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How the hell did Republican Louie Gohmert of Texas ever become a member of the House of Representatives? Did he collect the most Froot Loops box tops in his district? Did our reptilian alien overlords take a sudden liking to him halfway through eating his brain? Did he run against a seagull crapping in a bag of Ruffles? 

I really want to know, because something here just isn’t right. God forbid he ever need a brain transplant, because krill don’t live very long outside of water. I’d suggest he get a vasectomy to protect us from the creeping contagion of his corn nuts, but his doctor would almost certainly give him one of those acrylic head cones to keep him from licking his stitches, and you simply can’t brook such lurid spectacles on the House floor.

So instead you get this:

GOHMERT: “We can’t produce synthetic fibers, so much of the carpets and rugs we have—synthetic. The toothbrush, you wouldn’t have the modern-day toothbrush, and I realize that, yes, there are people that have used bark off certain trees to brush their teeth. I get that, but I kind of like having a modern-day toothbrush myself. You wouldn’t have that without fossil fuel, particularly natural gas.”

Okay, then. I have questions.

1. Who the fuck is brushing their teeth with bark?
2. Assuming this is actually happening somewhere in the real world, doesn’t that argue for the family-friendly social safety net provisions in President Biden’s Build Back Better plan? Hey, Biden might even want to lead with that during his next speech in support of the BBB. “Americans brushing their teeth with trees? Outrageous! Pass this bill!”

Oh, but Mr. Science wasn’t done. Oh, no. Not by a long shot:

GOHMERT: “The Trump years, we have been producing 1.3% less carbon dioxide. And we can debate about what that does to the environment, whether it makes the temperature warmer. I’ve read where experts have said if you’ve got a choice between the temperature getting slightly warmer or slightly colder, you want warmer because if it’s getting slightly colder that means there’s less time for crops to grow. If it’s slightly warmer, not too much warmer, then you got more time for crops to grow, you’ve got more food, and you have fewer people starving.”

He’s read that, huh? Where? The highly respected New England Journal of Things Pulled From Louie Gohmert’s Ass at 3 AM on a Tuesday in the Waco ER? 

If you want to convince someone to support measures to combat climate change—well, yes, you can tell them about melting icecaps and emaciated polar bears and whatnot, but perhaps the best argument in favor of urgent action is that Louie Gohmert is against it.

Clearly, Republicans are not sending their best people, now are they?

It made comedian Sarah Silverman say, “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT,” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

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by Juliana Clark

This story was originally published at Prism.

From an early age, Joel Velasquez knew that Texas A&M University was his dream school, drawn by the university’s sizable student population, traditions, and leadership opportunities. Being a prospective first-generation college student reliant on financial aid programs, he heavily considered in-state public universities for the reduced tuition costs which “just seemed more realistic,” he said. But when Velasquez learned his parents wouldn’t be able to provide any financial support, he turned down his acceptance to Texas A&M University and enrolled in Trinity Valley Community College because doing so would mean taking on a lower level of debt.

Velasquez’s situation is far from unique. For Black, Indigenous, and other students of color, community colleges are a common choice to continue their education and obtain a degree to increase their chances of building a stable career while carrying less tuition debt. In fact, community colleges serve a disproportionately larger number of students who identify as part of a racial and/or ethnic minority than four-year institutions according to the Community College Research Center (CCRC) at Columbia University’s Teachers College. This also makes students like Velasquez more vulnerable to the impact of policies that reinforce or increase inequities in public education, including those that determine how community college districts are shaped.

The lack of information about how state policies affect the way community college districts are drawn is concerning, given the highly detrimental effects that geographic boundaries of school districts can have on students of color, including exacerbating disparities in resource allocation, which can restrict educators’ ability to effectively engage with their students. Diminished teacher engagement and a lack of resources can trigger cascading effects such as fewer students achieving bachelor’s degrees, lower engagement in the workforce, and reduced earning capacity. Furthermore, attending a diverse educational setting fosters a sense of safety among students of color, which can increase their ability to concentrate on and excel in their studies.  

However, more researchers are beginning to pay attention to community college districting policies. Dominique J. Baker, an assistant associate professor of education policy at Southern Methodist University, is part of a handful of scholars committed to holding this bracket of public education accountable. She spent months deciphering the political and legal processes governing the creation of community college service areas, including how districts intersect with racial segregation. Her preliminary findings were recently published by the Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis, using her home state of Texas as its case study to provide clearer direction on which aspects of these policymaking processes require further examination. While the study didn’t reveal any “smoking gun” pointing to direct manipulation of district boundaries along racial lines, it did indicate some areas of concern about how districts could be altered to the detriment of students who currently rely on the accessibility of their community colleges.

More critically, the uniqueness of Baker’s study points to a lack of widespread understanding that access to community college depends as much on human choices, biases, and errors as four-year institutions—the way those factors can raise or lower barriers to education just happen to look different. The assumption that community college districts and their access to state funding and resources exists in a permanent state puts the educational and professional futures of BIPOC, low income, and other students who depend on community colleges at the mercy of political whims. Without a better understanding of how community college districts can be redrawn, students, communities, and advocates are left ill-equipped to spot warning signs and fight to have a more influential say in determining the future of an oft-overlooked avenue that many depend on to build a more secure and prosperous life.

