Captured Russian soldier said commanders were high on painkillers and gave ‘nonsensical orders’ like sending them out under mortar fire
Sinéad Baker – July 6, 2023
In this photo released by Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on July 6, 2023, a Russian 152 mm self-propelled Giatsint-S fires toward Ukrainian positions at an undisclosed location.Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP
A Russian soldier told CNN his commanders were high on painkillers and gave nonsensical orders.
Slava, who was captured by Ukraine, said this included soldiers being sent out under mortar fire.
He told CNN that he got only two weeks of basic training and Russian soldiers “had no morale.”
A captured Russian soldier told CNN that his commanders in Ukraine were high on drugs and gave nonsensical orders that put their men’s lives at risk.
The prisoner, identified as Slava, said his commanders would send soldiers out under mortar fire while high on their stock of painkillers.
Slava also described jumping over craters and body parts amid Ukrainian shelling, before being captured in a foxhole south of Bakhmut. It is not clear when this took place.
CNN interviewed Slava and two other Russian soldiers in the presence of Ukrainian soldiers.
The outlet said the captives did not appear to be speaking under duress, and that it did not use their real names to avoid “possible negative consequences upon their return to Russia” and to follow Red Cross guidelines on reporting about prisoners of war.
Slava and Anton, another soldier, said they had just two weeks of basic training before they were deployed.
Both Slava and Anton, who were recruited out of prison, said that everything they had known about the war came from Russian media. Media in Russia is considered to be tightly controlled by President Vladimir Putin.
Anton also described how he planned to kill himself when Ukrainian soldiers reached him, as he expected to be either tortured or executed.
“I switched the rifle to single shot mode, and I thought I would shoot myself. But I couldn’t,” he told CNN.
Food Industry Giants Must Fix Their Plastic Pollution
McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and other major brands are creating massive amounts of plastic waste. Their initiatives are not enough and they need to be held accountable for the plastics crisis.
By Ashka Nail – July 6, 2023
Plastic bottles for recycling are seen at a junkshop on April 11, 2023 in Manila, Philippines. (Photo by Ezra Acayan/Getty Images)
Plastic has allowed many food industry giants to become the massive entities they are today. For example, Coca-Cola generates 3 million tons of plastic packaging a year; PepsiCo has been found to use nearly 2.3 billion tons of plastic each year for its bottles and packaging; and McDonald’s has been called out for generating the weight of “100 Eiffel Towers” worth of packaging waste.
It hasn’t always been this way. Plastic became the packaging material of choice in the mid-20th century, when it took over human imagination with its malleability, seeming ease of production, and strength. Its production increased threefold during WWII alone.
The political power of plastic also became palpable rather quickly with the emergence of plastic industry lobbying more than 30 years ago. Its primary function has been to fight laws designed to safeguard people and the planet from plastic’s well-documented toxicity. Plastic industry lobbyists also amped up their work as widespread concern grew about plastic’s presensce in the ocean, in animals, in farming systems, and in the human body. And while the industry has always had grand plans of recycling its plastic waste, most plastic is not recycled today.
“Predictably, when we take a closer look at some of these initiatives, what we find is not much evidence of meaningful or sustained progress.”
This lobby’s political power was also present in the corridors of the United Nations recently, as the majority of the world’s countries negotiated a legally binding agreement on plastic pollution focused on production, design, use, and disposal. In this context, the industry has worked diligently to position itself as a solution to a crisis it has avariciously fueled.
The industry has also judiciously crafted narratives about its commitment to solving this global emergency by supporting entities like the Ocean Cleanup, Ocean Conservancy’s Trash Free Seas Alliance, and World Wildlife Fund’s ReSource.
Predictably, when we take a closer look at some of these initiatives, what we find is not much evidence of meaningful or sustained progress. In fact, recent investigations have found that many corporations like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have been backing these initiatives while using more plastic than even before.
There is also a litany of corporate doublespeak on plastic in the media. Take the recent New York Timesarticle by Boyan Slat titled, “Reducing Plastic Pollution in Our Oceans Is Simpler Than You Think.”
Slat is the founder of Ocean Cleanup, “a nonprofit funded by donations and a range of philanthropic partners with the mission to rid the oceans of plastic.” In the article, Slat claims his program has salvaged “more than 0.2 percent of the plastic in the [garbage] patch so far,” and mentions the need for stopping “more plastic from flowing into the oceans,” but conspicuously shies away from calling on Coca-Cola and his other program partners to stop producing plastic.
Instead, he writes that “meaningful reductions in plastic use will be difficult to achieve.” Slat also blames the lagging waste management systems in middle- and lower-income countries for the majority of ocean plastic pollution without recognizing that much of the plastic waste from the Global North is in fact being dumped in middle- and lower-income countries—such as Vietnam, India, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
He fails to recognize the fact that it is often “waste colonialism” that forces these nations to become what Slat calls “hot spots” of plastic pollution.
Corporations often tout the fact that the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s (EMF) New Plastics Economy Global Commitment reports on their plastic use. But if you dig deeper, the information it shares doesn’t provide much actual transparency.
For instance, its audit of PepsiCo says there is “no third-party verification or assurance in place.” Coca-Cola’s reporting on this portal yielded no concrete third-party reviewed progress, but more of the same—self reporting and more corporate marketing speech than evidence of verifiable progress. In fact, an analysis done by Oceana of the data from the 2022 progress report found that Coca-Cola increased its plastic packaging use by nearly 9 percent between 2020 and 2021, and PepsiCo increased its use of virgin plastic by 4.5 percent in 2021 compared with the previous year.
Another disturbing example of promises unkept comes from the world’s largest distributor of plastic toys, McDonald’s. It has publicly committed to “drastically reduce plastics in Happy Meal toys [including the latest toy, a replica of The Little Mermaid, a symbol of the ocean] around the globe and transition to more sustainable materials by the end of 2025.”
However, when some of the largest food and beverage corporations were surveyed by a conservation organization last year, McDonald’s emerged as one of only two whose “plastic intensity” was actually increasing. And then at the company’s annual meeting in May, McDonald’s faced investor scrutiny (p.101) for its staunch opposition to proposed EU plastic waste reduction laws.
The company distributes nearly 1 billion toys a year, every year. To its credit, it claims that in Japan it has recovered toys to make trays that can be equivalent to approximately 0.75 percent of its annual global toy distribution. The number of recycled toys for other countries where it operates, and there are nearly 100 of them, are difficult to find; it’s not clear whether they even exist.
All these initiatives and commitments tell the true story of plastic. It is about time McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and other food and beverage companies own up to their role in fueling the plastics crisis, by eliminating the use of plastic from their entire supply chains immediately. For more than 80 years, Coca-Cola mainly used glass and aluminum, so it can be done! It’s time for these companies to devise business models that stop exploiting the planet, its ecosystems, and the public to benefit a handful of shareholders.
These corporations also need to be held accountable by legal systems and democratic institutions across the world for their inaction.
Yes, the power of plastic has proven potent in changing the course of our history, but lest the world forget, so has the power of the people to determine our collective future. It’s about time food and beverage companies stopped jeopardizing the viability of future generations of all species to have a livable planet to call home.
Ashka Naik is a director of research and policy at Corporate Accountability. Her work focuses on on strategic campaign development, corporate research, and equity-centered analysis of corporate power across issues that guide the vision and overall success of the campaigns. She also spearheads Corporate Accountability’s food program, which focuses on structural determinants and sociopolitical dimensions of food systems, nutrition, and public health, while uncovering industry’s influence in the policies and politics of global food security, sovereignty, and justice. Read more >
The Supreme Court is on a mission to ensure the US assumes the form that the Republican Party wants
Chauncey DeVega – July 5, 2023
Clarence Thomas; John RobertsPhoto illustration by Salon/Getty Images
Last week, the United States Supreme Court issued a series of decisions that ended race-based affirmative action programs at colleges and universities, voided President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, and made it legal for people to cite sincere “religious objections” as a reason for discriminating against the LGBTQ community (and presumably other marginalized individuals and groups as well) in ways that violate civil rights laws.
The Washington Post bizarrely described the Supreme Court’s last term as “restrained.” The reality is very much the opposite: it was a political and judicial bloodletting, a collective act of radical right-wing judicial activism that will have serious negative implications for the American people and the country as a whole for decades to come. These decisions by the “conservative” majority on the Supreme Court are part of a decades-long project to return American society to a time period before the civil rights movement(s) of the 1960s and 1970s and back to the Gilded Age (if not before) when white men and moneyed interests – a true tyranny of the minority —were able to exercise dominion over American society, largely uncontested.
In an attempt to make better sense of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions about race-based affirmative action and its broad implications for American democracy, the law, and society, I recently spoke with Khiara M. Bridges. She is a Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law whose scholarship examines race, class, reproductive rights, and the intersection of the three. Professor Bridges is the author of three books, the most recent of which is Critical Race Theory: A Primer.
This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
How are you feeling given the Supreme Court’s decisions this week, in particular the decision to ban the consideration of race in university and college admissions?
I’m tired – even though none of this is surprising. All of this was perfectly predictable. We knew that decisions such as the one gutting affirmative action were almost inevitable after Kavanaugh and Barrett joined the court. The decisions this week are the realization of a long-term project by the Republican Party to use the federal judiciary to shape the nation into its vision of what the country ought to be.
It has been an exhausting week.
How do we connect the dots between the affirmative action decision and the decision to allow “religious objections” to be used as a justification for discriminating against gays and lesbians — and presumably other groups as well?
“I think that what we are seeing is just how hellbent the Supreme Court is on ensuring that the U.S. assumes the form that the Republican Party wants it to assume.”
Those two decisions represent a backlash against people of color and LGBTQ people. Both groups have realized substantial gains in terms of being conceptualized as equal and valuable members of the body politic. Many people want to reverse those gains. They want to return LGBTQ people and Black and brown people to second-class citizenship. The court is doing the bidding for those folks.
The Republicans, “conservatives” and other members of the larger white right are joyous and celebrating the end of affirmative action. Black and brown folks, white folks and others who believe in multiracial democracy and equality are hurting and lamenting this decision and what it symbolizes and means for our society and the harm it does to real people. How are you reconciling those divergent responses?
I understand these celebrations as consistent with a right-wing effort to erase America’s brutal history of racial subjugation and to deny the consequences that history has on society today. Conservatives are celebrating the myth that America is “post-racial” and the lie that events like chattel slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, “urban renewal,” etc. really have no effect on contemporary society. And most of all, they are celebrating the fact that there is a Supreme Court that is willing to affirm those fictions.
In the most basic sense, what are the competing visions of the law and its role in society that we are seeing play out with the Supreme Court this week, and of course the Age of Trump these last few years?
I think that what we are seeing is just how hellbent the Supreme Court is on ensuring that the U.S. assumes the form that the Republican Party wants it to assume. It is important to keep in mind that the Court creates its own docket; it selects the cases that it wants to hear. And it is no coincidence that the Court is deciding to hear cases that touch on all of these hot button issues: affirmative action, abortion, guns, religious freedom, LGBTQ rights. And of course, it is no coincidence that the Court is deciding these cases in ways that are consistent with the Republican Party’s platform.
It is also important to keep in mind that it is really hard to reconcile these decisions with one another in terms of an overarching theory of law. So, the government can force people to carry pregnancies to term, but the government cannot forbid people from carrying firearms outside of the home. Institutions cannot consider race when making college admissions decisions, but they can consider their customers’ sexual orientation and gender identity when deciding whether to sell products and services to them. Those decisions cannot be reconciled with one another very easily in terms of law. It’s all politics.
In simple terms, how do we explain what “affirmative action” is or isn’t and how it’s been distorted by the right wing and its propaganda machine for the general (white) public?
In order to understand what affirmative action is in the context of university admissions, one has to understand how decisions traditionally have been made about who is admitted to a school. This generally has consisted of evaluating a student’s GPA and performance on standardized tests. Affirmative action moves beyond just grades and standardized testing. It insists that those measures are not the totality of an individual. We actually know empirically that grades and standardized testing only imperfectly predict success in college. For example, a student that has had to raise their younger siblings while they’re in high school probably has the determination and grit to succeed in a four-year university. We might guess that a student who has managed to learn and succeed in an underfunded school lacking in resources will likely learn and succeed at a university or college that has lots of resources.
Race-based affirmative action specifically says that we ought to be conscious of a student’s race when making admissions decisions, because a student’s race might help us understand their grades and standardized test scores. Race contextualizes those numbers. Despite what conservatives say about it, affirmative action is not some type of “handout” like “welfare” for lazy and unqualified Black and brown people.
Of course, the right-wing members of the court did not mention legacy admissions or how the children of big money donors get preferential treatment — what is a de facto type of white privilege and white unearned advantage, an “affirmative action” program for unqualified white people. Likewise, the majority did not object to how at most universities a decision is made to admit more “unqualified” male students as a way of achieving gender parity in a given cohort.
There is a conservative argument about so-called “mismatch,” where students of color are imagined to be admitted through affirmative action into institutions where they supposedly do not have the skills and preparation to succeed. Clarence Thomas mentions this theory repeatedly. But the science is not there to justify mismatch theory. It has been debunked time and time again, which Justice Sotomayor mentions in her dissent. Interestingly, the right-wing justices who claim to be concerned about mismatch in terms of students of color going to competitive colleges and universities do not have the same level of concern about mismatch in terms of legacy admits.
“It is really hard to reconcile these decisions with one another in terms of an overarching theory of law.”
Your dad and granddad having graduated from college does not prove that you have the academic chops, or discipline, or determination to succeed in the school. Similarly, your family having donated millions of dollars to the university does not translate into academic ability and intelligence. Students who lack the highest SAT scores and GPAs, but who are admitted because they are athletes, would fall into that category as well. The court was not concerned about those students either.
For me, this reveals that the justices who signed on to these opinions are not really worried about whether Black and brown students are going to do well in elite institutions; it is just that they do not want Black and brown students to “take the seats” of white and Asian students who they believe actually deserve to be at these elite institutions.
In their decision to end affirmative action at the nation’s colleges and universities, the right-wing justices summoned up Brown v. Board of Education. This is part of a larger project by the “conservative” movement and white right to weaponize, distort, abuse, and misrepresent the victories of the long Black Freedom Struggle and civil rights movement as a way of undermining and ultimately reversing them. Please help me process their twisted readings of Brown v. Board and the Equal Protection Clause.
Brown v. Board looms over these debates about affirmative action. Those who oppose race-based affirmative action and those who support it both say that their position is faithful to Brown v. Board. In 1954, the court decided in Brown that racially separate schools were inherently unequal and that they were a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Brown is subject to many interpretations. One interpretation is that Brown mandated colorblindness; it forbade school districts from taking into consideration students’ races when assigning them to schools.
