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Elections expert says North Carolina is no longer a democracy.

Andrew Reynolds, an adviser with the Harvard-based Electoral Integrity Project (EIP), has observed elections across the world — from Afghanistan to Burma, Egypt to Sudan.

“If it were a nation state,” Reynolds writes in the Raleigh News & Observer, “North Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table – a deeply flawed, partly-free, democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world.”

North Carolina scored 58 on EIP’s 100-point scale in its report on the 2016 elections, ranking near Cuba, Indonesia, and Sierra Leone for overall electoral integrity. When it comes to the state’s electoral laws and voter registration, it does even worse, standing alongside Iran and Venezuela. Its score on unfair districting is the worst in the world: a whopping 7 out of 100.

The implications are vast: the GOP-controlled legislature succeeded in a last-minute attempt to limit the incoming Democratic governor’s power. This less-than-stellar democracy has its share of suffering already, ranging from wildfires to floods to toxic coal ash spills and millions lost in state revenue after passing HB2 anti-transgender bathroom bill.

Recently, a federal court ordered the state to redraw it’s notoriously gerrymandered districts earlier this year. Maybe North Carolina will graduate to second-worst government in the world on districting, after that.

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Elections expert says North Carolina is no longer a democracy.

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Building a ‘Good’ Anthropocene From the Bottom Up

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Building a ‘Good’ Anthropocene From the Bottom Up

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The fires of Indonesia aren’t just killing the planet; they’re killing people.

Despite the political and market forces arrayed against it, the coal industry is still clinging to life, pushing forward massive new mines, export terminals, railway lines, and power plants.

In a special report this week, Grist examines the struggling industry’s long game, including one company’s efforts to build a $700 million project on the Chuitna River in south-central Alaska. Here are seven other places where the American coal industry is trying to resuscitate itself at the expense of, well, the rest of us:

  1. Millennium Bulk Coal Terminal Longview, Washington

Even after major backer Arch Coal declared bankruptcy and dropped its stake in 2016, the $640 million export terminal won’t die.

  1. Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal Oakland, California

The city council and Gov. Jerry Brown oppose the $1.2 billion proposal, but developers are threatening legal action.

  1. Wishbone Hill Coal Mine Matanuska-Susitna Borough, Alaska

The project had cleared most of its regulatory hurdles when members of the the nearby Chickaloon tribe filed a lawsuit.

  1. Coal Hollow Mine Kane County, Utah

A company with a history of cleanup violations wants an expansion that would double the mine’s annual output.

  1. Kayenta Mine Navajo County, Arizona

Located on reservation lands on Arizona’s Black Mesa, the Peabody-owned mine opened in 1973 but faces new opposition.

  1. Dos Republicas Mine Eagle Pass, Texas

Opened for business in November 2015, the mine on the U.S.-Mexico border threatens archaeological sites and burial grounds.

  1. Kemper County Energy Facility Kemper County, Mississippi

Mississippi’s $6.7 billion “clean coal” plant has been criticized as excessively expensive and too carbon-heavy, but officials say it could be operational by October.

Read our special report: Coal’s Last Gamble.

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The fires of Indonesia aren’t just killing the planet; they’re killing people.

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The group that was supposed to make palm oil sustainable just disappeared

IPOP pops

The group that was supposed to make palm oil sustainable just disappeared

By on Jun 30, 2016Share

The skyrocketing global demand for palm oil is devastating forests in Southeast Asia, and now a group that was created to stop the destruction has been cut down, too — razed by political forces that opposed the push to end deforestation. But all is not as dark as it might look.

Palm oil is everywhere: it’s in most processed foods, not to mention shampoos, soaps, and cosmetics. The Indonesia Palm Oil Pledge, or IPOP, was created at the 2014 United Nations Climate Summit as a means to allow sustainable-minded business interests and responsible palm oil companies to work with and influence government leaders, in an effort to preserve forests and stamp out human rights abuses by bad operators. But IPOP and its member companies became punching bags for their political opponents, who want to keep clearing land (more on the factions here).

The organization itself has not confirmed its dissolution — at least as of June 30 — but corporate members have said it is shutting down. “Cargill supports the dissolution of IPOP,” an associate vice president of the giant U.S.-based agribusiness wrote in a letter to stakeholders, explaining that the Indonesian government had stepped in to fill the role IPOP was originally supposed to perform. The government has instituted a moratorium on new palm oil plantations, protected areas with big trees and high biodiversity, and established an agency to restore carbon-rich peatland.

