#you voted for project 25 when you voted for obama the second time and then again when voting for biden Ever. learn the facts.

[anarchistettin]

this kinda stuff is 30 years late. we've been shown what we can expect from liberals.

if this pattern were to magically stop today, we still might not have enough time to vouchsafe any kind of sane or practicable Tomorrow to live in.

if you don't understand that - if you don't see your thinking's role in bringing this horror into existence - you have to accept that you're unable to communicate to the tiny sliver of people you're currently blaming for the horrible fact of fascism.

we warned you. demanding our support now isn't just insulting or silly, it's suicidal.

if you want to work with reasonable people with the energy to build a better tomorrow, stop pretending to be smart and start asking people right next to you what they need. Get it to them.

If you can't do that, your voting practice is something perfidiously worse than irrelevant.

Voting is not something that you can boycott. Someone wins the election no matter what.

“B-but Biden-”

It doesn’t matter. I don’t like him either, but it doesn’t matter.

To everyone in the US: you, as an American and as (I hope) generally decent human beings, you have an obligation to elect the candidate who will do the least damage. And the United States, like it or not, possesses the largest proverbial stick, meaning it effects the rest of the world heavily.

You want to stop genocide? Start by voting so that genocides don’t happen here. I want you to look up Project 2025, the Republican plan for if they win, and tell me, honestly, that you think having that happen would be better than electing Biden again?

Grit your teeth, clench your fist, and vote blue.

[bustedbernie]

“Compare that to what Hillary did for Obama in 2008” didn’t more Hillary voters go to McCain than Bernie voters to Trump

1. Opinion polls are NOT evidence that 25% of Hillary supporters defected to McCain.

There are only two sources for the 25% Hillary/McCain defection number. The first is opinion polls from during the primary, which are meaningless for obvious reasons.

But if we were to take these numbers seriously (and again, don't, because they are literally useless), Bernie supporters would have no legs to stand on. In fact (although The Guardian's article put some truly insane spin on it), opinion polls from a comparable point in 2016 finds that only 7% out of 18% of respondents who were Bernie supporters said they would vote for Hillary in the general election. That's less than 39%, whereas 62% of Hillary supporters said they were willing to vote for Obama 2008 primary polls.

But again, primary opinion polls are meaningless, so let's move on.

2. There is still ZERO evidence that 25% of Hillary's primary voters voted for McCain.

The second source is a study published in Public Opinion Quarterly, titled "'Sour Grapes' or Rational Voting?", specifically this particular table: https://i.imgur.com/fiCeesG.png. The authors analysed the self-reported votes of 1,837 respondents, finding that of the 15% (~275) who reported voting for Clinton in the primary, 25% (~69) claims to then have voted for McCain in the general election.

Sounds damning? Except... it's all bullcrap. See for yourself by adding up the votes for Obama and McCain: 0.76 * 30 + 0.11 * 21 + 0.33* 49 vs 0.19 * 30 + 0.86 * 21 + 0.37 * 49 => 41.28% vs 41.89%. Of course, in our timeline, instead of losing by 0.61%, Obama became president in a 7.1% (52.9 to 45.7) landslide. Further red flags: Studies typically find only 2% of primary voters vote against their own candidate. Yet, in this table only 87% of Obama's primary voters reported voting for him in the general, and for McCain it's even lower, 84%.

So why is this apparently the worst poll since The Literary Digest called the election for President Alfred Landon in 1936? Simple: because it is the unweighted results of a panel survey.

Normally, opinion polls try to produce representative results by getting a certain number of responses from different demographics and modelling the population. If they don't get enough responses, they keep trying until they do. In contrast, with a panel survey, a fixed cohort of panel members are selected at the start and just keeps getting re-interviewed throughout the rest of the year. Inevitably, response rates drop off a cliff. Hence, it is conventional wisdom that panel surveys are good for showing trends of the self-reporting cohort, but useless as an prediction of the absolute numbers. This gets even worse when you try to get a subgroup of a subgroup, as the author were doing in creating this table. All 69 Hillary-McCain voter it found could just be from West Virginia, for all we know.

It makes zero sense to believe that the 25% number is accurate, when we know for fact that nearly every other number on that table is off by double digits.

3. In fact, exit polls say 84% of Hillary supporters voted for Obama

Thanks to the media attention PUMAs attracted, one of the questions asked in the 2008 exit polls were who the voters supported in the primary. These are the only concrete numbers we have on the Clinton-McCain defectors. And it shows that of the voters who supported Hillary during the primary, 84% voted for Obama and 15% voted for McCain.

Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/04/exit.polls/

I'll be the first to admit that wasn't ideal (ratfucking by Rush Limbaugh aside, there's clearly a fair bit of racism in play). However,

4. Only 74.3% of Bernie's primary voters voted for Hillary.

The spammers usually either ignore the Bernie defectors completely, or point out that "only" 12% voted for Trump. I mean, for starters, McCain was a way better candidate than Trump. Literally anyone is. More importantly, however, this is a lie by omission, because another 13.7% voted third party or wrote in Harambe, or stayed home altogether.

Here is a table of the results, as prepared by 538. As you can see, at least 24% of Bernie's primary voters voted against Hillary in the general election. And I'm sure you all remember this, but enough of them voted for Jill Stein to throw the election in MI, PA, and WI.

The source for these numbers is the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, which used actually confirmed voter records (as opposed to self-reported votes) of some 64,600 voters. When one of the authors, Brian Schaffner, shared the preliminary results on Twitter, he noted that the sample size of confirmed Bernie primary/general voters was 4,226. That is fifteen times larger than the "Sour Grapes" study had for Hillary voters.

TL;DR - the "25% of Hillary supporters voted for McCain" claim is projection from the far left. They don’t actually care, anyway, they’re trying to externalize their guilt/shame from putting Trump into the White House and are running from their responsibility to own up to their white-supremacist mistake by playing a game of “what about...”. If you were able to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and you didn’t, that’s on you. 

[blogaholik]

Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding

What is crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. The term crowdsourcing was coined by journalist Jeff Howe in the issue of Wired (Bannerman, 2012).

Crowdsourcing is optimistically depicted as a way of putting to use the creativity of the public for free, or for a moderate charge. ‘Turkers’, a term for online workers who use the sites, apparently makes small amounts of money by executing online tasks.

For example, a website named Mechanical Turk operated by Amazon, grants individuals or organizations to post micro-tasks, such as “find the email address for a company” (payment: $0.01/each address), “vote for the best translation” (payment: $0.05/each link), or “rate adult-oriented videos for quality and relevance” (payment: $0.15/each rating) (Amazon, 2010).

Other crowdsourcing platforms include:

Innocentive

Focus on crowdsourcing research and development for pharmaceutical and biomedical companies,

99designs

The world's biggest graphics design marketplace, associates customers requiring custom design work, for example, websites and logos to a thriving network of talented designers who present a new custom design to the site each 7-10 seconds.

Social media and crowdsourcing

Social media has played a significant role throughout the years in catastrophic natural disaster as an information propagator that can be utilized for disaster relief. After the devastating and disastrous Haiti earthquake on 12 January 2010, individuals published numerous photographs and texts about their own encounters during the earthquake via Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, blogs and videos were posted on YouTube. In only 48 hours, the Red Cross received US$8 million in donations legitimately from texts, which represents one advantage of the incredible propagation ability of social media sites.

Survivors likewise utilize social media to stay in contact with the world after a disaster. The jammed cellular network in Japan brought about by the tsunami and earthquake made it difficult for people to communicate with one another. In response, they used Twitter, Facebook, Skype, and local Japanese social networks to communicate and keep in touch with their loved ones (Bannerman, 2012).

Although social media can positively impact disaster relief efforts, it does not give an innate coordination ability to effectively plan and share information, resources, and plans among different relief organizations. All things considered, crowdsourcing applications dependent on social media applications, for example, Twitter and Ushahidi offer a ground-breaking ability for gathering information from disaster scenes and picturing data for relief decision-making.

Research has shown that it is possible to leverage social media to generate community crisis maps and introduce an interagency map to allow organizations to share information as well as collaborate, plan, and execute shared missions. The interagency map is intended to allow organizations to share data in the event that they operate on the same platform or utilize comparative data-representation formats (Bannerman, 2012).

What are the advantages of crowdsourcing for disaster relief?

Compared to traditional relief methods, leveraging crowdsourcing for disaster relief has three advantages.

First, crowdsourced data including user requests and status reports are collected almost immediately after a disaster using social media. Ushahidi-Haiti was set up two hours after the 12 January earthquake by volunteers from Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts (Heinzelman and Waters, 2003).  Soon after, organizations were able to borrow a short message service (SMS) short code phone number (Mission 4636) to send free SMS texts (Munro, 2012). News of this free emergency number was spread through local and national radio stations.

As of 25 January, the Haiti crisis map had more than 2,500 incident reports, with more reports being added every day. The large amount of nearly real-time reports allows relief organizations to identify and respond to urgent cases in time.

Second, crowdsourcing tools can collect data from emails, forms, tweets, and other unstructured methods and then do rudimentary analysis and summaries, such as by creating tag clouds, trends, and other filters. These can help partition the data into bins (such as most-frequently requested resources) and requests into predetermined, most-urgent categories (such as medical help, food, shelter, or people trapped). Relief agencies can then concentrate on the issues and events that are most important to the relief effort.

Third, providers can include geo-tag information for messages sent from some platforms (such as Twitter) and devices (including handheld smart phones). Such crowdsourced data can help relief organizations accurately locate specific requests for help. Furthermore, visualizing this type of data on a crisis map offers a common disaster view and helps organizations intuitively ascertain the current status.

What are the shortfalls of crowdsourcing for disaster relief?

Despite the fact that crowdsourcing applications can give precise and convenient information about a crisis, current crowdsourcing applications actaully miss the mark in supporting disaster relief efforts (Gao et al., 2011).

Above all, most applications do give a common mechanism explicitly designed for cooperation and coordination between different relief organizations. For instance, microblogs and crisis maps don’t give a component for distributing response resources, so various organizations may react to an individual request simultaneously.

A subsequent inadequacy is that data from crowdsourcing applications, while helpful, do not generally give all the correct information required for disaster relief efforts. The accuracy of the report’s geo-tag and content is not guaranteed, in spite of the fact that relief workers enormously need the ability to naturally and precisely locate crowdsourced data on the crisis map. That is, a geo-located tweet does not really allude to the geo-location point. Somebody may message the emergency guide's telephone number to report something they saw earlier, potentially messaging from a shelter about a bridge that collapsed 10 miles not far off.

Furthermore, there are regularly duplicate reports, and information essential for relief coordination isn't promptly accessible or effectively available, for example, arrangements of relief resources or correspondence systems and relief organization contact information.

Lastly, current crowdsourcing applications do not have adequate security features for relief organizations and relief operations. For example, crowdsourcing applications that are publicly available for reporting are also publicly available for viewing. Although it is important to provide information to the public, this can create conflicts when decisions must be made about where and when relief resources are needed.  

In conclusion, crowdsourcing supporting applications don't have sufficient security features for relief organizations and relief operations. For instance, crowdsourcing applications that are openly accessible for revealing are additionally freely accessible for viewing. In spite of the fact that it is essential to give information to people in general, this can stimulate conflict when decisions must be made about where and when relief resources are required.

What is crowdfunding?

Out of crowdsourcing has developed a new phenomenon: crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is the act of funding a project or venture by collecting modest amounts of money from a large number of individuals, ordinarily by means of the Internet.

Crowdfunding is related to crowdsourcing in that both draw on the power of intensity of groups of people and networks. Notwithstanding, crowdfunding is additionally very unique. It works through an open call for funding for specific projects. Funding is requested online, typically in moderately modest quantities, from individual donors or investors, nd goes towards specific projects: personal loans for small businesses, the production of design t-shirts, production of movies or music, or covering medical expenses for the less privileged.

There are four basic models of crowdfunding:

1. Donation-based - funders donate to a project without any expected compensation. An example of a donation-based crowdfunding platform would be:

GoFundMe

GoFundMe is a free crowdfunding platform tailored to fundamentally support people and causes. Since GoFundMe is fit to individual causes— anybody can make a campaign—sponsors on here tend to only support campaigns that originate from inside their own community and personal networks.

GoFundMe isn’t intended for business crowdfunding campaigns, unlike the other platforms. However, if you’re an entrepreneur who has run into difficult times, or you need to raise money to overcome a personal challenge, you can have a go at leveraging this platform for support from your personal network.

Governments, political parties, and the public sector have also experimented with crowdfunding. Barack Obama relied on small donations solicited online during his presidential campaign in 2008. Many government parties fundraise online, as do a wide variety of other initiatives and projects (Pricco, 2014).

2. Reward-based - offers non-financial rewards to funders, such as t-shirts or the opportunity to see a band backstage. An example of a reward-based crowdfunding platform would be:

Kickstarter

This platform is designed around recurrent donations that permits content creators to monetize their videos, blog articles, music and even software developments. On the off chance that people like the project, they can pledge money to get it going. If the project succeeds with regards to arriving at its funding goal, all sponsors' credit cards are charged when time expires.

3. Lending-based - funders expect repayment of the funding they contribute to a project. An example of a lending-based crowdfunding platform would be:

Kiva

Provides the ability to lend money via the Internet to low-income entrepreneurs and students. Kiva's mission is "to expand financial access to help underserved communities thrive."

4. Equity-based -  funders receive equity, revenue, or a share of the profits in a project. An example of an equity-based crowdfunding platform would be:

StartEngine

StartEngine is one of the world’s biggest equity crowdfunding sites. StartEngine pulls funds from an investor's account once the company has exceeded their minimum funding goal, and the escrow account has been opened (StartEngine, n.d.).

Crowdfunding platforms encourage the assembly of ideas, the interconnection of funders with creators, the uniting of ideas and resources, and new entity prospects.

In conclusion, a few key inquiries should be posed as crowdfunding moves past its outset: How can crowdfunding work in the interests of the public, creating new opportunities, contributing to public spheres, and guaranteeing a reasonable appropriation of benefits? Should the principle that publicly-funded research be made openly available apply to crowdfunded projects?

On top of the potential advantages crowdfunding brings to individual corporations, it likewise can possibly improve the efficiency of the development sector as a whole. Numerous development organizations are dependent on traditional support mechanisms with pre-set up measures for performance defined by external donors and tested by anonymous authorities. Crowdfunding, by contrast, empowers joint development of projects and dialogue. During the selection of projects, its only reference are the organization's values and quality measures, which need to be communicated to potential supporters. Projects that are attractive and significant receive adequate sufficient support - not simply those that meet the current (political) support priorities.

References list

Bannerman, S. (2012). Crowdfunding Culture. Web. Wi: Journal of Mobile Culture, [online] 06(04), p.4. Available at: http://wi.mobilities.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/sbannermanwi_2012_06_04.pdf [Accessed 13 Oct. 2019].

Amazon. (2010). All Hits. [online] Available at: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/findhits?match=false [Accessed 26 Oct. 2020].

Zeng, D., Gao, H., Barbier, G. and Goolsby, R. (2010). Ieee InTeLLIGenT SySTemS Harnessing the Crowdsourcing Power of Social Media for Disaster Relief. [online] Available at: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a581803.pdf.

Heinzelman, J. and Waters, C. (2003). About the RepoRt Crowdsourcing Crisis Information in Disaster- Affected Haiti Summary. [online] Available at: https://mirror.explodie.org/Crowdsourcing%20Crisis%20Information%20in%20Disaster-Affected%20Haiti.pdf [Accessed 27 Oct. 2020].

Muralidharan, S., Rasmussen, L., Patterson, D. and Shin, J.-H. (2011). Hope for Haiti: An analysis of Facebook and Twitter usage during the earthquake relief efforts. Public Relations Review, 37(2), pp.175–177.

MP, H. (2011). Japan Tsunami & Earthquake – Use of Twitter, Facebook, Skype & other Social Networks. [online] Bubblecube. Available at: http://bubblecube.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/japan-tsunami-earthquake [Accessed 27 Oct. 2020].

Munro, R. (2012). Crowdsourcing and the crisis-affected community. Information Retrieval, 16(2), pp.210–266.

Gao, H., Barbier, G. and Goolsby, R. (2011). Harnessing the Crowdsourcing Power of Social Media for Disaster Relief. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 26(3), pp.10–14.

Flannery, M. (2007). Kiva and the Birth of Person-to-Person Microfinance. Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization, 2(1–2), pp.31–56.

Pricco, D. (2014). Political Crowdfunding - how politicians are learning to harness the crowd. [online] CrowdExpert.com. Available at: http://crowdexpert.com/articles/crowdfunding-in-politics/ [Accessed 27 Oct. 2020].

CROWDFUNDING INDUSTRY REPORT Market Trends, Composition and Crowdfunding Platforms THE INDUSTRY WEBSITE TM. (2012). [online] Available at: http://www.crowdfunding.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/92834651-Massolution-abridged-Crowd-Funding-Industry-Report.pdf [Accessed 27 Oct. 2020].

StartEngine. (n.d.). Investor FAQ. [online] Available at: https://www.startengine.com/investor-faq [Accessed 27 Oct. 2020].

[dacieng]

Remember, if you have a fit and decide to not vote like a bunch of people did in 2016, *we will get Donald Trump again*. You know, the pathological liar who rapes and cheats on his wife despite being a Christian fearing Republican? Who obviously also never went to church? The man who, before even becoming president, conned people who trusted him with his Trump University scam, and continuing to con people even now? With his NFTs, his stupid golden shoes, and using his MUGSHOT and PICTURES OF THIS PAST WEEKEND, where a man other than him *actually* died while he got off incredibly lucky and Trump didn't even mention him, in campaign emails to squeeze even more money out of his lower class supporters who can't afford it? The man who incited his supporters to storm the capitol on January 6th after trying all he could and failing to put fake electors to steal the election from Joe Biden, which some people have actually been arrested, charged and put in jail for? The man who said he only wanted to be a friggen DICTATOR for just a day??? When it will obviously be much, much longer than just a day? The man who led the WORST Covid response globally, causing the United States to have 25% of the entire worlds causalities because he disbanded the pandemic response team that the Obama administration set up, because they, more than 5 years before it happened, could see the trend that we were going towards and prepared for it. Trump was the man who decided he didn't need something that could have saved thousands of lives, instead pretending like it didn't exist, and then deciding inaction was the best course of action. I am not even scratching the surface of how bad this man is. The racism, the misogynism, bigotry, hatred, abuse, narcissism, clear dementia symptoms that mental health experts have been warning us for years now, his policies that would injure the LGBTQ community, his stances on abortion, his plans with Project 2025 to fill his cabinet with yes-men that will not say no. I could go on and on and on until I am blue in the face to remind you all what a severely rotten and demented person this is. All of this is to say that this is not the time to get upset, take your ball and go home. If we do not want a continuation of all of these, we need to buckle up and work together to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe. We all need to vote. If you do not know if you are registered to vote, you can check here:

I very, very highly encourage you all to make sure you can, especially if you live in a swing state. I'm sorry this is a long post, I don't normally add to posts at all in general, and especially not one this long, but this is something I am passionate about, considering I and many of my friends and family would be one of the many many people put in danger if this administration would to be put in power again.

I have no idea what’s about to happen now – and neither does anybody else, keep that in mind. But I do know a few things:

White people: I know that a LOT of adult and older Black people are going to be INCENSED about this, and it’ll be because of Kamala. This is because the Black people I talk to in this cohort say so, it’s not a hypothetical. They see this as being BECAUSE of WHITE REJECTION of KAMALA HARRIS. In short, that it is racist as fuck.

LISTEN to them, ACKNOWLEDGE their view, be fucking RESPECTFUL and take their opinions seriously because I do think it’s one of the reasons.

As I’m writing this, Biden endorsed Harris. You want to fix item one? WHITE PEOPLE, GET HER THE NOMINATION. FUCKING DO IT. SHUT UP, AND DO IT.

White people who didn’t want this: do what way too many Bernie people did not do, and GET OVER IT NOW. It’s done. None of us can afford to carry any grudges.

Bernie people: I have talked with so many Bernie people still carrying grudges, so same goes to you: GET OVER IT NOW. It’s DONE.

Everybody: Many of you will get someone you don’t want. I don’t care, I’ve never got someone I actually want, and you can’t afford to care either. The Democrats have just thrown away more advantages than you know and the work gets harder now, not easier.

Work your asses off to get whoever comes out of this elected, no matter what.

Goddamn, we really, really do not have room for any more self-inflicted wounds. Got that?

I hate the phrase “vote blue no matter who” but I got some fucken news: Vote blue, no matter who.

This time, it really, really, really matters.

[whitehotharlots]

Handicapping the 2020 Dem primary

Tier Four

The Tom Vilsack Memorial “No Chance in Hell” Tier

These are the candidates whose family members won’t even vote for them. They will drop out either before or immediately after Iowa. Some of them will be working specifically to plant the seeds of a 2024 run, while others are auditioning for an MSNBC gig.

Joe Kennedy

Any person who is simultaneously old enough and illiterate enough to have any fondness for the Kennedys is 100% in the Trump camp. Joe has zero appeal outside of this voting bloc, which literally does not exist. He won’t even win Massachusetts--won’t even be in the top five in Massachusetts.

Michael Avenatti

My man ain’t even announced his run and he’s already facing domestic assault charges. A potential Avenatti run had a mystical WWF vibe to it. I will admit, I was excited, the same as I’d be excited to finally pull alongside the accident that caused the pile up. No one has any idea what his policies are, because neither does he. He might honestly beat Trump in the general, as he is far and away the most likely candidate to physically assault Trump if the two ever share a stage (any Dem who punches Trump will be automatically 100% guaranteed to win the election). But he probably won’t even run.

Mitch Landrieu

Mitch will appeal to that small demographic of erstwhile independent voters who were drawn to Trump solely because he is an openly corrupt grifter. By May he will be a panel participant on a new MSNBC show that’s like Shark Tank but but all the contestants are trying to get the panel to fund their medical gofundme’s.