A pathway to success

BIPOC students are more likely to lack sufficient resources to attend four-year colleges, leaving two-year colleges looking like a more affordable path to post-secondary education. Students of color are also less likely to expect their families to financially contribute to their education, a metric used by education experts to indicate high financial need. Black and Latinx students as a whole are more likely than their white counterparts to pay for either all or some of their own college education.

These financial barriers create an education system where adults of color have a lower average rate of educational achievement than white adults. For example, in California, roughly 50% of K-12 students identify as Latinx, but approximately only 10% of Latinx adults obtain a baccalaureate. Increasing these rates of achievement by providing more avenues to obtain a college degree can help bolster BIPOC adults’ overall earning potential, which could be life-changing for many. The median annual earnings of full-time employees increase by approximately $7,000 from a high school degree to an associate’s degree and by nearly $19,000 from an associate’s to a bachelor’s.

While community college isn’t always a cost-effective solution to borrowing upward of six figures to satisfy private and public university tuition rates, they still play a key role in lowering barriers for low-income and other marginalized students. Additionally, community college programs are often a better fit for students’ needs and lifestyles than four-year institutions. Community college students tend to be much older than students at four-year colleges—the average age of community college students is 28. They’re more likely to be the head of their household, providing for dependents, and are often juggling multiple responsibilities and obligations along with their studies. This is the case for Velasquez, who works approximately 30 hours per week in addition to his class load and leadership responsibilities. As a result, community college students’ average timeline for obtaining a bachelors degree also tends to be much longer, more uncertain, and involve unpredictable costs.

The reality is that students who attend community colleges tend to have different needs and priorities than their counterparts at four-year institutions. And their ability to obtain a degree that would increase their chances to land a stable career depends heavily on how their college is able to access the resources of its district. This is why it’s vital to have a better understanding about how those districts are created and who benefits from those boundaries.

A case study for community college practices

State policies for creating community college districts vary widely across the nation. Moreover, while a large number of studies have analyzed patterns in how districts serving K-12 students are shaped, there’s been little research into the policies dictating district boundaries in post-secondary institutions—specifically, those that determine the location and creation of community colleges. Depending on an individual state’s policies, some community college districts could be more vulnerable than others to racial gerrymandering, in which district boundaries are manipulated to exclude certain racial groups.

Baker’s interest in community colleges and the effects of racial gerrymandering was piqued after reading an article by Inside Higher Ed columnist Matt Reed, vice president of academic affairs at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft, New Jersey, about a failed attempt by the Texas independent school district Barbers Hill to reduce the minimum population necessary in the state Education Code to establish a community college. If the bills had passed, the district’s sole community college would have been faced with a potential competitor and fewer available resources to provide for their students.

“My first thought, ‘This is wild! Wait, what actually goes into the creation of [community college] districts?’” Baker said in a Twitter post.

Baker chose Texas for the case study because as one of the most populous states with a racially diverse population, it offered a wealth of potential data. In August, the U.S. Census Bureau rated the Longhorn State with a diversity index of 67%, surpassing New York. With 82 community colleges statewide, over 700,000 students enroll in classes annually, 70% of whom are people of color. Additionally, Texas had the highest number of community college students among bachelor’s degree earners at 75% during the 2015-2016 school year.

While every state has a different legislature dictating the creation of junior college districts, Texas is an atypical example. Unlike other states, its criteria for creating districts is available to the public through its Education Code, which reveals the numerous political actors involved in the process including the Commissioner of Higher Education and School Board. This document also outlines the specific boundaries for each district according to the counties and independent school districts served.

Secondly, its districts have two geographic layers: the service area, in which two-year institutions are designated to offer an affordable education, and the taxing district, in which certain colleges offer discounted tuition. For example, Alvin Community College has a $50 difference between the cost of tuition for one credit hour depending on the student’s status as an in-district or out-of-district resident within the context of these two geographic layers. This reduced rate is especially vital for community college students who are consistently paying for their education and its related costs out of pocket. A study from 2020 found that reduced tuition prices at a local community college in Michigan led to an increase in its enrollment. Plus, academics also have found that overall, undergraduate students are more likely to attend institutions close to where they live. With the way these districts are structured, racial gerrymandering could be even more detrimental to low-income students looking to attend an in-district college.

Because service areas and taxing districts are tied to boundaries that can be subject to gerrymandering, Baker and her team positioned them in a framework similar to voter exchange, a practice in which legislators distort the shapes of districts to “exchange” voters living nearby for voters living much further away. The team measured the compactness of districts because the more compact or dense the district is, the higher the likelihood that gerrymandering was present in the drawing of its political boundaries. Their results presented conflicting evidence, which isn’t uncommon in evaluating district compactness. Ultimately, they found that three community college districts—Alvin, Hill, and Wharton—had fewer Black residents in their district versus in their local environment, which is the area surrounding each person in a district. The team didn’t have access to the actual locations of residents, so the researchers worked on the understanding that individuals lived in the middle of their census block group. The same was true for the Latinx population present in the Lone Star and Trinity Valley districts. Wharton County was the only district to exhibit evidence of gerrymandering by using both older and newer forms of measuring compactness.

Accessible education can’t be taken for granted

The issue with detecting racial gerrymandering as a whole is that there isn’t one definitive way of quantifying it. Not only are there multiple measurements of compactness, there isn’t a universally recognized threshold.

