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Conservative Culture and the Fear of Reverse Racism

by KimberlUMA Posted on February 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Bruce Bartlett has written a new paper that examines the role of “reverse racism” in the rise of Donald Trump. Bartlett touches on a number of topics—e.g., changing demographics, partisan realignment, the media promotion of race as an in-group marker—but the cornerstone of his narrative is a simple recognition that fear of reverse racism is deep and pervasive among white Americans. Here’s the basic lay of the land from a bit of research done a few years ago by Michael Norton and Samuel Sommers:

As you can see, everyone agrees that racism was endemic in the 50s, and everyone agrees that it’s improved since then. But among whites, a majority believe that racism against blacks has improved so much—and reverse racism against whites has intensified so much—that today there’s literally more bias against whites than against blacks.

The Norton-Summers study doesn’t break down racial views further, but it’s a safe guess that fears of reverse racism are concentrated primarily among political conservatives—encouraged on a near daily basis by talk radio, Fox News, and Republican politicians. Given this, it’s hardly any wonder that Trump’s barely-coded appeals to racial resentment have resonated so strongly among Republican voters. Trump himself may or may not have any staying power, but his basic appeal is rooted in a culture of white grievance that’s been growing for years and is likely to keep growing in the future as white majorities continue to shrink. No matter what happens to Trump himself, he’s mainstreamed white victimhood as a political force to be reckoned with for the foreseeable future.

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Conservative Culture and the Fear of Reverse Racism

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Sanders Threatens to Sue Democratic Party in Data Breach Dustup

by NicholaHertz Posted on December 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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At a press conference Friday afternoon, Jeff Weaver, Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager, threatened legal action against the Democratic National Committee for cutting off the Sanders’ presidential campaign from critical voter data, such as addresses and phone numbers of potential supporters. The DNC took this step after a Sanders campaign staffer on Thursday accessed private voter data belonging to the Hillary Clinton campaign in a breach that the Sanders campaign has denounced.

“We will be in federal court this afternoon seeking immediate relief,” Weaver said. Our data “has been stolen by the DNC.”

Weaver’s threat was the latest move in a serious—and complicated—digital dustup involving the Sanders and Clinton campaigns, the DNC, and a contractor hired by the Democratic Party to maintain voter data for various campaigns. This contractor, NGP VAN, is supposed to keep data for different campaigns separate. But on Thursday, news broke that at least one member of the Sanders campaign accessed Clinton campaign data when a firewall temporarily went down. Evidence surfaced Friday that more than one staffer of the Sanders campaign had access to the Clinton campaign voter data, and that some of the information had been downloaded.

The Sanders campaign immediately fired a staffer responsible and is undertaking an internal review into what happened and who else was involved. But the Sanders campaign insists that fault also belongs to the DNC and NGP VAN for the firewall failure. “Given that it is the DNC’s responsibility to secure the voter data file, the DNC failed in this regard,” the campaign said in a statement released Friday.

In response to the breach, the DNC revoked access for the Sanders campaign to this database—which includes crucial voter data collected by the campaign itself—until the campaign can prove it has destroyed any Clinton campaign data that it downloaded. The Sanders campaign needs this information in order to maintain contact with voters and reach out to supporters, especially as the initial voting and caucusing approaches. The lawsuit threat is an indication of how serious the situation is for the Sanders campaign.

The incident has given the Sanders campaign an opportunity to bolster its long-running claim that the DNC favors Clinton, though the party insists that is not true. “This is taking our campaign hostage,” Weaver said of the DNC’s action.

As of Friday afternoon, the Clinton campaign had said nothing about the breach or the threatened lawsuit. Saturday is the third Democratic debate, and it may well be that Sanders and Clinton address this issue there.

Update: The Clinton campaign commented on the situation.

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Sanders Threatens to Sue Democratic Party in Data Breach Dustup

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What Makes a Killer a Terrorist? We Asked the Nation’s Top News Outlets

by ModestoBrickhou Posted on December 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the aftermath of the recent scourge of mass shootings—from San Bernardino to Colorado Springs to Charleston—as well as attacks aimed at Black Lives Matter protesters, many have asked why the media and public officials have been hesitant to call the suspects “terrorists.”

In a press conference on Wednesday, San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Berguan said, “We have no information at this point to indicate that this is terrorist-related, in the traditional sense that people may be thinking. Obviously, at a minimum, we have a domestic terrorist-type situation that occurred here.”