Another equally plausible interpretation of Brown is that the court was concerned with anti-subordination. In this view, segregated Black and white schools were unconstitutional because they functioned to subordinate Black people; they functioned to subjugate Black people vis-à-vis their white counterparts. So, which is the better understanding of Brown? Was Brown about colorblindness, or was it about antisubordination?
In my opinion, Brown was about antisubordination. And I get there because I think that we have to pay attention to the motivations behind the Equal Protection Clause, which was added to the Constitution after the Civil War. The 14th Amendment, which contains the Equal Protection Clause, was proposed and ratified in order to make formerly enslaved Black people equal citizens.
“The conservative majority on the court does not care; they are very comfortable with subjugating non-white people in America.”
The Equal Protection Clause was designed to undo slavery. And the problem of chattel slavery was not that white people weren’t being colorblind. The problem of chattel slavery was that white people thought that Black people were an inferior race of humans and treated them accordingly. The Equal Protection Clause was ratified not to make white people colorblind, but rather to ensure that Black people were no longer treated as subhuman. Race-based affirmative action programs are consistent with what the 14th Amendment requires because it is interested in real racial equality, not just colorblindness.
A Supreme Court justice made the intervention not too long ago that to get past racism one must take account of race.
That guy’s gone, right? It’s really just a numbers game with the Supreme Court today. Before Justice Kennedy retired, conservatives on the court just didn’t have the votes to instantiate this view that the Constitution mandates colorblindness. Now they do. It’s not that those arguments make more sense today than they did 10 years ago. It’s not that there is more evidence to support that right-wing view. It is most certainly not true that we as a country are closer to a multiracial democracy than we were ten years ago. Ultimately, the only thing that has changed is the composition of the court.
As a factual and historical matter, the United States Constitution is not “colorblind.” In reality, it is a document that represented the interests of the white slave-owning class and was one of the bedrock documents of a herrenvolk racial state. Serious historians and other scholars have repeatedly documented how as a group the framers and other white elites saw little if any contradiction between white on Black chattel slavery, white supremacy, and their vision of (white) democracy. Yet, the right-wing justices insist on the Constitution somehow being “colorblind” and then reasoning from that incorrect premise to whatever conclusion they want to reach. Taking them seriously, how is such a view of the Constitution structured?
I think they believe that if you keep saying it, somehow it becomes true. But reality does not work that way. The Constitution is very much aware of race. The document literally contemplates race. The 3/5th clause is an obvious example. The majority opinion in the court’s recent affirmative action decision repeats “colorblind” so many times that an uninformed person may actually think that if you read the Constitution, you would see the words “colorblind” or “colorblindness.” But it doesn’t say that. What it does say is that no person shall be denied “equal protection of the laws.” Conservatives insist that those words mean “colorblindness.”
What the conservative majority will say is that during those lamentable and tragic moments in our nation’s racial history, the court was not interpreting the Constitution to be colorblind. They would say that the problem was that the court was allowing people to think about race. However, in my view, the problem of separate but equal, for example, wasn’t that people were thinking about race. The problem was how people were thinking about race. And they were thinking about race in order to conserve the existing racial hierarchy and to protect white supremacy. The conservative majority pretends that it cannot see the difference between those divergent uses of race. These conservative justices—all of whom got the finest educations from competitive universities—supposedly cannot see the difference between thinking about race in order to subjugate somebody and thinking about race in order to attempt to undo that subordination. Of course, they can see the difference. They know better.
The distinction here is important. Do the right-wing justices, like Clarence Thomas for example, actually believe in the factually wrong version of history and the Constitution (and reality) that they are articulating in the decision to end affirmative action, and more generally in terms of their legal theories? Or are they just ideologues and operatives, zealots, who don’t really care about the substance of the law and the Constitution and are just using it to advance a larger political and societal project?
I don’t know. And I don’t think it matters. What I do know for sure is that they are very comfortable signing on to decisions and handing down interpretations of the Constitution that will hurt people of color. In the end that is all I need to know. They won’t lose any sleep at night thinking about how students of color are going to be even more underrepresented in the nation’s colleges and universities. They don’t care about the real world implications of striking down affirmative action; they don’t care that, quite literally, lives will be lost, as Justice Jackson so compellingly and brilliantly demonstrated in her dissent when she talked about the effect that doctor-patient racial concordance has on reducing Black infant mortality. The conservative majority on the court does not care; they are very comfortable with subjugating non-white people in America.
‘A lot of fear’: Rent hikes across the country mean eviction notices for many Americans
Claire Thornton, USA TODAY – July 5, 2023
A looming rent increase in New York City is poised to force the most vulnerable renters onto the streets at a time when eviction rates nationwide have been steadily rising, and the worst cities are seeing eviction filings increase by more than 60%.
In New York — one of the country’s most expensive housing markets — the panel that sets rent rates for rent stabilized apartments last month approved hikes of 3% for one-year contracts. Last year saw rent upped by a similar amount.
“Even 3% is going to hurt a substantial number of people,” he said.
Why is rent so high in so many cities?
In recent years, cities across the United States have seen dramatic rent hikes. As a result, eviction filing rates are surging, particularly in the South and Southwest, where the rent increases are among the biggest, according to data collected by the Eviction Lab.
The cost of shelter is increasing in part because of record inflation and the rise in evictions over the past 18 months coincides with the expiration of eviction moratoriums and COVID-19-related rental assistance.
Rent hikes happening across the country are most painful for working single moms, retirees and people receiving disability payments from the government, said Robert Desir, a staff attorney with New York’s Legal Aid Society who worked on the city’s rent stabilization law.
“People are going to be stuck with this extra cost that many are going to have a really hard time meeting. They are going to have to sacrifice other basics to pay for the rent,” Desir said. If people can’t cut corners, they will fall behind in rent, risking eviction, he said.
Why are landlords choosing evictions?
In big cities and small town across the country, a rent increase can be a “de-facto” eviction, said Desir.
“They can receive a notice from the owner that says, ‘I’m going to raise the rent by 25, 50, 75 or 100%’ — whatever the landlord thinks that the market can bear,” he said.
Telling a tenant they must pay that much more in rent each month “can be used as a weapon” if an owner wants a certain tenant out, he said. In New York, the recent vote to increase rents in stabilized units is completely lawful, but still, “it’s dire and really makes a difference,” he said.
Since January 2022, landlords in Las Vegas have been initiating 60% more evictions than they did in 2016 through 2018, data shows. So far in 2023, Phoenix has also had around a 40% spike in filings compared to the years before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Eviction Lab.
The rent hikes of 20% or more are happening because landlords expect to find tenants in the hot housing market who will pay the higher rents, which pushes more people out of their longtime homes that used to be affordable, Gershenson said.
In New York City, landlords have also pointed to inflation as a reason why they’re raising rents, citing increasing operational and maintenance costs.
Where are eviction rates the highest in the US?
Here are some of the cities with the sharpest increases in eviction filings:
In, Houston, the Lone Star State’s largest city, there has been a 50% increase in eviction filings compared to 2016 through 2018 averages.
Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas’ second-largest metro area, has seen above-average eviction rates, with some months reaching around 40% more than 2016-2018 averages.
InColumbus, Ohio, eviction filings have risen 20% higher compared with 2016 to 2018.
Some cities are helping renters avoid eviction
Rates of evictions in New York City shuttered during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, when an eviction moratorium was in place. But rates popped up in January 2022 after the moratorium expired and they’ve been on the rise since then, according to data from the Eviction Lab.