But the government will need industry support to bring these policies to fruition. Responsible companies should look to the successful strategy used to reduce soy and cattle deforestation in the Amazon, which involved blocking rogue companies from access to the market, said Glenn Hurowitz, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. That strategy allowed agricultural production to double even as forest clearance was reduced to one third of what it had been.

The Amazon example shows that there’s plenty of room for Indonesia to grow its agriculture businesses without burning more trees. But to achieve that, responsible companies will have to engage in politics and fight for sustainability, Hurowitz said. Now business leaders will have to do that in some other form than IPOP.

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The group that was supposed to make palm oil sustainable just disappeared

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Another Look at Young High School Grads

Mother Jones

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Over at the Economic Policy Institute, I’m in hot water over my question about the unemployment rate for young high school grads:

Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum seems to dislike a New York Times article calling job prospects for young high school graduates “grim.” Along the way, he directs an odd bit of unprovoked snark at us….The reason we get 17.8 percent while Kevin gets 11.2 percent when looking at unemployment rates for young high school graduates is pretty obvious: we’re looking at 17-20 year old high school graduates who are not enrolled in further schooling while he is looking at 20-24 year old high-school graduates (no college).

For the record, I meant for my snark to be aimed not at EPI, but at the Times. Their reporter should have done at least a cursory check of standard BLS data to see if it backed up her story, but she didn’t. That said, let’s take a closer look at the EPI data.

I can’t quite recreate their methodology, but that doesn’t matter. As usual, I’m only asking, “Compared to what?” In this case the question is, “How does unemployment among young high school grads compare to the normal rate before the recession?” Here’s the EPI chart:

I’m just eyeballing this, but it looks like the pre-crisis average was a little over 15 percent. Today it’s 18 percent. In other words, about one-fifth higher than normal. That’s roughly the same as 6 percent compared to 5 percent.

So if the headline unemployment rate were at 6 percent, would you call that “grim”? I wouldn’t. I’d say there’s certainly room for improvement, but it’s not too bad. Ditto for young high school grads. There’s clearly room for further improvement, but the current numbers don’t suggest an ongoing crisis. Things are very much getting back to normal.

I realize that my hobbyhorse about the economy might be getting annoying. And I sympathize with everyone on the left who wants to make sure we don’t declare victory and give up on further economic gains, especially for the working and middle classes. At the same time, we should also respect what the numbers are telling us. And by all the usual conventional measures, the economy is is pretty good shape. For now, at least, the recession really is largely over.

POSTSCRIPT: Just to make sure I’m as clear as possible, I’ll repeat what I said a couple of days ago: what the numbers tell us is that the current state of the economy as conventionally measured is pretty good compared to normal. This has nothing to do with larger, structural critiques of the economy. If you think that tax rates are too high or wages are too stagnant or income inequality is out of control, those are entirely different issues. These kinds of critiques have very little to do with how well or badly the economy is performing at the moment.

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Another Look at Young High School Grads

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BinC Watch: Donald Trump Has Now Changed His Mind on the Minimum Wage Three Times In Three Days

Mother Jones

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Does Donald Trump think we should raise the federal minimum wage? Let’s roll the tape:

November 10, 2015: NO!

CAVUTO: So do not raise the minimum wage? TRUMP: I would not do it.

May 8, 2016: YES!

I think people have to get more….Sure it’s a change. I’m allowed to change.

May 8, 2016: NO!

I don’t know how people make it on $7.25 an hour….I think people should get more….But I would say let the states decide.

May 11, 2016: YES!

Goofy Elizabeth Warren lied when she says I want to abolish the Federal Minimum Wage. See media—asking for increase!

So what does Trump really think about the minimum wage? There’s no telling. Maybe he really has changed his mind over and over. Maybe he didn’t realize there were separate state and federal minimum wages until someone clued him in on May 8. But his tweet today sure makes it clear that he wants an increase in the federal minimum wage. He even capitalized it to make sure we got the point. I wonder how long we’ll have to wait before he claims he never said this and he really wants the states to decide after all?

