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RFK Jr. Considering Dropping Out of Race and Endorsing Trump

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2024 //
41

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to amaze. He is a lawyer; he worked for years for environmental protection. Then he became involved in opposing vaccines and spread the claim that vaccines cause autism. Most members of his illustrious family have publicly opposed him as a candidate.

He found a very wealthy running mate, Nicole Shanahan, the ex-wife of Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google. She poured millions into the campaign.

The Kennedy-Shanahan ticket has had trouble getting onto the ballot in every state. So far, they have succeeded in 19 states. Their ticket has declined in the polls, and it’s running short of money.

Kennedy has approached both of the major candidates about joining forces with them. Trump was enthusiastic and even hinted that there might be an important post for him, something like a major Cabinet post (Health and Human Services, perhaps?). Imagine RFK Jr. with the power to recall or ban vaccines.

He also tried to meet with Democratic leaders, but they rebuffed him. After Biden’s disastrous June debate performance, he offered to take Biden’s place at the top of the ticket. When Kamala became the consensus candidate, he tried to meet with her, but she was not interested.

It turns out that RFK Jr. draws more votes away from Trump than from Harris. The anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, and other conspiracy theorists like him.

The New York Times reported that Shanahan, RFK Jr.’s running mate, was interviewed in a podcast, where she mentioned that they were thinking of joining forces with Trump. She expressed bitterness towards the Democrats and blames them for undermining the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket. She said that one of the options for the future is forming a third party.

Hmmm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. working on behalf of Donald Trump? Trump is a guy who doesn’t believe in climate change. He says it’s a hoax. Will RFK Jr. abandon his many years as an environmentalist to get a shot at political power? Shameful.

Categories Democrats, Elections, Environment, Ethics, Extremism, Health, Science, Trump

Dean Baker: The Little-Known Biden-Harris Success Story

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2024 //
6

Dean Baker published a terrific article in The New Republic, called “The Biggest Success Story the Country Doesn’t Know About.” Baker is a  macroeconomist who co-founded the Center for Economic and Policy Research(CEPR) with Mark Weisbrot.

He wrote:

Over the last few weeks, an extraordinary series of events has altered the course of an election that previously seemed to have few surprises in store. Eight days after Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt, President Joe Biden announced his historic decision to withdraw from the presidential race and cast his support for Vice President Kamala Harris to run in his stead. It will be some time before we know all the political ramifications of these events, but whatever they may be, they will not change the past.

What can the past tell us about what’s to come? Perhaps the most critical element of a candidate’s platform is their approach to the economy. In assessing Harris as a presidential candidate, people will want to look at the economic track record of the Biden-Harris administration. As always, the president takes the lead role in setting the economic course for the administration, but throughout Biden’s term in office, Harris was standing alongside him. The Republicans will surely blame her for everything that went wrong and many things that didn’t. On the other hand, Harris can take credit for what went right, and there is much here to boast about. Indeed, she can (and should) run on the outstanding—and criminally underappreciated—economic record of the Biden administration.

Under Biden, the United States made a remarkable recovery from the pandemic recession. We have seenthe longest run of below 4.0 percent unemployment in more than 70 years, even surpassing the long stretch during the 1960s boom. This period of low unemployment has led to rapid real wage growth at the lower end of the wage distribution, reversing much of the rise in wage inequality we have seen in the last four decades. It has been especially beneficial to the most disadvantaged groups in the labor market.

The burst of inflation that accompanied this growth was mostly an outcome of the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine. All other wealthy countries saw comparable rises in inflation. As of summer 2024, the rate of inflation in the United States has fallen back almost to the Fed’s 2.0 percent target. Meanwhile, our growth has far surpassed that of our peers.

Furthermore, the Biden administration really does deserve credit for this extraordinary boom. Much of what happens under a president’s watch is beyond their control. However, the economic turnaround following the pandemic can be directly traced to Biden’s recovery package, along with his infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, all of which have sustained growtheven as the impact of the initial recovery package faded. While the CARES Act, pushed through when Trump was in office, provided essential support during the shutdown period, it was not sufficient to push through the recovery.

Finally, the negative assessment that voters routinely give the Biden administration on the economy seems more based on what they hear from the media or elsewhere. They generally rate their own financial situation positively and say that the economy in their city or state is doing well. It is only the national economy, of which they have no direct knowledge, that they rate poorly.

Let the Good Times Roll!

Before going through what is positive about the Biden economy, I’ll just state the obvious. Tens of millions of people are struggling to get by, or not getting by at all. This is a horrible situation, which we should be trying to change every way we can. However, this has always been the case. We have a badly underdeveloped system of social supports, so that people cannot count on getting the food, health care, and shelter they need.

It’s also the case that the spurt of inflation in 2021 and 2022 was a shock after a long period of low inflation. People found themselves paying considerably more for food, gas, shelter, and other essentials, and in many cases their pay did not keep up, especially at the time these prices were soaring.

But the Biden administration has taken important steps to directly improve the situation for low- and moderate-income people, notably by making the subsidies in the exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, more generous and expanding the Child Tax Credit, or CTC. He increased the benefitsin the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, by 21 percent. Unfortunately, the expansion of the CTC, which was included in the initial recovery package, was only temporary. It expired at the end of 2021, and Biden has been unable to get the support needed in Congress to extend it.

While we should always recognize the enormous work left to be done, we need as well to acknowledge when we are making progress, and we have made an enormous amount of progress in improving living standards during Biden’s presidency. Also, the suffering of tens of millions of people at the lower end of the income distribution can’t possibly be the explanation for negative views of the economy. People at the bottom were suffering at least as much in 2019, when most people gave the economy high marks.

Categories Biden, Democracy, Economy, Elections, Environment, Higher Education

The New Yorker: The Sad Story of RFK Jr.’s Life

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2024 //
12

Every once in a while, a story appears that is so riveting that you can’t put it down. Such a story is Clare Malone’s analysis of what makes Bobby Kennedy Jr. tick. It appears in The New Yorker, where Malone is a staff writer. Malone has interviewed him and numerous people who knew him at different points in his life. What emerges is a portrait of a man who is charismatic and charming but deeply troubled.

He is a man of many addictions. He was addicted to drugs for many years; she says he first tried heroin when he was 15, and he was deeply into drugs when he was a student at Harvard.

He is addicted to sex. Women flocked to him, and he bedded them as often as he could. He married three times, and she writes that he was a serial philanderer. He left his first wife for his second wife, who was six months pregnant when they married. He left her for his third wife and sued for custody of their children. The second wife committed suicide.

He is addicted, as she shows, to attention. A lawyer, he became involved in environmental activism, where he carved out a new identity and achieved great success litigating against major corporations. Then he became engaged in anti-vaccine activism, after a mother from Minnesota convinced him in 2003 that her son’s autism was caused by vaccines he received when he was only four months old.

Kennedy, she shows, was always susceptible to conspiracy theories. He believes the CIA was involved in the murders of his uncle and father. He easily saw a conspiracy to hide the evidence behind vaccines and autism. He became a leading opponent of vaccines.

Malone tells the story of Kennedy and the body of a black bear cub, which he found on the road in the Adirondacks in 2014. He put the dead animal in the trunk of his car and staged a photo of himself with his hand in the mouth of the dead animal.

That year, Kennedy and his wife moved to Los Angeles, where he became active with an anti-vaccine group called World Mercury Project, founded by a vaccine skeptic, Eric Gladen. The group was later named Children’s Health Defense.

At an event in Sacramento to promote a film by Gladen, “Trace Amounts,” Kennedy told a crowd that, when children receive vaccines, “that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone. This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”

Following a measles outbreak in 2019, his older brother and sister wrote an article denouncing Robert’s anti-vaccine advocacy. He was undeterred. Children’s Health Defense was one of the nation’s leading purveyors of vaccine skepticism.

