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January 26 - February 3, 2025
If, in 2010, you lived in a county with a higher exposure to toxic pollution, we discovered, you are more likely to believe that Americans “worry too much” about the environment and to believe that the United States is doing “more than enough” about it.
Powell drew up a list of characteristics of the “least resistant personality profile”: • Longtime residents of small towns in the South or Midwest • High school educated only • Catholic • Uninvolved in social issues, and without a culture of activism • Involved in mining, farming, ranching (what Cerrell called “nature exploitative occupations”) • Conservative • Republican • Advocates of the free market
A “Qatar on the Bayou,” the Wall Street Journal called it. It will call for “losing 26 public roads, buying out 883 public property lots.” And in their place will rise “new cities of fertilizer plants, boron manufacturers, methanol terminals, polymer plants, ammonia factories and paper-finishing facilities.”
An instrumentation foreman at Phillips 66 before running for mayor of Westlake, Hardey hasn’t given many public speeches, he says. “So I just got up there with my iPad. It had a picture of my wife, so I looked at her.”
Residents don’t want the man camps near them, Hardey says. What if the imported workers included rapists or burglars? they’d asked the mayor. “I don’t want to tell them, but they’re already living near a few registered sex offenders in nearby trailer parks; they just don’t know it.”
Sasol also sought and received permission to use public water—thirteen million gallons a day of relatively clean water from the Sabine River. This it would use, pollute, and dump back in the Calcasieu River.
Meanwhile, the city government of Lake Charles launched its own Ozone Advance Program, which focused exclusively on what private citizens could do.
We’ll throw away more plastic bottles, buy more, and further expand the market for plastic, the production of which pollutes water.
He was not a racist, Hardey told me, but he favored no special breaks for blacks or foreigners.
The town needed to “improve the quality of life” in order to recruit professional chemists, engineers, and physicists from elsewhere. To do this, they had to become highly desirable places to live, with state-of-the-art public schools, innovative art and music programs, magnificent parks, freshly paved sidewalks, clean lakes to swim in, and exciting museums open regular hours.
since 2008 the governor has eliminated $800 million from the higher education budget, leading to cuts of academic programs and the loss of 854 faculty and 4,734 other employees. Students were thrown into turmoil.
Only after public outcry did the governor restore some funds to public education—and cut public health and environmental protection instead.
To attract outside talent for the private sector, it turned out, you needed a thriving public sector, for which the two-term, Tea Party–supported governor had drastically cut funds.
Nearly everyone had a boat, knew the good fishing spots, got on with their neighbors, and enjoyed a good crawfish boil.
government should never, Mike felt, erode the spirit of a community.
The problem was not that the state government was too big, too intrusive, too controlling; it seemed to me that the state government had barely been present at all.
Texas Brine didn’t care. They were all about money.
The inspector general concluded that he was “unable to fully assure the public that Louisiana was operating programs in a way that effectively protects human health and the environment.”
Why such low marks? Three reasons, the inspector general concluded: natural disasters, low funds, and “a culture in which the state agency is expected to protect industry.”
An alert auditor had also discovered that the state had accidentally “given back” about $13 million to oil and gas companies that it should have retained in taxes.
According to the state’s own website, 89,787 permits to deposit waste or do anything that affected the environment were submitted between 1967 and July 2015. Of these, only sixty—or .07 percent—were denied.
“You got a problem? Get used to it.”
a public servant who doesn’t make very much is more likely to be dedicated to what he’s doing.”
my criticisms were based on a faith in the idea of good government.
How about the 44 percent of the state budget that comes from Washington, D.C.?
If the programs are there, why not use them?”
Tea Party advocates seemed to be saying, “I’m above the government and all its services” to show the world their higher ideals, even though they used a host of them.
our distance from necessity tends to confer honor.
They pay taxes, but they give at church.
All of them referred Moyers to their shared spokesman, Dr. Calvin Beisner, an adjunct fellow at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Fox gives Madonna and others the news. It suggests what the issues are. It tells her what to feel afraid, angry, and anxious about.
Fox News stokes fear.
And the fear seems to reflect that of the audience it most serves—white middle- and working-class people.
“A lot of liberal commentators look down on people like me. We can’t say the ‘N’ word. We wouldn’t want to; it’s demeaning. So why do liberal commentators feel so free to use the ‘R’ word [redneck]?”
Fox offers no less news on the environment than did CNN or CNBC, but its oratory was inflammatory.
But that child’s problems aren’t our fault.”
I don’t want to be told I’m a bad person if I don’t feel sorry for that child.”
some people cheat the government, I thought, and that’s wrong. But it is a very long leap between annoyance at cheaters and hatred of nearly all federal government.
These are opportunities you’d have loved to have had in your day—and either you should have had them when you were young or the young shouldn’t be getting them now. It’s not fair.
Blacks, women, immigrants, refugees, brown pelicans—all have cut ahead of you in line. But it’s people like you who have made this country great. You feel uneasy. It has to be said: the line cutters irritate you. They are violating rules of fairness. You resent them, and you feel it’s right that you do. So do your friends. Fox commentators reflect your feelings, for your deep story is also the Fox News deep story.
And who can explain why it’s so hard to get a good job?
You are a stranger in your own land. You do not recognize yourself in how others see you. It is a struggle to feel seen and honored.
People want to achieve the American Dream, but for a mixture of reasons feel they are being held back, and this leads people of the right to feel frustrated, angry, and betrayed by the government.
Race is an essential part of this story.
And racism appears not simply in personal attitudes but in structural arrangements—as when polluting industries move closer to black neighborhoods than to white.
The women I spoke to seemed to sense that if we chop away large parts of the government, women stand to lose far more than men,
One theater animates the politics of the left. It focuses on conflict in the private sector between the very richest 1 percent and the rest of America.
It is between haves and have-nots, the ever-more-wealthy 1 percent and the other 99 percent of Americans.
but the absence of tax policies that could help restore America as a middle-class society.
Under recently revised bankruptcy laws, the billionaire Donald Trump can freely declare bankruptcy while insulating himself from risks to investment, while smaller businesses cannot.
