Paul Krugman | Trump Hits the Panic Button

13 September 19 Your Wonderful and Indispensable Work I am in full support of RSN and have found it immensely helpful in keeping abreast of our body politic from a perspective which is not driven by money but by the appeal to truth and accountability among all the institutions of our government as well as among all of us who are citizens of this country and world. I have sent what is for me a significant contribution to you. RSN at the end of this calendar year. I hope that your cause will not only survive but thrive in the months and years ahead, because I for one am fully convinced that we as citizens need what you provide. Thank you. Donovan L., Ph. D., RSN Reader-Supporter Sure, I'll make a donation! Update My Monthly Donation If you would prefer to send a check: Reader Supported News PO Box 2043 Citrus Hts, CA 95611

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Paul Krugman | Trump Hits the Panic Button

Paul Krugman, The New York Times

Krugman writes: "It's now clear that Trump's in full-blown panic over the failure of his economic policies to deliver the promised results."

EXCERPT: 

Trump thinks that federal debt is like a business loan, which you can pay down early to take advantage of lower interest rates. He’s clearly unaware that federal debt actually consists of bonds, which can’t be prepaid (which is one reason interest rates on federal debt are always lower than, say, rates on home mortgages). That is, he imagines that the government’s finances can be managed as if the U.S. were a casino or a golf course, and it never occurred to him to ask anyone at Treasury whether that’s how it works.

But while Trump realizes that he’s in trouble, there’s no indication that he understands why. He’s not the kind of person who ever admits, even to himself, that he made mistakes; his instinct is always to blame someone else while doubling down on his failed policies.

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Greta Thunberg speaks at a climate protest outside the White House in Washington D.C., on September 13. (photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)

'If You Did Your Job, We'd Be in School': Greta Thunberg Joins White House Climate Protest
Max Cohen, USA TODAY
Cohen writes: "After calling out politicians for climate inaction on 'The Daily Show' this week, teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg is protesting Friday outside the White House to demand the U.S. government address the affects of climate change."
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A healthcare rally. (photo: Health Care for All)

Medicare for All Would Cut Poverty by Over 20 Percent
Matt Bruenig, Jacobin
Excerpt: "Medicare for All doesn't just provide everyone with the care they need, free of charge. It's also a potent anti-poverty program, reducing poverty by over 20 percent and increasing poor people's incomes by 29 percent."
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Guatemalan immigrants. (photo: The Intercept)

With Trump in Office, Newspapers Increasingly Quoted Anti-Immigrant Groups Without Explaining Who They Were
Maryam Saleh, The Intercept
Saleh writes: "Ninety percent of news articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today that cited the Center for Immigration Studies from 2014 to 2017 did not mention 'the extremist nature of the group or its ties with the Trump administration.'"
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Beto O'Rourke. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

'My AR Is Ready for You': Texas Lawmaker Threatens Beto O'Rourke Over Gun Control Proposal
Antonia Noori Farzan and Kayla Epstein, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Beto O'Rourke has already backed mandatory buybacks for assault weapons, but at Thursday's Democratic debate, he left no ambiguity about what that would mean. 'Hell yes, we're going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,' he said."

Speaking to reporters after the debate, O’Rourke said that Cain’s comment “sure reads” like a death threat. “I think it’s a really irresponsible thing for him to do,” he added, “especially somebody who is a public servant and in a position of public trust to be sending that kind of message.”

Tim Perry

✔@tperry518

Responding to Texas State Rep. Briscoe Cain saying "My AR is ready for you" @BetoORourke says "I think it;s a really irresponsible thing for him to do... we are a nation of laws and if that (mandatory buyback) ends up becoming the law.. we expect people to comply w/ it"

2,336

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Cain, an attorney, frequently uses his official social media accounts to air inflammatory and hyperbolic views. On Wednesday, for instance, he suggested on Twitter that the Texas legislature should “abolish” the famously liberal city of Austin.

