gridlock

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">disambiguation</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">this is polarysis capt 719</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">polarysis719</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see filibuster/nuke option</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see polarization 2 am</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">HR 1 for the ppl act stalled</font></div><div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/how-mitch-mcconnells-legislative-graveyard-is-leaving-veterans-behind/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/how-mitch-mcconnells-legislative-graveyard-is-leaving-veterans-behind/</a></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How Mitch McConnell’s legislative graveyard is leaving veterans behind</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Joan McCarter / Daily Kos November 11, 2019</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On this Veterans Day, here’s a reminder from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about recognizing the service of the men and women in our military. “On Veterans Day, a grateful nation gives thanks for the heroism and indomitable spirit of the 22 million veterans who have fought for freedom around the world and strengthened our democracy here at home,” she writes.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In recognization of that service, House Committees have “held 32 hearings and passed 25 bipartisan bills on the Floor, and are now advancing robust legislation that provides equity for women veterans accessing VA,” she points out. “Democrats have worked across the aisle to secure historic funding levels for VA’s mental health and suicide prevention initiatives, passed fixes to end unjust and unfair taxes on military families and expanded benefits for Blue Water Navy Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>A total of 56 House bills have passed that have addressed veterans either as a focus or peripherally. But of the 25 Pelosi discusses, none have passed in the Senate, aka Moscow Mitch McConnell’s graveyard. Those include:</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">H.R. 95: Homeless Veteran Families Act, passed on October 15, with a 28% chance of being enacted;</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">H.R. 2045: To establish in the Department the Veterans Economic Opportunity and Transition Administration, passed on May 21, with a 2% chance of being enacted;</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">H.R. 1812, to furnish Vet Center readjustment counseling and related mental health services to certain individuals, passed on May 21, with a 2% chance of being enacted;</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">H.R. 2333: Support for Suicide Prevention Coordinators Act, passed on May 21, with a 2% chance of being enacted;</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">H.R. 2372: Veterans’ Care Quality Transparency Act, passed on May 21, with a 2% chance of being enacted.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Since the Senate hasn’t passed any of those bills, McConnell’s remarks marking this day are limited to the anodyne: “The Senate will not be in session on Monday, as we honor Veterans Day. But I know that each of our members will be remembering and giving thanks for all veterans, and for those brave men and women serving today,” he said on the floor last week.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">From Moscow Mitch, there’s nothing but lip service to America’s veterans.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Top GOP Priority: Make Obama a One-Term President, National Journal, (October 23, 2010)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Top GOP Priority: Make Obama a One-Term President, National Journal, (October 23, 2010)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.ecowatch.com/tackling-climate-change-requires-healing-the-divide-2619880310.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tackling Climate Change Requires Healing the Divide</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Canadian climate change opinion is polarized, and research shows the divide is widening. The greatest predictor of people's outlook is political affiliation. This means people's climate change perceptions are being increasingly driven by divisive political agendas rather than science and concern for our collective welfare.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Over the past year, the Alberta Narratives Project gathered input from a broad range of Albertans (teachers, faith groups, health professionals, farmers, artists, industry, environmentalists, etc.) to better understand how they feel about public discourse on global warming. Participants said they want less blame and a more open, balanced and respectful conversation. Many don't see themselves in the conversation at all. No one is speaking to them, using language that reflects their values and identity.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Albertans are deeply divided in their climate change perceptions. In 2017, just over half the population was doubtful or dismissive. When an issue is highly polarized, people find it difficult to discuss. The Alberta Narratives Project found people rarely, if ever, speak to others about climate change.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Climate disruption is a collective threat, not just an environmental issue. We must all see ourselves as part of the effort to prevent extreme impacts and ensure sustainable, resilient communities. But how can we take shared action when we can't even talk to each other about the problem?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's most recent report calls for action to limit warming to 1.5 C to reduce the risk of increasing extreme weather events, prevent catastrophic species loss, decrease numbers of climate refugees and protect human health and resilience.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It's an urgent warning. After examining more than 6,000 scientific studies, the IPCC was clear: We must cut harmful carbon emissions by at least 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030 and reduce them to net zero by 2050 by cutting emissions and removing CO2 from the atmosphere.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rising populist politics are weaponizing climate action as a wedge issue for political advantage—with tragic implications.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How can we reverse this?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Cities are responsible for 70 percent of global emissions. According to C40 Cities research, they can lead the way by acting across four key areas: energy supply, buildings, mobility and waste.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Recently, Regina's council unanimously passed a motion to run on 100 percent renewable energy by 2050, a meaningful target in line with the international Paris Agreement and the most recent IPCC report. Victoria has adopted the same target.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps wrote that "to solve the climate challenge, we have to weave a strong social fabric, to build on the gifts, assets and talents of our friends, neighbors and colleagues. It means we have to shift our thinking from me to we, from now to the long term."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In March, Edmonton partnered with the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy for the Change for Climate Global Mayors Summit. They developed the Edmonton Declaration, asking signatories to recognize the urgent need for action that will limit global warming to 1.5 C.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The city's video says, "Let's come together and lead the charge against climate change. Let's show the world how much we love our city and our planet. Let's change our neighbors' minds. Change our habits. Change the world. Each of us needs to do whatever we can. Whatever we do, we have to do it now. Because if we don't change anything, climate will change everything."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples is also crucial.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dene elder François Paulette said, "First Nations are in a unique position to be leaders in climate change initiatives because of our knowledge of the sacred teachings of the land. We must not be situated as passive recipients of climate change impacts. We must be agents of change in climate action."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To tackle climate change, we must heal the divide and act—as individuals, families, neighbors, communities and societies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Wherever you see yourself on the political spectrum, whether you identify as rural or urban, youth or elder, the time for foot-dragging is over. Each of us must join together with others to address climate change, and demand meaningful action from political representatives. All parties must commit. We must call out those who stall or prevent solutions to serve their own self-interest and political agendas.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We can't afford to wait.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a new piece for the New York Review of Books, historian Christopher Browning warns that there are troubling parallels between the present-day United States and the days of fascism's rise in Europe.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Browning, a specialist in the areas of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, and world war-era Europe, isn't arguing that President Donald Trump is a modern Adolf Hitler or that Trumpism is akin to Nazism. But he does argue that certain stress fractures in the society and the international order appear to be re-emerging and that these patterns portend troubling trends for the United States and the rest of the world.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And there is one figure in American politics that Browning does see as a relatively direct — and troubling — analog to a crucial world war-era figure. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican, is becoming "the gravedigger of American democracy," Browning wrote, a role played for Germany beginning in the 1930s by President Paul von Hindenburg.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hindenburg didn't defend democracy in Germany. Instead, he unleashed emergency powers in 1930 to appoint chancellors to skirt over political divisions in parliament. Eventually, Hitler became chancellor, when Hindenburg erroneously thought he could be controlled.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now, McConnell shows a similar disregard for democracy and likewise opens up the country to serious risk, Browning explained:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As a result of McConnell's strong-arm tactics, Browning argued, it will now be impossible for a president to make significant judicial appointments — including to the Supreme Court — unless the Senate is led by the same party. This dynamic will push the country toward greater dysfunction.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He continued:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Whatever secret reservations McConnell and other traditional Republican leaders have about Trump’s character, governing style, and possible criminality, they openly rejoice in the payoff they have received from their alliance with him and his base: huge tax cuts for the wealthy, financial and environmental deregulation, the nominations of two conservative Supreme Court justices (so far) and a host of other conservative judicial appointments, and a significant reduction in government-sponsored health care (though not yet the total abolition of Obamacare they hope for). Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump. The combination of Trump’s abasement before Putin in Helsinki, the shameful separation of families at the border in complete disregard of US asylum law (to say nothing of basic humanitarian principles and the GOP’s relentless claim to be the defender of “family values”), and most recently Michael Cohen’s implication of Trump in criminal violations of campaign finance laws has not shaken the fealty of the Republican old guard, so there is little indication that even an explosive and incriminating report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller will rupture the alliance.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Most ominously, Browning warns that the detrimental effects of figures like McConnell and Trump will last for a long time. However long they stay in power, they will eventually leave — but the damage done to democracy and American institutions may persist for generations.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/historian-details-why-america-under-trump-closer-civil-war-it-has-been-1850s</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings have once again exposed massive divides within the United States — and one historian believes the country is closer to civil war than it has been at any time since the 1850s.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Talking with the New York Times, Columbia University historian Stephanie McCurry says that the current split in American society mirrors the split over the legalization of slavery that occurred in the mid-19th century.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“At that point, what you’re looking at is this sense of powerlessness all around about the ability of any institution to mediate not just a political conflict, but a conflict of fundamental values,” she said. “That’s maybe something like what we’re dealing with right now.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What makes this moment particularly unusual, Public Religion Research Institute director Daniel Cox explains to the Times, is that the voters whose party is in power feel just as estranged as the voters whose party is out of power.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even more striking, he says, is that Trump supporters’ feelings of cultural alienation have actually increased slightly since his election.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Trump is continually stoking these feelings of resentment, of loss,” he said. “If you’re already primed to feel that way, getting a sort of regular dose of that kind of rhetoric I think would cause you to continue to believe it.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Read the whole report here.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AN</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...Meacham characterized the events at the hearing as the victory of “a fundamental, instinctive impulse to believe that which you wish to believe because your fellow tribesmen believe it over a fairly American openness to search for the truth.” And he went on to say, “The thing I found so off-putting about the Republican performance yesterday was this predisposition to say, ‘We don’t need—we don’t even want, more to the point—any other facts….What you saw yesterday, particularly on the right side of that Committee, was passion before reason.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kavanaugh’s nomination and the sexual abuse allegations of Ford and two other women (Deborah Ramirez and attorney Michael Avenatti’s client, Julie Swetnick) have underscored the bitter partisan divide in the U.S., with most Republicans and supporters of President Donald Trump rallying around Kavanaugh despite those allegations and most Democrats opposing the nomination. And that partisan divide was painfully evident on September 27.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">During his testimony, a combative, emotional and overwrought Kavanaugh angrily pointed the finger at Democrats specifically—declaring that he was being persecuted as an act of “revenge on behalf of the Clintons.” Kavanaugh didn’t outright insult Ford during his rant, but he did paint her as a tool of the Democratic Party. And Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina drew a line in the sand as well, agreeing that Kavanaugh is a victim of Democratic persecution and insisting that any Republican senators who voted against his confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court would be aiding and abetting that persecution.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Graham declared, “To my Republican colleagues: if you vote ‘no,’ you’re legitimizing the most despicable thing I’ve seen in my time in politics.” And while he didn’t mention them by name, it was painfully obvious that the Republican senators Graham was referring to were Jeff Flake, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. Graham reached a shameless new low on September 27, doing everything possible to bully, coerce and strong-arm those senators into a vote for Kavanaugh.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The allegations against Kavanaugh are troubling, to say the least. Ford, at the September 27 hearing, testified that he attempted to rape her back in 1982—and Swetnick has alleged that Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge were present when she was gangraped during that time period. But even when it comes to something as serious as alleged sexual assault, Graham insists that independent thought on the part of Flake, Collins or Murkowski cannot be tolerated. And his message to them on September 27 was clear: either you are with our tribe, or you are against our tribe.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the past, most Supreme Court nominations weren’t nearly as polarizing. President Ronald Reagan’s first High Court nominee, Sandra Day O’Connor, was confirmed by a Democrat-dominated Senate in 1981—and although Senate Democrats torpedoed Robert Bork’s nomination in 1987, they voted to confirm a different right-winger that year: Reagan’s more libertarian nominee Justice Anthony Kennedy. But that spirit of give and take was absent when, in 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to even give President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, the time of day. And the ugly us-versus-them tribalism of the modern-day GOP escalated with Kavanaugh’s nomination and the overt partisanship that Kavanaugh, Graham and other Republicans brought to the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on September 27....</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">TM</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">mark fine</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">September 26, 2011</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.lawofcontrast.com/?p=58</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;state of political paralysis or dysfunction that arises when discourse becomes so polarized as to preclude members of a community from comprehending, communicating, and/or acting upon issues that affect them.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A History of the Rise of the 1%</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Patrick McKercher, UCSC</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Occupy San Jose</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">San Jose Peace and Justice Center&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">12/19/11 patmck13@gmail.com</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">joanne freeman&nbsp; (backstory podcast) the field of blood</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">duel seen as barbaric in north, so so could get political advantage by threat to duel</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-september-19-2018/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">NEW</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/scholar-warns-we-could-be-headed-violent-conflict-between-republicans-and-democrats</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;Lincoln famously warned that "a house divided against itself, cannot stand." More than 150 years later his alarm still resonates: While the conflagration will most likely take a different form than it did in Lincoln's day, America in the era of President Donald Trump is increasingly a country of warring tribes rather than a united people possessed of a shared sense of identity and destiny.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, do not live in the same communities. They do not consume the same news media. They are divided by race, gender, religion and ethnicity. Republicans and conservatives have even tried to create their own alternate universe, a world free of facts not governed by empirical reality where right-wing ideology is a religion or cult that supersedes all other things.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The president of the United States is not a unifier who seeks to lead all people and by doing so to inspire the best of who and what America and the American people can be. Instead he is hell-bent on creating chaos and division. For his voters and other Republicans and conservatives, he is a champion and political godhead. For Democrats, liberals and other people of conscience he is closer to being a monster.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How did America become so divided? Why has political polarization become so extreme? In what ways have political parties become like sports teams where winning is all that matters and the common good is unimportant? Can American democracy to survive Donald Trump amid the rise of a conservative movement that views Democrats and liberals as an "un-American" enemy?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with Lilliana Mason. She is a assistant professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the author of the new book "Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How do you explain the election of Donald Trump and the current state of American politics?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Our party identities have been moving into alignment with other social identities. As a result race, religion, culture, geography and to some extent gender and other identities align with political parties. This means we become much more focused on the party winning. For Republicans this means white and Christian, rural and male. What Trump did was to activate a particular type of white identity. Then he made it clear to the Republican electorate that they should be paying attention to their white identities and voting based on it.&nbsp; Trump was also telling these voters what they had in their heads already.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He really pointed to a group of people who were feeling vulnerable and condescended to and made fun of and said, “You guys are losers, right? We're all losers, we are losing all the time.” Then he said, "But I'm going to make you winners, I’m going to make us win again." So it was this almost perfect message delivered to a group of people who were ready to hear a message like that, and were committed to defeating the Democrats because the other party is so socially "other" from them. Ultimately, Donald Trump tapped into a dynamic that has been developing over the last few decades in America.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">America has a long history of extreme political polarization and partisanship. We actually fought a civil war that killed 750,000 people. Those fault lines of race still exist. Part of me feels like there is nothing really new about Trump and what he represents. In fact, America has only been a democracy on paper for about the last 50 years. Then again, Trump and his supporters' unabashed contempt for democracy and overt racism and bigotry does feel new in the recent history of American politics. How do you reconcile those tensions?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is not a completely new way of approaching politics, at least in the Republican Party -- consider the racist Southern Strategy [of the 1968 election and thereafter]. But there are now such strong partisans that will do almost anything just for their political team to win. As I said earlier, this is partly because when our party "wins," our racial group and our religious group and our other cultural and social identities "win" too. The victory of our political party is taking up more and more of what I describe as "self-esteem real estate." Every part of us is involved now in the outcome of the election. So when our party loses, it hurts a lot more than it did before, because we used to have other meaningful identities.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the United States, historically, there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. You don't have them anymore. This means the loss feels much worse and the victory feels much better. So we end up approaching our elections in a way that's very much like a sports game where we don't actually care what the team does after they win. That's the whole thing that you wanted and you're happy and excited and you cheer. But you don't follow the team around and ask them what they're going to do next in order to make your life better. Having Trump be like a performer enhances that sports-like competition, and it really reduces the attention that people pay to what government is actually doing.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How does the reorientation of the Democrats and Republicans relative to race and civil rights factor into your narrative about identity and partisanship?&nbsp;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I think the difference is that the Democratic Party is better at representing the interests of black voters at present than it was before. For a long time, through the ‘60s and ‘70s and ‘80s, the Democratic Party was the best party for people of color in general to be with, but it didn't do a great job of helping them. What's been happening is that as the Republican Party has become much more clearly the party of white voters, everyone else has mostly moved over to the Democratic Party.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One of the ways that I think about this divide between the parties is that it revolves around questions of social justice. The Republicans are focused on keeping everything the way it was and the Democrats are actually, to some extent, trying to move things forward in terms of social justice.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There really are not significant negative consequences for Republican candidates who use white racial resentment and overt white racism as political tools, because the electorate is so sorted.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One of the things that we know is that this type of white identity politics is becoming more powerful than it was before in recent American politics. Partially because there is clearly a party that is made entirely of white people: Ninety-seven percent of Republicans are white. The Democratic Party has plenty of white people, but it's something like 56 percent white and then 19 percent black and 17 percent Latino. So the power of white identity is becoming almost more urgent. It doesn't necessarily change everything, but there is good research showing that when you talk to people about demographic change, they become more conservative, even on issues that are unrelated to immigration, for example.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This includes superficially "non-racial" or "race-neutral" public policy matters such as access to public transportation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It's not necessarily about "white power" per se as much as it is about relative status. For people who are high on white identity, the distance between them and the nonwhite people below them is getting smaller. It's relative status. That doesn't feel good for the dominant group because their power starts feeling precarious. Whenever you have "status threat," people tend to lash out with anger and political action.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Anecdotes are not data, but there is this whole new genre of writing where reporters and researchers go out to Trump territory and talk to his supporters. There are these conversations where Trump's people have said that "winning" and "beating Hillary" matters more than the country's democracy. Some of these Trump voters have even said they support Russia's apparent interference in the 2016 presidential election. These are signs of a democracy in crisis.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In American society and politics at large, where we have much powerful identities, people are willing to give up a lot in order to get a win. The stronger the identity, the more they're willing to give up. So when we see people who are essentially willing to give away democracy for their partisan win, there is perhaps no better example of the power of identity. This is extremely dangerous for democracy because it creates this rift between partisans where no one wants to cooperate or compromise, ever. We're not only seeing democratic norms erode but we're also losing the ability to functionally govern. The greater good is no longer of interest to many Americans. The only thing that we care about is whether or not we get the victory and after that nothing really matters.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump is something of a political sadist. His policies actually hurt most of his supporters, but they still support him because in their eyes Trump is causing even more pain to their "enemies": black and brown people, gays and lesbians, women and whoever else. Do you think that's a fair analysis of the dynamic?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yes. Many of these interviews with Trump supporters have been with people whose immediate families are being hurt. There's a large amount of self-deception going on in the electorate. A lot of people think that they are holding their positions for logical and thoughtful reasons, but in reality these divisions are actually completely informed by partisanship. For example, look at Russia and the Republican Party. As soon as the party changes its position, all the voters change their position on it. It can happen very quickly. It's not true for every issue: Attitudes about race are one example. But on a lot of issues, particularly economic ones, an individual's opinions can change relatively easily and they're not actually as committed to these policies as they think they are.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Polarization is not symmetrical. For decades the Republicans have being moving farther to the right and have dragged the Democrats after them in a desperate effort to find some type of "consensus" or middle ground. What does the empirical data tell us about this?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Some data from the 2016 campaign is very instructive here. There is research looking at how Democrats and Republicans feel about each other, and also how they feel about the social groups that are aligned with each party. It shows that Democrats and Republicans really don't like each other at all. But if you look at partisan feelings towards the groups that make up the other side -- for example, this would be whites, Christians, evangelicals, police and men for Republicans. For Democrats this would include gays and lesbians, blacks, Hispanics and activists, among a long list of people.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What we found is that Democrats don't dislike the groups that make up the Republican Party as much as Republicans dislike the groups that make up the Democratic Party. This helps to explain why there is so much anger from Republicans, because every group associated with the Democratic Party is a groups they do not like. Because of the nature of the respective parties, Democrats practice tolerance a lot more than Republicans are forced to practice it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What are some solutions to this problem of extreme political polarization around social identities?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">First we need to tone down the "winning versus losing" coverage of legislation. Framing things that way just makes matters worse. If we actually were more focused on what the government is supposed to do, rather than who's going to win, that would be helpful for our government and society. The "greater good" needs to be emphasized.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We also need to find some new shared identities between Democrats and Republicans. This makes the other side seem a bit more human. One way to do that is by having actual social contact with people from your "out group." You can see sympathetic members of the group on television and that can increase your tolerance.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We can also try to get people exposed to others who are not like them -- but by doing this in a non-political way. Do some service or volunteering together, form friendships, find shared interests.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the abstract that sounds compelling, but what about this particular moment in America where you have an authoritarian president who is breaking up families of nonwhite immigrants, inspiring hate crimes and violence and encouraging horrible behavior by his followers? I have argued that people of conscience should no longer communicate with Trump supporters and anyone who has not renounced him. This includes family members and friends. There must be moral accountability.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I would add some caveats. People who are in danger by contacting someone who hates them should not be doing this. So, generally, marginalized groups should probably not be the first ones to reach out in this way. The second caveat is that the people who most need to do this are the people who are the least likely to do it. It really requires not just contact, but also some motivation to try to fight this type of thinking. Without motivation, it doesn't work as well, but the people who need it the most are the least motivated to use it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So that is a major problem, and really it's going to require more work from the right than the left at this point because the right is the party of high-status groups that are in power. This would be white Christian men. They're the ones who have to reach out. They can't rely on people who are feeling vulnerable to necessarily do that work for them. Members of the high-status group are also the ones who are the least interested in reaching out. Why would they reach out? They would perceive it as challenging their power. Why would they try to ruin that?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What worries you the most about how political identity is so deeply intertwined with social identity in the United States?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I don't really believe that any of the solutions that I told you about are going to happen. It's very hard. The last chapter of my book is called “Can we fix it?” and I almost titled it “Seven unlikely scenarios.” I am worried that this process is not going to stop anytime soon, and that the worse it gets, the more divided we get, the less we can compromise, the more we actually undermine democracy. It could be extremely damaging to the country.