohio household income and $20,452 less than the U.S. median household income. The minimum wage in Ohio is $10.10/hour, $5.05 for tipped employees.

At the same time, though, the unemployment rate for the county is just 4.3%, all of which means that there are a lot of working people in this place who are living in or very nearly in poverty. And yes, you hardly need to ask: Those people voted for Trump in 2020, 72% to 27% for Biden. They’re probably now lining up in diners all through the county to be interviewed by New York Times reporters.

These are the very programs the GOP always wants to destroy, the programs that truly help working people. Medicaid, food assistance—they’re all on the chopping block as far as the GOP is concerned, and always have been.

This isn’t about Ukraine, and it sure as hell isn’t about the working people of East Palestine, Ohio—where were any of them when Trump was deregulating the rails and making this kind of disaster almost inevitable? Oh, that’s right, supporting an insurrection against the government.

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/gop-2653811907/

"Death Wish" was a hit movie in 1974, starring Charles Bronson as a violent vigilante. Now it's the primary motivation for the Republican Party. As of this week, in 13 states you have a legal right not merely to have a death wish but to inflict it on others by refusing to get vaccinated against COVID. In 21 more states, bills have been introduced that would limit any requirements that individuals produce evidence that they have been vaccinated. In six of those states, the laws specify that schools, including public primary and secondary schools and public colleges, cannot require coronavirus vaccines, even while the same schools continue to require vaccinations against whooping cough, polio, measles and chicken pox.

"It seems to be kind of a mixed bag of all the things going on here — there's the limiting of requiring proof of vaccine, there's the limiting of requiring the vaccination itself, the prohibition of the mandates. So, there's a lot," Lori Tremmel Freeman, chief executive officer of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, told CNN.

These bills are being called "vaccine freedom laws," as in, you have a right to be free of the vaccines against COVID. What's not a mixed bag is the political leaning of the states. All the states where such laws are in effect are controlled by Republican governors and legislatures: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.

You could call them the death wish states, or the Kevorkian states, after the infamous Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who was jailed for eight years after assisting a man to commit suicide who suffered from ALS, otherwise known as Lou Gehrig's disease. So if you want to enjoy your freedom to catch COVID and possibly die, those 13 states are the states for you. In six of them, you are guaranteed the freedom to subject your unvaccinated children to the virus as well.

At the same time the Republican Party is moving to protect your right to refuse the COVID vaccine, rates of infection are on the rise across the country. According to Johns Hopkins University, the new case rate is 10 percent higher in 46 states than it was last week. According to CNN, "In 31 states, new cases this past week are at least 50% higherthan new cases the previous week."

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CNN that more than 99 percent of deaths from Covid in June were unvaccinated patients. CNN reports that "the vast majority of new Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths … are among unvaccinated people, doctors say."

The Delta variant of the virus is causing more infections among children and young adults than before. In Missouri, where just 39 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated, the situation is so bad that the CDC and FEMA have sent teams of specialists to the state to help stop the spread of the disease. "We've been seeing a much younger population," Dr. Harold Jarvis, an emergency physician in Springfield, Missouri, told CNN. "We're seeing a lot of people in their 30s, 40s, early 50s. We're seeing some teenagers and some pediatric patients as well."

Missouri is one of the states that has passed a law forbidding the requirement of a COVID vaccine or evidence of vaccination such as a so-called vaccine passport.

In Mississippi, where the vaccination rate is only 33 percent, seven children are in intensive care with COVID disease and two are on ventilators, according to the state health officer, Thomas Dobbs. On Monday, Dobbs tweeted "Pretty much ALL cases in MS are Delta variant right now. Vast majority of cases/hospitalizations/deaths UNVACCINATED." By Wednesday, Dobbs was tweeting that the state had suffered a "Big jump," and reported 641 new cases and five deaths in one day, along with 36 new outbreaks of the virus in long-term care facilities such as nursing homes and rehabilitation centers.

Mississippi has three bills pending before the state legislature that would prohibit issuing a "vaccine passport" and prohibit businesses and state facilities from requiring proof of vaccination.. One bill has passed both houses of the legislature and is awaiting the governor's signature.

But it's in Tennessee that promotion of the Republican death wish has reached its nadir. On Monday, the state fired its top immunization official for her efforts to get teenagers vaccinated against the COVID virus. "This is about a partisan issue around covid vaccines and around people in power in Tennessee not believing in the importance in vaccinating the people, and so they terminated the person in charge of getting it done," Michelle Fiscus told the Washington Post. She was director of all immunization programs at the Tennessee Department of Health. "The government is sacrificing public health to be in the good graces of our legislators; it's a horrid dereliction of duty," she said on Monday. The Tennessean, the state's largest daily newspaper, reported on Tuesday that the state would stop promoting vaccinations for all teenagers, and would cease sending out reminders for teenagers who had received one vaccination to get their second dose.

That's more than a death wish. With 99 percent of all deaths from Covid among the unvaccinated, that is more like the organized and state-sanctioned killing of children.

I've been reading these stories all week and trying to figure out what's driving this madness. The evidence is out there for everyone to see. There can't be a state legislator or governor in this country who isn't aware that virtually all people who come down with COVID today, and 98 or 99 percent of those who die from the disease, are unvaccinated. They have to be aware of the fact, and it is a fact, that if you want to avoid being hospitalized with this disease and dying from it, a vaccination will not only help, it will absolutely prevent both outcomes.

They're not just standing up and speaking out against the COVID vaccines, they are passing laws with the express purpose of making it easier for people to refuse vaccinations. In some cases, these laws are specifically aimed at school-age children. It's one thing to put your adult neighbors and employees and fellow workers at risk. It's quite another to put not only your children, but allchildren at greater risk of getting sick with a virus that, with the spread of the Delta Variant, is showing signs of being deadly to children as well as adults.

The only answer I've been able to come up with is the obvious one. It's about politics, and not just any politics. These Republican death wish laws have one purpose: they are designed to make President Biden's push to get all Americans vaccinated fail. Republicans at the CPAC gathering last week in Dallas were laughing at references to Biden's goal of vaccinating 70 percent of the population by the Fourth of July. One speaker received an ovation when he told the crowd, "The government was hoping they could sucker 90% of the population into getting vaccinated. And it isn't happening."

"The government," of course, is no longer being run by the man the whole CPAC conference was designed to celebrate, former president Donald Trump. It's run by the man who beat him, Joe Biden, and the Republican Party seems determined to do as much damage to his vaccination program as they can, even if that means enacting laws that will surely cause more people to get sick from the virus and die.

Republicans have become the death wish party. Unsatisfied with passing laws to take away people's right to vote, they have moved on to passing laws that will, without a doubt, take away people's right to life.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

:{Majority of top newspapers in agricultural producing states fail to mention UN climate and land report on their front pages:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{:(style="box-sizing:border-box;display:flex;height:1.5em;margin-right:1em;width:1.5em"):}:08/14/19 MMA

also good

The Wall Street Journal reports that “a small but growing number of Republican lawmakers are urging action on climate change, driven by shifting sentiment among GOP voters and the effects of global warming, from stronger hurricanes to more-destructive wildfires.”