One small piece of good news is that eviction rates in the city have decreased since 2016 through 2018, the next most recent time period for which the Eviction Lab has data, because New York City has some of the strongest tenant unions and protections in the country, Gershenson said.
Philadelphia is another city that’s had “quite a bit of success” reducing evictions, largely due to its eviction diversion program that launched in 2020, Gershenson said. The program has helped 75% of landlords and tenants who participate avoid eviction, the city says.
People gather outside of a New York City Marshall’s office calling for a stop to evictions in New York City.
‘A lot of fear out there’ over eviction threats
An hour outside of Nashville, in Columbia, Tennessee, tenants have been organizing after seeing their rents explode in the past several years, causing more people to become homeless.
Judy Schwartz-Naber, a Walgreen’s worker and organizer with Tennessee for Safe Homes has seen her rent double from $450 to $900 per month in the last seven years. She said there’s “a lot of fear out there” as people are facing more threats of eviction. Schwartz-Naber, 66, said she knows of one woman who was threatened with eviction because her granddaughter who was temporarily living with her was not on the lease.
“I’ve been told in Tennessee they can evict you if they don’t like the look of your face anymore,” she said. “I believe it’s true.”
She said landlords have too much power to kick people out of their homes, and that’s one reason why rents in the town of just over 40,000 have been increasing so quickly.
“They raise the rent and they raise it so high you can’t afford it,” she said.
In nearby Nashville, evictions have spiked since January 2022, sometimes exceeding 2016 to 2018 rates by more than 50%.
“Oh my God, I’m horrified because the human suffering that is connected to that is terrible. My god. It’s horrific there,” said Schwartz-Naber, who herself has experienced eviction. In 2003, the single mom and her daughter were kicked out of their home and the shock forced a cross-country move to Florida.
China’s economy, labor market ‘the complete opposite’ of the U.S.: Economist
Yahoo Finance July 5, 2023
China’s economy continues to struggle in the wake of last year’s pandemic lockdowns. Steven Wieting, Citi Chief Investment Strategist and Chief Economist details how policy in China can help the country’s economy to rebound.
Video Transcript
DIANE KING HALL: We want to do a deeper dive into the impact of China. More disappointing news from the world’s second largest economy. China’s services purchasing Managers’ Index fell to 53.9 from 57.1 in May. While not a contraction, the weakest print since January.
China’s growth faltered in Q2, causing investors to pull back with the Hang Seng index down almost 6% in the last three months. We want to bring back in Steven Wieting, a City chief investment strategist and chief economist. Stephen, in your note you said you trimmed your allocation to Chinese equities in recognition of significant challenges. Can you explain that more?
STEVEN WIETING: Well, this has been a couple of moves. China’s economy from a long term perspective is an economy that’s likely to have a solid cyclical recovery. It has a lot of runway, has very high unemployment, headline inflation is zero, monetary and fiscal policy are easing. That’s just the complete opposite of where we are in the US right now.
All of the things that would get us concerned about the US that we’ve sort of run out of capacity to grow with tight labor markets, just the opposite in China. Unfortunately, after this reopening from COVID, their economy really stalled in the second quarter. There was a sharp reopening effect, you have low valuations, you have what should be low expectations.
But even with double digit retail sales growth, China’s economy is not matching the hopes that everyone had for it. And they do have some very significant overhang from a really terrible real estate depression much like ’08/’09 in the United States. And policy needs to take very definitive action, again, for China to reach its own growth targets. We think that action will come, but it’s a riskier backdrop. It’s very much more policy-dependent.
And China is not going to get help from the rest of the world from exports. Didn’t help them during the period when they were outperforming. But these internal reasons again, the lack of confidence in China right now is being felt very much in their asset prices and their valuations. Usually after these periods, returns are strong, but it can take some time and it can take some serious focus on action.
BRAD SMITH: Even with that lack of confidence, should there be an investor out there that is still trying to put some type of international or global positioning within their portfolio? What’s the smart play to then play the reopening in China right now?
STEVEN WIETING: Well, a couple of things. They have industry-leading technology in electric vehicles, in solar power, these things that are very emphasized as areas of development in China that are not, again, tied up in all of the geopolitics, again, of US-China. And again, you want to think about size. When you think about two decades of outperformance of US equities, 62% of global market cap trading at a vast valuation premium to the rest of the world, you put some money to work in a diversified portfolio.
Think about Brazil is another example. It’s one country that’s going to trade very, very differently from the United States, seven times earnings, 7% dividend yield, 9 and 1/2% real interest rate. That is very, very different from the US. So China and Brazil is examples or Japan. These are all places, regions that look very, very different. And they will perform better when US equities, when the large caps underperform.
So these are opportunities, fuel for economic recovery in the future in the next couple of years at much, much lower valuations. You have to scale it property. We have about 7% of portfolios in global portfolios, in China. And that includes for investors in that region of the world as well as US investors.
DIANE KING HALL: Steven, so as we know, the US and relationship with China is tenuous at best. What does that mean for the investor here? Do does the investor here, especially when you consider where growth is with China and it’s moving in fits and starts recently, does the investor here need to limit exposure, especially in a note that you shared with us that you called it your headline was China between disappointment and hope? I guess, what’s the hope?
STEVEN WIETING: Well, the hope is an economy with four times the population of the United States at a mid-level of income with a valuation about half the United States. And again, this can be a tricky issue. You can have constraints on the ability to invest directly in any of these economies.
But we are global investors, and we have clients all over the world, and we’re putting portfolios to get together that take offsetting risks in particular industries. Idiosyncratic risk, country risk has always been, again, the reason why global portfolios tend to have less severe declines during shocks. That’s not been a worry for the US in the last 20 years. That might not always be the case.
DIANE KING HALL: All right. We will have to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us today, Steven Wieting, City chief investment strategist and chief economist. We appreciate you.
The ruble traded near 91 per US dollar on Wednesday, extending its 3% fall after the Wagner Group’s short-lived rebellion against Moscow last week.
The latest move means Russia’s currency has blown through a key range of 80-90 per US dollar, which first Russian deputy prime minister Andrey Belousov described as the optimal level for the currency.
The ruble has been one of the worst-performing currencies in 2023 thanks to sanctions and economic headwinds resulting from Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, with investors eyeing the impact of Western trade restrictions and increased military spending on the Kremlin’s coffers. The value of the ruble against the dollar is now 21% lower from levels at the start of the year.
Ruble holders have also shown their desire to switch to other currencies, with retail deposits held in other countries rising to $43.5 billion from early 2022 through May 2023, per an analysis from Bloomberg Economics. 15 regions in Russia saw demand for other currencies increase as much as 70-80% shortly after Wagner’s attempted rebellion, Belousouv previously stated.
The Kremlin, meanwhile, has increased its reliance on other currencies, particularly China’s yuan. The government began selling its $54 billion yuan stash in February to cover falling energy revenues, Russia’s finance ministry said.
Major city announces ban on new homes due to concerning conditions: ‘We’re going to manage this situation’
Laurelle Stelle – July 5, 2023
Due to a lack of water, the state of Arizona has announced that it will not approve any more building permits for single-family homes that rely on wells in Maricopa County, CleanTechnica reported.
Like much of the western U.S., Arizona has been facing a huge drought for many years. A shortage of rainfall has led to residents relying on underground aquifers and the Colorado River for water.
As CleanTechnica explained, the state has been using far too much water. Homes, farms, businesses, and public programs have been drawing on water supplies at an increasing rate, totaling 2.2 billion gallons per day in Maricopa County alone.