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I'm worried about violent conflict between Democrats and Republicans at some point. I haven't seen anything that's stopping that outcome yet. As long as the current crop of voters is out there it seems like there's just a lot of bad stuff brewing. I'm hoping we can find a way to cool it down. The first step is to diagnosis the illness. That's what we're trying to do now and hopefully that can lead to some type of better outcome.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AN scarily the same day:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A new arena in our burgeoning political circus has opened in the form of short-take political commentary: American Civil War, 2.0. Not restricted to 4chan, alt-left or alt-right, it grows instead from the fever swamps of what was once called the respectable middle. Examples of these predictions can be found here, here and here.&nbsp; And one knows it’s “a thing” when Twitter features a parody hash tag, #SecondCivilWar.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Few of these forecasters see a repeat of our last civil war. No attacks on a Fort Sumter followed by militia mobilization and hot war between rival governments. Most writers wisely modify Civil War 2.0 with adjectives such as “soft” or “cold” or other words short of “lethal.” But most articles do share a gist: The differences between so-called “Red” and “Blue” America are now irreconcilable, traditional political remedies that once peaceably managed conflict are irretrievably broken, and thus, a separation of some sort is, or will soon, be necessary. And if necessity can be made a virtue, it will be somehow peacefully managed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Before exploring the likelihood of civil war, forgive a hedge. Historians should be the last to dismiss these kinds of literary trends. Fin de siècle Europe saw the publication of many dystopian novels envisioning the monstrous war that finally arrived in 1914. And if the events foretold in films such as Fail Safe and Seven Days in Mayor The Day After television series did not come to pass, they nonetheless offer a window on contemporary mindsets. Besides, America was founded in revolution and reformed by civil war. As Saul Bellow once observed through a character, “Nothing is so rum that it can’t be true.” Or, I would add, as might become true.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But is a civil war, soft, hard, cold or hot, in our cards? Color me skeptical. As a Civil war historian and a sometime journalist, I covered some tragically real insurgencies and counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. They weren’t fought on Twitter or websites. Usually, they show up in Taliban night letters quickly followed by assassinations, or in market place IEDs that leave scattered body parts of innocent civilians. And despite our political differences, few Americans have an appetite for that kind of domestic conflict. Lefties and Righties still enjoy going to the mall. So I’ll default to a bumper sticker of my youth: “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” And at least for now, few Americans would come to a violent civil war. A car with Massachusetts’s plates can drive still through Texas without worrying overmuch about RPGs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Real civil wars have a pattern. One or more consequential constituencies,</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">? Have grievances decades or even centuries in the making that they believe are existential; and,</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">? They cease believing that the current power structure offers redress of such grievances; and,</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">? They have the material capacity, sometimes with the help of self-interested third parties, to inflict sustained violence on opposing constituencies; and,</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">? They possess in sufficient mass the will and organization to inflict this violence as well as absorb the inevitable counterattacks.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I may be wrong, but there’s nothing in this list that screams, “America, 2018.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As for a cold civil war or peaceable separation, it’s about time to expose the fraudulence of the construct on which such predictions are based: “Red” vs. “Blue” states. This meme, once convenient for summarizing presidential election returns, now corrupts many analyses of our domestic circumstance. Consider these points:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">? Unlike 1860, the United States is now a highly integrated economic, social and legal polity. Class conflict has replaced sectional conflict, and little of what’s disputed—immigration, abortion, gun control—amounts to a rationale for disunion.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">? But no region is actually “Blue” or “Red.” For example, in so-called “deep Blue” California, of 13,237,498 votes cast for Trump or Clinton, 33.8% voted for Trump. If you’re touting separation “because Trump,” or what you fear about his supporters, you’d better have a plan to deal with the 4,483,810 Californians who voted for Trump. The Cherokee Removal, a crime and stain on our history was the last time government enforced a mass population transfer. The alternative is secession within secession. For further reading, see West Virginia, State of.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">? “Red” and “Blue” differences are much exaggerated, especially within dead tree and social media silos. A vote for Clinton wasn’t necessarily a vote to bust the Union and few of Missouri’s Trump voters envisioned expelling Illinois from the republic.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sadly for this moment in time, social media has become an influence multiplier, whose pathways of unbounded ids are coupled with the routine portrayal of political extremism as representative. The result is a daily replay of something like Orson Welles’s famous 1938 radio hoax, “War of the Worlds,” true fake news about an alien invasion that reportedly led to panic in the streets.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The updated version is a mountain of “truthiness” about shadowy Russians, political murders, FBI plots, stolen elections, Kenyan births, and Donald J. Trump, slave to Vladimir Putin. The growing cult of Civil War, 2.0, is truthiness-as-prediction. It says more about elite anxiety, bipartisan virtue signaling, and the replacement of hard analysis by the studied ignorance “social” media. As that journalist of our moment, Michael Wolff declared with perfect sincerity, “If it rings true, it is true.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Civil War, 2.0? Nah. I’ll stick with one of my late mother’s favorite sayings: “Always try to separate the noise from the thing that makes the noise.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Richard F. Miller’s books include Harvard’s Civil War: A History of the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry and States At War, Volumes 1-6, (UPNE, 2013-2018).&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">polarization 2 capt 818</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">polar818</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">two americas</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">newly interesting post trump</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see also inequality 2</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see gingrich on origins</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see red state, blue state, South&nbsp; as well as confederacy south</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">originally on legislators, but expanded to red/blue divide, and inequality</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">stunning split on congr leadership LCV</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">cap 818</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/watching-reality-luxury-tv-killing-americas-economic-drive-and-maybe-its-soul</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">NEWS & POLITICS</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Watching Reality Luxury TV is Killing America's Economic Drive — And Maybe Its Soul</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There is a psycho-social link between regularly watching reality-based shows and being in favor of draconian cuts to social welfare benefits.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Bob Hennelly / Salon August 6, 2018, 10:36 AM GMT</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In both Britain and the United States conservative lawmakers are trying to radically reduce the social safety net for the poor by adding conditions and requirements to programs like Food Stamps and Medicaid. Proposals include adding work requirements and drug testing.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Their voting base is loving it: "Finally, something is getting done. . . ."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A lot has been written about how the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump reflected the ascendancy of anti-immigrant sentiment on both sides of the Atlantic. Both votes, coming in the first quarter of the 21st century, illustrate that there is a psychology of scarcity that has made deep inroads into our political bloodstream.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Of course there’s a surreal irony here when we see Apple reach the trillion dollar mark in value and the personal wealth of the planet’s top .01 percent on an ever upward trajectory to "infinity and beyond."&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Abundance is not the problem. Sharing it is.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For down here on earth, the squeeze play is really on social welfare budgets because it simultaneously pulls out the welcome mat for that alien other while also taking a whack at the native born poor who have been "mollycoddled long enough." In this world view the poor are to be viewed with suspicion, like the criminals they likely are.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And like the YouTube video that went viral of the white New York City lawyer berating Latino workers in a Manhattan eatery by threatening to call ICE on them, this emerging xenophobic zeitgeist has a kind of passionate self-righteousness edge to it.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That kind of Trumpian self-indulging tirade is rooted in the conviction that the subject of your derision is actually not a human being at all, but an object worthy of your total contempt. It is the kind of discourse we hear on talk radio when people are described as “vermin” — wild mammals and birds that are harmful to crops and carry disease.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As any person with any background in agriculture&nbsp; knows, there’s only one thing to do with vermin, call the exterminator.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It would appear from the current tenor of political discourse that the biblical instructions to raise up the poor and the immigrant stranger might as well be prehistoric cave drawings.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There’s just no place in our Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous reality TV world&nbsp; for Matthew’s instruction (19:21): “Jesus said to him, 'If you want to be perfect, go, sell what&nbsp; you have&nbsp; and give&nbsp; to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven, and come follow me.'”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We know that for decades now in both countries church attendance has been on the decline. And just what has risen up in its place? Based on ratings for reality television, it would appear to be our actual worship of wealth itself.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Add in our lust for wealth and high-end luxury goods stroked by the corporate media and&nbsp; voila — we have Donald Trump sitting in the White House atop the Golden Calf (That’s the idol the Israelites built to kill time waiting for Mosses to return from Mt. Sinai).&nbsp; &nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to a recently released study from the London School of Economics there is psycho-social link between regularly watching reality based shows like the “The Apprentice” and “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” and being in favor of draconian cuts to social welfare benefit.&nbsp;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dr. Rodolfo Leyva, with LSE’s Department of Media and Communications "studied the responses of 487 British adults aged 18-49 to a randomized-control web-survey experiment that was masked as a memory and attention test,” according to an LSE press release. “The treatment group was exposed to 4 adverts for luxury products, 4 tabloid photos of famous celebrities showing off expensive goods, and 4 newspaper headlines of rags to riches stories.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">LSE continued, “The control group was exposed to neutral stimuli such as adverts about the London underground, images of natural scenery and newspaper headlines about dinosaurs. In total, each group was intermittently shown 12 separate images — each for 5 seconds.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The results showed that even just&nbsp; an “intermittent minute of attention to common and typical materialistic media messages caused a significant increase in anti-welfare sentiments” with results showing&nbsp; that “those who also regularly watched shows such as “The Apprentice” and “X-Factor”&nbsp; were much more likely to hold “stronger materialistic and anti-welfare attitudes than lighter consumers of these shows.”&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dr. Leyva studies political participation, media psychology, neuroscience as well as quantitative and experimental methods in media and communications research.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“”The Apprentice”, “Keeping Up With The Kardashians” and “X-Factor” are replete with MMMs [materialists media messages] that are engineered to absorb audiences into the glamorous world of wealth and celebrities and thus have a strong potential to function as cultivators of materialistic values and attitudes,” wrote Dr. Leyva.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Humans are inherently materialistic but also very social and communal. The way this is expressed depends on our culture. If there is more emphasis on materialism as a way to be happy, this makes us more inclined to be selfish and anti-social, and therefore unsympathetic to people less fortunate.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He continued, “This study can contribute to explanations for why the UK public’s support for welfare to aid the impoverished and unemployed has been decreasing during a time of rapidly growing wealth disparities, living costs, and rates of precarious [employment] and underemployment.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As we look to 2018 and beyond, our real problem is not so much Donald Trump, but the part of our national character he personifies, that believes prosperity is achieved through greed and selfishness.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bob Hennelly is an award-winning investigative journalist and a contributor to Salon</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">nb 1994 start date</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">chart</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.people-press.org/interactives/political-polarization-1994-2017/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">re</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.people-press.org/2017/10/05/the-partisan-divide-on-political-values-grows-even-wider/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The divisions between Republicans and Democrats on fundamental political values – on government, race, immigration, national security, environmental protection and other areas – reached record levels during Barack Obama’s presidency. In Donald Trump’s first year as president, these gaps have grown even larger.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And the magnitude of these differences dwarfs other divisions in society, along such lines as gender, race and ethnicity, religious observance or education.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A new study by Pew Research Center, based on surveys of more than 5,000 adults conducted over the summer, finds widening differences between Republicans and Democrats on a range of measures the Center has been asking about since 1994, as well as those with more recent trends. But in recent years, the gaps on several sets of political values in particular – including measures of attitudes about the social safety net, race and immigration – have increased dramatically.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Government aid to needy. Over the past six years, the share of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents saying the government should do more to help the needy, even if it means going deeper into debt, has risen 17 percentage points (from 54% to 71%), while the views of Republicans and Republican leaners have barely changed (25% then, 24% today). However, Republicans’ opinions on this issue had shifted substantially between 2007 and 2011, with the share favoring more aid to the needy falling 20 points (from 45% to 25%).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The result: While there has been a consistent party gap since 1994 on government aid to the poor, the divisions have never been this large. In 2011, about twice as many Democrats as Republicans said the government should do more for the needy (54% vs. 25%). Today, nearly three times as many Democrats as Republicans say this (71% vs. 24%).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Racial discrimination. In recent years, Democrats’ views on racial discrimination also have changed, driving an overall shift in public opinion. Currently, 41% of Americans say racial discrimination is the main reason many blacks cannot get ahead – the largest share expressing this view in surveys dating back 23 years. Still, somewhat more Americans (49%) say blacks who cannot get ahead are mostly responsible for their own condition.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When the racial discrimination question was first asked in 1994, the partisan difference was 13 points. By 2009, it was only somewhat larger (19 points). But today, the gap in opinions between Republicans and Democrats about racial discrimination and black advancement has increased to 50 points.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Immigration. Nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) say immigrants strengthen the country “because of their hard work and talents.” Just 26% say immigrants are a burden “because they take our jobs, housing and health care.” Views of immigrants, though little changed from a year ago, are more positive than at any point in the past two decades.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As with views of racial discrimination, there has been a major shift in Democrats’ opinions about immigrants. The share of Democrats who say immigrants strengthen the country has increased from 32% in 1994 to 84% today. By contrast, Republicans are divided in attitudes about immigrants: 42% say they strengthen the country, while 44% view them as a burden. In 1994, 30% of Republicans said immigrants strengthened the country, while 64% said they were a burden.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Peace through strength.” About six-in-ten Americans (61%) say good diplomacy is the best way to ensure peace, while 30% say peace is ensured by military strength. Opinions in both parties have changed since the 1990s; Democrats increasingly say peace is ensured by good diplomacy, while Republicans say it is military strength that ensures peace. Today, 83% of Democrats and Democratic leaners see good diplomacy as the way to ensure peace, compared with just 33% of Republicans and Republican leaners.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The surveys were conducted June 8-18 among 2,504 adults and June 27-July 9 among 2,505 adults, with a follow-up survey conducted Aug. 15-21 among 1,893 respondents. This report was made possible by The Pew Charitable Trusts, which received support for the surveys from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Party gaps much larger than demographic differences</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The partisan shifts on political values over the past 23 years have had different trajectories across different sets of issues. While there has been greater movement among Democrats than Republicans on several issues, on others Republicans have shown more change.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In views of stricter environmental laws and regulations, for example, there has been a larger long-term change among Republicans than Democrats. Republicans are far less supportive of stricter environmental laws than they were in the mid-1990s, while Democrats have become somewhat more supportive.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But the bottom line is this: Across 10 measures that Pew Research Center has tracked on the same surveys since 1994, the average partisan gap has increased from 15 percentage points to 36 points.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Two decades ago, the average partisan differences on these items were only somewhat wider than differences by religious attendance or educational attainment and about as wide as the differences between blacks and whites (14 points, on average). Today, the party divide is much wider than any of these demographic differences.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">....</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Other important findings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Partisan antipathy remains extensive. The shares of Republicans and Democrats who express very unfavorable opinions of the opposing party have increased dramatically since the 1990s, but have changed little in recent years. Currently, 44% of Democrats and Democratic leaners have a very unfavorable opinion of the GOP, based on yearly averages of Pew Research Center surveys; 45% of Republicans and Republican leaners view the Democratic Party very unfavorably. In 1994, fewer than 20% in both parties viewed the opposing party very unfavorably.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Big house, small house. Our studies of political polarization and partisan antipathy both found that the disagreements between Republicans and Democrats go far beyond political values and issues. They also have markedly different preferences about where they would like to live. Most Republicans (65%) say they would rather live in a community where houses are larger and farther apart and where schools and shopping are not nearby. A majority of Democrats (61%) prefer smaller houses within walking distance of schools and shopping.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Deep differences over factors for nation’s success. About half of Americans (52%) attribute the country’s success more to “its ability to change,” while 43% say the nation’s “reliance on long-standing principles” has been more important. Most Democrats (68%) link the nation’s success more to its ability to change, while 61% of Republicans point to its reliance on principles. In addition, there are wide age differences, with young people far more likely than older adults to say America’s success is mainly linked to its ability to change.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">page 1 of many ....</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">kpfa 7/25/18 every prz since ? seen as not legit by signif chunk of pop: BC b/c?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">red states sickest, poorest, but killing ACA pre-exist conds:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">hmmn anecdote:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/conservative-naval-professor-details-his-futile-attempt-sway-lost-trump-voters-some-them-are-just</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"preach" v discuss</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;women, who were immigrants from India and a post-Soviet region, asked to debate Nichols afterward, and asked if he had called them “willfully evil” — and he said they sputtered after he corrected them and said they were “willfully ignorant."&nbsp; "Both did the standard Trump thing: talking at me in a fusillade of words punctuated with questions that they would not let me answer,” Nichols said. “This is a compulsion with Trumpers: they must – must – constantly explain to you why they had to vote for Trump.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The women listed “phantom Trump successes” and insisted Trump was taking jobs away from foreign workers and giving them back to Americans, and Nichols tried to correct them.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Look, what you believe to be true is false,” he told them. “The things you think are facts are not facts. We can’t go further here.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The women rapidly insisted their beliefs were true, and they demanded Nichols accept their views as valid.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“You should respect my view and not call me ignorant,” one of them said, according to Nichols. “That’s not reasonable.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Well, he’s not as bad as Obamanation,” the woman replied, referring to the former president. “That’s what he was, an abomination.”Nichols told the woman she was not a reasonable person, and he said their views on Trump were simply not compatible with reality.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nichols rolled his eyes as the woman walked away, and the other woman explained she had voted for President Barack Obama but could not support Hillary Clinton — who she accused of various alleged crimes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“These two people will never, ever change their minds,” Nichols said. “They are not accessible to reason. They demand agreement and respect, even when they don’t give it and are themselves unreasonable. This is the cohort that neither the GOP post-Trump nor Dems will ever reach.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He said the women were unwilling to accept Nichols’ opposing viewpoint and instead only wanted to bash Obama and Clinton, and he said they would never change their minds.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“These types of Trumpers are just lost,” he said. “They’re not going to climb down, change their minds, listen to new information. Trump really could shoot them on Fifth Avenue. There’s no point in discussion, because they don’t discuss, they preach.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“No rational or fact-based politics will reach these folks,” Nichols added. “I hate to say that, because I believe in the power of reason and facts. But they’re gone. Some of them are nice people, but dumb. Some of them are just bad people. But rationality isn’t going to change much here."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The States Attacking Obamacare Pre-Existing Condition Protections Would Be Most Harmed by Their Repeal</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These efforts will disproportionately hurt the people of the states that are now suing to strike down the law's protection</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Joan McCarter / Daily Kos July 18, 2018, 6:15 AM GMT</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/states-attacking-obamacare-pre-existing-condition-protections-would-be-most-harmed</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Gov. Mike Parsons of Missouri. The state's pre-existing condition rate is over 35 percent.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At some point you would think that the leadership in Republican states would just get over their hatred of President Barack Obama and realize that the Affordable Care Act has helped them. Or failing that, the people Obamacare has been helping would realize they have shitheads for leadership, and vote them out. Because here we go again—the efforts of Republican leadership in conservatives states will disproportionately hurt the people of the states that are now suing to strike down the law's protections, reports Kaiser Health News.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"These states have been opposed to the ACA from the beginning," said Gerald Kominski, a senior fellow at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. "They’re hurting their most vulnerable citizens."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Looking at data from insurance companies and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, KHN determined which states have the highest rates of adults with pre-existing conditions, and 9 out of the 11 have signed on to the lawsuit to strike down the ACA. West Virginia has the highest rate, with 36 percent of adults under age 65 living with preexisting conditions. Probably 1 in 3 of those would have a hard time buying insurance on the individual market of their state if Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who joined the legal challenge against the ACA, were to prevail. There's one more argument for Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) to oppose the nomination ofBrett Kavanaugh, who's proven hostile to the ACA, to the Supreme Court.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A reminder of who's at risk here: "Common conditions that led insurance companies to deny coverage included high blood pressure, cancer, obesity, diabetes and depression, among many others. Some people were denied for having acne, asthma or for being pregnant." That encompasses at least a quarter of all adults who are under age 65—more than 50 million Americans.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That's just one reason so many people—three-quarters of Americans—say keeping these protections is "very important," including majorities of Democratic, Republican and independent voters.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski want their refusal to go along with Obamacare repeal and their repeated claims that they want to see these protections maintained to mean anything at all, to have any lasting effect, they've got to oppose this nomination.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ref</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://khn.org/news/states-attacking-aca-would-hurt-most-if-shield-on-preexisting-conditions-were-axed/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with preexisting medical conditions are struck down in court, residents of the Republican-led states that are challenging the law have the most to lose.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“These states have been opposed to the ACA from the beginning,” said Gerald Kominski, a senior fellow at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. “They’re hurting their most vulnerable citizens.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Twenty Republican state attorneys general and governors challenged the constitutionality of the ACA in federal court in February. Last month, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Department of Justice made the unusual decision not to defend key portions of the law against this legal challenge.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The states’ lawsuit argues that because Congress eliminated the Obamacare tax penalty for not having insurance coverage, effective next year, the entire law is unconstitutional. By extension, the suit calls on federal courts to find the health law’s protections for people with preexisting conditions unconstitutional — and Sessions agrees.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nine of the 11 states with the highest rates of preexisting conditions among adults under 65 have signed onto the lawsuit to strike down the ACA, according to data from insurance companies and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The 2015 data, the most recent available, were analyzed by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2016. (Kaiser Health News, which produces California Healthline, is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Those who support the lawsuit contend that there are other means of protecting people with preexisting conditions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“If a court strikes down the constitutionality of the ACA, there are ways to repeal and replace without Arizonans with preexisting conditions losing their coverage,” said Katie Conner, a spokeswoman for Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Conner said her boss, who is party to the lawsuit, believes preexisting conditions should “always be covered.” In Arizona, more than 1 in 4 adult adults under 65 have a preexisting condition, according to the data.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The state with the highest rate of adults with preexisting conditions is West Virginia — 36 percent of those under age 65. That means that about 1 in 3 of them could have a hard time buying insurance through the individual marketplace without the ACA protections.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The office of West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who joined the legal challenge against the ACA, declined to comment. But a spokesman for Morrisey’s re-election campaign told PolitiFact last month that “help should be provided to those who need it most, including those with preexisting conditions.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Plaintiffs in the lawsuit “are paying lip service to these critical protections for people, but they are in fact engaged in a strategy that would get rid of those protections,” said Justin Giovannelli, an associate research professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms. “Frankly, it’s hard to square what they’re saying on the one hand and what they’re arguing in the courts on the other.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to a poll released in June, also by the Kaiser Family Foundation, three-quarters of Americans say that maintaining protections for people with preexisting conditions is “very important.” This includes majorities of Democratic, Republican and independent voters.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Before the health law was adopted, insurance companies routinely denied coverage to millions of people with preexisting conditions who purchased insurance through the individual marketplace. If they didn’t deny coverage outright, some health plans charged consumers exorbitant premiums, or offered policies that excluded coverage for pricey conditions. (Although many people got insurance through their employers or public plans that covered preexisting conditions, they could have been left vulnerable if their employment status or other circumstances changed.