Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 30,091]

1 Politician vs 25 Undecided Voters (Feat. Pete Buttigieg) | Surrounded

He is the single most effective American political debate communicator atm.

[Vesper 30,091]

Germany’s Governance Crisis: Why State Reform Can’t Wait

Henning Meyer 4th November 2024

Facing mounting challenges, Germany’s outdated, process-bound administration must be reformed to meet citizens’ needs and safeguard democracy.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/germanys-governance-crisis-why-state-reform-cant-wait

The German state has a problem. It delivers too little. The results of state activity far too often fail to meet the legitimate expectations of citizens. If the major challenges of our time, such as the transition to climate neutrality or managing rapid technological change, are to be successfully addressed, we need a more capable state. It must be said clearly: without prompt reform, the major goals are at risk—with all the consequences this would have for society and democratic stability in Germany.

 

What exactly does state reform mean? The key here is comprehensive administrative modernisation. The good news upfront: the existing problems are not caused by the people working in state institutions. Contrary to popular belief, most are highly competent. The bad news: they work in rigid and hierarchical structures that still largely follow principles from the 19th century. These structures are what cause the inadequate results and demotivate employees, instead of encouraging them to actively shape change.

Why are administrations so crucial? They are at the heart of statehood, fulfilling two essential roles. Administrations, especially at the local level, are the direct interface between citizens and the state. This is where direct contact occurs, and where it becomes evident when people’s experiences with authorities increasingly diverge from their everyday reality. Digital processes that have long been standard in private life and businesses? They are still far too underdeveloped in the state’s offerings.

A look at the implementation status of the Online Access Act (OZG) illustrates the problem. Since the end of 2022, all authorities at the federal, state, and local levels are actually required to offer their services digitally. The initiative began in 2017. The result: even in the autumn of 2024, we are still far from comprehensive implementation, especially in the states and municipalities. Why is that?

As the Federal Audit Office rightly criticised, the responsible Federal Ministry of the Interior took more than two years to determine which administrative services should be digitised, when, and to what extent. Only after that could the responsible ministries at the federal and state levels prioritise, which took about another year and a half. By then, much of the originally planned project duration had already passed before things really got underway. This illustrates how cumbersome cross-departmental and cross-level coordination can be. Such conditions understandably lead to frustration on all sides and undermine trust in the state’s ability to perform.

Administrations are not just an interface; they are also the executive organs of their respective governments. The widespread notion that newly elected governments can move into ministries and begin implementing their coalition agreements from day one is far from reality. Without efficient and capable administrations, political priorities and programmes simply cannot be realised. And if political promises to the electorate are inadequately fulfilled, this, in turn, leads to frustration and further loss of trust in the state. The growing gap between what is necessary, what is promised, and what is delivered ultimately results in an erosion of democratic substance.

Why do administrations not function as they should? How can this profound crisis of statehood be understood? A look into the sociology of the last century provides useful clues. At the beginning of the 20th century, Max Weber analysed bureaucracy as a form of governance, as opposed to monarchy and charismatic leadership. The core of his typology was the primacy of rationality and transparent rules in administrative bureaucracy. A century later, the state system is still largely process-oriented. Too often, the means of action take precedence over the necessary goals.

This process-orientation can be observed in many areas. Facilitated by the multi-level structure of Germany’s federal system and ministerial silos, employees in administrative institutions are far too often occupied with processes without clear outcomes. The multitude of actors involved in every issue, as demonstrated by the OZG example, inevitably leads to lengthy procedures and a culture of caution. The more veto players there are, the harder it is to change the status quo. The result is a sluggish and change-resistant system.

One could argue that the state system does produce results, specifically in the form of extensive regulations in an increasing number of areas of life. That is true, but it is part of the problem. Regulations are, in many ways, nothing more than the definition of rule-based processes for others and are therefore inherent to the process-oriented administrations. This at least explains why so much regulation is produced. The logic of the administration’s own framework of action is transferred to the outside world.

Individual regulations can be well justified in isolation, reflecting the rationality of the administrative system. Hence, any attempt at comprehensive deregulation is difficult and usually results in only cosmetic changes. Whether reducing the retention period for company records from ten to seven years is the ultimate solution is certainly debatable – to say the least. The problem is that the sheer number of regulations leads to overregulation. Hardly anyone has an overall view of the regulatory jungle, making compliance a massive challenge.

Overregulation hampers not only the private sector but, paradoxically, also the state itself. For instance, if planning procedures or building codes are so extensive that it takes years before construction projects can even begin, public housing companies also suffer. As a result, achieving political goals, such as social housing targets, becomes increasingly difficult or can only be realised with significant delays.

This malaise is also evident in the number of housing completions in general. In Germany today, significantly fewer apartments are built annually than in the 1970s. This is not due to interest rates, as even during the prolonged period of low interest rates, the number of housing completions remained below average. The federal government has significantly missed its goal of 400,000 new apartments per year. Overregulation and other bureaucratic hurdles at various administrative levels are a substantial part of the reason.

Absurd situations are also not uncommon. In Tübingen, a planned €250 million expansion of the university hospital, which is central to the medical care of three million people, was prohibited by the nature conservation authority. The reason: a rare bird, the nightjar, had nested on the hospital roof. Before construction could begin, a replacement habitat would be needed, which has proved difficult because the bird prefers extensive areas with little tree cover. There was even talk of partially clearing ten hectares of forest. The nightjar has not been seen for about a year. Perhaps the bird itself has solved the administrative problem in this case.

The problems of an overregulated, process-oriented system are less significant when it comes to managing the status quo. But that is precisely not what is needed in our time. On the contrary, we have been navigating from one crisis to the next for what feels like forever, and must simultaneously tackle the major challenges of our time. The Herculean tasks ahead cannot be managed with a process-oriented state. The entire administrative system urgently needs to be reformed and aligned with the quality of results rather than processes. Helmut Kohl once said: “What matters is what comes out at the end.” He was right.