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A vigil held in memory of slain journalists. (photo: Orlando Sierra/Getty Images)

12 Journalists Have Been Killed in Mexico This Year, the World's Highest Toll
Carrie Kahn, NPR
Kahn writes: "This year, Mexico surpassed Syria to become the deadliest country for journalists."
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People wade through flood waters in a rural neighborhood affected by Cyclone Idai on March 24. (photo: Andrew Renneisen/Getty Images)

Record 7 Million People Displaced by Extreme Weather Events in First Half of 2019
Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch
Rosane writes: "The number was nearly double the number displaced by conflict and violence during the same period this year."
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Bernie Sanders Just Suggested a Unique Way to Legalize Marijuana

13 August 19

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What is the purpose of reading news? Why do we? Is it so that we may be instructed by those who publish or broadcast the news to hate, to fear? Or is it because we choose to educate ourselves?

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Bernie Sanders Just Suggested a Unique Way to Legalize Marijuana 

Sean Williams, The Motley Fool
Williams writes: "Sanders has proposed a unique means of bringing the green rush to the United States. He would use a presidential executive order to make it so."
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A sign painted on top of a mural says 'We accept food stamps,' in Harvey, Ill. (photo: Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor/Getty Images)

Trump Administration Tightens Rule That Could Deny Green Cards, Citizenship to Immigrants Who Need Public Assistance
Hamed Aleaziz, BuzzFeed
Aleaziz writes: "The new policy, long in the works, will reshape the immigration system."
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FBI agents. (photo: Joshua Lott/Getty Images)

The FBI Told Congress Domestic Terror Investigations Led to 90 Recent Arrests. It Wouldn't Show Us Records of Even One.
Fritz Zimmermann, ProPublica
Zimmermann writes: "Four days after asking for information on the FBI's claims of 90 domestic terrorism arrests, we are still waiting. And, frankly, it got kind of weird."
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ICE agents talk to a women in her home. (photo: Norsk Telegrambyra AS/Reuters)

'No One Is Coming Out': Ice Raids Leave Latino Community Paralyzed With Fear
Ashton Pittman, Guardian UK
Pittman writes: "Ovidio Miguel watched last week as business dried up at his grocery store in the wake of a large-scale immigration raid at the local poultry plant in Forest, Mississippi."
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Representation of virtual currency. (photo: Dado Ruvic/Reuters)

Facebook's Libra Cryptocurrency Is Part of a Disturbing Financial Trend
Graham Steele, The Washington Post
Steele writes: "In June, Facebook announced plans to effectively create its own alternative currency called Libra - and, eventually, a financial system to go with it."
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Vladimir Putin. (photo: Sergey Guneev/Sputnik/AP)

5 Russian Nuclear Engineers Buried After Rocket Explosion
Vladimir Isachenkov, Associated Press
Isachenkov writes: "Thousands of Russians attended the funerals Monday of five Russian nuclear engineers killed by an explosion as they tested a new rocket engine, a tragedy that fueled radiation fears and raised new questions about a secretive weapons program."
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Green sea turtle. (photo: Koa Matsuoka/Flickr)

As Scientists Warn of Biodiversity Crisis, Trump Administration Guts Endangered Species Act
NRDC
Excerpt: "The bedrock conservation law saves 99 percent of the plants and animals it protects-and we need it now more than ever."
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America Is Divided by Education

'I love the poorly educated': why white college graduates are deserting Trump

America Is Divided by Education

The gulf between the party identification of white voters with college degrees and those without is growing rapidly. Trump is widening it.

• ADAM HARRIS
 
•  NOV 7, 2018

One of the most striking patterns in yesterday’s election was years in the making: a major partisan divide between white voters with a college degree and those without one.

According to exit polls, 61 percent of non-college-educated white voters cast their ballots for Republicans while just 45 percent of college-educated white voters did so. Meanwhile 53 percent of college-educated white voters cast their votes for Democrats compared with 37 percent of those without a degree.

The diploma divide, as it’s often called, is not occurring across the electorate; it is primarily a phenomenon among white voters. It’s an unprecedented divide, and is in fact a complete departure from the diploma divide of the past. Non-college-educated white voters used to solidly belong to Democrats, and college-educated white voters to Republicans. Several events over the past six decades have caused these allegiances to switch, the most recent being the candidacy, election, and presidency of Donald Trump.

Last night’s results confirm that the diploma divide is likely here to stay—especially if the GOP maintains its alignment with Trump and the nationalist, anti-immigrant sentiments he hangs his hat on. The gap is likely to be one of the most powerful forces shaping American politics for decades to come.