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The ACA ended those practices.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Common conditions that led insurance companies to deny coverage included high blood pressure, cancer, obesity, diabetes and depression, among many others. Some people were denied for having acne, asthma or for being pregnant.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The KFF analysis estimated that at least 27 percent of adults under 65 — more than 50 million Americans — had at least one preexisting condition that would have jeopardized their coverage pre-ACA. The foundation said its estimates were an undercount because some diseases that insurers cited when declining coverage are not in the survey data. Also, each insurance company set its own rules and conditions for denials, making accurate counts of those who could be affected hard to nail down.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Less precise estimates by other researchers and the Department of Health and Human Services show that up to half of all adults under age 65 have at least one preexisting condition.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-are-poor-whites-more-depressed-and-pessimistic-poor-african-americans</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AN alex anderson</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;Carol Graham appeared on Charles Ellison’s “Reality Check” program on WURD AM/FM (a liberal/progressive African-American talk radio station in Philadelphia) and discussed the emotional differences between poor blacks and poor whites. It was a fascinating conservation: according to Graham’s research, poor African-Americans in the United States are, on the whole, more optimistic than poor whites—who Graham described to Ellison as being much more likely to fall into despair. As worried as the African-American community is by the Trump Administration and its horrible policies, Graham finds poor whites to be in a much worse state emotionally and are decidedly more pessimistic.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">WURD callers, mostly African-Americans living in Philadelphia, offered different views on Graham’s findings. Some asserted that formerly middle-class whites who fell into poverty during the Great Recession were ill-equipped, emotionally, to handle the types of economic struggles African-Americans have been facing all these years. But another explanation for Graham’s findings is that poor whites—whether they became the neo-poor during the Great Recession or were poor long before that—are much more likely to have been thoroughly indoctrinated into right-wing Republican ideology, especially in Republican-dominated areas of the U.S. And as a result, they feel a certain self-hatred and blame themselves for their economic misfortunes in a way that poor African-Americans don’t. Poor whites (especially the ones based in rural areas or small towns) and poor African-Americans often live in very different worlds—and everything from the media outlets they embrace to the churches they attend to the music they listen to is likely to affect whether they view the poor as morally deficient or as people who have been seriously screwed over.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As much as right-wingers like to whine about the mainstream media having a liberal bias—which, for the most part, it doesn’t—the fact is that right-wing media is vast, from Fox News to white AM talk radio to Breitbart, Townhall, the Weekly Standard and countless other high-traffic wingnut websites. And the right-wing media has invested considerable time and energy in teaching that the poor are useless freeloaders living off the sweat, hard work and innovation of the rich (who Rush Limbaugh calls “the achievers”). Rural whites who have been bombarded with decades of poor-bashing from Fox News and white talk radio are bound to take that message to heart and view themselves as moral failures if they are not doing well financially.&nbsp; The overall message at an African-American talk radio station like WURD is totally different from what one hears on Limbaugh’s show. From the local programming that dominates the station to the Rev. Al Sharpton’s syndicated program, “Keeping It Real,” Donald Trump’s presidency and the Republican Party are painted in a consistently negative light on WURD—and the poor are not painted as parasites or leeches by any means, but as people who have been screwed over by crony capitalism and a rigged game. While WURD callers often sound angry and frustrated over the political climate in the Trump era, the anger doesn’t sound like self-hatred or self-blame. Sharpton and Ellison will encourage education, self-improvement and job training, but in a way that uplifts rather demonizes or belittles the poor.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Christianity comes in wildly different forms in the U.S., where white fundamentalist megachurches often have a very different view of economics than African Methodist Episcopal (AME) denominations. The Christian Right, white megachurches and fundamentalist Pentecostals typically embrace the so-called “prosperity gospel,” which teaches that the rich are blessed with affluence because of their moral superiority and that the poor are poor because of their immoral, sinful ways. But in black AME churches, one often hears that it is a Christian’s duty to feed the poor and help the homeless—and one is more likely to hear Jesus Christ quoted as saying, “It is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In AME churches, the burden of proof is usually on the rich rather than the poor. So, if an African-American in an AME congregation graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school or law school and has a six-figure income, that’s all well and good—but they’re still encouraged to roll up their sleeves and do some volunteer work in a homeless shelter because that’s their duty as a Christian. The prosperity gospel is viewed as wrong-headed and unchristian in many black AME congregations.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Liberal AME pastors view Jesus Christ as an advocate for the poor and the downtrodden. To right-wing white megachurches, Jesus hates the poor and spits in their faces.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Music is another way in which poor whites and poor blacks can receive radically different messages. The fact that Kanye West said some favorable things about President Trump earlier this year was controversial in the hip-hop community, where Immortal Technique, Public Enemy, Ice-T, KRS-1, Paris, N.W.A, Ice Cube and countless other rappers have been known for their left-of-center views. But modern country-rock is full of right-wing activists who think former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin represents “the real America.” The Dixie Chicks became pariahs in the country music community after Natalie Maines criticized President George W. Bush and the Iraq War in 2003; Maines found out the hard way that being openly liberal can seriously damage one’s career in country music.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The message poor blacks are receiving is that poverty is the result of injustice and the failures of crony capitalism. The message many poor whites are receiving is that if you’re poor, you’re a loser and a parasite.&nbsp; Of course, Jay-Z, Chance the Rapper and other hip-hop stars attract racially diverse audiences and have plenty of white fans. And as many liberals and progressives as there have been in hip-hop, conservative rappers are not nonexistent. But on the whole, the poor receive a lot more emotional support in hip-hop than they do in modern country music. And even though hip-hop has plenty of imagery of bling and Benzes while modern country music likes to portray itself as music of the common man, hip-hop—at the end of the day—tends to view the poor in a much more compassionate and favorable light.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With so many poor whites being demonized whether they’re turning on Fox News, going to a megachurch or hearing their favorite country-rock stars urging them to vote Republican and support President Trump’s agenda, it’s no wonder that so many of them have fallen into despair, hopelessness and self-hatred.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/supreme-court-decides-let-political-extremists-run-wild-key-election-case</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;U.S. Supreme Court on Monday all-but dismissed one of the most-watched election law cases in recent years, saying those in Wisconsin filing a lawsuit that sought to show how extreme partisan gerrymandering was anti-democratic had no basis to sue.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It also took no action on a second partisan gerrymandering case from Maryland.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The Court has not found that this presents an individual and personal injury of the kind required for Article III standing,” the majority said in the Wisconsin case, sending it back to a lower court. “A citizen’s interest in the overall composition of the legislature is embodied in his right to vote for his representative. The harm asserted by the plaintiffs in this case is best understood as arising from a burden on their own votes.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Wisconsin case sought to show how the state’s GOP-led legislature in 2011 segregated each party’s reliable voters by party to draw legislative districts after the 2010 Census to create a red super-majority. In the Maryland case, those suing said a Democratic-led legislature had overreached to erase a GOP-held House seat.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Wisconsin suit was the most carefully watched of the two gerrymandering cases, because it involved statewide jockeying of political districts, as opposed to a single congressional seat. It was also the platform for advanced analysis that showed how the use of technology was able to tilt the electoral playing field to game political advantage based on voter turnout patterns.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The decision will reverberate on many political and cultural levels. Seen from a partisan standpoint, the Court is saying that the plaintiffs’ efforts to demonstrate that Wisconsin’s Republican mapmakers were able create a structural head start in the likely popular vote was fair game—even if it led to one-party rule for most of this decade. Beyond the technicalities of how the GOP nullified their opposition’s ability to win in typical election cycles (2018 is not a typical year), the Court’s majority is saying that rebalancing elections to create greater equality among voters is not a constitutional priority.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Going deeper, the Court’s action is likely to signal that ruling parties in supermajority state legislatures are free to tinker with the rules of voting and elections as they see fit—to preserve their power. (Wisconsin was one of more than a dozen red states that drew extreme gerrymandered maps after the 2010 census, leading to super majorities in their state legislatures and House delegations. Those ultra-red majorities then passed many of this decade’s voter suppression, anti-union, anti-abortion, anti-LGBT and anti-safety net laws.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On a cultural level, the Court is signaling that American democracy will remain a deeply uneven system, where governing classes can advantage themselves and take steps to undermine the participation and power of their opponents or under-represented constituencies.While there is a tendency among the judiciary to keep a certain distance from the political process—as a co-equal branch of government and separation of powers—the fact remains that the Court is not seeking to rebalance the most glaring anti-democratic features in the fundamentals that shape the electoral process.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Inequality in elections is going to remain a formidable obstacle. Only last week, in purple North Carolina, did the Republican-led legislature propose anew series of election rules that would disadvantage a key Democratic voting block—African Americans who voted on the weekend before the Tuesday general election. The state’s GOP proposed, among several measures, to eliminate the early voting option used by 200,000 citizens in 2016.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That move came despite a federal appeals court in 2016 rejecting an earlier slate of anti-participatory election reforms, saying those measures targeted the state’s black voters “with almost surgical precision.” But now, with the Supreme Court not acting on the partisan gerrymandering cases, the political process will be freer to revert to more aggressive tactics to advantage one side—where partisan power apparently carries more constitutional weight than equality among the electorate.&nbsp;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">how dem die:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">7 The Unraveling p. 145</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">fedsoc said no new justice min after scalia dead; mike lee, mitch mcc</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">(1st x since 1866) stole scotus seat and got away w/ it; divergence between way sys works and the way it should;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">newt june 1978 CR pitched war; purpose of leader is to build a majority 147; cadre of loyalist, hijacked CSPAN, "corrupt? sick" shocked dems silent for years 148</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">GOPAC spread tactics; 2k audio tapes // Allay Khomeini ; anti-family, traitors "... min whip then spkr 1995, pulled pty to rt (vs resistance to him); and Gingrich Senators ~ compromise; new wave of polarization based on pop discontent, esp gop 149; pol as war" --> dom strategy ; enemy is immoral, a Mccarthy who succeeded"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1993 dole sez BC had no mandate, thus no honeymoon; filibusters and invest "scandals"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2 govt shutdowns 95=6; weaponized impeachment;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">// delay. K street: if it's not illegal, do it;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">B43 declared tex bi-part model, uniter vs divider --> 0</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rove said US so polarized, go hard rt to energize base [djt?]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">dems ~, slowed down jud noms [Bork? 1987 RR]; 110th, last b41, record filib, 2x BC years 153; GOP quit "regular order' so no amendments --> no oversight of pres; 140 hrs on BC xmas list for $, but no subpoena b41 1st 6 years;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2003 state redistrict TX House majority leader delay; 2004 dems need 13 seats to win house; 47 legs fled to OK on buses 4 days;&nbsp; sen flew 1 mos, but caved; delay from DC to oversee reconciliation; dems lost 6 in TX</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">coulter "treason" bill ayers (hannity and colmes 61 shows 2008 campaign) 156</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">delay, steve king BO marxist; McC balked but "lipstick" Palin, palin' around with terrorists (domestic) BO not a real american, who sees the world as we do;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">TP: BO a threat to democ; Broun dictator //AH, joni ; tancredo, newt, rudy g;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">birther 2004 sen, 2008 pres, mike coffman co; djt 2011 as think of run;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">not 1st, but unprecedented got beyond fringe and accept by high gop palin and TP</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">lock her up"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">loss forbear b/c Cruz sez BO 0 respect rule of law, then block judge noms by all means;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">young guns mccarthy ryan , cantor --> party of no; sen mcconn"1 term pres"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">sen obstruct spike 2008 (holds used to be a couple days to prep) 385 filib = 70 yrs</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">dems nuke option (elim filib for noms except scotus) --> BO exec order/memo eg fed agy co2 (McConn said ignore regulatory order on co2 [cpp?]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">debt limit as hostage</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">tom cotton 3/15 46 gop sen wrote letter to iran said pres no authority 165</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">cruz, mccain and bur said block hillary scotus noms 4 yrs;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">polar: sep by race, religion, geogr "way of life" 167.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1960 cross marr 4-5%; 2010 33 dem 49 gop unhappy if; 70 dem 62% gop fear other pty;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">60's both big tent; evangel slightly dem; 64 CR act, RMN so stra, RR coded dog whistles; gop went hard right, dems not hard left ; 60's big immigration start, asia lat am, proj non white maj 2044; Row swung evangels; 2000's married wht xian 80 -40%</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Media: gop 2010 69% fox; talk radio; no compromise, attack any defector/enforce; trent lott warned, also Norquist and CFG no tax pledge [also climate] AFP Am Energy Alliance Koch 400m$; gop --> more vulnerable to pressure groups and donors 173;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">hof paranoid style about response to threat (here demographic)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">8 Trump Against the Guardrails p. 176</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/map-shows-huge-differences-in-educational-attainment-across-us</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">District of Columbia is the best-educated part of the country: 56.8% of its residents have at least a Bachelor's degree.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Second is Massachusetts, with 42.7%. While a lot of dark blue clusters on the East Coast, the third-highest score is for Colorado, way out west: 39.9%.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Worst-scoring state is West Virginia, where just 20.8% of the residents 25 and older have at least a Bachelor's degree. That's just over a third of the share of Bachelor's degree holders in DC.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Mountain State is marginally outperformed by Mississippi, where 21.8% have completed a college or university education.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Educational attainment is linked to income. In 2016, the average median income as divided per highest attained degree was as follows:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">$27,800 – didn't finish high school</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">$36,700 – high school or equivalent</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">$67,300 – Bachelor's degree</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">$95,200 – advanced degree</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Map found here at Overflow Data, via Simon Kuestenmacher. Additional information here at Marketing Charts.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/white-people-america-are-sharply-divided-education-and-income-donald-trump-result</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">America appears caught in a maelstrom of what I have described as "malignant reality," sustained by lies, half-truths, misunderstandings, willful ignorance and confusion about many things. Most notably, how Donald Trump became president. There will be no return to normalcy until there is a full and proper accounting of how this crisis came into existence.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here are some examples of those falsehoods and evasions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump is a populist who represents a mass movement of "forgotten" Americans. In reality, he is an elitist whose policies serve the rich and hurt the vast majority of Americans. Donald Trump lost the vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes; the aggregate turnout in the 2016 election was not that dissimilar from the last three presidential elections.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump will at some point be restrained by the Republican Party and "mature" into the responsibilities of the office. Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party; his policy positions are supported by the vast majority of Republican voters, elected officials, media and interest groups. Donald Trump has repeatedly demonstrated hostility towards democracy and the basic standards of decency and dignity exemplified by his predecessors.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donald Trump was elected because of "economic anxiety" among the "white working class." In reality, those voters who were most concerned about the economy supported Clinton. Donald Trump won every category of white voters -- not just those who were poor or working-class.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At the center of these claims is a belief that racism was a peripheral variable which was not central to Trump's razor-thin victory over Clinton. This is one of the most egregious and toxic falsehoods to emerge from the 2016 election.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The new article "Understanding White Polarization in the 2016 Vote for President: The Sobering Role of Racism and Sexism," by political scientists Brian Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams and Tatishe Nteta, demonstrates that racial animus and sexism were in fact the most powerful factors influencing Trump's voters.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Writing in the Spring 2018 edition of Political Science Quarterly, the authors explain that the 2016 election "witnessed the largest gap between the presidential vote preferences of college-educated and non-college-educated whites" since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Schaffner and his fellow researchers conclude that the 2016 campaign "witnessed a dramatic polarization in the vote choices of whites based on education," and argue that "very little of this gap can be explained by the economic difficulties faced by less educated whites." Had college-educated and non-college-educated white voters split between the two candidates in roughly the same manner, Hillary Clinton would almost certainly be president today.While Donald Trump enjoyed just a four-point margin over Hillary Clinton among whites with a college degree (10 points less than Mitt Romney’s margin over Barack Obama among that group in 2012), his advantage among non-college-educated whites was nearly 40 points. ... While many election postmortems were quick to make note of the education gap among whites in terms of presidential vote choice in 2016 explanations for the origins of this gap were a subject of significant debate. ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We find that while economic considerations were an important part of the story, racial attitudes and sexism were much more strongly related to support for Trump; these attitudes explain at least two-thirds of the education gap among white voters in the 2016 presidential election.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a political environment where racism and conservative politics almost fully overlap, where authoritarianism intersects with racism and sexism, and where political polarization is driven in anxiety about changing racial demographics, Donald Trump may be a prototype for a more refined, and even more dangerous, right-wing successor.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/education/corporate-plan-groom-us-kids-servitude-wiping-out-public-schools</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Temin traces the emergence of the U.S. dual economy to the 1970s and 80s, when civil rights advances were making a lot of Americans uneasy. People who had long been opposed to the New Deal began to find new ways to advance their agenda. The Nixon administration gave momentum to anti-government, free-market fundamentalist ideologies, which gained even more support under Reagan. Gradually, as free-market programs became policy, the rich began to get richer and economic inequality began to rise. Economist Paul Krugman has called this phenomenon the “Great Divergence.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_issue</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For example, some Republican strategists have hoped that African Americans, a traditionally Democratic voting bloc, yet also one that possesses some of the most conservative views on matters of homosexuality, may be more inclined to vote for the Republican Party because of their opposition to gay marriage. In 2012, internal National Organization for Marriage memos dating to 2009 were released that stated that they sought "to drive a wedge between gays and blacks" by promoting "African American spokespeople for marriage", thus provoking same-sex marriage supporters into "denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots", and to "interrupt" the "assimilation" of Latinos into "dominant Anglo culture" by making the stance against same-sex marriage "a key badge of Latino identity".[2][3]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Likewise, Democratic strategists have hoped that the issue of stem cell research could be used as a wedge issue against the right, since some Republicans support the research while others are morally opposed to the use of embryonic cells in research. The well known mantra "God, guns and gays" typifies Republican wedge strategy crafted along other famous wedge issues beginning in the Nixon era which aided winning the South from the Democrats.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Reform of the laws regarding illegal immigration to the United States operated as a wedge issue in 2007. Some Republican legislators, with the backing of President George W. Bush, sought to address the dual issues of ongoing illegal immigration to the United States and the illegal status of an estimated 12 million people currently living in America. Other Republicans bitterly opposed any "amnesty" for illegal immigrants, out of fear that their constituents were unsupportive of immigration reform. Some Democrats pitched in to keep the issue alive as they recognized the issue was deeply dividing the Republican party between advocates of reform and advocates of the status quo. The result was a bitter division in Republican ranks and a stalled bill in Congress; columnist Peggy Noonan wrote in January 2008 that President Bush had "destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other", by pushing immigration reform, as well as other wedge issues for the Republicans.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">See also[edit]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Attack ad</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Divide and rule</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dog-whistle politics</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Negative campaigning</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Push poll</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">polar promotes fascism:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/american-democracy-already-beyond-saving</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The true tale of Donald Trump's journey from reality TV show character, professional wrestler wannabe, serial adulterer and supposed billionaire to president of the United States is stranger than fiction. This is a living nightmare for Trump's opponents and others terrified by the harm he is doing to American society -- and a dreamlike state of political ecstasy for Trump's supporters.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In many ways, this discord and chaos are by design. Donald Trump's voters, along with the right-wing think tanks, plutocratic monied interests, conservative media and Christian fundamentalists have long wanted to break America's political and social norms, punish those they view as not "real" Americans", gut the social safety net, destroy the commons, and ultimately the undermine the very idea of democratic government. Trump is a means to an end; he is a human political bomb.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How does one assess the health of a democracy? Is the poison that Donald Trump and the Republican Party have injected into the American body politic lethal? Is American democracy truly exceptional? Can a multi-ethnic and multiracial democracy such as the United States survive the white nationalist and white supremacist identity politics of Donald Trump and the Republican Party?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In an effort to answer these questions I spoke with Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. They are both professors of government at Harvard University and the co-authors of the widely discussed new book "How Democracies Die."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How would you explain the election of Donald Trump?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Daniel Ziblatt: I think there is mass disaffection with our political system. What was different this time was that one of the country's main political parties, the Republican Party, failed to serve its gatekeeping function to keep a demagogic figure out of office. The most important question to explain is not why Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, but why Donald Trump got the [Republican] nomination in the first place.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Steven Levitsky: The United States has had no shortage of authoritarian demagogues circling around our polity and many of them, whether it's Henry Ford in the early '20s, Huey Long in the 1930s, or George Wallace in the '60s had a fair amount of public support -- in terms of percentages not far from Donald Trump. What is new is that a major party nominated him and then after nominating him basically lined up behind him.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ziblatt: There's always a kind of sub-current of authoritarianism in American political culture, and there's always a segment of the population that support these types of figures. What really changed are two things. One, the way we select our presidential candidates changed. Beginning with the increasing importance of primaries after 1972 it actually became easier for a figure like Trump to get through. The second big thing is simply that everybody kept waiting for the party establishment to step in and we discovered that the Republicans have a very hollow organizational core. There were no party leaders to step in and say, "We'll endorse somebody from the other side."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Has American political culture just become so extreme, with a radicalized right wing, that a demagogue president like Donald Trump was inevitable?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Levitsky: I would also add that in many respects, Fox News and a handful of AM radio personalities exert greater leverage over candidates and candidate selection than the Republican Party establishment itself.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How would you evaluate the role of the news media as "guardians of democracy" in the era of Trump?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Levitsky: In a sense, there is no single fourth estate anymore. There is now a very fragmented, very diversified, and very partisan media. This is not the first time in history and certainly not the first country in the world where the news media has been partisan. In fact, in most places at most times in history, the news media has been quite partisan, but there's no question that it is reinforcing our polarization.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What are some of the metrics commonly used to assess the health of a democracy?I actually think that the establishment media -- what is often referred to as the "mainstream media" -- are doing a pretty good job of highlighting the abuses of power and the norm violations carried out by this government under Trump.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Levitsky: We look in comparative politics for regular free and fair elections; not just elections but elections in which people can exercise the right to vote freely and fairly, in which the conditions of competition are reasonably fair. Second, a broad protection of civil liberties: the right to organize, the right to protest or to free speech, freedom of the press, and whether an elected government has the power to govern, making sure that there's not a power behind the throne, be it monarchs or militaries or ayatollahs who limit the power of elected officials. It's relatively easy to determine the existence of a democracy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The health of a democracy is a lot harder because there are many, many dimensions that you can evaluate -- public opinion, the state of the economy, how well institutions are functioning -- you can go down the line. I think it's a much harder, more elaborate task. The United States is still fully democratic. The health of democracy is a much more difficult problem to evaluate.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donald Trump is the symptom, not the disease. Do you think that observation is correct?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ziblatt: It's clear that the election of Trump has focused our attention on this acute moment but there are deep underlying problems that gave rise to his election. For example, there are deep underlying processes of political polarization. The norm erosion that we highlight in "How Democracies Die" is being driven primarily by the radicalization of the Republican Party, which has become the representative of a declining white majority and its electoral power.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How did a decline in civic literacy make Trump's election possible?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ziblatt: People have the sense that public community is disintegrating. It is certainly exacerbated by a transformation in the country's media landscapes and investments in education. A lot of these things are driven by public policies where if we can't even agree on the basic rules of the game, it's going to be even more difficult to formulate public policies and come up with solutions for the kinds of problems that are necessary to sustain a democracy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Levitsky: Yes, civic literacy helps, but ultimately, we place a lot of responsibility on political leaders and political parties. Here I think the Republicans, in particular, have failed us. At times politicians have to lead, they have to say to their base, "No, we're not going to do what you want. We're going to do what's good for the country, we're going to defend institutions." That sort of leadership has been completely absent for the last 10 or 15 years in particular.