According to the Journal, longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz (author of a now-infamous memo on how to confuse and divide votersabout climate change) has warned Republicans that their obstruction and anti-science rhetoric are driving away voters, particularly younger conservatives.

great: flood survivors want answers for unnatural disasters

After her hometown flooded for the fourth time in three years, killing some of her neighbors,Missourian Susan Liley got mad.
Liley and other De Soto residents founded the Citizen’s Committee for Flood Relief in 2015 with two initial goals, as Ensia, the solutions-focused digital magazine, reports:“figure out some kind of early warning system” and “understand the root causes of repeated flooding and address them”
Now they’re networking with dozens of other flood survivors’ groups to strategize, connect with scientific assistance, and petition elected officials for answers to why this is happening, along with funding and action to slash future flood risks.
Human-caused climate change is driving rainfall and sea level changes, which are contributing to the growing number of disastrous flood events across the country.
But lax zoning and construction rules also contribute by allowing overdevelopment on floodplains, which puts more people in the way of these more frequent and destructive floods.
“Questions of fairness are increasingly on flood survivors’ minds,” notes Ensia. “A substantial body of research (highlighted in a recent exposé by NPR) shows that federal aid actually leaves wealthy, white communities better off after natural disasters — while the reverse is true for low-income communities of color.”
Another new Ensia piece explores the promise and challenges of moving urban floodwaters underground to better cope with increased flooding, and recharge aquifers at the same time.

519 eg flooding, pipleines

, InsideClimate News and 14 Midwest newsrooms published an innovative joint project on climate change challenges and solutionsacross the region. Here's what we found.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/most-of-americas-rural-areas-are-doomed-to-decline/

the conv swenson

Since the Great Recession, most of the nation’s rural counties have struggled to recover lost jobs and retain their people. The story is markedly different in the nation’s largest urban communities.

I’m writing from Iowa, where every four years presidential hopefuls swoop in to test how voters might respond to their various ideas for fixing the country’s problems.

But what to do about rural economic and persistent population decline is the one area that has always confounded them all.

The facts are clear and unarguable. Most of the nation’s smaller urban and rural counties are not growing and will not grow.

Let’s start with my analysis of U.S. Commerce Department data.

Employment after the Great Recession

Between 2008 and 2017, non-farm jobs grew in most U.S. counties, but a few, mostly rural places were left behind.

[map]

Metropolitan areas consist of those counties with central cities of at least 50,000, along with the surrounding counties that are economically dependent on them. They make up 36% of all counties. Between 2008, the cusp of the Great Recession, and 2017, they enjoyed nearly 99% of all job and population growth.

What remained of job and population growth was divided among the 21% of counties that are called micropolitans, which have midsized cities with between 10,000 and 50,000 residents, and the remaining 42% of counties that are rural.

Nationally, 71% of all metropolitan counties grew between 2008 and 2017, but more than half of the remaining micropolitan and rural counties did not grow or shrank in population.

Population after the Great Recession

Nearly 99 percent of all population growth between 2008 and 2017 occurred in metropolitan counties or in counties directly adjacent to them.

[map]

Regional breakdown

Regional outcomes were also sharply divergent. The West and the South combined had 72% and 82% of the job and population gains, respectively, while the Northeast and the Midwest split the remainder.

Economic and population declines among micropolitan and rural areas were especially strong in the Northeast and the Midwest. Eighty-seven percent of the micropolitan counties contracted in the Northeast, as did 85% of their rural counties. In the Midwest, 61% of the micropolitans contracted, as did 81% of the rural counties.

Geographically, a large fraction of the nation is struggling to simply maintain the status quo. Yes, there are many struggling metropolitan regions, but there are many more midsized and rural counties wrestling with decline.

Bringing it back home, 69 of Iowa’s 99 counties have contracted since 2010, along with 10 of its 15 micropolitan counties. This ongoing struggle of midsized counties has negative economic and social consequences. Residents in surrounding rural areas depend on them for jobs, essential services, public goods and other commercial and recreational amenities.

There is, in short, a regional ripple effect. When micropolitan counties falter, neighboring rural counties that depend on them often falter, too. This is true in Iowa and evident as well across much of the U.S.

What’s behind the trends

Scholars and analysts have varying explanations for these outcomes.

The more rural areas are hollowing out the middle of the workforce. They contain lower percentages of people in the prime working ages of 25 to 54 because of persistent outmigration.

Others define the population losses in terms of widespread declines in demand for middle skill jobs due to automation and outsourcing in manufacturing, as well as technology advances in mining, forestry and agriculture.

Of late, manufacturing and technology firms claim that the woes of small urban and rural areas are due to skills gaps – that distressed economies could grow and their populations could stabilize if more people acquired more technical skills.

US growth after the Great Recession

Between 2008 and 2017, the lion’s share of population growth and non-farm job growth occurred in metropolitan areas, primarily in the south and west.

Fated to dwindle

The U.S. has been consistently urbanizing, especially for the past 100 years. Technology advances in manufacturing, agriculture, mining, fishing and forestry accelerated migration from rural to urban areas.

Over time, incremental innovations in those original core industries required fewer workers, further boosting migration away from rural areas. Much of the blue-collar and middle-income shares of more rural economies dwindled as a result.

Small and medium-sized urban areas – and the rural counties that are linked to them – are left withtransportation, public works, housing and commercial bases that they struggle to maintain. Inevitably, blight ensues. Most micropolitan and rural communities have no viable economic Plan B, so I believe that the majority of them are fated to dwindle until eventually reaching some level of stability.

Federal and state governments provide them fresh water and wastewater treatment assistance, health care access, subsidized transportation and workforce training, but none of that alters the underlying forces inhibiting their collective prospects for growth. Every core industry originally undergirding these areas continues to shed jobs.

Meanwhile, the nation’s metropolitan cities continue to accumulate greater opportunities for meaningful jobs, career advancement and enhanced qualities of lives.

As a researcher who has studied rural economies for more than three decades, I urge policymakers to seriously consider the fact that most rural areas will not grow. It is important to develop policies that assure access to necessary public services, connect rural residents to modern technologies for the sake of participating meaningfully in modern society and safeguard that which is good and appealing about these less populated places.

Academics are good at isolating the causes and the consequences of rural decline, but we have yet to figure out what to do about it.

mma 3/19

Climate change is often talked about in the media as some thing that will happen in the distant future. This characterization is dangerously misleading: The climate crisis is here now. And the effects are very real -- and incredibly devastating.

Climate change is behind the devastating flooding in the Midwest. The flooding has caused billions in damages, multiple deaths, and one Native American reservation has even been left without drinking water for weeks. A "bomb cyclone" led to massive flooding in the Midwest, and scientists are clear on the role climate change played. Climate scientist Michael Mann told MSNBC, "As the oceans warm up, there’s more moisture that’s available to these storms to turn into record rainfall. That’s what we saw with this bomb cyclone." That's not the only factor linking to climate change, either. The fluctuating jet stream and water on the ground as a result of record snow before the storm are both linked to climate change.

Media Matters' Evlondo Cooper looked at how the floods were covered, and as it turns out, none of this was mentioned in the network coverage of the flooding. Climate change never even was mentioned at all on ABC, CBS, and NBC. Cable news was barely better than that, and even newspaper coverage was barely adequate.

The corporate media has completely failed on the climate crisis. Regardless of whether it is a heat wave, hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, outlets repeatedly refuse to connect the dots. It's time to stop portraying climate change as a problem for the future -- and to recognize it as a crisis we are dealing with now.