What does administrative modernisation mean in this context, and what are the key approaches? How can the focus be shifted from processes to results? New approaches must be developed, especially in three areas: structures, personnel, and technology. First, the hierarchical structures and thematic silos must be gradually opened. This is a long-term undertaking that will not succeed overnight. However, there are concepts that can at least make a quick start.

The approach of consolidating the most important political priorities into “missions” is essentially an attempt to overcome structural obstacles and focus on achieving core objectives. This is precisely the idea behind the new British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s “Mission Delivery Boards.” The name says it all: it is about the state working with external actors to deliver quantifiable results. Therefore, all decisions are aligned with the concrete missions, and the boards are given the authority to push necessary measures through fragmented and rigid structures in Whitehall.

Even if Mission Delivery Boards mainly fight against existing structures rather than reforming them, they can still provide the right impulses. Ultimately, sustainably reformed structures are not possible without a cultural change within the administrations themselves. This can be promoted by experimenting with new structures and changing recruitment policies. In Germany, there is far too little personnel exchange between the public sector, private sector, and academia. The rigid administrative career path should no longer be the unshakeable cornerstone of administrative personnel policy.

There is ample evidence that organisations benefit from the diversity of staff profiles and personal experiences. In German administrations, however, people often spend their entire careers in largely predetermined paths, which also set the wrong personal incentives more often than not. To become more results-oriented, administrations must become more innovative and entrepreneurial. This needs to be reflected in personnel policies.

If the organisational culture changes, structures can also be sustainably reformed. This includes the much more effective use of digital tools, especially Artificial Intelligence (AI). There are two stages of development: in the first stage, AI-supported assistance systems will need to support the existing process-oriented work of the administrations. This is necessary to secure the state’s general ability to act in light of impending retirements. According to a PwC study, the public sector faces a shortage of at least one million skilled workers by 2030.

In the second stage, AI must then act as a catalyst for structural system reorientation in combination with a more open personnel policy. One of AI’s most important capabilities is evaluating large amounts of data and making them useful for strategic decisions. This will enable a new level of evidence-based policymaking and data-driven administration in the medium term. Both are necessary steps to move from process orientation to result orientation.

Another important step in results-oriented administrative modernisation is opening structures to participatory methods. Such procedures strengthen trust in the state and lead to practical solutions. Here, too, technology can play a significant role, as demonstrated by the digital platform “vTaiwan,” which has been innovatively implementing participatory methods in Taiwan since 2014. Such approaches increase the transparency and legitimacy of state decisions and reduce the distance to citizens. German sociologist Steffen Mau even argues that participatory methods can initiate social learning processes that strengthen the democratic culture as a whole.

Reforms in the areas of administrative structure, personnel policy, and the use of technology must therefore be interconnected and implemented iteratively in order to truly reform the ossified structures in the medium to long term.

In April 2021, US President Joe Biden convincingly argued in a speech before the US Congress that the proof of a functioning democracy that delivers results for its citizens needs to be re-established in the US. This proof is also necessary in Germany. The widespread impression that problems are piling up and that major challenges are not being addressed is toxic to the democratic substance of the country. The temptations of populists become all the more effective the fewer concrete solutions the state delivers.

To meet the challenges of our time, we need a strong and effective state. Therefore, administrations in particular must urgently be modernised. However, this can only succeed if the right impulses are set, triggering a change that ultimately comes from within the administrations themselves. As mentioned at the outset, the employees of the administrations are not the problem. On the contrary: they are the greatest hope for getting the problems under control.

The recent state elections in Saxony and Brandenburg have shown that the traditional people’s parties in East Germany, despite incumbency advantages and sharp polarization, can only narrowly keep the AfD at bay. A popular prime minister from the Left Party has already failed to do so in Thuringia. Time is running out. The state must deliver better results and create new conditions to achieve them.

This article was first published in German in Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung

[Vesper 30,091]

A very tired Trump is spewing complete gibberish right now

“And I said, first lady, first lady see this is a little bit of a weave, you see those stories, first lady book boom, but you can always bring it back when it comes to a time when it doesn't meet at the bottom, then it's time to say let's not do this shit anymore. We won't do this anymore. But so what happened…”

 

 

Edited November 4, 2024 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,091]

SAD MAGA FACES IN FINAL HOURS... ARENA HALF EMPTY?

THE DON BAFFLES WITH INCOMPREHENSIBLE RAMBLE...

VIDEO: CHENEY FIGHTS BACK AFTER TRUMP'S DEATH THREAT...

RECORD 76,438,831 HAVE ALREADY VOTED...

Conservative Megachurch Pastor Backs Harris in Last-Minute Op-Ed...

LIVE DATA...

+

Election Betting Odds Turn Sharply Toward Kamala Harris After Shock Poll Shows Her Leading Trump in Iowa

 

Meanwhile, PredictIt flipped the advantage to Harris in the hours after the Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll drop:

Edited November 4, 2024 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,091]

*****BREAKING A RATED MARIST POLL*****

Harris 51% TFG 47%

U.S. Presidential Contest, November 2024

Harris +4 Points Against Trump Nationally

https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/u-s-presidential-contest-november-2024/

Marist is rated 6th out of 282 rated pollsters on 538.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings/

[Fulham Broadway 17,299]

1 hour ago, Vesper said:

A very tired Trump is spewing complete gibberish right now

“And I said, first lady, first lady see this is a little bit of a weave, you see those stories, first lady book boom, but you can always bring it back when it comes to a time when it doesn't meet at the bottom, then it's time to say let's not do this shit anymore. We won't do this anymore. But so what happened…”

 

 

Doesn't make any sense. All Greek to me. Does he post on here ? 