“Generally speaking, we don’t have a clear measure where we say, if the number is five, gerrymandered. If the number is 4.9, not gerrymandered,” Baker said.

The data did indicate enough of a possibility that some of the districts in Texas may exhibit racial gerrymandering to merit concern. Additionally, since 40% of districts in Texas provide reduced tuition for their student residents, how political boundaries are shaped likely has a strong role in affecting students’ school choice. Further studies may produce more detailed information about how racial gerrymandering would affect access to community colleges and how to prevent it.

While there wasn’t a clear pattern across districts, that wasn’t necessarily the point of this study for Baker. Her hope is that researchers, policymakers, and the public begin to understand that community college districts are created by people who are equally as vulnerable to being influenced by social and political actors as anyone else. Education scholars, the electorate, and state officials need to acknowledge this before they can begin focusing on ways that they can each make this system more equitable, which may involve district redrawing. At minimum, the students who rely on community colleges deserve to have their interests looked out for and protected proactively, rather than taking their current availability for granted.

“This is something we need to take seriously [and] pay attention to,” Baker said. “If we do not question and analyze how these boundaries are created, we risk allowing resources to be distributed in an inequitable manner.”

Juliana Clark (she/her) is a freelance journalist and audio producer. She is interested in promoting equity through her reporting and a progressive feminist perspective through her arts and entertainment criticism.

Prism is a BIPOC-led non-profit news outlet that centers the people, places, and issues currently underreported by national media. We’re committed to producing the kind of journalism that treats Black, Indigenous, and people of color, women, the LGBTQ+ community, and other invisibilized groups as the experts on our own lived experiences, our resilience, and our fights for justice. Sign up for our email list to get our stories in your inbox, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

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Around 2,000 health care workers at South Buffalo Mercy Hospital have been on strike since Oct. 1. Now, they have a tentative agreement and picket lines are suspended while the workers vote whether to ratify the contract. The continuing John Deere strike is a reminder that workers sometimes vote down agreements that their union leaders bring them, but the Communications Workers of America hailed the tentative deal as a win, and from the summary the union offered, it looks like one.

Not only did the workers beat back efforts to cut their health care benefits and get a significant raise over the course of the contract, but they won safe staffing ratios for the first time, with the new staffing levels to be fully implemented by January 1, 2023. That’s a significant advance for the workers and, of course, it’s also a win for patients who will be guaranteed care from workers who aren’t stretched across too many patients.

● FedEx is fiercely non-union. UPS workers are unionized. Guess which of the delivery companies is having labor shortage problems. Yep, the one that keeps its wages low and turnover high.

● Teachers strike against a “heartless” school board in President Biden’s hometown, Barbara Madeloni reports.

The union has been without a contract for four years. In the last two years, they have lost 100 colleagues, either because the positions were cut or because educators have left, fed up with the board’s disinvestment in the schools.

The cuts to librarians, related arts classes, and music especially impact the students who need them most, who are least likely to have access to these activities through their families. “We are a very diverse community,” said high school English teacher Adam McCormick. “There is a wide range of socioeconomic levels. The school district has to provide opportunities for students. And they haven’t. Opportunities for students are more and more limited.”

● The New Orleans city council has passed responsible contractor requirements, two years after the Hard Rock collapse that killed three workers.

● IATSE workers will vote on whether to ratify their proposed contract starting November 12, with results coming November 15.

● Hamilton Nolan writes, Mississippi believes it can be organized. Does anybody else? 

● Important:

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A string of antisemitic attacks has taken place over the last few days across Texas and in Austin. In the latest incident, several people in an Austin neighborhood received hateful letters at their homes. The letters received by Jewish residents in Hays County were sealed in a plastic bag filled with small rocks, Hays County Judge Ruben Becerra said Sunday, according to the Austin American-Statesman.  

The letters blamed Jewish community members for the novel coronavirus pandemic. “Every single aspect of the COVID agenda is Jewish,” the letters read. They also named Jewish scientists and pointed fingers at leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that are Jewish.

“Negative actions motivated in bias is an attack against an entire community and not just an attack on a single person,” Becerra wrote on Twitter. “This behavior is not acceptable.”

According to the Austin American-Statesman, Chabad of San Marcos, the only Jewish center in the county, offered guidance and support to members who were targeted.  

After receiving multiple calls from people who were upset regarding the incident, Rabbi Ari Weingarten said he is working with community leaders to “heal spirits” and remind them that “unity is key.” Since the eight nights of  Hanukkah begin Nov. 28, community menorah lighting events have been scheduled. “The message of Hanukkah is that light is stronger than dark and good prevails,” Weingarten said.

While the Hays County Sheriff’s Office said the letter distribution does not qualify as a criminal offense, it said it is aware propaganda is being anonymously distributed. The FBI, however, noted that is is prepared to investigate should the need arise.

“We are aware of the incidents and are in regular contact with local authorities,” the FBI said in a statement regarding the letters, according to the Hays Free Press. “If in the course of the local investigation, information comes to light of a federal violation, the FBI is prepared to investigate. “

According to the Anti-Defamation League in Austin, 17 antisemitic incidents have been reported in the past 10 days in Texas. This includes an incident in which Austin’s Congregation Beth Israel synagogue was set on fire Sunday night, While the damage was contained to the exterior of the building, fire officials said they are looking for a man seen carrying a five-gallon container then fleeing the scene in a car after starting the fire.