The democratic and republican Parties looked a lot different in 1952, when the American National Election Studies—surveys of voters conducted before and after presidential elections—were in their infancy. The Republicans, to some extent, were still regarded as the party of Lincoln, even though they had shifted their focus to courting southern white voters, causing black people to leave the party. Meanwhile, the Democrats were the party of a coalition that pushed for social services—the party of the New Deal. There were far fewer college-educated Americans at the time, but the white Americans who did have degrees tended to vote Republican, and those who didn't sided with the Democrats by a significant margin.

This split was relatively stable for decades and then, steadily, it began to change. “The shift in whites without a college degree away from the Democratic Party begins as the Democratic Party becomes identified as the party of civil rights,” starting in the 1960s, Robert P. Jones, the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, told me. Disaffected white southern Democrats, in particular, fled in droves.

Party realignment doesn't happen overnight. Just because some voters swing across the aisle in one election doesn't mean they’ll quit the party they've identified with their entire lives. Still, strong support for the Democrats among whites without a college degree, borne out of economic incentives—and racial resentment—began to wane. In their book, The Rise of Southern Republicans, the scholars Merle Black and Earl Black call this shift the “Great White Switch.”

From the mid-1990s to 2008, the diploma divide was small, if not negligible. Even though the Democrats had become the party of civil rights and a broad, multicultural coalition, they were also still the party of unions, which were largely made up of non-degree-holding whites. Therefore, white people with and without college degrees were equally as likely to be Democrats or Republicans.

But in 2008, the election of Barack Obama, a black man, signaled that the Democrats were becoming the party of progressive racial politics. “Obama’s presidency simplifies the politics of race,” Michael Tesler, an associate professor of political science at UC Irvine, says. “If you were a low-educated white, you were much more likely to know about the partisan differences on race [after Obama] than you were before.”

That change didn’t show up in the party-affiliation data right away, but that’s common, Tesler says. It often takes more than one election for people to switch their party identification. But by 2012, white voters without a college degree were distinctly more likely to vote Republican than those with college degrees.

Read: The women who gave Trump the White House could tip the midterms to Democrats

In the 2016 election, 48 percent of college-educated white voters voted for Trump, compared with 66 percent of non-college-educated white voters. A Marist poll in October of this year found that 55 percent of non-college-educated white voters approved of the job Trump was doing, compared with just 39 percent of college-educated white voters. When Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh squeaked through a Senate confirmation hearing with a sexual assault allegation in tow, 54 percent of non-college-educated white voters supported him, compared with 38 percent who had gone to college. And the partisan diploma divide held steady last night, reflecting a divide in values between those with degrees and those without.

There’s a question that splits Americans neatly in two. Every year, on its American Values Survey, the Public Religion Research Institute asks Americans whether they “think American culture and way of life has mostly changed for the better, or has it mostly changed for the worse,” since the 1950s. 

Fifty percent of Americans say that it’s gotten better in this year’s poll, and 47 percent say that it has gotten worse.

But for white voters, the answer to that question is split by education level. Fifty-eight percent of college-educated whites this year say that America has gotten better since 1950, while 57 percent of non-college-educated whites say that it’s gotten worse. When President Trump says “Make America great again,” the againis instructive. He’s capitalizing on the nostalgia that non-college-educated white voters have for America’s past. “That harkening back to a supposed golden age where things were better has a really, really strong appeal for whites without a college degree,” Jones said.

That nostalgia, however, is for a time when black Americans and other minority groups had significantly fewer civil rights. And a Republican rhetoric that centers a longing for an era of white prosperity, rife with racist violence against black people, is why it’s impossible to understand the diploma divide without accounting for racial resentment. Needless to say, black Americans and other minority groups aren’t as keen on returning to the past.

Read: The nationalist’s delusion

When researchers control for voter attitudes on race in addition to white voters’ education level, Tesler says, the diploma divide disappears. No other factor, he says, explains the education gap as well—not economic anxiety, ideology, income, or gender.

David N. Smith, a professor at the University of Kansas, came to a similar conclusion when he and Eric Hanley took a dive into the 2016 American National Election Survey. They found that demographic data such as education are important predictors of which party someone votes for. But “when you bring the attitudes variables into account as well, what emerges is that attitudes loom even larger than demographics,” he told me.

