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January 26 - February 3, 2025
Many members we met had grown up in small towns in the Midwest and felt deeply disoriented in California’s anomic suburbs, an unease they transformed into a belief that American society was at risk of being taken over by communists. Looking around, we could well understand why they felt “taken over”—in a few years, entire orange groves had disappeared into parking lots and shopping malls, a case of wildly unplanned urban sprawl. We too felt taken over by something, but it wasn’t communism.
How could he be both near tears to recall his lost home and also call for a world stripped of most government
And the more that people confine themselves to like-minded company, the more extreme their views become.
This split has widened because the right has moved right, not because the left has moved left.
Under Dwight Eisenhower, top earners were taxed at 91 percent; in 2015, it was 40 percent.
Conservatives of yesterday seem moderate or liberal today.
In 1970, not a single U.S. senator opposed the Clean Air Act. Joined by ninety-five Republican congressmen, Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, one of the most polluted states in the union, has called for the end of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Louisiana has suffered many environmental problems too: there are nearly 400 miles of low, flat, subsiding coastline, and the state loses a football field–size patch of wetland every hour.
Small farmers voting with Monsanto? Corner drugstore owners voting with Walmart? The local bookstore owner voting with Amazon?
how can a system both create pain and deflect blame for that pain?
the affluent who vote against government services use them anyway.
But shame didn’t stop those who disapproved of public services from using them.
I believe that their friendship models what our country itself needs to forge: the capacity to connect across difference.
Just 158 rich families contributed nearly half of the $176 million given to candidates in the first phase of the presidential election of 2016—$138 million to Republicans and $20 million to Democrats.
A rich man’s “economic agenda” is paired with the “bait” of social issues.
“Vote to stop abortion: receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. . . . Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meat packing. Vote to strike a blow against elitism, receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes.”
I told them I had followed my boss’s orders. I told them the chemicals had made me sick. I told them I’d been fired for absenteeism.
both sides of the Great Paradox—the need for help and a principled refusal of it.
Still, his source of news was limited to Fox News and videos and blogs exchanged by right-wing friends, which placed him in an echo chamber of doubt about the EPA, the federal government, the president, and taxes.
It’s a tree graveyard.
There it was written that God would bring ruin to those who ruin the earth.
they don’t want people to know—or if they knew, they don’t want [them] to remember—that it’s polluted around here.
They didn’t want to leave, and even if they had wanted to, they couldn’t afford to.
the Sabine River, whose waters were inked by an upstream paper mill,
“The Sabine River is a public river,” Paul Ringo told me on a visit I paid him, “But if you can’t drink in the river, and you can’t swim in the river, or fish in the river, or baptize your young in the river, then it’s not your river. It’s the paper mill’s river.”
of new jobs, new money, and new products. Talk was of “economic progress,” and nostalgia would get in its way.
they overregulate the bottom because it’s harder to regulate the top.”
The higher up the ladder of power, the more likely one was to get off; the lower down, the less likely.
it is common corporate strategy, with the cooperation of the state agencies, to string these lawsuits out for so long that plaintiffs die before money is due.
am again struck by what both candidates avoid saying—that the state ranks 49th out of 50 on an index of human development, that Louisiana is the second poorest state, that 44 percent of its budget comes from the federal government—
They disdain “insider Washington” while trying to pry as much money from it for Louisiana as they can.
“That’s not the Mississippi’s water. That’s Monsanto water. Exxon water. Shell Oil water. It’s a public waterway, but that’s private water. Industry owns the Mississippi now. There’s hardly a public dock along it.”
The spill released the equivalent of one Exxon Valdez–sized oil spill every three to four days—for 87 days.
Perhaps for better-off people of the far right, problems such as poverty, poor schools, and medical care didn’t come up because such problems didn’t hit them directly.
A person can walk into a bar on Bourbon Street in New Orleans with a loaded gun.
In 2010, the governor passed a law that permitted concealed handguns in churches, synagogues, and mosques. The next year, Louisiana had the highest rate of death by gunfire in the country, nearly double the national average.
Liquor, guns, motorcycle helmets (legislation had gone back and forth on that)—mainly white masculine pursuits—are fairly unregulated.
for women and black men, regulation is greater.
prisons are the ultimate instrument of regulation.
The United States incarcerates a higher proportion of its population than does any nation in the world outside the Seychelles Islands—more than Russia or Cuba.
Louisiana incarcerates the highest proportion of its population of all the states in the union, and those inmat...
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Sometimes they don’t tell us the truth about what’s going on because they don’t want to alarm us,” he replied. “And, of course, we don’t want to be alarmed.”
But there was almost no talk about freedom from such things as gun violence, car accidents, or toxic pollution.
“Part of the psychological program is that people think they’re free when they’re not,” he said. “A company may be free to pollute, but that means the people aren’t free to swim.”
the job of auditing oil company payments was handed over to the Office of Mineral Resources, which has close ties with the industry and which, between 2010 and 2013, performed no audits at all.
“Oil brought in some jobs,” Templet says, “but it causes other jobs to disappear or simply inhibits other sectors—such as the seafood industry and tourism—from growing.”
No one wants to eat oil-tainted shrimp or vacation on beaches strewn with tar balls.
Louisiana brought jobs into the state, not by nurturing new business in the state, but by poaching jobs in another state.
the tougher the regulation, the more jobs were available in the economy.
A 2016 survey of the world’s major economies also found that strict environmental policies improved, rather than handicapped, competitiveness in the international market.