Additionally, in October about a dozen people displayed an antisemitic banner from the heavily trafficked North MoPac Boulevard overpass, and displayed similar posters in the East Sixth Street entertainment area, the Houston Chronicle reported. In the same week, an Austin school building was also vandalized with swastikas, homophobic slogans, and racist slurs.

Community leaders and others condemned the actions, including the Austin City Council and mayor.

“When we see acts of hate, they’re jarring. They’re hurtful, and they are scary. But they are not surprising,” Austin Mayor Steve Adler said, according to the Houston Chronicle. “Because there are people who do hateful and horrible, wrongful things.”

 “The danger is that hate spreads,” he cautioned.   

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Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has emerged as the favored candidate of multilevel marketing companies, and it’s not because of her statement handbags and dresses, as easy as it would be to imagine her recruiting a group of coworkers or friendquaintances to aggressively pitch said handbags and dresses over a few glasses of red wine. It’s because multilevel marketing companies, many of which come about as close as possible to being full-on pyramid schemes while remaining within the law, are worried about Democrats passing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act and see Sinema as a key ally in defeating it, Politico reports.

The PRO Act would, among other things, make it more difficult for companies to misclassify workers as independent contractors rather than employees. Independent contractors don’t have many protections and rights that employees have—little things like the minimum wage, overtime pay, Social Security contributions, and protections against discrimination. Multilevel marketing companies want to keep it that way because their entire business model is built around people working for them for very little—in some cases, even losing money.

Sinema is one of three Democratic senators who hasn’t signed on to the bill, with her fellow Arizona senator, Mark Kelly, who has said he wants changes to the independent contractor provisions, and Sen. Mark Warner, who has signaled support despite not having formally co-sponsored it. Even Sen. Joe Manchin is theoretically on board. 

Multilevel marketing companies are not traditionally big political givers, and especially not to Democrats. The DeVos family got its wealth through Amway, one of the early big names in the industry, and they are obviously huge Republicans. But the PAC for Alticor, Amway’s parent company, gave Sinema $2,500 in June. The bat signal definitely went out in June, because, Politico reports, three other multilevel marketers gave Sinema $2,500 apiece that month. She got other chunks of $2,500 from industry players in April and July. Aside from the DeVos family, several of these firms make few political contributions: two of the PACs that donated to Sinema haven’t given to any other federal lawmakers this year, and a third has otherwise only given to lawmakers in its home state of Utah.

In addition to her opposition to strengthening worker protections, Sinema has been a supporter of multilevel marketing, joining a virtual town hall put on by the Direct Selling Association and Isagenix in May 2020, and saying she would help them “succeed through these difficult circumstances.” The Direct Selling Association has described her as “One of the few Democratic Senators who supports direct selling.”

Come to think of it, if Sinema gets primaried out in the future, she could have a future as a real rock star MLM seller and recruiter.

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Tuesday and the handwringing that followed has undoubtedly been unpleasant. As Democrats on Wednesday tried to assess the magnitude of the post-election fallout, one astute observer chimed in with some good news.

“The 2022 election is not, in fact, being held yesterday,” wrote Twitter user Corrine McConnaughy, a Princeton political scientist. Many thanks to the Daily Kos reader who dropped that somewhere in my comments this week.

Let’s take a step back and try to parse what’s real (and what isn’t) as we move forward.

1. The headwinds of history are real

There’s just no escaping the fact that when one party controls the federal government, voters are going to take out any dissatisfactions they have on that party, deservedly or not. That dynamic was doubly true in Virginia, where Democrats also held a trifecta, controlling not just the executive, but the state House of Delegates and state Senate.

We can quibble about campaign messaging, and how much things came down to persuasion vs. base turnout, but the fact of the matter is that backlash reared its double-digit head in both Virginia and New Jersey. Joe Biden won Virginia by 10 points last year, while Democratic gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe lost it by roughly two points; Biden won New Jersey by 16 points, while Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy secured reelection by just two-and-a-half points—a net swing of roughly 12 and 14 points, respectively, against Democrats just one year later.

The data point more to political trends than to the specifics of each race, so Democrats can expect some of the same forces to be at work in next year’s midterms when, by historical standards, Republicans stand a good chance of picking up the House, and maybe the Senate.

On the bright side, nothing is inevitable and the Senate has historically proven somewhat less vulnerable to the wild swings often seen in the lower chamber.  

2. Things will change between now and next November

Assuming Republicans can recreate what happened in Virginia also assumes that time will come to a standstill and none of the atmospherics will change over the next year. It’s preposterous.

By next year, Democrats will hopefully have passed two meaningful bills that spur job growth, provide considerable support to families, and make historic investments in combating climate change. Indeed, the bipartisan infrastructure bill received final passage Friday evening, sending it to President Biden’s desk. Those legislative accomplishments alone will be a major difference.

The Supreme Court will have also weighed in on two crucial abortion cases that will almost surely deal a blow to the constitutional right of women to seek an abortion.

Biden’s approval rating, goddess willing, will likely be in a different and hopefully more positive place than the over seven points underwater where it is now. Biden has already delivered a lot to the American people, including record job growth, a soaring stock market, and a vaccine rollout that has largely made the pandemic a back-burner issue for a substantial majority of Americans.  

Nobody can say exactly what the political environment will be like at this time next year, but without a doubt, it will have changed.

3. Democrats need a positive education message and it’s ready-made if they pass the Build Back Better bill

It’s still unclear how decisive a factor critical race theory and the broader issue of education was in the Virginia election, but one thing is for certain—Republicans plan to run on it in 2022.

In fact, running on something that’s merely a stand-in for stoking racism and white identity isn’t new for the GOP, it’s a return to its roots. On Wednesday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy jumped at the chance to say House Republicans plan on unveiling a “parents bill of rights.”

Okay, fine. Here’s Democrats’ parental bill of rights: We believe every parent should be able to access quality, affordable education for their child; we believe every parent should have access to quality, affordable child care; we believe every parent should have the piece of mind to know they can care for their child if they fall sick without going into debt. That’s why we included universal pre-K, child tax credits, a cap on child care costs, and paid family leave in the Build Back Better bill.

Republicans’ new education focus is a decades-old tactic: They always return to making every issue one of division that pits white against Black and brown. It’s been their bread and butter since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Democrats need to find a way to make every issue that Republicans seek to distort about shared interests that include everyone. Democrats just happen to have already included the perfect rebuttal for the GOP’s new education ploy in the Build Back Better bill currently under consideration.

4. Glenn Youngkin was unique and will be uniquely difficult to recreate

I have written about this at some length, but just to reiterate, Youngkin—a self-funded private equity guy with no political baggage and no well-documented record of overt fealty to Trump—is going to be difficult for congressional Republicans to replicate.

Perhaps most importantly, virtually none of them will have the backbone to bar Trump from their district/state, as Youngkin did. Many of them will actually owe their primary wins specifically to Trump, who will do exactly as he pleases as the campaign plays out.

Finally, Youngkin, with his fleece vest and happy warrior persona, made himself accessible to suburban voters who turned away from Trump in 2018 and 2020. He walked a line that few—if any—Republicans in the Trump era have proven capable of walking. Most of Trump’s handpicked slate of radicals simply won’t have the temperament to pull it off, particularly in the Senate.

In short, Republicans will have a bunch of Larry Elders (the Trumpy GOP candidate in the failed California gubernatorial recall) trying to run like Youngkin. Notably, Gov. Gavin Newsom beat the GOP recall effort in California with a 24-point margin that was practically identical to the margins in his 2018 election. It’s not the size of the margin that matters so much as it is the fact that Newsom, just two months earlier, didn’t suffer any drag from the national environment that both McAuliffe and Murphy did.

Part of that was likely the motivating specter of an Elder administration along with Biden’s approvals being closer to 50% when early voting began in the Golden State, as David Lauter of The L.A. Times points out. Biden’s approvals currently sit at about 43%, which would be an historic low at this point in a presidency … except that Trump sat at 38% around this same time in 2017.

5. It’s not all about the base or all about persuasion, it’s both and now

High turnout is no longer synonymous with Democratic wins. Virginia saw record turnout, and Democrats still lost the governorship by roughly two points.

The New York Times‘ Reid Epstein writes:

In this week’s election, Mr. McAuliffe won 200,000 votes more than Northam did when he won the 2017 election in a blowout. He won nearly 600,000 more votes than he did in 2013 when he beat Kenneth Cuccinelli II to become governor. He beat his internal turnout targets in Northern Virginia, Richmond and the Norfolk area. Turnout was strong in Black precincts, college towns and the suburbs, all traditional areas of strength for Democratic candidates.

Despite McAuliffe’s turnout successes, Youngkin won about 550,000 more votes than his GOP predecessor, Ed Gillespie, did in 2017. Youngkin also improved on Trump’s numbers everywhere, including in rural, exurban, and suburban parts of the state.

Democrats can no longer rely on the notion that if they just turn out their base, they’ll succeed. They need to turn out the base along with winning over a healthy piece of the suburban bloc that helped boost them to victory in 2018, and elevated Biden to the White House in 2020.

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This week’s U.S. Supreme Court rocket docket hearing on Texas’s abortion ban demonstrated that the court might not be ready to turn citizens into vigilantes when it comes to enforcing their political wishes. That was an argument worthy of scaring Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who seemed to take to heart the amicus brief from the Firearms Policy Coalition, which argued that “it takes little in the way of creative copying for States hostile to the Second Amendment—New York, California, New Jersey, Hawaii, etc.—to declare that the ownership or sale of a handgun is illegal … and set up a bounty system with the same unbalanced procedures and penalties adopted by Texas in this case.”

Speaking of guns, the court also heard a challenge to New York state’s 108-year-old concealed handgun permit law, which requires that applicants show “proper cause” before getting an unrestricted license to carry. It’s looking like that law will go down, or at least be narrowed. Chief Justice John Roberts seemed to sum up much of the conservative majority’s view when he asked during oral arguments: “You don’t have to say, when you’re looking for a permit to speak on a street corner or whatever, that your speech is particularly important. So why do you have to show in this case, convince somebody, that you’re entitled to exercise your Second Amendment right?”