Also: One of the worst climate disasters was Hurricane Maria, in which at least 3,000 Americans died in Puerto Rico alone. And yet, Puerto Rico has consistently been under covered in televised media since the disaster, even as Trump alleged that the death toll itself was fake. In the past few weeks, network news has ignored that Trump has repeatedly called for reduced aid to Puerto Rico amid a food stamp crisis.

If one word can capture the sentiment of rural and small-town dwellers in recent years, it is “resentment.”

I am a scholar who studies politics at the state and local level. Residents of rural and small-town communities believe they are not getting their fair share of government attention and vital resources compared to urban dwellers. They believe that America is moving away from them.

As the 2020 presidential campaign gears up, these resentful Americans will play a key role. How strong supporters of Donald Trump in the 2016 election vote in 2020 will depend on whether the president has delivered on the promises he made to help them out.

Will this growing divide affect American politics beyond Trump?

Left behind

Political scientist Katherine Cramer has spent over a decade doing field work in 27 small Wisconsin towns to understand how people use social class identity to interpret politics. Cramer found that people in these rural areas feel as though they are being ignored by urban elites and urban institutions like government and the media at a time when they are struggling to make ends meet.

They believe their communities are dying, the economy is leaving them behind, and that young people, money and their livelihoods are going somewhere else.

They think that major decisions affecting their lives are being made far away in big cities. And perhaps most importantly, they feel that no one is listening to them or their ideas about things that are important to them.

Most distressing to those living in this situation is the belief that no one, and especially no one in government, really cares.

From resentment to division and deadlock

To date, the phenomenon of “resentment” has been responsible for adding another layer of heightened division among Americans, including an increase in political polarization.

That makes it much more difficult for federal government officials, as well as those at the state and local level, to reach consensus on important issues of the day.

University of California, Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s book, “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right” helps in explaining how this frustration and anger of small-town and rural area dwellers has resulted in increasing political support for Republican candidates, generally, and for Trump, specifically.

Hochschild contends that the changing and turbulent politics of Wisconsin, a so-called purple state with a stark urban-rural divide, mirror the national rage that swept Trump into the White House.

Given their intensifying feelings of resentment for being ignored and left behind, rural and small-town dwellers were particularly receptive to the slogan touted by Trump in his campaign – “Make America Great Again!”

Trump won the country’s small town and non-metropolitan areas by 63.2 percent to 31.3 percent, with his largest vote shares coming from the most rural areas.

Like other Republican presidential candidates over the last 10 years, Trump garnered a large majority of the vote in traditional rural areas like Appalachia, the Great Plains and parts of the South.

Surprisingly, however, Trump also won a substantial proportion of the traditionally Democratic small town and rural vote in several key Midwestern industrial areas. He won 57 percent of that vote in Michigan, 63 percent in Wisconsin and 71 percent in Pennsylvania.

Why Trump triumphed

Trump implied or clearly promised to repeal Obamacare, build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and deport around 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the U.S.

Other appealing policies were tax cuts for both businesses and individuals; significant reductions in the regulation of business and industry; and import tariffs on foreign goods that compete unfairly with American-made products.

Data collected by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (from a national survey of more than 54,000 respondents) clearly show that people living in small towns and rural areas who supported these kinds of policies were decisively more likely to vote for Trump rather than Clinton in 2016.

Above all, Trump promised a shift in the focus of the national government so that much more attention would be directed to rural areas and small towns and the challenges they faced.

This evidently buoyed the hope of Trump supporters in these areas that they would be getting something closer to their fair share of government attention and resources.

Voters’ party breakdown by community, November 2018 election

Residents of small-towns and rural areas are more supportive of the Republican Party and its candidates than people in urban and suburban areas.

Voting implications

There is ample evidence of voting patterns in recent years – even before the 2016 election – that suggest that voters in rural areas and small towns were increasingly voting for Republican candidates in national and state elections. This trend was quite visible from Republican and Democratic vote proportions in the 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012 elections.

In 2008, 53 percent of rural voters cast ballots for the Republican presidential candidate; 59 percent did in 2012; and 62 percent did in 2016.

This was most clear in the 2016 election in the 2,332 counties that make up small-town and rural America, where Trump swamped Hillary Clinton by winning 60 percent as opposed to 34 percent of the vote.

Trump’s 26-point advantage over Clinton in rural America was much greater than had been the case for Republican presidential nominees in the four previous elections.

The Trump appeal and the growing urban-rural division in the country is also evident from the fact that Trump’s vote percentage in rural America was 29 points higher than he received in the nation’s urban counties and far larger than for Republican presidential nominees between 2000 and 2012.

Moreover, responses to a 2017 Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation survey of rural and small-town voters in the 2016 election indicate that they were more likely to vote for Trump and also agree with him on a variety of issues.

Those included immigration, tax cuts, eliminating regulations on businesses, making better trade deals, targeting more infrastructure projects and federal government services to rural areas and small towns, and appointing more conservative judges to the federal courts.

But, did this trend of strong support from rural voters for Republican candidates, including Trump, continue into the 2018 midterm election?

About half of Trump’s ideas and policy proposals have been accomplished, with the others yet to gain traction in Congress, two years after his election. So his record of delivering for these rural voters is mixed.

Nevertheless, they stuck with Trump in the 2018 election.

“Rural voters stormed to the polls in virtually unprecedented numbers in 2018 and once again delivered for the president they voted for in 2016,” The Hill reported. They delivered Trump “a handful of critical Senate and gubernatorial elections in ruby red states.”

While not totally surprising, the Trump camp did not know what to expect going into the midterm election, given the numerous investigations of the president and his low public approval rating.

Somewhat more surprising is what has been happening in a purple state like Florida, where Republicans have improved on both their turnout and overall performance in rural areas for several elections in a row.

Newly elected Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis ran ahead of Trump’s 2016 performance and former Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s 2014 vote share in 13 of 16 counties in the Florida Panhandle. Rick Scott unseated longtime Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson by piling up large margins in the small towns and rural areas of the state. Similar scenarios in U.S. Senate races took place in key states like Missouri, Indiana, Texas and Tennessee, where Republicans won huge victories in rural counties.

Survey data collected from over 90,000 people by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago in November 2018 paint a vivid picture of the continuing urban-rural/small-town divide.

Results show that residents of small towns and rural areas are much more supportive of the Republican Party and its candidates than people in urban and suburban areas.

In addition, the most ardent supporters of Republicans are among those small-town and rural dwellers who are white and male, have less than a college education and vote on a regular basis.

I believe that the urban-rural/small-town divide will continue to act as a major force in politics for the remainder of the Trump era – and probably longer.

J. Edwin Benton, Professor of Political Science and Public Administration, University of South Florida

Water is life”: Midwestern floods threaten indigenous communities at forefront of climate crisis

by Amy Goodman March 24, 2019

As Nebraska and the U.S. Midwest recover from devastating climate change-fueled floods, we speak with Lakota historian Nick Estes on how two centuries of indigenous resistance created the movement proclaiming…

beat 2018 --> dirty tricks: (anti-democratic authoritarian moves)

eg https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2019/03/04/right-wing-funded-groups-battle-new-state-governors

ctr-attack

If the corporate-funded influence groups on the Right have their way, there will be no honeymoon for newly elected Democratic governors.

Affiliates of the State Policy Network (SPN), a network of right-wing “think tanks” in 49 states bankrolled by the Kochs and other billionaires and big corporations, have already been deployed to oppose legislation introduced by Democratic governors in states that previously had GOP governors.