Because of this overuse, the Colorado River and groundwater are both drying up. State officials that modeled Arizona’s future water use predict that in the next 100 years, the Phoenix area will need over 1.5 trillion more gallons than it has.
Much of this excess water use has been driven by the growth of towns and cities throughout Arizona, CleanTechnica reported. One of the worst offenders is Phoenix, the state capital, which is located in Maricopa County. The city is surrounded by ever-expanding suburbs that rely on well water.
That’s why Governor Katie Hobbs has put a stop to new building permits.
Unfortunately, the new ban won’t stop the 80,000 building permits for new homes that have already been approved. It also doesn’t cover building projects that rely on river water or source their water from nearby businesses and farms. According to Governor Hobbs, though, the situation is under control.
“We’re going to manage this situation,” Governor Hobbs said at a news conference on June 1, according to The Guardian. “We are not out of water and we will not be running out of water. It is also incredibly important to note that the model relates only to groundwater and does not concern surface water supplies which are a significant source of renewable water for our state. What the model ultimately shows is that our water future is secure.”
In the northeast corner of Indiana, soybean and corn fields stretch across the landscape, separating the schools of the East Noble School Corporation by as much as 20 miles. Last summer, when interim food service director Roger Urick geared up to offer summer meals to the district’s 3,400 students, pandemic-era waivers allowing him to offer to-go meals to families had expired, forcing him to go back to the old model.
Instead of being able to offer take-away meals at several locations in the area, Urick was required to serve meals at two designated locations where kids had to come in and eat their meals on site. (In the school nutrition world, this is known as a “congregate” setting.)
Participation dropped to half of what it had been the two summers prior. “We found it was difficult for parents and kids to come to our two buildings and eat on site,” says Urick.
Before the pandemic, an estimated 6 out of 7 kids who qualified for free or reduced lunch could not access food in the summer largely due to the mandate that it be eaten on site, a problem that’s particularly acute in rural regions.
“We have known for a very long time that structural, fundamental changes were needed in the summer meals program because of barriers like transportation to meal sites,” says Carolyn Vega, associate director of policy at Share Our Strength, the nonprofit whose No Kid Hungry campaign focuses on access to summer meals. “School buses aren’t running over the summer. A lot of summer meals would be (served) outside, but there can be extreme heat or rain.”
Early in the pandemic, though, congregate anything was forbidden and restrictions around summer feeding were stripped away. Families were allowed to pick up several days’ worth of meals in the summer or even have them delivered. As a result, the number of summer meals served nationwide in July 2020 was nearly triple the number served in July 2019, according to No Kid Hungry.
In December 2022, as part of the end-of-year $1.7 trillion budget bill, Congress approved $29 billion in meal programs for low-income kids, and permanently loosened the rules around congregate feeding during the summer—a win for child nutrition advocates. But it came with a cost, as Democrats agreed to end pandemic-era SNAP “emergency allotments” a few months early. (The end to those allotments has left millions of Americans with slashed benefits.)
“We would have liked to see those allotments continue,” says Clarissa Hayes, the deputy director of school and out-of-school time programs for the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC). “We never like to see one program cut to prop up another program.”
The boost in school meal funding will pay for two major changes. Starting this summer, families in rural areas will once again be allowed to pick up meals or have them delivered, if districts and community groups are available to do so. This “non-congregate” option is expected to benefit up to 8 million children living in rural areas, according to a USDA spokesperson. And come next summer, families of children who qualify for free and reduced meals at school will receive a $40 monthly grocery stipend when school is out, creating permanent summer assistance.
These two changes will “work together to end summer hunger and fill that gap that many families face,” says Hayes.
Long Overdue Option
The history of summer food service dates to the late 1960s, when the federal government provided grants to states to offer meals over break. Decades later, summer feeding programs have greatly expanded and are entrenched in many low-income and rural communities.
School districts participate in the Seamless Summer Option (SSO), which provides reimbursement for all meals delivered to kids under the age of 18. All children eat free in communities where at least 50 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The Summer Food Service Program (SFSP), meanwhile, offers reimbursement to summer enrichment programs (such as camps and religious organizations) that offer meals in low-income areas.
Over the last few months, after the USDA greenlit “non-congregate” meal services in rural areas, most states opted to participate, and school districts, along with community groups that provide summer meals, have been busy submitting plans to whichever state agency oversees SFSP or SSO.
Vega, at Share Our Strength, says offering more flexible feeding options in rural areas is long overdue. “There aren’t a lot of community locations that [rural] kids can regularly and easily get to during the summer, much less twice a day for breakfast and lunch,” she says. “This is the level of service our rural communities have needed all along.”
In Indiana’s Noble County, where about half of the student population is eligible for free and reduced lunch, Urick says he’s “excited” to once again offer a service that should help ensure that more kids get access to meals after last year’s low participation rates.
The summer, families are able to pick up meals at seven different sites in the area, including a public library and two public housing apartment complexes. When Urick announced the change to the community, he says he was “overwhelmed” by grateful emails and calls. Though many school kitchens face staffing shortages, Urick has had no problem finding workers eager to earn some summer money preparing and delivering meals. But not all rural districts are that fortunate.
Becky Woodman, cafeteria operations manager at the Klamath-Trinity Joint Unified School District in Northern California, says she’s not participating in a grab-and-go or delivery option for summer feeding largely due to staffing. “We’re just not in a position to do that,” she says. “All of our cafeteria staff are 10-month employees.”
During the height of the pandemic, Woodman says, meal delivery to families was a huge challenge. The furthest delivery site was an 80-minute drive down a one-lane road. During the school year, she was able to lean on bus drivers and other district employees to help. “It took a lot of people working really hard and being creative and making things work,” she recalls. Over the summers of 2020 and 2021, though, that meal delivery service paused.
This summer, she has hired two people to serve breakfast, lunch, snacks, and supper at an elementary school located on the Hoopa Valley Reservation, where the majority of the district’s roughly 1,000 students live. The meals are included in a month-long summer school that typically only attracts about 70 students. She expects “100 percent” of those students will take advantage of the meals. And in a district in which nearly 68 percent of kids qualify for free and reduced lunch, she says many in the community will likely turn to nonprofits and other outreach programs during the summer for help with groceries and meals.
Why the US ‘does not get to assume that it lasts forever’
Ronald Brownstein – July 3, 2023
Giorgio Viera/AFP/Getty Images
As the United States marks its 247th birthday Tuesday, questions about how many more the nation will celebrate in its current form have become ominously relevant.
Possibly not since the two decades before the Civil War has America faced as much pressure on its fundamental cohesion. The greatest risk probably isn’t a repeat of the outright secession that triggered the Civil War, though even that no longer seems entirely impossible in the most extreme scenarios. More plausible is the prospect that the nation will continue its drift into two irreconcilable blocs of red and blue states uneasily trying to occupy the same geographic space.
“I can’t recall a time when we’ve had such fundamental friction between the states on such important issues,” says Donald Kettl, former dean and professor emeritus of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy and author of the 2020 book, “The Divided States of America.”
The strains on America’s basic unity are broad and diverse. They include a widening divergence in the basic rules of life between red and blue states on everything from the availability of abortion and guns to what teachers can say in the classroom; sharpening conflicts not only between the states, but among the urban and rural regions within them; a growing tendency of voters in each political coalition to view the other party not only as a political rival but as an “enemy” that threatens their core conception of America; the increasing inability of almost any institution – from the media to federal law enforcement to even consumer products – to retain comparable credibility on both sides of the red-blue divide; more common threats of political violence, predominantly from the right, against local and national officials; and the endurance of Donald Trump as the first leader of a truly mass-scale American political movement who has demonstrated a willingness to subvert small-d democracy to achieve his goals.