With the arrival of covid, Kennedy’s reach exploded. He churned out books: “The Real Anthony Fauci,” “Vax-UnVax: Let the Science Speak,” and “A Letter to Liberals: Censorship and Covid.” In the summer of 2021, as covid vaccines were rolling out, Children’s Health Defense promoted its film “Medical Racism: The New Apartheid,” which was seemingly aimed at Black Americans. During the early weeks of Kennedy’s Presidential campaign, the New York Post published a video in which Kennedy said that covid was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” Researchers in China, Russia, and the U.S., he went on, are developing “ethnic bioweapons” to “target people by race.” (Kennedy said that his remarks were taken out of context.)

After Kennedy decided to run for president as a spoiler, Kennedy’s former colleagues in the environmental movement were appalled. They were afraid that he would help Trump win, the candidate whose record on the environment was a disaster. He had turned from anti-corporate to anti-government.

After the assassination attempt on Trump, Kennedy praised Trump for his courage. Trump called Kennedy and let him know that there would be a place for him in the next Trump administration. Kennedy appeared at the Republican National Convention.

In a recent text exchange, Kennedy told one person that Trump was “a terrible human being. The worse president ever and barely human. He is probably a sociopath.” But, Kennedy went on, Biden was “more dangerous to the Republic and the planet.”

Kennedy’s press secretary told Malone that Trump wanted Kennedy to drop out of the race because he was hurting Trump more than Biden. Kennedy was tempted by the role as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

The article is engrossing. At the end, I felt that Kennedy was a man of intellect and passion who squandered his talents. Too much money, too much privilege, too much tragedy, too consumed by his addictions. And now, championing a cause that may lead to the deaths of countless children.

Alexandra Petri, the Washington Post’s great humorist, wrote about the bear cub incident from the perspective of Kennedy’s brain worm:

Hello again. I had been hoping to continue my peaceful existence, far from the news cycle. But I have heard my name invoked and I simply must set the record straight. I would not rest well knowing that people thought I was implicated in the episode that recently came to light involving Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s disposal of a dead bear cub. That was all my host. I, the brain worm that died inside his skull in 2010, had no part in it.

“Isn’t picking up a dead bear cub and bringing it along in your car, ‘Weekend at Bearnie’s’-style, for an afternoon of outdoor activity and dinner at Peter Luger Steak House, then ditching it in Central Park along with a bicycle in an attempt to implicate cyclists in its demise the kind of suggestion that a brain worm would make?” First of all, rude. Second of all, no. What self-respecting parasite would say, “Yes, let us spend more time with meat that has been improperly handled? I want maximum competition for my spot within my host’s brain!” There is no logic in it.

Worse yet, there is an image circulating of my erstwhile host posing with the dead bear cub that he drove around for that memorable afternoon in 2014; he suggests that perhaps taking this photo was when he picked up his brain worm. This is slander, and my legal team will be in contact with his. I died in 2010 and was not involved in the bear incident.

Candidly, no part of the story makes any sense to me. I have watched the video in which my former host attempts to explain the situation to Roseanne Barr, whose presence is, improbably, the most normal part of the video. My host’s explanation, as far as I can understand it, is that he was on his way to do falconry (no, this is still not the strangest part of the story! If I lose you now you are lost forever), saw an unknown driver hit a bear and then he put the dead cub in his van because he was going to eat the meat.

I had thought that we parted on bad terms and he would not want a repeat brain-worm visitor, but the decision to eat roadkill bear meat, especially roadkill bear meat that had sat in his car all day while he did falconry, leads me to wonder if perhaps he missed me, or if I had left an emptiness in him that he wished to fill with another guest. But I can only speculate.

He had such a good day of falconry that he forgot all about the bear carcass in his van. (I am just a simple brain worm. Is this a normal sentence that human beings say all the time?) And then he had to go to dinner at a famous steakhouse and then realized he had to go to the airport and couldn’t just leave the bear carcass in his car at the airport. The part about not leaving a bear carcass in your car at an airport makes sense to me, once you have reached the point where you have a bear carcass in your car. It is that first part, though, that continues to baffle me.

And then his friends, who had been drinking (when you are a human being and your drunk friends all say, “This sounds like a good idea!” is this how you know that you have hold of a good idea?) signed off on his plan for disposing of the bear, which was as follows: There had been a lot of bike accidents, and he had an old bike in his car that someone had asked him to get rid of (okay!), so why not drive the bear to Central Park and stage the bike to make it appear that the bear had perished in one such accident? Just as a treat for the people who would find the bear. (Is this what you would consider a treat? I don’t know! I am just a brain worm, asking questions. I do not have a brain, except a little bit of it which I enjoyed consuming very much.)

