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WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME
HOW THE IRAQ WAR GAVE US TRUMP
If you want to know where President Donald Trump came from, if you want to trace the long winding road (or escalator) that brought him to the Oval Office, don’t look to reality TV or Twitter or even the rise of the alt-right. Look someplace far more improbable: Iraq… Donald Trump is a president made by war. His elevation to the highest office in the land is inconceivable without that invasion, which began in glory and ended (if ended it ever did) in infamy. He’s the president of a land remade by war in ways its people have yet to absorb… In the end, a victory-less permanent war across the Greater Middle East did indeed come home… All of this reached its crescendo (at least thus far) in Donald Trump. Think of the Trump phenomenon, in its own strange way, as the culmination of the invasion of 2003 brought home bigly… All this was, in turn, fused at the hip to the many irrational fears that had been gathering like storm clouds for so many years, and that Trump (and his alt-right companions) swept into the already looted heartland of the country. More
'Moving Beyond Resistance': Bernie Sanders to Headline Progressive People's Summit
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will headline a major progressive conference this summer that aims to galvanize the resistance to President Donald Trump into a larger movement for a just world. The People's Summit will be held in Chicago from June 9-11 at McCormick Place, and is expected to feature a line-up of numerous progressive icons, including author and activist Naomi Klein; lawmakers Kshama Sawant of Seattle, Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, and former Ohio State Sen. Nina Turner; journalists Shaun King and Sarah Jaffe; Honor the Earth cofounder Tara Houska; and activist and CNN commentator Van Jones, among dozens of other organizers and artists. Sanders will deliver the keynote speech for the conference, which is organized under the theme of "moving beyond the resistance." More
Trump Signs Executive Order Obliterating Regulations on Carbon Emissions and Pollution
Today President Trump signed an executive order rolling back scores of Obama-era regulations aimed at mitigating anthropogenic climate disruption. The executive order constitutes an assault on the environment that will annihilate Obama's environmental record and completely redraw key rules that were set in place to curb US carbon emissions. Speaking on a stage at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters, surrounded by coal miners at the signing of the order, Trump said, "I am taking historic steps to lift restrictions on American energy, to reverse government intrusion and to cancel job-killing regulations." Trump has misleadingly described the document as an "energy independence" order, despite the fact that it was crafted directly on behalf of the oil, gas and coal industries and does little, if anything, to make the United States less dependent on fuel imports. More
The entire coal industry employs fewer people than Arby’s
Experts in the industry have already pointed out, repeatedly, that the coal jobs are extremely unlikely to come back. The plight of the coal industry is more a function of changing energy markets and increased demand for natural gas than anything else… Another largely overlooked point about coal jobs is that there just aren't that many of them relative to other industries. There are various estimates of coal-sector employment, but according to the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns program, which allows for detailed comparisons with many other industries, the coal industry employed 76,572 people in 2014, the latest year for which data is available. That number includes not just miners but also office workers, sales staff and all of the other individuals who work at coal-mining companies. Although 76,000 might seem like a large number, consider that similar numbers of people are employed by, say, the bowling (69,088) and skiing (75,036) industries. Other dwindling industries, such as travel agencies (99,888 people), employ considerably more. Used-car dealerships provide 138,000 jobs. Theme parks provide nearly 144,000. Carwash employment tops 150,000. More
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