[Fernando 6,585]

8 hours ago, Fernando said:

That is true you got a point, I did not saw it like that. 

 

So based on your argument then I will change my stance. I will only support abortion for medical reasons meaning doctor will save the women. 

I will no longer support abortion for rape. 

It is as you mentioned murder. 

I remember one case in the Bible a step brother rape his sister, she had the kid and the kid became important later on. 

So ya rape is bad but the kid might be something big in the future. Mother can always give the kid away as many people want a kid. 

[Fulham Broadway 17,299]

Whatever happens next, one day historians will have to explain why a candidate who earlier this year had been presented as disciplined started to veer off into unrestrained racist rhetoric and dancing for 40 minutes to his own playlist. Was it age, as plenty of commentators have speculated? Was it a brilliant attempt to balance dehumanizing attacks on minorities with an effort to make himself look human?

A much more sinister explanation must be taken seriously. We still assume that we are witnessing two campaigns for the presidency. But what if we are witnessing one campaign and one slow-motion coup, whose organizers need to go through the motion of campaigning for the plan to work? Since winning at the ballot box does not matter, taking a break to listen to Pavarotti isn’t a problem; conversely, a festival of racism and conspiracy theories, as at Madison Square Garden, is not about convincing any undecided voter, but motivating committed Trumpists to go along with another coup attempt.

The point is not prediction, but to call for preparedness. After all, there is an overwhelming number of reasons why, should Trump lose, he will once more try to take power anyway. His followers have long been primed to assume that evil Democrats will steal the election. The unchecked racism fits into a logic of far-right populism more generally: far-right populists claim that they, and they alone, represent what they call “the silent majority” or “the real people” (the very expression Trump used on January 6 to address his supporters).

If far-right populists do not win elections, the reason can only be that the majority of the electorate was silenced by someone (liberal elites, of course). Or, for that matter, people who are not “real people” – fake Americans – must have participated in the election to bring about an illegitimate outcome. This explains the Republican obsession with finding proof of “non-citizen” voting.

Dozens of lawsuits have already been launched to put election results into doubt. As in 2020 and early 2021, Trump is likely to make sharing his lies a test of loyalty.

Maga members have been primed to resort to violence. Trump and his allies have framed the election as an apocalyptic battle. Here analogies with other far-right populists are again illuminating: it is doubtful that all followers of the far-right Law and Justice Party (PiS) in Poland truly believe that relatively liberal prime minister Donald Tusk had colluded with Russians to have the country’s president, a member of PiS, killed in a plane crash in Smolensk in 2010. But professing the Smolensk conspiracy theory was not about making an empirical statement; it became a means to signal membership of a political tribe.

In theory, Republicans could seize the chance at last to break with Trump, who, after all, has only delivered defeats to the party. He has stated that he will not run again (though it would of course be naive to take any of his promises at face value). Yet there were already plenty of incentives to get rid of Trump in early 2021, and still Republicans did not disown, let alone impeach, him.

Most worryingly, Maga members have been primed to resort to violence. Trump and his allies – including the world’s richest man, who just happens to be a rightwing extremist – have framed the election as an apocalyptic battle. If Democrats win, Musk has claimed, there will not be any proper elections ever after; they will bring in more foreigners to secure a permanent majority. It is already half forgotten that Trump held his first major rally this election cycle in Waco, Texas.

Who knows whether Trump can really mobilize large numbers of people on the streets; it might be enough to prolong a sense of chaos. Vance has claimed that the 2020 election was problematic, because so many citizens had doubts about its “integrity” and Democrats prevented a “debate” which the country needed to have (never mind that Republicans had created the doubts in the first place). How long a debate would Vance like, exactly? Incidents like the infamous Brooks Brothers riot, where rightwingers in fancy suits stopped a recount in Florida in 2000, might accompany this debate. After all, as Jack Smith has claimed, Trump campaign operatives in 2020 already issued the order: “Make them riot.”

The hope may well be that, if decisions are kicked to the correct court, things could still go Republicans’ way. Trumpists know from the US supreme court’s decisions about ballot access and immunity earlier that some parts of the judiciary have given up on any conventional legal logic; they are likely simply to deliver whatever benefits Trump. The conservative justices’ decision this past week allowing the removal of voters from the rolls in Virginia so close to the election – a clear break with precedent – might well have been a preview of what a court captured by Trumpists is willing to do.

To be sure, the system as a whole is less vulnerable than in 2020. What is officially known as the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022 makes it harder to challenge results in Congress; the theory that legislatures could overturn the outcome – popular among Trumpists in 2020 – has not found much legal support. But since Trump has everything to lose (including his freedom, given the charges still pending), there’s every reason to think that he’ll try everything.

• Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University 

[Vesper 30,091]

20 minutes ago, Fernando said:

It is as you mentioned murder. 

just to be clear

as long as it does not meet my clear sentientness and/or viability tests I do not consider it murder as it is not yet the taking of a human life

I understand that it IS murder to someone (and I profoundly disagree and have laid out why multiple times) who believes life begins at conception

if a person believes it is a human life at conception, then they simply have to (to be logically and morally consistent) never make 'abortion is ok' excpetions for rape and /or incest-generated pregnancies, as it is, still murder (given their stance of life beginning at conception)

 

[Vesper 30,091]

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-11-04-why-trump-speech-more-violent/

 

As Donald Trump’s closing pitch grows more violent and incoherent, many of my fellow pundits have wondered if he’s just losing it. That presupposes, of course, that he once had it, whatever “it” may have been.