Anyway, I had no part in any of this. And for the record, the talks about taking a Cabinet position in a second Trump administration weren’t my idea, either.

Categories Character, Elections, Environment, Health, History, Science

Florida: Climate Change Kills Off Last of a Rare Species of Tree

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2024 //
15

The state of Florida—Ron DeSantis and his dumdum legislature—has decided that climate change doesn’t exist, but climate change doesn’t care. The Miami Herald reported that the last of a rare species in the Florida Keys has died—because of rising seas. The children of Florida won’t understand any of this because the State Department of Education will not buy textbooks that explain climate change. They think—I suppose—that if you don’t learn about it, it will go away.

Key Largo has a new, disturbing and first-of-its-kind graveyard. There are no headstones, no burial markers, no names, no bodies. 

It’s the last place an incredibly rare species of tree called the Key Largo tree cactus was seen alive, back in 2023. The killer? All the clues point to climate change. 

At least, that’s what a newly published paper suggests. Scientists have been watching this particular stand of cacti — known for their height (up to 20 feet) and brown hairlike puffball they grow around their flowers — since the 1990s.

At the time, researchers determined that a two-acre patch in John Pennekamp State Park was the only population in the U.S. of Pilosocereus millspaughii, an offshoot from the larger Caribbean population of the cactus. But as of last year, the very last of the bunch is gone. And researchers believe sea level rise was the main culprit — rising tides and groundwater turning the soil too salty for the plant to survive. It appears this local extinction (also known as extirpation) could be the first climate-driven demise of a species in the United States.

“As far as we know, from any published research we can find, this is the first case we can find,” same James Lange, lead botanist with Fairchild Tropical Botanical Gardens and co-author of the study, which was published Tuesday in the Journal of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas. “It was tragic to see as we monitored this over the years,” he said. “It was a big, old beautiful plant, one of the things that makes the Keys unique. And we’ve lost it.”

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/environment/climate-change/article289915489.html#storylink=cpy

Categories DeSantis, Environment, Florida, Stupid

Mercedes Schneider: Politicking for Jesus

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2024 //
26

Mercedes Schneider read Project 2025 and concluded that its unifying goal is to turn the American people into white evangelical Christians. This “conservative” vision of a different America doesn’t give much thought to those who are neither white nor evangelical not Christian.

She writes in summary:

Free the churches, imprison the librarians.

Roberts was in the news for stating that an “ongoing American Revolution” will “remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” According to The Hill, that comment caused “blowback” for Roberts and the Heritage Foundation.

None of Jesus’ ministry involved any political agenda, much less the government-driven denigration of “other” or the imposing of His will on any human being.

Yet here we are.

It behooves every literate American to read this extremist document before casting a vote in November.

Categories Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Citizenship, Civil Rights, Democracy, Disruption, Economics, Elections, Environment, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Gender, Librarians, Privatization, Propaganda, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Trump

Robert Hubbell: Joe Biden Is Running to Protect Democracy Against Tyranny

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2024 //
137

Robert Hubbell writes a blog about the travails of politics. I have excerpted a small portion of his post. Please open the link to read in full.

Hubbell writes:

The 2024 election is not merely a choice between Biden and Trump. It is a choice between democracy and tyranny, liberty and subjugation, dignity and debasement, safety and mayhem, global stability and chaos, climate crisis mitigation or acceleration, retirement security and insecurity, justice and vengeance, science and ignorance, decency and depravity. If we cannot convince voters that the choice comes down to those polar opposites, it does not matter who the candidate is.

I support Joe Biden because he is a great president, a good and decent man, and a skilled politician who achieved great things with bare majorities in the House and Senate. His performance in the debate does not define him. I believe Joe Biden is the best candidate to defeat Trump. If he is forced out by a media-driven frenzy and a cabal of unnamed insiders and pundits, it will be the greatest miscalculation and tragedy in American politics in a century.

