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For the first time in 50 years, Republican legislators are free to effectively minimize the power of racial minorities.

Republicans are gerrymandering themselves into entrenched minority power, unless we stop them now

For the first time in 50 years, Republican legislators are free to effectively minimize the power of racial minorities. What’s really different about this redistricting cycle is that Republicans have become much more proficient at figuring out exactly how to design gerrymandered districts to minimize Democratic voters and maximize Republican voters.

For the first time in 50 years, Republican legislators are free to effectively minimize the power of racial minorities. Now bear in mind, in 2019 the Supreme Court made it very clear that if there is racially motivated gerrymandering, that is illegal under the Constitution under the 14th Amendment. But that left open partisan gerrymandering. And the fact of the matter is that most people of color are Democratic voters.

It doesn’t matter whether you actually show or prove racial intent; that’s what the Republicans are doing.

If there was ever a demonstration of the power of gerrymandering to actually suppress the votes of people of color, you don’t have to look beyond Texas. In Texas, you’ve got about 40% of the electorate that’s white and about 40% of the electorate that’s Hispanic. But if you look at actually the congressional districts, fewer than one-fifth are majority Hispanic because of gerrymandering. Hello?

What we have here is a system — we might call it entrenchment. If you look at Wisconsin or North Carolina or Georgia or any of these key swing states, these states are all becoming more and more Democratic, capital “D.” But Republicans are radically gerrymandering so they can stay in power. As they gain more and more power and grab it from majorities, disproportionately people who are Black or Hispanic, they’re able to, not only take over a legislature, they can take over the electoral machinery.

And in the next election, they can simply declare that the will of the majority is not going to be observed, or that most of the votes are not going to be counted, or some other way of rigging —and this is rigging — an election that further entrenches their status.

Look, we have to have national minimum voting standards, but in order to be passed, they need to be passed by 60 votes in the Senate because of the Senate filibuster, which means that the only way they’re going to get passed is if the filibuster has a carve out.

I mean the choice ahead is very very clear: it’s either the filibuster or it’s our democracy. It comes down to that.

Robert Reich

Crossposted with permission from Robert Reich’s Blog.

The post Why Gerrymandering Could Get Way Worse appeared first on LA Progressive.

The partisan pandemic, explained in 15 charts.

President Donald Trump presided over the fastest vaccine development process in history, leading to abundant, free vaccines in the US by the spring of 2021. Although the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines haven’t been able to stop transmission of the virus, they have been highly effective against hospitalization and death, saving hundreds of thousands of lives and rendering the majority of new Covid-19 deaths preventable.

Trump has received three doses of the vaccine. But many of his most dedicated supporters have refused, and many have died as a result. Why? Obvious culprits include misinformation on social media and Fox News and the election of Joe Biden, which placed a Democrat at the top of the US government throughout the vaccine distribution period. But if you look closely at the data, you’ll see that vaccine-hesitant conservatives largely made up their mind well before the vaccines were available and before Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

To understand why, I took a deep dive into the data, interviewed researchers, and spoke to people who lost loved ones to preventable severe Covid-19 infections. What I found is a stark cautionary tale for the country and for Republican political elites. Partisan polarization takes on a life of its own; once set into motion it’s nearly impossible to stop, even when the fallout is immense and irreparable.

Accepting donations in memory of Philly Baird and Phil Valentine.

Transcript

The transcript of this interview will be made available as soon as possible.

The midterm elections are more than eight months away, but with Democratic defeat all but inevitable, the finger-pointing has already begun. That, at least, is one explanation for Axios’s Mike Allen’s latest bite-size piece of what passes for analysis inside much of the Beltway. Titled “Squad politics backfire,” it is best understood as a preemptive strike on the Democratic Party’s left flank from its establishment: If the midterms are a bloodbath, it’s the progressives’ fault, not ours!

According to Allen, Democrats are on the brink of defeat due to “the hard-left politics of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and the so-called ‘Squad,’” which are now “backfiring big-time.” What hard-left politics? “The push to defund the police, rename schools and tear down statues has created a significant obstacle to Democrats keeping control of the House, the Senate and the party’s overall image,” Allen continues.

This is, to be fair to Allen, the consensus among a large swath of the commentariat: Democrats have lost control of their messaging, which has been taken over by radicals and junior staffers, who have promptly driven the party off a cliff. It is a neat and convenient explanation, and one that Democrats have been returning to for decades: Whenever their electoral prospects dip, it must be the fault of the party’s left flank. What’s the solution? Look no further than the electoral success of Bill Clinton—or, for that matter, Joe Biden—and the answer is clear: The party’s only hope of success is by tacking rightward.

There are several problems with this analysis. For one, the members of “the Squad,” for all of the media attention they receive, are still backbenchers with little sway over the party’s legislative agenda: They are but six of the 222 Democratic members of the House. They’re also far more focused on creating equitable economic policy than on any of the things mentioned by Allen. Nor, it’s worth underlining, are they the engines of those policies. “Defund the police” emerged from activists and has hardly been embraced by the Democratic Party. Renaming schools and tearing down statues emerged in similar fashion—both were seen as the bare minimum during the unrest over police brutality that defined the summer of 2020, something Allen does not mention—though both have more support within the party’s mainstream.

Instead, Allen is making a common mistake: He’s taking one recent election and making wild extrapolations from it. In this case, a recent San Francisco School Board recall election is a stand-in for the politics of the nation. “The latest sign of the backlash was the landslide (70%+) recall this week of three San Francisco school board members, who were criticized for prioritizing issues like the renaming of 44 public schools—including ones honoring George Washington and Abraham Lincoln—over a return to in-person classes,” Allen notes. “The most liberal city in the most liberal state decided that liberal activists had gone too far.”

There are signs that San Francisco’s school board did go too far. Attempts to rename the city’s schools were badly managed. The crowd-sourced process ensnared Senator Dianne Feinstein and Lincoln, for instance, while abrupt changes to the admission process of the school district’s honors high school angered parents. “Reform was always going to be contentious and messy but needed to be public and transparent,” Mother Jones’s Clara Jeffery wrote in a lucid piece. “Instead the board rammed through a change without allowing for public input, apparently violating state sunshine provisions and triggering more lawsuits.”

Virginia’s gubernatorial election, another of Allen’s data points, is yet another case study: There, the party was punished for its “failure to appreciate parents’ skepticism about public schools’ mask mandates, policies on transgender rights and approach to teaching about race.” Allen cites an opinion piece and a report from Loudon County, the epicenter of the state’s anti–critical race theory movement, but not any data backing this up. That the critical race theory panic is largely invented gets nary a mention.

None of that is great for San Francisco’s School Board. It certainly wasn’t good for Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s defeated Democratic nominee for governor. But it doesn’t really have anything to do with the national Democratic Party, which isn’t advocating for any of the stuff Allen says it is, or for the Squad, which is also primarily engaged in other arenas. Instead, it more accurately reflects a political problem for the Democratic Party, one that Allen’s myopic piece neatly illustrates.

Republicans have been remarkably successful in recent years at using the activist left to tar the Democratic Party by suggesting that it stands for, among other things, open borders, defunding the police, and teaching students that white people are inherently evil. They have been successful doing this in part because of reporters like Allen, who treat the fact that these smears are successful as proof that they’re true—or at least that the fact that they’re successful makes it not matter if they’re true or not. The same, it should be said, rarely happens with Republicans, who are not being forced to answer for the book bans that are happening across the country. A case could be made that Republicans are getting more of a pass for the attempt to overturn the 2020 election—something many of the party’s sitting members of Congress refuse to publicly condemn—than Democrats are for policies like “defund” that they don’t even support.

Narratives are politics, and the narrative that Democrats support issues like “defund” may very well play a role in November’s impending bloodbath. But other issues unmentioned by Allen will, as well. The party promised to pass a transformative set of economic policies and has thus far failed to do so. The failure to extend the child tax credit is already causing an increase in poverty. These failures, however, stem from the party’s leadership and from its moderate center. No wonder they rarely get mentioned as the cause of the party’s electoral woes.

An economic analysis finds that the actual cost of car ownership is vastly underestimated

A woman shops in the chicken and meat section at a grocery store on April 28, 2020, in Washington, D.C.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., on Tuesday accused corporate executives of using inflation as a cover to jack up the cost of meat, vegetables and cleaning products and rake in record profits.

“Giant corporations are making record profits by increasing prices, and CEOs are saying the quiet part out loud: they’re happy to help drive inflation,” Warren tweeted on Monday.

“American families pay higher prices and corporate executives get fatter bonuses,” the Democrat added.

Giant corporations are making record profits by increasing prices, and CEOs are saying the quiet part out loud: they’re happy to help drive inflation.

American families pay higher prices and corporate executives get fatter bonuses. See for yourself what executives are saying:

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) February 15, 2022

Last year, the consumer price index saw a 7% increase, the largest 12-month gain since 1982. Inflationary pressures have had a particular impact on the prices of meat, poultry, fish and eggs, which increased by 12.5% in 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This is clearly hitting ordinary consumers hard, and is disproportionately impacting poor and low-income people. But executives of major grocery chains, meat producers and household products manufacturers openly crowing about the phenomenon, largely because it has created higher profit margins.

On an earnings call with analysts Thursday, Rodney McMullen, CEO of the supermarket retail company Kroger, said the company “operates the best when inflation is about 3% to 4%,” adding that “a little bit of inflation is always good in our business,” according to CNN.

The CEO also noted that the increasing cost of goods, fundamentally driven by soaring demand and a supply chain backlog, can be passed off to consumers because they “don’t overly react to that.”

“Businesses like ours have done well when in periods where the inflation was 3% to 4%,” Albertsons CEO Vivek Sankaran echoed during an investor conference Tuesday.

Last week, the CEO of Tyson, the nation’s second largest processor of chicken, beef and pork products, attributed price increases to rising manufacturing costs and materials shortages, saying in an earnings call: “We’re not asking customers or the consumer ultimately to pay for our inefficiencies. We’re asking them to pay for inflation.”

During the final quarter of 2021, Tyson’s average price of beef rose by roughly 31%. The company’s share price shot up by 11% on Monday after it reported profits that doubled in the first quarter of 2022, according to Reuters.

Consumers also face similar difficulties in the household products market.

Last month, Procter & Gamble — which manufactures or distributes a wide range of cleaning and hygiene items as well as food, snacks and beverages — said on Wednesday that the company expects profits to increase into 2022, even as the cost of labor, freight and raw materials continues to rise, according The Wall Street Journal.

“The consumer is very resilient and very focused on these categories of clean home and health and hygiene,” P&G finance chief Andre Schulten told the Journal.

On CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” P&G CEO Jon Moeller called pricing “a positive contributor to our top line for 17 out of the last 18 years.”

“When you have a business model that’s founded on innovation that provides higher levels of delight, solves problems better upon the consumers, you are able to charge a little bit more,” he added.

Last quarter, P&G outperformed Wall Street’s expectations, leading to a 3.8% jump in share price. The company has also projected a strong financial outlook for 2022.

Lindsay Owens, executive director at Groundwork, a progressive economic think tank, wrote on Twitter last week that “if you want to understand the role of corporate greed in price hikes & inflation in America today, you don’t have to take the word of watchdogs or critics of corporations,”

“CEO’s are admitting it themselves in plain daylight,” she said. “And they’re betting they can get away with it.”

This apparent profiteering is finally receiving scrutiny from the Biden administration. In a blog post from December, the White House said that meat processors’ profits were too high to justify their claim that price increases are the result of supply chain issues, noting that gross profit margins are up 50%.

“If rising input costs were driving rising meat prices, those profit margins would be roughly flat, because higher prices would be offset by the higher costs,” the National Economic Council wrote. “Instead, we’re seeing the dominant meat processors use their market power to extract bigger and bigger profit margins for themselves.”

In September, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a plan to crack down on “pandemic profiteering” by enforcing antitrust laws, improving transparency in labeling, creating a fund of $1.4 billion to help independent meat processing companies and related businesses get through the pandemic, and continuing a joint investigation with the Justice Department into the chicken processing industry.

Just this month, beef giant JBS was forced to pay $52.5 million to settle a price-fixing lawsuit, according to CBS News. The plaintiffs’ attorney, Dan Gustafson, said the settlement could be an “icebreaker” that might prompt similar cases against other big meat producers, including Tyson, Cargill and National Beef.

“Neither Congress nor the courts nor the White House can afford to slumber while the threat of authoritarianism grows and festers in the open,” a new letter states.

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For the first time in 50 years, Republican legislators are free to effectively minimize the power of racial minorities.

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