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How do we locate American exceptionalism relative to the global rise of anti-democratic and illiberal politics in this moment?&nbsp;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Levitsky: First of all, I'm not sure that there is a global wave against democracy. The evidence is not so overwhelming. There are some trends that are worrisome. For example, I am very concerned about how Western democracies are responding to immigration and ethnic diversity.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The idea of American exceptionalism is existentially problematic because it has led too many people to take American democracy for granted. There is an assumption that no matter how recklessly our politicians or our parties may behave, we can't possibly break our democracy. This is a really dangerous way of thinking. If the American people continue to shut our eyes to history and to the rest of the world and simply act on faith that we are somehow immune to all this, we'll realize the extent of the crisis far too late.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ziblatt: Looking to other countries we can also see some things that are different about the United States. It is a much older democracy as compared to those countries whose democratic order has broken down. The United States also has the oldest written constitution in the world, a much more robust civil society than some of these other countries, and a much stronger economy. The United States is distinctive in that way.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There have been surveys and interviews in which Trump supporters said they did not care if Vladimir Putin interfered in the election because "their guy" won. This is evidence of wanting to win at all costs, with no respect for democratic norms and institutions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Levitsky: This is a sign of the type of extreme polarization that has wrecked democracies elsewhere. Gallup polls throughout 2017 showed that Putin has a much higher approval rating among Republicans than Hillary Clinton. Think about that. That's pretty stunning.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There's also another data point that I like to point to: The exit poll on election night 2016 found that about one in four of Trump voters said they believed he was not fit for the office of the presidency. Yet they still preferred Trump to the Democrat. That is a sign of extreme polarization and it reminds me of Latin America in the 1960s and '70s.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ziblatt: To sustain a democracy, norms of mutual toleration are critical, as is the willingness to treat your rivals not as enemies but rather as fellow loyal citizens.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What are the "pressure points" in a democracy that demagogues and authoritarians try to leverage?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ziblatt: There is a common set of strategies that authoritarians use. They go after the referees of the political systems: law enforcement, courts, judges. They go after their rivals as well as the media and the opposition. They try to sideline these groups and then they try to institutionalize the advantages they have made by tilting the playing field through changing the rules in the political system to lock themselves into power.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ultimately, once an autocrat is in power who wants to dismantle democracy -- or even just wants to protect their own interests -- they will find those points of the political system to try to manipulate in order to defend themselves and go after their opponents.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How does the color line intersect with this political moment, specifically, and political polarization more generally?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ziblatt: For most of our history, race didn't enter centrally into electoral politics because nonwhite voters were disenfranchised. Race became much more central in electoral politics once nonwhite voters could all vote, which is a pretty recent phenomenon. What's happened in the last couple of decades, unfortunately, is that race has taken on a very clear partisan dimension. It could be that people of different ethnic groups were diffused equally across the parties. If both parties had both white and nonwhite people, they would fight about other things, but they wouldn't fight about race. Race is a fissure today because one party represents, quite clearly, a declining white majority and a threatened white majority.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Republican Party is desperate. It fears that it is not going to be able to win elections, so bending and breaking rules to cheat their way into electoral victories becomes a preferred strategy. The rules that 30-plus state legislatures in the United States have adopted over the last decade have made it harder for people who are, by and large, lower-income nonwhite voters to register and to vote. That is deeply undemocratic. As long as the Republican Party is an overwhelmingly white and Christian party in a society as diverse as the United States, it is going to be prone to this kind of white-nationalist extremism. The Republicans must become a more diverse party.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Once this sort of extremism has taken hold, is it possible to repair the harm done to our democratic institutions and norms?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Levitsky: If in the fall of 2018 or in 2020 there is a shift to the Democrats, this, in principle, could prompt a reevaluation on the side of the Republicans to "refound" the party. Looking at cases around the world, in countries like Germany after World War II or Chile after Pinochet there have been efforts, after major catastrophes, for groups to reorganize themselves. It is difficult, but we don't really have any other options. It's probably naïve to think about going back to the norms that we had before. Probably we'll evolve in some forward direction, but it certainly did not have to be this sort of no-holds-barred partisan warfare that we've seen in the last couple of decades. If our democracy is going to remain even minimally healthy we need to develop a set of norms that allow our political parties to work through institutions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What are you hopeful for about America's future and what are you worried about?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ziblatt: One thing that I'm very worried about is the unwillingness of the Republican Party to, essentially, stand up and say, "Enough is enough." The reason that is so very worrisome is that, when one looks around the world and sees one of two major parties not accepting the rules of democracy and becoming ideologically radicalized, that is a fatal flaw for democracies. If you do not have a player who is willing to play the democratic game this also infects the other side, which results in a spiraling kind of dynamic.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Levitsky: It's very hard, really it's impossible, for me to think of a democracy in the world that survived an ethnic majority making a transition to minority status. There really has not been a successful experiment with multiethnic democracy in the world, and that's why the growing diversification of Western democracies is a real challenge. Looking at the reaction of the Republican Party over the last 10 or 20 years to these trends scares me a lot.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What gives me some room for optimism, and what makes me think that the United States has a shot to be the first successful multiethnic democracy, is that our democratic institutions are in fact quite strong. I think we did -- helped a lot by World War II -- a pretty decent job as a society of integrating immigrant groups that arrived in the late 19th and early 20th century. It was pretty nasty, it was hardly a model, but we did it. So as a society, we have much more experience with dealing with diversity and with integration than do other Western societies. That's how I put myself to sleep at night.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.c-span.org/video/?442049-2/the-class-74</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">MARCH 3, 2018</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Class of '74 John Lawrence, former chief of staff to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, recalls the 1974 congressional elections, which followed the Watergate scandal, and ushered in many new office holders, dubbed the “Watergate Babies.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Senate:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">---</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.c-span.org/video/?417834-8/tom-daschle-trent-lott-discuss-bipartisanship</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">NOVEMBER 10, 2016</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bipartisanship and the Trump Presidency Former Senate Majority Leaders Tom Daschle (D) and Trent Lott (R) offered suggestions for bipartisanship in the upcoming Congress and Trump presidency.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Beyond the Crisis Point with Former Senators Tom Daschle and Trent Lott” was the closing general session of the Roll Call Live 2016 Election Impact Conference.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">*&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; *&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; *</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">OLYMPIA SNOWE: You know, I had been fighting&nbsp; to try to bring up issues that I thought were important to address, and basically the Senate had been shut down.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">MUSIC: Fine Prince, “Log Lady, Instrumental” (from Lookout)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That’s Olympia Snowe, from Maine.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">SNOWE: Yes, I served in the state legislature in both the State House and the State Senate prior to my 34 years in the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate where I served 16 in the U.S. House of Representatives and 18 years in the U.S. Senate.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Over that time, the tenor of Congress changed a great deal.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">SNOWE: In fact, the last Congress I served in, in 2012 — it was the least productive Congress in modern history.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Snowe was a moderate Republican, a coalition-builder, happy to work across the aisle. In fact, her support for some Democratic positions — on reproductive rights, on ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, her votes for Democratic judicial nominees – this all came to anger her Republican colleagues, especially the new breed of hardliners. Over time, Snowe saw her brand of centrism essentially disappear.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">SNOWE: And in fact, three political scientists conducted a study and said that we are experiencing the worst polarization since the end of Reconstruction, 1879. If you think about it, that is pretty serious. In an analysis up through 2013 that showed in 1982, there were 58 senators that came between the most conservative Democrats and the most liberal Republicans. Today — at least up to 2013, and I doubt that that has changed — for the fourth time in a row,&nbsp; fifth time ever, zero senators come into that category. In the House of Representatives in 1982, there were 344 members of the House of Representatives that came between the most conservative Democrats and the most liberal Republicans. Today, there are only four in that category. So it tells you there is no Democrat who is more conservative than a Republican; there is no Republican more liberal than a Democrat.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This polarization became spectacularly manifest during the debt crises of 2011 and 2013, when Congress threatened to shut down the Federal government, and actually did so in 2013.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">SNOWE:&nbsp; I mean, I was stunned that we would be at a point in the United States Congress that we were prepared to take the country to the financial and political brink to make a political point.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Snowe had been planning to run for re-election to the Senate. Everything was in place. She was just 65 years old. She had the money and the organization. In her previous election she’d won nearly 75 percent of the vote. But, she decided that she didn’t fit in this Congress any more.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">SNOWE: So they abandoned legislating and policymaking and just devolved into a series of gotcha votes, “my way or the highway,” and the all-or-nothing proposition that was really the road to nowhere. And I decided that I would take my fight on the outside because I realized that the change was not going to occur from within.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Snowe joined the Bipartisan Policy Center, which addresses, as she calls it, “congressional dysfunction and political paralysis.” She wrote a book called Fighting for Common Ground: How We Can Fix the Stalemate in Congress. Many of her solutions have to do with re-creating a bipartisan Congress: less filibustering and grandstanding, more regular meetings between majority and minority leadership, more regular meetings between Congress and the President. Because that’s how it was in Snowe’s early years in Washington.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But over time, moderates were purged from both parties, and partisan battles became more intense, more destructive. So what’s to be done about that? And, since it’s election season, we might as well ask a bigger question: what’s to be done about all the other rotten things in American politics? Today on Freakonomics Radio, we ask politicians and scholars, donkeys and elephants and everyone in between: what’s the one political or electoral practice that deserves to die?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">note polarization less b/c mayors have to be pothole practical/accountable.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://insideclimatenews.org/news/21022018/clean-power-plan-repeal-cities-climate-change-epa-emissions-rules</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hundreds of U.S. mayors, representing one in seven Americans, have told EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt that they need the Clean Power Plan's emissions rules in order to fight climate change and protect their cities.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a letter released on Tuesday, 236 mayors from 47 states urged Pruitt not to repeal the plan, which was a centerpiece of President Obama's effort to tackle climate change by cracking down on emissions from electric power plants. The rule has been in limbo during litigation, and President Trump wants it revoked, as Pruitt has proposed to do.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change-new-hampshire-2531879372.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How One State Bridged the Cultural Divide on Climate Change</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Cameron Wake</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The year 2017 painted a grim picture of coastal storms in the eastern U.S. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Mariawere deadly and destructive harbingers of how climate change contributes to bigger storms with stronger winds, greater extreme precipitation, and higher storm surge due to rising seas.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Unfortunately, there's a long-standing cultural divide around climate change. On a political level, this has made it difficult for coastal states to act on—or even acknowledge—the growing risk of coastal flooding from climate change.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">New Hampshire, however, is an exception. The state has passed legislation and made rule changes designed to better prepare the state for the damage from storm surge and rising seas. And several municipalities in coastal New Hampshire are integrating preparations for rising seas in their long-term master plans.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This progress occurred despite divisive political views on climate change in New Hampshire. As one of the scientists involved in reviewing the science related to coastal flooding, I discovered that this seemingly intractable cultural divide over climate change can be bridged—if scientists show up and build relationships with local decision-makers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Challenge for Municipalities</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Some large coastal cities, including Boston, New York, Norfolk and Miami, have decided to act now to build resilience to current and future coastal flooding. Upgrades include installing flood walls, elevating roads, improving stormwater systems and expanding open space.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Small coastal communities, meanwhile, tend to lack the financial and personnel resources to address the challenges presented by a changing climate, all while dealing with the cultural divide around the issue.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.ecowatch.com/energy-efficient-states-2513543805.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Which States Are the Most Energy-Efficient? New Rankings for 2017</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By John Rogers</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Autumn makes me think of leaves colored orange and amber and red, of the smell of cinnamon and nutmeg wafting from a range of desserts … and of states vying for top honors in the annual state ranking of energy efficiency policies and progress.The leaves are mostly done, and the desserts are in my belly. But the latest ranking from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy is out and available, and ready for sampling. It's always a beautiful sight and a tasty treat.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Energy efficiency – Why and how?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Energy efficiency is already one of the main tools we use for meeting new energy demand. Why it makes sense as a tool is clear, as the new report says:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"[Energy efficiency] creates jobs, not only directly for manufacturers and service providers, but also indirectly in other sectors by saving energy and freeing up funds to support the local economy. Efficiency also reduces pollution, strengthens community and grid resilience, promotes equity, and improves health."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The annual scorecard "ranks states on their efficiency policies and programs, not only assessing performance but also documenting best practices and recognizing leadership." ACEEE does that by looking at a range of metrics that are shaped by each state's efforts:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Utility and public benefits programs and policies</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Transportation policies</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Building energy codes and compliance</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Combined heat and power (CHP) policies</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">State government–led initiatives around energy efficiency</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Appliance and equipment standards</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Who's on top?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The highlighted states include some familiar faces plus a few new ones. The top states were the same in 2017 as in 2016, and highlighted the strong focus on efficiency in certain parts of the country:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Massachusetts took the top spot for the seventh straight year, and stood alone at the top (after tying with California for 2016 honors). Northeast states also took third (Rhode Island), fourth (Vermont), sixth (Connecticut), and seventh (New York).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The West Coast states garnered high marks, too, taking second (California), fifth (Oregon), and seventh (Washington).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Midwest also made a good showing, at ninth (Minnesota) and eleventh (Illinois and Michigan, tied).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ACEEE makes a point of calling out some "most improved" states, too, and this year that brought in states from other parts of the country:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Idaho was the most most improved, jumping up seven spots and landing it in the middle of the pack—its best performance, says ACEEE, since 2012—due to investments in "demand-side management", increased adoption of electric vehicles, and building energy code improvements.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Florida gained three spots in part due to its work on energy efficiency for the state's farmers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Its work to strengthen building energy codes in the state helped Virginia move up four notches.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/environment/3-ways-climate-change-will-have-unequal-economic-impacts-across-us</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">recent study confirms what many have known: Climate change won’t impact all U.S. states equally.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The report's 12 authors, some from the University of Berkeley and Princeton University, published the study in the journal Science, where they investigate the different economic gains and losses states across the United States will see in 2088 to 2099.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The sectors the researchers analyzed, including crime and labor, will see their damage value increase with the global mean temperature. This translates to a 1.2 percent loss in gross domestic product (GDP) per every Celsius degree increase, on average, the study says. Some states will benefit from climate change as their typically brisk temperatures increase while warm states see loss as their climates worsen.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The study relies on economic losses from the past, which could shift with changing technologies. It also does not look at how migration patterns may change in the future as popular locations like Arizona and Texas become less appealing as a result of their climbing temperatures.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">County-level median values for average 2080 to 2099 impacts. This map shows median total direct economic damage across all sectors. Courtesy of "Science," Estimating economic damage from climate change in the United States.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here, three main takeaways from the study.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1. The mortality rate will shift</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fewer cold-related deaths will hit the Northern states as they warm. Already-hot Southern states, in contract, will have more deaths. Maps in the analysis show increases of 40 to 80 deaths per 100,000 in the Southeast while deaths in the Northeast will decrease by roughly 20 to 60 per 100,000.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The study determines that if temperatures increase past 2.5 degrees Celsius, the U.S. will experience “excess mortality” from the changes in agricultural production and labor supply—a sector largely made up of Latinx immigrant farmers who are paid some of the lowest wages in the U.S., per United States Department of Agriculture.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The U.S. mortality rate will increase by 0.5 deaths per 100,000, as the decrease in the North and increase in the South should nearly level out.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2. Economic loss will be greatest where many people of color live: the South and Midwest</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The South, however, is home to most of the nation’s poorest Black communities. The Midwest is too. It’s also where the majority of poor Native American families live.Northern and Western will see fewer losses—or even benefits, as noted above. The same does not hold true for the Midwest or South.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the South, people have already felt what these impacts will look like: $1 billion+ hurricanes from which the federal government won’t help states rebuild. The Midwest doesn’t have hurricanes, but it does experience severe flooding and powerful wildfires.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the Southwest, home to Latinx border communities, GDP loss will range from 10 to 15 percent. The same goes for Florida.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3. This translates to greater income inequality</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The authors told The New York Times that “climate change tends to increase pre-existing inequality.” As noted above, the nation's poorest regions will see some of the worst impacts.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The richest counties will likely feel the least amount of damage as a percentage of their county income. The poorest ones will likely be most damaged, but their data is less definitive, as The New York Times shows.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Check out The New York Times breakdown of the study to visualize these effects in maps and charts here.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">older art ref to book, see also taiibi great divide</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2016/03/10/america-today-is-two-different-countries-they-dont-get-along/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">proxy poverty?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">IMR</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/2015-annual-report/measure/IMR/state/ALL</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">animated map stunning</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">indina, ohio, illin and SO</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/2015-annual-report/measure/Obesity/state/ALL</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/human-rights/root-problem-american-health-care</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mountain Dew, the carbonated fluorescent-green soda that Willy the Hillbilly declared “will tickle your innards” in a 1966 commercial, has long been a staple of Appalachia. It was officially developed in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the mid-1900s, but it has ties to the wheat and rye distilled by Irish immigrants who settled in the region as coal miners during the previous century. Today, coal has left Appalachia, as have a host of other industries that brought economic opportunity. Mountain Dew, however, remains culturally significant. Sarah Baird, a writer who grew up in Eastern Kentucky, recently wrote about the importance of the drink to her sense of identity, saying, “It’s not just a beverage—it’s a portable sense of home.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a region long undergoing a cultural and economic crisis, Appalachia’s thirst for Mountain Dew is perhaps the lesser of many evils. Opioid addiction, smoking, chewing tobacco, lack of access to municipal water systems, and the necessary preoccupation with getting food on the table over worrying about nutritional value are also having an enormous effect on people’s teeth. The soda is ruining teeth, in an epidemic known as “Mountain Dew-mouth.” The acid causes erosion and the sugar abets decay.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I would see a lot of kids who had a mouth full of rotting teeth,” Dr. Edwin Smith, a traveling dentist who drove his mobile dental truck for 12 years throughout Kentucky, told CNN last September. “They were in pain, and they’d be hurting at school.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In Kentucky, the state with highest proportion of adults under 65 without teeth, Smith has witnessed the extremes of Mountain Dew-mouth—toddlers with baby teeth filled with cavities, kids who won't brush their teeth because of inflamed gums, and teenagers who have pulled out their own rotting teeth with pliers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Other forces are at play. Hundreds of prescription medications, as well as chewing tobacco and cigarettes, cause dry mouth, preventing the natural flow of saliva and making teeth more susceptible to decay. Use of these substances is rampant in Appalachia; a single Kentucky county filled prescriptions for over 2 million doses of painkillers last year, which is about 150 doses for every man, woman and child. Kentucky is also the state with the most smokers, followed closely by West Virginia, according to a Gallup study. On top of that, without municipal water systems, people rely on well water, which is unfluoridated—or they drink more Mountain Dew to quench their thirst. Nearly half of the people in Kentucky, and 25 percent of the national population, depend exclusively on well water, posing a threat to natural resources as well as people’s teeth.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With 26 percent of preschool-age kids suffering from tooth decay and 15 percent of young adults extracting a tooth because of erosion, Mountain Dew-mouth in Appalachia has created one of the worst dental health problems in the United States according to a legal brief by Priscilla Harris, an associate professor at the Appalachian College of Law. Nonetheless, the factors that contribute to poor dental health are not simply Mountain Dew; they are not even specifically linked to Appalachia. Noxious substances merely exacerbate a national problem that is affecting every region of the United States. Bad oral hygiene could be significantly remedied through the American health care system; that is, if the United States adopted a holistic approach to health care. However, as it stands now, dental care is treated separate from health care, launching an epidemic that weighs heaviest on those who need it most—the rural poor.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dental health is essential to overall health, and serious and sometimes fatal illness can result from untreated oral conditions. A problem as common as gingivitis (excess plaque) can result in serious health problems such as heart disease, diabetes, or cancer. Yet throughout the United States, from remote areas of Alaska and across the contiguous 48, poor people struggle to get access to regular dental care, relying on charity clinics and hospital emergency rooms. According to the federal government, more than 50 million Americans live in areas officially designated as Dental Health Professional Shortage Areas, and must travel hundreds of miles to get help. A suburb of Washington, D.C., could have one dentist for 350 residents, while Dickenson County, Virginia, has one dentist for every 15,468 residents.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The distinction between dental care and health care extends to insurance. Medicaid, the joint federal-state health care program that provides health coverage for 72 million people, reckons dental benefits as optional for adults, leaving it up to states to decide. It was not until the Affordable Care Act passed under President Obama in 2010 when Medicaid gave dental care to children under 19. Medicare, the federal health care program that covers 55 million seniors and disabled people, has never included insurance for routine dental services.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While Medicaid, as the medical safety net for the poor, should provide help for those with dental needs who cannot afford to pay, only 15 states offer full dental benefits and five states offer nothing at all, as reported in a study by Pew. However, even in the states that do offer dental benefits, poor patients have difficulty getting appointments. As an isolated industry, dentistry has remained private and unencumbered by the brunt of market forces. Dentists cannot turn away patients based on “race, creed, color, sex, or national origin” according to the American Dental Association's Principles of Ethics and Code of Conduct; however, dentists can turn away patients based on their ability to pay. In order to cover high overhead costs, pay back dental school bills and earn an income, many dentists refuse to treat people on Medicaid. In 2013, only 34 percent of general dentists accepted Medicaid patients, according to Pew.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With limited benefits through Medicaid and no benefits through Medicare, in order to receive insurance, people must purchase private plans or employer-provided plans. Most dental insurance limits annual benefits to between $1,000 and $1,500 per person—this cap has hardly changed since the mid-'80s, despite inflation. Employer-provided plans—assuming the patient has a job and the job offers a plan—can exceed $500 a year or more and do little to ease the burden when other concerns take priority. So millions of Americans go without dental insurance.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">More than a third of Americans do not have dental coverage, according to a Washington Post article. Appalling already, the state of dental care in America faces even greater challenges with the threat of the Trump-backed American Health Care Act currently being debated in the Senate after passing in the House at the beginning of May. The ADA has reported that Obamacare's requirement to provide dental care for children under 19 will be rolled back, and the 5.4 million adults who gained coverage under the Medicaid expansion will lose all dental benefits.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Without insurance, people often go years without seeing a dentist. Toothaches are the most common problem, causing lack of sleep and difficulty eating. With time, a toothache can become another entity entirely. Germs collect, white blood cells accumulate, pus escalates, and suddenly a swelling, debilitating dental carbuncle has taken residence in one’s mouth.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dee Matello, a small business owner and mother of three in Laurel, Maryland, had not been to a dentist in nine years. To compensate for the cracked molar on the left side of her mouth, she had simply learned to chew on the right side. Like many Americans without dental insurance, it was not until Matello heard a free dental clinic would be held in the town of Salisbury, just 20 minutes away from her home, that fixing the cracked tooth seemed like a possibility.