I don’t know about the incoherence, but I don’t think the growing violence of his speech—opining, for instance, that we need a day of unchecked police violence to restore law and order—is the Lear-like meandering of an aggrieved old man. I think it’s a very conscious strategy to turn out those Trump supporters who are least likely to vote: working-class young men. Even if it’s not conscious on Trump’s part, I think his handlers know that their employer’s adding a little ultraviolence to his speeches may prod just enough smoldering incels and other angry young men to bring themselves to the polls.

Trump’s get-out-the-vote problem was well illustrated by a Washington Post poll of Michigan voters late last week. The poll revealed that Trump led Kamala Harris by a 47 percent to 45 percent margin among registered voters, but trailed her 47-46 among likely voters. That discrepancy follows logically from what we know about the candidates’ respective voting bases. Harris’s base is disproportionately female and college-educated, both groups that tend to turn out in higher numbers than male and working-class voters. Much of Trump’s base, correspondingly, turns out to vote at lower rates. And the lowest rate of all is that of working-class young men.

The Trump campaign is aware of this, of course. It’s the reason why the pro-Trump canvass operations—vexed, fraught, and inexperienced though they may be—are focusing on “low propensity voters,” who are disproportionately young men. It’s the reason why Trump is going on every independent media or social media outlet that has built any semblance of a fuck-’em-all young male audience. It’s the reason why Trump and JD Vance sat for a collective six hours with Joe Rogan and why Trump trots out Hulk Hogan at his rallies. If the voters he needs respond best to spectacles of violence, or maybe even real violence, then spectacles of violence—with the threat of real violence—is precisely what he’ll provide.

Many of Trump’s threats doubtless bubble up from his own vast cesspool of rage and are directed at figures who personally affronted him, from Liz Cheney to John Kelly. These people may be almost entirely unknown to Trump’s angry young men. But obscure though Trump’s targets may be, it’s the violent rhetoric that matters. It shouldn’t be a mystery, then, that Trump’s campaign managers aren’t trying (or at least, aren’t trying very hard) to get him to de-escalate his threats. After all, he’s consistently said that he will reward his supporters with “retribution,” which comes as close as anything to being his campaign’s raison d’ȇtre, and most certainly is for many or most of the angry young men he’s trying so hard to move to the polls.

Just as Bill Clinton told voters, “I feel your pain,” so Donald Trump tells voters, “I feel your rage—and that rage will become government policy if you elect me.”

MY COLLEAGUE BOB KUTTNER WROTE last week about why so much open, vituperative hatred now characterizes the American right, at a level that would probably appall such right-wing icons of yore as William Buckley and Ronald Reagan. Bob rightly notes that the bipartisan elite’s indifference to the significantly reduced economic standing of the working class (at least, until Bernie Sanders jolted the Democrats in 2016) surely played a role in this. I’d add that Newt Gingrich normalized the demonization of Democrats among Republican elites during the 1990s, and that Fox News and friends gleefully joined in. And given that a majority of Republicans, having swallowed Trump’s biggest lie, have consistently told pollsters that the 2020 election was stolen, the intensification of right-wing rage should come as no surprise.

I suspect there’s yet another factor that’s unhinged a number of our compatriots in recent years, and that’s the disruptions and dislocations that came with the COVID pandemic. For many on the right, the government’s attempts to stop the spread of COVID were seen as the ultimate assault of liberal elites on their personal sovereignty. That anger, its absurdity notwithstanding, is in large part with us still, and I suspect it’s the wellspring of some of the hatred that is powering the Trump campaign. Only some, to be sure; it’s not like prior to COVID, Trump spoke in fully demure fashion.

The great Menshevik leader Julius Martov had a theory of how the Bolshevik Revolution became so violent. Before they took power, Martov noted, violence hadn’t been an element of the Bolsheviks’ doctrine or playbook. He observed that when they first seized power, they abolished (briefly) the death penalty and freed many of the ministers of the government they’d overthrown.

But the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who’d been on the World War’s front lines and then sided with the Bolsheviks had understandably grown numb to the unprecedented level of violence they daily faced, Martov noted. More pointedly, as their aristocratic officers routinely ordered them to frontally attack German machine guns, to no apparent gain but to massive casualties in their ranks, many of those soldiers came to view those officers as their real enemies, for which reason there were many instances in which those soldiers killed their superiors. Properly redirected, violence was much more a solution than a problem to the soldiers who sided with the Bolsheviks. And in the initial Bolshevik seizure of power in many cities and towns, the violence began with the Bolshevik soldiers who’d left the World War’s front and transferred their own front to their domestic enemies.

If no World War, Martov wrote, then the level of enraged, sadistic violence that came to characterize the Bolsheviks’ battles might have been greatly reduced.

I wonder if the rage that many on the right—very much including working-class young men—feel toward those they regard as part of the liberal elite isn’t also a spillover, at least partly, from the presumable impositions they suffered during the pandemic. It’s absurd, of course, to equate being compelled to wear a mask during a pandemic to being ordered to make a suicidal charge in the face of machine guns, but the decades of fury at liberal elites to which the leaders of the right had conditioned them has almost surely contributed to the levels of fury that Trump is now working hard to stoke. To win those last hard-to-get votes that could put him back in power, Trump’s campaign knows he has to promise and personify violence. Happily, from his campaign’s perspective, that’s something he can easily do.

Edited November 4, 2024 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,091]

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-11-02-can-sherrod-brown-close-deal-rural-ohio/

 

In any neighborhood in Jackson County, Ohio, somebody’s bound to have a story about U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) helping them. That’s what Lisa Parker, the chair of the Democratic Party in Jackson County, says.

“Anything from their Social Security benefits, to they had trouble with the Postal Service. In my family’s case … veterans’ benefits,” she says. “We have a large [Veterans Affairs] hospital that covers southeastern Ohio, which is kind of a medical desert anyway. Sherrod fought to keep that VA medical center open.”