Here’s how he put it: If you look at white people who voted for Trump—both those with college degrees and those without—and identify everybody with a high level of resentment toward minorities, women, and Muslims, as well as those who want an arrogant, assertive leader, there’s almost no one left. The vast majority of Trump voters share those sentiments, the researchers found, regardless of education level.

The GOP has come around to Trump. As my colleague McKay Coppins wrote, “Trump’s conquest of the Republican Party is complete, and the former ‘fringe’ has become so thoroughly intertwined with the ‘establishment’ that the two are virtually indistinguishable.”

The growing diploma divide is less a result of non-college-educated white voters becoming Republicans, and more of college-educated white voters finding that they can’t fully support the party anymore. “What's happened since 2016 is that the low-educated whites have kind of plateaued in their support for the Republicans,” Tesler says. “But you've seen this trend increase [of] high-educated whites [moving] towards the Democrats.”

Smith told me that from 2015 to 2017, the Weidenbaum Center at Washington University in St. Louis conducted a monthly panel survey—where the same statistically significant number of people are interviewed each month—that cataloged Republican attitudes toward Republican candidates. Over time, those who supported Ted Cruz, who called Trump a “sniveling coward” during the campaign, and those who supported Marco Rubio, who called him a “con man,” tended to come around to Trump.

But the voters that stand out, Smith said, are those who initially supported John Kasich. “They, in many instances, agree with Trump on policy issues, but the best data indicates that they are uncomfortable with him personally,” he said. “There are key aspects of his rhetorical style, of his governing style, that they don't like.”

Kasich has been on a crusade in recent weeks combatting the Republican rhetoric around the migrant caravan. “The Lord doesn’t want” America to build walls around around itself, he told CNN. And that wasn’t the first time he’d expressed concern about the state of the Republican party, and its rhetoric, as it has inched closer and closer to Trump. “If the party can't be fixed,” Kasich told Jake Tapper in October 2017, “then I’m not going to be able to support the party. Period. That's the end of it.”

Jones argues that the logic is simple. “The risk that the Republican Party runs by becoming the party that’s opposed to immigration, that’s worried about the country becoming more diverse,” he said, “is that they will turn off college-educated whites.”

But the consequences of the diploma divide are not just evident in the demographics on Election Day. Hidden in that gap is a threat to higher education itself. Last year, Pew issued a sobering survey. 

“Republicans have soured on higher education,” the survey declared, and it threw people into a frenzy.

Sixty-seven percent of Republicans, the survey found, had “some” to “little” confidence in colleges as institutions. A number of factors contribute to this distrust, the rising cost of tuition and the perception of a liberal bent at colleges among them. And if one major party believes that higher education is an engine of liberal indoctrination, and that party’s voters are increasingly likely not to have attended college, the political benefits of an anti–higher education stance are obvious.

Read: American higher education hits a dangerous milestone

That puts the budget lines for public colleges, in particular, at risk. Decades of funding cuts by state governments have already hit the institutions hard. And these cuts, in turn, have driven an increase in tuition costs and more animosity toward higher education. As Michael Grunwald recently wrote in Politico, “The next big Republican culture war will be a war on college.”

As the Republican party continues to cozy up to Trump, whose political career began by questioning the legitimacy of the first black president, and who rests his laurels on hostile anti-immigrant sentiments, more moderate Republicans—who, often, are college educated—will likely continue to flee. And the GOP will have even less of a reason to try to cater to the college set, or to embrace higher education–friendly policies. The diploma divide is wide, and the closer Republicans embrace Trump, the wider it may get.