Behind almost all of these individual challenges is the same larger force: the mounting tension between those who welcome the propulsive demographic and cultural changes reshaping 21st century America and those who fear or resent those changes. It’s the collision between what I’ve called the Democrats’ “coalition of transformation” and the Republican “coalition of restoration.” As the US evolves toward a future, sometime after 2040, when people of color will constitute a majority of the population, political scientists point out that the country is trying to build something without exact modern precedent: a true multi-racial democracy that provides a voice to all its citizens.
The urgent demands for greater opportunity and inclusion from traditionally marginalized groups (from Black to LGBTQ people) and the ferocious backlash against those demands that Trump has mobilized in his “Make America Great Again” movement demonstrate how fraught that passage has become.
“To expect we are going to be as unified as we [have been] trying to negotiate these fundamental transformations of American demography is wholly unrealistic,” says Daniel Cox, a senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “There is going to be real differences and divisions on these things and, unfortunately, some people are weaponizing them in a way that is unhelpful.”
The ideal of national unity celebrated on July Fourth has almost always been overstated: the country from its founding has been riven by sectional, racial, class and gender conflicts. Large groups of people living within our borders have always felt excluded from any proclaimed national consensus: American Indians who were brutally displaced for decades, Black people who faced generations of legal slavery and then decades of state-sponsored segregation, women denied the vote until the 20th century.
But today’s proliferating and intersecting pressures have reached a height that is forcing experts to contemplate questions few Americans have seriously considered since the Civil War era: can the United States continue to function as a single unified entity, and if so, in what form?
In the late 1990s, Alan Wolfe, a Boston University political scientist, wrote a book called “One Nation, After All” based on in-depth interviews with hundreds of Americans around the country. His book was one of several published in the era that concluded the broad American public was not nearly as divided as its leaders and that average Americans, however much their views differed on issues, recognized the importance of finding common ground with others of opposing views.
Now, Wolfe told me in an interview, he considers the current situation much more worrying. “I was so optimistic with the title of ‘One Nation, After All,’ but I couldn’t say that now,” Wolfe, a professor emeritus, said. “I think the book was right for its time. I think the sociology of it was right. That’s what I found. But I’m sure I wouldn’t find it now.”
To Wolfe, the US is now trapped in a “vicious cycle” of rising partisan and ideological hostility in which political leaders, particularly on the right, see a “benefit in fueling the rage even more.” While President Joe Biden, Wolfe says, has struck traditional presidential notes of emphasizing the value of national unity, Trump – currently the front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination – has built his political strategy on widening the nation’s divides in ways that may be difficult to reverse any time soon. “I don’t know if [Trump’s] a political genius or just instinctively knows something, but he sure has exacerbated the shocks, and I don’t know how we are going to recover from him,” Wolfe says.
Experts may be the least concerned about the most often discussed scenario for a future American unraveling. That’s the prospect the nation will fully split apart into separate entities, as it did when the South seceded to create the Confederate States of America after the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Republican from Georgia who has become a close ally of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, has called for “a national divorce” in which Republican- and Democratic-leaning states would go their separate ways, presumably peacefully. “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government,” Greene said in a tweet on President’s Day this year.
Susan Stokes, a political scientist and director of the Chicago Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago, said that prospect could receive growing discussion in coming years, particularly on the right, “if we continue to go in this direction and we continue to view each other as threats and as anathema, immoral, and a threat to each other’s existence.”
But the practical barriers to any formal national divorce, she says, are likely to limit such discussion to the fringes. Unlike the Civil War, which had a clear geographical boundary, the nation’s current political divide has created a checkerboard – with Democrats strongest in coastal and upper Midwest states, as well as parts of the Southwest, while Republicans hold the edge in most Heartland states, particularly those in the South and Great Plains. Plus, Stokes notes, the red-blue line runs not only between but within the states, with the urban areas of every state leaning relatively more toward Democrats than their rural neighbors. In some future national divorce, “What do you do with upstate New York? What do you do with Memphis or Austin?” she asked.
For those reasons, none of the experts I spoke to worry much about full-scale national separation through any intermediate time frame, though most no longer consider it inconceivable either. (Polls don’t show extensive interest among the public, with one national CBS/YouGov survey last year finding a quarter of Americans favoring the idea.) One wild card is what might happen if Trump wins in 2024 and moves to implement some of the policies he’s proposed that amount to mobilizing federal power against blue institutions and individuals – including a massive deportation program of undocumented immigrants and the deployment of the National Guard into high-crime cities. Blue state governors, legislatures and mayors might respond to such an offensive in forceful ways difficult to predict today.
The nation’s greater challenge may be the continuing incremental separation between the red and blue blocs – the political equivalent of continental drift. Polls show that voters in each coalition hold darkening views of the other. In that 2022 CBS/YouGov survey, about half of the voters for both Trump and Biden said they considered the other party not just “political opposition” but “enemies, that is, if they win, your life or your entire way of life may be threatened.”
More tangibly, red and blue states are hurtling apart. The most aggressive moves have come from red states shifting social policy sharply to the right on a broad array of issues, from retrenching abortion and LGBTQ rights, to censoring classroom discussion of race, gender and sexual orientation, expanding access to guns while limiting access to books that provoke conservative objections, and restricting access to voting. With red states exploring various ways to discourage their residents from traveling to blue states for banned activities (such as abortions or gender-affirming care for transgender minors), and blue states passing laws to inhibit such red state enforcement, the nation is facing open conflict over the cross-border application of state law reminiscent of the bitter disputes between free and slave states over the Fugitive Slave Act.
No single issue separates the red and blue states today as profoundly as the gulf between those with and without legal segregation during the Jim Crow era, or that between states with and without slavery before the Civil War. But, as experts point out, the current divergence involves more issues in more states than those earlier conflicts, with nearly half the country joining the red state drive to create what I’ve called “a nation within a nation” operating by its own rules and values.
“I really feel like we are becoming two different countries, if not that it has already happened,” says Wolfe. “I don’t like it, but I don’t see what we have in common anymore. I really don’t.”
To some students of government, allowing states to set their own course on these divisive issues may relieve pressure and help hold the nation together. “In some ways, you can say how this is terrible, how can we remain a unified country and address global concerns” when states are separating this fundamentally, says Cox. “But by the same token, there’s something that is positive about these ‘laboratories of democracy’ where one party is given free rein to put forward their ideas and legislate and the public can see how they do and react to that.”
Yet allowing states to diverge this comprehensively may do more to heighten than relieve national tensions. Cox acknowledges one reason: severe gerrymandering in many states’ legislative districts means most politicians are unlikely to suffer consequences even if the public doesn’t like the agenda they have advanced.
A second problem is this experimentation is unlikely to proceed on an even track. The Republican-appointed majority on the US Supreme Court has encouraged the red state social offensive with decisions that stripped away national rights – most prominently on abortion and voting. Many legal experts believe that conservative majority is unlikely to block many of the new red state social laws that critics (including, in many cases, the Biden administration) are challenging in federal courts. On the other hand, the six GOP-appointed justices have shown no hesitation about overturning blue state initiatives, such as gun control measures that conflict with their reading of the 2nd Amendment, or LGBTQ protections they argue infringe on religious liberty or free speech. “Given the make-up of the courts, it’s difficult for blue states to be hopeful about this,” says Kettl.