Eric Holder

Like every other member of the Obama administration, his faults are glaring and the relatively good stuff he did takes way too much context for most voters to understand. Under his leadership, the DoJ began began to litigate hate crimes, which had been almost completely neglected under Bush. That’s good. Also, under his leadership, the DoJ stalwartly refused to prosecute the war criminals who lied us into Iraq or the bankers who tanked the world economy. That’s bad. Politically, he has the platform of a Republican circa 1992. Personally, he has the charisma of a very dry snail.

Steve Bullock

He looks and sounds like the dumb guy sidekick of an old cartoon villain. He is therefore the Bebop/Rocksteady of the field. His policies are indistinguishable from any other civil moderate/fiscal conservative candidate, and his moistness will drive away both donors and media . (NOTE: With Bullock, the Avenatti Rule applies: if he threatens to physically assault Trump or any member of Trump’s family--especially including Baron--he will rocket to the top of the pack. If he actually assaults them, he will win the general election and usher in a glorious Centrist Utopia)

Kristen Gillibrand

She was once considered a front-runner for the same reason Corey Booker kinda sorta still is a frontrunner--because she looks similar to a previous Dem nominee, and many liberal strategists and commentators cannot conceive of a politics beyond identity markers. Trouble is, unlike Booker, Gillibrand pissed off her donor base by leading the the charge against Al Franken. I don’t for a second think that Gillibrand’s efforts had anything to do with principles. She just leaned into the wrong direction of the skid of cynicism: if there’s one thing Democrat donors hate, it’s a candidate who appears to adhere to any kind of moral framework. And Gillibrand is not the sort of candidate who stands a chance without full institutional support.

Tier Three

The “Gormless Dweebs” Tier

These people might stick around until late in the game for the same reason they’d stay at a house party until well after they were no longer welcome. Each also possesses a very particular strain of weirdness that might resonate with voters in New Hampshire enough that they’d finish in the top 3, but none has a realistic chance to live past Super Tuesday.

Martin O’Malley

O’Malley is the Democrat John Kasich. He’s mostly running because he wants to have people to talk to. Several New Hampshire people will nod at him and that will be it. 

Terry McAuliffe

Imagine if Joe Lieberman were a governor and slightly less physically repulsive. He is still a very moist man, and his only moments of attention will come when he criticizes one of the more left-leaning candidates after they point out that the Iraq war didn’t go so good. (Let me ask Senator Sanders a question. We he says that global warming is the biggest threat we face... has he ever heard of ISLAM?” *Tufts University crowd goes wild*)  Terry might come in top 3 in Virginia, and he also might stick around if a frontrunner is facing some kind of big scandal. But his main effect on this debate will be that of a zebra mussel on the side of a leaky rowboat, hoping it fills with just enough water that he’ll be able to slither aboard for the last few minutes before it sinks.

Elizabeth Warren

Warren is one of small handful of Dem candidates whose economic politics fall to the left of Margaret Thatcher. That doesn’t really work for her, though, because it’s hard for a quiet dweeb to project any sense of populism. She’d be a significantly less horrible president than most on this list, probably. But there’s no way she would beat Trump head to head. He can bait her with literally any claim and her response will always be “golly gee I will refute this man with logic and evidence and then those who repeated his taunts will surely see the error of their ways.” By August, it would get to the point where she’d be sending out topless pics to prove she really doesn’t have several teats and therefore is not a pregnant dog, as Trump suggested. But thankfully she will have flamed out long before that.

Tier 2

The “Viable Candidates Who Are Gonna Get Rat Fucked Really Hard” Tier

Sherrod Brown

Same general platform as Bernie, only without the voting record, name recognition, or widespread appeal. We are also living in an age where crudity is now taken for a sign of sincerity, and while he does kinda give off a “disheveled history teacher” vibe, that’s not enough to really combat Trump. Trump can only really be beaten by a platform, not a personality, so Brown might have a chance. But he’ll also almost certainly bow out before Super Tuesday. My guess he won’t be able to take the heat nearly as well as Bernie and he’s gone before Iowa.

Bernie

Bernie will win New Hampshire. He will win for the same reason he won it in 2016: he’s well-known there, he will be the only believable candidate running on a civil libertarian platform. He will win it by a bigger margin, because the Establishment field will be more split. He will win Iowa for the same reasons: much more name recognition now. Pledged delegates-wise, he will be far and away the frontrunner after the first two contests, although on-screen graphics will continue to present him as a longshot, due to superdelegates. He will then square off in a contest between 1-2 of the following candidates, whom the establishment will rally behind. He could win the nomination, but you and I literally cannot imagine the absurdity of the smears he will face. If he wins the nomination he wins the general Reagan vs. Mondale-style, and we might narrowly avoid civilization collapse. There’s only about a 25% of that happening, though.

Tier 1

The “If the Establishment Unites Behind Any One of These People They Will Beat Bernie for the Nom Then Get Stomped by Trump” Tier

None of these candidates would have a realistic chance against Trump, but each of them is well positioned to take advantage of the unique corruption of the Democratic Party. Our only real hope--as a society and a species--is that they manage to split the vote between themselves.

Kamela Harris

Did you watch HBO’s The Jinx? It’s about a weird, repulsive millionaire serial killer who keeps evading justice. She was the prosecutor who tried to convict him. To stress: she could not convict Robert Derst. She’s running in the right direction, though, (disingenuously) espousing some populist positions while hoovering up donor cash. She could very well wait this thing out and then see the donors line up behind her enough so that he "victory” is called by the AP right before the California primary.

Beto

Centrism couldn’t win in Texas, even with a candidate who was immensely more appealing than his opponent. That’s exactly what Centrism is designed to do, and it didn’t do it. It failed. It will always fail. Still, Beto is very handsome and very shameless and not Republican-level evil, which means he will make some money and also sway some idiots. But he’s not nearly connected enough, yet, to win the nom. He will come close however, and bow out at the right time so as to not burn any bridges. Beto will be the nominee in 2024, when he will narrowly win the popular vote but lose the electoral college to Immortum Joe.

Corey Booker

Laugh if you must, but Booker appeals strongly to the exact strain of idiocy that controls the strategy within the Democratic Party: He is a black male...  like Obama! That means he will win, since Obama did. Yes, anyone who spends a few minutes studying Booker will realize he lacks Obama’s intelligence, wit, and oratorical ability. But that’s not how the Democratic establishment understands politics: they believe, genuinely, that the way to win is to raise the most money while being in possession of the correct identity markers. Should a candidate do this and lose, as Hillary did, it was the inevitable result of machinations outside of their control. Ergo, we must appoint the anointed one and see if he pleases the gods. Plus, if you mute the TV and squint, Booker totally looks like Obama!

Hillary

The main benefits of wokeness--why it has so many adherents, so far as I can tell--is that it allows certain people to skirt all responsibility for everything they say and do, even as it forces others to attempt to adhere to literally impossible programmatics of speech and comportment. And so Hillary’s recent nativist turn will be forgiven (it will most likely go unmentioned), while Bernie’s wardrobe and posture will be used as evidence of his sexism. She can continue making jokes about Colored People Time, while any of her competitors will be crucified for not using the exact right terms in describing whatever happen to be the Woke Cause of the Day. This insulation from criticism is Hillary’s biggest strength with the Democrat electorate, while her fiscal conservatism will continue to help her with donors. She will get beaten horribly in the general, but still stands a strong chance in the primary.

Joe Biden

I have no idea how this man is leading in some polls other than name recognition. Which--don’t get me wrong, name recognition is huge, especially in early goings within a crowded primary field. But what does Biden bring to the table, policy-wise or personality-wise? I realize the people who bleat about how they don’t want any more OLD. WHITE. MALES. running for president are just trying to make their cruel centrist politics appear radical--but could they be shameless enough to actually throw their support to Biden? Biden, the dude who most certainly would have been MeToo’d were he still in a position of power? Biden, the pro-war economic conservative who repeatedly says that young people just need to stop whining? That’s the guy you’re gonna run against Trump? Probably. I would take a 50/50 bet on him winning the nomination.

Final odds:

Biden: 1:1

Hillary 1.5:1

Bernie 4:1

Booker 8:1

Beto 10:1

Harris 12:1

Field (including only aforementioned candidates): 30:1

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

For the first time this cycle, there was just one debate night, and only 10 candidates made the cut — so now we’re trying to make sense of what happened when the front-runners shared the stage. In recent weeks, the polls have shown a top tier of three to five candidates, with former Vice President Joe Biden leading, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren tied for second, and Sen. Kamala Harris and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, a distant fourth and fifth — but did that change last night?

Some candidates from the lower-polling tiers had strong performances — former Rep. Beto O’Rourke delivered an impassioned speech on gun violence and Sen. Cory Booker spoke nearly as much as Biden, though Booker is only polling at 2.1 percent on average (based on 21 debate-qualifying polls). But as you can see from the FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll conducted using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, the overall picture hasn’t shifted much yet — although Warren does seem to have done the most to boost her campaign. Here’s what we’ve learned so far about what viewers made of the debate and the candidates’ performances:

Which candidates wowed the crowd?

First of all, how did viewers in our poll think the candidates did on Thursday night? To answer this, we compared debate-watchers’ ratings of the candidates’ performances to their pre-debate favorability scores1 to see if any well-liked candidates failed to impress or if anyone got high marks despite lower favorability. By this measure, O’Rourke and Warren were the biggest standouts, though Buttigieg and Booker also made a positive impression. But Biden and former Cabinet secretary Julián Castro — who memorably clashed — got the lowest scores relative to their pre-debate favorability.

  Who gained (or lost) potential supporters?

Another way to assess who won last night’s debate is to see who convinced more voters to at least think about voting for them. Most candidates saw some change in the share of likely Democratic primary voters who were considering supporting them, though not all changes were positive. Warren, for example, saw the biggest increase in voters who were considering her — almost 4 percentage points, while Harris lost more than 2 percentage points of potential support. But for most candidates, the numbers stayed pretty much the same as they had been before the debate. Even for those whose debate performance stood out — like Biden and Castro, who got relatively poor grades, or O’Rourke, who got a strong rating — there was little change in how many likely primary voters said they were considering voting for them.

Which candidates appeal to the same voters?

With many voters in our poll still considering multiple candidates, we were also interested in examining which candidates share potential supporters. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the two candidates who are being considered by the most voters in our poll — Biden and Warren — also tended to draw a high proportion of other candidates’ supporters, too. Seventy percent of Buttigieg’s supporters are also considering Warren, for example, while 65 percent of O’Rourke’s supporters are also considering Biden. Although many respondents in our survey said they were considering Sanders, fewer of his supporters are considering supporting other candidates. In fact, Biden and Sanders had the most exclusive supporters — 24 percent of Biden’s supporters and 18 percent of Sanders’s supporters aren’t considering any of the other candidates who participated in the debate.

Who made a positive (or negative) impression?

You can also look at the change in candidates’ favorable and unfavorable ratings to understand who got people feeling more positively about them (or perhaps gained unwanted notoriety). So after Ipsos polled voters before and after the debate, we calculated the change in candidates’ net favorability (favorable rating minus unfavorable rating). O’Rourke may not have picked up many potential supporters, but he did improve his net favorability rating by more than 8 points with his debate performance. Castro, meanwhile, took the largest hit, dropping 6.7 points in net favorability, which could be related to his heated exchanges with Biden.

More people like O’Rourke, but Castro lost ground

Change in net favorability for candidates in a FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll taken before and after the third Democratic primary debate

Net favorability candidate before debate after debate change O’Rourke +23.9 +32.5 +8.6 Warren +48.5 +56.0 +7.5 Klobuchar +8.1 +13.9 +5.8 Buttigieg +32.2 +37.7 +5.4 Booker +26.7 +32.1 +5.4 Harris +31.3 +35.2 +3.9 Yang +14.8 +17.4 +2.6 Biden +45.7 +45.5 -0.2 Sanders +44.0 +43.7 -0.3 Castro +19.7 +13.0 -6.7

From a survey of 4,320 likely Democratic primary voters who were surveyed between Sept. 5 and Sept. 11. The same people were surveyed again from Sept. 12 to Sept 13; 2202 responded to the second wave.

Who spoke the most?

Though respondents to the FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll thought Biden’s debate performance was less impressive than Warren’s, it wasn’t because he didn’t get a chance to talk. Of all the candidates on the stage last night, Biden had the highest word count, with over three thousand words spoken. Booker and Warren, the next two most prolific speakers, were about 600 and 750 words behind, respectively.

Who held the floor?

Number of words candidates spoke in the third Democratic debate

Candidate Words Spoken Joe Biden 3,363

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Cory Booker 2,769

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Elizabeth Warren 2,616

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Kamala Harris 2,369

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Julián Castro 2,104

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Pete Buttigieg 2,054

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Amy Klobuchar 1,933

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Bernie Sanders 1,891

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Beto O’Rourke 1,714

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Andrew Yang 1,546

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Excludes words spoken in Spanish

Source: Debate Transcript via ABC News

Booker’s place as the second-most-prolific talker is even more impressive considering that he’s polling in the low single digits. (The polling average is based on 21 debate-qualifying polls released between June 28 and Aug. 28.) Castro also spoke more than anticipated given his polling average (1 percent), holding the floor for longer than both Buttigieg and Sanders. Sanders, in fact, had the second-highest polling average going into the debate, but was third from the bottom in words spoken, beating out only O’Rourke and businessman Andrew Yang.

Who mentioned Trump?

In addition to counting the words spoken by candidates, we also tracked the number of times each candidate mentioned President Trump by name:

Who talked about Trump?

How often Trump was mentioned by candidates participating in the third Democratic debate

Candidate Trump Mentions Kamala Harris 11

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Julián Castro 7

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Cory Booker 5

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Bernie Sanders 5

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Beto O’Rourke 2

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Andrew Yang 2

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Joe Biden 1

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Pete Buttigieg 1

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Elizabeth Warren 1

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Amy Klobuchar 0

Source: Debate Transcript via ABC News

Harris was the clear leader, mentioning Trump 11 times, though as a group, the candidates talked about Trump considerably less often than they did in either night of the second debate. And some of the candidates who spoke the most, such as Biden and Warren, seemed to avoid Trump, each mentioning the president only once. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, meanwhile, got through the whole debate without saying Trump’s name even once.

So did the single-night debate change the game? Thursday night’s debate drew about 14 million television viewers, which is more viewers than both nights of the second debate, but still slightly fewer than those who tuned into watch the first debate. And if our poll with Ipsos is indicative of voters’ reactions, then the needle didn’t move all that much. But for those of you who preferred the two-night approach, you might be in luck — the fourth debate, set for Oct. 15 and potentially Oct. 16, might be split across two nights, since at least 11 candidates have qualified so far. (The Democratic National Committee hasn’t yet confirmed what it will do, however.) Either way, we’ll be here live blogging, so stay tuned!

Do you want even more debate coverage?

Cool graphics from other sites

The New York Times compared how long each candidate talked about each issue.

Bloomberg charted the time devoted to each issue in the first three primary debates:

Nigel Chiwaya at NBC News looked at who attacked who on the debate stage (you can see how much Biden was the focus of others’ barbs).

And The Washington Post looked at who invoked Obama positively and how often.

And here’s more great post-debate analysis:

Fact-checks from ABC News, as well as five key takeaways.

Vox’s roundup of the winners and losers and the most substantive answers.

Debate recaps from The Washington Post’s preeminent Dan Balz …

… and the Associated Press’s wonderful Julie Pace.

From The New York Times, a recap of what Trump was doing while the Democratic candidates were debating.

Finally, check out the rest of our debate coverage:

Our “Who Won The Third Democratic Debate?” project, in which we partnered with pollster Ipsos to show how voters reacted to Thursday’s event.

And our live blog of everything that went down Thursday night.

Additional contributions from Aaron Bycoffe.

[mynameisbluenotjane]

This is for a class

So, I’m taking this online comp 1 class. For our final project, my teacher wants us to take something from American culture; a person, place or idea. It can come from high culture (ballet) or low culture (monster truck rally). The idea is to then take this thing and advertise it somewhere. 

Because of reasons, y’all get the pleasure of reading, or scrolling past, about why y’all need to vote. 

Big surprise. It’s an overloaded topic, but 

A) it’s July

and B) I wrote a speech about why 18-25 year olds need to vote and I didn’t want to do more work than I had to. 

To make life easier, if you don’t want to read any more, keep scrolling, no judgement. If you do, there’s more under the cut

While I was doing research for why people my age weren’t voting, I came across this lovely video from Obama from like 9 months ago:

and this became the basis for my entire speech. 

Within this video, three of the excuses he talks about are registration issues, problems voting, and issues with the candidates. 

This https://www.vote.org/ walks you through how to check if you’re registered to vote, and you can register right there online if you aren’t. You can also check where you need to physically when it’s time to vote. (I haven’t actually had the chance to try the second part yet, but the instructions seem fairly straight forward)

Also, there are a bunch of places you can go to get registered to vote other than the courthouse. My campus had a booth set up in the union for like a month before the midterm elections last year. Also, the farmers market in my home town has a booth where you can register and they’ve been there every week this summer. We had a sidewalk sale last week and there was a tent send up by the local newspaper where you could register. I’m sure wherever you happen to be reading this from there are lots of places like that.

Now, when it comes time to do the actual voting, I’ve heard so many people tell me they couldn’t get home to where they were supposed to vote in time. There’s this really great thing called an absentee ballot. 

For those who don’t know what an absentee ballot is: If you aren’t going to be where you’re registered to vote on voting day, or you can’t get to the building you’re supposed to go, you fill out an absentee ballot. Your vote will get counted along with everybody else’s, all you have to do is mail it in before the end of election day. You can print off one from vote.org (see above link), but if you’re in college on a campus, I bet you can find an absentee ballot somewhere already printed off and waiting for your vote. 

We’re almost do the end. 

Candidates being unrelatable is becoming less of an issue (go you guys for making noise), however it’s not improving enough to improve the 18-25 turn out. Our age demographic is frighteningly small. I don’t remember where I saw the statistic, but I think it said that only 14% of 18-25 year olds voted in the 2014 election. I know it’s a really old statistic, but I don’t think it’s gone up much in the last five years, given some of my real life peers. 

If the candidates are unrelatable to you because you don’t know what they stand for, this website is a hub of information. Sure, it takes a while to weed through the extremist views, but when I’ve gone looking, I’ve found both sides of the argument. Besides, there’s always Google. Just stick with new sites and websites with “edu” at the end to make narrowing down where to find information less of a headache. Plus, we all have that super politically informed and aware friend who knows everything. I’d go there first, then start looking in the direction you feel more inclined towards. 

This wasn’t as long as I thought it was going to be, but I just want to close with this:

I’m really early for the next presidential election, but hopefully by doing this, I can give my age group a head start for the next one. Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of not caring about what’s happening around us anymore. We have to show those who are before us how much we care, or we’ll be the children who cried wolf. Voter registration and voting is a lot easier than you think, and the only way to make the candidates care about us is to make them. I hope that anyone who is apathetic towards politics, or those who didn’t vote in the midterms and were able, won’t make that choice next time.

[arlingtonpark]

SNK 103 Review

CONTENT WARNING: includes discussion of american politics and Donald Trump. 

“There’s no need for us to worry. The battlefield is under our control now. We’re closing in on all our enemies. They decided to make their entrance using their ‘vertical maneuvering’. So they don’t have much in terms of weapons or fuel. In other words, they’re in the middle of enemy territory with no supply lines. They’re cornered rats. The Marleyan army should be surrounding this internment zone, so there’s no escape route. The Paradis forces never had the numbers to take on Marley in a proper war.”

Pieck is supposed to be the genius here, right? So if they’re saying the same things I was saying, does that mean I’m a genius, too?

As Pieck said, this is largely correct, however, that does not mean that victory is assured for Marley, as we saw in this chapter.

The Marleyans made a number of critical errors. Both Porco and Pieck let their feelings get the better of them, and they both charged rashly at the enemy without thinking, which for Pieck opened her up to a surprise attack. Porco may yet escape unscathed, but ultimately, it would’ve been better if he had strategized first before charging in. What’s more is Pieck’s inexcusable incompetence, which led to Zeke’s apparent death. She was supposed to cover his rear. That means her position is behind him, yet she foolishly repositioned herself to be in front of him, leaving Zeke wide open so Levi could kill him.  

Zeke and Pieck are now both down, Armin is not far away, Eren is free again, and the Marleyans won’t be getting as much reinforcements as they thought they would. All in all, this is a definite improvement from Paradis’ perspective.

Whether or not this is the start of a more long term improvement in the situation for them depends on a couple of unknowns. Whatever the Survey Corps’ plan is, it involves the placing of lights at various places, and it involves taking out the Warhammer titan and disabling Pieck either within a certain amount of time, or by a certain time. Whatever ace they have up their sleeve could potentially win them the fight, or at least get them out of this predicament. Eren also apparently has an ace up his sleeve since he’s “not done yet.” I can’t fathom what they could be planning, but that just makes things more exciting.

Just a thought, but earlier Willy said that it was possible that Paradis was working with one of Marley’s enemies. Koyomi is apparently an ambassador of her country since she was seen at the gala rubbing elbows with other ambassadors, and she’s shown to care for the Eldians, which could be seen as a hint at her country’s general attitude towards Eldians. Perhaps the Survey Corps has reinforcements of their own coming to the fight.

That would explain why it so important to eliminate Marley’s titans as quickly as possible. Marley is the dominant world power because of their titans. That implies that no other military can match the group of titan shifters that make up the backbone of Marley’s military. But the Survey Corps specializes in killing titans, which is why they are tasked with eliminating the titan shifters in time for Hizul to arrive and mop up the remaining non-titan aspects of Marley’s military.