By definition, a terrorist is a person who uses violent acts to achieve political ends. So do major news outlets have protocols on when to use the words “terrorism” and “terrorist”? And does the media use them in a biased way? We reached out to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and NPR to hear how they approach the issue. Here are shortened versions of what they said:

New York Times‘ Standards Editor Phil Corbett:

The Times doesn’t have any “official” definition of terrorism. Unlike the U.S. government, we don’t have some kind of formal process of labeling terrorists, and I don’t think we need one. It’s probably not surprising that “terrorism” and related terms are likely to be used more often for attacks connected to well-known, long-standing, recognized terrorist organizations like ISIS or Al Qaeda—events like the Paris attacks, for instance. But in fact The Times has often used “terrorism” in connection with white supremacist attacks and other cases of domestic extremism, going back to Timothy McVeigh and beyond. A quick check shows that we used it in several stories in the Charleston coverage. The main point is, we try to report the facts accurately and fairly, in language that is clear to our readers. We are not working with predetermined categories or official terms or definitions. (When I’m in doubt, I generally turn to the dictionary).

The Washington Post‘s Executive Editor Marty Baron:

We don’t have a rigid protocol. Given the range of potential circumstances, we make judgments on a case by case basis. We’ve used “terrorism” and “terrorist” for both domestic and international acts of violence. For U.S. incidents, we have used the phrase “domestic terrorist” or “domestic terrorism.”

The Associated Press’ Vice President of Media Relations Paul Colford:

We generally avoid the terms because we prefer to describe more specifically what the individuals in question have done.

NPR’s Standard and Practices Editor Mark Memmott:

In each case, there are talks about the right ways to describe what has happened. That may change in the first few hours or days as more information comes in. “Murder” or “terror” or “hate crime”—all those words start percolating in the back of your mind, but it’s always best to stick to the facts and stick to the action words as information is still coming in before trying to apply labels. Now, there comes a point where it’s clear one way or the other in many of these cases. It became clear pretty quickly in Paris that this was something more than “simple” crimes. You had a lot of eye witness reporting about what was said by the attackers, how they operated, and the coordinated nature of the attacks. The targets were civilians—often an important consideration when deciding whether something is or is not terrorism.

Some of the threshold questions you have to start looking at and trying to answer: Is there evidence that it was a political motive? Is there evidence or indication that one of the motives was to strike terror in some sort of an attempt to force change, either in government or policy?

…Regarding the shooting in Charleston I don’t think newsrooms have settled on that one yet. Did he have political motives or was it a hate crime—a racially motivated crime? We’ll find out when the trial gets going whether he really did think he was going to start a race war.

Part of the media’s job is to lay out the facts. Labels are interesting but they sometimes aren’t helpful and they can get in the way.

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What Makes a Killer a Terrorist? We Asked the Nation’s Top News Outlets

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Kids in Mexico block a development that would pave over a mangrove forest

by FreddyLininger Posted on November 15, 2015

A mangrove plant grows on a shore in Cancun. Reuters/Gerardo Garcia

Kids in Mexico block a development that would pave over a mangrove forest

By on 15 Nov 2015 8:08 amcommentsShare

When it comes to fighting environmental battles, low expectations are kind of the name of the game. So when a group of warm-hearted kids tries to stop a massive development project in the name of environmental protection, they ought to be met with immediate and soul-crushing failure, right?

But, as we’ve seen recently in Washington, the tide may be turning! As Quartz reports, a group of 113 youngsters in Mexico garnered a big win for their local community — and, you know, the air and water around them. They petitioned a judge to halt the pending destruction of 170 acres of mangrove forest in Cancún to build a mixed-use resort development, arguing that they have a constitutional right to a healthy environment. The judge apparently agreed that fancy new homes, shops, and a boardwalk didn’t quite fit that definition.

Mexico’s tourism development agency put this project in the works more than two decades ago, and if it doesn’t go forward, investors stand to lose something like $900 million, Quartz reports. But, as one four-year-old explained to Quartz, “If we cut everything down then we’re going to die. … Trees help us breathe.” That’s a compelling point — and makes it pretty hard to give a shit about those investors, $900 million or no.