Last week the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) wrote about the battle over Medicaid in Wisconsin, where the newly elected Democratic governor, Tony Evers, who replaced the GOP’s Scott Walker, has introduced a measure to expand Medicaid in the state.

The article showed how right-wing “think tanks,” in this case the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) and the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy (CROWE), and state legislators quickly rolled out a flawed study to exaggerate the costs of Medicaid expansion to the tune of $600 million. The “research” was released without noting that the paper supported the anti-Medicaid expansion position taken by the groups’ major funders: the Bradley Foundation and the Koch brothers.

Minimum Wage Fight in Illinois

In Illinois, Governor J.B. Pritzker, who defeated Republican incumbent Bruce Rauner, introduced an increase in the state’s minimum wage as one of his first acts. The state’s SPN affiliate, the Illinois Policy Institute (IPI), quickly went on the attack, repeating claims that a rise in the minimum wage reduces jobs, because Illinois would have higher minimum wages than surrounding states. The group does not consider the relative cost of living among Midwestern states, and ignores the experience of nearby Minnesota where 92,600 have directly benefited from the January 1 increase, the Economic Policy Institute reports.

Nonetheless, the Illinois legislature voted along party lines to increase the state minimum wage to $15 by 2025, starting with a $1 increase next year to $9.25 an hour. On February 19, the Governor signed the bill into law.

IPI is well-connected to right-wing billionaires. The GOP megadonor Richard Uihlein has provided $11.8 million through his foundation to IPI since 2009, according to a CMD analysis of IRS filings. Robert Mercer has donated $1.1 million through his foundation to IPI over the same period, and the preferred piggy bank of the Koch donor network, DonorsTrust and its sister organization Donors Capital fund, has funneled over $1.5 million to IPI since 2010.

Notably, IPI has received $717,300 from SPN itself between 2012 and 2017, making it one of the largest grant recipients over this period.

Previously IPI was listed as a “partner organization” in the Charles Koch Institute‘s Liberty@Work program, but the current status of that program is unknown.

Consistent with the opinions of its funders, IPI also does not consider the ripple effect of a rise in the incomes of low wage workers.

A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute finds that raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2024 would increase wages for 40 million U.S. workers, which would “stimulate the economy and spur greater business activity and job growth.”

Renewable Energy in New Mexico

In New Mexico, newly elected Democratic Governor Lujan Grisham has made increasing the state’s reliance on renewable energy a hallmark of her first year. “We know that we cannot rely on the federal government right now to lead on climate action,” Lujan Grisham said in her January 15 State of the State address. “It is our responsibility and indeed our moral obligation to ensure our planet and our state are preserved for our children and their children.”

The SPN local affiliate, the Rio Grande Foundation (RGF), came right out to oppose the increase in renewable energy the state relies on, from 20 percent to 50 percent by 2030, and then to 80 percent by 2040, saying it will raise electrical bills.

RGF has received over half a million dollars from DonorsTrust since 2010 and tens of thousands from the Charles Koch Foundation since 2015. In addition, RGF has held joint events with the Charles Koch Institute.

RGF fails to consider the cost of carbon on health and its effects on climate change in its analysis. The industry-backed group also leaves out the fact that renewable energy prices in New Mexico have gone down by 60 percent to 70 percent, according to the newly appointed state energy agency head, Cottrell Propst, and that as new technologies are adopted the costs will come down even more. “We know that this technology and cost will not stay the same for renewables or energy storage,” Propst said. “History shows us it’s good to be ambitious, it’s good to be bold.”

RGF does not share that ambition and is even out of step with the state’s major utilities which, while not now embracing the same targets as the Governor, support increases in the state renewable energy standard to reduce carbon emissions.

Medicaid Work Rules in Michigan

The SPN affiliate in Michigan, Mackinac Center for Public Policy, is already battling newly elected Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s reconsideration of a 2018 law that included a work rule requirement for Medicaid recipients. Mackinac lobbied for the work requirement and testified in support of its passage.

Whitmer wants a reconsideration of the requirement in light of new research showing that people are losing coverage in Arkansas, one of the first states with the work requirement. Thousands of people in the state have lost coverage because of failing to report their activities, whether they are meeting rules or not, and almost 17,000 Medicaid recipients in all lost coverage in 2018.

In December alone, 4,655 Medicaid recipients lost coverage, many for failing to report their activities to the state. “Arkansas takes an especially aggressive approach to terminating coverage due to paperwork and compliance issues, such as not responding to a (state) request for information quickly enough,” the *Arkansas Times* reported.

The Mackinac Center ignores the negative societal effects a work requirement has and instead focuses on cutting Medicaid costs. “Medicaid has ballooned into an unwieldy and massively expensive entitlement program that crowds out access to services and vital resources for that most vulnerable population,” Mackinac reports.

But it provides no such evidence for its claims. Whitmer believes the Arkansas research may show that vulnerable people are losing coverage and that, until it is known who is losing coverage and why, Michigan should go slow on adopting the work rules.

Mackinac Center has received over $1.5 million from the Bradley Foundation since 1993 and $590,000 from the Koch family foundations since 2001, as well as over $3.4 million from the DonorsTrust conduits since 2010.

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/in-11th-hour-power-grab-republicans-in-wisconsin-and-michigan-use-koch-playbook-to-subvert-the-will-of-voters

In Wisconsin and Michigan, Republicans in their respective state legislatures

are aiming to clip the wings of newly elected Democratic governors by curtailing executive-branch power with legislation

advanced in lame-duck sessions controlled by GOP majorities....

rural city co-op

https://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/how-to-reinvent-a-rural-economy-100-at-a-time-20190306

https://www.alternet.org/rise-robots-how-trump-and-republicans-betrayed-their-base-voters

Trump’s formula for his unfortunate electoral victory in 2016 relied almost exclusively on persuading rural American voters in the so-called “heartland” that their economic decline was due not to any fault of corporate, late-stage capitalism but to fact that their jobs were being “stolen” by people with darker skin than themselves. By scapegoating Latinos and Hispanics in particular, and by employing familiar Republican stereotypes against African-Americans, Trump succeeded in eking out the election against a polarizing female Democratic candidate by mobilizing rural “working class’” Americans, mostly white and male, to vote for him out of a sense of race-based grievance.

In an articlefor the New York Times, Thomas Edsall shows how Trump and the Republicans almost immediately betrayed that rural voting base with their massive tax giveaway to corporations in 2016, creating a tax incentive bonanza that encouraged and accelerated the pace of automation and the implementation of robots, now displacing thousands of relatively low-skilled workers in largely Trump-voting areas of the country. Another articleby Eduardo Porter (also written this week for the Times) highlights the root causes behind the seemingly intractable problem of rural poverty in this country, and offers some clues on how we as Democrats might reclaim many of those rural voters without compromising Democratic values on issues of racial inclusion and equality.

If for nothing else, last month’s elections were remarkable for the fact that virtually no Republicans highlighted their singular achievement, a massive tax giveaway to corporate America. One obvious reason for that is that few Americans making less than mid-six figure incomes saw any benefit to themselves from this tax cut. But the other reason was even more damning, if less noticeable: buried in this gargantuan payoff to reward the CEO donors in boardrooms who supported their campaigns, Republicans deliberately provided a huge incentive for corporations to eliminate the very jobs that their rural voters needed to survive.