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[img]“It’s always bothering me,” Matello told the Washington Post as she waited outside the Wicomico Civic Center in Salisbury. Over the course of two days, among the reclining chairs and portable dental equipment that had been erected on the civic center floor, 116 dentists provided $1 million worth of care to 1,165 patients, many of whom had traveled across state lines to endure long lines and the bitter cold as they waited for treatment. After getting an x-ray and having the tooth extracted—a procedure that would have cost from $600 to $800 in a regular dentist's office—Matello left the clinic, wondering why people who work hard and put faith in their government for help are obligated to endure such demeaning treatment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At the University of Maryland dental school, a team of researchers explored the effect of toothaches in poor Maryland adults like Matello: 44.3 percent of their respondents reported having experienced more than five toothaches in the past 10 years. Nearly half said that their most recent toothache had caused them the worst pain possible and interfered with many aspects of their daily lives. When initial strategies to remedy their pain, such as nonprescription medicines, failed, many resorted to seeing a dentist.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For Americans who do not have health insurance and need dental treatment immediately, the emergency room remains the only option. However, this poses a significant problem because, in the eyes of the American health care system, the mouth is separate from the rest of the body. So even though hospital visits for dental problems cost an enormous amount to the health care system as a whole—an estimated $2.7 billion over a three-year period according to one major study—people rarely receive the treatment they need.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dr. George Kushner, the director of oral and maxillofacial surgery at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, explained that he sees ER patients with dental pain on a daily basis. “I take out teeth every week that could have been saved with restorative work,” he told a reporter for USA Today. The vast majority of doctors lack the knowledge and tools to treat dental ailments. They offer the services they can, provide prescriptions for painkillers and antibiotics, and recommend a dental clinic for a follow-up. However, clinics are often too crowded to meet the demand. Thus, patients leave the ER with no long-term solution for treatment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Though pain and discomfort are unfortunate enough, lack of dental care presents other, more enduring problems. While millions of Americans suffer because of their teeth, another portion of America supports a $110 billion-a-year dental industry, investing in procedures such as gum contouring and spending up to $2,000 on a single veneer. As the wealth gap continues to increase, teeth represent the dividing line between the classes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Glimmering pearly whites have long been a symbol of social and financial success in America. Consider what every movie star, news anchor and television personality has in common: not height, weight or ethnicity (though there is certainly an enormous amount of room for more diversity). All share an enviable smile—gleaming, bright white, smooth, ovular teeth.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a country where significant value is placed on a perfect smile, bad teeth prevent economic mobility. The predominant jobs of the working class—waitressing, housekeeping, nursing, etc.—are in the service sector, yet these jobs are hard to come by without a certain degree of oral health. A study published in the Nation Bureau of Economic Research found that a missing tooth can result in a loss of $720 of earnings (and 178 million people are missing at least one tooth).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As she waited to have teeth removed at a free clinic in Jonesville, Virginia, Emma Marsee told Mary Otto, the author of Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America, that people only want “a healthy-looking individual” taking care of them. In areas where jobs are scarce, a person’s financial security depends on her teeth. For 10 years, Otto researched and conducted interviews about oral health in America, traveling across the country attending beauty pageants and clinics, talking to dentists and patients alike. In her book, she writes:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"In the way that they disfigure the face, bad teeth depersonalize the sufferer. They confer the stigma of economic and even moral failure. People are held personally accountable for the state of their teeth in ways that they are not held accountable for many other health conditions."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Regardless of cultural influences—Mountain Dew-mouth or not—the dental health epidemic in America is rooted in the historical and political legacy of an unequal system. Without access to preventative measure like regular oral checkups and teeth cleanings, as well as comprehensive care, America’s poor fight an uphill battle, involving increased health risk, social stigma and reinforced economic disadvantage.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">---</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/economy/its-wealth-gap-stupid-inequality-drives-economic-anxiety-both-real-and-perceived</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no link</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ECONOMY</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s the Wealth Gap, Stupid: Inequality Drives 'Economic Anxiety'—Both Real and Perceived</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Salon talks to the social psychologist author of "The Broken Ladder" about why both sides think somebody’s cheating.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Erin Keane / Salon May 14, 2017</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One of the most prominent story types of 2016 election coverage involved dropping in on Southern and Rust Belt communities that supported Donald Trump and probing the people and their towns for answers. The economic “anxiety” of the white working class emerged as an explanation for why an ill-tempered real estate magnate had become the champion of voters who might in other years have been turned off by his conspicuous affluence, lackadaisical faith and combative demeanor, to say nothing of his “Access Hollywood” tape. Trump voters, it was said, have been left behind economically by globalization and the technological divide and have seen their economic prospects plummet in recent years.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Some of that lined up with reality. But when the data emerged, another picture emerged of a key Trump voter bloc — still overwhelmingly white, but not necessarily economically insecure. A majority of Americans who make more than $50,000 a year voted for Trump, compared to a majority of those who make less who voted for Hillary Clinton. The narrative then shifted to racism, as data also showed it drove Trump voters to the polls.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As a new book by social psychologist Keith Payne explains, the narratives aren’t mutually exclusive or necessarily contradictory. In “The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live and Die,” Payne explains the research that shows that inequality can predict outcomes previously associated solely with poverty, such as higher infant mortality rates, lower life expectancies and higher rates of obesity. Areas with a larger wealth gap tend to have more of these problems than those with more homogeneous standards of living.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even more relevant to the question of “economic anxiety” is the research that shows perceptions of inequality are just as important as actual numbers. When people feel poor—regardless of whether or not they objectively are — they exhibit risk-taking behavior and act in their short-term interests. When they feel richer, they practice delayed gratification and plan ahead.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We have to look at ordinary middle-class people and ask why it is that, regardless of actual money, so many of them feel that they are barely getting by, that they are living paycheck to paycheck to paycheck, that the neighbors know something they don’t, and that if they could just earn a little more, then everything would be a bit better,” he writes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These perceptions have real outcomes, according to Payne. People who locate themselves on a lower “rung” of perceived affluence are more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety and chronic pain, and it’s more probable that they will make bad decisions, underperform at work, suffer health issues like obesity and heart problems, and even believe in conspiracy theories.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Contrary to the “bubble” argument, it’s also not true across the board that poor people vote Republican and the affluent vote liberal. Higher incomes result in a higher probability of voting GOP. But feeling poor — or well-off — plays a role.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The tendency for the rich to vote Republican is stronger in poor states than in rich ones,” Payne writes. “If you are a wealthy Mississippian, you are much more likely to vote Republican than if you have the same wealth in New York or Connecticut.” Social comparisons — a six-figure income makes you feel more well-off in Tunica than in Manhattan — affect how people think about politics and therefore how they vote.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Payne’s book encourages us to look beyond bank statements at how people think and feel as a better predictor of behavior. The incomes of the poor and middle class, when adjusted for inflation, have been fairly stagnant since 1980, while the wealth of the 1 percent continues to rise. Feeling poor — and the anxiety that goes along with that — is relative.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Even though the subjective experience of poverty or subjective experience of wealth and subjective experiences of inequality are what drives so many of these effects, the consequences are not just subjective,” Payne told me. “The subjective perception is important, but we can’t lose track of the fact that it ends with objective outcomes.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I spoke with Payne by phone last week, after the House of Representatives voted to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act with the support of many constituents who simultaneously rely on Obamacare and have called for its repeal.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You’ve just written a book about inequality, and you’re from Kentucky. What did you think about J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy?”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I thought it was a really interesting memoir. Even though I grew up in western Kentucky and he’s writing about eastern Kentucky, I recognized a lot of the experiences he talks about and the mentality of people. I thought it was excellent [as] a memoir of personal experience. I was a little surprised toward the end when the author seemed to throw up his hands and say, “But in the end there is nothing do about these problems.” I would disagree with that implication.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You mean the implication that it’s an inherent cultural issue that keeps people poor and unhealthy and unstable, that there is nothing that you can really do without changing people’s entire perceptions of who they are?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That’s right. People are exquisitely sensitive to their contexts. Both economic policy and history show that if you change the economic context in which people live, then they start to behave differently and think differently. I think the reason that people sometimes get into the self-destructive patterns of behavior that “Hillbilly Elegy” talks about is that they are responding in what is a reasonable way to their immediate circumstances. If you change those circumstances, people’s thoughts and behaviors change too.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">People tend to look around and say, “Well, whatever the baseline is, whatever the default is, you know, that’s just normal.” But of course the conditions that are leading to the growing inequality that we see around us today are the result of policies, and policies are the result of choices.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Different places, whether it’s different states or different countries, make different choices. As a result, they have different levels of inequality. And you can see that reflected in people’s lives.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I think people are responding to their environments, and their environments are the products of choices.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One of the media’s big obsessions has been the struggle to understand how Donald Trump became president. One of the themes that emerged from this is the “economic anxiety of the white working class.” When that narrative is countered with actual statistics — when it turns out that a lot of Trump voters are relatively well off, especially if you compare their incomes to working-class minority Clinton voters — how come those two things don’t really align with each other?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Subjective perception is incredibly important. Think about how much it takes to feel like you are getting by OK today as opposed to 100 years ago. It takes much more. Think about how much it takes to feel like you are getting by OK in America as opposed to, say, in Bangladesh. It’s very different. And in the same way, it takes more to feel like you are getting by if you are in a context in which some people are really getting ahead. It feels like other people are all passing you by. That feeling of being left behind is something that a lot of journalistic accounts of the 2016 election have pointed out as a major motivator for people who voted for Donald Trump, and I think that’s probably right.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But the feeling of being left behind isn’t inconsistent with the idea that people actually have above-average incomes, [as] Trump voters [did] on average. If you look at how incomes have changed over the last 50 years or so, the bottom two-fifths are making — with inflation, in adjusted dollars — almost exactly the same as they were making in the late 1960s. That hasn’t changed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What’s changed is that the top 5 percent, the top 10 percent, the top 1 percent have been making drastically more over time. Making the exact same amount today as maybe your grandparents’ family made in the ’60s feels like you are being left behind, because other people are getting so far ahead.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What is it that makes some people think, well, the enemy, so to speak, is that 1 percent, or that fraction of the 1 percent, who are getting wildly ahead while the rest of us are being held back? While other people think, well, the enemy is other people around me who I perceive are getting unfair advantages? There’s a big divide there between progressive and conservative voters, in terms of who they see as their economic opponents.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The changes in the economy that have led to this growing inequality are actually very complex and very abstract. So there are things like globalized patterns of trade, technology, robotics and policies that have not changed tax rates, or redistribution policies, in ways that keep up with the growing wealth at the top; that’s all very abstract and complex. Ordinary people, when they’re thinking about their lives and they’re thinking about politics, don’t typically focus on abstractions as explanations.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And so there are different competing narratives out there. Some, like you said, focus on the 1 percent as the concrete cause of these problems. Other competing narratives [include] maybe it’s immigrants coming in and taking our jobs, or maybe it’s environmentalists trying to destroy jobs in coal country, those sorts of things. Those are very concrete. There is an identifiable person who’s the bad guy. And so all of those [narratives] are going to have an advantage in terms of people’s minds as being plausible explanations. There is somebody doing something that’s leading to my particular condition.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Is it the 1 percent on Wall Street that are the bad guys, or is it immigrants coming in and taking jobs? Which one seems more plausible to you is going to depend on how much those different narratives fit with the worldviews that we already have. Those are conditioned by the social networks we’re a part of, the places we live in and things like levels of education and all of those background factors that predispose some people to resonate more with the liberal version of the story and others to resonate more with the conservative version of the story. But all of those are pretty concrete oversimplifications compared to what’s driving inequality on a macroeconomic level.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Do you think it’s possible for Americans to come together to address those abstract issues of inequality, or is that just beyond the scope of a country of our size and geographical diversity, with the historic racial issues that we’ve had?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a representative democracy, the way this works is that individual citizens don’t necessarily have to have complex mental models of economic policy, right? Policy elites who actually focus on these issues, whether it’s in government or in think tanks and places like that, they are the ones who grapple with the more complex issues. I think it’s a shame that the experts are allowing themselves to be polarized and partisanized along with the electorate. Ordinary voters vote for politicians, whose job is to be an intermediary between the expert policy [theorists] and explain it to ordinary people. Unfortunately, the voters and the politicians, as well as the experts, are only listening to their own side. I think a lot of responsibility rests on both the politicians and the experts to listen to the evidence.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One concrete manifestation of these theoretical and economic models that’s changing in front of our eyes is health care. Republican voters on one hand are saying, “I love having health insurance now; it’s saved my life” and on the other are saying, “But I’m still going to vote for the guys who are promising to do away with it.” But coverage of pre-existing conditions is a concrete thing; a person with a household budget and awareness of their own health can put their hands around that issue.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The common thing is that people don’t always connect the way that they view individual cases to the way that they view policies about how entire systems work. So for Republicans right now, there is a conflict between [their individual cases], especially for lower-income people who would benefit from Obamacare, and the messages that they’re getting otherwise from Republican leaders.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But also, the general worldview that is more popular among the right says that America is a well-functioning meritocracy in which everybody earns what they get and their rewards are just. That’s a much more frequently endorsed worldview on the right than the left. So that creates a conflict for people, especially [those] who would actually benefit from benefits like [affordable] health care.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In terms of the psychology of it, it’s not surprising that we focus on one issue at a time and then say to voters, “Well, you know, if you hope to repeal Obamacare, it’s going to hurt you. Now, do you still want to vote for Republicans?” One issue isn’t going to flip somebody’s entire worldview because we are so polarized and sorted into not only political issues, but also urban and rural, highly educated and less educated, more religious and less religious; all of these things go together in a package and no single issue is going to flip somebody from one camp to the other just because it is inconsistent with all of the rest.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What people do in those situations, both on the left and the right, is engage in what psychologists call “motivated reasoning” to reduce that cognitive dissonance. So, any single issue is unlikely to flip somebody’s entire worldview, so that means they have to reconcile, usually by some sort of post-talk reasoning.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Such as reconciling the belief in the sanctity of the American meritocracy, yet also feeling a deeply unfair sense of inequality. Those seem to be at odds with each other. If you really believe in the meritocracy, then you should then believe that your position in life is exactly what you deserve. It’s what you’ve earned. It’s what you’ve worked for. But that’s not actually how people are reacting to the growing inequality in our country, right?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Right. If you believe in that “just world” theory — that the world is generally a fair and just place where people get what they deserve and deserve what they get — then you will tend to assume that whatever people have is what they deserve, unless you think somebody’s cheating. Now, both sides think somebody’s cheating, but it’s different cheaters.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In one of [author and sociologist] Arlie Hochschild’s books, she talks about a narrative on the right that imagines people standing in line waiting for their just reward, and other people keep cutting in front of them. In that narrative, it’s often immigrants or African-Americans who are getting special benefits and cutting in line. That’s a very common view.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In general, if people don’t feel like they’re getting outcomes that they deserve, it’s easy to find somebody [they believe is] cheating to blame it on. On the left, that is often Wall Street or other kinds of big corporations that are rigging the system.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So who’s right?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I think both of those narratives are oversimplified stories, but I think there is good empirical evidence that shows that the kinds of economic policies we vote for have influences on the amount of economic inequality that there is. So, the kinds of higher taxation and redistribution — policies that characterize Western Europe — result in less income inequality than the low-taxation, low-redistribution policies in America. The economies and policies that are in places like Utah, Iowa and Vermont end up having less inequality than Mississippi, Alabama, New York and California.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In terms of who’s right, I think if we care about inequality as a problem — and I think we should, because it predicts lots of poor life outcomes — then the right thing to do is to make decisions that reduce inequality, or at least limit its growth. Usually that means more progressive taxation. Usually it means strengthening a safety net for the poor, not reducing it, and it sometimes could mean rules that limit inequality at the top, like rules discouraging or capping excessive pay for CEOs. I’m not a policy person. I’m not an economist. So I don’t want to recommend specific policies to people. The point I want to make is that we shouldn’t see political decisions as disconnected from our daily lives because they affect our incomes, not only in terms of our own incomes, but those we compare to.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Let’s circle back to the narrative that blames immigrants and African-Americans for jumping the line, so to speak, thereby cheating white Americans out of their meritocratic due. You have a whole chapter on racial inequality in the book. Can you talk about how the perception that we’re in a post-racial culture now affects inequality, and even keeps people who are in the same economic class from working together to combat inequality?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The perceptions of how racial inequality has changed over time are dramatically different if you ask white Americans and black Americans. If you ask white and black Americans how much discrimination against black people there was in the 1950s, both white and black Americans say, yes, it was a terrible problem — there was a terrible amount of discrimination against black people in the 1950s and 1960s.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But if you ask how those things have changed over time, those perceptions diverge dramatically. Black Americans see a very slow decrease in anti-black racism over time, and they think that anti-white racism is basically nonexistent — in the ’50s, as today. But if you ask white Americans those same questions, they think anti-black racism has declined precipitously and is at very low levels today, and at the same time white Americans perceive anti-white bias to be increasing in proportion to the degree that anti-black bias has been decreasing.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One poll found that if you ask white Americans those questions about how big a problem anti-black racism is and anti-white racism is, they perceive that by the 2000s, there is actually more anti-white bias than anti-black bias, which is just astounding compared to real economic data or real behavioral data showing that if white and black job applicants apply for the same job using the exact same résumés for the purposes of a study, and they’re exactly equally qualified, black applicants are called back at a rate about half as often as white applicants. There are very high current rates of ongoing discrimination, but average white Americans aren’t tuned into that.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Where do you think white Americans get this idea that they are the ones who are being racially discriminated against?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yeah, that’s a good question. First of all, social networks are incredibly segregated still, so few white Americans know very many black Americans and still fewer know them in terms of close personal relationships. So, that’s part of it. Most white Americans just don’t see the experiences of black Americans on a daily basis. When discrimination happens, it’s usually covert, so nobody’s announcing it. Black Americans are more likely to actually experience it on a day-to-day level and white Americans are less likely to witness it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">People want to believe that the world is fair and just, and if that is not contradicted by seeing racial discrimination in front of you, it’s often the easiest thing to believe that it’s just not a problem.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I can understand where the myth that racism is over because it’s not the 1950s any more comes from. Where I’m losing them is the idea that anti-white discrimination is significant and growing, especially with the rise of the alt-right, with actual neo-Nazi groups having legitimate political influence today, when they seemed completely marginal and on the fringe 20 years ago. That strikes me as a dangerous delusion. How do you go from “I think everyone is OK and racism is over” to “I’m the one being racially discriminated against,” despite a lack of empirical evidence?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I agree. It is a delusion and it’s a dangerous delusion. Part of the source of that comes from the fact that for whites, the two perceptions are correlated.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What I mean by that is that for whites, the more progress they see for African-Americans, the more they also think that anti-white bias is increasing. And so they see it as a zero-sum game. This is from research by psychologists Sam Summers and Michael Norton that I’m drawing on. For white Americans, if they see more diversity in their workplace, for example, and more diversity in their neighborhood than there was 20 years ago, they assume that that must have been because of some kind of affirmative action policy that discriminated against whites. Those two things are linked together in the minds of many white Americans: If African-Americans are making progress, it must be at the expense of whites.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s a difficult problem, how to advance the interest of diversity and inclusion without also alienating people who feel that it’s coming at their expense.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So where do we go from here? We live in a wildly unequal society, in a country that is really polarized on how to fix that, or even whether or not it is an issue to fix. If you had to pick one key cultural or psychological thing that has to change in the minds of Americans to move us forward, what would it be?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Well, it’s a great question. I think one of the things that would help in terms of understanding racial inequality is having greater contact across racial lines. Not just, “Oh, I know a guy at work.” One factor that seems effective at reducing people’s implicit racial biases is having close personal contact across racial lines. Cross-race marriage in your family, for example, if you have in-laws. . . . One study showed that [in an experiment using faces] white Americans showed faster fear-learning whenever black faces were paired with electric shock than white faces, as if there was already a pre-existing level of fear there. And it was slower to extinguish when the shocks went away. But that didn’t happen for people who had had interracial dating relationships in the past. Those kinds of close personal relationships, rather than just formal relationships — like having somebody [of another race or ethnicity] in your workplace — are more powerful. But at the same time that’s not the kind of thing that easily changes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Right, and on an institutional level, it’s not the sort of thing that can drive policies that are more attuned to addressing racial inequality. Donald Trump can appoint Ben Carson to all the Cabinet positions that he wants, but that doesn’t mean that Trump is necessarily invested in policies that are going to address ongoing racial inequality in the country.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s important to understand people’s beliefs and their emotions, but when it comes to trying to actually reduce prejudice and reduce discrimination, I think a more effective short-term strategy, rather than trying to change people’s hearts and minds, is trying to structure situations well, so that when people are making decisions like who to hire, who to admit to colleges and so forth, their decisions are made in a way that minimizes the potential for bias. Let’s assume that most people who are hiring or making admission decisions would like to be fair, but people are vulnerable to all sorts of unintended biases. There are strategies that we can take.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Some of them are things like blinding résumés, so you don’t know who the person is who’s applying until you’ve already looked at their qualifications. Things like specifying the criteria that are important up front, so you don’t look at a job candidate and perhaps feel uncomfortable and then decide, “Oh well, this person is not a good fit,” without ever specifying what a good fit means. There are a lot of mental gymnastics that people go through that can be taken out of decision processes that would minimize the potential for bias.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And the other thing that is important is recognizing that bias is so pervasive. Evidence on implicit bias shows that it’s widespread. We should realize that the baseline condition is not equality; it is bias. So if we don’t do anything, if we are just passive and assume a colorblind competition process [without actually creating one], then the outcome is going to be disparities. So that means we have to take other kinds of affirmative steps, like actively trying to increase the inclusiveness and representativeness of job applicant pools, for example.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fact checking as a countermeasure to disinformation is practiced by both mainstream and alternative media outlets. Hundreds of fact-checks were published during the Brexit referendum and in the US elections this year. However, none of those checks seemed to matter significantly. As discussed broadly, one reason might be that our polarized social networks increasingly constrain us to live in our own constructed realities, which are reinforced by recommender systems and news feeds curated by black-box algorithms. Filter bubbles on social media are more real than ever, as demonstrated by Gilad Lotan’s meticulous analysis of how bubbles are being developed on Twitter, and MIT Media Lab’s Lab for Social Machines’ mapping of how Trump and Clinton supporters live in their own Twitter worlds. Moreover, even if the facts are aroused enough to leave an echo chamber, moving from one isolated social cluster to another, they evaporate rapidly as a result of organized trolling.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">data viz</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://medium.com/@d1gi/the-election2016-micro-propaganda-machine-383449cc1fba</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.ecowatch.com/nuclear-option-gorsuch-2347867635.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Senate Republicans Rig System, Trigger 'Nuclear Option' to Push Through Gorsuch</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Senate Republicans rushed through a confirmation vote Thursday on President Donald Trump's nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. Judge Neil Gorsuch has been met with widespread criticism both across the country and from the Senate before, during and after his confirmation process.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For more than 200 years, the Senate has honored a 60 vote margin for Supreme Court nominees to be confirmed. Gorsuch only received 55. According to existing Senate procedure, Gorsuch's nomination would be defeated and the Senate would move forward without confirming him to the court. Instead, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell changed the rules and triggered the so-called "nuclear option" for what had been deemed the "greatest deliberative body" to force Gorsuch's nomination through.