I had previously said that Zeke’s apparent duplicity could just be a feint on Isayama’s part, but now I’m really starting to think that it might be re-nope, just kidding, I’m still not convinced. My official stance on this is that there are too many unknowns to say beyond reasonable doubt that Zeke and Eren are in league. For example, we don’t know the exact circumstances of why Eren came to Marley in the first place, which is pretty damn important for determining if he would even want to ally with Zeke at all. However, I’m going to play devil’s advocate here and argue the opposite of what most people seem to believe because being contrarian is fun.

In the past, Zeke had said he hoped to never face an Ackermann again. Now he’s literally calling one of them out. I will acknowledge that I cannot account for this inconsistency, but I doubt that Zeke’s death is part of some grand plan on the part of the Eren or the Survey Corps. I can, however, think of some good excuses for some eyebrow raising things we see in this chapter.

Yes, Zeke flat out says that Eren isn’t his enemy, but that isn’t a hint at their being allies. It has been a consistent theme of this series that people are forced to do unsavory things due to unfortunate circumstances. Zeke cares about Eren, but him having to oppose him anyway due to the circumstances would be in line with this series’ themes. Eren is not the enemy, but he is the opposition.

And the panel where we see that Levi is keeping the time for some reason? I sure some people would interpret that as Levi timing out when to attack Zeke on the assumption that Zeke being “killed” was preplanned somehow. My explanation for that? Well, Jean has repeatedly made clear they have a schedule to keep. Clearly, time is an important component of this operation, and in that case, it makes sense that some high ranking, or perhaps even all, soldiers would have a watch on their person to track the time. And the choice to show Levi doing this when Zeke is calling him out is just part of Isayama’s ruse.

The baseball glove Eren had earlier when, in the same chapter, Zeke was also shown with one? Simple: it’s just a metaphor and nothing else. The glove is used to highlight the differences between Zeke and Eren in what was at the time the present situation. Eren had previously said he was on bad terms with his family and he was at the moment on his own in enemy territory. Thus, Eren having the glove and ball but no partner to play catch with is a metaphor for his isolation. Zeke, meanwhile, does have a partner, and that emphasizes that Zeke is not alone, that he is in familiar territory with people who care about him, or at least respect him.

I could go on all day, really, just pulling these explanations out of thin air. I am, after all, a Pieck level genius.

The final thing to talk about is, ironically, since they’re the first two people we see, Reiner and Falco.

That was some quick thinking on Reiner’s part, he deserves great credit for that. I think he’ll live. He may have said he wished to die, but the thing is that statements like that are usually spur of the moment type things. If someone says they wish they were dead, they’ll usually walk that statement back if you give them time (sometimes as little as a few seconds) to think about it some more. Beyond that, Reiner cares about Falco and confirming that he did indeed survive requires that Reiner not be dead, so that by itself should be reason enough to motivate him to heal.

This also confirms that Reiner’s suicide attempt from earlier would indeed have killed him, regardless of whatever that nervous system mumbo jumbo Isayama used to save him back in Shighanshina is.

So, can the cycle of violence be broken?

The answer is yes, in theory anyway.

Many people believe that humans are predisposed to conflict. That is a very rudimentary way of thinking. In reality, there will eventually be peace for the same reason that organized society exists at all: ultimately, cooperation is preferable to conflict. In the long run, everyone benefits more when people are working together than when everyone is trying to kill each other. Really, it’s just obvious.

Human beings are rational. This means we assess the situation and perform the action we believe will carry the most benefit. For ourselves, our loved ones, our ideals, our nation. This does not mean that the right choice is always made, but it does mean that violence is not the natural state of humanity.

The one confounding factor here that is preventing this peace from coming about is human tribalism.

Human behavior is tribal in nature, meaning that we view others that we identify with in some way as being “one of us,” and people we don’t identify with as being “one of them.” It’s a natural, human inclination.

White people identify with other white people.

Gay people with other gay people.

Floridians with Floridians.

Yankees fans.

Whovians.

Fandom itself exists because of this. Fandoms are tribes, though of course tribal instincts are weaker for fandom compared to other social group identifiers such as race.

Donald Trump is now our President because of tribalism.

The white race has always dominated American society. However, in recent years, it has become fashionable to conclude that white people will lose their dominance in the coming decades. White people are projected to no longer be the majority racial group by 2050, though they will still be a plurality of the population.

Before 2016 put a damper on things, there was much talk of “the Obama coalition,” or the “coalition of the ascendant.” The idea was that the voters who made Obama president, black people, Hispanics, women, etc. (in other words, people who aren’t white men) would form an enduring and dominant bloc of voters that would steer national politics in their favor.

At the expense, it was and is felt by many, of white people.

The thought of one’s social group, one’s tribe, losing its social standing and dominance inspired great fear in many white people, and so they voted for Trump, who promised to “Make America Great Again.”

It would be remiss of me to not say, though, that not all Trump voters are racist. The above paragraph only applies to Trump’s core base of supporters. So in other words, about 25% of the adult population. The rest voted for Trump not because of the racism, but in spite of it, and that in itself is another example of tribalism at work.

Donald Trump is many things: a predator, a misogynist, a racist, a blowhard, a bullshit artist, a moron, a narcissist.

A Republican.

In the words of Brendan Nyhan: “Partisanship is one hell of a drug.” Many people voted for Trump simply because he was a Republican and not a Democrat.

To be sure, there was a great deal of wishful thinking involved.

“He’s not as bad as people make him out to be.”

“He’ll appoint a conservative to the Supreme Court.”

“He won’t really be calling the shots. Paul Ryan will be the power behind the throne.”

All these and more were excuses people told themselves to justify voting for Trump in spite of knowing about his more … unsavory characteristics. People will overlook (or even rationalize!) despicable behavior by their own side simply because it’s their side that’s doing it. They may even simply refuse to believe their side could do such things.

Relatedly, there is the concept of negative partisanship. This refers to the phenomenon of people rooting for one team because they hate the other. They don’t like their team either, but they hate the other, so they (half-heartedly) support it regardless. It’s the lesser of two evils taken to its logical extreme.

The point behind this looong, seemingly unrelated digression is to highlight how powerful of a force tribalism can be. It is “a hell of a drug.”

You see it most obviously in Willy’s plan. Marley is an imperialist aggressor, yet Willy was clearly banking on the world’s fear/hatred of Paradis trumping whatever reservations they have with working with Marley. It’s textbook negative partisanship.

In this war of Paradis vs the world, tribalism runs rampant.

The world hates Paradis, and if Floch’s views are indicative of anything, a sizable number of walldians probably hate the world in return.

Eren was willing to kill innocent bystanders, including children, because it was in the name of fighting for his tribe.

Floch just flat out wants to kill as many people as he can because they’re not a part of his tribe. They may not be involved in the fighting (they were, after all, civilians) but they’re still with the Marleyan tribe. The enemy.

Can we overcome this? Can we break the cycle of hatred and tribalism?

This will surprise many people, but for all the anti-immigrant talk among Trump supporters, most do not actually live near large immigrant populations. In other words, their fear of “the other,” of those who are not a part of their tribe, is most likely based on a lack of interaction with those “others”.

This is the key, and it’s a total cliché. Actually interacting with “the other” is the solution to the puzzle of tribalistic hatred.

RBA thought the walldians were vaguely defined evil entities, devils. But then they actually interacted with them, and saw them for the people they were.

The same will almost certainly be true for Floch. It was true for Eren, even if he still thought killing children was a necessary sacrifice to make on the altar of defending his tribe.

In other words, fear of “the other” can be overcome through familiarity. The tricky part is actually getting everyone to calm down and see everyone else as people. The walldians who see the outside world as just a vaguely defined threat need to rethink their worldview, and the members of the outside world (those who aren’t complete garbage like Sergeant Gross or whatever his name was) also need to look past their hatred.

I just hope that people will not read SNK and be influenced to take a cynical view of the world. It is not human nature to be violent. Those who look at others with fear can come to love and accept them. The scenario Isayama has crafted here is simply not generalizable, and it would be a mistake to apply the apparent take aways of this story to our world. Which, of course, can only be seen as a flaw in Isayama’s storytelling.

Just look at California to see what I mean.

38% of Californians are white. 39% of Californians are Hispanic. That’s right, white people are a close second behind Hispanics as the largest racial group in California, and it’s starting to show. The lower chamber in the state legislature is majority non-white. One of the state’s two Senators, Barbara Boxer, who is white, retired in 2016 and was replaced by Kamala Harris, who has a mixed Indian/Jamaican heritage.

White people still retain significant power though. The upper chamber in the legislature is overwhelmingly white, the state’s other Senator, Dianne Feinstein, is white, and the top contender to serve as Governor for the next eight years, Gavin Newsom, is also white. However, this continued dominance of positions of power is entirely vestigial and it will decline as time goes on.

The same holds true for New Mexico and Hawaii. White people are either not dominant or clearly losing dominance in these states.

And yet, I see no news reports of white Californians, New Mexicans, or Hawaiians throwing hissy-fits over their clearly diminishing dominance over society. White people are a minority in those places, and unless I’m missing something, they seem pretty chill about it.

Because tribes can coexist. It’s just a matter of opening oneself up to others.

An important thing to mention, though, is the status of black people. Black people have always been seen as “the other” and even in California, where 7% of the population is black compared to 12% of the general US population, anti-black sentiment abounds, though in subtle ways, most notably in the form of NIMBYism. 

However, real progress is being made on that front in California, and in the US as a whole, there seems to be a real commitment to racial inclusiveness among the younger generation. Real progress is being made, though unfortunately a world where black people are seen as equal to white people is a long time coming. 

The only thing left to do is speculate about where the series is heading. This chapter is the start of volume 26, which I assume will be the fourth of five volumes in this story arc. My guess is that the battle will continue for the remainder of volume 26 with volume 27 wrapping up this current arc before dovetailing into the next, and most likely final, arc of the series.

[eustorebattery-blog]

Biden

Biden's vice-presidential campaigning gained little media visibility, as far greater press attention was focused on the Republican running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.[162][187] During one week in September 2008, Sony svf153a1yw keyboard

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for instance, the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism found that Biden was included in only five percent of coverage of the race, far less than the other three candidates on the tickets received.[18

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8] Biden nevertheless focused on campaigning in economically challenged areas of swing states and trying to win over blue-collar Democrats, especially those who had supported Hillary Clinton.[147]

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[162] Biden attacked McCain heavily despite a long-standing personal friendship.[nb 1] He said, "That guy I used to know, he's gone. It literally saddens me."[162] As the financial crisis of 2007–2010 reached a peak with the liquidity crisis of September 2008 and the proposed bailout of the United States financial system became a major factor in the campaign,

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Biden voted in favor of the $700 billion Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which went on to pass in the Senate 74–25.[190]

 On October 2, 2008, Biden participated in the vice-presidential debate with Palin at Washington University in St. Louis. Post-debate polls found that while Palin exceeded many voters' expectations, Sony svs131b11l keyboard · Biden had won the debate overall.[191] During the campaign's final days, he focused on less populated, older, less well-off areas of battleground states, especially Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, where polling indicated he was popular and where Obama had not campaigned or performed well in the Democratic primaries.[192][19Sony svs131b11l keyboard ·Sony svs131b11l keyboard ·Sony svs131c1dl keyboard · 3][194] He also campaigned in some normally Republican states, as well as in areas with large Catholic populations.[194]

 Under instructions from the campaign, Biden kept his speeches succinct and tried to avoid offhand remarks, such as one he made about Obama's being tested by a foreign power soon after taking office, Sony svs131c24l keyboard · ·Sony svs131a12w keyboardwhich had attracted negative attention.[192][193] Privately, Biden's remarks frustrated Obama. "How many times is Biden gonna say something stupid?" he asked.[171]:411–414, 419 Obama campaign staffers referred to Biden blunders as "Joe bombs" and kept Biden uninformed about strategy discussions, Sony svs131e1dl keyboard ·Sony svs131g1dl keyboard · ·Sony svs131b12v keyboard which in turn irked Biden.[185] Relations between the two campaigns became strained for a month, until Biden apologized on a call to Obama and the two built a stronger partnership.[171Sony svs131g21l keyboard ·Sony svs131a12w keyboard ·Sony svs131a12w keyboard]:411–414 Publicly, Obama strategist David Axelrod said Biden's high popularity ratings had outweighed any unexpected comments.[195] Nationally, Biden had a 60% favorability rating in a Pew Research Center poll, compared to Palin's 44%.[192] HP PX03XL Battery

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  On November 4, 2008, Obama and Biden were elected with 53% of the popular vote and 365 electoral votes to McCain–Palin's 173.[196][197][198] HP SG03XL Battery

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  At the same time Biden was running for vice president he was also running for reelection to the Senate,[199] as permitted by Delaware law.[136] On November 4, he was reelected to the Senate, defeating Republican Christine O'Donnell.[200] Having won both races, Biden made a point of waiting to resign from the Senate until he was sworn in for his seventh term on January 6, 2009.[201HP BP02XL Battery

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 ·  HP TE04XL Battery] He became the youngest senator ever to start a seventh full term, and said, "In all my life, the greatest honor bestowed upon me has been serving the people of Delaware as their United States senator."[201] Biden cast his last Senate vote on January 15, supporting the release of the second $350 billion for the Troubled Asset Relief Program,[202] and resigned from the Senate later that day.[nHP BI03XL Battery

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 ·  HP RR03XL Batteryb 2] In an emotional farewell, Biden told the Senate: "Every good thing I have seen happen here, every bold step taken in the 36-plus years I have been here, came not from the application of pressure by interest groups, but through the maturation of personal relationships."[206] Delaware Governor Ruth Ann Minner appointed longtime Biden adviser Ted Kaufman to fill Biden's vacated Senate seat.[2HP CM03XL Battery

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 Vice president (2009–2017)

 Biden being sworn in as vice president on January 20, 2009

First term (2009–2013)

Biden said he intended to eliminate some explicit roles assumed by George W. Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, and did not intend to emulate any previous vice presidency.[208] He chaired Obama's transition team[209] and headed an initiative to improve middle-class economic well-being.[21HP CI03XL Battery

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 ·  HP HT03XL Battery0] In early January 2009, in his last act as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, he visited the leaders of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan,[211] and on January 20 he was sworn in as the 47th vice president of the United States[212]‍—‌the first vice president from Delaware[2HP NP03XL Battery

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 ·  HP TF03XL Battery13] and the first Roman Catholic vice president.[214][215]

 Obama was soon comparing Biden to a basketball player "who does a bunch of things that don't show up in the stat sheet".[216] In May, Biden visited Kosovo and affirmed the U.S. position that its "independence is irreversible".[HP BT04XL Battery

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 ·  HP PK03XL Battery217] Biden lost an internal debate to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about sending 21,000 new troops to Afghanistan,[218][219] but his skepticism was valued,[177] and in 2009, Biden's views gained more influence as Obama reconsidered his Afghanistan strategy.[220] Biden visited Iraq about every two months,[ HP ME03XL Battery

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 ·  HP KB06XL Battery147] becoming the administration's point man in delivering messages to Iraqi leadership about expected progress there.[177] More generally, overseeing Iraq policy became Biden's responsibility: Obama was said to have said, "Joe, you do Iraq."[221] Biden said Iraq "could be one of the great achievements of this administration".[22HP LE03XL Battery

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 ·  HP TE04XL Battery 23] By 2012, Biden had made eight trips there, but his oversight of U.S. policy in Iraq receded with the exit of U.S. troops in 2011.[224][225]

  President Obama congratulates Biden for his role in shaping the debt ceiling deal which led to the Budget Control Act of 2011

Biden oversaw infrastructure spending from the Obama stimulus package intended to help counteract the ongoing recession, and stressed that only worthy projects should get funding.[ HP SG03XL Battery

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 ·  HP HT03XL Battery 7] and when he completed that role in February 2011, he said the number of fraud incidents with stimulus monies had been less than one percent.[227]

 In late April 2009, Biden's off-message response to a question during the beginning of the swine flu outbreak, that he would advise family members against traveling on airplanes or subways, led to a swift retraction by the White House.[228] The remark revived Biden's reputation for gaffes.[229][220][2HP BI03XL Battery

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 ·  HP TF03XL Battery 30] Confronted with rising unemployment through July 2009, Biden acknowledged that the administration had "misread how bad the economy was" but maintained confidence the stimulus package would create many more jobs once the pace of expenditures picked up.[231] On March 23, 2010, HP MB04XL Battery

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 ·  HP PK03XL Battery a microphone picked up Biden telling the president that his signing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was "a big fucking deal" during live national news telecasts. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs replied on Twitter, "And yes Mr. Vice President, you're right ..."[23HP BT04XL Battery

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 ·  HP KB06XL Battery 2] Despite their different personalities, Obama and Biden formed a friendship, partly based around Obama's daughter Sasha and Biden's granddaughter Maisy, who attended Sidwell Friends School together.[185] HP ME03XL Battery

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  Members of the Obama administration said Biden's role in the White House was to be a contrarian and force others to defend their positions.[233] Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff, said that Biden helped counter groupthink.[21HP LE03XL Battery

·  HP BK03XL Battery 6] White House press secretary Jay Carney, Biden's former communications director, said Biden played the role of "the bad guy in the Situation Room".[233] Another senior Obama advisor said Biden "is always prepared to be the skunk at the family picnic to make sure we are as intellectually honest as possible."[177] Sony SVF13NA1UM battery Obama said, "The best thing about Joe is that when we get everybody together, he really forces people to think and defend their positions, to look at things from every angle, and that is very valuable for me." Sony SVT111A11M battery Sony VGP-BPS42 battery Sony vgp-bps20/s battery [177] On June 11, 2010, Biden represented the United States at the opening ceremony of the World Cup, attended the England v. U.S. game, and visited Egypt, Kenya, and South Africa.[234] The Bidens maintained a relaxed atmosphere at their official residence in Washington, often entertaining their grandchildren, and regularly returned to their home Sony SVP132A2CM battery Sony vgp-bps20/b batteryin Delaware.[235]

 Biden campaigned heavily for Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections, maintaining an attitude of optimism in the face of predictions of large-scale losses for the party.[236] Following big Republican gains in the elections and the departure of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, Sony SVP132A1CM battery Sony vgp-bps20 battery Biden's past relationships with Republicans in Congress became more important.[237][238] He led the successful administration effort to gain Senate approval for the New START treaty.[237] Sony SVZ1311Z9E battery Sony SVZ1311C5E battery Sony vgp-bpl20 battery [238] In December 2010, Biden's advocacy for a middle ground, followed by his negotiations with Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, were instrumental in producing the administration's compromise tax package that included a temporary extension of the Bush tax cuts.[238] Sony SVZ1311S9E battery Sony VGP-BPS40 battery [239] Biden then took the lead in trying to sell the agreement to a reluctant Democratic caucus in Congress.[238][240] The package passed as the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010.

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In foreign policy, Biden supported the NATO-led military intervention in Libya in 2011.[241] He supported closer economic ties with Russia.[242]

 In March 2011, Obama delegated Biden to lead negotiations with Congress to resolve federal spending levels for the rest of the year and avoid a government shutdown.[243] By May 2011, a "Biden panel" Sony SVD112A1SM battery Sony VGP-BPS41 battery with six congressional members was trying to reach a bipartisan deal on raising the U.S. debt ceiling as part of an overall deficit reduction plan.[244][245] The U.S. debt ceiling crisis developed over the next few months, but Biden's relationship with McConnell again proved key in breaking a deadlock and bringing about a deal to resolve it, in the form of the Budget Control Act of 2011, signed on August 2, 2011, the same day an unprecedented U.S. Sony VGP-BPS27 batterydefault had loomed.[246][247][248] Biden had spent the most time of anyone in the administration bargaining with Congress on the debt question,[247] and one Republican staffer said, "Biden's the only guy with real negotiating authority, and [McConnell] knows that his word is good. He was a key to the deal."[246] Sony SVD132A1SM battery Sony VGP-BPS36 battery Sony SVF15AA1QM battery Sony SVP1121C5E battery Sony VGP-BPS37 battery

[dispatchesfrom2020]

2020

Week 43: October 19-October 25

19: Trump is beefing with Anthony Fauci, the grandfatherly epidemiologist who has become a media-stay amid coronavirus coverage. As the United States’ leading infectious disease expert, he has become the de-facto voice for public health in America. Fauci drew the president’s ire after he denounced a pro-Trump political ad for misquoting him and using his words out of context to mislead voters into thinking that the president enjoys his support. Trump calls the infectious disease expert “a disaster” on call with campaign staff and reports, and complains: “Every time he goes on television, there’s always a bomb, but there’s a bigger bomb if you fire him”. And, in voting news, the Supreme court deadlocked over a decisions, ultimately enabling Pennsylvania election officials to extend the deadline for mail-in voting, allowing ballots received up to three days after the election to be counted. As mail deliveries lag under the leadership of the Trump loyalist he appointed to head up the postal service, many worry that Republicans are effectively trying to sabotage mail-in-ballots. This is a decision that will come back time and again during Trump’s prolonged ‘stop the steal’ campaign.

An October protest in Lagos, Nigeria - Temilade Adelaja/Reuters

20: Nigerians are calling for the end of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a branch of the national police notorious for brutalizing residents. Their long list of alleged abuses include conducting illegal searches, unlawful detention, brutally beatings, torturing detainees using stress positions, raping women, and committing extralegal executions. They often target young Nigerians with luxury products like exotic cars and iPhones and extort them for money or steal their belongings. Though the country has seen periodic protests agains SARS since 2016, momentum was sparked again in October by a brutal video of police shooting a young motorist before driving off in his vehicle. Police claimed the video is faked and arrest the man who posted it to twitter - which only further incised their opponents. On Tuesday, though, violence escalates as the Nigerian army opens fire on a group of peaceful protesters gathered at the Lekki toll gate in Lagos. At least 12 people are killed - witnesses claim the military blocked ambulances from attending to the wounded or removing the bodies of the dead. DJ Switch, a popular figure in the Nigeria’s local music scene, livestreams the shootings. Her videos counter the government’s denial of the event, and eventually force the military to acknowledge the massacre. By November, she will have fled the country after threats on her life, and will be successfully granted asylum in Canada.