Donald Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut has increased incentives to replace workers with robots, contradicting his campaign promise to restore well-paying manufacturing jobs in the nation’s heartland.

The Trump tax bill permits “U.S. corporations to expense their capital investment, through 2022. So, if a U.S. corporation buys a robot for $100 thousand, it can deduct the $100 thousand immediately to calculate its U.S. taxable income, rather than recover the $100 thousand over the life of the robot, as under prior law,” Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and a specialist in tax policy, wrote me by email.

The sheer appeal to corporations of taking advantage of an immediate tax deduction by investing in automation cannot be understated. The biggest liability corporations face is the high cost of paying their workers. Robots do not need health benefits and “sick time”—they need only to be programmed and oiled on occasion. They do not require wage “increases” because they do not require any wages to begin with. So a tax incentive to automate was immediately hailed by corporate America as a win-win. And the impact has for the most part fallen in those industries that typically employ the same type of non-college educated—usually male--workers (semi-skilled assemblers, machinists, material handlers, welders) who voted in droves for Donald Trump.

Edsall quotes Jeffrey Sachs, a professor of Economics at Columbia:

The demographic group most hindered by the rise of automation, Sachs wrote, “has been the proverbial white male with less than a college degree and living in rural and semirural areas.”

Sachs believes that

[T]he next wave of job losses will be in basic business services (wholesale and retail trade, warehousing and transport) which will mean another hit for workers with relatively lower educational attainment.

Edsall also cites and quotes extensively from a recent study out of MIT that shows the Trump-voting swaths of the South and Midwest have a far higher concentration of robot-dependent industries than other areas of the country.

But the Trump tax cut did more than just encourage automated replacement of workers in Trump country—it encouraged industries to move out of the country altogether:

The 2017 Trump tax cut not only boosted incentives for corporations to replace workers with robots, it has also created incentives for American companies to move production overseas, even as it directed resources toward “opportunity zones” in what the Trump administration defines as “neglected and underserved communities” — incidentally providing a bounty of lucrative grants, guarantees and breaks for real estate developers.

Many in the Democratic Party frankly feel like these voters in Trump country are getting exactly what they deserve for supporting Trump and his cast on enabling charlatans in the GOP. And there is undoubtedly some appeal in schadenfreude,that sense of pleasure that people derive from others’ misfortune, particularly if it is viewed as deserved. But the racism that drove Trump voters to the polls didn’t arise in a vacuum. It was packaged, stoked and fed to them as an easy opportunity to assign blame to what they felt as a real problem, the plain fact that American business industries are not offering livable jobs in rural areas any more.

....

https://www.alternet.org/trump-country-turnaround-why-presidents-faux-populism-could-return-rust-belt-its-democratic-roots

Politically, the Rust Belt has been one of the most volatile parts of the United States.While New England and the West Coast lean Democrat and many of the southern states have been reliably Republican, the Rust Belt has generally had a mixture of blue states and swing states (with Indiana being the most GOP state in the Rust Belt). But in 2016, President Donald Trump’s faux-populism not only resulted in a victory in the swing state Ohio—Trump also flipped three states that usually go Democrat in presidential races: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is still fuming over the fact that Hillary Clinton was the first Democrat to lose Wisconsin in a presidential election since Walter Mondale in 1984.

The 2018 midterms, however, found Democrats regaining a lot of ground in parts of the Rust Belt—and between now and 2020, the DNC will no doubt be spending considerable time trying to figure out ways to avoid another Rust Belt debacle like the one two years ago.

In 2019, this is what the political environment will look like in four Rust Belt states that were carried by Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 but by Trump in 2016.

Michigan

Saying that Michigan is a blue state does not mean that Michigan residents vote Democrat exclusively in major races—only that they are, on the whole, more likely to vote Democrat. During the Obama years, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder campaigned as a self-described “pro-life, pro-2nd Amendment, pro-family” Republican and won in both 2010 and 2014. It was under Snyder’s watch that the appalling Flynt water crisis occurred, but even that tragedy didn’t prevent Trump from carrying Michigan in 2016 (making him the first GOP presidential candidate to do so George H.W. Bush in 1988).

In 2018, however, Democrat Gretchen Whitmer defeated Republican Bill Schuette by 10% in Michigan’s gubernatorial race. Incumbent Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow was reelected, defeating Republican John James by 7%—and Michigan Democrats flipped two GOP-held seats in the U.S. House of Representatives when Elissa Slotkin defeated incumbent Rep. Mike Bishop and Haley Stevens defeated Lena Epstein in the 11th Congressional District. Meanwhile,

Democrats didn’t obtain a majority in Michigan’s state legislature in 2018, although they decreased the GOP majority in the Michigan House and the Michigan Senate.

Pennsylvania

Although Pennsylvania and Ohio are both Rust Belt swing states, Pennsylvania has been more favorable to Democrats in presidential elections—especially when there is a heavy voter turnout in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. But in 2016, Trump managed to flip Pennsylvania with a strong turnout in the central part of the state (which Democratic strategist James Carville famously described as “Alabama in between”). Altoona, Johnstown and other areas of Central Pennsylvania that Pennsylvanians jokingly refer to as “Pennsyltucky” or “Pennsissippi” came out for Trump in droves, making him the first Republican to carry Pennsylvania in a presidential race since 1988.

Democrats, however, enjoyed double-digit victories in the 2018 midterms when Gov. Tom Wolf and Sen. Bob Casey, Jr. were reelected. In Pennsylvania, Democrats flipped three GOP-held seats in the U.S. House of Representatives; of the 18 House seats in Pennsylvania, there will be nine held by Democrats in 2019 and nine by Republicans. However, Republicans still control Pennsylvania’s state legislature (110-92 in the Pennsylvania House, 29-21 in the Pennsylvania Senate).

Ohio

Some elections were very easy to predict in 2018. Republican Mitt Romney’s chances of losing the Utah Senate race were slim and none, as were House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s changes of not being reelected in the San Francisco Bay Area. And in New York City, Congresswoman-Elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez enjoyed so much support that voters hardly knew anything about her Republican challenger Anthony Pappas. But countless races in the 2018 midterms were major nail biters, from Texas to Florida to Virginia—and Ohio had its share of nail-biters this year.

Ohio is a swing state where Democrats can perform well (Obama carried Ohio in both 2008 and 2012) but have to work extra hard, as Hillary Clinton was reminded when she lost to Trump in the Buckeye State in 2016. And this year, Democrats were disappointed in Ohio once again when Democrat Richard Cordray lost to Republican Mike DeWine by 4% in the state’s gubernatorial race—although Sen. Sherrod Brown was reelected, defeating Republican challenger Jim Renacci by 7%.

Republicans maintained a strong majority in Ohio’s state legislature (both the Ohio House and the Ohio Senate) this year, and 12 of Ohio’s 16 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives will be held by Republicans in 2019. As Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley asserted in a November 23 piece for the New York Times, Ohio has not turned into a red state but is a state where Democrats will need to find their “path out of the wilderness.”