Here’s Quartz with more on the unfolding drama:

The recent suit is the first filed in Mexico advocating for the collective rights of kids over corporate interests in order to protect the environment, said Carla Gil, the group’s lawyer, in an interview with Quartz. (Earlier this year, a group of children in the US filed a case using similar arguments to force the Obama administration to act on climate change.)

Antonella Vazquez, the mother of a plaintiff, says it’s important for children to raise their voices, even at the age of five, like her daughter did. For generations, Mexicans have had the defeatist attitude of “What for? Nothing is going to happen,” she tells Quartz.

Given the pace of development in Cancún, if her daughter doesn’t speak up, “there’s going to be nothing left for her,” she adds.

While a great success, this isn’t all puppies and rainbows. The judge also ordered the kids to pay a bond of $1.2 million to compensate developers, according to Quartz. To which the kids’ lawyers were like, “Uhhh, are you serious?” They’re arguing that that ruling shouldn’t apply to minors — because, you know, there’s simply no way they could have $1.2 million.

Fortunately, this is 2015 — so even if the kids do have to pay up, they’ll at least have access to the biggest piggy bank of all time: online crowdsourcing. If it comes down to it, environmentalists the world over — who have seen more than their fair share of disappointment — will surely be willing to shell out to help them.

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Kid environmentalists have derailed a $900 million development in a popular Mexican resort town

, Quartz.

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Kids in Mexico block a development that would pave over a mangrove forest

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It Looks Like We’re Stuck With Low Inflation

by HannahLombardo Posted on October 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Back in August I agreed with Brad DeLong that 4 percent inflation would be a good thing right now, but I was skeptical that the Fed could engineer this given current conditions. So I asked him what it would take. Today, I apparently made it to the top of the question pile:

I think the answer is: We don’t know whether it is in fact possible for a central bank today to hit a 4%/year average inflation target via conventional ordinary quantitative easing. It might well require other tools. For example:

  1. Miles Kimball’s negative interest rates.
  2. Helicopter drops–that is, allowing everyone with a Social Security number to incorporate as a bank, join the Federal Reserve system, and borrow at the discount window, with the loan discharged by the individual’s death.
  3. The Federal Reserve as infrastructure bank–an extra $500 billion/year of quantitative easing buying not government or mortgage bonds but directly-financing public investments.
  4. Extraordinary quantitative easing–buying not the close substitutes for money that are government bonds but rather the not-so-close substitutes that are equities.

I say: If we could win the argument about what the goal is, we could then begin the discussion about what policies would be needed to get us there.

That’s pretty discouraging. Of these, #2 and #3 are almost certainly illegal, and undesirable in any case. I may not like what Congress is doing, but disbursing money is certainly under their purview—and should be. I don’t want the Fed mailing out checks or contracting for new roads and bridges.

I don’t know if #4 is illegal. Probably not. But I’m not crazy about this either. The Fed shouldn’t be in the business of directly propping up the stock market, and certainly shouldn’t be in the business of directly propping up specific stocks.

So that leaves only #1. This one is perfectly OK, and a few European countries have adopted negative rates recently. But there’s probably a limit to how negative these rates can be. Individuals could avoid negative rates by deciding to hold physical cash, which pays zero percent, but banks and corporations almost certainly couldn’t. I’m not sure how long it’s sustainable to essentially have two different interest rates like that.

This is why DeLong mentions “Miles Kimball’s” negative interest rates. Kimball’s version depends on making the e-dollar into the unit of account, and this would allow negative rates of any level for any period of time. However, it would also require many years to make this transition. It’s not an option in the short term.

So if I’m reading DeLong right, it’s not clear that the Fed could engineer 4 percent inflation at all right now. Maybe Scott Sumner has a bright idea about how we could do this.

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It Looks Like We’re Stuck With Low Inflation

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The View From the Top

by JanisUnaipon Posted on August 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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The down-trodden and marginalized have long been fodder for documentary photo projects. A new photo exhibit curated by Myles Little explores the other side of economic inequality. The photos in 1%: Privilege in a Time of Global Inequality provide a rarified though nuanced glimpse into a world inhabited by a few. The collection of photos, cut from an initial round of 2,000 images, does not just present ostentatiousness but includes subtler signifiers of wealth along with a few quiet glances at poverty.

The collection is currently appearing in galleries in China, Dubai, Nigeria, and other international locations and will be coming to Chicago next spring. A book is being funded on Kickstarter campaign. I spoke with Little, the associate photo editor at Time, about how the exhibit came about and what he hoped it would accomplish.