Matt Slocum/AP

21: Obama joins the Biden campaign, delivering a blistering rebuke of the sitting President. Pointing to Trump’s fumbled handling of the coronavirus pandemic, Obama says: “Donald Trump isn't suddenly going to protect all of us. He can't even take the basic steps to protect himself.” In Oklahoma, archaeologists searching for graves of the victims of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre uncover a mass burial containing ten sets of remains. And, in gay news, Pope Francis gives an interview in which he vocalizes support for same-sex civil unions and backs legal protections for homosexual couples. 

22: A Polish tribunal rules that abortion in the case of fetal defects is unconstitutional. When the ban comes into place, terminations will be restricted solely to instances of rape or incest, or where carrying the pregnancy to term will gravely endanger the life of the expectant mother. Poland has been slowly introducing more and more restrictions since the 1990s.  And it’s the night of the second presidential debate. It’s a more subdued and even-keeled event than the previous match-up. Trump’s answer to his plan to combat coronavirus is more self-congratulatory boasting about closing the borders with China and wishful thinking about the not-yet-developed vaccines. He claims the virus will “go away” and argues that the United States is “rounding the turn”. They’re not. Numbers are growing rapidly - and everywhere.

In San Francisco, motorists partake in a drive-in watch party to view the second and final Presidential debate - Jim Wilson/The New York Times

23: The President of Poland becomes the world’s latest leader to test positive for the coronavirus. In the United States a record-setting 85,000 new cases are reported and a study, published in Nature Magazine indicates that over 500,000 people could die of the virus in the United States by March 2021 [February 2021 hindsight says: yep]. The study projects that if just 85% of the population participated in mask-wearing, nearly 100,000 deaths could be prevented [February 2021 hindsight says: they wont]. And the FBI release a sworn affadavit by a member of the right-wing “Boogaloo Bois” militia stating that right-wing extremists infiltrated the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis in June. Posing as Black Lives Matter protesters, 26-year-old Ivan Hunter shot at police, looted the station, and helped set it on fire.

Department of Agriculture workers wear thick protective suits while they dismantle a Giant Asian Hornet nest containing approximately 500 live samples - Elaine Thompson/AP

24: You know what’s back? Murder hornets. Officials near Blaine, Washington announce they have successfully removed a nest of Giant Asian hornets - the first of its kind located in the United States. A handful of worker hornets and queens have been spotted in the region throughout 2020, although scientists had been unable to pin-point the hive’s location until earlier this week. Scientists predict there are likely other colonies still active in the Pacific Northwest. The recently-released Borat sequel has stirred up controversy after it dupes Giuliani into unwittingly appearing in its film by posing as a news crew. The young actress playing Borat teenaged daughter pretends to be a reporter and brings Giuliani to her hotel room for an interview. The former mayor of New York and present-day personal lawyer to the President, gets drunk and flirty. Giuliani untucks his shirt, and appears to touch himself through his trousers. If Sasha Baron Cohen and an unknown Bulgarian actress can pull one over on ol’ Rudy, many wonder what highly-trained foreign operatives could get...

25: Pope Francis names thirteen new cardinals... including the United States’ first Black cardinal, 72-year-old Wilton Gregory. The State Department reports that is has halted diversity and inclusion training programs following an executive order from the president calling such programs “divisive” and “fundamentally racist and sexist”.

[multipleservicelisting]

Meena Harris, Building That Brand

Meena Harris, a lawyer and former tech executive, used to make statement T-shirts as a side job. Her most famous read, simply, “Phenomenal Woman.” (Perhaps you saw it on Instagram, worn by celebrities including Serena Williams, Lizzo, Ciara, Viola Davis, Laverne Cox and Eva Longoria.)

She also made hats for the “Phenomenal Mother” and sweatshirts for the “Phenomenal Voter.” All benefited various charities.

But during a summer of mass protests against racism and injustice, Ms. Harris’s apparel took on new resonance. Naomi Campbell wore a “Phenomenally Black” T-shirt for a high-end fashion event in July. Regina King accepted her lead actress Emmy in September wearing a shirt by Ms. Harris, with an illustration of Breonna Taylor and the words “Say Her Name.”

Ms. Harris’s passion project became her full-time job; she left her role as head of strategy and leadership at Uber to run her own company, called Phenomenal. She also picked up another side-gig — one that brought her more visibility than any prestigious job that came before it: campaign surrogate for her aunt, Kamala Harris, now the vice president-elect.

At the time, Ms. Harris, 36, made it clear that her clothing brand was “not something that I want to be using to promote the candidacy of a family member.” In a phone interview, she added: “There’s a lot of cool people in my family that do cool stuff. And this is my thing. I’m doing my own thing.”

But her relationship to the vice president-elect is a fact that can’t be separated from her story or that of her business.

As a surrogate, Ms. Harris offered insight into her family in ways traditional (introducing her aunt in a video at the Democratic National Convention) and more novel (during the primaries, she defended her aunt’s criminal justice record against progressives who disparaged her as “a cop” in a series of Instagram stories).

She also sold several Kamala-related sweatshirts, including one with the letters “MVP,” for Madam Vice President; one emblazoned with the phrase “I’m Speaking,” referring to the much-memed moment from the vice-presidential debate; and a third with the names Sojourner (Truth), Harriet (Tubman), Shirley (Chisholm) and Barbara (Jordan) stacked above Kamala’s, released in partnership with Win With Black Women.

But putting a campaign slogan, like “Kamala for the People,” on a shirt would be too explicit, Ms. Harris said, crossing the line she’s drawn to protect her brand and establish her own identity.

“I look at her as another figure in history and someone to be celebrated,” she said of her aunt — for example, with a holiday sweatshirt reading “Deck the halls with smart, strong women, Kamala-la-la-la-la-la-la.”

‘What’s Our Message?’

The name of Ms. Harris’s company comes from a Maya Angelou poem, published in 1978: “I’m a woman / Phenomenally. / Phenomenal woman, / That’s me.”

First sold during Women’s History Month in March 2017, the “Phenomenal Woman” shirt was meant to remind people that Ms. Angelou “came before us, and it was women like her,” Ms. Harris said, “who made it possible for the Women’s March to happen in the huge way that it did.”

She planned to split profits from the shirt between seven women’s organizations. “I thought we’d sell a couple hundred shirts, if I got enough of my friends and family to support,” she said. But on release day, she sold more than 2,000, she said. (It was modeled online by friends, including Issa Rae, who was a college classmate, and America Ferrera.)

At the time, Ms. Harris didn’t know exactly what to do with the enthusiasm, she said: “How do we keep this going? What are we talking about? What are we doing? What’s our message?” So she gave herself a mission: raising awareness around issues affecting underrepresented communities.

The Breonna Taylor shirt, released in August, flooded social media, buoyed again by a flock of celebrities. On its front, the black tee read “Arrest The Cops Who Killed Breonna Taylor” in pink text (Ms. King wore it backward at the virtual Emmys). Profits from the $45 shirt benefited the Breonna Taylor Foundation. (Depending on sales, other Phenomenal products raise anywhere from $5,000 to $150,000 for a nonprofit, according to Ms. Harris.)

Inevitably, the simple T-shirt company has become a multipurpose venture, with a content arm, Phenomenal Media (for publishing articles and putting out full-page newspaper ads), and a creative agency, Phenomenal Productions (which will make videos, products and other content for ideologically aligned clients). On Jan. 19, Ms. Harris will publish her second children’s book, “Ambitious Girl.” And on the following day, one of the characters in her first children’s book, “Kamala and Maya’s Big Idea,” about two sisters taking on a community project, will take her oath for the second highest office in the nation.

‘Entrepreneurial Tendencies’

Kamala and Maya were raised primarily by their mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a scientist and activist.

When Maya was 17, she had Meena. She raised her daughter with the help of her mother and sister, while earning degrees and building a career in law and progressive policy. Maya worked as a law school dean, executive director of the A.C.L.U. of Northern California, adviser to Hillary Clinton, and her sister’s campaign chairwoman — among other roles. Since 1998, she has been married to Tony West, who was the associate attorney general during the Obama administration and is now Uber’s chief legal officer.

Young Meena Harris, surrounded by lawyers, wasn’t nudged toward law. Her first job, after graduating from Stanford University in 2006, was as a community operations manager at Facebook — just as it was expanding to the general public, no longer available only to college students.

Ms. Harris also joined the 2008 Obama campaign, in youth vote organizing and grass roots fund-raising. But finally, she decided to start law school, as if it were the “path of least resistance,” she said.

In 2014, two years after she graduated from Harvard Law School, Ms. Harris was working as a cybersecurity and data privacy attorney in Washington, D.C., when she had her first “kind of fun, provocative” idea for a T-shirt, she said. Inspired by the early Mark Zuckerberg business card that said “I’m CEO, bitch,” her tee read “I’m an entrepreneur, bitch.” (These were the “Lean In” years.)

By 2015, Tyra Banks was wearing the shirt onstage during press interviews. And Ms. Harris — who’d always identified as a creative person with “entrepreneurial tendencies,” she said — was feeling, for the first time, like an entrepreneur.

Statement as Brand

T-shirts are not a new form of expression, either of values or of protest. But unrest during the Trump administration — and the steady rise of both political expression and posturing on social media — has inspired a great number of them. Mugs, onesies, pet collars, phone cases and fanny packs, too.

In September 2019, the sisters Kate and Lisa Sokolov founded Social Goods, an online boutique for activist apparel. All of their sales include a donation — on average 25 percent of the proceeds, the founders said — to various related nonprofits. Phenomenal was one of the first brands sold on their site.

The founders see merchandise as a “catalyst and entry point for change,” Kate Sokolov said — “a way to get people to start talking and keep talking about issues.”

It’s the “keep talking” part of it that Ms. Harris has been considering herself lately.

“I think this is going to be a big question for us next year. When we don’t have the constant drama and attacks that are coming out of the administration, how do we keep people engaged in a meaningful way?” she said. “Not just the people that have been doing this work, and will continue doing this work, and are literally doing it all day every day. But regular folks.”

Communicating serious messages through a medium like apparel is tricky. Tone is paramount. Nuance can be lost. There’s only so much room on a tee.

“Just because a bunch of people liked it doesn’t mean that you should go put it on a T-shirt and sell it,” Ms. Harris said, of ideas she knew would be popular but messy.

Not everything sold by Phenomenal has a social justice message. Addressing work-from-home culture, Ms. Harris released sweatshirts in 2020 that read “Can everyone mute please?” She’s also sold pieces without phrases, like a one-piece swimsuit printed with Sonia Sotomayor’s face. Proceeds from these more general items are donated to a spread of nonprofits, rather than to a specific cause or organization.

One of those nonprofits is Essie Justice Group, an organization for women with incarcerated loved ones. Gina Clayton-Johnson, the group’s founder and executive director, said working with Phenomenal has relieved some of the overwhelming pressure to fund-raise.

“My team needs to be writing policy, running healing circles and organizing outside jails and prisons. They don’t need to be setting up chairs at a fund-raiser, or putting cute little sequins in envelopes,” Ms. Clayton-Johnson said.

‘Breaking Away’

On a phone call in August, the day after making her Democratic National Convention debut, Ms. Harris described herself as happy but “running on fumes.” She’d spent that night “drinking wine in a furry bathrobe” while watching the videos and speeches, she said.

During a conversation a few months later, the election was over but the holidays were approaching, and Ms. Harris’s partner Nikolas Ajagu, who works as an executive at Facebook, had just told her that letters to Santa from their two daughters (ages 2 and 4) had gone missing. There was a pile of laundry on the couch and the house was a “mess,” she said, using an expletive.

Because of her work with Phenomenal, Ms. Harris already had a robust following before her aunt became Joe Biden’s running mate in August. But starting that month, she began gaining followers on Twitter and Instagram in droves.

Accordingly, she has faced more criticism, trolling and general scrutiny for actions associated with her family. One recurring topic is Prop 22, a California ballot measure approved by voters in November, allowing companies like Uber to continue classifying drivers as independent contractors rather than as employees.

Ms. Harris’s stepfather is the top lawyer at Uber, which spent millions trying to pass the measure. (Her aunt strongly opposed it.) Ms. Harris was dragged into the fight as well because of her former job at Uber. In November — after the election — she decided to make it clear that she voted against Prop 22.

“I think it’s a very simple thing,” she said. “I’m very lucky to be in a family of a bunch of successful people who are doing a lot of different things. There’s interesting dynamics around that, but I’m my own person with my own views and my own platform and my own aspirations.

“Sure, you can be curious about somebody’s relationship with their family, or how their communications around these things are,” she said. But at the same time, she noted, “I’m not an elected official. I’m not formally accountable as a public servant, and I think sometimes, people do kind of treat you that way if you have a public profile.” (She later added: “It’s weird to talk about yourself as having a public profile.”)

When she talked about her decision to leave Uber in June, Ms. Harris used phrases like “breaking away” and “liberating myself.” For years, she’d felt like she was on a “treadmill of checking prestige boxes” — elite schooling, a law degree, a high-powered tech career, a treadmill powered by the ambition of her first-generation immigrant family.

Still, that ambition was fairly contained to the worlds of law and activism, “which of course, are core to who I am and how I view everything,” she said.

“No one in my family, other than me, has a business-minded bone in their bodies. I was not exposed to that at all,” Ms. Harris said. (Her stepfather didn’t take a job in the corporate world until 2014.) The idea of entrepreneurship? “That was just totally foreign.”

Now, she’s on a new treadmill. “I just didn’t really know the path to getting there,” she said.

from Multiple Service Listing https://ift.tt/2LPlJfw

[easyfoodnetwork]

Fighting Voter Suppression in Hog Country, North Carolina

A voter waits in line a polling place in Black Mountain, North Carolina | Photo by Brian Blanco/Getty Images

In an election like none before it, the residents of North Carolina’s hog- and poultry-intensive eastern counties are fighting to regain the power of their vote

This story was originally published on Civil Eats.

Elsie Herring spends many days documenting and responding to complaints from her neighbors — about everything from the stench coming off of factory farms to the clearcutting of trees for timber to the emissions from nearby factories. But lately, when Herring, a community organizer for the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network (EJN), gets a call, she’s also been making sure the person on the other end of the line has a plan in place to vote.

With almost two million swine within its borders, Herring’s native Duplin County in eastern North Carolina is the top hog-producing county in the United States. And because many residents have pre-existing health conditions, in part from living alongside the waste produced by so many animals, many are choosing to mail their ballots in this year rather than venture to the polls, where COVID-19 presents an additional threat.

But, in a part of the state home to many people of color, Herring worries about reports of minority ballot rejection rates. In North Carolina, the ballots of white voters are being rejected at a rate of .5 percent, while Black voters’ ballots are being rejected at a 1.8 percent rate and Native American voters’ ballots are being rejected at a 4 percent rate (eight times more than white voters’), according to October 21 data from the U.S. Elections Project.

Voter suppression and environmental injustice often perpetuate and compound each other.

“They’re disproportionate, and right there, that tells me they’re trying to suppress the Black votes,” Herring says. “That has always been their focus, to suppress our vote and not allow us the right.”

And so, she carefully walks her neighbors through the mail-in voting process: “We’re telling them to be careful and aware of what they’re writing and not writing on their ballots. The witness name has to be printed, and you have to have their signature and address. If that’s not there, they kick it out.”

Herring’s fears about the suppression of minority votes are not ill-founded, given recent and long-term efforts in North Carolina. Over the last decade, the state’s General Assembly, which the Republican party has controlled since 2010, has gerrymandered voting district maps along racial lines and passed numerous laws aimed at making it harder for minorities to vote (though many of the measures have not held up in court and are no longer in place).

In the midst of these ongoing efforts, many Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities in the eastern part of the state say they’ve repeatedly watched as their elected officials promote the interests of hog and poultry companies over their safety and well-being — as evidenced by the number and density of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) permitted in their communities and the ineffectiveness of the facilities’ waste-disposal systems.

In addition to enabling the industry to concentrate around low-income communities of color, residents say state lawmakers have limited the tools those communities once had at their disposal to protest the resulting pollution.

Voter suppression and environmental injustice often perpetuate and compound each other: Without people in office to protect their interests, polluting industries such as the state’s industrial hog and poultry operations proliferate and remain largely unchecked, Herring says. And when industries pollute with little consequence, damaging the health and quality of life of the people around them, people are less likely to prioritize getting to the polls, especially given the fact that many are already dealing with myriad other issues, including poverty, food and housing insecurity, and lack of quality education and access to healthcare.

“It’s particularly troubling that when someone who is harmed by all these cumulative impacts seeks to remedy that . . . they find [that] the legislature in recent years has taken very intentional steps to deprive them of long-available remedies,” says Will Hendrick, staff attorney and manager of the Waterkeeper Alliance’s North Carolina Pure Farms, Pure Waters campaign.

“The reaction is, ‘My vote won’t matter — corporations control everything, and that won’t change.’”

Sherri White-Williamson, who worked for years in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office for Environmental Justice before returning two years ago to her hometown in Sampson County, says she has tried to encourage young people in her town to vote. “The reaction is, ‘Why should I? My vote won’t matter — they [corporations] control everything, and that won’t change,’” says White-Williamson, who now works as the NC Conservation Network’s environmental justice policy director. “People who live in communities and get stuff dumped on them feel less empowered to be able to effect any change.”

As a swing state that voted for Barack Obama in 2008, Mitt Romney in 2012, and Donald Trump in 2016, North Carolina will be pivotal in this election. The U.S. Senate race between Republican incumbent Thom Tillis and his Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham could affect which party controls Congress as well. And while there are many conservative parts of the state, the demographics are changing as metropolitan areas continue to grow and more Latinx and young people register to vote.

Despite the factors stacked against them — made worse by the pandemic — Herring says many people in eastern North Carolina are still determined to make their voices heard. This year, groups like the one she’s involved with are working to educate voters and ensure they have transportation to the polls. And while Herring’s biggest concern is that her community’s votes will be under attack, she asks: “What can we do to combat that? I don’t know, other than just showing up at the polls to bring about a change.”

Photo by Logan Cyrus/AFP via Getty Images

An employee of the Mecklenburg County Board of Election in Charlotte, North Carolina holds up instructions that are mailed with absentee ballots for the 2020 election.

Suppressing the vote

In 2011, Republicans gained control of both of North Carolina’s Congressional houses and redrew the legislative district maps in the once-a-decade redistricting process to favor their party. In 2017, a district court and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the maps were illegally racially gerrymandered, meant to dilute the voice of Black voters. Two years after lawmakers submitted new maps, federal judges struck down the voting districts again, this time as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders, saying they had been drawn with “surgical precision” — and were among the most manipulated in the nation. Lawmakers were ordered a second time to redraw the maps, which will be redone yet again in 2021, based on the 2020 Census.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in the state have made two other attempts at passing voter suppression laws. HB 589, one of the most dramatic voting rights rollbacks in the U.S., was overturned in federal court after it had been in effect for several years, and the voter ID requirement HB 1092 was blocked by a federal judge.

“There are a lot of different ways people are trying to cut back who is eligible to vote, whose votes count after they are cast, and who is going to feel comfortable voting,” says Kat Roblez, staff attorney with Forward Justice, a nonpartisan organization advancing racial, social, and economic justice in the South. In the Old North State — and nationwide — these tactics commonly include in-person voter intimidation at the polls, periodic purges of voter rolls, the spread of misinformation, voter ID requirements, and felony disenfranchisement laws, she says.

This year, the pandemic and the divisive nature of politics bring additional concerns. While in 2016, about 25 percent of total votes were cast by mail, this year that portion will be almost twice that, according to the Pew Research Center — and voting in a new way comes with its own complications. “It doesn’t have to be active voter misinformation as much as confusion,” says Roblez. At the same time, many residents have concerns about the effectiveness of the postal service itself, prompted by budget cuts and policy changes put in place over the summer.

“It doesn’t have to be active voter misinformation as much as confusion.”

The increased number of demonstrations by white supremacist and neo-Confederate groups is also worrisome, Roblez says. “What we’re most concerned about in some of the more rural areas is . . . Confederate parades coming to the polls,” she says, recalling how last February, demonstrators hung Confederate flags at a polling site in Alamance County, North Carolina.

Social distancing requirements will also necessitate larger polling places, which can put rural precincts, with less infrastructure available, at a disadvantage. “In an instance where a bigger polling location is needed, they might close two others that are smaller, but that [new] location may not be as accessible,” explains Joselle Torres of Democracy NC.

White-Williamson remembers seeing voter suppression growing up in Sampson County — a particular business owner showing up at the polls to confuse and discourage Black voters, for example — but she hasn’t been aware of polling-place suppression efforts in recent years.

Still, she could see it happening this year. George Floyd was originally from Clinton, the town where she lives, and after his murder at the hands of a white police officer in May, protestors pulled down the Confederate statue in front of the Sampson County courthouse, sparking heated public debates.

“There are a lot of things fresh on people’s minds,” she says. “As a Republican county, I see the potential for there to be efforts at polling places to discourage voting, like what we’re seeing around the country.”

Jeff Currie, a member of the Lumbee Tribe who works as a riverkeeper protecting the Lumber River watershed, believes the poor education system in low-income parts of the state also has a role to play in the area’s disenfranchisement.

“If the education system is not saying ‘vote,’ people don’t understand what voting is — they lack civics training and education and the cultural sense that that’s what you do,” he says.

As Election Day approaches, Democracy NC and Forward Justice are placing volunteer vote protectors at polling places across the state who “are ready and trained to sound the alarm” if they see signs of suppression, adds Torres.