Despite that, Parker still believes that Brown’s opponent in the 2024 Ohio Senate race, Bernie Moreno, will win the county. However, she thinks Brown will win the seat again in a tight race and more of Jackson’s residents will vote for him than expected.

Brown has served in his Senate seat since 2007 and has won re-election easily thus far, with vote counts over 50 percent in each election cycle. This year, alas, seems to be different. In early September, a Bowling Green State University poll showed that Brown led Moreno by five percentage points, as compared to his eight-point margin in 2018. Then a poll from early October conducted by The Washington Post found an even tighter margin, with Brown up by only one point.

In 2012, Brown won multiple rural counties in the south and southeast of the state. In 2018, he won the major cities and northeast suburbs, but only won a single county in the southeastern, Appalachian part of Ohio, namely Athens—and that only because of its liberal-leaning college town. His declining margins in rural areas are reflective of a larger trend for the Democratic Party, and it might be why he loses.

The rural vote is the difference between another Trump administration or maintaining a blue executive office. Declining news organizations in rural America led to an absence of voter participation. Since rural Ohio, among other states, is without reliable, high-speed internet, face time between candidates is crucial.

For the past two decades, rural voters have steadily shifted farther right. In 2000, the Republican Party held a narrow advantage over Democrats in non-metro areas—only 51 percent. Now, the GOP holds a 25-percentage-point lead over Democratic candidates.

In The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America, the largest, most detailed set of surveys on rural voters to date, agricultural towns say they feel discarded by the Democratic Party.

In the Prospect’s coverage of Project 2025, Janie Ekere found that under past Democratic administrations, neoliberal trade and regulatory policy benefited corporations at the expense of the rural working class, deepening the population’s mistrust of outside politicians. Economic production and good jobs flowed to a handful of booming cities. In rural regions, the Democratic Party became synonymous with expanding metropolitan areas.

Under past Democratic administrations, neoliberal trade and regulatory policy benefited corporations at the expense of the rural working class.

Since 2009, 77 percent of rural Ohio communities have lost population as 700,000 residents, mostly prime-working-age adults, relocated for better jobs. Aging cities were left with many fewer working residents to fund community infrastructure and benefits.

Approximately 160 rural Ohio hospitals have closed since 2010—or about three-quarters of the total—and the 25 percent that remain are on the verge of bankruptcy. Most clinics have cut back their services to save money, leaving women’s health, including maternity wards, on the chopping block.

Medical staff in Holmes and Tuscarawas Counties attribute growing mortality rates to inaccessible health care. Fewer doctors complete their fellowships or establish roots in the countryside. With scattered communication services, unreliable transportation, and underfunded social programs, rural Ohio cannot sustain its population in the long term.

As a result, there is little remaining trust for Democrats as an institution.

So, how did billionaire Trump foster trust among rural voters? The easy answer is to write off these communities as bigoted, and certainly, there are many voters drawn to Trump’s racism. And it’s also true that most Republicans voted for the same trade and deregulation policies that have devastated rural Ohio.

However, Trump is seen as an outsider, and, led by him, conservatives began seizing the opportunity left by prior Democratic administrations. Republicans convinced voters that liberals cannot understand the needs of rural voters because urban, blue-state politicians do not live working-class lives.

At the same time, Trump used all the usual tools of the demagogue to whip up anger and grievance among rural whites by blaming their plight on immigrants, urban minorities, and other out-groups. He saw an opportunity to use non-urban communities as tools and feed on white rural resentment to further divide rural and urban communities.

Trump’s pitch was and is mostly lies. Republicans falsely promise economic prosperity to rural residents, but when it comes time to pass legislation, they do the same thing they’ve done since the 1980s.

Trump claimed his 2017 tax cuts would boost incomes for those making less than $114,000 by $4,000, but in reality they did almost nothing for that group, while corporate profits and executive salaries soared. Just like his predecessor George W. Bush, Trump oversaw a dramatic rise in the incomes of the top 1 percent, while the bottom 66 percent stagnated. The median income for rural Ohioans, by the way, is around $49,000.

BUT BROWN IS ONE OF THE FEW IN EITHER PARTY who have consistently fought against neoliberal policy, and he has prioritized constituent services for all Ohioans, no matter where they live.

He’s one of the few U.S. senators who really do champion the rural working-class voter. He makes it a priority to show up for constituents, not only with a handshake or a smile, but also in his work. And the reason he’s been tenured so long is practically everyone in the state has heard of how he’s helped Ohio communities. That’s a good example for Democrats across the board.

Interestingly, the Biden administration seems to have learned from Brown. The Inflation Reduction Act and other marquee Biden policies do direct billions of investment into rural communities. Unlike Trump’s tax cuts, the red-hot labor market created by the Biden stimulus package actually has reduced wage inequality. But there is a large legacy to overcome, and the investment is only just starting to bear fruit.

“Rural areas have experienced decades of systematic disinvestment and a slogan or a campaign stop is not going to suddenly erase that reality,” Shawn Sebastian, director of organizing at RuralOrganizing.org, says.

Democrats need to show their support for rural communities in more ways than just a campaign speech, because both urban and rural populations are critical to winning elections. Now that the majority in the Senate may hinge on this race, it’s good to have a candidate like Brown, who appeals to rural voters, running.

In the wake of the uncertainty this election cycle has brought, one thing is certain: Brown is not to blame for his race being as close as it is. Being on the same ballot as Trump, in a state where Trump is expected to win handily, against a Trump-backed candidate doesn’t bode well for any Democrat. This is especially true when simply seeing a “D” next to a candidate’s name can turn away so much of a state’s rural population because they feel abandoned.

“Sherrod Brown has always put Ohio over partisanship or politics,” Isaac Wright, co-founder of the Rural Voter Institute, said. “It’s the Democratic brand, not our candidates, that’s the problem.”