Wisconsin

When President George H.W. Bush enjoyed an electoral landslide over Democrat Mike Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election, Wisconsin was one of the states Dukakis managed to win. Wisconsin, all things considered, is still a blue state, but far-right Republicans enjoyed some important victories in Wisconsin during the Obama years. House Speaker Paul Ryan was elected via Wisconsin, and Gov. Scott Walker won two terms. Ryan and Walker became stars of the far-right. But Ryan opted to resign from the House, claiming that he wanted to spend more time with his family (which is nonsense—Ryan was worried about a blue wave). And Republicans suffered a painful loss in Wisconsin when Walker failed to win a third term in 2018 and was defeated by Democrat Tony Evers, who Obama had campaigned for aggressively. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, defeating Republican Leah Vukmir, was reelected by 11%. Those were important wins for Democrats, although Republicans will still control five of Wisconsin’s eight seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2019.

https://www.alternet.org/general-motors-laying-thousands-workers-and-closing-two-us-plants-michigan-and-ohio

General Motors has made an announcement that is going to bring considerable pain in the Rust Belt. The automotive giant will be slashing 14,700 jobs, many of them in Michigan and Ohio—and a plant closing is expected in Ontario, Canada as well.

This is the biggest restructuring at GM in a decade, with 15% of its workforce being eliminated in North America. According to GM CEO Mary Barra, these job cuts reflect changing tastes in the automotive market and will bring a greater emphasis on electric and autonomous vehicles. Models expected to be discontinued include the Cadillac CT6, the Chevrolet Cruze and the Buick LaCrosse.

According to GM, tariffs on imported steel—which were imposed by the Trump Administration earlier this year—have cost the company $1 billion. And in late October, GM offered buyouts to 50,000 salaried workers in North America.

The decline of traditional passenger cars in favor of larger SUVs and pickup trucks has been a major factor in GM’s evolution. In 2012, traditional passenger cars comprised over 50% of vehicle sales in the U.S., but during the first nine months of 2018, that number decreased to 31%. This year, SUV and pickup truck sales have increased by about 31%.

GM announced that it will also be closing two plants outside of North America by the end of 2019.

Ohio politicians, including Rep. Tim Ryan and Sen. Sherrod Brown ripped the company's decision.

...

mike d

The Mythic Blue Wall

Looking ahead to future presidential elections, the Trump strategy points to a red wall that could be bigger and more beautiful than the Democrat’s blue one.

Clinton’s “blue firewall” cracked in Minnesota; was narrowly breached in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania; and totally collapsed in Ohio (and Iowa, if we consider it a Democrat-leaning state.) Whole swathes of 2012 Obama counties in northwestern Illinois, eastern Iowa, western Wisconsin and Minnesota, and northern Ohio and New York were won by Trump.

The “margin shift” — winning or losing percentage of Clinton 2016 versus Obama 2012 — was over 15 points in West Virginia, Iowa, and North Dakota; 9 to 14 points in Maine, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Hawaii, Missouri, Michigan, and Vermont. In southern Wisconsin’s former auto belt (Kenosha and Rock counties), where Obama had crushed Romney by huge margins in 2012, the Democratic vote was down 20 percent and the former UAW stronghold of Kenosha went for Trump.

Even in New York Clinton finished 7 points behind Obama, thanks to a massive Republican vote in eastern Long Island (Suffolk County) and poor support from blue-collar Democrats in older industrial districts upstate. According to exit polls, she won 51 percent of union households, a poor showing compared to the 60 percent of Obama in 2008 and 2012. Trump beat the union vote of the previous three Republican candidates and in Ohio won a flat-out majority.

This pattern is particularly ironic since Democrats in many of these areas had cast outsized votes for her during the 2008 primaries. Indeed this had been presumed to be Clinton country. “How could they lose Michigan with 10,000 votes!” groused veteran pollster Stanley Greenberg, a key architect of Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory, when he saw the final figures.

But one overriding fact determined the outcome: the Republicans have had an aggressive strategy for winning dominance in the Rust Belt, supported by an impressive infrastructure of state-level think tanks, regional billionaire donors, and wizard gerrymanderers from the Republican State Leadership Committee. In contrast, the Democrats, especially those in the industrial but non-metropolitan counties so common throughout the upper Midwest, have been left to swing in the wind by a national party that (the 2009 General Motors and Chrysler rescues aside) offers no remedies to further decline and communal pauperization.

As readers of David Daley’s bestselling *Ratf**ked*know, Rove and his conservative quants responded to the meltdown of Republican power in 2008 with an audacious scheme for retaking power in Washington through control of decennial redistricting. The Midwest was the bullseye. “There are 18 state legislatures,” Rove wrote in the Wall Street Journal,

that have four or fewer seats separating the two parties that are important for redistricting. Seven of these are controlled by Republicans and the other 11 are controlled by Democrats, including the lower houses in Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana and Pennsylvania. Republican strategists are focused on 107 seats in 16 states. Winning these seats would give them control of drawing district lines for nearly 190 congressional seats.

In the event, as Daley shows, chump change (about $30 million) spent on targeted state races in 2010 produced a revolution in party power with the Republicans winning nearly seven hundred seats and control of key legislatures in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan as well as Florida and North Carolina. Computer-generated redistricting punctually produced a dream map that made Republican control of the House virtually invulnerable until the 2020 census, despite the demographic forces favoring Democrats.

The piece d’resistancewas the gerrymandering of Ohio overseen by John Boehner. “The GOP controlled the redrawing of 132 state legislative and 16 congressional districts. Republican redistricting resulted in a net gain for the GOP state house caucus in 2012 and allowed a 12-4 Republican majority to return to the US House of Representatives — despite voters casting only 52 percent of their vote for Republican congressional candidates.” (There are worst cases: in North Carolina in 2012 Democrats won a majority of the congressional vote statewide but gained only four out of thirteen House seats.)

In the Midwest the 2010 Tea Party victories brought a new generation of feral Republicans to power, many of them groomed by far-right think tanks such as Indiana’s Policy Review Foundation (once headed by Mike Pence), Michigan’s Mackinac Center, Wisconsin’s MacIver Institute, and Minnesota’s Center of the American Experiment, all of them spoiling for a fight to the death with the region’s public-sector unions and progressive big-city governments. Coordinating through the State Policy Network (sixty-five conservative think tanks) and the American Legislative Exchange Council, they launched campaigns to destroy public-sector bargaining rights, defund unions through right-to-work laws, and privatize public education through vouchers.

They focused in other words on increasing their structural and legal advantages in ways that Democrats would find difficult, even impossible to roll back. Unions and students, of course, conducted an epic resistance in Wisconsin but were unable to recall Scott Walker, in large part because of the lackluster character of the Democratic candidate. In Ohio the unions were more successful and repealed right-to-work by referendum, but in Indiana, Michigan and West Virginia, Republican majorities rammed throughright-to-work and in Michigan, a Mackinac Center-inspired receivership for Detroit’s schools.

The Republican down-ticket in 2016, from Senate incumbents to state representatives and judges, ironically benefited greatly from Trump’s poor backing from the Kochs and other conservative mega-donors who switched funding from the presidential race to preserving control of Congress. For the first time super-PACs spent more on the Senate races than the presidential campaign. Trump, whom the New York Times estimated received $2 billion of free publicity from the media, was little affected, but the huge injection of dark money into state races was revolutionary.