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Senate rightfully rejected Judge Neil Gorsuch's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. It is their duty to advise and consent on judicial nominees and with this vote, they refused their consent and advised President Donald Trump that Gorsuch is not fit to be granted a lifetime appointment to America's highest court..</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/culture/divide-between-rural-and-urban-america</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/left-vs-right-us/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">David McCandless:&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Email: justin.farrell@yale.edu.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change-tipping-point-2170296371.html?page=2</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Work from Yale, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, continues a trend of defining the culpability of the so-called Climate Change Counter Movement (CCCM) in obfuscating climate science. This work looked at 164 organizations identified in other academic literature as being involved in the CCCM between 1993-2013 and included 40,785 pieces of textual content and more than 39 million words. Two main findings emerged: Organizations with corporate funding were more likely to have distributed content meant to polarize the climate change issue; and corporate funding influences the actual thematic content of these polarization efforts, confirming previous work showing the CCCM to be at the root of climate change politics and discourse.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">---</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Corporate funding and ideological polarization about climate change&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Justin Farrell1 School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511 Edited by Theda Skocpol, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and approved October 12, 2015 (received for review May 13, 2015)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;Drawing on large-scale computational data and methods, this research demonstrates how polarization efforts are influenced by a patterned network of political and financial actors. These dynamics, which have been notoriously difficult to quantify, are illustrated here with a computational analysis of climate change politics in the United States. The comprehensive data include all individual and organizational actors in the climate change countermovement (164 organizations), as well as all written and verbal texts produced by this network between 1993–2013 (40,785 texts, more than 39 million words). Two main findings emerge. First, that organizations with corporate funding were more likely to have written and disseminated texts meant to polarize the climate change issue. Second, and more importantly, that corporate funding influences the actual thematic content of these polarization efforts, and the discursive prevalence of that thematic content over time. These findings provide new, and comprehensive, confirmation of dynamics long thought to be at the root of climate change politics and discourse. Beyond the specifics of climate change, this paper has important implications for understanding ideological polarization more generally, and the increasing role of private funding in determining why certain polarizing themes are created and amplified. Lastly, the paper suggests that future studies build on the novel approach taken here that integrates largescale textual analysis with social networks.&nbsp; tags:&nbsp; funding | polarization...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...Ideological polarization presents increasingly important challenges for sustainability science and solutions for climate change. Much attention has been given to the outcomes of polarization by demonstrating its effect on individual choices about energy-efficient behavior (1), individual attitudes about climate change (2–6), and variation in individuals’ trust in science as a whole, especially among Americans who self-identify as politically conservative (7).&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Climate change is not the first issue with scientific consensus to become so highly polarized (8, 9), but the magnitude of its ecological and human-health effects—and the socio-political roadblocks for mitigating emissions—have led to a wide body of attitudinal research documenting the current sociopolitical environment of polarization that exists. Despite this fruitful body of individual-level research, we have considerably less data and understanding about the underlying organizational and financial factors that made polarization possible in the first place.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Qualitative and historical research has suggested that well-funded and well-organized “contrarian” campaigns are especially important for spreading skepticism or denial where scientific consensus exist—such as in the present case of global warming, or in historical contrarian efforts to create doubt about the link between smoking and cancer(8–15). The primary way that contrarian campaigns create skepticism and ideological polarization is through the production of an alternative contrarian discourse(To be clear, the term discourse here refers to communication in an authoritative fashion about a particular topic or debate), which necessarily takes the form of written text and speech from organizations and individuals (11, 14).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;Indeed, many scholars have examined climate change discourse in media coverage of climate change (16–21), but because of data constraints and the difficulty of gathering such complex and furtive data, we still lack a comprehensive data-driven understanding about the actual content and source of contrarian messages, as well as the complex organizational and financial networks within which they are produced. This study presents such an approach, and examines how the production of an alternative discourse is embedded within a particular social structure and how the content itself is influenced by particular funding sources. Important to this approach is the fact that in the United States, there are a growing number of grassroots lobbying firms who work on behalf of corporations, industry groups, and associations (22, 23). Along with this growth in corporate lobbying, other social and political opportunities have opened the door for movements like climate change contrarianism to flourish, such as weakening restrictions on political finance (24) and the concentration of corporate wealth more generally (25, 26).&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With these factors in mind, and building on prior climate change research, this study asks three specific—and closely related—empirical research questions: (i) Of all of the organizations in the climate contrarian movement, which ones produced discourse? (ii) What are the specific themes contained in this contrarian discourse? (iii) Does the reception of corporate funding influence the thematic content and ideological language of this discourse? And, how do all of these factors change over time? These important questions have not been adequately addressed because of the difficulty of collecting and analyzing such large amounts of longitudinal textual content and funding data.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Given the breadth of actors in this movement and the sheer volume of texts produced, scholars have either focused on smaller samples of text (11–13), or on rigorously identifying the organizations</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Significance Ideological polarization around environmental issues—especially climate change—have increased in the last 20 years. This polarization has led to public uncertainty, and in some cases, policy stalemate. Much attention has been given to understanding individual attitudes, but much less to the larger organizational and financial roots of polarization. This gap is due to prior difficulties in gathering and analyzing quantitative data about these complex and furtive processes. This paper uses comprehensive text and network data to show how corporate funding influences the production and actual thematic content of polarization efforts. It highlights the important influence of private funding in public knowledge and politics, and provides researchers a methodological model for future studies that blend large-scale textual discourse with social networks.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...who participate in the counter movement (14, 15). This study combines—and significantly extends—these important approaches with the use of novel computational data-collection methods. The first half of the data include a new social network of all known individuals and organizations who have participated in the climate contrarian movement between 1993 and 2013. As described in much more detail in SI Appendix, contrarian organizations are those identified by prior peer-reviewed research as overtly producing and promoting skepticism and doubt about scientific consensus on climate change. This large bipartite network includes 4,556 individuals (e.g., board members, employees, politicians, researchers) with ties to 164 organizations (e.g., think tanks, foundations, trade associations, grassroots</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">lobby firms). This population of organizations was built-up primarily from a published census of organizations and funding (12, 14, 15), and supplemented with lists from reputable nonprofit organizations (27, 28). The second half of the data include a new dataset of every text about climate change produced by every organization between 1993 and 2013 (n = 40,785 texts with more than 39 million words).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;This massive corpus was constructed with the assistance of automated Python scraping scripts, which gathered, cleaned, digitized, and prepared for analysis the entirety of current and archival press releases, website articles, policy statements, conference transcripts, published papers, and blog articles. Any PDFs were converted to plain text with optical character recognition. (See SI Appendix for specific information about how these text and network data were collected and cleaned.) These data provide a comprehensive analytical framework for examining the influence of corporate funding on the discursive efforts of organizations to create ideological polarization around climate change.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The collection of organization ties and their total population of texts is the product of a real-life countermovement and do not suffer from the methodological drawbacks that hamper survey research or social laboratory experiments. Furthermore, it links the organizations involved in the movement directly with the texts that they produce, enabling analysis about how organizational features might influence the actual thematic content of the texts. With this approach in mind, the data also include several important organizational covariates, such as the year the organization was founded, its total assets, its mission focus, the organization type, and an organization’s influence on the transfer of information within the network (i.e., betweenness centrality) (29). Most importantly for the purposes of this study, the data also include a measure of corporate funding from entities that prior literature on contrarian movements have identified as especially influential (8, 9, 14, 15): ExxonMobil (EM) and the Koch family foundations (KFF). Relying on this past research, along with Internal Revenue Service data (see SI Appendix for important details), this measure records whether or not an organization in the network received funding from either of these entities between 1993 and 2013. Donations from these corporate benefactors signals entry into a powerful network of influence.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;Analytical Approach...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Results&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To begin, Fig. 1 provides a broader bird’s-eye-view context with which to interpret the main text analysis findings below. The graph describes which organizations (nodes) produced texts and whether the organization received corporate funding. For example, a dark green circle node is an advocacy or think-tank organization that produced texts about climate change and received corporate funding. It is a one-mode network constructed from the original bipartite social network data, where ties between organizations are a function of a tie they share with individuals (see SI Appendix for details). To give a sense of change over time, the graph includes cross-sections from each decade that restricts the nodes and ties to organizations founded before that year. This approach means that 2013 is the final graph that includes all nodes and ties in the data. There are two related findings that emerge from this network analysis and serve to inform the main text analysis below. First, organizations who produce climate contrarian texts (versus those who did not) are significantly (P < 0.006) more likely to have higher betweenness centrality scores, which is a reliable indicator that they exert more organizational influence in the network (29).&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One can spot this trend in the figure by recognizing that these nodes tend to cluster toward the center of the network. Second, organizations who produced texts and received corporate funds were also significantly more likely (P < 0.002) to have higher betweenness centrality scores. Taken together, these results suggest that organizations within the movement who made an effort to produce textual discourse about climate change are the most central to the movement itself, providing them more influence over the transfer of information. This finding aligns with prior knowledge about resource mobilization (33), discursive influence (34), and corporate mobilization (22). The fact that the production of discourse was more likely to be corporately funded organizations at the core of the network provides an important</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">backdrop for the novel analytic focus of this article—namely, assessing via computational text analysis the influence of corporate funding on the actual thematic content and ideological polarization of the discourse itself.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;Turning to the results of the computational text analysis, Fig. 2 summarizes the results of the structural topic model. This corpus level visualization displays all of the topics along with the top 15 words associated with each topic. This figure also includes the proportion of the corpus that belongs to each topic. It is important to note that these topics and the words should be interpreted in light of the purpose of the texts and the larger goals of climate change contrarianism described above (8–15).&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Broadly, one can see that these organizations focused their climate change discourse on people’s knowledge of the issue, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change science, debates over temperature trends, international politics such as the Kyoto Treaty, and related energy issues such as fuel, oil, and cap and trade bills. How are all of these topics related to one another, and do they cluster together in meaningful ways? Fig. 3 plots the layout of all topic correlations using the Fruchterman–Reingold algorithm. A tie between two topics indicates a positive topic correlation, meaning that both topics were more likely to be discussed together within a document. Node sizes correspond to the topic proportions from Fig. 2. The dashed ellipses were overlaid after graphing to draw attention to four thematic clusters: First, toward the bottom left (in green) is a cluster of topics relating to questions about scientific evidence and disputes over the real causes and effects of CO2, long-term temperature cycles, global cooling, and who has scientific authority.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Adjacent (in yellow) is a second cluster pertaining to public knowledge and the role of news media and Al Gore’s film. Just above this (in blue) is a cluster of topics pertaining to federal and state-level bureaucratic politics related to climate change. Lastly, toward the top (in black) is a cluster of topics related to energy industry concerns, and alarm about the economic and political costs of enacting climate change policy. These four broad clusters provide a comprehensive profile of all discourse produced by climate contrarian organizations from 1993 to 2013.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lastly, Fig. 4 examines how the actual prevalence of these topics might be influenced by corporate funding. It focuses on four topics that have been particularly salient to the recent history of climate contrarianism (for all topic plots, see SI Appendix, Fig. S1). These interaction plots allow the prevalence of the topics to vary by time (by year, 1993–2013) and whether an organization received corporate funding during this same timespan (Red Line = Yes, Black line = No). For example, the plot in the top left demonstrates that temperature trends became much more salient between 2007 and 2013 for organizations who received funding, whereas they became less salient for organizations who did not.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Similarly, the issue of energy production (top right), the positive benefits of CO2 (bottom left), and climate change being a long-term cycle (bottom right) all showed distinctly positive trends over time for organizations who received corporate funding, whereas those who did not receive corporate funding remained more constant over the same time period. On the whole, these findings show that despite being part of the same contrarian network, the organizations who received corporate funding actually produced discourse that was qualitatively different from organizations that did not receive such funding, and these differences tended to revolve around energy</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">production, debates about the effects of CO2, and questions about the scientific veracity of long-term climate change.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Discussion The main empi....</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2. McCright AM, Dunlap RE (2011) The politicization of climate change and polarization</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">in the American’s public view of global warming, 2001-2010. Sociol Q 52(2):155–194.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3. Ding D, Maibach EW, Zhao X, Roser-Renouf C, Leiserowitz A (2011) Support for climate</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">policy and societal action are linked to perceptions about scientific agreement.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nature. Clim Change 1:462–466.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4. Leiserowitz A, Maibach EW, Roser-Renouf C, Smith N, Dawson E (2012) Climategate,</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">public opinion, and the loss of trust. Am Behav Sci 57(6):818–837.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">5. Scruggs L, Benegal S (2012) Declining public concern about climate change: Can we</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">blame the great recession? Glob Environ Change 22(2):505–515.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">6. Hart PS, Nisbet EC (2011) Boomerang effects in science communication: How motivated</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">reasoning and identity cues amplify opinion polarization about climate mitigation</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">policies. Communic Res 39(6):701–723.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">7. Gauchat H (2012) Politicization of science in the public sphere: A study of public trust</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">in the United States, 1974 to 2010. Am Sociol Rev 77(2):167–187.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">8. Oreskes N, Conway EM (2010) Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury, London).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">9. Coll S (2012) Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (Penguin Group US,</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">New York).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">10. Brulle R, Antonio R (2011) The unbearable lightness of politics: Climate change denial</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">and political polarization. Sociol Q 52(2):195–202.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">11. Jacques PJ, Dunlap RE, Freeman M (2008) The organisation of denial: Conservative</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">think tanks and environmental scepticism. Env Polit 17(3):349–385.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">12. McCright AM, Dunlap RE (2000) Challenging global warming as a social problem: An</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">analysis of the conservative movement’s counter-claims. Soc Probl 47(4):499–522.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">13. Elsasser SW, Dunlap RE (2013) Leading voices in the denier choir: Conservative columnists’</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">dismissal of global warming and denigration of climate science. Am Behav</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sci 57:754–776.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">14. McCright AM, Dunlap RE (2003) Defeating Kyoto: The conservative movement’s impact</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">on US climate change policy. Soc Probl 50(3):348–373.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">15. Brulle RJ (2013) Institutionalizing delay: Foundation funding and the creation of U.S.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">climate change counter-movement organizations. Clim Change 122:681–694.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">16. Boykoff MT, Boykoff JM (2004) Balance as bias: Global warming and the US prestige</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">press. Glob. Environ. Chang. 14:125–136.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">bernie DN media ignored his rural rallies?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now, one of the problems I think we have as a nation, I think media—and, by the way, at the back of the book, one of the important chapters—if you get tired, skip to the back. If you don’t like taxation or immigration reform, go to the back, last chapter, which deals with—it’s entitled "Corporate Media, a Threat to Democracy." And it talks about the role of corporate media in our society and in politics, in particular. But what is going on in this country is that we live in a pretty siloized nation. That’s a kind of a inside-the-Beltway term; I don’t know if it’s expanded to Pennsylvania. But what it means is we all live in our own worlds, basically. We associate with people who think the same as we do. I guess there was somebody who said, "How could Trump have won? Nobody I knew voted for Trump!" Well, you don’t know people in different walks of life than your own. And one of the things that a lot of middle-class people, upper-middle-class people don’t know is that, yes, we are better off economically today than we were eight years ago, when Bush left office—there’s no debate on that—but for 40 years in this country, under Democratic and Republican administrations, we have seen a shrinking of the American middle class, we have seen more and more income and wealth inequality, so that today the top one-tenth of 1 percent now owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, and today we have 43 million people living in poverty, some in really dire straits.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now, one of the things that I did in the campaign—what I wanted to do, and I did—was to go into parts of the country where media very rarely goes, and I wanted to be talking to people, and I wanted to see if we can get some national exposure. And in a sense, I failed. We had media following me all over the place, what they call embedded media, from all the networks and major newspapers, but basically they did not write about what we were seeing in various parts of the country.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And let me just talk a little bit about that. We talked—and again, these are facts; some of you know it, some of you don’t. But I want you to understand the pain and the hurt that millions of people are experiencing. You’re a single mom in Philadelphia...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://wwwwww.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bernie-sanders-warns-corporate-media-threatens-democracy</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">goldsmith urban planner progressive plan for cities, earlier bk on inequality?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://kpfa.org/episode/rising-up-with-sonali-december-2-2016/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.ecowatch.com/renewable-energy-growth-2162122653.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Jessica Collingsworth</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With the Clean Power Plan's future up in the air and concerns about how science might fare given the recent election results, some may think 2016 wasn't a great year for clean energy. However, lots of great state level policies were passed—some with bipartisan support—and there's even some good news on the national front. Looking back at the last year I see a lot of clear signs that the clean energy transition is moving forward in the U.S.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here are eight states that really stepped up to become climate leaders:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1. California</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In August, the California legislature passed remarkable climate change legislation. SB 32 builds on Assembly Bill 32, the landmark Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 that required California to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. SB 32 now sets the next target, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. Another bill, AB 197 increases legislative oversight and transparency for the state's climate change programs and emphasizes the state's commitment to ensuring these policies help communities most impacted by climate change and air pollution.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">California is on track to meet its emissions reductions goals and its overall economy is growing. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) brought in our scientists and passage of these two bills cemented the state's commitment to leading the fight against climate change.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2. Illinois</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On Dec. 1, Illinois passed the Future Energy Jobs Bill (SB 2814). The bill was passed with bipartisan support, and was signed into law by Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner. The Illinois Clean Jobs Coalition (which UCS is a member of) worked on the bill for nearly two years. The bill includes several big wins for clean energy including a meaningful fix to the state's existing Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) law that corrects flaws in the policy, new in-state renewable build requirements for wind and solar, the state's first community solar program, and a new Illinois Solar for All program which is a comprehensive low-income solar deployment and job training initiative. The bill also increased the state's energy efficiency policies; ComEd will achieve a 21.5 percent reduction and Ameren will achieve a 16 percent reduction in energy use by 2030.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3. Maryland</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The state passed landmark legislation, the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction Act (SB 323), which was signed into law by Republican Gov. Larry Hogan. The law requires Maryland to reduce statewide greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent from 2006 levels by 2030. This target was unanimously recommended by the state's bipartisan Climate Change Commission in fall 2015. The legislation was supported by a diverse group of stakeholders and is expected to create and maintain thousands of jobs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4. Massachusetts</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This summer Massachusetts legislators passed an omnibus energy bill that will once again make Massachusetts a clean energy leader. The bill includes a large scale clean energy procurement requirement for hydro, wind, solar and other renewable sources and the necessary transmission to power the state. The legislation also calls for Massachusetts utilities to solicit contracts for 1,600 megawatts of offshore wind development by 2030. That's enough to meet 15 percent of Massachusetts's electricity needs. In all, up to 40 percent of the state's electricity could come from clean energy sources by 2030.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">5. Michigan</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This month the state passed Senate bills 437 and 438, that make progress on Michigan's clean energy future. The legislation strengthens the state's renewable portfolio standard (RPS) from 10 percent by 2015, to 15 percent by 2021, and requires renewable energy resources to be built within the service territories of utilities that serve Michigan. The strengthened RPS ensures a baseline level of diversity in Michigan's energy mix.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For energy efficiency, the legislation changes the state's current standard to a regulatory-focused process in 2021, but it will preserve current levels of energy efficiency by requiring utilities to regularly submit efficiency plans that must maintain efficiency investments deemed reasonable and prudent. The legislation also removes the existing cap on energy efficiency program spending, and provides a new incentive structure that could drive utilities to achieve annual savings of 1.5 percent.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">6. New York</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The New York Public Service Commission (PSC) gave approval to Gov. Cuomo's plan for New York to obtain 50 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, through the state's Clean Energy Standard. The PSC order established an overall legally binding renewables target for 2030, and requires New York state utilities to ramp up long-term purchases of renewable energy credits to meet those targets. This builds on the state's commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by signing the Under 2 MOU in 2015, which sets a laudable target to reduce emissions 40 percent by 2030 and 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">7. Oregon</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In March, the Oregon Legislature passed the Clean Energy and Coal Transition Act (Senate Bill 1547) with bipartisan support. The legislation doubles Oregon's existing renewable portfolio standard (RPS) from 25 percent by 2025 to 50 percent by 2040 and requires the state's two largest utilities (Portland General Electric and Pacific Power) to phase out coal generation imports by 2035. A huge advantage of Oregon's coal phase out is that it creates room in the power supply for cleaner energy sources. The legislation had true consensus with support from environmental groups, the state's consumer advocate, businesses and the state's two largest utilities.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">8. Rhode Island</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The state passed HB 7413 that will increase the state's renewable energy standard by 1.5 percent each year, requiring 38.5 percent of the state's electricity to come from renewables by 2035. Also, the state's Block Island became the site of the first offshore wind project in the Western Hemisphere. The project consists of five wind turbines adding up to 30 megawatts which became operational this year and more offshore wind is coming!</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Wait, There's More!</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sometimes good news comes in the form of stuff that didn't happen. Florida's Solar Amendment 1, an anti-solar ballot initiative, didn't pass. The amendment was backed by utilities and fossil fuel interests, and was an attempt to deceive voters and limit solar development in the state.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">National Level</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And on the national level, the five-year extension of federal tax credits for wind and solar signed into law late last year was a huge driver for clean energy development this year and in the coming years. One million solar installations are now turned on in the US. Solar is being installed throughout the U.S. thanks to falling prices and a vast supply of sunshine. And U.S. wind generation set new records in 2016 as costs continue to fall.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-november-28-2016/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Strangers in their own Land: Anger and Mourning on the ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In "Strangers in Their Own Land," Arlie Russell Hochschild tries to understand the worldview of Louisiana Tea Party supporters. ... STRANGERS IN THEIR ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Search domain www.nytimes.comnytimes.com/2016/09/25/books/review/strangers-in-thei...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Strangers in Their Own Land | The New Press</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">New Republic reviews Strangers in Their Own Land: "Hochschild is fascinated by how people make sense of their lives, ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Search domain thenewpress.comthenewpress.com/books/strangers-their-own-land</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Arlie R. Hochschild | UC Berkeley Sociology Department</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Arlie R. Hochschild . Professor Emerita. ... Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (The New Press, September 2016), ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Search domain sociology.berkeley.edusociology.berkeley.edu/professor-emeritus/arlie-r-hochschild</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Arlie Russell Hochschild on "Strangers in Their Own Land ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Arlie Russell Hochschild on "Strangers in Their Own Land: ... Arlie Hochschild is author of the new book Strangers in Their Own Land: ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Search domain www.democracynow.orgdemocracynow.org/2016/9/28/arlie_russell_hochschild_on_str...