[Vesper 30,091]

Tucker Carlson says "human forces" did not create nuclear technology. Instead, it was demons.

[Vesper 30,091]

https://prospect.org/environment/2024-11-04-climate-crisis-cost-of-living/

A cargo ship sails through the Panama Canal, in Panama City, June 13, 2024. Canal authorities recently had to restrict vessel transits due to drought.

 

Bewilderingly, Donald Trump is still perceived by a large chunk of the electorate as a relatively good economic policymaker, even though his proposed across-the-board tariffs and cruel mass deportation plan would dramatically increase the cost of living in the United States. (Voters don’t seem to penalize him either for his promise to preserve his highly unpopular 2017 tax cuts for corporations and the rich.) Indeed, companies are already planning price hikes to offset his global tariff scheme if he wins, making clear that U.S. consumers—not foreign countries—will be the ones who pay more. Moreover, if Trump follows through on his sadistic, fascist pledge to expel millions of immigrants, prices would soar even higher, as immigrants make up a huge fraction of both agricultural and construction laborers.

Yet it gets even worse: Trump’s hostility to climate action also threatens to saddle ordinary people with rising energy, food, and housing bills for years to come. Readers surely remember the quid pro quo offer that Trump made to fossil fuel executives gathered at his Mar-a-Lago palace back in May: Give him $1 billion and he’ll reverse Biden’s electric-vehicle and clean-energy policies, and gut a slew of environmental rules. As reported recently, Big Oil has dutifully readied a road map to undo Biden’s admittedly mixed climate legacy should Trump prevail. The upshot would be derailing the incipient American clean-energy transition, and even more fossil fuel expansion in a country that’s already the world’s top producer and exporter of oil and gas. Scientists have been unequivocal: New dirty-energy projects are incompatible with limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius—and damages grow exponentially with warming.

Even setting aside the devastating social and ecological consequences of climate change, Team Trump’s reactionary blueprint to fry the planet is sheer economic madness. Recent research found that the global macroeconomic damages from climate change are six times larger than previously estimated. According to the authors, “a 1°C increase in global temperature leads to a 12 percent decline in world GDP.” For context, the world has already warmed 1.3 degrees Celsius since the preindustrial era, and the United Nations warned recently that the world is currently on track for roughly 3 degrees of warming by 2100. A U.S.-focused study came to a similar conclusion: Under a high-emissions scenario, national GDP would shrink by 1 to 4 percent per year by century’s end.

A separate peer-reviewed paper projected that the world in 2049 will suffer $38 trillion in economic damages from climate change, based on likely policy pathways, with losses unjustly concentrated in poorer regions that have done the least to cause the crisis. According to this grim forecast, trillions of dollars in global annual income reductions are already locked in due to extant greenhouse gas emissions, and trillions more will come with every year that nations fail to zero out emissions.

A big way these economic damages will be felt is inflation. Climate disasters will damage or destroy land, factories, transportation networks, and so on—essentially, harming the economy’s supply of goods and services, leading to bidding wars over what remains. Therefore, the right’s opposition to climate action is objectively pro-inflation. The left and the center ought to communicate this point to voters as clearly as possible.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who is leading a joint investigation of Trump’s quid pro quo offer to Big Oil, has suggested some pithy language: “Republicans are corrupted by fossil fuel money, they’re lying to you about climate change, and you’re about to get an economic punch in the face because of it.”

Disasters interact badly with global supply chains, left fragile by decades of neoliberalism and corporate concentration.

What do these economic punches look like? For one thing, increasingly frequent and severe heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes, and floods are leading to ever more “billion-dollar” disasters each year. Those are economically ruinous for the direct victims, with pain dished out disproportionately to the poor and the nonwhite. But they also tend to lead to local shortages and price hikes.

More slow-moving disasters such as drought also jeopardize food security and wreak havoc on supply chains. A few days ago, barges started running aground in the Mississippi River due to a lack of rainfall, impeding U.S. farmers’ ability to deliver crops. Over the past year, an El Niño–linked drought has also slowed the passage of container ships through the Panama Canal, a critical node of global trade.

We may be a quarter-century away from living through some of the more horrific effects of our current warming trajectory, and yet climate change is already being experienced as a pocketbook issue—contributing to higher grocery bills, fueling a property insurance debacle that makes housing even more expensive while heralding far-reaching real estate devaluations and financial meltdowns, and more.

Disasters interact badly with global supply chains, left fragile by decades of neoliberalism and corporate concentration. This effect can be seen in the sellers’ inflation that began in 2021. Powerful firms exploited real and perceived supply issues stemming from multiple crises—including the COVID-19 pandemic, bird flu, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—to justify price hikes that exceeded increased input costs.

Writing about the shortage of intravenous fluid last month, the Prospect’s David Dayen explained how Hurricane Helene flooded a North Carolina factory that’s a key producer of IV solution, less than a decade after Hurricane Maria did the same thing to IV bag factories in Puerto Rico. As Dayen put it, the storm “is only the surface-level cause; it’s really about America refusing to learn the lessons of monopoly fragility.”

That’s why, amid COVID-era inflation, progressives argued against the Fed’s job-threatening interest rate hikes and for a more relevant mix of policies, including a windfall profits tax, stronger antitrust enforcement (the greater supply is dispersed, the more resilient the economy), and targeted price controls. Unlike the blunt tool that Jerome Powell wielded ineffectively, those customized solutions to profit-driven inflation can diminish the power of price-gouging corporations without hurting workers.

Meanwhile, the Roosevelt Institute has shown that in addition to heating up the planet, the price of fossil fuel energy is highly volatile and contributes to inflation. Anyone with an EV knows that (so long as you can charge at home) they cost much less to charge than a similar tank of gas. More broadly, renewable energy is so cheap, and so consistently getting cheaper, that shifting from fossil fuels to renewables will permanently reduce inflationary pressures. Dovish monetary policy can help increase investment in wind, solar, and other forms of green energy.