National polling continues to reflect support for sensible gun regulations, and abortion access and  – overwhelmingly rejects Texas-style bans. Large majorities, too. Yet we’ve got a Supreme Court majority on the far-right fringe of mainstream America. There’s increasing momentum to change that, though.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU)—one of North America’s largest labor unions—announced its support for expanding the court in comments to the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, urging that panel to restore the court’s legitimacy. Writing for the group, International President Mary Kay Henry represents the “union of approximately two million working women and men.” That’s two million workers who “stand in the unique position of being the targets of a long-running, coordinated, and well-funded effort to strip them of their organizing and other rights via federal-court litigation.” What’s more, Henry writes, “many SEIU members, as BIPOC citizens, are also targets of an additional campaign to strip them of their voting rights. That anti-voter campaign, like the anti-worker effort, has found success with this Supreme Court.”

“We firmly believe that this democracy rests on a razor’s edge and came, within the last 12 months, very close to falling apart,” Henry tells the commission, in large part because the “interests of poor and working people have been largely shut out from government and the law, feeding the rise of anti-democratic forces to which people throughout history have turned in desperation.” Henry pleads with the commission to “not forget where we have been in the last twelve months” and to “not get lost in all the academic talk and mundaneness of Zoom meeting rooms.”

Henry makes a powerful argument for substantive reform, for the commission to not do the thing most presidential commissions do: “Please be wary of meaningless gestures at reform and of resistance to change that is camouflaged as seemingly reasonable restraint, and please interrogate what may be even your own inherent biases against change.” Such gestures include a reform the commission seems to be considering, instituting term limits, which is nibbling around the edges of a 6-3 majority that is intent on rolling back decades of progress. Spending valuable time and political capital on such a limited effort, that could ultimately be rejected by that extremist majority anyway, puts that idea “in the category of apparent reforms that may achieve nothing.”

“We believe it is long past time to expand the size of the Court,” Henry writes on behalf of the SEIU. “You have an opportunity to lend your credibility to serious suggestions that can lead to real change. Please do not waste it.”

As of now, wasting this opportunity appears that’s what the commission is inclined to do, scheduled to finish its work with a final report on December 15. The commission should recognize within itself what Henry warns it against, that its members are “blessed by power, prestige, and expensive educations, […] very good at cloaking their arguments in what sound like high-minded principles.”

Meanwhile, the effort to build a coalition in Congress to do the job the commission doesn’t seem to want to take on continues and strengthens. There are now 40 House members cosponsoring the Judiciary Act of 2021 to expand the court.

This post was originally published on this site

There was a moment in the spring of 2021 when the steady growth of e-commerce actually reversed. For three months, Americans actually put down their laptops, mice, and smartphones and, like bears emerging from a very long hibernation, went out to enjoy the novelty of shopping for real things in real stores. Then the delta wave began, that mini-retail blip disappeared, and online sales resumed their relentless march toward gobbling up everything.

It probably comes as a shock to no one that in 2020 the United States set a record for retail closures, with 12,200 locations shutting their doors, according to commercial retail firm CoStar Group. But was that the effect of the pandemic, or was it something else? Because the record that 2020 broke was set in 2019, when 9,300 stores closed. That followed 2018, when 5,700 stores closed.

Some of the closures in 2020 might be more easily pegged to the pressures of the pandemic than others— clothing stores were more likely to turn out the lights than the grocery or drugstores deemed essential by authorities in many areas. Yet if you put 2020’s data on a chart next to that of previous years, it’s hard to even see the effect of the pandemic. 2020 was just another bad year for retail, in a a slide that’s been going on for decades.

In 1990 alone, 19 massive new shopping malls opened in America. It was the height of a retail build up that seemed unstoppable. More stores, more variety, more more. Decades later, when The New York Times reported on the state of American shopping malls, they noted that the empty corridors of what had been the glitziest, most upscale locations “looked as if a viral outbreak had removed all life from the place.” But that wasn’t the coronavirus at work, because The Times’ report came out in 2017.

Just like 2020 and 2019, 2017 was another record year for store closures. It’s not just malls that are emptying out, it’s shopping centers and shopping districts of all kinds. Of course, long before that came the gutting of America’s Main Streets, as big box stores—located carefully outside the tax boundaries of towns—sucked dry the “mom and pop store” dream.

A childhood haunting

Still, for a lot of people, seeing vast malls lying empty has its peculiar eeriness. When I first moved to St. Louis in 1981, there was a small shopping center—with just a handful of stores—at a place called Crestwood Plaza. Over the next decade, that location expanded into a huge mall with four “anchor stores,” including Sears and Famous-Barr. Thirty years later, I wandered through the empty shell of that mall, past closed theaters, empty fountains, and dusty bandstands. Two years ago, the whole place was demolished, as was another mall built in downtown St. Louis that once spanned three city blocks.

According to author Gillian Flynn, dead malls have a particular resonance with the people who once saw them as the centers of not just shopping, but socializing. “For kids of the ’80s especially, dead malls have a very strong allure,” wrote Flynn. “To see all those big looming spaces so empty now—it’s a childhood haunting.”

Well before the pandemic, I wrote about The Traveling Salesman Problem. By this, I don’t mean the classic mathematical puzzle, but the way trends in retail over the last half-century have eliminated whole swaths of jobs and businesses, all in the name of “productivity.” Much of America moved from a retail space once dominated by small stores and local outlets of a few national chains to big box stores and malls, to … dust. In the process, communities didn’t just lose those retail outlets, they lost all the jobs and infrastructure that supported that world.