A man floats in the 57th floor swimming pool of the Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands Hotel Paolo Woods & Gabriele Galimberti/INSTITUTE

Mother Jones: You’ve been working on putting this exhibit together for two years. How did it come about?

Myles Lyttle: I was on vacation in Oaxaca, Mexico, and I introduced myself to a gallerist there named Daniel Brena. We went out for lunch and talked about things that interested us. Out of that conversation came this idea to focus on wealth photographically. Since then, the image choices, organizational framework, and logistics of the show have been my own. But that’s the original seed of the project.

Cheshire, Ohio, 2009 Daniel Shea

MJ: How did you decide on the specific photographers you chose for the exhibit?

ML: It took a lot of work and tons of online research. It really was going down the rabbit hole. I wound up with 2,000 images, a huge variety of aesthetics, moods, and topics within the world of wealth. I wanted the form of the show to mirror its content as far as its spirit. I wanted the show to feel posh, well-crafted, quiet. So I decided to only use medium format photography, which tends to feel a little more considered, a little less spontaneous—maybe a little more stately. I just set these very strict rules whereby I had to cut a lot of strong work.

You could say it’s my response to the famous Edward Steichen exhibit at the MoMA called The Family of Man. It’s this huge, sprawling, very inclusive, democratic, curated show of photos from all over the world that argues, “We’re all in this together,” no matter where you’re from, no matter who you are—rich, poor, old, young. I had tremendous respect for that show and the ambitiousness of it. But I do feel that its thesis is not so accurate, at least these days. I feel that the social fabric is tearing. A quick look at statistics proves this. Do you know the six members of the Walton family who inherited the Wal-Mart fortune? They own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of America. Given that, it’s very hard to argue that we’re all in one boat together. I think the privileged these days speak a different language, live in different part of the world, play by different rules, have different opportunities and live in a different legal universe than the rest of us.

A 25-year-old British man undergoes surgery to reduce the size of his nose Zed Nelson

MJ: What kind of response you hope to generate, especially given that most people who go to photo galleries and exhibits tend to be at least upper middle class or people of wealth?

ML: All I hope to do is start a conversation about fairness, about our priorities in society, what we value, the values that we celebrate. Are we celebrating a segment of the population that we largely don’t understand and have very little chance of joining in our lifetime? Or do we celebrate something else, a segment of the population that works hard and contributes but finds themselves barely holding on or slowly slipping backwards?

Untitled #5, from “Hedge” Nina Berman/NOOR

MJ: Joseph Stieglitz wrote the forward to the book you’re publishing via Kickstarter. How’d you get him on board?

ML: I found his email and I said, “Hi, I’m Myles.” From everything I’ve heard, Dr. Stieglitz is a very warm and gracious person. I haven’t met him in person. He agreed almost immediately. He’s a Nobel Prize-winning inequality expert with a book called The Great Divide. The other essay in the project is written by Geoff Dyer, the British essayist and photography expert. He’s just a marvelous writer.

Paradise Now Nr. 18. 2008 Peter Bialobrzeski

Shanghai Falling (Fuxing Lu Demolition), 2002 Greg Girard

Gated homes in Henderson, Nevada Michael Light, from Lake Las Vegas/Black Mountain, Radius Books

Scrapper, Packard Motor Car Company plant, Detroit, 2009 Andrew Moore, courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery

Legless star cleaner on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, 2005 Juliana Sohn

A street preacher in New York City appeals to Wall Street to repent, 2011 Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos

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The View From the Top

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Meet the Megadonors Bankrolling Jeb Bush’s Campaign

by pinfamozpa Posted on July 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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Jeb Bush knows it doesn’t look good if a candidate appears to get most of his financial support from a small group of wealthy donors. Earlier this spring, he asked donors to try not to give checks of more than $1 million to his super-PAC, and when the group announced its total haul for the first six months of the year, it took pains to emphasize that 9,400 of its more than 9,900 contributors had donated less than $25,000.

But now it’s going to be a lot harder for anyone to think of the Bush super-PAC—which completely dwarfs his campaign in terms of financial resources—as anything but driven by extremely wealthy donors.