I am not giving up and I won’t be pressured into apologizing for Joe Biden’s imperfections in a world where every politician is imperfect. Shadowboxing with unnamed party insiders and pundits is a waste of time. We have real work to do. Let’s get to it!

Categories Accountability, Biden, Character, Elections, Environment, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Republicans Continue Efforts to Cripple Federal Government

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2024 //
31

Heather Cox Richardson wrote today about two concurrent stories: on one hand, Democrats are locked in an internecine battle about their candidate; on the other, the Trump-dominated Supreme Court is shredding the balance of powers and crippling the administrative authority of the federal government.

She writes:

In this morning’s Talking Points Memo, David Kurtz observed that “much of political journalism is divorced from policy and the substance of politics.” It’s all about a horse race, he wrote, while complex questions, competing public interests, and the history of an issue get distilled to “whether it’s good or bad politically.”

Today, he noted, that horse-race coverage means that “[a]n election about whether the United States will continue its two and half century long experiment in representative democracy, where a convicted felon is running to return to the office he tried to seize through extralegal means, where the specter of a new form of fascism looms on the horizon is suddenly consumed by a political death watch for the only person at present standing between democracy and another Trump term in the White House.”

Yesterday, President Joe Biden tried to quell that political death watch by sending a letter to congressional Democrats stating that “despite all the speculation in the press and elsewhere, I am firmly committed to staying in this race, to running this race to the end, and to beating Donald Trump.” He noted that 14 million voters in the Democratic primary chose him, rather than a challenger, adding, “It was their decision to make. Not the press, not the pundits, not the big donors, not any selected group of individuals, no matter how well intentioned…. How can we stand for democracy in our nation if we ignore it in our own party?” 

In an apparent attempt to get beyond the horse-race politics Kurtz identified and to make clear the substance of this election, Biden explained: “We have an historic record of success to run on.” He cited his administration’s creation of more than 15 million jobs, leading to historic unemployment lows; revitalization of American manufacturing; expansion of affordable health care; rebuilding the country’s infrastructure; lowering the cost of prescription drugs; providing student debt relief; and making a historic investment in combating climate change.

That vision, Biden wrote, “soundly beats” that of Trump and the MAGA Republicans, who are “siding with the wealthy and big corporations,” while the Democrats are “siding with the working people of America.” Trump and his people want another $5 trillion in tax cuts for the rich, he noted, and they plan to cut Social Security and Medicare, as well as end the ability of the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies to bring drug prices into line with prices in other countries. “We are the ones lowering costs for families,” he wrote, “from health care to prescription drugs to student debt to housing. We are the ones protecting Social Security and Medicare. Everything they’re proposing raises costs for most Americans—except their tax cuts which will go to the rich.” 

He went on to note that the Democrats are “protecting the freedoms of Americans,” while Trump’s people are “taking them away.” He pointed to the right-wing attacks on abortion rights, IVF, contraception, and gay marriage. Biden reiterated that he will sign a law making Roe v. Wade the law of the land if the nation elects a Democratic House and Senate. Finally, he pointed out that Democrats are protecting the rule of law and democracy, while Trump is actively working to destroy both. Trump, he wrote, has proven himself “unfit ever to hold the office of President.” “My fellow Democrats,” Biden wrote, “we have the record, the vision, and the fundamental commitment to America’s freedoms and our Democracy to win.” 

Hours later, the New York Times joined the tabloid New York Post in noting that visitor logs showed that Dr. Kevin Cannard, an expert on Parkinson’s disease, visited the White House eight times between July 2023 and March 2024. After pressing White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre for information beyond her statements that Biden is not being, and has not been, treated for Parkinson’s and that he sees a neurologist as part of his annual physical exams, a CBS News White House reporter accused Jean-Pierre of deliberately withholding information. Jean-Pierre pointed out that “personal attacks” are not appropriate from the press corps and that the press team does its best to give the information they have. She said she took offense at the reporter’s tone. 

