Month: September 2024

Trump’s biggest fans aren’t who you think

Posted on by ajk1311@gmail.com

“In 2020, three political scientists studied how location and income affected white voters’ voting decisions. They found that, on a national level, poorer white people were indeed more likely to vote for Trump than richer ones.
But when you factored in local conditions — the fact that your dollar can buy more in Biloxi than Boston — the relationship reverses. “Locally rich” white people, those who had higher incomes than others in their zip codes, were much more likely to support Trump than those who were locally poor. These people might make less money than a wealthy person in a big city, but were doing relatively well when compared to their neighbors.

Put those two results together, and you get a picture that aligns precisely with Hochschild’s observations. Trump’s strongest support comes from people who live in poorer parts of the country, like KY-5, but are still able to live a relatively comfortable life there.

So what does this mean for how we understand the Trump-era right? It cuts through the seemingly interminable debate about Trump’s appeal to “left behind” voters and helps us understand the actual complexity of the right’s appeals to region and class in the United States. America’s divisions are rooted in less income inequality per se than is widely appreciated, and often tied to divisions inside of communities and social groups.

In Stolen Pride, Hochschild locates the heart of Trump’s appeal to rural voters in emotions of pride and shame — including pride in their region’s traditions and shame in what it’s become in an era of declining coal jobs and rising drug addiction.

For Roger Ford, a KY-5 entrepreneur and Republican activist who serves as Hochschild’s exemplar of Trump’s “locally rich” base, Trump helps resolve those emotions by offering someone to blame. Ford may not be suffering personally, but his region is — and Trump’s rage at liberal coastal elites helps him locate a villain outside of his own community.

“He based his deepest sense of pride, it seemed, on his role of defender of his imperiled rural homeland from which so much had been lost — or, as it could feel, ‘stolen,’” she writes.

Ford’s comments to Hochschild shift seamlessly between economic and cultural grievances. In discussing his opposition to transgender rights, he situates it as the latest in a long line of dislocations that people in his region faced.

“With all we’re coping with here, we’re having a hard enough time,” he tells Hochschild. “Then you make it fashionable to choose your gender? Where are we going?”

This comment might make it seem as if economic concerns are somehow prior to cultural ones, and people like Ford are angry at transgender people because of economic deprivation in coal country. But high-quality research tells a different, more complicated story.

In 2022, scholars Kristin Lunz Trujillo and Zack Crowley examined the political consequences of what they call “rural consciousness” for politics. They divide this consciousness into three component parts: “a feeling that ruralites are underrepresented in decision-making (‘Representation’) and that their way of life is disrespected (‘Way of Life’) — both symbolic concerns — and a more materialistic concern that rural areas receive less resources (‘Resources’).”

When they tried to use these different “subdimensions” of rural consciousness to predict Trump support among rural voters, they found something interesting. People who saw the plight of ruralities in cultural and political terms were most likely to support Trump, while those primarily concerned about rural poverty were, if anything, less likely to support him than their neighbors.

Taken together, these findings suggest that the story isn’t simply that economic deprivation breeds cultural resentment. Trump’s strongest supporters in rural areas tend to be angry that their regions don’t set the social terms of American life: that they don’t control the halls of power and that, as a consequence, both political and cultural life is moving away from what they’re comfortable with. Economic decline surely exacerbates this sense of alienation, but it isn’t at the heart of it.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/369797/trump-support-class-local-rich-arlie-hochschild

Crypto is betting it all on the 2024 elections

Posted on by ajk1311@gmail.com

“Crypto has spent a record $119 million in the 2024 federal elections, magnitudes more than it has ever spent before. This huge number means that crypto accounts for almost half of all corporate political contributions in this cycle. Its spending since 2010, totaling $129 million, puts the industry second only to fossil fuels, according to a report from the progressive consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.

“It’s already 15 percent of all known corporate contributions since the Citizens United ruling,” says Rick Claypool, a research director at Public Citizen who authored the report on crypto election spending, referring to the landmark 2010 Supreme Court decision that opened the floodgates for virtually unlimited corporate spending in elections through outside groups.

Crypto’s ballooning political war chest and voracious appetite to dangle money in front of lawmakers speaks to the power it has amassed over the past decade and a half, even as it has struggled to gain any real traction with the public.

Three-quarters of Americans who’ve heard of crypto aren’t confident in its safety and reliability, a 2023 Pew Research survey found, and only 7 percent of Americans used crypto last year, according to the Federal Reserve. Crypto’s reputation suffered in particular from the controversy surrounding crypto companies in the last few years, especially the catastrophic meltdown of FTX. Though the first cryptocurrency was launched in 2009, it still hasn’t penetrated as a mainstream payment method, with very few retailers allowing customers to pay directly with cryptocurrency. It remains mostly a vehicle for speculative investment.

Despite that — or because of it — crypto companies have redoubled their efforts to help elect pro-crypto politicians and lobby for policies that would boost the sector’s growth. The industry wants the influx of money it’s spending to send the clear message that the crypto craze isn’t over — and in fact, isn’t a craze at all, but the lasting future of finance. “Crypto is here to stay,” Paul Grewal, Coinbase’s chief legal officer, recently wrote in public comments regarding regulation.

The sector’s most strident champions want you to believe that it’s a key issue for voters in the upcoming election, right next to inflation and health care. The industry is shouting from the rooftops that politicians can’t ignore crypto — and trying its hardest to make sure we won’t be able to either.”