More than three-quarters of Senate campaign funding came from out-of-state sourcesin 2016 and “just three groups, One Nation [Adelson], the Koch network’s Americans for Prosperity, and the US Chamber of Commerce, account[ed] for 67 per cent in dark money spending.” The result, according to some political scientists, has been the “nationalization” of state politics. “As a result of the growing connection between presidential and state elections the once clear divide between state politics and national politics has largely disappeared in most of the country.” Thus for the first time in history, “there were no split votes in 2016 between Senate candidates and presidential contenders; the thirty-four states with Senate contests all voted the same party for both offices.”

It is no secret that the inadvertent ally of the Republicans in the Rust Belt has been Obama himself, whose lofty conception of the presidency does not include being the leader of the party, at least not in the old-fashioned, out-in-the-hustings style of an LBJ or even Clinton. In 2010, 2012, and again in 2014, Democratic candidates bitterly complained about their lack of support from the White House, especially in the upper South, Louisiana, and Texas.

Obama ended his presidency with the Democrats having lost nearly one thousand legislative seats across the country. Republicans legislatures are now targeting Missouri and Kentucky — possibly Ohio again, as well as Pennsylvania and New Hampshire — as the next right-to-work states. (In Missouri and New Hampshire right-to-work amendments recently had been passed by the legislatures but were vetoed by Democratic governors. Both states now have Republican governors.) You might call it the Southernization or Dixiefication of the Midwest.

Why Plans to Turn America’s Rust Belt into a New Plastics Belt Are Bad News for the Climate

The petrochemical industry anticipates spending a total of over $200 billion on factories, pipelines, and other infrastructure in the U.S. that will rely on shale gas,...

https://www.alternet.org/under-assault-trumps-gop-and-supreme-court-unions-lead-massive-get-out-vote-effort-midterms-we-vote

In the face of a coordinated, corporate-funded assault on their very existence by President Donald Trump, Republicans at the federal and state level, and the right-wing Supreme Court, labor unions nationwide have mobilized massive numbers of struggling workersto turn out for Tuesday's critical midterms with the goal of defeating anti-union candidatesand electing politicians willing to fight for progressive policies that benefit the working class like Medicare for All, a higher minimum wage, and the fundamental right to organize.

"The Culinary Workers Union registered 10,300 voters for the midterms. This union really gets it done. Still impressed by what I saw reporting on them in Vegas."

—David Jamieson, Huffington Post

"We don't know any other way," said Geoconda Arguello-Kline, the Secretary-Treasurer for the Culinary Workers Union in Las Vegas, which has registered over 10,300 new voters ahead of Tuesday's midterm elections to defeat Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.). "For us, it's a very natural way to survive here in Las Vegas: organize, organize."

With the rallying cry, "We vote, we win!" the union has provided resources for workers to learn about the candidates on the ballot, spread the word about the issues at stake in the midterms, and find the closest polling site. The Culinary Union's get-out-the-vote efforts have been replicated throughout the nation, including in so-called "right-to-work states," where Republican legislatures have barred unions from collecting dues from all workers they represent in collective bargaining efforts to raise wages and improve working conditions.

"Things aren't changing for the better like they thought would happen. Real wages are not keeping pace with inflation. We haven't replaced the well-paying manufacturing jobs that we lost."

—Tim Burga, Ohio AFL-CIO

In Southern states like North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, and Georgia, the Communications Workers of America (CWA)—which represents 700,000 workers nationwide—say it organized canvassing, mail, and phone bank operations that resulted in over four million door knocks."

In the Midwest, where workers have suffered from decades of deindustrialization, corporate outsourcing, and neglect from politicians who so often claim to care about their plight, the AFL-CIO says it has convinced thousands of union workers who backed Donald Trump in 2016 to turn out for progressive Democrats on Tuesday.

"About half of union households that voted for Trump said they are planning to vote for Democrats in two key statewide races," Vox reported on Monday, citing figures from the Ohio AFL-CIO. "That includes 51.4 percent of Trump voters who plan to cast a ballot for progressive Democrat Richard Cordray for governor and 49.9 percent of Trump voters who favor incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown—the only Democrat currently holding statewide office."

Tim Burga, president of the Ohio AFL-CIO, said many union workers who initially backed Trump have realized after two years of plutocratic policies and stagnant wages that the president and his billionaire-filled cabinet are not on their side, and never were.

"Things aren't changing for the better like they thought would happen," Burga said. "Real wages are not keeping pace with inflation. We haven't replaced the well-paying manufacturing jobs that we lost."

With a historic number of House Democratic candidates backing Medicare for All, National Nurses United (NNU)—the largest organization of registered nurses in the U.S.—has also been tirelessly canvassing and phone banking in Maryland, Florida, and the many other states where candidates are standing up to America's disastrous for-profit healthcare industry.

See NNU's full list of all 225 House Democratic candidates running on Medicare for All here.

11/18 3 flipped?

Strangers in Their Own Land

https://www.c-span.org/video/?416749-3/arlie-russell-discusses-strangers-land

Arlie Russell Hochschild talked about her book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.

https://ww2.kqed.org/forum/2017/06/09/joan-williams-on-misconceptions-about-the-white-working-class/

Shortly after the election, UC Hastings law professor Joan Williams published a widely-shared essay in the Harvard Business Review, now expanded into a book, that explores what she says are misconceptions of the white working class — including that they are poor. Williams joins us to discuss her new book “White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America,” and to offer some ideas for getting past the divide.

https://www.c-span.org/search/?searchtype=All&query=hillbilly

DECEMBER 18, 2016

LAST AIRED DECEMBER 18, 2016

Vance Discusses [Hillbilly Elegy

J.D. Vance on Hillbilly Elegy

Vance talked about his book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, which details the struggles of America's white working class through his own story of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town.

SEPTEMBER 13, 2016

LAST AIRED OCTOBER 24, 2016

Q&A with J.D. Vance

Vance talked about his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, about growing up in a poor, white family that has its roots in Appalachia.

OCTOBER 11, 2016

LAST AIRED OCTOBER 24, 2016

White Working-Class Americans

Vance talked about his latest book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, where he reflects on his life growing up in a white working-class community of Middletown, Ohio.

"Blue wall" is a term that was used by some political analysts and pundits referring to the theory that in Presidential elections in the United States, the Democratic Partyhad, between the 1992 and 2012 presidential elections, established such an advantage in many states that the electoral map made a Republican victory an uphill battle from the start. The 2016 election showed this wall was not impregnable, when Donald Trump won 3 previously solidly Democratic states, as well as one electoral vote from a fourth state, in the area referred to as the rust belt.

The term "blue wall" and "red wall" refer to the colors associated with the Democratic and Republican Parties, respectively.

[hide]

Creating of the Term:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

The earliest description of the forces creating the Blue Wall comes from a Houston Chronicle blogger, Chris Ladd.^[1] A Republican, Ladd wrote in November 2014 that the seemingly impressive Republican win in that year's General Election had overshadowed another trend apparent in the results - a demographic/geographic collapse. The Blue Wall was a Democratic demographic lock on the Electoral College resulting from the GOP's narrowing focus on the interests of white, rural, and Southern voters. Ladd's analysis was popularized when it was picked up by MSNBC commentator Lawrence O'Donnell and featured on his show.^[2]

A similar "red wall," behind which lie states solidly Republican, also exists, but having fewer votes it is easier for a Democratic candidate to win without breaching it. The Republican party has won just 13 states in each of the last 6 election cycles, totaling 102 electoral votes.