Chuck Liddy/Raleigh News & Observer/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

A pig at Silky Pork Farms in Duplin County, North Carolina

Corporations over constituents

While legislators have tried to limit voting, the hog and chicken industries in eastern North Carolina have grown exponentially in ways that damage their surroundings, residents say. In the 1970s, family farmers in North Carolina raised an average of 60 pigs per farm, and the animals were free to roam around outside. That began to change in the 1980s and ’90s, however, as state lawmakers like teacher and farmer Wendell Murphy sponsored and helped pass bills that shielded large-scale hog farms from local zoning regulations and gave the industry subsidies and tax exemptions.

Now, North Carolina ranks second in the country for the number of hogs it produces, and the state’s average hog farm houses more than 4,000 animals. The 4.5 million hogs in Duplin and Sampson counties — the top two hog-producing counties in the country — produce 4 billion gallons of wet waste a year, making up 40 percent of the North Carolina’s total. The waste is stored in open-air pits and periodically sprayed on nearby fields.

The foul-smelling chemicals the facilities release — ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, in particular — have been associated with difficulty breathing, blood pressure spikes, increased stress and anxiety, and decreased quality of life. Additionally, a 2018 study found higher death rates of all studied diseases — including infant mortality, mortality due to anemia, kidney disease, tuberculosis, septicemia — among communities located near hog CAFOs.

The 4.5 million hogs in Duplin and Sampson counties produce 4 billion gallons of waste a year. The waste is stored in open-air pits.

For years, residents have spoken out about their suffering. They’ve told their representatives that the odor from the facilities forces them indoors all the time; they can’t sit on their porches, play in their yards, open their windows, or hang their laundry on the line; they have to buy bottled water rather than drinking from their wells; and “dead boxes” containing pig carcasses line the roads, and buzzards, flies, gnats fill the air.

And yet, says Naeema Muhammad, organizing co-director of the NC EJN, the state legislators and regulatory agencies don’t listen — and repeatedly prioritize large corporations as they make decisions about the permitting and regulation of these facilities. Time after time, she says, “legislators pass bills unmistakably against their constituents, in favor of the industry.”

In 2013, 500 residents of eastern North Carolina filed nuisance suits against the Chinese-owned Smithfield subsidiary Murphy-Brown, LLC, which owns the majority of the hogs in the state, complaining of the health problems and unpleasant ills the company subjected them to. In a victory for the hog-farm neighbors, juries ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in the first five of the more than 20 cases to be tried, awarding the 10 plaintiffs in the first lawsuit more than $50 million in damages. (This number was reduced to a total of $3.25 million due to the state’s punitive-damages cap.) The industry is currently appealing the ruling.

As these lawsuits worked their way through the justice system, though, Herring watched in horror as her county’s representative in the state legislature, Jimmy Dixon, sponsored a bill that tied the hands of disadvantaged people looking for protection from factory farm pollution. The bill, passed in 2017, limits the compensation plaintiffs can receive in civil suits like the Smithfield case to a sum related to the diminished value of their property, and prevents them from receiving damages related to health, quality of life, and lost income.

Dixon, who did not respond to a request for comment in this story, said the bill was designed to protect farmers from the “greedy” lawyers who would sue them. “This bill is designed to protect 50,000 hardworking North Carolina farmers who are feeding a hungry world,” Dixon wrote in a 2017 op-ed in The Raleigh News & Observer.

In 2018, Senator and farmer Brent Jackson sponsored a similar bill that practically eliminates the right of residents to sue industrial hog operations by declaring that agricultural operations cannot be considered nuisances if they employ practices generally accepted in the region (like spraying hog waste on fields, for example). “With Senate Bill 711 on the books, we don’t have a leg to stand on,” Herring says. “We have to take what they give us, and [we don’t] have an avenue for recourse.”

Though legislators say they have the interests of farmers and consumers in mind, Muhammad thinks it’s more about campaign contributions. “You have people in power that are owned by the corporations — they’ve taken so much money from them, even if they wanted to do better, the industries would go after them,” she says.

John Althouse/AFP via Getty Images

In 1999, floodwaters from Hurricane Floyd engulfed a Burgaw, North Carolina hog waste lagoon.

Disproportionately polluting poor and minority communities

Those most affected by CAFO pollution are people of color. Duplin and Sampson counties have the highest share of Latinx residents in the state, with 23 and almost 21 percent, respectively. The residents of these two counties are also about 25 and 26 percent Black, as compared with the statewide average of 22 percent.

In 2014, NC EJN, Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help (REACH), and Waterkeeper Alliance filed a Title VI Civil Rights complaint with the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. EPA claiming the North Carolina environmental regulatory agency allowed industrial swine facilities in the state to operate “with grossly inadequate and outdated systems of controlling animal waste and little provision for government oversight” — and that they had an “unjustified disproportionate impact on the basis of race” against Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people.

In 2018, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) settled the complaint, and this year, they put measures in place including a program of air and water monitoring near hog operations and involving impacted community members in permitting decisions. “I believe there’s a group of people [at the DEQ] who are trying to do the right thing,” says Muhammad. “With more collaboration with communities, we’ve seen some change. But you have a body of people who want to hold onto those old ways.”

In the name of “creating jobs,” governing bodies allow all sorts of polluting industries to cluster in communities of color.

Another complicating factor is the fact that the state has cut the regulatory agency’s budget year after year. “If you don’t have the budget to hire the staff to do the inspections, that’s a problem,” White-Williamson says.

While the size of pork industry has stabilized since a moratorium on new facilities with the lagoon-and-sprayfield system went into effect in 1997, no such limit was put in place on chicken operations, and as a result, the size of the poultry industry has tripled since then.

According to a report released this summer by the Waterkeeper Alliance and Environmental Working Group, between 2012 and 2019, the estimated number of chickens and turkeys in Duplin, Sampson, and Robeson counties increased by 36 percent to 113 million, compared to only 17 percent in the rest of the state. The racial disparities continue as well: In Robeson County, 42 percent of residents identify as Native American — compared to 1.6 in the state as a whole, according to 2018 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The concentration of chicken CAFOs worries environmental advocates, because rather than being kept in pits, the drier chicken feces is stored in large, uncovered piles and runs off into waterways when it rains. North Carolina chickens produce three times more nitrogen and six times more phosphorous than its hogs, causing environmental damage like toxic algal blooms and fish kills.

Unlike with hogs, the chicken industry does not have to notify the government when it opens a new facility, even if it is in an area prone to floods. As a result, the state environmental regulation agency often does not even know where chicken CAFOs are located, and inspections occur only when a complaint arises.

Lumber Riverkeeper Jeff Currie, who can smell poultry CAFOs from his house, says in the two years that have passed since Hurricane Florence, he’s documented 17 new operations consisting of 320 new barns in the watersheds he watches over.

Currie points out that, in the name of “creating jobs,” governing bodies allow all sorts of polluting industries to cluster in communities of color. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and a controversial wood pellet plant were both slated to be built in low-income communities of color in the area this year. While the pipeline was cancelled in July, the pellet plant is on its way to completion. If you don’t have the money to hire a private attorney and exert influence, Currie says, “you get dumped on.”

The effects of disenfranchisement

The environmental injustices piled onto low-income communities of color stem in part from their lack of political influence; disenfranchisement efforts on the part of politicians and parties who’d like to stay in power only make it worse.

Eastern North Carolina residents say that even without the state’s attempts to make voting difficult for them, the democratic process is frustrating, because when it comes to protecting them from agricultural pollution, there are no candidates who actually represent their interests.

“You get to the point where you’re like, what’s the point?” Currie says. “It’s not party-based — they all took the money. So who do you go to to try to get a bill introduced to end poultry operations in the 100-year floodplain?”

It’s going to be hard to reverse a lot of the environmental damage that has been done, as well as the cultural and racial damage.

White-Williamson believes even if solid state- and federal-level lawmakers were elected in 2020, it would take decades to recover from the damage that has resulted from the regulatory rollbacks, budgetary priorities, and culture of hatred that elected officials have promoted over the last few years. “It’s going to be hard to reverse a lot of the environmental damage that has been done, as well as the cultural and racial damage,” she says. “I feel like this is going to [take] almost a generation to straighten out.”

Muhammad is similarly concerned. “I’ve looked at everybody running from the federal level down to the local level, and I don’t hold out hope it’ll be a process that’ll bring about a lot of change,” she says.

And yet, despite the lack of strong local representation on CAFOs, many eastern North Carolina residents are still motivated by a desire to see change at the top, and they’re mobilizing to help each other get out the vote. Because, despite the roadblocks placed in their way and their lack of expectation for change, they have hope that things can get better — they offer as examples the victory in the Smithfield nuisance cases and the collapse of the oil pipeline project. Though the overall system is structured against them, they’ve seen small successes, and they plan to keep at it.

“If we have to continue to fight for the right to vote, so be it,” Herring says. “Whatever the issue is in our communities that is keeping us from living the best lives we can for our families and children, we have to organize, stay informed, hold meetings, make trips, write letters, make phone calls — do whatever we have to do to keep the issue on the forefront until we bring about change. We can’t give up.”

• Fighting Voter Suppression, Environmental Racism, and Corporate Agriculture in Hog Country [Civil Eats]

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A voter waits in line a polling place in Black Mountain, North Carolina | Photo by Brian Blanco/Getty Images

In an election like none before it, the residents of North Carolina’s hog- and poultry-intensive eastern counties are fighting to regain the power of their vote

This story was originally published on Civil Eats.

Elsie Herring spends many days documenting and responding to complaints from her neighbors — about everything from the stench coming off of factory farms to the clearcutting of trees for timber to the emissions from nearby factories. But lately, when Herring, a community organizer for the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network (EJN), gets a call, she’s also been making sure the person on the other end of the line has a plan in place to vote.

With almost two million swine within its borders, Herring’s native Duplin County in eastern North Carolina is the top hog-producing county in the United States. And because many residents have pre-existing health conditions, in part from living alongside the waste produced by so many animals, many are choosing to mail their ballots in this year rather than venture to the polls, where COVID-19 presents an additional threat.

But, in a part of the state home to many people of color, Herring worries about reports of minority ballot rejection rates. In North Carolina, the ballots of white voters are being rejected at a rate of .5 percent, while Black voters’ ballots are being rejected at a 1.8 percent rate and Native American voters’ ballots are being rejected at a 4 percent rate (eight times more than white voters’), according to October 21 data from the U.S. Elections Project.

Voter suppression and environmental injustice often perpetuate and compound each other.

“They’re disproportionate, and right there, that tells me they’re trying to suppress the Black votes,” Herring says. “That has always been their focus, to suppress our vote and not allow us the right.”

And so, she carefully walks her neighbors through the mail-in voting process: “We’re telling them to be careful and aware of what they’re writing and not writing on their ballots. The witness name has to be printed, and you have to have their signature and address. If that’s not there, they kick it out.”

Herring’s fears about the suppression of minority votes are not ill-founded, given recent and long-term efforts in North Carolina. Over the last decade, the state’s General Assembly, which the Republican party has controlled since 2010, has gerrymandered voting district maps along racial lines and passed numerous laws aimed at making it harder for minorities to vote (though many of the measures have not held up in court and are no longer in place).

In the midst of these ongoing efforts, many Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities in the eastern part of the state say they’ve repeatedly watched as their elected officials promote the interests of hog and poultry companies over their safety and well-being — as evidenced by the number and density of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) permitted in their communities and the ineffectiveness of the facilities’ waste-disposal systems.

In addition to enabling the industry to concentrate around low-income communities of color, residents say state lawmakers have limited the tools those communities once had at their disposal to protest the resulting pollution.

Voter suppression and environmental injustice often perpetuate and compound each other: Without people in office to protect their interests, polluting industries such as the state’s industrial hog and poultry operations proliferate and remain largely unchecked, Herring says. And when industries pollute with little consequence, damaging the health and quality of life of the people around them, people are less likely to prioritize getting to the polls, especially given the fact that many are already dealing with myriad other issues, including poverty, food and housing insecurity, and lack of quality education and access to healthcare.

“It’s particularly troubling that when someone who is harmed by all these cumulative impacts seeks to remedy that . . . they find [that] the legislature in recent years has taken very intentional steps to deprive them of long-available remedies,” says Will Hendrick, staff attorney and manager of the Waterkeeper Alliance’s North Carolina Pure Farms, Pure Waters campaign.

“The reaction is, ‘My vote won’t matter — corporations control everything, and that won’t change.’”

Sherri White-Williamson, who worked for years in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office for Environmental Justice before returning two years ago to her hometown in Sampson County, says she has tried to encourage young people in her town to vote. “The reaction is, ‘Why should I? My vote won’t matter — they [corporations] control everything, and that won’t change,’” says White-Williamson, who now works as the NC Conservation Network’s environmental justice policy director. “People who live in communities and get stuff dumped on them feel less empowered to be able to effect any change.”

As a swing state that voted for Barack Obama in 2008, Mitt Romney in 2012, and Donald Trump in 2016, North Carolina will be pivotal in this election. The U.S. Senate race between Republican incumbent Thom Tillis and his Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham could affect which party controls Congress as well. And while there are many conservative parts of the state, the demographics are changing as metropolitan areas continue to grow and more Latinx and young people register to vote.

Despite the factors stacked against them — made worse by the pandemic — Herring says many people in eastern North Carolina are still determined to make their voices heard. This year, groups like the one she’s involved with are working to educate voters and ensure they have transportation to the polls. And while Herring’s biggest concern is that her community’s votes will be under attack, she asks: “What can we do to combat that? I don’t know, other than just showing up at the polls to bring about a change.”

Photo by Logan Cyrus/AFP via Getty Images

An employee of the Mecklenburg County Board of Election in Charlotte, North Carolina holds up instructions that are mailed with absentee ballots for the 2020 election.

Suppressing the vote

In 2011, Republicans gained control of both of North Carolina’s Congressional houses and redrew the legislative district maps in the once-a-decade redistricting process to favor their party. In 2017, a district court and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the maps were illegally racially gerrymandered, meant to dilute the voice of Black voters. Two years after lawmakers submitted new maps, federal judges struck down the voting districts again, this time as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders, saying they had been drawn with “surgical precision” — and were among the most manipulated in the nation. Lawmakers were ordered a second time to redraw the maps, which will be redone yet again in 2021, based on the 2020 Census.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in the state have made two other attempts at passing voter suppression laws. HB 589, one of the most dramatic voting rights rollbacks in the U.S., was overturned in federal court after it had been in effect for several years, and the voter ID requirement HB 1092 was blocked by a federal judge.

“There are a lot of different ways people are trying to cut back who is eligible to vote, whose votes count after they are cast, and who is going to feel comfortable voting,” says Kat Roblez, staff attorney with Forward Justice, a nonpartisan organization advancing racial, social, and economic justice in the South. In the Old North State — and nationwide — these tactics commonly include in-person voter intimidation at the polls, periodic purges of voter rolls, the spread of misinformation, voter ID requirements, and felony disenfranchisement laws, she says.

This year, the pandemic and the divisive nature of politics bring additional concerns. While in 2016, about 25 percent of total votes were cast by mail, this year that portion will be almost twice that, according to the Pew Research Center — and voting in a new way comes with its own complications. “It doesn’t have to be active voter misinformation as much as confusion,” says Roblez. At the same time, many residents have concerns about the effectiveness of the postal service itself, prompted by budget cuts and policy changes put in place over the summer.

“It doesn’t have to be active voter misinformation as much as confusion.”

The increased number of demonstrations by white supremacist and neo-Confederate groups is also worrisome, Roblez says. “What we’re most concerned about in some of the more rural areas is . . . Confederate parades coming to the polls,” she says, recalling how last February, demonstrators hung Confederate flags at a polling site in Alamance County, North Carolina.

Social distancing requirements will also necessitate larger polling places, which can put rural precincts, with less infrastructure available, at a disadvantage. “In an instance where a bigger polling location is needed, they might close two others that are smaller, but that [new] location may not be as accessible,” explains Joselle Torres of Democracy NC.

White-Williamson remembers seeing voter suppression growing up in Sampson County — a particular business owner showing up at the polls to confuse and discourage Black voters, for example — but she hasn’t been aware of polling-place suppression efforts in recent years.

Still, she could see it happening this year. George Floyd was originally from Clinton, the town where she lives, and after his murder at the hands of a white police officer in May, protestors pulled down the Confederate statue in front of the Sampson County courthouse, sparking heated public debates.

“There are a lot of things fresh on people’s minds,” she says. “As a Republican county, I see the potential for there to be efforts at polling places to discourage voting, like what we’re seeing around the country.”

Jeff Currie, a member of the Lumbee Tribe who works as a riverkeeper protecting the Lumber River watershed, believes the poor education system in low-income parts of the state also has a role to play in the area’s disenfranchisement.

“If the education system is not saying ‘vote,’ people don’t understand what voting is — they lack civics training and education and the cultural sense that that’s what you do,” he says.

As Election Day approaches, Democracy NC and Forward Justice are placing volunteer vote protectors at polling places across the state who “are ready and trained to sound the alarm” if they see signs of suppression, adds Torres.

Chuck Liddy/Raleigh News & Observer/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

A pig at Silky Pork Farms in Duplin County, North Carolina

Corporations over constituents

While legislators have tried to limit voting, the hog and chicken industries in eastern North Carolina have grown exponentially in ways that damage their surroundings, residents say. In the 1970s, family farmers in North Carolina raised an average of 60 pigs per farm, and the animals were free to roam around outside. That began to change in the 1980s and ’90s, however, as state lawmakers like teacher and farmer Wendell Murphy sponsored and helped pass bills that shielded large-scale hog farms from local zoning regulations and gave the industry subsidies and tax exemptions.

Now, North Carolina ranks second in the country for the number of hogs it produces, and the state’s average hog farm houses more than 4,000 animals. The 4.5 million hogs in Duplin and Sampson counties — the top two hog-producing counties in the country — produce 4 billion gallons of wet waste a year, making up 40 percent of the North Carolina’s total. The waste is stored in open-air pits and periodically sprayed on nearby fields.

The foul-smelling chemicals the facilities release — ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, in particular — have been associated with difficulty breathing, blood pressure spikes, increased stress and anxiety, and decreased quality of life. Additionally, a 2018 study found higher death rates of all studied diseases — including infant mortality, mortality due to anemia, kidney disease, tuberculosis, septicemia — among communities located near hog CAFOs.

The 4.5 million hogs in Duplin and Sampson counties produce 4 billion gallons of waste a year. The waste is stored in open-air pits.

For years, residents have spoken out about their suffering. They’ve told their representatives that the odor from the facilities forces them indoors all the time; they can’t sit on their porches, play in their yards, open their windows, or hang their laundry on the line; they have to buy bottled water rather than drinking from their wells; and “dead boxes” containing pig carcasses line the roads, and buzzards, flies, gnats fill the air.

And yet, says Naeema Muhammad, organizing co-director of the NC EJN, the state legislators and regulatory agencies don’t listen — and repeatedly prioritize large corporations as they make decisions about the permitting and regulation of these facilities. Time after time, she says, “legislators pass bills unmistakably against their constituents, in favor of the industry.”

In 2013, 500 residents of eastern North Carolina filed nuisance suits against the Chinese-owned Smithfield subsidiary Murphy-Brown, LLC, which owns the majority of the hogs in the state, complaining of the health problems and unpleasant ills the company subjected them to. In a victory for the hog-farm neighbors, juries ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in the first five of the more than 20 cases to be tried, awarding the 10 plaintiffs in the first lawsuit more than $50 million in damages. (This number was reduced to a total of $3.25 million due to the state’s punitive-damages cap.) The industry is currently appealing the ruling.

As these lawsuits worked their way through the justice system, though, Herring watched in horror as her county’s representative in the state legislature, Jimmy Dixon, sponsored a bill that tied the hands of disadvantaged people looking for protection from factory farm pollution. The bill, passed in 2017, limits the compensation plaintiffs can receive in civil suits like the Smithfield case to a sum related to the diminished value of their property, and prevents them from receiving damages related to health, quality of life, and lost income.

Dixon, who did not respond to a request for comment in this story, said the bill was designed to protect farmers from the “greedy” lawyers who would sue them. “This bill is designed to protect 50,000 hardworking North Carolina farmers who are feeding a hungry world,” Dixon wrote in a 2017 op-ed in The Raleigh News & Observer.

In 2018, Senator and farmer Brent Jackson sponsored a similar bill that practically eliminates the right of residents to sue industrial hog operations by declaring that agricultural operations cannot be considered nuisances if they employ practices generally accepted in the region (like spraying hog waste on fields, for example). “With Senate Bill 711 on the books, we don’t have a leg to stand on,” Herring says. “We have to take what they give us, and [we don’t] have an avenue for recourse.”

Though legislators say they have the interests of farmers and consumers in mind, Muhammad thinks it’s more about campaign contributions. “You have people in power that are owned by the corporations — they’ve taken so much money from them, even if they wanted to do better, the industries would go after them,” she says.

John Althouse/AFP via Getty Images

In 1999, floodwaters from Hurricane Floyd engulfed a Burgaw, North Carolina hog waste lagoon.

Disproportionately polluting poor and minority communities

Those most affected by CAFO pollution are people of color. Duplin and Sampson counties have the highest share of Latinx residents in the state, with 23 and almost 21 percent, respectively. The residents of these two counties are also about 25 and 26 percent Black, as compared with the statewide average of 22 percent.

In 2014, NC EJN, Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help (REACH), and Waterkeeper Alliance filed a Title VI Civil Rights complaint with the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. EPA claiming the North Carolina environmental regulatory agency allowed industrial swine facilities in the state to operate “with grossly inadequate and outdated systems of controlling animal waste and little provision for government oversight” — and that they had an “unjustified disproportionate impact on the basis of race” against Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people.

In 2018, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) settled the complaint, and this year, they put measures in place including a program of air and water monitoring near hog operations and involving impacted community members in permitting decisions. “I believe there’s a group of people [at the DEQ] who are trying to do the right thing,” says Muhammad. “With more collaboration with communities, we’ve seen some change. But you have a body of people who want to hold onto those old ways.”

In the name of “creating jobs,” governing bodies allow all sorts of polluting industries to cluster in communities of color.