…

“After a rough few years of being walloped by scandals and government crackdowns, crypto is facing an existential crisis. There are already some patchwork regulations governing the world of digital currencies, but one key issue remains hotly debated: Which government agency should oversee them?

In the US, securities like stocks and bonds have to be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which comes with a host of disclosure requirements and other rules to protect investors.

As far as the SEC is concerned, the law already puts most cryptocurrencies squarely under its purview, and the agency has been aggressively pursuing enforcement against crypto exchanges like Coinbase and Binance, alleging that they’re running unregistered securities exchanges. But the crypto industry doesn’t want to be regulated by the SEC — it wants to fall under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) instead.

“The CFTC is a much smaller agency with far fewer resources,” says Molly White, a crypto researcher and critic who has been tracking the industry’s political spending.”

…

“One major change this election cycle is how much more visible and vocal the Trump-supporting faction of crypto proponents has become. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who founded the crypto exchange Gemini, tried to donate roughly $1 million worth of bitcoin each directly to the Trump campaign, apparently unaware it would exceed the FEC contribution limit. Venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have both affirmed that they’re joining Team Trump too. Other backers include Jesse Powell, co-founder of the crypto exchange Kraken, and Charles Hoskinson, co-founder of the ethereum blockchain.

It’s worth noting that when Bankman-Fried was still the biggest face of crypto, he was known as a Democratic megadonor. We only found out later that he’d contributed roughly the same amount to Republicans through dark money groups.

Trump, for his part, was a harsh crypto critic in the past, but has recently done a 180, saying he would end Biden’s “war on crypto,” and that he would fire Gensler, the SEC chair. He even recently announced a family crypto project, run by the Trump Organization, called The DeFiant Ones — a play on “decentralized finance” — that would, according to Trump, help Americans who have been “squeezed by the big banks and financial elites.”

But crypto’s partisan inclinations are more complicated than simply supporting Republicans.

The industry’s spending is funneled mostly through the pro-crypto super PAC Fairshake, which has already spent $93.8 million this election cycle and is the second best-funded super PAC in the election, after Trump-backing Make America Great Again Inc. Fairshake’s backers include Coinbase, which has contributed a total of $50 million to the 2024 elections so far, and Ripple, a blockchain payment network that spent $49 million. (Both Coinbase and Ripple have faced SEC lawsuits.) Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has also contributed $47 million to Fairshake.

Fairshake largely focuses on House and Senate races, and has been largely nonpartisan, supporting and opposing politicians of both parties based on their crypto stance.”

https://www.vox.com/money/371597/crypto-politics-spending-2024-elections-trump

The astonishing link between bats and the deaths of human babies

Posted on by ajk1311@gmail.com

“By compiling and analyzing a huge amount of government data, environmental economist Eyal Frank, the study’s sole author, discovered that in regions with outbreaks of white nose syndrome, a wildlife disease that kills bats, the rate of infant mortality increased by nearly 8 percent relative to areas without the disease.
There’s a clear reason for this, according to the paper. Most North American bats eat insects, including pests like moths that damage crops. Without bats flying about, farmers spray more insecticides on their fields, the study shows, and exposure to insecticides is known to harm the health of newborns.”

https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/370002/bats-link-babies-death-study-white-nose-syndrome

Is this algorithm driving your rent higher?

Posted on by ajk1311@gmail.com

“a software company called RealPage is being sued by the Department of Justice for using an algorithm that suggests rent prices to corporate landlords. The DOJ argues that its algorithm has driven rents higher, and constitutes an illegal information sharing scheme. That is, competitors (the landlords) who would otherwise be acting independently, have exchanged “nonpublic, competitively sensitive data” to the detriment of renters who don’t have access to such knowledge.”

https://www.vox.com/money/370351/realpage-doj-lawsuit-rent-algorithm-pricing

Can we grow the economy without making more useless junk?

Posted on by ajk1311@gmail.com

“I like to think of the circular economy as a jacked-up “reduce, reuse, recycle” system. The hope is to keep materials in use for as long as possible with minimal waste, and to do so on a much wider scale.
Right now, there are two main reasons why a lot of what we recycle doesn’t ever actually get made into new things: It’s either prohibitively expensive to do, or we just don’t know how to recycle that material yet (like most plastics). A circular economy also would aim to prevent waste from happening in the first place by designing products made to be recycled.”

…

“The most obvious approach to see — but the most difficult for governments to implement — is to pass regulations that ensure compliance for labor and the environment. Every company that produces would have to adhere to some kind of law that outlines how the waste and the extraction of new materials should be handled. Governments would also have to invest in infrastructure to make it possible to meet those tougher rules, whether that’s scaling up recycling facilities or providing subsidies for innovators to solve a complex recycling problem.

One public policy idea that’s gaining traction is extended producer responsibility (EPR), which shifts the end-of-life management of products away from consumers and governments back to the corporations that sell those products.

Right now, you and I likely pay taxes to our municipal and state governments to handle trash and recycling. EPR laws would require companies to front money for the products they sell into a responsible entity — like a nonprofit organization or government agency — that helps pay for recycling infrastructure, collection, sorting, processing, and sale of recovered materials. (EPR can also look like voluntary take-back programs, where consumers can return their used stuff to the company to recycle into other things.)”

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/370626/consumerism-circular-economy-single-use-recycling-landfill-garbage