The biggest challenge created by the widening distance among the states is where to draw the line between local leeway and preserving a baseline floor of nationally guaranteed rights in every state. Racial segregation, after all, was justified for 70 years on the ground of respecting “local traditions.”
From both Congress and the Supreme Court, the general trend in American life from the 1950s through the 2010s was to nationalize more rights and to restrict the ability of states to curtail those rights. Now, though, the red states are engaged in the most concerted effort over that long arc to roll back the “rights revolution” and restore a system in which people’s basic civil rights vary much more depending on where they live.
“It is certainly good to have a chance to have a contest over basic values, and that’s one of the great strengths of the American republic,” says Kettl, co-author of the new book “Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems.” He continued: “But there is also a basic question of the fundamental rights of individuals and whether the balance of power in deciding them ought to lie” with states or the nation as a whole.
The chasm between the civil rights and liberties available in blue and red states has widened to the point where it will be highly explosive for either side to attempt to impose its social regime on the other. If Democrats win unified control of the White House and Congress in 2024 and pass legislation to restore a national floor of abortion or voting rights, red state leaders would likely sue to block them (even though abortion rights are popular in several of them). This Supreme Court majority could prove receptive to such challenges. Conversely, the fear that Republicans will seek to pass national legislation imposing the red state rules on blue and purple states, particularly on abortion and guns, may be the best Democratic asset in the 2024 presidential race in the key swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona.
Michael Podhorzer, the former long-time political director for the AFL-CIO, has argued that the wave of restrictive red state social laws has simply made more apparent something that has long been true: that the red and blue parts of the country are so divergent in their values, priorities and even economic structures that they are more accurately described as separate nations than separate regions. In his mind, what’s changed isn’t that these different regions – or different nations – have divergent approaches on both social and economic issues, but that the Trump-aligned MAGA movement ascendant in the red states is now pursuing such an extreme and even anti-democratic (small d) agenda.
Eric Liu, co-founder of Citizen University, a non-partisan organization that trains people to work together on local problems across ideological, racial and other boundaries, agrees that Trump and much of his movement represent a unique threat to the future of American democracy. The nation, Liu says, now faces the challenge of doing two things at once: countering and isolating that threat to democracy, while building a bigger coalition for cooperation and consensus-building among what he calls (borrowing from Richard Nixon’s phrase) the “silent majority” of Americans who want to coexist.
Liu counsels that lowering the temperature does not require an artificial level of agreement between people of differing views: “It’s OK to argue it out. It’s necessary to argue it out because America is an argument.” But it does, he believes, require both sides to commit to respecting the democratic process and staying engaged with the other when that process produces decisions they don’t support. “That means to recognize that politics is not a one-and-done, winner-take-all, wipe-the-other-side-off-the-face-of-the-earth, scorched earth endeavor,” he says.
Even more important, strengthening the nation’s bonds, he believes, requires people on both sides of the political divide to see the other “as three-dimensional, complicated, sometimes contradictory human beings.” The best way to achieve that, he says, is to work together to solve local problems. Liu’s group tries to facilitate that through programs like Civic Saturdays that promotes collaborative local actions, or initiatives that bring together rural and urban residents around shared concerns.
Such interactions, Liu believes, can nudge the US toward the national unity it celebrates on July Fourth. But he acknowledges there’s no assurance this patient nurturing of civic connection can overcome all the forces in politics, the media and communications technology blowing toward separation. Even the most carefully cultivated garden, after all, may not survive a gale-force wind.
“It is totally not a given that we get through this,” Liu told me. “The United States does not get to assume that it lasts forever.”
Conservatives go to red states and liberals go to blue as the country grows more polarized
Nicholas Riccardi – July 4, 2023
Jennifer and Tim Kohl poses for a photo in their front yard with the American flag and a thin blue line flag in Star, Idaho, on April 14, 2023. The couple recently moved to Idaho from the Los Angeles area. Americans are segregating by their politics at a rapid clip, helping fuel the greatest divide between the states in modern history. (AP Photo/Kyle Green)Kathleen Rickerson poses for a photo at her home Wednesday, May 24, 2023, in the west Denver suburb of Lakewood, Colo. Americans are segregating by their politics at a rapid clip, helping fuel the greatest divide between the states in modern history. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)Aaron and Carrie Friesen feed chickens in the backyard of their home in Boise, Idaho, on April 12, 2023. The couple, who has three children, recently moved to Idaho from the Bluffton, S.C., area. Americans are segregating by their politics at a rapid clip, helping fuel the greatest divide between the states in modern history. (AP Photo/Kyle Green)Leah Dean, a native of the Texas Panhandle, poses outside her home Monday, July 3, 2023, in Denver. Americans are segregating by their politics at a rapid clip, helping fuel the greatest divide between the states in modern history. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
STAR, Idaho (AP) — Once he and his wife, Jennifer, moved to a Boise suburb last year, Tim Kohl could finally express himself.
Kohl did what the couple never dared at their previous house outside Los Angeles — the newly-retired Los Angeles police officer flew a U.S. flag and a Thin Blue Line banner representing law enforcement outside his house.
“We were scared to put it up,” Jennifer Kohl acknowledged. But the Kohls knew they had moved to the right place when neighbors complimented him on the display.
Leah Dean is on the opposite end of the political spectrum, but she knows how the Kohls feel. In Texas, Dean had been scared to fly an abortion rights banner outside her house. Around the time the Kohls were house-hunting in Idaho, she and her partner found a place in Denver, where their LGBTQ+ pride flag flies above the banner in front of their house that proclaims “Abortion access is a community responsibility.”
“One thing we have really found is a place to feel comfortable being ourselves,” Dean said.
Americans are segregating by their politics at a rapid clip, helping fuel the greatest divide between the states in modern history.
One party controls the entire legislature in all but two states. In 28 states, the party in control has a supermajority in at least one legislative chamber — which means the majority party has so many lawmakers that they can override a governor’s veto. Not that that would be necessary in most cases, as only 10 states have governors of different parties than the one that controls the legislature.
The split has sent states careening to the political left or right, adopting diametrically opposed laws on some of the hottest issues of the day. In Idaho, abortion is illegal once a heartbeat can be detected in a fetus — as early as five or six weeks — and a new law passed this year makes it a crime to help a minor travel out of state to obtain one. In Colorado, state law prevents any restrictions on abortion. In Idaho, a new law prevents minors from accessing gender-affirming care, while Colorado allows youths to come from other states to access the procedures.
Federalism — allowing each state to chart its own course within boundaries set by Congress and the Constitution — is at the core of the U.S. system. It lets the states, in the words of former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, be “laboratories of democracy.”
Now, some wonder whether that’s driving Americans apart.
“Does that work as well in a time when we are so politically divided, or does it just become an accelerant for people who want to re-segregate?” asked Rob Witwer, a former Republican Colorado state lawmaker.
Colorado and Idaho represent two poles of state-level political homogenization. Both are fast-growing Rocky Mountain states that have been transformed by an influx of like-minded residents. Life in the two states can be quite similar — conversations revolve around local ski areas, mountain bike trails, and how newcomers are making things too crowded. But, politically, they increasingly occupy two separate worlds.
Witwer watched Colorado steadily swing to the left as affluent, college-educated people fled the coasts for his home state starting in the late 1990s. For two decades, it was one of the nation’s fastest-growing states, and during the Trump era it swung sharply to the left. Democrats control all statewide offices and have their largest majorities in history in the legislature, including a supermajority in the lower house.