States behind the blue wall:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Behind this "blue wall" lay states, many carrying a high number of electoral votes, which appeared to be solidly behind the Democratic Party, at least on the national level, and which a Republican candidate appeared likely to have to write off, seeking a total of 270 votes from other regions. States behind this wall lay generally in the northeast, and west coast, and included some of the Great Lakes states. In each of the 6 election cycles prior to 2016, the Democratic Party had won 18 of these states (as well as the District of Columbia), totaling 242 of the necessary 270 votes need to win. The "big three" Democratic stronghold states include California, New York, and Illinois.

States falling behind this blue wall generally included those the Democrats had carried since the 1992 election,^[3][4] and included (in order of decreasing population): California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Jersey, Washington, Massachusetts, Maryland, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Oregon, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Vermont, as well as the District of Columbia. The last time any of these states cast their votes for the Republican candidate before 2016 was when George H. W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis in 1988, and several of them go back to Ronald Reagan's landslide in 1984. One of these states, Minnesota, has not been carried by a Republican presidential candidate since 1972. (The District of Columbia has voted for the Democratic candidate in every election since it was admitted to the electoral college for the 1964 election.)

In the 2016 election, Donald Trump made major inroads into the wall, winning in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Maine's 2nd congressional district, giving him victory despite not winning certain swing states such as Nevada, Colorado, New Hampshire and Virginia.

Red Wall:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

The states which Republicans have won in the last 7 cycles include Texas, Alabama, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Utah, Kansas, Nebraska, Idaho, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, and Wyoming, giving a total of 102 votes. States with a 6-out-of-7 Republican record include Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Indiana, and Montana for a total of 158 electoral votes. Much of the south is probably safely Republican as well, as 6 other states from that general region haven't voted for a Democrat since southerner Bill Clinton in 1996, and the Deep South is solidly Republican in their senators and governors.

Criticism:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

The Democratic "lock" on these states had been called into question prior to 2016, as several had been competitive in recent elections, and many had Republicans currently holding elected statewide office, generally either senator or governor.^[5] Blue wall states with a Republican senator included Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Maine. Those with a Republican governor included Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Wisconsin, and Maine. In addition to these 18 states, three others, Iowa, New Mexico, and New Hampshire, had only voted for the Republican once in the same 6 election cycles, giving their votes to George W. Bush in either 2000 or 2004. If included in the total, the votes behind the blue wall numbered 257, just 13 short of what is needed to win. In 2016, the blue wall was broken by President-elect Donald Trump.

Nate Silver had criticized the idea of the blue wall, pointing to a larger "red wall" of states that voted Republican from 1968 to 1988. He argued that the blue wall simply represented a "pretty good run" in elections, and that relatively minor gains in the popular vote could "flip" some of its states to Republicans.^[6] As seen in the 2016 election, where voters from manufacturing states and minorities traditionally behind the blue wall, voted for Donald Trump providing him the victory.

Background:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

In the twentieth century local economies in these states specialized in large scale manufacturing of finished medium to heavy industrial and consumer products, as well as the transportation and processing of the raw materials required for heavy industry.^[3] The area was referred to as the Manufacturing Belt,^[4] Factory Belt, or Steel Belt as opposed to the agricultural Midwestern states forming the so-called Corn Belt, and Great Plains states that are often called the "breadbasket of America".^[5]

The flourishing of industrial manufacturing in the region was caused in part by the close proximity to the Great Lakes waterways, and abundance of paved roads, water canals and railroads. After the transportation infrastructure linked the iron ore found in northernMinnesota and Upper Michigan with the coal mined from Appalachian Mountains, the Steel Belt was born. Soon it developed into the Factory Belt with its great American manufacturing cities: Chicago, Buffalo, Detroit, Milwaukee, Gary, Cincinnati, Toledo,Cleveland, Akron, Youngstown, and Pittsburgh among others. This region for decades served as a magnet for immigrants from Austria-Hungary, Poland and Russia who provided the industrial facilities with the inexpensive labor resources.^[6]

Following several "boom" periods from the late-19th to the mid-20th century, cities in this area in the end of the century started to struggle to adapt to a variety of adverse economic and social conditions. They include: the US steel and iron industries' decline, the movement of manufacturing to the southeastern states with their lower labor costs,^[7]the layoffs due to the rise of automation in industrial processes, a decreased need for labor in making steel products, the internationalization of American business, and the liberalization of foreign trade policies due to globalization.^[8] Big and small cities that struggled the most with these conditions soon encountered several difficulties in common, namely: population loss and brain drain, depletion of local tax revenues, high unemployment and crime, drugs, swelling welfare rolls, poor municipal credit ratings and deficit spending.^{[9][10][11][12][13]}

Geography:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

As people migrate, they often coin new names for their destinations.^[14] Since the term describes a set of economic and social conditions rather than denoting a geographical region of the United States per se, the Rust Belt has no precise boundaries. The extent to which a community may have been described as a Rustbelt city depends at least as much on how great a role industrial manufacturing has played in its local economy in the past and how it does now, as well as on perceptions of the economic viability and living standards of today.

A patchwork of now-defunct centers of heavy industry and manufacturing across the upper northeastern and mid-western United States, because of their vibrant industrial economies in the past, are occasionally referred to collectively in the media as the snow belt,^[15] manufacturing belt, and the factory belt. This includes most of the cities of the Midwest out to the Mississippi River, including St. Louis, and many of those in the New England and northern Mid-Atlantic states.

At the center of this expanse lies an area stretching from northern Indiana and southern Michigan in the west to Upstate New York in the east, where local tax revenues even now rely more heavily on manufacturing than on any other sector.^[16] At or near the periphery are eight of the nation's largest metropolitan areas— New York,Philadelphia, Baltimore, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Chicago— parts of which fall squarely within the Rust Belt while their core cities are not always considered as such. In his influential book The Nine Nations of North America, Joel Garreau included New York City boroughs of Bronxand Queens into the postindustrial northeastern United States and Great Lakes region along with Southern Ontario which he called The Foundry.^[17]

Before World War II, the cities in Rustbelt region were among the nation's largest, however, by the century's end their population had fallen the most in the nation.^[18]

History:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

The linking of the former Northwest Territory with the once-rapidly industrializing East Coast was effected through several large-scale infrastructural projects, most notably the Erie Canal in 1825, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1830, the Allegheny Portage Railroad in 1834, and the consolidation of the New York Central after the American Civil War. A gate was thereby opened between a variety of burgeoning industries on the interior North American continent and the markets not only of the large Eastern cities, but of Western Europe as well.^[19]

Coal, iron ore and other raw materials were shipped in from surrounding regions which emerged as major ports on the Great Lakes and served as transportation hubs for the region with a proximity to railroad lines. Coming in the other direction were millions of European immigrants, who populated the cities along the Great Lakes shores with then-unprecedented speed. Chicago, famously, was a rural trading post in the 1840s but grew to be as big as Paris by the time of the 1893 Columbian Exposition.^[19]

Sectors of the US Economy as percent of GDP 1947–2009.[20]

Early signs of the difficulty in the northern states were evident early in the 20th century, before the "boom years" were even over. Lowell, Massachusetts, once the center of textile production in the United States, was described in the magazine Harper's as "a depressed industrial desert" as early as 1931,^[21] as its textile concerns were being uprooted and sent southward, primarily to the Carolinas. After the Great Depression, American entry into the Second World War effected a rapid return to economic growth, during which much of the industrial North reached its peak in population and industrial output.