GOP's Inability To Govern Is A Double-Edged Sword

We all knew that the combination of a Republican-controlled Congress and a Trump presidency would be awful and, for some, probably deadly. But I don't think any of us had any idea that the GOP would simply drop all pretense of caring about anything other than themselves, the top 1%, and their corporate donors. They just don't give a damn about the rest of us anymore and they're not afraid to say it and show it.

Perhaps it is the Trump effect where a presidential candidate could just brazenly lie almost every day throughout the campaign and still get elected. Perhaps it is the recognition that total control of Congress and the White House gives them the hubris to say and do what they want. