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Yes, Economic Anxiety Really Does Explain Some of Donald Trump’s Appeal

by rogalski_adam@o2.pl Posted on August 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Matt Yglesias says it’s ridiculous to attribute Donald Trump’s support to economic anxiety:

While plenty of people, including plenty of Trump fans, certainly have concerns about the economy, it’s racial resentment that drives who does and doesn’t support Trump….Adding an economic anxiety factor to your account doesn’t actually help to explain anything. Trump’s supporters, for example, are considerably whiter and considerably older than the American population at large. If the economic problems of the past decade had been unusually hard on the white and the old, then an economics-focused explanation could be valuable. In reality, things have been rougher on nonwhites and rougher on younger cohorts.

Generally speaking, I agree. There’s been an endless amount of research, including endless splicing and dicing of poll internals, that tries to explain what’s different about Trump supporters. And every time, the answer is pretty clear: racial resentment. This is so clear that it’s become a joke on Twitter. Every time a Trump supporter (or Trump himself) does or says something racist, it will get linked with a snarky comment about the latest bit of “economic anxiety.”

And yet, I do think that genuine economic anxiety has something to do with Trump’s popularity. The chart on the right, which I posted a couple of weeks ago, tells the basic story. Over the past few decades, women’s incomes have made great strides. Blacks have improved their economic position a bit. Hispanics too. The only group that’s failed to make any progress at all is white men. Maybe it’s not right to call this “anxiety,” but it’s certainly something that helps explain why white men are angrier than most people about their economic position.

Nor do I really buy this:

By contrast, the idea that Donald Trump is going to usher in a new era of broadly shared prosperity based on a revival of coal mining and labor-intensive methods of steel production is patently ridiculous. Under guise of being respectful of Trump voters’ concerns, pundits attributing his appeal to his economic “policies” are in effect attributing a remarkable degree of foolishness to his supporters. The more parsimonious and simple explanation is that there is a basic divide over values and cultural identity.

One of the remarkable things about presidential elections is the extent to which voters simply believe whatever candidates tell them. It doesn’t matter if it’s impossible. It doesn’t matter if the candidate changed his mind about this the day before yesterday. It doesn’t matter if there’s no plausible policy behind the claim. If Trump says he’s going to build a wall, then he’s going to build a wall. If he says he’s going to renegotiate all our trade treaties, then that’s what he’s going to do. This is not something specific to Trump fans. It’s true of all voters.

Personally, I find it sort of remarkable. But then, I’m basically half-Vulcan. Most people aren’t.

Presidential campaigns are mostly just an exercise in finding someone whose heart is in the right place. The fancy term is “mood affiliation.” Most voters don’t really care if either Trump or Hillary Clinton can do what they say. They just want to know what they consider important. Trump has very loudly signaled that he considers the plight of blue-collar workers important, both economically and culturally—and that’s really all that matters.

Now, there’s a metric buttload of racial and sexist angst wrapped up in that word “culturally.” Yglesias is right about that. But there really is an economic component too.

POSTSCRIPT: Of course, this whole argument might be moot. There’s considerable evidence that blue-collar whites don’t actually support Trump any more strongly than they’ve supported any other Republican candidate for president. Some of them may be louder than usual this year, but Trump doesn’t actually seem to have moved the needle much in terms of raw numbers.

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Yes, Economic Anxiety Really Does Explain Some of Donald Trump’s Appeal

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How Far Will GOP Candidates Go to Get Into Next Week’s Debate?

by rogalski_adam@o2.pl Posted on July 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Trailing in the polls, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee grabbed the media’s attention this weekend by claiming that President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran is “marching the Israelis to the door of the oven.” On Friday, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz made headlines by calling fellow Republican Mitch McConnell—the Senate Majority Leader—a liar on the Senate floor. A few days before that, Rand Paul literally took a chainsaw to the tax code over an electric-guitar rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner.”

The first Republican presidential debate is next Thursday on Fox News. And under rules set by Fox (with the blessing of the Republican National Committee), just 10 of the 16 declared major candidates—those with the highest average in the five most recent national polls leading up to the debate—will get a spot on the stage. Participants in the second debate, hosted by CNN in September, will also be selected based largely on polling averages. The result is a last-minute scramble by the candidates to crack the top 10 any way they can.

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How Far Will GOP Candidates Go to Get Into Next Week’s Debate?

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What do you catch when there are no more fish? Jellyballs

by rogalski_adam@o2.pl Posted on September 22, 2014

You ready for this jelly?

What do you catch when there are no more fish? Jellyballs

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22 Sep 2014 7:06 AM

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What do you catch when there are no more fish? Jellyballs

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When you come across a slick of jellyfish packed bell-to-tentacle into an area the length of five or six city blocks, you may sense something is wrong with the picture. Massive jellyfish blooms have been sprouting more and more often in recent years, one even reaching 1,000 miles long, for reasons mysterious but generally agreed to be bad.

But where there’s a fork, there’s a way! If we can focus all the energy we’re using to overfish more conventional ocean edibles on jellies instead, maybe we stand a chance at pruning the bloom to a more manageable size. Apropos, Modern Farmer reported recently on U.S. fishermen in a tiny port in Georgia who are trawling for cannonball jellyfish, otherwise known as — wait for it — “jellyballs.”