Another complicating factor is the fact that the state has cut the regulatory agency’s budget year after year. “If you don’t have the budget to hire the staff to do the inspections, that’s a problem,” White-Williamson says.

While the size of pork industry has stabilized since a moratorium on new facilities with the lagoon-and-sprayfield system went into effect in 1997, no such limit was put in place on chicken operations, and as a result, the size of the poultry industry has tripled since then.

According to a report released this summer by the Waterkeeper Alliance and Environmental Working Group, between 2012 and 2019, the estimated number of chickens and turkeys in Duplin, Sampson, and Robeson counties increased by 36 percent to 113 million, compared to only 17 percent in the rest of the state. The racial disparities continue as well: In Robeson County, 42 percent of residents identify as Native American — compared to 1.6 in the state as a whole, according to 2018 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The concentration of chicken CAFOs worries environmental advocates, because rather than being kept in pits, the drier chicken feces is stored in large, uncovered piles and runs off into waterways when it rains. North Carolina chickens produce three times more nitrogen and six times more phosphorous than its hogs, causing environmental damage like toxic algal blooms and fish kills.

Unlike with hogs, the chicken industry does not have to notify the government when it opens a new facility, even if it is in an area prone to floods. As a result, the state environmental regulation agency often does not even know where chicken CAFOs are located, and inspections occur only when a complaint arises.

Lumber Riverkeeper Jeff Currie, who can smell poultry CAFOs from his house, says in the two years that have passed since Hurricane Florence, he’s documented 17 new operations consisting of 320 new barns in the watersheds he watches over.

Currie points out that, in the name of “creating jobs,” governing bodies allow all sorts of polluting industries to cluster in communities of color. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and a controversial wood pellet plant were both slated to be built in low-income communities of color in the area this year. While the pipeline was cancelled in July, the pellet plant is on its way to completion. If you don’t have the money to hire a private attorney and exert influence, Currie says, “you get dumped on.”

The effects of disenfranchisement

The environmental injustices piled onto low-income communities of color stem in part from their lack of political influence; disenfranchisement efforts on the part of politicians and parties who’d like to stay in power only make it worse.

Eastern North Carolina residents say that even without the state’s attempts to make voting difficult for them, the democratic process is frustrating, because when it comes to protecting them from agricultural pollution, there are no candidates who actually represent their interests.

“You get to the point where you’re like, what’s the point?” Currie says. “It’s not party-based — they all took the money. So who do you go to to try to get a bill introduced to end poultry operations in the 100-year floodplain?”

It’s going to be hard to reverse a lot of the environmental damage that has been done, as well as the cultural and racial damage.

White-Williamson believes even if solid state- and federal-level lawmakers were elected in 2020, it would take decades to recover from the damage that has resulted from the regulatory rollbacks, budgetary priorities, and culture of hatred that elected officials have promoted over the last few years. “It’s going to be hard to reverse a lot of the environmental damage that has been done, as well as the cultural and racial damage,” she says. “I feel like this is going to [take] almost a generation to straighten out.”

Muhammad is similarly concerned. “I’ve looked at everybody running from the federal level down to the local level, and I don’t hold out hope it’ll be a process that’ll bring about a lot of change,” she says.

And yet, despite the lack of strong local representation on CAFOs, many eastern North Carolina residents are still motivated by a desire to see change at the top, and they’re mobilizing to help each other get out the vote. Because, despite the roadblocks placed in their way and their lack of expectation for change, they have hope that things can get better — they offer as examples the victory in the Smithfield nuisance cases and the collapse of the oil pipeline project. Though the overall system is structured against them, they’ve seen small successes, and they plan to keep at it.

“If we have to continue to fight for the right to vote, so be it,” Herring says. “Whatever the issue is in our communities that is keeping us from living the best lives we can for our families and children, we have to organize, stay informed, hold meetings, make trips, write letters, make phone calls — do whatever we have to do to keep the issue on the forefront until we bring about change. We can’t give up.”

• Fighting Voter Suppression, Environmental Racism, and Corporate Agriculture in Hog Country [Civil Eats]

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/31HCIWv via Blogger https://ift.tt/3orBhVR

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Only two African-Americans — neither of them women — have ever been elected governor. But this year, Democrats have chosen black men to be their gubernatorial nominees in Florida and Maryland and a black woman in Georgia, creating the potential for a huge breakthrough for African-Americans at the state level.

It’s unlikely that all three candidates will win — and entirely possible that all three will lose. Moreover, the three candidates stand wildly different chances, according to FiveThirtyEight’s newly launched governors forecast.

In Maryland, Ben Jealous, a former head of the NAACP, is a heavy underdog, according to our forecast. He has less than a 1 in 100 (or less than 1 percent) chance of winning. A poll released last week found him trailing by 20 percentage points, and it was not an outlier.

You might be surprised that Jealous is so far behind. After all, Maryland is solidly blue in presidential elections, it has a large black population (about 30 percent of the electorate) and the state’s white voters are not adamantly opposed to voting for Democrats, like they are in some other states.7 (More on that in a moment.)

Jealous’s problem is simple: Incumbent Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, first elected in 2014, is really, really popular. In a recent Goucher College poll, Hogan’s approval rating was 64 percent; his disapproval rating was 17 percent. Goucher also found that Hogan is winning about a third of the state’s Democrats in his race against Jealous, a strong performance from a Republican. So Jealous is very likely to lose, but I don’t think that says much about him, his campaign or black candidates in Maryland or the U.S. Again, Hogan is just super popular.

In contrast, former Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams and Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum have very real chances in Georgia and Florida, respectively.

Gillum is in a better position than Abrams, according to our forecast. Gillum has a 7 in 10 (70 percent) chance of defeating Republican Ron DeSantis, a former U.S. House member. Gillum has led DeSantis in nearly every nonpartisan poll of the race, although his leads are small and generally within the margin of error. Abrams, meanwhile, is an underdog, but only a slight one — she has a 3 in 7 (43 percent) chance of defeating Republican Brian Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state.

Why are Gillum’s prospects better than Abrams’s? The mayor has two big advantages compared with Abrams. First, Florida is a shade bluer than Georgia: Obama narrowly won Florida in 2008 and 2012, and Hillary Clinton barely lost it in 2016. Second, Gillum’s opponent, DeSantis, has never won a statewide race,8 unlike Abrams’s opponent.

A Gillum victory is far from guaranteed, however. DeSantis’s chances, 3 in 10, are about the same as President Trump’s were nationwide on Election Day in 2016, according to FiveThirtyEight’s forecast. Indeed, Democrats tend to struggle in statewide, state-level races in Florida, compared with federal contests such as those for the U.S. Senate and president. The state-level races typically take place in midterm election years, when the electorate in Florida is usually much smaller than it is for presidential elections. The last time a Democrat won one of the state’s four major constitutional elected offices9 was 2006. Also, even though Trump has dismal approval ratings in other Obama-Trump states, such as Michigan and Wisconsin, his numbers have held up relatively well in Florida. That means he might not be as big of a drag on DeSantis as he is on other GOP gubernatorial candidates.

The Abrams race is a bit more complicated. Polls show it’s very close; the most recent survey found Kemp ahead of her 48 percent to 46 percent. But it’s not too hard to see why her road is tougher than Gillum’s. Georgia is redder than Florida. Trump’s 5-percentage-point victory was fairly narrow, but Mitt Romney carried the state by 8 points in 2012. And the last time Democrats won a major statewide race in Georgia — including for Senate or president — was 2006.

One key difference between the two states: White voters are more Republican-leaning in Georgia. Democratic candidates have been getting less than 25 percent of the white vote in Georgia in recent elections. In Florida, meanwhile, Clinton won 32 percent of white voters in 2016, and Obama won 37 percent in 2012. And even though Georgia has a smaller share of white residents than all but five states, nearly 60 percent of its voting-age population is white. To win, Abrams probably needs close to 30 percent of the white vote,10 and that’s been a real challenge for Democratic candidates in Georgia.11

Finally, since we are talking about black candidates, I should probably address how much I think being black helps or hurts Abrams and Gillum. During their primaries, Abrams and Gillum argued that Democratic voters should be open to them in part because they were non-traditional candidates — Florida and Georgia Democrats have tapped white, moderate candidates for governor in recent election cycles and lost each time. And Abrams and Gillum backers argued that those two candidates could boost black and millennial turnout, creating an alternative path to victory.

But supporters of the white candidates who ran against Abrams and Gillum in the Democratic primaries this year hinted that the white candidates would do better in the general election than the black candidates. The implication, usually not stated directly, is that white, moderate voters in the South might be wary of Trump and back some Democratic candidates in the midterms, but perhaps not a Democrat who is also black. Gillum, I should note, was also significantly more liberal than his main rival in the Democratic primary, former U.S. House member Gwen Graham. So if he loses the general election, there will be some debate over whether it was because of race, ideology or some combination of both.

Research into race and electability is rather inconclusive. So in trying to look at how being black might affect Abrams and Gillum, I looked at some demographic breakdowns in the polls we have so far in these two contests. A recent survey found that Abrams is carrying about 25 percent of the white vote, a standard number for a Democrat of any ethnicity running in Georgia but one that will make it difficult for her to win. Gillum, meanwhile, has the support of 35 percent to 40 percent of Florida’s white voters, according to recent surveys. That’s a fairly typical level for a Democrat in Florida and suggests that his contest will be very close. But we’re talking about fairly small samples of white voters, so I’m reluctant to draw too much from these polls. It’s also not clear from the polling whether minority or young voters in Florida and Georgia will turn out at higher rates for Abrams or Gillum than they did for previous Democratic candidates.

In other words, you can explain the electoral prospects of all three black gubernatorial candidates without putting their race front and center. So far, Abrams, Gillum and Jealous are performing about how you would expect any Democrat to perform in their respective situations. That said, it will be interesting to see on election night whether Abrams and Gillum, in closely contested races, are able to generate higher-than-projected minority turnout, which might suggest a new path for Democrats competing in the South — focusing more on turning out non-white voters than wooing white centrists. Alternatively, if white voters end up turning against Abrams and Gillum even more than the white Democratic candidates who ran in these states before, that will be interpreted as a sign that nominating a black candidate imposes an additional electoral barrier on Democrats in a region where they are already weak.

[ericvick]

What Prop. 22's defeat would mean for Uber and Lyft — and drivers

(Ross May / Los Angeles Times; Getty Images)

One way or another, the business of summoning a ride from your phone is likely to look different in California after Nov. 3.

The future of gig work could hinge on the success or failure of Proposition 22, called the App-Based Drivers as Contractors and Labor Policies Initiative. Uber, Lyft and other companies bankrolling the initiative say it would improve workers’ quality of life, providing new benefits while preserving their autonomy. If passed, the measure would cement gig workers’ status as independent contractors, dealing a huge blow to a labor movement striving to bolster protections for workers at the margins.

Gig companies’ business models rely on hiring large numbers of workers cheaply as independent contractors to provide rides, deliver meals and groceries and perform other services. Assembly Bill 5, a state law passed in 2019, aimed to expand protections to these workers, requiring gig companies to reclassify them as employees.

Proposition 22 represents the companies’ efforts to battle that law and the obligations that come with it.

Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and Postmates (which was recently acquired by Uber) have jointly poured close to $200 million into the “yes” campaign, flooding the airwaves and their own apps with ads and making the measure the costliest in U.S. history.

At the heart of it all is a vicious fight to shape the prospects of hundreds of thousands of drivers and delivery workers across the state.

Here’s what you need to know.

What would happen if Proposition 22 passes?

The text of Proposition 22 assures drivers they would maintain flexibility as independent contractors. The measure offers some benefits similar to those conferred under AB 5, but significantly weaker.

Gig companies thus far have resisted compliance with AB 5, which went into effect Jan. 1. In early August, a judge ordered Uber and Lyft to convert their drivers to employees. At the 11th hour, the companies won a temporary stay of the order from a state appeals court, effectively pushing off the deadline until after voters have their say.

Story continues

Uber and Lyft presented oral arguments before California’s 1st District Court of Appeal on Tuesday. The court has 90 days to decide whether it will uphold the lower-court ruling. But Proposition 22, if passed, would override protections granted by AB 5.

The measure instead would grant 120% of the minimum wage (state or local, depending on where the driver is). However, this minimum narrowly applies to “engaged time,” meaning the time a driver is on a trip with a passenger or en route to pick up a passenger. One study found drivers spend one-third of their time waiting between passengers or returning from trips, time that would not count toward the minimum wage.

Under Proposition 22, workers would also receive reimbursement of 30 cents for each “engaged” mile, but employee status would entitle drivers to 57.5 cents for each mile driven, in accordance with Internal Revenue Service guidance.

The proposition also includes a healthcare subsidy and occupational accident insurance to cover on-the-job injuries.

If gig companies complied with AB 5, workers would have access to the full slate of benefits, including overtime pay for time worked past 40 hours a week, paid sick leave, unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation.

A recent report by UC Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment found employee status would increase total driver compensation by about 30%.

What would the companies sponsoring Proposition 22 do if it fails?

Uber Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi detailed what he called “the high cost” of making drivers employees in a recent blog post. He said that if Uber employed drivers, the company would be able to hire only 260,000 people full time, out of the nearly 1.2 million drivers in the U.S. before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Specifically in California, Uber projects the number of active drivers the platform could accommodate would fall by 75% if it was forced to treat drivers as employees. Increased labor costs would cause fares to rise 25% to 111%, the company says.

It’s unlikely the companies will follow through on their threat to leave California, one of their biggest markets, said Michael Reich, a labor economist at UC Berkeley who has studied Proposition 22’s effect on drivers extensively and whose work informed ride-hailing regulation adopted in New York. California accounts for about 16% of Lyft’s business and 9% of Uber’s global rides and Uber Eats gross bookings. However, the state represents a negligible fraction of adjusted earnings, Uber has said, according to Reuters.

Instead, the companies will probably continue to challenge AB 5 in the courts, including at the appellate and state Supreme Court levels in California, and then appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Reich said. That process would take one to two years.

Although California is the first state to challenge how Uber and Lyft classify drivers (with Massachusetts in a close second place), cities that have instituted minimum wage protections, including New York and Seattle, offer clues as to what a future under AB 5 could look like. In those markets, drivers have been making more hailing rides, Reich said. He predicts even less effect on demand in California from price increases.

“In New York you expect more price sensitivity because you have more transportation — you have the subway, you have more taxis. In California, you don’t have those alternatives,” Reich said.

Crunching the numbers, Reich has a more optimistic view than Uber and Lyft of their ability to transition. He predicts that in California, prices would increase 5% to 10%, while labor costs would go up 25% to 30%. He said Uber’s analysis assumes that every dollar of cost increase translates into a dollar price increase, but that didn’t happen in New York and won’t happen here. He thinks about two-thirds of the cost increase could be offset by greater efficiency in the use of drivers, reduced employee turnover costs and smaller commissions.

Uber’s economist “does not at all explain why the number of drivers would fall so much. She apparently asserts that the company would not hire part-time drivers, even though they would still need them because of the difference between demand during peak and off-peak hours,” Reich said in an email.

In New York, drivers did lose some degree of flexibility, with fewer spots open for new drivers and Uber and Lyft announcing moves to limit access to their apps. The companies locked out drivers at times and in areas of low demand in response to the new regulations, providing a map showing where demand is highest for drivers to find work elsewhere in the city. These changes have been frustrating and even nightmarish for some drivers who say the new system is exhausting to navigate. Labor groups have said the changes by Uber and Lyft were scare tactics meant to undercut new regulations.

One effect of the uncertainty in California’s gig economy that’s already become apparent is the emergence of new players in the state that are willing to comply with AB 5.

Small Texas ride-hailing start-ups Alto and Arcade City have plans to launch in Los Angeles. The two companies employ business models that are completely different from those of the ride-hailing giants.

Arcade City began as a Facebook group connecting thousands of unemployed drivers with residents who needed rides after Uber and Lyft took a yearlong hiatus from Austin when the city tried to impose tighter background checks for drivers. The company offers an interface for drivers who build their own recurring customer base and set their own rates and hours.

Alto hires its drivers as employees and provides them with vehicles. Co-founder and CEO Will Coleman said in an interview that Alto hopes to come to L.A. by the end of November. The start-up has about 200 employees, with plans to hire 100 more.

“We knew this employment model was going to be a question…. We’ve seen the writing on the wall for years,” Coleman said.

If Proposition 22 passes, could it be changed later?

If passed, amending it would require a seven-eighths supermajority of the Legislature — a daunting hurdle.

In California, a law created by ballot measure can be changed only by another ballot measure, unless the original measure specifies otherwise. Because it’s a hassle to push through ballot measures, initiatives will frequently waive this protection and provide opportunity for the measure to be amended by the Legislature.

A two-thirds majority vote is a common benchmark initiatives use. A seven-eighths majority requirement is unheard of.

“I’ve never seen anything like that. The companies are trying to divest the Legislature of any authority,” said William Gould, a labor lawyer and professor emeritus at Stanford University who studies the gig economy.

Additionally, Proposition 22 would remove the teeth AB 5 gave state lawmakers to challenge companies on worker classification, said Charlotte Garden, a labor law professor at Seattle University School of Law. Before, workers who felt they were being denied benefits typically were shunted into employer-controlled arbitration processes, which had little effect, Garden said. AB 5 empowered California’s attorney general and city attorneys in the state’s most populous cities to force companies to provide benefits to workers who met the legal test for employee classification.

Will Proposition 22 have national implications?

Under President Trump, the federal government has been moving in the opposite direction. In September, the Labor Department issued a proposed rule that is friendlier to employers who use independent contractors.

“Under the Obama administration, the Department of Labor was pushing for a more aggressive ability to find someone as an employee, and it was causing a lot of, I would say, uncertainty in the business community,” said Gina Miller, a law partner in Snell & Wilmer’s Orange County office. “The new administration withdrew that guidance.”

That could change, depending on the outcome of the presidential election. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, have voiced support for AB 5 and endorsed a “no” vote on Proposition 22.

Times staff writers Vanessa Martínez, Rahul Mukherjee and Ryan Menezes contributed to this report.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

[techcrunchappcom]

New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/in-tell-all-book-michael-cohen-says-trump-hired-afaux-bama-before-white-house-run-cnn/

In tell-all book, Michael Cohen says Trump hired a 'Faux-Bama' before White House run - CNN

Trump’s disdain for Obama was so extreme that he took his fixation a step further, according to Cohen: Trump hired a “Faux-Bama” to participate in a video in which Trump “ritualistically belittled the first black president and then fired him.”

Cohen’s book, “Disloyal: A Memoir,” doesn’t name the man who was allegedly hired to play Obama or provide a specific date for the incident, but it does include a photograph of Trump sitting behind a desk, facing a Black man wearing a suit with an American flag pin affixed to the lapel. On Trump’s desk are two books, one displaying Obama’s name in large letters.

CNN obtained a copy of Cohen’s book ahead of its Tuesday publication.

As an insider who spent years as Trump’s personal attorney and self-proclaimed “fixer,” Cohen says he is uniquely equipped to unleash on Trump, whom Cohen describes as “a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man” and a person interested in using the presidency exclusively for his personal financial benefit.

But according to federal prosecutors and Cohen’s own guilty pleas, he, too, is a liar and a cheat. In 2018, he pleaded guilty to nine counts of federal crimes, including tax evasion, lying to Congress and campaign-finance violations he and prosecutors have said were done at Trump’s direction to help him win the 2016 presidential election.

CNN has reached out to the White House for comment. In a statement to the Washington Post, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said, “Michael Cohen is a disgraced felon and disbarred lawyer, who lied to Congress. He has lost all credibility, and it’s unsurprising to see his latest attempt to profit off of lies.”

Cohen acknowledges and apologizes for his role in Trump’s rise, saying he was “more than willing to lie, cheat, and bully” to help his long-time boss win the White House. And he recounts the pressure and guilt he experienced as he spoke out against Trump, writing that he considered suicide “as a way to escape the unrelenting insanity” in the weeks prior to testifying to Congress in 2019.

But in the book, he disputes having committed certain crimes to which he has already admitted, portraying himself a victim of the “gangster tactics” of the federal prosecutors of the US Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York.

Still, Cohen’s account of Trump’s personal nature and presidency is damning, and during Cohen’s time in prison, he writes, “I became even more convinced that Trump will never leave office peacefully.”

Trump’s model of a man in power, according to Cohen, is Vladimir Putin, and Trump is described as enamored of Putin’s wealth and unilateral influence, and awestruck by what he sees as the Russian president’s ability to control everything from the country’s press to its financial institutions.

“Locking up your political enemies, criminalizing dissent, terrifying or bankrupting the free press through libel lawsuits — Trump’s all-encompassing vision wasn’t evident to me before he began to run for president,” Cohen writes. “I honestly believe the most extreme ideas about power and its uses only really took shape as he began to seriously contemplate the implications of taking power and how he could leverage it to the absolute maximum level possible.”

But he reiterates his belief that Trump and his campaign officials were too disorganized to have coordinated with the Russians during the 2016 election. “What appeared to be collusion was really a confluence of shared interests in harming Hillary Clinton in any way possible, up to and including interfering in the American election — a subject that caused Trump precisely zero unease,” Cohen writes.

He also argues that, with Trump himself expecting to lose the presidential race, Trump’s goal in cozying up to Putin was to position himself to benefit financially from a planned real-estate development in Moscow after the election.

“By ingratiating himself with Putin, and hinting at changes in American sanctions policy against the country under a Trump Presidency,” Cohen writes, “the Boss was trying to nudge the Moscow Trump Tower project along.” (One of the crimes to which Cohen pleaded guilty was lying to Congress about the duration of the negotiations regarding the Moscow development.)

Cohen also portrays Trump as aspiring to have ties to the Russian president. After Trump sold a Palm Beach mansion he purchased for $41 million to a Russian oligarch named Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million in 2008, Cohen says, Trump told Cohen he believed the real buyer was Putin.