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Review: 'Strangers in Their Own Land,' by Arlie Russell ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">... Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. ... Review: 'Strangers in Their Own Land,' by Arlie Russell Hochschild. NONFICTION: ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">40 min vid (tracked by ggle?)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">line cutting story, elite vs hick</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM5ReFAh-YQ</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These 9 Maps Should Absolutely Outrage Southerners various socio-economic factors 3/14.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">alternet rt mad at CA economist krugman</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see map of hate groups</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/belief/america-really-getting-more-tolerant-100-new-hate-groups-appeared-last-year</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/economy/what-went-wrong-south-what-went-wrong-america</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">10/16</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://kpfa.org/episode/rising-up-with-sonali-november-2-2016/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">brandnew congress</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">interview w/ ca cc stident Millennials energized by Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign are continuing their political revolution by focusing on the 2018 Congressional midterm elections. And, mediator Mark Gerzon will join us for an in-depth discussion about his new book,&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.markgerzon.com/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">‘Spin’ is a polite word for deception,” writes Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a leading expert on political communication in the book which she co-authored with Brooks Jackson entitled “unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation.”&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ms. Jamieson and her colleagues at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania founded FactCheck.org, which strives to be a “consumer advocate” for voters and is particularly active during election cycles. to determine what is true, half-true, and plain old falsehood. Another source for truth-telling and lie-detecting, also designed by journalists, is PolitiFact, which was developed by the Tampa Bay Times. It actually rates the accuracy of statements by elected officials and pundits.&nbsp;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">• Support fact-based efforts it Washington. In March 2016, Congress passed, and the president signed into law, a bill establishing the Evidence-Based Policy Commission.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">house divided report/ bk?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Reunited States of America: How We Can Bridge the Partisan Divide. Plus, author James Hoggan will join us to discuss his new book, I’m Right and You’re an Idiot: The Toxic State of Public Discourse and How to Clean it Up.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">9/16</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.democracynow.org/2016/9/28/what_drives_trump_supporters_sociologist_arlie</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the wake of Monday night’s first presidential debate, the establishment Republican Party and conservative newspapers continue to distance themselves from Donald Trump amid increasing accusations of racism, sexism, xenophobia and Islamophobia. Today, former Virginia Republican Senator John Warner is reportedly slated to endorse Clinton. This comes as Arizona’s largest newspaper, The Arizona Republic, has endorsed Hillary Clinton—marking the paper’s first time ever endorsing a Democratic candidate for president. The editorial board wrote, "Since The Arizona Republic began publication in 1890, we have never endorsed a Democrat over a Republican for president. Never. … This year is different." For more, we speak with famed sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild. She has spent much of the past five years with some of Donald Trump’s biggest supporters, researching her new book, "Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">many interv newshour</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Political polarization on climate change has become so stark this election cycle that researchers say the gulf between Republicans and Democrats is wider than they have seen in more than 20 years of polling. The polarization has an equally startling financial corollary: an overwhelming 91 percent of fossil fuel industry campaign donations now flow to Republican candidates and 9 percent to Democrats.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As recently as 2000, when George W. Bush faced Al Gore for the presidency, the pot of fossil fuel spending was split almost evenly, with 60 percent going to Republicans, 40 percent to Democrats.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The deepening&nbsp; divide underscores how much of U.S. climate policy is riding on the November election. Donald Trump has promised to pull the country out of the Paris accord and Republican majorities in Congress are working to block environmental regulations. Hillary Clinton has vowed to support the global agreement to reduce carbon emissions and build on President Obama's climate initiatives.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">An InsideClimate News analysis of data from the Center for Responsive Politics shows that from the beginning of this election cycle in 2015 through the first six months of this year, fossil fuel industry political action committees and employees donated $37.2 million to Republicans running for federal office. In contrast, industry giving to Democrats totaled just $3.8 million.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The trend dovetails with new research that shows the partisan gap has increased in U.S. citizens' views on climate change science and the impacts of a warming planet. That research is published in the latest issue of the journal Environment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fossil fuel industry political donations flow overwhelmingly to Republicans</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Riley Dunlap, sociologist at Oklahoma State University who led the new research, was not surprised by the parallel trend in political donations from those with an interest in fending off climate policy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"What has happened since 2008 is that the Democrats have become very clearly the party identified with taking climate change seriously and promising to do something, while the Republicans have become intransigent," he said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What is difficult to answer, however, is which trend is driving the other.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Are the contributions rewarding the voting? Or are the political votes driving the Republican contributions?" asked Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Philadelphia's Drexel University who studies the fossil fuel money's influence on communication about climate change. "It probably works both ways. 'This guy's always voting with us, he's one of our friends, let's give him more money.' And he becomes a better friend. It's kind of a reciprocal relationship."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Republicans became much better friends to those who oppose environmental action in Congress since 1970, according to Dunlap's analysis of the League of Conservation Voters' annual scorecards.&nbsp; On a scale where 100 signifies a "perfect" environmental voting record, the GOP average in the 1970s hovered between 30 and 40 percent, while the Democrats stayed mostly between 50 and 60 percent. Today, the GOP average has dropped to the single digits, while the Democrats' average is about 90 percent.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Environmental voting records by Democrats vs. Republicans</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dunlap also looked at The Gallup Organization's regular opinion polling on global warming to track the shift in political polarization over time. The gap between Republicans and Democrats on the question of whether changes in the Earth's temperature are due to human activities grew from 17 percentage points in 2001 to 32 points in 2008 to 41 points in polling this year: Eighty-two percent of Democrats believe in human-caused climate change versus 47 percent of Republicans.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dunlap said the increasing gap between the parties reflects that climate action opposition has become a "core identity issue" for Republicans, on a par with opposition to abortion or taxes.&nbsp; Anti-regulatory ideology may have made the party "fertile ground" for hardened opposition to climate action, he said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Dunlap said the GOP leadership helped encourage the divide, especially since 2008. For example, he said when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, (R-Ky), urged states last year to defy the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan, it sent a signal that the party was aligned with&nbsp; opponents of the regulations, including the fossil fuel industry. Dunlap also said it sent an important cue to rank-and-file Republicans to put pressure on Republicans in Congress who might be inclined to favor action. That was the pressure that helped oust Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) in 2010, when he supported a price on carbon and saw his donations dry up and was unseated by a Tea Party challenger.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"They face both top-down and bottom-up pressure," said Dunlap.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dunlap's research shows it will be difficult to reverse the trend. The partisan divide on climate change is just as wide regardless of education level—indicating that efforts to reach doubters through education and better communication of science may be fruitless. Dunlap said he believes only a fundamental shake-up in the GOP is likely to dislodge the deep-seated views. It's just one reason, he says, that this election—and what happens to the Republican party following it—may be crucial for the future of action on climate change....</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/08/31/americans-now-more-politically-polarized-climate-change-ever-analysis-finds</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">American voters and politicians are now more polarized than ever before across all aspects of climate change&nbsp; — from the cause, to the science and the impacts — a major new analysis has found.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Campaigns funded by vested fossil fuel interests and pushed by a network of ideological think tanks, many linked to the oil billionaire Koch brothers, have helped to widen the gap, pushing Republican politicians, elites and voters away from action on greenhouse gas emissions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tracking Gallup opinion poll surveys going back to 2001 and congress voting patterns from 1970 onwards, the analysis authors warn that as the November election approaches, Americans are faced with a stark political choice.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The analysis is published in the respected journal Environment and comes from sociologists Associate Professor Aaron McCright of Michigan State University, Professor Riley Dunlap of Oklahoma State University, and PhD researcher Jerrod Yarosh also at Oklahoma.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The researchers found the widest gaps between Democrats and Republicans come when they are asked about the causes of climate change and if the media exaggerates the seriousness of the issue.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While virtually all climate scientists and the world's leading scientific academies have long agreed that the burning of fossil fuels is causing climate change, only about half Republicans accept the science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A Republican controlled Congress, the article says, would be a “huge step backward in our nation’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions” and could also undermine international cooperation, especially if Republican nominee Donald Trump won the Presidency.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Whether, and how, individual Americans vote this November may well be the most consequential climate-related decision most of them will have ever taken,” the authors conclude.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Stark Choices</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dunlap told DeSmog the choice facing US voters was glaring.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Looking back, Gore versus Bush was stark, although Bush hid his denial for a bit.&nbsp; But now the partisan differences on climate change are out in the open, and the choices from the top down are stark.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Koch brothers had led a network of “conservative mega-donors” that had created a “shadow GOP” that had managed to reduce the influence of the Republican National Committee, the analysis argues.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These efforts, the article explains, have blocked legislation, limited international negotiations and made rejection of climate science&nbsp; “normative” among Republican elites and activists.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Widening Gaps</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dunlap, McCright and Yarosh looked at how elected Democrats and Republicans had voted on environment and climate bills in both houses of Congress since 1970, using data from the League of Conservation Voters.&nbsp; The researchers found:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What was once a modest tendency for Congressional Republicans to be less pro-environmental than their Democratic counterparts has become a chasm—with Republicans taking near-unanimous anti-environmental stances on relevant legislation in recent years, especially 2015.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Since 2001 polling company Gallup has been asking US voters for their views on aspects of climate change, such as if they think it’s happening, if it’s caused by humans and if they are concerned about it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2001, 53 percent of Republican voters agreed that global warming was caused by humans, compared with 70 percent of Democrats — a gap of 17 percentage points. But by 2016, this gap had blown out to 41 percentage points, with only 43 percent of Republican voters accepting climate change is human-caused.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These “partisan gaps” had widened across all areas since 2008, except when voters were asked if they thought global warming had already started, where the gap remained at 34 percentage points.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bridging the Gap?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Alongside the analysis, the authors look at various attempts to bring Republicans closer to accepting the realities of climate change, such as changing communication strategies. The writers claim:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Does any persuasive framing strategy hold special promise for penetrating Republicans’ partisan/ideological identities? The evidence so far gives little basis for optimism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The sociologists say one major reason why attempts to better communicate the realities of climate change to conservatives have failed is down to “motivated cognition” — described as the tendency for people to only accept information that reinforces their existing political beliefs and their views on the world.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even when Republicans experience extreme weather events, there was little evidence that this was enough for those voters to change their views. Dunlap told DeSmog:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I fear polarization will be difficult to overcome because Republican reluctance to accept the reality and seriousness of human-caused climate change is in a self-reinforcing loop.&nbsp;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There are top-down cues from Republican political elites and their supporters from conservative think tanks to conservative media — especially the Murdoch media— that influence voters, as well as bottom-up pressure from party activists such as Tea Party supporters who act as ‘enforcers’ of party principles, especially in primary elections to select Republican candidates.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The result is that global warming has joined God, guns, gays, and abortion as core elements of Republican identity, and this will be hard to change.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/books/strangers-their-own-land-anger-and-loss-among-tea-partiers-and-trump-supporters</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">... Id first seen Mike Schaff months earlier standing at the microphone at an environmental rally on the steps of the Louisiana state capital in Baton Rouge, his voice cracking with emotion. He had been a victim of one of the strangest, literally earth-shaking environmental disasters in the nation, one that robbed him of his home and community—a sinkhole that devoured hundred-foot-tall trees and turned forty acres of swamp upside down, as I shall describe. That raised a big question in my mind. The disaster had been caused by a lightly regulated drilling company. But as a Tea Party advocate, Mike had hailed government deregulation of all sorts, as well as drastic cuts in government spending—including that for environmental protection. How could he be both near tears to recall his lost home and also call for a world stripped of most government beyond the military and hurricane relief? I was puzzled. I sensed a wall between us.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Empathy Walls</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You might say I’d come to Louisiana with an interest in walls. Not visible, physical walls such as those separating Catholics from Protestants in Belfast, Americans from Mexicans on the Texas border, or, once, residents of East and West Berlin. It was empathy walls that interested me. An empathy wall is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances. In a period of political tumult, we grasp for quick certainties. We shoehorn new information into ways we already think. We settle for knowing our opposite numbers from the outside. But is it possible, without changing our beliefs, to know others from the inside, to see reality through their eyes, to understand the links between life, feeling, and politics; that is, to cross the empathy wall? I thought it was.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I’d asked Mike Schaff to show me where he’d grown up because I wanted to understand, if I could, how he saw the world. By way of introduction, I’d told him, “I’m from Berkeley, California, a sociologist, and I am trying to understand the deepening divide in our country. So I’m trying to get out of my political bubble and get to know people in yours.” Mike nodded at the word “divide,” then quipped, “Berkeley? So y’all must be communist!” He grinned as if to say, “We Cajuns can laugh, hope you can.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He wasn’t making it hard. A tall, strongly built man in tan-rimmed glasses, he spoke succinctly, in a low near mumble, and was given both to soulful, sometimes self-deprecating, reflection and stalwart Facebook proclamations. Explaining his background, he said, “My mom was Cajun and my dad was German. We Cajuns call ourselves coon asses. So since I was half Cajun, and half German, my mom called me half-ass.” We laughed. Mike was one of seven children his dad had raised on a plumber’s wage. “We didn’t know we were poor,” he said, a refrain I would hear often among those I came to know on the far right, speaking of their own or their parents’ childhoods. Mike had an engineer’s eye, a sportsman’s love of fish and game, and a naturalist’s ear for the call of a tree frog. I didn’t know any members of the Tea Party, not to really talk to, and he didn’t know many people like me. “I’m pro-life, pro-gun, pro-freedom to live our own lives as we see fit so long as we don’t hurt others. And I’m anti–big government,” Mike said. “Our government is way too big, too greedy, too incompetent, too bought, and it’s not ours anymore. We need to get back to our local communities, like we had at Armelise. Honestly, we’d be better off.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Not only have the country’s two main political parties split further apart on such issues, but political feeling also runs deeper than it did in the past. In 1960, when a survey asked American adults whether it would “disturb” them if their child married a member of the other political party, no more than 5 percent of either party answered “yes.” But in 2010, 33 percent of Democrats and 40 percent of Republicans answered “yes.” In fact, partyism, as some call it, now beats race as the source of divisive prejudice.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When Americans moved in the past, they left in search of better jobs, cheaper housing, or milder weather. But according to The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded Americans Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop and Robert G. Cushing, when people move today, it is more often to live near others who share their views. People are segregating themselves into different emotionally toned enclaves—anger here, hopefulness and trust there. A group of libertarian Texans have bought land in the salt flats east of El Paso, named it Paulville, and reserved it for enthusiastic “freedom-loving” followers of Ron Paul. And the more that people confine themselves to like-minded company, the more extreme their views become. According to a 2014 Pew study of over 10,000 Americans, the most politically engaged on each side see those in the “other party” not just as wrong, but as “so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being.” Compared to the past, each side also increasingly gets its news from its own television channel— the right from Fox News, the left from MSNBC. And so the divide widens. We live in what the New Yorker has called the “Tea Party era.” Some 350,000 people are active members, but, according to another Pew poll, some 20 percent of Americans—45 million people—support it. And the divide cuts through a striking variety of issues. Ninety percent of Democrats believe in the human role in climate change, surveys find, compared with 59 percent of moderate Republicans, 38 percent of conservative Republicans, and only 29 percent of Tea Party advocates. In fact, politics is the single biggest factor determining views on climate change.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This split has widened because the right has moved right, not because the left has moved left. Republican presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford all supported the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1960, the GOP platform embraced “free collective bargaining” between management and labor. Republicans boasted of “extending the minimum wage to several million more workers” and “strengthening the unemployment insurance system and extension of its benefits.” Under Dwight Eisenhower, top earners were taxed at 91 percent; in 2015, it was 40 percent. Planned Parenthood has come under serious attack from nearly all Republican presidential candidates running in 2016. Yet a founder of the organization was Peggy Goldwater, wife of the 1964 conservative Republican candidate for president Barry Goldwater. General Eisenhower called for massive investment in infrastructure, and now nearly all congressional Republicans see such a thing as frightening government overreach. Ronald Reagan raised the national debt and favored gun control, and now the Republican state legislature of Texas authorizes citizens to “open carry” loaded guns into churches and banks. Conservatives of yesterday seem moderate or liberal today.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The far right now calls for cuts in entire segments of the federal government—the Departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, and Interior, for example. In January 2015, fifty-eight House Republicans voted to abolish the Internal Revenue Service. Some Republican congressional candidates call for abolishing all public schools. In March 2015, the Republican-dominated U.S. Senate voted 51 to 49 in support of an amendment to a budget resolution to sell or give away all non-military federal lands other than national monuments and national parks. This would include forests, wildlife refuges, and wilderness areas. In 1970, not a single U.S. senator opposed the Clean Air Act. Joined by ninety-five Republican congressmen, Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, one of the most polluted states in the union, has called for the end of the Environmental Protection Agency.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And the Tea Party’s turn away from government may signal a broader trend. During the depression of the 1930s, Americans turned to the federal government for aid in their economic recovery. But in response to the Great Recession of 2008, a majority of Americans turned away from it. As the political divide widens and opinions harden, the stakes have grown vastly higher. Neither ordinary citizens nor leaders are talking much “across the aisle,” damaging the surprisingly delicate process of governance itself. The United States has been divided before, of course. During the Civil War, a difference in belief led to some 750,000 deaths. During the stormy 1960s, too, clashes arose over the war in Vietnam, civil rights, and women’s rights. But in the end, a healthy democracy depends on a collective capacity to hash things out. And to get there, we need to figure out what’s going on—especially on the more rapidly shifting and ever stronger right.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.globalpossibilities.org/stark-new-evidence-on-how-money-shapes-americas-elections/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Eccentric gazillionaires or big corporations driving elections?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Their paper closes by examining the notion that right wing politics in America has been driven by donations piling up from eccentric entrepreneurs like investor and conservative mega-donor Foster Friess — the sort of people who are widely imagined to populate the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans – rather than mainline big business corporations, such as those on the Fortune 500 list.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On the contrary, the researchers find that “a simple count of firms and investors on Forbes show that the largest American corporations support Tea Party Congressional candidates and organizations supporting the movement, such as Freedom Works, at much higher rates than Forbes 400 members. Even making due allowances for Dark Money, the difference is substantial.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Evidently American big business firms are not centrist, as many pundits would have it. As Ferguson and his colleagues put it, “Stories that the steady rightward drift of the American political universe is somehow the work of exceptionally ideological individual entrepreneurs are huge over-simplifications. If the center is not holding in American society — and it rather plainly is not — America’s largest companies are as implicated as anyone else; indeed, perhaps more so.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This state of affairs explains why economic inequality has grown into a crisis, with social unrest amplified by economic distress. Because of this money-driven system — which has been getting worse since 1970s up to the current dysfunctional mess — when the rich don’t feel like paying taxes, we all suffer. Infrastructure collapses, schoolchildren and sick people suffer, and hard-working citizens are robbed of their fair share of the country’s prosperity and end their lives struggling keep body and soul together....</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">WalletHub shows patriotism among Americans has been steadily decreasing—down nearly 10 percent from 2011.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Analyzing 12 metrics, including military engagement, voting habits and civil-education requirements, the study ranked states by “military engagement rank” and “civic engagement rank,” to determine which rank the highest and which the lowest for patriotism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here they are.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">10 Most Patriotic States</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Virginia</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Alaska</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">South Carolina</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Colorado</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Georgia</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hawaii</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Montana</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Alabama</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Washington</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">New Hampshire</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">10 Least Patriotic States</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">New Jersey</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Connecticut</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">New York</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rhode Island</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Illinois</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Massachusetts</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pennsylvania</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">California</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Michigan</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Louisiana</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Perhaps unsurprisingly, three of the five states (Georgia, Alaska and South Carolina) with the highest percentage of residents who enlisted in the military landed on the “most patriotic states” list. Among the states with the lowest enlistment rate, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Rhode Island were also among the “least patriotic” locales. Veterans per capita, Peace Corps volunteers per capita, voting percentages, and volunteer rates similarly correlated with patriotism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The study also found a divide among political affiliation: States that voted Republican in 2012 were more patriotic than those which voted Democrat.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Stanford University professor Bruce E. Cain, who analyzed the data set, said it’s imperative that schools and local authorities focus on the patriotic divide in the United States. “We really need to revamp civic education to teach better political and collaborative skills to solve problems,” Bruce wrote in his analysis. “We cannot continue to be polarized into different groups, posturing and posing rather than negotiating and compromising to work for the collective good.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Read more about the study and find out where your state ranked at WalletHub</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">st looks at cities with more than 500,000 residents and ranks them based on their per-capita purchases of books, magazines, and newspapers, both in print and in Kindle format. These cities made the top ten:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1. Seattle</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2. Portland</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3. Washington, D.C.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4. San Francisco</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">5. Austin</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">6. Las Vegas</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">7. Tucson</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">8. Denver</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">9. Albuquerque</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">10. San Diego</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s the second year in a row that Seattle has topped the list, but California reigned supreme in bookish states with three most well-read cities on the 20-city list</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/these-are-americas-most-well-read-cities-180959224/#hk6rYl837fmt2Co5.99</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/media/obama-explains-trumps-rise-fox-host-chris-wallace-republicans-have-their-own-tv-station</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">fox BO</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/11/12982/alecs-rich-states-poor-states-paints-happy-face-failing-state-policies</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Arn Pearson, arn@prwatch.org</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Today, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) rolls out another edition of its "Rich States, Poor States" publication. The publication annually slaps a fresh coat of paint on the flawed fiscal and economic austerity policies favored by the group and its corporate patrons.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It's going to take a lot of paint this year.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The poster child for the ALEC anti-tax, low-wage policy agenda is Koch Industries' home state, Kansas, which has been plugged by Governor Sam Brownback as a "real live experiment in supply side economics. But Brownback's tax cuts have thrown the state into fiscal crisis, saddling the state with a projected budget deficit of $190 million for the next fiscal year, no reserves, slashed public services, and lagging job growth. Although wealthy taxpayers and businesses have reaped big benefits, it's an economic disaster for working families.