While insufficient, Biden’s decision to pause the approval of new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals as his administration updates its public-interest criteria is a sound move, from both a climate standpoint and an economic one. Industry-backed arguments about the supposed emission-reducing benefits of LNG have been thoroughly debunked. Trump and other proponents of increased LNG exports, including the fossil fuel executives he made promises to, should be forced to answer for the fact that shipping fracked gas around the world contributes to higher domestic energy prices.

Though much more needs to be done to address the housing affordability crisis in a way that also advances decarbonization, a modest Biden rule requiring homebuilders to improve energy efficiency standards to qualify for federal financing will save Americans more than $2 billion on utility bills. Contrast this effort with Trump’s spiteful defense of outdated light bulbs, toilets, showerheads, and dishwashers, all of which waste resources and eat into wages.

A report out last month from Evergreen Action contrasts two futures: one in which the Trump-aligned Project 2025 agenda is implemented and one in which the achievements of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act are protected and built upon. What it found, unsurprisingly, is that “Project 2025 will result in significant job and GDP losses, higher household energy costs, and higher climate pollution by 2035.”

The left should make clear the economic stakes of climate action. To that end, the Climate & Community Institute last week outlined the contours of a progressive climate agenda, including major investments in green public works projects that would provide good infrastructure and employment, and a redirection of federal resources from militarization to equitable climate mitigation. One of the memos focuses specifically on lowering the cost of living through greater public investment in housing, transportation, utilities, and social safety nets. The left must also make clear that the right’s opposition to such measures will result in economic misery.

Unfair though it may be, inflation remains an albatross around Kamala Harris’s neck. If she loses, widespread anger over rising prices from 2021 to early 2024 will be one key reason why. Democrats have tried—though not as hard or often as they should have—to explain to voters that the recent bout of inflation was caused to a significant degree by corporate profiteering, particularly in highly consolidated industries like Big Oil and Big Ag.

That’s an essential message that ought to be repeated moving forward. Survey data shows that Harris’s vow to crack down on price-gouging is broadly popular. This is especially true among working-class voters, who researchers have found respond well to left-populist criticisms of billionaires and corporate wrongdoing.

It wouldn’t hurt to add a new argument to the repertoire: Global warming is already making your life more expensive. Among other things, curbing planet-heating pollution and investing in green public goods is about protecting you and your loved ones from catastrophic disruptions while moderating the costs of essentials. Anyone who doesn’t take the climate crisis seriously doesn’t care about your material well-being.

[Vesper 30,091]

Who’s going to win on Election Day? Here are 8 columnists’ predictions.

Kamala Harris or Donald Trump? Which party will control Congress? Here are our best guesses.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/04/election-predictions-harris-trump-congress/

The election is on a knife’s edge. It’s mind-blowing how close this race is, according to the polls.

Nevertheless, seven of my colleagues and I gave it our best to come up with predictions for what will happen on Election Day. I also joined Karen Tumulty and Eugene Robinson to discuss what’s informing our expectations.

🔮 🔮 🔮

First, our predictions. Here are our best guesses for the presidential swing states:

And for Congress:

James Hohmann: Gene and Karen, thanks for chatting. I’ll confess that I hate to make predictions about this election and have low confidence in the outcome. It feels so fluid. I have thought Donald Trump would win for months, but he seemed to be snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in the final week — with his Madison Square Garden rally and more.

Karen Tumulty: May I remind you that, in 2016, I was supposed to write the paper’s lead election story, and all I had ready at 7 p.m. on election night was a 50-inch story on how America had just elected its first woman president?Follow

Eugene Robinson: Predicting is hard, especially about the future.

Karen: I don’t have any confidence at all in my own prediction.

James: In retrospect, it’s all going to seem glaringly obvious — just like it did after Hillary Clinton lost in 2016. Karen, you posted something on X that showed how 15 states were in play on Election Day that year. This year’s map is much smaller — really only seven states are in play. Why do you think the map has shrunk?

Karen: It’s amazing, isn’t it? Fifteen states, including Florida, Ohio, Virginia and … Utah … were in play in 2016. None of those are this year. The map has shrunk because polarization in this country has gotten even worse.

Gene: There aren’t that many true swing states. At least we don’t think there are.

James: Third parties were also a big factor that year. Utah was in play because Evan McMullin was threatening to split the Republican vote. Gary Johnson was a real factor. And Jill Stein arguably cost Clinton the presidency. Third parties aren’t really a force this year.

Karen: Not for lack of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. trying.

Gene: I guess I would say the shrinkage has to do with Trump. The arguments aren’t so much about policy, as they are about Trump vs. not-Trump. It becomes terribly binary.

James: I hate to ask you to assign percentages, but how confident are you in your predictions? Gene, how strongly do you feel that Harris wins? I’m somewhere close to 50 percent sure — maybe 55 percent — that Trump wins. But no outcome would surprise me.

Gene: I’m a little confident. Maybe a bit more than a little. My theory is basically that reproductive freedom is an issue that has legs beyond the 2022 midterms and will have an under-the-radar effect like the shy-Trump-voter phenomenon had in 2016.

Karen: Harris is running against some structural headwinds: President Joe Biden’s low approval rating and the fact that, for the first time in 30 years, more people identify with the Republican Party than the Democrats.

Gene: True, there is that, Karen. That’s why I’m not more than pretty sure of my prediction.

Karen: The economy is also top of mind for most voters. But honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised by any outcome at this point — except, perhaps, a blowout by Trump.