First of all, what do you call it when you fish for jellyballs? Is it jelly-balling? Please, please let it be jelly-balling. From Modern Farmer:

“Jellyballs have been very, very good to me,” says [one fishing boat owner, Thornell] King, who has worked as a state trooper for the last 20 years, and might be the only jelly-balling cop in the country. This past season was particularly robust: King and his men caught
 an estimated 5 million-plus pounds of cannonball jellyfish. At what King says is this year’s price (seven cents a pound), this equates to $350,000. Statistics are absent in this burgeoning new industry, but … the market value of the jellies being fished in the U.S. can be estimated at somewhere in the low millions.

Yessss! Jelly-balling!

And what, pray tell, does one do with 5 million pounds of jellyballs? Typically, the answer is to dry them out and ship them to Japan and China, where they are rehydrated, cut into strips, and tossed into delicious salads. Apparently, prepared correctly, the brined jellies are crunchy “like a carrot.”

John Dreyer

Jellyball, the carrot of the sea?

Not enough to whet your appetite? Then try this for sauce:

And as climate change and the global industrial agriculture system continue on what many view as a doomed course, we may have no choice but to eat foods that make sense ecologically — or can at least thrive in a changed environment. Jellyfish, prolific breeders with low metabolic rates and the ability to eat almost anything (some breeds just ingest organic material through their epidermis), have survived in unfriendly environs for centuries.

I’ve been a proponent of eating invasive species before, and as ocean ecosystems are stressing out more delicate denizens, jellyfish are a hardy bet. That being said, if greener protein is your goal, you might be better off with crickets; jellyfish are made up of a little protein and salt floating in more than 95 percent water.

American foodies have been slow to champion the jelly cause, but if we could learn to eat sushi, we can learn to eat anything.

If you’ve made it this far and are still hungry for more jellyball, the Modern Farmer article is mouth-watering.

Source:
Jellyfish: It’s What’s For Dinner

, Modern Farmer.

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What do you catch when there are no more fish? Jellyballs

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Power Company Comes Clean: We Bankrolled Arizona’s Anti-Solar Blitz

by rogalski_adam@o2.pl Posted on October 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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In recent months, sunny Arizona has been the scene of a shady dark money-fueled battle pitting Arizona’s largest electricity utility against the burgeoning solar power industry. Over the weekend, the fight took an interesting turn: The utility, the Arizona Public Service Company (APS), outed itself as a funder of two secretive nonprofits fueling the anti-solar fight—and revealed that it had funneled its anti-solar money through a political operative associated with the Koch brothers and their donor network.

Follow that? Some backstory might help.

The fight between APS and the solar industry concerns an issue called net metering. The way net metering works, private consumers who use solar panels can transfer extra energy they generate back to the power grid; the credits they receive for that excess energy, proponents argue, make solar an economical and smart choice for energy generation. APS wants changes to the net metering program that would, in effect, add $50 to $100 a month to power bills of solar users. That additional money, solar companies argue, would make solar power look uneconomical and do serious damage to the industry’s business.

Earlier this year, a coalition of solar companies, including SolarCity and Sunrun, launched TUSK (short for “Tell Utilities Solar won’t be Killed”) and hired Barry Goldwater Jr., the son of the onetime presidential candidate, to fight the net metering changes. TUSK accused APS of being anti-solar and trying to kill the burgeoning solar energy industry. In response, a pair of secretly funded nonprofit groups began running ads on TV, radio, and online calling net metering credits “corporate welfare” and comparing SolarCity and Sunrun to Solyndra, the solar panel company that accepted $500 million in government loans and then went bankrupt.

Here’s one of those anti-net-metering ads by the 60 Plus Association:

The 60 Plus Association, a Virginia-based nonprofit, has received money from the Koch brothers’ donor network. The other nonprofit fighting net metering is Prosper, which was started by former Arizona State House Speaker Kirk Adams. Although the ads run by 60 Plus and Prosper championed the cause of APS, the utility denied that it was funding the groups’ anti-solar ads, saying it was a coincidence the groups had joined the net metering fight.

Now, APS has changed its tune. The utility told the Arizona Republic that it had in fact donated to both groups. What’s more, APS told the Republic that it had given that money through Sean Noble, a political consultant described in a recent Huffington Post story as “the wizard behind the screen” for the Koch donor network’s activities in 2012. “We needed to respond to these ridiculous assertions that we do not support solar,” John Hatfield, an APS spokesman, told the Republic. (Noble no longer appears to be in the good graces of Kochworld: The Huffington Post story reported that he had fallen out of favor with Charles and David Koch and their donor network. “Noble has had his wings clipped,” one Republican operative is quoted as saying.)

The Arizona Corporation Commission could vote within weeks on whether to accept or reject the net metering changes backed by APS, or to side with the solar industry. What the commission decides could have major ramifications for the renewable energy industry in the southwest. Expect to see plenty more dark money flying around in the run-up to that vote.

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Power Company Comes Clean: We Bankrolled Arizona’s Anti-Solar Blitz

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