My own father once owned three clothing stories—Rustic’s, which provided mostly women’s clothing; Rustic’s Also, for a younger crowd; and Factory Suits USA, which offered discounted menswear from Nashville factories. All of these were found on the same side of the street, in a town of with a population of just 3,000, and those three stores were just a few in an absolutely packed downtown. Those stores didn’t just employ clerks and salespeople on-site; they were supported by traveling salesmen, who stayed at the Dan Dee Inn and stopped for breakfast at the Corner Cafe—where my grandfather got up at 4 AM to start the coffee and fried biscuits.

Secondhand stores and payday loans

That era ended for my family in the 1980s, when Walmart and similar stores arrived, dropping their first hulking stores conveniently just outside the town’s borders, while huge malls sprouted in larger towns an hour down the road. A local store selling clothing, hardware, or most home goods became impossible to maintain in face of this competition. Those downtown stores gradually cycled through candy shops, theme diners, and specialty coffee spots, all in an effort to hold onto something that wasn’t available for cheaper inside a 200,000-square foot container, or in far more variety at a marble-clad shopping temple. Eventually, the small town stores edged toward their terminal condition—secondhand stores and payday loan offices. Which is itself a solid notch above the condition of many towns: completely empty.

But the era of Walmart and mega-malls was far shorter lived than the era that came before. Within a decade of that 1990 peak of 19 new malls, the building of new behemoths had completely stalled; a decade after that, malls were closing at a rate faster than they’d ever been built. That trend marched right on into the 2010s, riding not just a wave of mall failures but retail chains—Brooks Brothers, K-Mart, Sears, Borders, Pier 1, Toys ‘R’ Us—finding themselves on their way to becoming ex-retail chains. 

Ghost malls became a thing. So did a plague of empty big box stores. In many towns and small cities, a large percentage of the most accessible retail space—the space conveniently located along highways and near intersections—is now buried under empty malls and dead megastores, none of which have any real prospects of finding a new occupant. 

In rare occasions, some of these locations have been reclaimed as public spaces. In others, they’ve been converted into things like “antique malls,” the giant cousin of the secondhand store. But in most instances, they’re just drains on an area’s tax base, infrastructure, and property values.

All of this—the collapse of small towns, the rise and fall of shopping malls, the gradual whittling down of even the largest big box stores—all came before the pandemic. That 31% increase in retail closings in 2020 isn’t even close to the 63% increase that took place the year before.

Retail Apocalypse Redux

The Times’ 2017 article may be correct in pointing out that empty malls look like they’ve been hit by a virus, but the actual coronavirus had little to do with the retail apocalypse. The real cause has been, and is, the never-ending drive for increased profit margins that has driven the rise of e-commerce.

Going from 0% to 4% of sales between 2000 and 2010, e-commerce has made an almost maddingly persistent rise ever since. It was 7% of consumer sales in 2015, and 9% by 2017. It was 11% at the start of 2020. With the pandemic, it jumped abruptly to over 15%. Amid all this growth, there have also been a few months of decline in e-commerce as traditional retail—now measured in the form of those big box stores and surviving shopping centers—somewhat rebounded.

That rebound has generated a number of optimistic headlines this year. In addition to several months showing e-commerce decline, 2021 is actually expected to produce the lowest number of retail closings in the last five years.

But no one should expect that trend to continue. By the end of 2021, the marching line of ec-ommerce expansion is almost certain to once again begin growing its portion of consumer sales. And companies that held on through the pandemic are likely to find that the post-pandemic world is even less warm to in-person retail than during the already frosty pre-pandemic conditions. 

In the meantime, that same force is a big part of why the shelves at Target are bare, but the boxes from Amazon arrive full. 

Productivity is people

For decades, American businesses have pursued multiple versions of “lean” or “just-in-time” (JIT) business models. From lean manufacturing, to lean distribution, to lean retail, all of these are based on ideas gleaned from observing Japanese companies just before and after World War II.

These ideas took particular hold after the American auto industry found themselves losing huge portions of the market following the oil shock of the 1970s. All of this was against a backdrop that viewed Japan and its rapidly-growing economy in the way much of the U.S. sees China today: as a place with some kind of innate advantage in competing with American industry. In that atmosphere, business leaders resurrected observations about Japanese companies and turned them into holy writ that has since defined what “good business” means for at least two generations of American leaders.

In this ideology, ideas about keeping inventory on hand went out the window. So did ideas about the value of experienced workers who could handle their roles with flexibility. Instead, focus moved to management. It’s no coincidence that this is the era when salaries of CEOs and other top management began to explode, because the whole philosophy is one in which the plan with the fewest, cheapest workers is the best. For the last four decades, American companies have stayed true to that tune, treating every issue as something that can be addressed by better management, rather than by strengthening any other aspect of the system.

What companies tended to overlook is that Japan only went to this path because, at the time it deployed those rules in the 1930s, it was extraordinarily poor. Not only was Japan reeling from the worldwide Depression, it was also in the midst of a military buildup that saw it expending resources in all directions (it was also dominated by a political system that relied heavily on succeeding by assassinating the guy ahead of you in line … but that’s another story). 