James: Nevada is interesting. Karen thinks Harris will carry the Silver State, but Gene thinks Trump gets it. On paper, it should be a Trump state: rural Republicans, very low percentage of college-educated voters, larger populations of Latinos who are drifting to Trump. But the Culinary Union and the late Harry Reid’s machine remain strong. Jon Ralston, the smartest journalist in Nevada, thinks the early vote bodes well for Trump. How do you each see it?

Karen: I think the Zombie Harry Reid machine and the unions might pull this off, but the housing crisis there has been horrific.

Gene: My prediction for Nevada was partly a reaction to Ralston’s analysis. It should go to Harris, but I just have a sense that Trump will take it narrowly. “A sense” is no way to make a scientifically sound prediction, but that’s what we’re left with at this point.

James: Yeah, no one should make investment decisions off our educated guesses. Another thing that surprises me about our colleagues’ predictions is that everyone guessed Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) wins. No one thinks Eric Hovde will pull it off.

Gene: I’d worry if I were Baldwin. I mean, can we all be right?

James: Totally. Harris was there multiple times last week. If Trump wins Wisconsin by two to three points, I think Hovde might ride his coattails. It just feels like split-ticket voting is declining, which is why I’m bearish on Tester, Brown, etc.

Karen: The Wisconsin race was, until recently, not even supposed to be in doubt for Baldwin. If she loses, Schumer is going to be sorry he was gallivanting around Texas and Florida. Speaking of which, Gene, really? You think Ted Cruz loses? Texas is the burying ground for Democratic hopes, cycle after cycle.

James: (Karen, a native Texan, wrote a great column on the race there. You can read it here.)

Gene: This is Lucy and the football. Every time, it looks as though the Dems have a chance to knock Cruz off, and every time Cruz pulls off a fairly comfortable win. But the polls have been even closer this time, and Cruz might have worn out his welcome. For Colin Allred to win, my theory about reproductive rights lifting the Democratic boat has to be true. But, of course, Karen is the Texas expert.

James: Texas will be red right up until it’s not. Stranger things have happened. I just don’t know how many Trump-Allred voters there could possibly be, even though Cruz is so unlikable and hasn’t faced voters since the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection or his trip to Cancún during widespread power outages in his state.

Karen: I was down there quite recently, and the energy of the Cruz events I went to was pretty intense. Allred had a rally in a community center near Houston — his only event in that very blue area that weekend — and was barely able to fill half of a basketball gym.

Gene: Exactly, on Cruz’s unlikability. My impression (again, deferring to the sage of San Antonio) is that people do remember Cancún.

James: Gene, I appreciate you laying that flag on abortion. ProPublica reported last week about women who have died because of Texas’s ban. And early vote data suggests that women are turning out at significantly higher rates in the swing states than men.

Karen: Women always do. This is what happens when you give us the vote — we use it. But I’m not sure abortion is going to be the determining issue, even for women.

Gene: Right. Keeping in mind that early vote data can be entirely misleading, this is an issue that affects so many people in such an intimate way. Those stories are horrifying, and I just don’t think the issue has died down, politically.

James: The Post on Friday published its final poll in Pennsylvania, with Harris at 48 and Trump at 47. What’s wild is that it is unchanged from six weeks ago, despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent there. 🤯

Karen: Couldn’t get much closer in Pennsylvania. But the Democratic registration edge there has been cut in half since 2020, when Biden barely squeaked by in the state.

Gene: Aren’t all the polls unchanged for the past six weeks, basically? They all say this is a margin-of-error race in basically every swing state. And one does wonder how so many polls can so consistently agree on such a tight margin — again, everywhere. It would be human nature for pollsters not to want to publish outliers that could later make them look foolish.

James: Yeah. It’s not just ours. The race looks shockingly static in polling, even with daily firestorms. Do you think Trump starting to falsely claim that Democrats are cheating in Pennsylvania is a sign of desperation? Or is it just his standard MO?

Karen: That would seem to be a tell …

Gene: Republicans do seem genuinely worried there.

Karen: I wonder, though, whether Trump’s premature (and false) claims of election fraud might backfire on Republicans, like they did in the Senate runoffs in Georgia four years ago.

James: To wrap this up, what will you two be watching for these final days?

Gene: On election eve, I’ll probably be watching Monday Night football. A bit of a break before it all gets really real.

Karen: I hope there’s something good on Turner Classic Movies.

Gene: I don’t think TCM has “2,000 Mules” …

[cosmicway 1,333]

Are there going to be more terror attacks under a Trump presidency like 9-11 and the London tube, or less ?
Chances are 99.95% that there will be more.
To understand this one should try to enter the mentality of the immigrant populations in America and Europe.
There are many popular myths about those populations.
But the truth is they can be divided into broadly two groups:
Politically friendly and politically hostile to the host country.
I 'm not talking about those who are into common crime. Common crime by immigrants or anyone else is of course not something to be tolerated, but it has nothing to do with politics.
Thus a successful house burglar or cheque forger after doing his tricks for some years may stop it and become a respected citizen - even enter the house of Lords.
So it's the politically friendlies and the politically hostiles the two important groups in what regards terrorism.
A politically hostile immigrant was something of an oddity several decades ago. Why emigrate to America or Britain if you don't like America / Britain ?
They existed but it was an oddity.
Nowadays a fair percentage are hostiles, thanks to the fanatical muslims and also thanks to their antisemitism.
Those are dangerous.
Under a Trump administration who is calling ordinary people "garbage" what will happen then ?
The 15 say percent will become 30%, not 5%.
So a cycle of violence and inevitable counter repression is under way.
There are also the old style urban guerrilas of the left and it's a golden opportunity for them to start again. They are in any case outlaws (were - they will be) so the whatever new laws don't deter them.
Putin - Iran - Hamash - North Korea are relishing in the mud, to borrow a horse racing expression.

 

Edited November 5, 2024 by cosmicway