In contrast, Idaho has become one of the nation’s fastest-growing states during the past decade without losing its reputation as a conservative haven. It has moved even more sharply to the right during that time and become a beacon to those, like the Kohls, fleeing blue states where they no longer feel welcome.
The states’ swings aren’t simply due to transplants, of course. The increasing clustering of Americans into like-minded enclaves — dubbed “The Big Sort” — has many causes. Harvard professor Ryan Enos estimates that, at least before the pandemic, only 15% of the homogeneity was due to people moving. Other causes include political parties polarizing on hot-button issues that split neatly on demographic lines, such as guns and abortion, and voters adopting their neighbors’ partisanship.
“A lot of this is driven by other sorting that is going on,” Enos said.
When Americans move, politics is not typically the explicit reason. But the lifestyle choices they make place them in communities dominated by their preferred party.
“Democrats want to live in places with artistic culture and craft breweries, and Republicans want to move to places where they can have a big yard,” said Ryan Strickler, a political scientist at Colorado State University-Pueblo.
But something may have changed as the country has become even more polarized. Businesses catering to conservatives fleeing blue states have sprouted, such as Blue Line Moving, which markets to families fleeing from blue states to Florida. In Texas, a “rainbow underground railroad” run by a Dallas realtor helps LGBTQ+ families flee the state’s increased restrictions targeting that population.
The switch might have been flipped during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, which created a class of mobile workers no longer bound to the states where their companies were based. Those who are now mobile are predominantly white-collar workers and retirees, the two most politically engaged parts of the national population.
Mike McCarter, who has spearheaded a quixotic campaign to have conservative eastern Oregon become part of Idaho, said most people didn’t pay much attention to state government until the pandemic.
“Then it was like ‘Oh, they can shut down any church and they can shut down my kids’ school?’” McCarter said. “If state-level government has that much power, you’d better be sure it reflects your values, and not someone else’s values that are forced on you.”
The pandemic helped push Aaron and Carrie Friesen to Idaho. When the pandemic hit, they realized they could take their marketing firm remote from its base near Hilton Head, South Carolina. They’d always planned to return to the West, but California, where Aaron, now 39, was born and raised, was disqualified because of its cost and progressive politics.
The Friesens and their three children settled on Boise. They loved the big skies, the mountains rearing up behind the town, the plethora of outdoor activities.
And they liked Idaho’s pandemic policies. When the Friesens visited, almost no one was wearing masks, which they took as a good sign — they were happy to mask up when sick, but found constant masking pointless.
“This was a place that had like-minded people,” Carrie Friesen said.
The Friesens are happy with the direction of their new state and the abortion and transgender restrictions out of the latest legislative session. But they don’t see themselves as part of what they called “the crazy right,” referring to the families displaying Trump yard signs in the less-politically-mixed Boise suburbs. They like living close to the center of Boise, one of the more liberal areas in the state.
They try not to make too many decisions based on politics — to a point.
“With the temperature of politics nowadays, if people choose to move somewhere, they are going to choose to move to a place with like-minded people,” Aaron Friesen said.
That’s apparently been happening in Idaho, said Mathew Hay, who oversees a regular survey of new arrivals for Boise State University. Historically, transplants mirrored the conservative population’s leanings, with about 45% describing themselves as “conservative,” and the rest evenly split between liberal and moderate.
But something changed last year — the share of newcomers that said they lived in Idaho for the politics jumped to 9%, compared to 5% for long-timers. The percentage describing themselves as “very conservative” also rose.
When Melissa Wintrow rode her motorcycle across the U.S. in 1996, she was captivated by Idaho.
“It was this grounded, commonsense, reasonable group,” Wintrow said. “Of course they were conservative, but they weren’t going to say openly racist and homophobic things.”
Now a Democratic state senator, Wintrow is aghast at how her adopted state has become more hardline.
“The state has just moved to a more extreme view,” she said. “It’s a certain group of people that is afraid their ‘way of life’ is diminishing in the world.”
In Colorado, the reverse may be happening.
Bret Weinstein, owner of a realty firm in Denver, said politics has become the top issue for people buying a home.
“It’s brought up in our initial conversations,” Weinstein said. “Three years ago, we didn’t have those conversations, ever.”
Now, many entering the state tell him they’re looking for a way to escape their red state — and homeowners leaving Colorado say they’re fed up with it turning blue. Even within Colorado, Weinstein said, homebuyers are picking based on politics, with some avoiding conservative areas where debates on mask mandates and curriculum has dominated school board meetings.
One of those politically motivated migrants is Kathleen Rickerson, who works in human resources for Weinstein’s firm. Rickerson, 35, lived in Minnesota for seven years, but during the pandemic grew weary of the blue state’s vocal anti-masking, anti-vaccine minority.
Rickerson’s parents and sister urged her to join them in Texas, but that was out of the question. Ready for a change, Rickerson instead zeroed in on Colorado. She moved to a Denver suburb in December 2021.
Cheered by the state’s strong stance to protect abortion rights, Rickerson wants Colorado Democrats to go further.
“Colorado isn’t as quick to take a stand on things, and I’d like to see that happen a bit more,” she said.
That was a sentiment shared by Colorado progressives, who were frustrated their party didn’t muscle through an assault weapons ban and other priorities of the left during the most recent legislative session.
“There is a point at which we need to stop acting like trying to get along with our enemies is going to preserve our institution,” progressive state Rep. Stephanie Vigil said at the end of the session, after the chamber’s Democratic leader said it was important that Republicans still feel like they have a voice.
The increasing political homogeneity in states makes it harder for both parties to feel invested, said Thad Kousser, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego.
“It gives one party the ability to move a state further when they’re doing exactly what their constituency wants,” he said.
The system works as a sort of escape valve, Kousser said, letting the majority in the state feel in power regardless of what’s happening in Washington, D.C. But the local minority party gets shortchanged.
The Kohls felt shortchanged in California. They said they watched their native state deteriorate before their eyes, and no one was willing to fix the problems. Trash piled up with homeless encampments. Tax money seemed to go to immigrants who had entered the country illegally rather than U.S. citizens. Jennifer’s mother qualified for government assistance due to her low income, but was on dozens of wait lists that were seven years long. Tim’s police station, in a former hippie colony in the mountains running through West Los Angeles, was firebombed during the George Floyd protests in 2020.
The Kohls wanted to live in a red state, but Jennifer said they’re not just party-line voters. A nurse, she hasn’t registered with either party and has a wide range of beliefs, including that abortion is sometimes necessary.
“I believe so many different things,” she said.
On balance, they feel more comfortable in a more conservative place.
“Here, the tax dollars naturally goes to the citizens, not the immigrants,” said Tim Kohl, who can understand why Idaho is growing so fast. “Most of the people we’ve met here are from California originally.”
In Denver, Dean has found other people who fled red states. She and her partner, Cassidy Dean, discovered that their neighbors fled Florida after the state’s hard turn to the political right.
Leah Dean was a 19-year-old cosmetology college student in San Antonio in 2008 when she had an abortion. She chafed at the obstacles she faced — the state-mandated waiting period before the procedure, having to get a sonogram before the procedure — and became a committed Democratic activist. She met her partner at the Texas state party convention in 2016, and every year since then she’s felt the Republican state legislature and governor make the state less and less hospitable to people like her.
Now in Colorado, she and her partner both work from home, telecommuting to their old Texas jobs. They have limited social outlets, but took care of that by throwing themselves into politics again, with Leah Dean becoming vice chair of Denver Democrats.
“It’s also how we meet people,” she said. “We don’t have any other way to do that.
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