LINK

Outlets Denounced as ‘Enemies of People’ Still Promote Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Narratives view post on FAIR.org by Joshua Cho This New York Times headline (3/5/19) hyping border crossings could have appeared on Fox News—which is presumably why FoxNews.com (4/11/19) highlighted it. If you keep up with all the various xenophobic “crises” and “threats” propagated by corporate media—depicting the United States as an overwhelmed nation, besieged by teeming swarms of scheming foreigners intent on stealing jobs and seizing scarce public benefits from across the southern border—you’ll recall that the United States has apparently been under “invasion” for years now. Decades, even (Extra!, 1–2/95). The media have spread this contrived account even during periods where unauthorized immigration was continuously falling (FAIR.org , 12/1/13 ). So it shouldn’t really come as a surprise to see Fox News (4/11/19) trumpeting the fact that establishment outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times are joining them in spreading the Trump administration’s racist narrative. Here are some recent headlines, offered as evidence by Foxthat “Mainstream Media Outlets Change Their Tune on Border Crisis Amid Illegal Immigration Surge”: “Border at ‘Breaking Point’ as More Than 76,000 Unauthorized Migrants Cross in a Month” (New York Times, 3/5/19). “US Has Hit ‘Breaking Point’ at Border Amid Immigration Surge, Customs and Border Protection Chief Says” (Washington Post, 3/27/19) “The US Immigration System May Have Reached a Breaking Point” (New York Times, 4/10/19) However, when one examines the Times and the Post’s sources for these alarming reports of an overloaded immigration system hitting a “breaking point,” one finds that they consist almost entirely of named and unnamed Trump administration officials, like Kevin McAleenan, then commissioner of US Customs and Border Protection agency, now acting secretary of Homeland Security. There’s no reason, of course, to treat official pronouncements about an alleged border crisis as objective truth, especially ones coming from the Trump administration. As FAIR (12/13/18) has previously noted, crucial context is often ignored in coverage of Central American migrants. When these reports aren’t omitting altogether the reasons why people are migrating and seeking asylum in the United States, primarily from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, journalists cite factors like “gang violence,” “death threats” and “deep poverty” without mentioning the connection between these realities and US foreign policy. Washington’s history of providing political and military support to genocidal dictatorships, coups, oppressive military forces and civil wars has permanently damaged these countries, as documented in works like historian William Blum’s Rogue State. Unfair “free trade” agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA removed trade barriers so that millions of Central American farmers were forced to compete with highly subsidized American agribusiness. Coverage also omits the fact that although the Trump administration is canceling development aid to these countries, it’s still providing lethal aid to repressive police and military forces, and even death squads, in the present (Intercept, 4/12/16; CounterPunch, 4/8/19 ). These reports by the Post and the Times mention a growing backlog of over 800,000 immigration cases judges need to “decide quickly,” and an insufficient number of prisons to detain families amidst recent spikes in the number of people crossing the border over the past few months, but almost none of them bother to explain why the Trump administration is on track to double the backlog of cases it began with—in large part due to its acceleration of mass roundups (ThinkProgress, 9/26/18). None of these reports raise the important questions of why it is even necessary to “detain” asylum-seeking families (a euphemism for imprisoning people in concentration camps), why we should consider regular spikes and fluctuations in border crossings an “emergency,” or why it is necessary to “quickly” decide the cases of asylum-seekers who are facing death upon return to their countries—as Nathan Robinson did in Current Affairs (4/12/19). None of these reports adequately consider the possibility that the Trump administration officials it relies on as sources are lying about wanting to reduce court backlogs and overcrowded prisons, and are intentionally punishing migrants in order to create the impression that the administration is hard at work to solve the “crises” it creates (Salon, 4/2/19). How else does one explain why the Trump administration consistently pursues actions that produce outcomes directly contrary to their stated objectives? No one can argue that overfilled “detainment centers” and an increasing backlog of immigration cases aren’t the predictable results of initiating the longest government shutdown in history, refusing to hire enough immigration judges to adjudicate bigger caseloads, shutting down and rejecting more humane and cost-effective alternatives to imprisonment—some with 99 percent success rates—and pursuing a “zero-tolerance” policy of prosecuting and imprisoning all asylum-seekers as criminals, and denying their rights in violation of international law, in order to make “family detention” and separation standard practice. This is important because, despite the Trump administration’s attempts (with the Post and Times’ help) to depict unauthorized migrants and asylum-seekers as criminals, asylum-seekers are actually following the law, which mandates that one can only apply for asylum status when physically present in the United States. It’s not difficult to figure out why establishment media outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post, despite being denounced by Donald Trump as “enemies of the people,” “fake news” and the “Opposition Party,” invariably amplify ridiculous narratives by the Trump administration on issues like immigration. If corporate journalists were to evaluate policymakers by the predictable consequences of their actions rather than their professed intentions, and reject face-value transmission of claims by official sources in favor of critical examination, it would jeopardize the revolving door between media and politics , and threaten corporate media’s business model of staying on the good side of the rich and powerful for a reliable stream of information—trustworthy or not. Featured image: Washington Post depiction (3/27/19) of a “Border at ‘Breaking Point'” (photo: Sergio Flores).

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