This morning, the Right to Rise super-PAC filed its first disclosure reports, confirming that it had indeed raised $103 million in the first six months of the year. That is an unprecedented amount, but what’s really news is the distribution of the donations. It does appear that only about 500 donors gave more than $25,000 to the super-PAC, but donations of less than $25,000 accounted for just $21.7 million of the total. On the other end of the spectrum, 23 people gave more than $1 million to the super-PAC, contributing a total of $27.3 million.

The size of the donations is shocking. Despite the growing public perception that super-PACs are playgrounds for millionaires, the number of people who have ever given $1 million to political causes in their lifetimes is small. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan campaign finance organization (where I used to work), prior to this election cycle, just 475 individuals had ever given $1 million or more cumulatively since 1989, when it began keeping track of the data. Given the seven-figure donations that have already been reported for other super-PACs in the last week, the number is probably well over 500 people now, and the Right to Rise super-PAC is responsible for many of them.

The fact that only about 0.04 percent of Americans gave more than $2,600 last election cycle means that even most of the donors who gave less than $25,000 were already elite in terms of political donations. But with these latest numbers, even the under-$25,000 contributors begins to look like small donors by comparison.

Among Bush’s top donors are people with an interest in some of the top foreign policy debates right now. Miguel Fernandez, a private equity executive who chipped in $3 million, the largest contribution to the super-PAC, was a refugee from Cuba. Bush has slammed President Obama’s rapprochement with the Castro regime. Hushang Ansary was the Iranian ambassador to the US before the Iranian Revolution; he and his wife each donated $1 million. Bush has likewise opposed Obama’s nuclear-containment deal with Iran.

The list of top donors has some expected names, the dependable rainmakers who have long fueled the Bush family. Included among the top donors are big Texas names like oilmen T. Boone Pickens and Ray Hunt, as well as the widow of Harold Simmons, a Dallas chemical magnate who is one of the largest political donors of all time and who was a major source of money for Karl Rove’s various fundraising efforts over the years.

There are also a number of donors who are not people—something that could not have happened before the super-PAC era, or at least not on the same scale. NextEra Energy, Florida’s electric utility, donated $1 million to the super-PAC. That donation itself is unusual, given that publicly traded corporations have tended to avoid giving money to super-PACs, though they may legally do so after the Citizens United court decision in 2010. The US Sugar Corporation Charitable Trust donated $505,000—possibly a first for charities, which are generally excluded from involving themselves in politics.

Not all of the corporate donors are quite as transparent. One $1 million donation came from a shell corporation called Jasper Reserve LLC. On the disclosure forms, the company lists a Charleston, West Virginia address belonging to a law firm that has represented numerous coal companies over the years. The company appears to be registered in Delaware, effectively blocking any information about who founded it or runs it.

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Meet the Megadonors Bankrolling Jeb Bush’s Campaign

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Even Shell’s former chair says some fossil fuel divestment would make sense

by GeoffreyMullaly Posted on June 5, 2015

Even Shell’s former chair says some fossil fuel divestment would make sense

By on 5 Jun 2015 2:20 pmcommentsShare

The former chair of Shell is bummed about how the fight against climate change is going. But he’s got a different take on the issue than you might expect, given his CV.

“I find it distressing that 18 years after major oil companies such as Shell and BP acknowledged the threat of climate change and the need for precautionary action, and indeed began to put into place many of the steps needed, the world has made very modest progress in addressing this challenge,” said Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, who hasn’t been involved with the company since 2005. He’s since gone on to chair the mining company Anglo American PLC, and to serve on the board of directors for the consulting firm Accenture, as well as to work with the U.N. Originally trained as a geologist, Moody-Stuart was with Shell for 39 years.

In a speech at an event organized by Carbon Trust, a company that helps organizations reduce their emissions, Moody-Stuart said he also understood where the divestment movement was coming from. According to the British publication Responding to Climate Change:

In contrast to many senior fossil fuel executives he argued the growing divestment campaign was not “without some rationale”, recalling how oil and gas companies ditched coal assets in the 1990s.

“Given the inevitable continued demand for some forms of fossil fuels for some decades to come, divestment of all such holdings is probably not an economically sensible choice for most investors,” he said.

“Selective divestment or portfolio switching certainly is. As in all such choices, timing is critical.”