Last night, White House physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor sent to Jean-Pierre a letter clarifying that the White House Medical Unit serves thousands of patients, many of whom are military personnel with neurological issues related to their service. Cannard was one of the team of specialists that annually examine the president. O’Connor’s office released the results of that examination in a letter dated February 28, he pointed out. It said, “An extremely detailed neurologic exam was again reassuring in that there were no findings which would be consistent with any cerebellar or other central neurological disorder, such as stroke, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s or ascending lateral sclerosis, nor are there any signs of cervical myelopathy.” The president does have “peripheral neuropathy in both feet. No motor weakness was detected. He exhibits no tremor, either at rest or with activity.”

As media attention remains focused on Biden, a Supreme Court decision from last week that upends the modern American state and another that overturns the central concept of our democracy have disappeared from public discussion. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the court overruled the longstanding legal precedent establishing that courts should defer to a government agency’s reasonable interpretation of a law. Instead, it said, judges themselves will decide on the legality of an agency’s actions. 

In Public Notice, Lisa Needham noted that right-wing judges have already blocked Biden administration rules that protect overtime pay for workers, prohibit noncompete clauses for truckers, and prohibit discrimination based on gender identity. As right-wing plaintiffs launch suits challenging rules they dislike, she notes, we should expect to see many more federal judges “deploying junk science and personal opinions to get to their preferred conclusion while ignoring the expertise of agency employees.”

Loper Bright was a slashing blow at the federal regulations that make up the framework of today’s government, but it paled in comparison to the Supreme Court’s decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States. In that stunning decision, the six right-wing justices—three of whom Trump himself appointed—declared that a president is immune from prosecution for crimes committed as part of his “official duties.” 

This astonishing decision overturned the bedrock principle of the United States of America: that no one is above the law. But to be clear, the court did not give this power to Biden. Because it is not clear what official acts are—since no one has ever before made this distinction—it claimed for itself the right to decide what illegal behaviors are official acts and which are not. Since at least one of the justices (Samuel Alito) has flown flags demonstrating support for overthrowing Biden’s government and putting Trump back into office, and the wife of another (Clarence Thomas) worked with those trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, it seems likely that their decisions will reinforce Trump’s immunity alone. 

An extraordinary effort to use the courts to set up a Trump dictatorship appears largely to have been hidden under the horse race.

And now that this scaffolding is in place, Trump’s team has begun to try to make him look more moderate than he is. On July 5, Trump claimed not to know anything about the extremist Project 2025, which calls for an authoritarian leader to impose Christian nationalism on the United States, despite the fact that his own appointees wrote it, his own political action committee advertised it as his plan, and his name appears in it 312 times. 

Agenda 47, the official Trump campaign website, has offered more information about how he will wield the absolute power he now claims. As Judd Legum pointed out today in Popular Information, a key author of Project 2025, Christian nationalist Russell Vought, has advanced a plan for killing any aspects of government his people dislike, and Trump has adopted that plan, vowing to cancel agencies or laws he dislikes by refusing to spend money Congress appropriates. This is known as “impoundment,” and Congress made it illegal in 1974 after President Richard Nixon used it to try to bend the government to his will. Trump says the 1974 Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional because it interferes with the power of the presidency. He promised to use it to “crush the Deep State.” First on the chopping block will be the Department of Education.  

The effort to make Trump sound more moderate continued yesterday, when the Republican National Committee released the party’s 2024 platform, in which it tried to fudge the issue of abortion while leaving language that supported a national abortion ban. The New York Timespublished an article reinforcing the idea that Trump is moderating, reporting: “Following Trump’s Lead, Republicans Adopt Platform That Softens Stance on Abortion.” 

In the midst of this political coverage, a key story has been largely overlooked. Not only does the stock market continue to set record highs, but also, as Jim Tankersley of the New York Timesreported, the so-called left-behind counties, distressed after the collapse of manufacturing in them, have “added jobs and new businesses at their fastest pace since Bill Clinton was president.” “That turnaround,” he notes, “has shocked experts.” More than 1,000 counties, mostly in the Southeast and Midwest, that grew at less than half the national rate in terms of both people and income from 2000 to 2016, have surged. From 2016 to 2019—mostly during Trump’s administration—those rural left-behind counties, which make up about 18% of the U.S. population, added 10,000 jobs. In 2023 alone, they added 104,000. 