Cohen, however, disputes the validity of a rumored videotape depicting Trump during a trip to Moscow, saying, “this claim never occurred, to the best of my knowledge and investigations.”

But Cohen discloses that during the summer of 2016, he received an anonymous call from a man who said he was in possession of a tape matching its description. Cohen told the caller that he would need to see a few seconds of the tape to determine if it was real, and the caller demanded $20 million before hanging up, never to be heard from again.

Blacks & Latinos, ‘They’re not my people’

If Putin is held in the highest regard in Trump’s mind, Cohen writes, Trump’s own voters rank among those in the lowest. Speaking to Cohen after Trump gathered religious leaders at Trump Tower in the lead up to the 2012 presidential race, an encounter during which they asked to “lay hands” on him, Trump asked Cohen, according to the book: “Can you believe that bullsh*t?…Can you believe people believe that bullsh*t?”

In the wake of Trump’s presidential kickoff announcement in 2015, in which he called Mexicans criminals and rapists, he dismissed concerns that he had alienated Latinos. “Plus, I will never get the Hispanic vote,” Trump allegedly told Cohen. “Like the blacks, they’re too stupid to vote for Trump. They’re not my people.” (Trump won 28% of the Latino vote in 2016.)

Trump’s contempt, in Cohen’s telling, extends broadly. Cohen characterizes Trump bluntly as racist, and says that while he never heard Trump use the “N-word,” Trump used other offensive language.

Ranting about Obama after he won office in 2008, Trump said, “Tell me one country run by a black person that isn’t a sh*thole…They are all complete f*cking toilets,” according to Cohen. After Nelson Mandela died, Trump allegedly said of South Africa that “Mandela f*cked the whole country up. Now it’s a sh*thole. F*ck Mandela. He was no leader.”

Cohen also divulges personal details about Trump, including his hair routine, described as a “three-step” combover designed to disguise “unsightly scars on his scalp from a failed hair-implant operation in the 1980s.”

Writing that he once witnessed Trump shortly after he showered, Cohen recalls that “when his hair wasn’t done, his strands of dyed-golden hair reached below his shoulders along the right side of his head and on his back, like a balding Allman Brother or strung out old ’60s hippie.”

Many instances of Trump’s alleged deceit have previously been detailed by Cohen and others in recent years: Trump’s alleged inflation of his net worth to publications like Forbes and Fortune and his minimizing of the value of his properties to avoid taxes, Cohen’s pressuring of the New York Military Academy to not release Trump’s high school records to avoid their public disclosure, Cohen paying to rig CNBC and Drudge Report polls in Trump’s favor, Trump campaign officials hiring extras for $50 apiece to attend Trump’s 2015 announcement that he was running for president and the alleged fraudulent Trump University scheme, over which Trump settled a class action lawsuit for $25 million.

Harshest judgment for the media

And a healthy portion of the book is devoted to the incidents perhaps best known at this point: Trump’s and Cohen’s alleged efforts to silence women who claimed affairs with Trump during the 2016 election — campaign finance violations that landed Cohen in prison and led prosecutors to say were done “in coordination with and at the direction of Individual – 1,” otherwise known as Trump.

Trump has denied the affairs and any involvement with the payments.

Cohen provides detailed accounts of the negotiations that led to the payments to two women — adult-film actress Stephanie Clifford, who goes by the name Stormy Daniels, and former Playboy model Karen McDougal — efforts that, according to Cohen, deeply involved himself, Trump and Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg, who ultimately cooperated with prosecutors.

Trump specifically authorized Cohen to strike the deal with Daniels, Cohen writes. “It’s only $130,000,” Trump said, according to Cohen. “F*ck it, Michael. Go talk to Allen and figure it all out.” (Cohen, too, mocks the payment, “a sum that seemed almost laughably low.”)

And he recalls Weisselberg allegedly convincing him to front the money to pay Daniels by using Cohen’s home equity line of credit.

On October 27, 2016, after Cohen had wired the $130,000, he called Trump to tell him the transaction was complete, Cohen writes.

In describing the investigation and prosecution, however, Cohen portrays himself as exceedingly cooperative, a notion prosecutors have refuted. With respect to tax evasion charges, he claims he provided his accountant with all of his records, an assertion federal prosecutors have said in court filings is false.

Regarding a count of lying to a bank, Cohen calls it a “fantasy of the federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York.”

“I didn’t lie for the simplest reason: the bank never asked what I wanted the money for,” he writes. But the charge to which Cohen pleaded guilty, according to court documents, stemmed from him repeatedly withholding information from banks or providing them with misleading information about various lines of credit secured by his taxi medallions. (In a sentencing memo to the judge overseeing his case, prosecutors referred to the false statement to a bank charge as “far from an isolated event: It was one in a long series of self-serving lies Cohen told to numerous financial institutions.”)

He writes that New York federal prosecutors “refused” his requests, made through his lawyer Guy Petrillo, to meet with him for four months in advance of his guilty plea and that they threatened to charge his wife if he didn’t agree to plead guilty.

And he says it is “unimaginable” that Trump didn’t have advance knowledge of the FBI raids of his properties, because Trump is “the chief law enforcement officer in the country,” which he is not.

“My lawyers had continually stated that they didn’t see any charges coming,” Cohen writes, “but the truth in this country is that if federal prosecutors want to get you, they will.”

In a section in which he describes reporting to serve his sentence, he laments being “railroaded into prison by federal prosecutors who’d since gone on to high paying white-shoe law firms, with my conviction as their signature achievement at the Southern District.” A spokesman for the Manhattan US Attorney’s office declined to comment.

But in a way perhaps even Trump could appreciate, Cohen reserves some of his harshest judgment for the media, which he blames for falling for Trump’s attention-grabbing tactics and propelling him to office.

“Donald Trump’s presidency is a product of the free press,” he writes. “Not free as in freedom of expression, I mean free as unpaid for. Rallies broadcast live, tweets, press conferences, idiotic interviews, 24-7 wall-to-wall coverage, all without spending a penny. The free press gave America Trump.”

“Right, left, moderate, tabloid, broadsheet, television, radio, Internet, Facebook — that is who elected Trump and might well elect him again.”

CORRECTION: This headline has been updated to correct when Michael Cohen says Trump hired a ‘Faux-Bama’

[bountyofbeads]

What Would Happen if Trump Refused to Leave Office?

A peaceful transfer of power is necessary for American democracy to survive.

By Barbara McQuade | Published February 22, 2020 7:00 AM ET | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted Feb 22, 2020

If Donald Trump is defeated in November 2020, his presidency will end on January 20, 2021. If he is reelected, then, barring other circumstances such as removal from office, his administration will terminate on the same day in 2025. In either of these scenarios, Trump would cease to be president immediately upon the expiration of his term. But what if he won’t leave the White House?

The American Constitution spells out how the transfer of power is supposed to work. Article II provides that the president “shall hold his office for the term of four years.” The 20th Amendment says that the president’s and vice president’s terms “shall end at noon on the 20th day of January … and the terms of their successors shall then begin.” Of course, a president may be reelected to a second four-year term, but under the 22nd Amendment, “no person shall be elected to the office of president more than twice.”

[ READ BELOW Read: Trump’s second Term]

For nearly 250 years, presidents have respected the law. Even when electoral defeat has been unexpected and ignominious, presidents have passed the baton without acrimony. In a sense, perhaps this is the central achievement of the American system: to have transferred power peacefully from one leader to the next, without heredity to guide the way.

That a president would defy the results of an election has long been unthinkable; it is now, if not an actual possibility, at the very least something Trump’s supporters joke about. As the former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee tweeted, President Trump “will be eligible for a 3rd term due to the illegal attempts by Comey, Dems, and media , et al attempting to oust him as @POTUS so that’s why I was named to head up the 2024 re-election.” A good troll though it may have been, Huckabee is not the first person to suggest that Trump might not leave when his presidency ends.

In May, the faith leader Jerry Falwell Jr. tweeted an apparent reference to the completed investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller into Russian election interference. “I now support reparations,” he wrote. “Trump should have 2 yrs added to his 1st term as pay back for time stolen by this corrupt failed coup.” Trump retweeted Falwell’s post.

One of Trump’s former confidants, Michael Cohen, has suggested that Trump won’t leave. In his congressional testimony before heading to prison, Trump’s former attorney said, “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”

Trump himself has joked about staying in office beyond his term, and even for life. In December, Trump told a crowd at a Pennsylvania rally that he will leave office in “five years, nine years, 13 years, 17 years, 21 years, 25 years, 29 years …” He added that he was joking to drive the media “totally crazy.” Just a few days earlier, Trump had alluded to his critics in a speech, “A lot of them say, ‘You know he’s not leaving’ … So now we have to start thinking about that because it’s not a bad idea.” This is how propaganda works. Say something outrageous often enough and soon it no longer sounds shocking.

Refusal to leave office is rare, but not unheard of. In the past decade, presidents in democracies such as Moldova, Sri Lanka, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Gambia have refused to leave office, sometimes leading to bloodshed. In 2016, Joseph Kabila decided not to step down after three five-year terms as the president of Congo, announcing that he would delay the election for two years so that a census could be conducted. His decision was met with mass protests in which 50 people were killed by government security forces. Still, he followed through and an election took place in 2018. He left office thereafter.

Elected officials in the U.S. have also refused to step down, albeit from lower offices than the presidency. In 1874, a Texas governor locked himself in the basement of the state capitol building after losing his reelection bid. The saga began when Republican Governor Edmund J. Davis lost the 1873 election by a resounding 2-to-1 ratio to his Democratic challenger, Richard Coke, and claimed that the election had been tainted with fraud and intimidation. A court case made its way to the state’s supreme court. All three justices, each of whom had been appointed by the incumbent Davis, ruled that the election was unconstitutional and invalid. Democrats called upon the public to disregard the court’s decision, and proceeded with plans for Coke’s inauguration. On January 15, 1874, Coke arrived at the state capitol with a sheriff’s posse, and was sworn in to office while Davis barricaded himself downstairs with state troopers. The next day, Davis requested federal troops from President Ulysses S. Grant. Grant refused, and Davis finally stepped down three days later.

In 1946, Georgia endured the “Three Governors Crisis,” when the governor-elect died before taking office. Three men—the outgoing governor, the son of the governor-elect and the lieutenant governor-elect—each claimed a right to the office. The state assembly voted for the governor-elect’s son to take charge, but the outgoing governor refused to leave, so both men physically occupied the governor’s office. The outgoing governor yielded when the governor-elect’s son had the locks changed. The state supreme court finally decided in favor of the lieutenant governor-elect three months later.

The closest thing to a refusal to leave office that the U.S. presidency has experienced was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s break with tradition by seeking a third term. Roosevelt rejected the norm set by George Washington, and followed by successive presidents, to step down after two terms. FDR was elected to a third and even a fourth term, but concern about a permanent executive led to the ratification of the 22nd Amendment in 1951, limiting presidents to two terms.

If Trump were inclined to overstay his term, the levers of power work in favor of removal. Because the president immediately and automatically loses his constitutional authority upon expiration of his term or after removal through impeachment, he would lack the power to direct the U.S. Secret Service or other federal agents to protect him. He would likewise lose his power, as the commander in chief of the armed forces, to order a military response to defend him. In fact, the newly minted president would possess those presidential powers. If necessary, the successor could direct federal agents to forcibly remove Trump from the White House. Now a private citizen, Trump would no longer be immune from criminal prosecution, and could be arrested and charged with trespassing in the White House. While even former presidents enjoy Secret Service protection, agents presumably would not follow an illegal order to protect one from removal from office.

Although Trump’s remaining in office seems unlikely, a more frightening—and plausible—scenario would be if his defeat inspired extremist supporters to engage in violence. One could imagine a world in which Trump is defeated in the 2020 election, and he immediately begins tweeting that the election was rigged. Or consider the possibility, albeit remote, that a second-term Trump is removed from office through impeachment, and rails about his ouster as a coup. His message would be amplified by right-wing media. If his grievances hit home with even a few people inclined toward violence, deadly acts of violence, or even terrorist attacks against the new administration, could result.

Ultimately, the key to the peaceful transfer of power is the conduct of the outgoing leader himself. America has thus far been lucky in that regard. After voluntarily relinquishing the presidency after his second term, Washington took measures to demonstrate the peaceful transfer of power. He attended the inauguration of his successor, John Adams, and insisted on walking behind Adams after the ceremony to display his subservience to the new president. Through this example, the citizenry was able to accept that the power of the presidency now resided in its new occupant.

More recently, upon leaving office after a heated campaign, George H. W. Bush left behind a letter to welcome Bill Clinton into the White House on January 20, 1993. It concluded, “You will be our president when you read this note. I wish you well. I wish your family well. Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you. Good luck.” Imagining such a gracious note from the current occupant of the White House to his successor is difficult.

But if Trump should fail in his final duty as president to transfer power peacefully, the nation’s laws, norms, and institutions will be responsible for carrying out the will of the electorate. Should those fail too, then the American experiment’s greatest achievement will come to a grinding halt, and with it the hope that a republic can ever be kept.

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This story is part of the project “The Battle for the Constitution,” in partnership with the National Constitution Center.

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BARBARA MCQUADE is a professor at the University of Michigan Law School. She was the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan and co-chair of the Attorney General’s Subcommittee on Terrorism and National Security in the Obama administration.

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NOW WE KNOW WHAT KIND OF AUTHORITARIAN TRUMP ASPIRES TO BE.... Over the past week, Trump has showed his commitment to creating Kyiv-on-the-Potomac.

By Franklin Foer | Published February 14, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted February 22, 2020 |

Donald Trump’s obsession with Ukrainian corruption turned out to be genuine: He wanted it thoroughly investigated—for the sake of its emulation. The diplomats who testified in front in Adam Schiff’s committee explained and exposed the Ukrainian justice system. Their descriptions may have been intended as an indictment of kleptocracy, but the president apparently regarded them as an instructional video on selective prosecution, the subversion of a neutral judiciary, and the punishment of whistle-blowers who expose corruption.

Over the course of Trump’s presidency, his critics have speculated about the model of illiberal democracy that he would adopt as his own. After the past week—which saw the firing of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the revocation of the Justice Department’s sentencing memo for Roger Stone, and Attorney General Bill Barr’s increasingly heavy-handed control of the investigations into his boss—there’s less doubt about the contours of the state Trump hopes to build. He’s creating Kyiv-on-the-Potomac.

The House Intelligence Committee narrative featured a villainous bureau in Kyiv called the Office of the Prosecutor General. On paper, this department is akin to America’s own Department of Justice, but in practice, it acted more like an auction house where top government lawyers would entertain bids from oligarchs. These prosecutors have been integral to the maintenance and perversion of the system. Oligarchs would abuse the office to bring cases against old enemies; they also used the office to punish critics of their corrupt practices. And, in the most extreme example, one Ukrainian president weaponized the office against his primary political opponent: He actually locked her up. (It was Paul Manafort’s job, as a consultant to that president, to justify the arrest to the rest of the world.)

The United States has tried to push Ukraine away from this corrupt system. When Joe Biden bragged about how he conditioned U.S. financial assistance on the firing of the prosecutor Viktor Shokin, he was boasting about a legitimate accomplishment. Thanks in part to his efforts, Ukraine’s judiciary moved toward a system more like our own—at least more like the system that existed before William Barr entered the Justice Department—where the state shows no favor to its friends and no punitive malice towards its enemies.

There’s an irony to this tale. Just as the United States was succeeding in pushing the Ukrainian judiciary in a more democratic direction, it began plundering Ukraine’s recent past, borrowing its worst practices. The corrupt prosecutors who were displaced in the course of reform have reemerged as the conspiratorial figures whispering in Rudy Giuliani’s ear, stoking unfounded theories about Burisma and Biden. They urged Trump to exact revenge against his enemies, with the same malevolent prosecutorial intent and flimsy evidence that they might themselves have deployed.

At the core of liberal democracy, especially as it evolved in the 20th century, is the notion that a swath of the state should be preserved as a neutral territory. One of the constraints on political power is a governmental structure that removes politics from important tasks. This commitment extended well beyond insulating the judicial system. The government installed a layer of experts and civil servants, who sat below political appointees. These are people like Alexander Vindman, who supply facts and dispassionate analysis. They are the technocrats, so maligned around the Western world these days. They tabulate the data about economic growth so that an administration can’t concoct self-serving statistics about employment and production. They process foreign intelligence so that sycophantic aides don’t simply manipulate briefings to confirm the policy biases of the commander in chief. And they exist as checks on the machinations of political appointees, sensitive to any attempts to corruptly distort the government for personal benefit.

Conservatives have long waged war on this neutral state. George W. Bush’s administration bulldozed the CIA when its bureaucracy objected to his Iraq policy; it trashed the EPA when officials there sought to provide assessments of the environmental impact of proposals. The problem with Trump is that he is even less sensitive to the idea of neutrality than were his predecessors. He’s incapable of self-control and incapable of distinguishing his self-interest from the common good. So with the ejection of Vindman and other events of this past week, it’s possible to see Trump finally making his move against the neutral state. By punishing whistle-blowers so ostentatiously, he’s disciplining the bureaucracy to accept his corruption. He’s instigating the Ukrainification of American government.

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Our Founders Didn’t Intend for Pardons to Work Like This

The Constitution allows the president to forgive any federal crime, but just because he can does not mean he should.

By Jeffrey Crouch, Assistant professor of American politics at American University | Published FEBRUARY 21, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted February 22, 2020 |

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump commuted the sentence of Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor and Celebrity Apprentice contestant who was imprisoned for trying to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat. The president also pardoned the former San Francisco 49ers owner Edward DeBartolo Jr., the “junk-bond king” Michael Milken, and former NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik, among others. Each person had some connection to the president, a fact that the White House press announcement  on the decisions made clear. Trump seems to view clemency as a way to reward celebrities and please his supporters.

The country’s Founders did not intend for the clemency power to be used as a prize. Article II of the Constitution allows the president to forgive any federal crime, but just because he can does not mean he should.

[ Quinta Jurecic: Trump’s unpardonable challenge to the Constitution]

The Founding Fathers had their own ideas about how the process should work; Alexander Hamilton provided the most famous rationales for the clemency power. In “Federalist No. 74,” he noted how the president must be able to make exceptions for “unfortunate guilt”; otherwise, the justice system would be “too sanguinary and cruel.” Additionally, Hamilton pointed out that presidents may need to use clemency to quell unrest or rebellion and thereby “restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth.”

President George Washington pardoned two men charged with treason after the Whiskey Rebellion. On December 8, 1795, in his annual address to Congress, he said he was motivated to both show mercy and serve the public good. Washington’s use of these dual rationales set the clemency standard for his successors. Going forward, one or both ideas have implicitly undergirded most of the roughly 30,000 individual clemency decisions that have been granted by presidents one through 44. Each rationale has also been featured in a Supreme Court case: United States v. Wilson described a pardon as an “act of grace,” and Biddle v. Perovich described the pardon power as “part of the Constitutional scheme” and characterized clemency as a decision to be guided by “public welfare.”

Using clemency to address a larger societal concern, Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson offered forgiveness to entice the Confederates to rejoin the Union. Harry Truman named a panel to recommend amnesty for Selective Service Act offenders after World War II. Both Jimmy Carter and his predecessor, Gerald Ford, offered amnesty to Vietnam War–draft offenders.

Presidents have also granted pardons and commutations as “acts of mercy” to individuals—many anonymous—for a variety of federal offenses. Most recipients applied to the pardon attorney’s office within the Department of Justice and, months or years later, successfully received a pardon or sentence commutation. Recent examples include Olgen Williams, whom George W. Bush pardoned in 2002 for stealing money from the mail, and Charles Russell Cooper, a bootlegger pardoned by Bush in 2005. In 2017, Barack Obama pardoned Fred Elleston Hicks for illegal use of food stamps.

Not all presidents have followed these rationales, though. History also shows that presidents—particularly recent ones—have abused clemency for their own personal or political benefit. In 1992, George H. W. Bush pardoned several Iran-Contra figures, including former Reagan Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, effectively relieving Weinberger of the need to stand trial, a boon to Bush, who may have been called to testify. Bill Clinton offered clemency to members of the violent Puerto Rican nationalist organization FALN, a controversial decision that  some said he made to gain Latino support for the political races of his wife and Vice President Al Gore. Right before he left office, Clinton pardoned  Marc Rich, a fugitive from justice  whose ex-wife was a large Clinton donor. George W. Bush commuted the sentence of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, sparing Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff a prison term. (Trump later pardoned Libby.) The presidents issued each of these clemency decisions after they were free from electoral consequences.

President Trump began by pardoning former Sheriff Joe Arpaio for criminal contempt of court, after Arpaio refused to stop police practices that amounted to racial profiling. Trump mentioned his intentions at a political rally before granting the pardon three days later. Since then, Trump hasn’t looked back. Along the way, he has favored a host of well-connected, famous, wealthy, or partisan figures for presidential mercy. To his credit, Trump has not hidden from the press, Congress, or other institutions when exercising clemency. He makes a decision and then takes the heat, often noting that his clemency grants counteract an “unfair” criminal-justice system.

Almost a year after Arpaio, Trump teased on Twitter a pardon for the conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, who had violated campaign-finance laws. He pardoned D’Souza that same day, and then made comments that shifted clemency speculation to the TV personality Martha Stewart and to Blagojevich.

Trump has also been swayed by celebrities. He commuted Alice Marie Johnson’s prison sentence after Kim Kardashian West visited the White House to advocate for her. He also pardoned the late African American boxer Jack Johnson in a grant pushed by the Rocky actor Sylvester Stallone.

The usual procedure for petitioning for a pardon or sentence commutation is far less showy than Trump’s current process. Typically, after waiting a minimum of five years, applicants go to the website of the pardon attorney; download, complete, and submit the appropriate form; and wait. After a lengthy review—sometimes years—the result is usually the same for everyone: a denial. George W. Bush granted only about 2 percent of petitions for a pardon or sentence commutation; Barack Obama granted 5.3 percent; and—as of February 7, 2020—Trump had granted less than 0.5 percent of clemency requests.