It’s easy to write this off to Trump’s general buffoonery, and that would be fair. What gets me is that his fans continue to believe everything he says even though he does stuff like this all the time. Do they really believe he’s going to build a wall? Why? I don’t think it would take him more than a few days in office to change his mind and insist that he had said all along that everything was up for negotiation.

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BinC Watch: Donald Trump Has Now Changed His Mind on the Minimum Wage Three Times In Three Days

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There’s More to "Improper Payments" Than Meets the Eye

Mother Jones

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Here’s an interesting thing. I was browsing over at The Corner and came across a post from Veronique de Rugy, who was unhappy about the federal government’s rate of improper payments, which totaled $137 billion last year. That’s fair enough. Here are the six worst programs:

This is the kind of thing that liberals should care about too—in fact, we should care about it more than conservatives if we want people to trust government to handle their tax dollars competently. Still, it got me curious. What exactly does this mean? $137 billion in waste and fraud last year? As it turns out, no. Here’s one interesting methodological tidbit:

Another prevalent misunderstanding is that all improper payments are a loss to the government, but that is not always the case. For example, although most of the $137 billion in improper payments was caused by overpayments (payments that are higher than they should have been), a significant chunk of that total amount was caused by underpayments (payments that are lower than they should have been). The difference between these two amounts (that is, overpayments minus underpayments) equals the net amount of payments that improperly went out the door.

Huh. So if the feds overpay Joe $10 and underpay Jane $10, that counts as $20 in improper payments. This is a reasonable thing to track, since we’d like all the payments to be correct, but it doesn’t give us much insight into how much money we’re losing to improper payments. My guess based on a bit of googling is that underpayments are a smallish part of the whole number, but for some reason there’s no official tally of this. Roughly speaking, though, you can probably shave 10-20 percent off the top and get pretty close.

What else? There’s this:

Also, many of the overpayments are payments that may have been proper, but were labeled improper due to a lack of documentation confirming payment accuracy. We believe that if agencies had this documentation, it would show that many of these overpayments were actually proper and the amount of improper payments actually lost by the government would be even lower than the estimated net loss discussed above.

An entire payment is labeled improper if complete documentation is not available. This appears to account for somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-60 percent of all improper payments. Most likely, though, once the documentation is in place, the vast majority of these payments turn out to be correct.

Put this all together, and the net value of genuinely improper payments is probably about $50 billion or so. Still high, but not quite as outrageous as it seems at first glance.

Something about this whole exercise seems kind of weird to me, though. We’re only a few months into 2016 and we already have numbers for FY2015. That’s fast work—too fast to be anything but a preliminary cut at flagging payments that might be incorrect. But how many of them really are incorrect? Nobody knows. For that, you’d have to wait a year or two and then re-analyze all the payments in the sample.

I’d be a whole lot more interested in that. $137 billion makes for a fine, scary headline—especially when the headline leaves the vague impression that this is all due to fraud and waste—but why don’t we ever get a follow-up number that tells us how much the feds ended up paying improperly once all the documentation is rounded up and the final audits are done? Wouldn’t that be a better number to care about?

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There’s More to "Improper Payments" Than Meets the Eye

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Donald Trump’s Newest Delegate Is a Kinder, Gentler White Nationalist

Mother Jones

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Meet the chairman of the American Freedom Party:

William D. Johnson, J.D., is an international corporate lawyer practicing in Los Angeles….As Chairman of the American Third Position, he serves the purpose of speaking on behalf of the party, and championing its sensible and just policies before the American people. He is also, more than any other, responsible for safeguarding the course, values, and program of the party.

And now, meet the American Freedom Party:

White Americans should push back! Change your party allegiance to the American Freedom Party. A Nationalist party that shares the customs and heritage of the European American people….Return to Americans their traditional right of freedom of association, including freedom in racial matters, along with the abolishment of all forms of government- and corporate-mandated racial discrimination and racial preferences, such as affirmative action, quotas, and all forms of “sensitivity training.”

Finally, courtesy of MoJo‘s own Josh Harkinson, meet Donald Trump’s newest delegate from the great state of California:

Trump’s slate includes William Johnson, one of the country’s most prominent white nationalists….”I just hope to show how I can be mainstream and have these views,” Johnson tells Mother Jones. “I can be a white nationalist and be a strong supporter of Donald Trump and be a good example to everybody.”