Tankersley notes that Trump overwhelmingly won the support of voters in these counties, but their circumstances did not improve during his administration. Under Biden, they added jobs five times faster than they did under Trump. Still, voters there appear to continue to back Trump. 

Now that’s a story. Are they backing Trump because they care more about culture wars than their economic security? Or are they ill informed?

Meanwhile, Republicans in the House today passed the Refrigerator Freedom Act and the Stop Unaffordable Dishwasher Standards (SUDS) Act, prohibiting the Secretary of Energy from prescribing or enforcing energy efficiency standards for residential refrigerators, freezers, and dishwashers. 

After noting that the average monthly cost of operating a dishwasher is two to four dollars, and establishing that the people pushing this measure had no idea how much a dishwasher costs, Representative Katie Porter (D-CA) said: “This bill… Congress at its worst. A bunch of people who haven’t unloaded a dishwasher ever telling the American people what dishwashers they should or should not have.” 

Categories Biden, Democracy, Democrats, Disruption, Elections, Environment, Ethics, Extremism, Injustice, Republicans, Trump

Chris Hayes: What Is Project 2025? A Frightening Plan for Trump’s Next Term: LINK ADDED

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2024 //
50

It occasionally happens that I forget to add a link. I forgot to add the link for this great segment by Chris Hayes. I was embroiled in a computer glitch all day (my computer and printer are not communicating). Please watch the segment to learn what horrors Trump has in store for us.

Chris Hayes has a regular evening news program on MSNBC.

In this short video, he explains Project 2025, which spells out plans for major changes in the government and in our freedoms.

It’s a short video. Please watch.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Civil Rights, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, Privatization, Shame, Trump

Robert Reich: Project 2025 Gives Evangelicals All They Want

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2024 //
25

It’s one of the great ironies of our time that Trump—a completely irreligious man—is serving the interests of the most evangelical Christians. Ban abortion? Done. End LGBT rights? Certainly. Ban contraception? Soon. Crush unions? Soon. Eliminate any climate regulations? On the way. Defund public schools? Yes. Send public money to religious schools with no accountability? Yes.

Robert Reich describes Project 2025 and demonstrates that—no matter how much he pretends otherwise—it is Trump’s blueprint for the long-sought goals of far-right extremists.

Reich writes:

“Project 2025” is nothing short of a 900-page blueprint for guiding Donald Trump’s second term of office if he’s re-elected.

After the Heritage Foundation unveiled Project 2025 in April last year, when Trump was seeking the Republican nomination, he had no problem with it.

But now that the nation is turning its attention to the general election, Trump doesn’t want Project 2025 to draw attention. Its extremism is likely to turn off independents and moderates.

So Trump is now claiming he has “no idea who is behind” Project 2025.

This is another in a long line of Trump lies…

Trump has said he’d seek vengeance against those who have prosecuted him for his illegal acts. Project 2025 calls for the prosecution of district attorneys Trump doesn’t like, and the takeover of law enforcement in blue cities and states.

Project 2025 is, in short, the plan to implement what Donald Trump has said he wants to do if he’s re-elected.

Trump may want to distance himself from Project 2025 in order to come off less bonkers to independents and moderates, but he can’t escape it. The document embodies everything he stands for.

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Environment, Evil, Extremism, Gender, Hoax, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Trump

John Thompson: Oklahoma Hurtles Toward Environmental Disaster

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2024 //
19

John Thompson, retired teacher in Oklahoma, writes here about the environmental crisis in his state, propelled by greed.

He writes:

Oklahoma City is again in the national news. On one hand, it was ranked 16th in the nation in the U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Places to Live” in 2024-2025. On the other hand, The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health’s, (ICF) Climate Center just projected how Oklahoma City’s “temperature will change by mid-century under a moderate warming scenario.” 

From 1981 to 2010, the average annual days in Oklahoma City where heat put a strain on electric transformers was 10. This was due to “blistering daytime highs along with sultry nighttime lows, depriving electrical equipment of a chance to cool down.” By the midcentury (2036 to 2065) it is projected to reach 45 days. Also, Tulsa is expected to reach 44 days and Altus 65 days of heat waves. 