The former pardon attorney Margaret Love explains in her article “The Twilight of the Pardon Power” that one crucial reason so few clemency cases receive a positive recommendation is that “all but a handful of the individuals officially responsible for approving Justice Department clemency recommendations since 1983 have been former federal prosecutors.” In other words, because prosecutors in the pardon attorney’s office are reluctant to undo the work of their fellow prosecutors, presidents are rarely given a thumbs-up to pardon.

[ Garrett Epps: The self-pardoning president]

The traditional role of the pardon attorney has been basically abandoned by the Trump administration, after the office assisted presidents for more than a century. As The Washington Post  reported earlier this month, “Former White House officials describe a freewheeling atmosphere in which staff members have fielded suggestions from Trump friends while sometimes throwing in their own recommendations.” Moreover, “all but five of the 24 people who have received clemency from Trump had a line into the White House or currency with his political base.”

Whether Trump is reaping significant personal benefits from his clemency decisions is unclear, but he does seem to enjoy the public’s reaction, even inviting two military clemency recipients onstage at a fundraiser late last year. With so many clemency grants to controversial figures like Arpaio, D’Souza, and now Blagojevich, he may be launching trial balloons to test public reaction to more serious pardons for his former associates, including Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn.

Along similar lines, Trump has twice tweeted about his understanding of the scope of the clemency power. In July 2017, he noted that he held “the complete power to pardon.” Roughly a year later, Trump tweeted that he had “the absolute right to PARDON myself.” Robert Mueller’s investigation and the impeachment trial are now both behind him. Still, it’s become apparent at this point in his presidency that Trump has used clemency to both gauge public opinion and stake out ground for a self-pardon, should he ever need one.

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This story is part of the project “The Battle for the Constitution,” in partnership with the National Constitution Center.

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JEFFREY CROUCH is an assistant professor of American politics at American University. He is the author of The Presidential Pardon Power and the editor of the journal Congress & the Presidency.

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WHAT DEMOCRATS AREN’T ADMITTING ABOUT TRUMP’S RECORD

The episodes in which critics’ predictions weren't borne out offer valuable lessons for Trump’s challengers, even if they still vigorously disagree with the moves the president has made.

By Uri Friedman | Published February 22, 2020 7:00 AM ET | The Atlantic | Posted February 22, 2020 |

It’s 2020, and America is embroiled in not one but two catastrophic wars: one with Iran that has sucked in the entire Middle East, and another halfway across the world in North Korea sparked by Kim Jong Un test-firing nuclear-capable missiles that could hit the United States. It’s all the worse since the U.S. is waging both wars without allies, all of which have abandoned Donald Trump because of his incessant bullying.

Fortunately, this isn’t where we find ourselves today, but it’s what the president’s critics have been warning could occur if he carries on with policies that have shattered decades of conventional U.S. policy making. It’s not as if their concerns have no factual basis. The Trump administration really did come to the brink of war with Iran and North Korea. In neither case are the underlying tensions that got them there anywhere near resolved. America’s alliances are indeed in flux. But the fact that this is not our reality in 2020 is just as instructive as the fact that it could have been.

This pattern has recurred on several occasions during the Trump era: The president’s detractors foretell doom caused by one of his decisions, only to be proved wrong, and then nobody acknowledges that they got it wrong or admits that Trump’s policies have had some advantages.

Of course, just because some of these doomsday scenarios haven’t yet  materialized doesn’t mean that they won’t eventually. A number of Trump’s actions have already inflicted serious damage and could have corrosive consequences that will only become evident over time. In some cases, Trump seems to have simply been lucky. A number of warnings, moreover, have proved right.

Nevertheless, as American foreign policy comes under greater scrutiny as part of this year’s presidential campaign, the Democratic candidates risk losing credibility with voters and undermining their policy prescriptions if they don’t reckon with the moments when they said the sky was falling and it wasn’t. Why should a voter be convinced that returning to aspects of the pre-Trump status quo is necessarily a good thing when the people advocating for that inaccurately diagnosed the results of Trump’s defiance of convention? The episodes in which critics’ predictions weren't borne out offer valuable lessons for Trump’s challengers, even if they still vigorously disagree with the moves the president has made.

[ Read: The Sanders doctrine]

As Charles Dunlap Jr., the head of Duke University’s Center on Law, Ethics, and National Security, wrote for Just Security early in the Trump administration, Americans “need balance in our national security and foreign policy discussions before we don sackcloth and ashes and hoist our ‘The End is Near’ signs. True, we are in an era of change, which is what happens in democracies when a candidate runs on a platform of change and wins, and change can be disquieting to those who prefer the status quo. But how good was the status quo?”

Consider three emblematic episodes:

The War With Iran That Wasn’t

In the wee hours of January 2, shortly after news broke that Trump had killed the Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike, Twitter pulsed with anxiety about #WWIII.

Enter the Democratic candidates: Bernie Sanders warned that Trump had just placed the United States “on the path to another” endless war, one that could again “cost countless lives and trillions more dollars.” Joe Biden  declared that Trump had “just tossed a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox,” potentially bringing America to “the brink of a major conflict across the Middle East.” The U.S. was perched precariously on that brink, Elizabeth Warren argued, “because a reckless president, his allies, and his administration have spent years pushing us here.”

The calamitous war they envisioned, however, has not come to pass. They were right, though, that there would be devastating consequences. Iran retaliated by firing missiles at a U.S. base in Iraq, leaving at least 109 American troops with traumatic brain injuries. The Iranians mistakenly downed a civilian airliner, killing its 176 passengers, and hostilities between Iran and the U.S. remain dangerously high. Tehran has cast off restrictions under the 2015 deal brokered by the Obama administration to constrain Iran’s nuclear program, though it hasn’t yet raced to build a bomb, as many of Trump’s critics predicted would happen when the president withdrew from the agreement in 2018. Had Trump stuck with the accord in the first place, Iran and the U.S. might never have found themselves on the precipice of war over Soleimani’s demise.

Nevertheless, Iran’s missile barrage was a relatively restrained response when measured against the blow of losing its most powerful military leader and the predictions made by Sanders, Biden, and Warren. Iranian officials thought “that after a series of escalatory [Iranian] military operations—the tanker attacks, the shooting down of an American drone, the Saudi oil strikes, rocket attacks on bases in Iraq by Iranian-backed militias—Mr. Trump would refrain from responding consequentially,” only to be shocked by Trump taking out Soleimani, The New York Times reported last week in a postmortem of the crisis. Trump’s decision, the paper noted, “might ultimately deter future Iranian aggression.” A former British diplomat similarly told my London colleague Tom McTague that the Soleimani strike opened up “the space for de-escalation” by scrambling the Iranian government’s “understanding of how the Americans might react in [the] future.”

Setting aside the vital question of whether Trump’s killing of Soleimani was legally justified or strategically wise (for candidates such as Sanders and Warren, the answer is unequivocally no), it’s worthwhile to investigate why Iran didn’t react the way so many assumed it would and what insights that yields for how the United States deals with adversaries. Trump, “accidentally or otherwise, has identified real problems, including Iran’s ability to act with relative impunity,” McTague concluded. The Soleimani incident also suggests that viewing every U.S. military action in the Middle East through the trauma of the Iraq War can distort our understanding of those events.

The War With North Korea That Wasn’t

Trump’s critics argued that war would break out as a result of the president’s  assorted threats (unleashing “fire and fury,” totally destroying “Rocket Man”) to attack North Korea during his first year in office. After Trump engaged in a nuclear-button measuring contest  with North Korea’s leader on Twitter, Biden argued that the United States was closer to a nuclear war with North Korea than it had ever been. Sanders and Warren helped  introduce legislation to restrain Trump from going to war with North Korea. These critiques weren’t confined to the left. Republican Senator Bob Corker  cautioned that Trump doesn’t realize that “we could be heading towards World War III with the kinds of comments that he’s making.”

North Korean officials probably didn’t interpret Trump’s remarks as a signal that war was imminent. But the bellicosity of the president and his advisers put the U.S. military on high alert, alarmed America’s ally South Korea, and increased the risk that the parties could stumble into conflict, just as the president’s critics had warned.

That bellicosity, though, was also productive in ways that Trump’s detractors rarely acknowledge. Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, told me that she leveraged her boss’s rhetoric and volatility to persuade China and Russia to support UN Security Council sanctions against North Korea, which helped pressure Kim into (thus far mostly fruitless) nuclear negotiations with the United States. Vincent Brooks, who commanded U.S. forces in South Korea from 2016 to 2018, told me that the president’s unpredictability, paired with new military maneuvers on the Korean peninsula, helped Brooks reestablish deterrence against North Korean provocations and create space for diplomacy. "Trying to bait a dictator who has nuclear weapons is not a way to advance diplomacy," Warren argued  in 2017. According to two former Trump administration officials who were at the forefront of its North Korea policy during this period, however, it was one way to do so.

The lesson here isn’t exactly that future American presidents should bait nuclear-armed dictators, but rather that, in certain situations, unconventional behavior can unlock opportunities to achieve breakthroughs with enemies. Thae Yong Ho, one of the highest-ranking officials ever to defect from North Korea, told me that he thought Trump’s sharp break with the “very gentle” posture of past American presidents helped dissuade North Korea from escalating the nuclear crisis with the United States in late 2017.

The Very Anxious Allies That Remain Allies

Trump’s critics have likewise divined doom each time the president has raised questions about his commitment to defending U.S. allies and demanded huge hikes in their financial contributions to collective security. Biden, for example, has warned that if Trump is reelected, “NATO will fall apart.” Similar predictions have been made as Trump pushes for new arrangements in which Japan and South Korea would cover most of the costs of stationing U.S. troops in each country.

These alliances are indeed being tested more than they have been in decades, and all these partners are now engaged in more contingency planning for a world in which they can no longer depend on U.S. protection. But the fact that the alliances haven’t yet shattered—and by some measures, certain alliances have actually grown  stronger during the Trump era—reveals two realities of America’s network of alliances that the next commander in chief will confront.

First, Trump’s tenure has underscored that the United States never really figured out its role in the world and national-security interests once the Cold War ended and its clout began to decline relative to that of rising powers. That debate is now under way in earnest, and U.S. allies are gradually grasping this and processing what it means for them.

Second, for all the upheaval of the Trump years, these partners have come to recognize that they ultimately don’t have attractive alternatives—teaming up with authoritarian powers such as China and Russia? Staking their security on a weak European Union?—to their alliance with the United States. Some allied leaders may not be especially enthused about collaborating with the U.S. these days, and their publics may be with them, but their national interests still dictate that they do. That means there’s more room to tackle sensitive issues such as burden-sharing and more resilience in the relationships than previous American presidents suspected. Kersti Kaljulaid, the president of Estonia, a NATO member bordering Russia and thus on the front line of fears about America’s wavering fidelity to the bloc, told me and my colleague Yara Bayoumy that it took Trump’s crass transactionalism (rather than Barack Obama and his predecessors asking “nicely”) to impress upon NATO members that they had to get serious about ramping up their own defense spending.

As Robert Blackwill of the Council on Foreign Relations noted in a 2019 assessment of Trump’s foreign policy—in which he memorably likened the president’s policies to “a large bowl of spaghetti bolognese dumped and spread on a white canvas”—many criticisms of the president’s conduct in the world are related to the manner in which he makes, announces, and explains decisions and to the policy incoherence within his administration. Rarely, however, is it acknowledged that “the president has disrupted a whole series of conventions in the international system, some of them undoubtedly needed.”

“Not a single U.S. politician,” Blackwill observed, “has a coherent and convincing set of policies to cope with this eroding world order, but Trump receives nearly all the slings and arrows.”

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TRUMP’S SECOND TERM.... It’s more likely than most people think—and compared with his first term, its effects would be far more durable.

By Paul Starr | MAY 2019 ISSUE | The Atlantic | Posted February 22, 2020 |

Of all the questions that will be answered by the 2020 election, one matters above the others: Is Trumpism a temporary aberration or a long-term phenomenon? Put another way: Will the changes brought about by Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party fade away, or will they become entrenched?

Trump’s reelection seems implausible to many people, as implausible as his election did before November 2016. But despite the scandals and chaos of his presidency, and despite his party’s midterm losses, he approaches 2020 with two factors in his favor. One is incumbency: Since 1980, voters have only once denied an incumbent a second term. The other is a relatively strong economy (at least as of now). Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University who weights both of those factors heavily in his election-forecasting model, gives Trump close to an even chance of reelection, based on a projected 2 percent GDP growth rate for the first half of 2020.

So far, much of the concern about the long-term effects of Trump’s presidency has centered on his antidemocratic tendencies. But even if we take those off the table—even if we assume that Trump continues to be hemmed in by other parts of the government and by outside institutions, and that he governs no more effectively than he has until now—the impact of a second term would be more lasting than that of the first.

In normal politics, the policies adopted by a president and Congress may zig one way, and those of the next president and Congress may zag the other. The contending parties take our system’s rules as a given, and fight over what they understand to be reversible policies and power arrangements. But some situations are not like that; a zig one way makes it hard to zag back.

This is one of those moments. After four years as president, Trump will have made at least two Supreme Court appointments, signed into law tax cuts, and rolled back federal regulation of the environment and the economy. Whatever you think of these actions, many of them can probably be offset or entirely undone in the future. The effects of a full eight years of Trump will be much more difficult, if not impossible, to undo.

Three areas—climate change, the risk of a renewed global arms race, and control of the Supreme Court—illustrate the historic significance of the 2020 election. The first two problems will become much harder to address as time goes on. The third one stands to remake our constitutional democracy and undermine the capacity for future change.

In short, the biggest difference between electing Trump in 2016 and reelecting Trump in 2020 would be irreversibility. Climate policy is now the most obvious example. For a long time, even many of the people who acknowledged the reality of climate change thought of it as a slow process that did not demand immediate action. But today, amid extreme weather events and worsening scientific forecasts, the costs of our delay are clearly mounting, as are the associated dangers. To have a chance at keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius—the objective of the Paris climate agreement—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that by 2030, CO2 emissions must drop some 45 percent from 2010 levels. Instead of declining, however, they are rising.

In his first term, Trump has announced plans to cancel existing climate reforms, such as higher fuel-efficiency standards and limits on emissions from new coal-fired power plants, and he has pledged to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement. His reelection would put off a national commitment to decarbonization until at least the second half of the 2020s, while encouraging other countries to do nothing as well. And change that is delayed becomes more economically and politically difficult. According to the Global Carbon Project, if decarbonization had begun globally in 2000, an emissions reduction of about 2 percent a year would have been sufficient to stay below 2 degrees Celsius of warming. Now it will need to be approximately 5 percent a year. If we wait another decade, it will be about 9 percent. In the United States, the economic disruption and popular resistance sure to arise from such an abrupt transition may be more than our political system can bear. No one knows, moreover, when the world might hit irreversible tipping points such as the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which would likely doom us to a catastrophic sea-level rise.

The 2020 election will also determine whether the U.S. continues on a course that all but guarantees another kind of runaway global change—a stepped-up arms race, and with it a heightened risk of nuclear accidents and nuclear war. Trump’s “America first” doctrine, attacks on America’s alliances, and unilateral withdrawal from arms-control treaties have made the world far more dangerous. After pulling the United States out of the Iran nuclear agreement (in so doing, badly damaging America’s reputation as both an ally and a negotiating partner), Trump failed to secure from North Korea anything approaching the Iran deal’s terms, leaving Kim Jong Un not only unchecked but with increased international standing. Many world leaders are hoping that Trump’s presidency is a blip—that he will lose in 2020, and that his successor will renew America’s commitments to its allies and to the principles of multilateralism and nonproliferation. If he is reelected, however, several countries may opt to pursue nuclear weapons, especially those in regions that have relied on American security guarantees, such as the Middle East and Northeast Asia.

At stake is the global nonproliferation regime that the United States and other countries have maintained over the past several decades to persuade nonnuclear powers to stay that way. That this regime has largely succeeded is a tribute to a combination of tactics, including U.S. bilateral and alliance-based defense commitments to nonnuclear countries, punishments and incentives, and pledges by the U.S. and Russia—as the world’s leading nuclear powers—to make dramatic cuts to their own arsenals.

In his first term, Trump has begun to undermine the nonproliferation regime and dismantle the remaining arms-control treaties between Washington and Moscow. In October, he announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed in 1987 by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. While the Russian violations of the treaty that Trump cited are inexcusable, he has made no effort to hold Russia to its obligations—to the contrary, by destroying the treaty, he has let Russia off the hook. What’s more, he has displayed no interest in extending New START, which since 2011 has limited the strategic nuclear arsenals of Russia and the United States. If the treaty is allowed to expire, 2021 will mark the first year since 1972 without a legally binding agreement in place to control and reduce the deadliest arsenals ever created.

The prospect of a new nuclear arms race is suddenly very real. With the end of verifiable limits on American and Russian nuclear weapons, both countries will lose the right to inspect each other’s arsenal, and will face greater uncertainty about each other’s capabilities and intentions. Already, rhetoric has taken an ominous turn: After Trump suspended U.S. participation in the INF Treaty on February 2, Vladimir Putin quickly followed suit and promised a “symmetrical response” to new American weapons. Trump replied a few days later in his State of the Union address, threatening to “outspend and out-innovate all others by far” in weapons development.

The treaties signed by the United States and Russia beginning in the 1980s have resulted in the elimination of nearly 90 percent of their nuclear weapons; the end of the Cold War seemed to confirm that those weapons had limited military utility. Now—as the U.S. and Russia abandon their commitment to arms control, and Trump’s “America first” approach causes countries such as Japan and Saudi Arabia to question the durability of U.S. security guarantees—the stage is being set for more states to go nuclear and for the U.S. and Russia to ramp up weapons development. This breathtaking historical reversal would, like global warming, likely feed on itself, becoming more and more difficult to undo.

Finally, a second term for Trump would entrench changes at home, perhaps the most durable of which involves the Supreme Court. With a full eight years, he would probably have the opportunity to replace two more justices: Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be 87 at the beginning of the next presidential term, and Stephen Breyer will be 82. Whether you regard the prospect of four Trump-appointed justices as a good or a bad thing will depend on your politics and preferences—but there is no denying that the impact on the nation’s highest court would be momentous.

Not since Richard Nixon has a president named four new Supreme Court justices, and not since Franklin D. Roosevelt has one had the opportunity to alter the Court’s ideological balance so decisively. In Nixon’s time, conservatives did not approach court vacancies with a clear conception of their judicial objectives or with carefully vetted candidates; both Nixon and Gerald Ford appointed justices who ended up on the Court’s liberal wing. Since then, however, the conservative movement has built a formidable legal network designed to ensure that future judicial vacancies would not be squandered.

The justices nominated by recent Republican presidents reflect this shift. But because the Court’s conservative majorities have remained slim, a series of Republican appointees—Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and most recently John Roberts—have, by occasionally breaking ranks, held the Court back from a full-scale reversal of liberal principles and precedents. With a 7–2 rather than a 5–4 majority, however, the Court’s conservatives could no longer be checked by a lone swing vote.

Much of the public discussion about the Court’s future focuses on Roe v. Wade and other decisions expanding rights, protecting free speech, or mandating separation of Church and state. Much less public attention has been paid to conservative activists’ interest in reversing precedents that since the New Deal era have enabled the federal government to regulate labor and the economy. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, conservative justices regularly struck down laws and regulations such as limits on work hours. Only in 1937, after ruling major New Deal programs unconstitutional, did the Court uphold a state minimum-wage law. In the decades that followed, the Court invoked the Constitution’s commerce clause, which authorizes Congress to regulate interstate commerce, as the basis for upholding laws regulating virtually any activity affecting the economy. A great deal of federal law, from labor standards to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to health and environmental regulation, rests on that foundation.

But the Court’s conservative majority has recently been chipping away at the expansive interpretation of the commerce clause, and some jurists on the right want to return to the pre-1937 era, thereby sharply limiting the government’s regulatory powers. In 2012, the Court’s five conservative justices held that the Affordable Care Act’s penalty for failing to obtain insurance—the so-called individual mandate—was not justified by the commerce clause. In a sweeping dissent from the majority’s opinion, four of those justices voted to strike down the entire ACA for that reason. The law survived only because the fifth conservative, Chief Justice Roberts, held that the mandate was a constitutional exercise of the government’s taxing power.

If the Court had included seven conservative justices in 2012, it would almost certainly have declared the ACA null and void. This is the fate awaiting much existing social and economic legislation and regulation if Trump is reelected. And that’s to say nothing of future legislation such as measures to limit climate change, which might well be struck down by a Court adhering to an originalist interpretation of our 18th-century Constitution.

Democracy is always a gamble, but ordinarily the stakes involve short-term wins and losses. Much more hangs in the balance next year.

With a second term, Trump’s presidency would go from an aberration to a turning point in American history. But it would not usher in an era marked by stability. The effects of climate change and the risks associated with another nuclear arms race are bound to be convulsive. And Trump’s reelection would leave the country contending with both dangers under the worst possible conditions, deeply alienated from friends abroad and deeply divided at home. The Supreme Court, furthermore, would be far out of line with public opinion and at the center of political conflict, much as the Court was in the 1930s before it relented on the key policies of the New Deal.

The choice Americans face in 2020 is one we will not get to make again. What remains to be seen is whether voters will grasp the stakes before them. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s emails absorbed more media and public attention than any other issue. In 2018, Trump tried to focus attention on a ragtag caravan of a few thousand Central Americans approaching the southern border. That effort failed, but the master of distraction will be back at it next year. If we cannot focus on what matters, we may sleepwalk into a truly perilous future.

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PAUL STARR is a professor of sociology & public affairs at Princeton & winner of Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. He is the author of Entrenchment: Wealth, Power & the Constitution of Democratic

Societies.

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