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sold to the press and state policymakers as an objective, academic measure of state economic performance, "Rich States Poor States" is in reality a scorecard ranking states on the adoption of extreme policies pushed by the Koch-funded ALEC that have little or nothing to do with good economic outcomes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The ALEC project that publishes the report, dubbed the Center for State Fiscal Reform, has received large grants from the Bradley Foundation, the Searle Foundation and the Claude M. Lambe Foundation, a Koch-controlled foundation that spent down and is now closed. Records indicate that the eponymous Charles G. Koch Foundation gave ALEC $150,000 in 2014, and Koch Industries and other Koch-led groups may also be donors. Those foundations are major funders of a national right-wing infrastructure that includes ALEC and its sibling group, the State Policy Network, 60+ state-based "think tanks" that produce talking points and more to advance ALEC's legislative agenda of tax breaks for corporations, steep budget cuts, and attacks on workers rights.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ALEC brings together corporate lobbyists and state legislators to actually vote on "model" bills behind closed doors, which are then proposed to become binding laws by ALEC state legislators across the country. Less than 1% of its revenue comes from the lawmakers it highlights as members. ALEC is funded by huge corporations, including Koch Industries, which has long had a seat and a vote on ALEC's corporate board, Altria (the former Phillip Morris), and Exxon Mobil, which has used ALEC to help peddle climate change denial and more. ALEC task force meetings, where bills are promoted and voted on, are closed to the press and the public.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Report's Methodology Has Been Debunked</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The lead author of the "Rich States, Poor States" report is economist and "ALEC scholar" Arthur Laffer. Influential in Republican circles, Laffer is considered the father of "supply side" economics–the notion of slashing taxes and government spending to spur economic growth. Adoption of Laffer's policies generated enormous federal deficits under presidents Reagan and Bush I, and have been widely dismissed as "voodoo" and "junk" economics.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Since ALEC first published the "Rich States, Poor States" report in 2007, with its Economic Outlook Ranking, experts say states rated better by ALEC have actually done worse economically.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Business Insider analyst Joe Weisenthal calls the ALEC report "silly."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Obviously ALEC is ranking states based on each state's level of deregulation and awarding the most deregulated states, but the outcomes seem to have very little bearing in where companies actually want to launch and do business," Weisenthal said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Good Jobs First and the Iowa Policy Project issued a comprehensive report in 2012, "Selling Snake Oil to the States," critiquing "Rich States, Poor States" on methodological grounds. The authors concluded that the criteria that ALEC uses to rank states, such as eliminating progressive taxes, suppressing wages, and cutting public services are actually a recipe for economic inequality, declining incomes, and undermining public infrastructure and education that really matter for long-term economic growth.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Working Families Hit Hardest by ALEC Policies</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The devastating impact of the Koch/ALEC budget agenda in Kansas must be enough to make some people glad they're not in Kansas anymore.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The result of Governor Brownback's ALEC-backed policies in the Sunflower State has been to widen the income inequality gap by shifting income to the state's wealthiest taxpayers and corporations, while suppressing wages and cutting services for the middle class, low-income children, and veterans. Brownback slashed education funding by $51 million last school year, forcing the early closure of Kansas schools, and asked for another $62.6 million in cuts this past July. Meanwhile, Kansas corporations walked away with $276.7 million in tax breaks and subsidies during Brownback's first term in office.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The biggest benefits of Governor Brownback's 2012 tax program went to the top 1% while actually increasing taxes for the bottom 20%. Kansas now has the 9th most unfair tax system of any state in the country, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. The poorest 20% of Kansans pay 11.1% of their income in state taxes, while the richest 1% pay just 3.6%.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ALEC's supply-side policies are getting a cold reception among Kansas residents. A recent poll found that Governor Brownback is the most disliked governor in the country, with an approval rating of only 26%, and that three out of four people surveyed believed they were paying higher state taxes now than two years ago.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"ALEC is rolling out this latest report on the eve of its meeting in Arizona with the 2016 election heating up to try to convince people that its prescription of tax cuts for the rich and austerity for the rest of us is sound economics," said Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy. "Those policies have failed in Wisconsin, and they are failing in Kansas."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For more information on ALEC business climate rankings and Kansas please see a newly launched website, Grading the States — gradingstates.org — which dissects several state business climate rankings, including ALEC's Rich States, Poor States. The website is a project of Peter Fisher of the Iowa Policy Project.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">red states more generous</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/25-most-charitable-states-america</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">states with the biggest weight problems are:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mississippi</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Louisiana</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">West Virginia</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tennessee</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">South Carolina</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Arkansas</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kentucky</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Alabama</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Oklahoma</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">North Dakota</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The states with the least weight problems are:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Minnesota</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Oregon</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Vermont</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Connecticut</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Montana</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Utah</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Massachusetts</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">New Jersey</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Colorado</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hawaii</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/09/opinion/despair-american-style.html?_r=0</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;been a lot of comment, and rightly so, over a new paper by the economists Angus Deaton (who just won a Nobel) and Anne Case, showing that mortality among middle-aged white Americans has been rising since 1999. This deterioration took place while death rates were falling steadily both in other countries and among other groups in our own nation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Paul Krugman</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even more striking are the proximate causes of rising mortality. Basically, white Americans are, in increasing numbers, killing themselves, directly or indirectly. Suicide is way up, and so are deaths from drug poisoning and the chronic liver disease that excessive drinking can cause. We’ve seen this kind of thing in other times and places – for example, in the plunging life expectancy that afflicted Russia after the fall of Communism. But it’s a shock to see it, even in an attenuated form, in America.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yet the Deaton-Case findings fit into a well-established pattern. There have been a number of studies showing that life expectancy for less-educated whites is falling across much of the nation. Rising suicides and overuse of opioids are known problems. And while popular culture may focus more on meth than on prescription painkillers or good old alcohol, it’s not really news that there’s a drug problem in the heartland.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But what’s causing this epidemic of self-destructive behavior?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If you believe the usual suspects on the right, it’s all the fault of liberals. Generous social programs, they insist, have created a culture of dependency and despair, while secular humanists have undermined traditional values. But (surprise!) this view is very much at odds with the evidence.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For one thing, rising mortality is a uniquely American phenomenon – yet America has both a much weaker welfare state and a much stronger role for traditional religion and values than any other advanced country. Sweden gives its poor far more aid than we do, and a majority of Swedish children are now born out of wedlock, yet Sweden’s middle-aged mortality rate is only half of white America’s.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You see a somewhat similar pattern across regions within the United States. Life expectancy is high and rising in the Northeast and California, where social benefits are highest and traditional values weakest. Meanwhile, low and stagnant or declining life expectancy is concentrated in the Bible Belt.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">----</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.thebigsort.com/maps.php</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.globalpossibilities.org/6-reasons-why-green-funders-need-to-get-off-the-fence/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By David Roberts GRIST</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I was recently asked to give a short presentation on the subject of political polarization to a group of professional greenies. I took down some notes to get my thoughts in order, and figured I might as well publish them. This covers a lot of the same ground as an earlier post; think of it as the tl;dr version of that post, or maybe an outline for a book someone other than me should write.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">—</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the U.S., environmental philanthropy has been failing for decades. There have been plenty of small-scale victories and successful campaigns, but the big picture (on climate change, species and habitat loss, etc.) remains grim. Political polarization can help explain why.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1. Political polarization is the new normal in America.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The U.S. has become steadily more politically polarized for decades. At this point, with rare exceptions, the rightmost elected Dem is to the left of the leftmost elected Republican.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The trend is being driven by deep demographic and economic forces that are unlikely to reverse themselves.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It is not just a phenomenon among national politicians; Americans are sorting themselves geographically into ideological enclaves, with specialized media sources to reinforce their tribal identities.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Republicans dominate rural and exurban areas while most elements of the Dem coalition — young people, minorities, single mothers, LGBT people, service workers, artists, cosmopolitans, and academics — cluster in urban areas and inner-ring suburbs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2. The polarization is not symmetrical.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The right has grown increasingly homogenous — ideologically, demographically, geographically — and more extreme in both outlook and tactics. At this point, Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein write, “the GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The left is less a coherent ideological force than a collection of disparate interests; as such, it is inherently more difficult to organize and turn out on Election Day (especially in midterms). Its elements fight for their priorities but those priorities are rarely traced back to a shared core philosophy. There is little to no sense of the left as a cohesive political and ideological entity in the U.S.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3. One way the right gained cohesion and power is through philanthropy, or more broadly, patient funding.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the ’70s, conservatism was in tatters and liberalism ascendent. (When the GOP took the Senate in 1981, it was the first time they’d controlled either house of Congress since 1953.) Wealthy conservatives like Paul Weyrich waged a long campaign to create an alternative infrastructure, including foundations, think tanks, legal groups, college recruiting groups, and media.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These institutions absorbed young people, supported them, trained them, schooled them, and released them into the wild to become lawyers, lobbyists, and elected officials.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At this point, that infrastructure is in place and ready to mobilize in response to threats as they arise. It doesn’t have to start from scratch or develop new messages.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4. Environmentalism has been badly hurt by polarization.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Professional environmentalism and green philanthropy have always been self-consciously nonpartisan/bipartisan. The key environmental policy wins of the post-war era have passed with bipartisan support, often under Republican presidents.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After the popular grassroots surge that helped pass the Clean Water Act and key Clean Air Act amendments in the ’70s, environmentalism became a mostly Beltway-based affair conducted among lawyers, lobbyists, and regulators, building on those laws. It relied on bipartisanship (especially on friendly Northeast Republicans) for its status and viability.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Today, all friendly Northeast Republicans have been drummed out of the party, many via primaries from the right. With the loss of Republican validators, environmentalism has lost its hallowed bipartisan status among U.S. elites. Inside the Democratic coalition, it has come to be seen as a left interest group, a risk to key Dem legislators from coal and oil states. Environmentalism now finds itself with no Republican support and no support from 20 percent (give or take) of Dem legislators; that is a political coalition insufficient to overcome the many barriers to action in the U.S. political system.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">5. In a polarized environment, team identity now almost entirely trumps “issues.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Professional environmentalism’s instinctive response to polarization has been to try to win back conservative validators by celebrating market mechanisms, promising green jobs, invoking “creation care,” and framing green in terms of national security and energy independence. All such attempts have failed to win back substantial conservative support.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Environmentalists tend to see environmental degradation as an “issue,” a practical problem with commonsense solutions that can unite people of all ideological stripes. But it turns out people do not vote on issues; they vote with their cultural team. The conservative team has successfully defined support from Democrats as the sine qua non of bad policy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thus, even benign issues like energy efficiency, which previously drew support from both sides of the aisle, now die in Congress.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">6. The alternative to wooing back Republicans is taking over the Democratic Party the way Tea Partiers took over the GOP, which will require the same patient, long-term funding of infrastructure.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Like it or not, the basic premises underlying solutions to environmental problems — namely, collective action, using government for good — are now contested ideological assumptions that require defense.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We need a generation of young people who see the principles of sustainability as core to their politics and are willing to punish politicians who disagree.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Environmental and climate funders should concentrate on making grants with longer time frames (five or even 10 years), fewer hoops to jump through, and fewer strings attached, to help build up the kinds of intellectual and advocacy institutions that defend fairness, the possibility of good government, and sustainability. That means think tanks, campus groups, legal groups, and media (ahem).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It also means accepting that anyone who wants environmental or energy reform that would reduce pollution and improve public health is, de facto, on a side — namely, the left. The American right has become too constricted to fit green in. The left is all that’s left, so for environmental solutions to happen, the left must win (see: California).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This can mean a variety of different things to different funders — maybe chipping in to the Democracy Alliance, or the Center for American Progress, or groups seeking collective impact (drawing disparate groups together for more cumulative force). But everyone on the left — and greens are on the left now — needs to think about how to make liberalism, including sustainability, a more vital force in American life. Short-term campaigns will never accomplish that.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Inert and Pathetic Federal Government Incapable of Transitioning to Renewable Economy</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Steven Cohen | August 5, 2014&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">My Columbia University colleagues Bill Eimicke and Alison Miller recently joined me in authoring a new book entitled Sustainability Policy: Hastening the Transition to A Cleaner Economy. If all goes well, Jossey-Bass publishers will release the book in early 2015. Our work focuses on how American government at the federal, state and local levels can work with the private sector to speed up what I see as the inevitable transition to a renewable economy. While there is a lot of action at the state and local level to promote sustainability, the federal government remains inert and pathetic. At the federal level, we see an ossified executive branch that cannot build a website or manage health care for veterans, a legislative branch that has forgotten how to compromise and legislate, and a Supreme Court willing to equate money with political speech.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There are several trends in American politics that lead away from democracy, moderate demands for change and inhibit building a federal government capable of working with the private sector to bring about a sustainable economy. These include unlimited money in politics, gerrymandered congressional districts and the replacement of fact-checked media with the fact-challenged media environment we now experience.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We are starting to see the long-term impact of the Supreme Court’s decision to considerpolitical cash donations a protected form of speech. This has magnified the impact of money in politics. In turn, this puts emerging high-tech, but capital-needy, companies at a disadvantage in the competition with old, capital-rich firms attempting to influence rules governing production, finance and taxation. The increased role of money in politics tilts the economy away from creative and sustainability-oriented companies toward old-line and extractive industries such as the fossil fuel business. While the old businesses will eventually give way to the new, the enhanced impact of money in politics will slow down the process.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The need for money also stimulates more moderate politicians on both the left and the right to move away from the political center—where deal making is possible—to the extremes. They need to do this to “activate the base” and win primary challenges. Money is only one of the issues here. National political groups gain media attention and attract money when they articulate extreme positions. And, as now former Rep. Eric Cantor can tell you, turnout in primaries is quite low and unpredictable, and so money is only one part of the equation. The other part is the fact-free media. Political communication has always had a strong dose of propaganda—it goes with the territory—but the weird, endless onslaught of misleading political ads and partisan commentary we see today is relentless and unavoidable. Character assassination, misrepresentation of positions and deception is now the norm as political consultants urge their candidates to “define the opposition before they define you.” Normal, rational people are avoiding electoral politics as never before.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It is true that, overall, Democrats win more votes in congressional elections than Republicans, but that Republicans these days are winning more seats. Gerrymandering is part of the problem, but as Sean Trende wrote in his incisive analysis in Real Clear Politics:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One of the most striking aspects of the 2012 elections is that Republicans won their third-largest House majority since the late 1920s while losing the popular vote. Pundits have largely coalesced around a single explanation for this: GOP control of redistricting. There’s no doubt that the party maximized its advantage by controlling redistricting in a majority of House districts, but that wasn’t really the culprit. The Democrats’ minority status has more to do with their “new coalition,” which might be good for winning presidential elections but is ill-suited for controlling the House....</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As Trende observed, the Democratic political coalition “has become geographically narrow in the past decade, heavily concentrated among urban liberals and minorities who live in densely populated cities or are placed into minority-majority districts under interpretations of the Voting Rights Act that many minority groups pressed for in the 1980s and 1990s.” This concentration helps win some state-wide races and national electoral votes, but means that Democrats lose a lot of close races for the House. When Democrats do manage to win in the House, they often win by larger margins than Republicans do, which helps account for their national popular vote majority. Gerrymandering is part of the problem faced by the Democrats, but the other part is that, like the Republicans, they too are less inclined to appeal to those outside of their coalition. Democrats may not be as extreme as Republicans, but they are also less interested in compromise and consensus building than they used to be.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When we look at American politics we need to understand that our legislative branches represent places (districts and states) as well as people. The U.S. is a representative democracy yet by design is far from a pure democracy. Our constitution is designed to facilitate continuity and the translation of economic power to political power, but it is also designed to permit change when absolutely needed. In the past, dramatic change has taken place when the stability of the political system was threatened by the absence of change. These changes took place when the political center accepted them: the reforms of the progressive era, the economic policies of the New Deal, the changes brought about by LBJ’s Great Society. Typically, agents of change convince moderates to accept some part of their view. The exception that proved the rule was our Civil War.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the past, the geographic orientation of our political system has led to moderate politics. In the U.S. system, an extreme party receiving 20 percent of the votes in every congressional district would send no one to Congress. Therefore, the political dynamic pushed candidates to the center where they build the largest coalitions generating pluralities or majorities. The growing presence of moderate independent voters continues that trend in general elections. But the growing importance of low-turnout primary elections has driven candidates further to the extremes. It is hard to believe that Eric Cantor was too moderate for the Republican base—but he was. The Tea Party has less than 20 percent of the national vote, but they have managed to skillfully work the seams of the political and media system to dominate the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. If the Occupy movement had been less politically pure they might have done the same thing on the left.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In our new book, my co-authors and I provide examples of regulations, subsidies, tax policies and government programs that could modernize the economy and stimulate the private behaviors that will be needed if we are to move away from a throw-away economy. The climateproblem and the need to decarbonize our energy system is the most visible problem we now face, but it is far from our only challenge. As the people boiling their water yesterday in Ohiocould tell you, we need to detoxify the production and consumption of goods and services. We need to protect the web of life in the ecosystems that feeds us. We need to learn how to manage the economic production that enables our life styles without destroying the planet from which we derive all of our material resources.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This transition is well underway in Europe and has begun at the state and local level here in the U.S. At the federal level we have an executive branch that is pursuing a meaningless “all of the above energy strategy,” and a legislative branch that does nothing. Perhaps it would be best if they acknowledge the reality of the situation and extend their August recess into the fall.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We need a federal government willing to invest in infrastructure like smart grids and mass transit, and provide predictable tax incentives for renewable energy. We need to modernize our environmental laws to deal with contemporary technology. There have been no major federal environmental laws enacted in the U.S. since 1990. We need to fund the basic science that will lead to the breakthrough technologies that can maintain economic growth without destroying our crowded planet.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To do all of this we need a functional federal government. We need a political process capable of rewarding rather than punishing compromise and moderation. The extremists on the right are happy with gridlock, because their goal is an inactive government. Extremists on both sides make their living off of demonizing people who do not share their views; it’s just good for business. The vast and generally apolitical moderate center simply wants to nurture their family, friends, community and planet. They are poorly served by a shrill, dysfunctional national government that is incapable of enacting the policies and programs we need to make the transition to a sustainable, renewable economy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You Might Also Like</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">LeBron James, Place and the Search for Sustainable Communities</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">City Doubles Bike Sharing Program As Urban Sustainability Initiatives Thrive</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Realities of Shifting to a Sustainable Economy</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://ecowatch.com/2014/08/05/fed-government-incapable-transition-to-renewable-economy/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These 9 Maps Should Absolutely Outrage Southerners</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Huffington Post&nbsp; |&nbsp; By Emily Cohn&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Posted: 03/06/2014 8:00 am EST&nbsp; |&nbsp; Updated: 03/07/2014 3:59 pm EST</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Look, there are lots of things to love about the South. It's clean and quiet. There's delicious food, good people and often amazing weather. But that's exactly why it makes us so sad to think about all the ways in which the region is struggling today.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">First off, poverty rates are a lot higher in the South.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">poverty map</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Source: USDA</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In fact, as many as one in four Southern kids lives in poverty, compared to the national average of one in five.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the map above, red shading indicates a poverty rates between 17.9 and 22.8 percent. Orange indicates 15.9 to 17.8 percent; light orange, 12.2-15.8 percent; pale yellow, 9 to 12.1 percent. As you can see, there's a lot of high-poverty red in the South.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And minimum wages are much lower.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">minimum wage</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">key</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Source: Department Of Labor</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Virtually no Southern states, with the exception of Florida, have a minimum wage higher than the federal floor of $7.25 an hour. Many Southern states do have relatively low living costs. But they are not dramatically lower than costs of living in other states, such as Ohio and Missouri, that have set minimum wages at least slightly higher than the national limit. The Southern states are doing the absolute minimum for their poorest citizens by keeping the minimum wage at the lowest levels possible.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And people living in the South are a lot less likely to move up the economic ladder.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">mobility</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Source: Equality Of Opportunity Project</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If you want to achieve the American Dream, don't move to the South. That's because states in the South have extremely low levels of economic mobility. In the map above, pale yellow represents places with higher mobility, while red indicates low mobility.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Many living in poverty in the South are being denied access to affordable health care.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">map 2</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Source: Urban Institute</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">States that didn't choose to expand Medicaid under Obamacare are highlighted in lighter gray.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...which is costing these states a ton of money.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">medicaid</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Source: The Huffington Post</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This map shows how much money the 19 states that rejected Medicaid expansion will lose by 2022 as a result of doing so (assuming all other states participate).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is particularly troubling because the South has several health crises on its hands. Like obesity.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">obesity</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Source: CDC</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Obesity rates are too high across the U.S. But they're particularly high in the South.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Southern states also have a higher percentage of cigarette smokers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">smokers</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Source: The Huffington Post</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Most Southern states have a higher percentage of smokers than anywhere else in the country. Incidentally, most Southern states have relatively low taxes on cigarettes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And a much higher rate of teen births.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">teen births</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Source: Zara Matheson + Atlantic Cities</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The map plots birth rates among women ages 15 to 19. In states shaded dark blue, there are more than 50 births per 1,000 teenage women.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Perhaps all this is why some Southern states are among the least happy states in the country.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">happy map</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Source: Gallup</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That's according to Gallup's recent "State of American Well-Being" report, which surveyed thousands of Americans and ranked states based on an average of six measures: "life evaluation," emotional health, physical health, healthy behaviors, work environment and basic access to things like food, water and shelter.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">two americas:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://vimeo.com/40629141&nbsp; doc</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">trying to find maddow charts show dot spread over time on legislators</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">many chart, // unemplyment and polar incl</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://voteview.com/blog/?paged=2</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">---</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mGr8FQNs0-E/T8EvGrxIzNI/AAAAAAAABb8/Jml_QHPqqIw/s1600/political+orientation+by+party+over+time.gif</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">==</font></div></div>