It also estimated that Phoenix, which is in the news for its current heat wave, “will endure an estimated 126 days each year with heat that reduces transformers’ performance, the analysis found. A power outage during a heat wave would kill thousands of people in the city, according to a peer-reviewed study published last year.”

Of course, the stress that heat waves dump on transformers is just an indicator of the predicted effects of a 350% increase in heat waves in Oklahoma City, and worse increases across the world. The distress imposed on infrastructure should be seen as a symptom of the devastation that humans, and other living beings will face.

The national press has also reported on possible ways that Oklahoma (and other places) could respond to global warming. In an editorial in the Tulsa World, Philip-Michael Weiner explained, “If we want to have a more stable climate in the future, we need to remove a lot of the carbon already in the air.” He adds, “Our elected representatives must not miss the chance to help Oklahoma become a global leader in carbon removal.”

Weiner explains that Oklahoma is “well-situated to become a global leader in carbon removal and reap meaningful economic benefits for our state.” He cites “Oklahoma’s geo-workers, technology, and resources, [and] vast geologic capacity, subsurface geology, needed for carbon storage.” And Weiner adds that, “Exxon Mobil Corp. estimates there will be a $4 trillion market by 2050 for capturing carbon dioxide and storing it underground.”

But that leads to another concern. Yes, given our failure to adequately tackle the proven threat of climate change, we must invest heavily in a range of efforts to decarbonize our atmosphere. And that will require major commitments from corporations, especially oil and gas companies, as well as government programs. But, we wouldn’t be facing such an existential threat if oil and gas companies, especially Exxon, had not hid their research which confirmed the findings of scientists who nearly convinced the H.W. Bush administration that carbon dioxide emissions needed to be quickly and massively cut. As the Guardian noted, their study:

Made clear that Exxon’s scientists were uncannily accurate in their projections from the 1970s onwards, predicting an upward curve of global temperatures and carbon dioxide emissions that is close to matching what actually occurred as the world heated up at a pace not seen in millions of years.

But they borrowed the tactics of the tobacco industry, which knowingly lied about the deadly dangers of their product. And then Exxon “continued its disinformation campaign for another half century.”

Yes, there has been reporting on Oklahomans seeking to apply technologies developed for fracking in order to cut greenhouses gases. But the bigger stories have focused on Oklahoma oil billionaire Harold Hamm, who pledges, “We’re going to be on oil and gas for the next hundred years,” It was Hamm who organized the “energy round table” at former President Trump’s private club where he promised “to eliminate Mr. Biden’s new climate rules intended to accelerate the nation’s transition to electric vehicles, and to push a ‘drill, baby, drill’ agenda aimed at opening up more public lands to oil and gas exploration.”

The New York Times reported that sources:

Asked not to be identified in order to discuss the private event.  Attendees included executives from ExxonMobil, EQT Corporation and the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for the oil industry.

One would think that the new predictions regarding global warming in Oklahoma City, and elsewhere, would convince the Chamber of Commerce and political leaders to immediately make de-carbonization a #1 priority. And it should be clear that the Hamm/Trump agenda – pushed by oil industry lobbyists – would devastate our planet. Somehow, we have to come together and hope businessmen will value stakeholders as well a shareholders, and place mankind over short-term corporate profits for a very few.  

By the way, as I was about to complete this post, United Nation’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said:

There is now an 80% chance that at least one of the next five years will mark the first calendar year with an average temperature that temporarily exceeds 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – up from a 66% chance last year.

As Reuters reports, “scientists warn of more extreme and irreversible impacts” if the 1.5C threshold is passed. So, “U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called for urgent action to avert ‘climate hell.”” And I would add, Oklahomans and other Americans must double down on our abilities to fight global warming. But it is too late to make a difference in saving our planet if we don’t resist Exxon, Harold Hamm, Donald Trump, and others who are promoting the economics of destruction.

Categories Billionaires, Corruption, Deregulation, Economy, Environment, Oklahoma
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