Oil execs past and present have had a lot to say about climate change lately. Though many oil companies have spent a lot of money to keep governments from enacting a price on carbon, certain players within the oil industry are beginning to strike a different chord. Or, a few different chords: Earlier this week, the CEOs of six major European oil companies, including Shell and BP, sent a letter to the U.N. calling for a price on carbon. But at the same time, Shell is trudging forward with its plans to drill in the Arctic. And many analysts suggested the letter might be more an attempt to nudge coal out of the global energy market — paving the way for more reliance on natural gas, a fuel that oil companies are heavily invested in — than a genuine effort to tackle climate change.

ExxonMobil has called for a carbon tax in past years, but it did not join this week’s letter to the U.N., nor did fellow American oil giants Chevron and ConocoPhillips. Exxon and Chevron have recently been resisting calls from shareholders to avoid tapping more expensive sources of oil in the Arctic, Canadian tar sands, and other unconventional locations. Asked why Exxon was not investing in renewables, CEO Rex Tillerson replied, “We choose not to lose money on purpose.” Ha ha.

So, yeah, oil companies are sort of all over the map on the whole climate-change-is-happening-but-we-can-make-it-less-horrendous-if-we-do-something-now issue. But the discord does seem to indicate that perhaps the ground is shifting. Even so, Moody-Stuart suggested that the momentum was not enough. He predicted the U.N. climate talks will yield some sort of deal later this year, but that it might be too loose to be useful. “This is progress and will doubtless be hailed as an agreement, although one can certainly question whether an agglomeration of diverse commitments can really be hailed as a global agreement,” he said.

Regardless, Moody-Stuart, 74, said, things aren’t changing that quickly. “I am going to be dead well before the end of the oil and gas industry.”

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Weird Tales and Trade Treaties

by MeganChelmsford Posted on May 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Watching the political fight over the TPP trade treaty has been kind of interesting. FWIW, two things strike me as a little odd:

Historically, it’s been Republicans who bitch and moan about how treaties are invasions of American sovereignty. And of course they are. If you sign a treaty with another country, there has to be some kind of neutral mediator that can decide if the treaty has been breached, and this is ipso facto an infringement of sovereignty for both countries. Democrats usually laugh this off, since it’s an obvious feature of any treaty (would you sign a treaty with Pakistan where Pakistan unilaterally gets to resolve all disputes?). This time, however, the worm has turned and it’s Democrats who are loudly objecting to something called the Investor-State Dispute Settlement, which sets up a special tribunal to adjudicate disputes brought by corporations against rules that they think violate the TPP. Republicans don’t care much.

I don’t have any big point to make here. It’s just kind of interesting to see the two sides switch.

I’m a little puzzled about why Republicans are so gung-ho to get TPP passed in the first place. Sure, they’re generally in favor of trade treaties, but it’s not exactly one of their hot button issues. And yet, they seem to be going out of their way to help President Obama get it passed. Given their recent track record, I’d expect them to yawn and tell Obama he’s on his own to whip the votes he needs. Is there some deeper strategy here that I’m not getting? Do they truly think this is going to rip the Democratic Party to shreds with months of vicious infighting? Or what?

Anyway, it looks to me like TPP is going to pass. These things nearly always do after a bit grandstanding followed by some face-saving compromises. It might be close, but it will pass.

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Weird Tales and Trade Treaties

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Washington State Is So Screwed

by ThaddeusChifley Posted on April 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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California’s been getting all the attention, but it isn’t the only agriculture-centric western state dealing with brutal drought. Washington, a major producer of wheat and wine grapes and the source of nearly 70 percent of US apples grown for fresh consumption, also endured an usually warm and snow-bereft winter.

The state’s Department of Ecology has declared “drought emergencies” in 24 of the state’s 62 watersheds, an area comprising 44 percent of the state. Here’s more from the agency’s advisory:

Snowpack statewide has declined to 24 percent of normal, worse than when the last statewide drought was declared in 2005. Snowpack is like a frozen reservoir for river basins, in a typical year accumulating over the winter and slowly melting through the spring and summer providing a water supply for rivers and streams. This year run-off from snowmelt for the period April through September is projected to be the lowest on record in the past 64 years.

The drought regions include apple-heavy areas like Yakima Valley and the Okanogan region. Given that warmer winters—and thus less snow—are consistent with the predictions of climate change models, the Washington drought delivers yet more reason to consider expanding fruit and vegetable production somewhere far from the west coast. That’s an idea I’ve called de-Californication (see here and here). But we’ll need a new term to encompass the northwest. De-westernization? Doesn’t have quite the same ring.

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Washington State Is So Screwed

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