….Armed with cash from affluent donors and staffed by what the movement considers to be its top thinkers, AFP now dedicates most of its resources to supporting Trump. Johnson claims that AFP’s pro-Trump robocalls, which have delivered Johnson’s personal cellphone number to voters in seven states, have helped the party find hundreds of new members. “Trump is allowing us to talk about things we’ve not been able to talk about,” Johnson says. “So even if he is not elected, he has achieved great things.”

….Johnson also now finds it easier to be himself: “For many, many years, when I would say these things, other white people would call me names: ‘Oh, you’re a hatemonger, you’re a Nazi, you’re like Hitler,'” he confessed. “Now they come in and say, ‘Oh, you’re like Donald Trump.'”

See? Donald Trump is already making America great again.

UPDATE: No worries, folks. This was all just a big misunderstanding: “A database error led to the inclusion of a potential delegate that had been rejected and removed from the campaign’s list in February 2016.” OK then.

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Donald Trump’s Newest Delegate Is a Kinder, Gentler White Nationalist

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Liberals Are Picking On Conservatives Again and John Thune Wants Them to Stop It

Mother Jones

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The latest micro-flap for conservatives to feel victimized by is an allegation by one guy that the Facebook team that selects “trending” topics is staffed by a bunch of Ivy League 20-something liberals:

“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” said the former curator. This individual asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of retribution from the company. The former curator is politically conservative, one of a very small handful of curators with such views on the trending team. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”

That was yesterday. Here is today:

The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, led by Republican Sen. John Thune, has launched an inquiry in response to recent news that Facebook was reportedly suppressing conservative news items in the “trending” section of the site. The committee, which oversees Internet communication and media issues, drafted a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking about the curated section, telling the tech giant to “arrange for your staff including employees responsible for trending topics to brief committee staff on this issue.” Thune signed the letter, which also asks for “a list of all news stories removed from or injected into the Trending Topics section since January 2014.”

Here’s my question: Even if the allegations are true, in what way is this the business of the United States Senate? Facebook is a private entity and it can highlight any kind of news it wants. Ditto for the Drudge Report, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Mother Jones. Thune should take a closer look at the First Amendment before he goes any further.

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Liberals Are Picking On Conservatives Again and John Thune Wants Them to Stop It

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Is Bernie Sanders Just the Latest Goo-Goo Candidate?

Mother Jones

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Jonathan Chait argues that the appeal of Bernie Sanders isn’t truly rooted in his ideology:

It is certainly true that Sanders pushed the debate leftward, by bringing previously marginal left-wing ideas into the Democratic discussion….But to understand the Sanders campaign as primarily a demand for more radical economic policies misses a crucial source of his appeal: as a candidate of good government.

American liberalism contains a long-standing tradition, dating back to the Progressive Era, of disdain for the grubby, transactional elements of politics….Candidates who have fashioned themselves in this earnest style have included Adlai Stevenson, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Gary Hart, Jerry Brown, Howard Dean, and Barack Obama. These candidates often have distinct and powerful issue positions, but their appeal rests in large part on the promise of a better, cleaner, more honest practice of politics and government.

I’ve made much the same argument myself, so you’d think I’d agree with Chait. But after hearing from a lot of pissed-off Bernie supporters over the past few days, I’m not so sure anymore. For example, here is Ryan Cooper explaining why non-Boomers like Bernie’s ideas:

Though I can’t speak for everyone, I’d wager that young people are attracted to those ideas because they know what it’s like to graduate with a crushing load of student debt or to have a baby in a country with no paid leave but which also expects both parents to work full-time. Or maybe they can just feel that the bottom half of the income ladder is getting a raw deal. They’re not idiots in thrall to a political charlatan.

I’ve gotten an awful lot of responses like this. The gist is usually a combination of (a) my “statistics” about the state of the economy are totally bogus, and (b) I’m too fat and contented to understand what life is like for anyone less fortunate than me. But here’s the thing: most of these responses seem to come from folks who themselves have student debt or low incomes. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I’d fully expect these folks to appreciate Bernie’s message. But they’re not arguing for good government, they’re arguing for policies that would help them personally. That’s your basic transactional politics, no matter how you dress it up.

POSTSCRIPT: I think Cooper is very, very wrong about the history of health care reform too, but I’ll leave that for another time.

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Is Bernie Sanders Just the Latest Goo-Goo Candidate?

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