Japan had no cash, no factories, and no natural resources. What it did have were millions of people who were, at the time, out of work, poorly educated, and viewed as disposable. Those were the conditions that drove the creation of the economic system that American companies would champion 50 years late—in a country that was wealthy, blessed with raw materials, and fortified by an experienced and well-trained work force. These U.S. companies brought in a system that was built on desperation, and discovered that it was uniquely powerful as a means of concentrating wealth into the hands of a few executives.

In the following decades, productivity—as expressed in terms of the profit generated from each worker—soared. And a system designed around impoverished workers with few opportunities created exactly that. Productivity is people. Or, more specifically, it’s the lack of people who have the authority and ability to create change.

Genuinely skeletal

Still, managers continued to be rewarded for squeezing human-shaped “inefficiencies” out of the system, And when brick and mortar stores were confronted with the challenge of e-commerce, there was only one solution they understood: They had to manage the holy shit out of this thing.

Under stress of trying to sustain an elaborate retail presence in the face of steady e-commerce gains, retailers have clawed for a winning formula, with terms like “destination retail” and “omnichannel marketing,” but all the marketing double-speak on the planet has refused to slow this steady decline. As a result, many retailers have gone way past “lean” or JIT and into the genuinely skeletal. In the effort to find a means of sustaining themselves, they’ve chopped a department here, outsourced a service there, and mercilessly cut, cut, cut back on people.  

One of the best examples of the effect might be that demonstrated, not by a retailer, but—perversely enough—by one of the companies on which e-commerce most heavily depends: FedEx.

As Bloomberg reports, rival shipping firm UPS maintains a cadre of relatively well-paid and highly experienced and unionized employees. UPS not only provides its drivers with solid pay and promotions, but provides benefits, including the kind of retirement package that most U.S. corporations long ago punted to the curb. 

In contrast, FedEx canned the majority of its “last mile” delivery service years ago, in favor of hiring independent contractors. Those contractors get fixed fees for deliveries, salaries, benefits, and pensions be damned.

But as the market for employees has been stressed during the pandemic, FedEx has repeatedly found itself facing staffing shortages and being forced to pay sharply higher prices for the deliveries it can get. Despite high demand and higher prices, FedEx has “leaned” itself into a situation where UPS outperformed it by almost $2 billion on nearly identical sales.

Fat and happy

For an on-the-ground example, see Costco. Throughout the pandemic, even as photographers snapped shots of the empty racks at other retailers, Costco has done a phenomenal job of keeping its stores operating not just as well as they did before the pandemic, but better. Same store sales are up 16% in the last year, and Costco managed this while at the same time increasing their own online sales by 44%. It’s done that, in part, by keeping employee turnover at a minimum, which comes from years of paying its employees well, offering them benefits, and respecting their health concerns during the pandemic. If “lean” companies are now finding themselves unable to keep the shelves stocked, Costco is fat and happy. 

But that experience is incredibly counterintuitive to what American businesses have done over the last four decades, and the lessons that every MBA in the country has been taught. In mimicking a system built in a period of extreme privation, companies traded well-paid employees invested in their work for disposable commodity workers and independent contractors, whose lack of knowledge wasn’t considered a detriment.

By treating workers as disposable, limiting opportunities, and constantly cutting away at benefits, companies created a system that maximized profit on the basis of productivity, even as it justified devoting an extraordinary amount of company pay to upper management. 

At the same time, these systems created companies that weren’t just fragile in terms of outsourcing manufacturing overseas or cutting back inventories to the minimum; they were “lean” in terms of knowledge. 

Over the course of four decades, all the wealth that used to be spread out among those traveling salesmen stopping for coffee, the people who both dealt with customers and did the books at small-town clothing stores, and workers found everywhere from assembly lines to accounting, moved into the pockets of CEOs. This redistribution of wealth happened not just because business was going through transitions that offered increased “productivity” through eliminating people, supported at every stage by improving technology, but because American managers were taught that this is the way it should be. 

Way Too Long, Definitely Did Not Read

The same business philosophy that encouraged American corporations to get “lean” is at least partly responsible for both the massive increase in income inequality, and the fragility resulting from corporations whose ranks have been gutted of business knowledge. As businesses transitioned from small store, to mall, to big box, to e-commerce, not only were workers eliminated, but worker knowledge was devalued in favor of “management skills.” Every problem became treated as something that could only be solved by management supermen making godlike decisions—and who, naturally, deserved godlike salaries.

But as physical retail has increasingly faced off with e-commerce, the management über alles approach has repeatedly failed. That failure is measurable in empty stores and empty shelves, though not in the empty pockets of CEOs, who continued to suck up Zeus-worthy salaries even as they were generating Hades-quality results. On the other hand, companies that have continued to pay workers well and treat them as part of the solution (i.e. UPS and Costco) have proven to be more flexible and durable in a crisis.

None of these realities were created by the pandemic. If the advantage that e-commerce holds over the “brick and mortar” world got another big underscore during the last two difficult years, so did the advantages of companies that are able to retain experienced workers.

Still, don’t expect most CEOs to read much into that second advantage. After all, Costco had revenues of almost $200B in the last year and the CEO isn’t even a billionaire. Clearly they’re doing it wrong.

This is one of a series of articles in Bodegaland: A vision of America in 2030. The intention is to not just examine trends in business, culture, education, and society, but to examine how the pandemic accelerated or altered those trends.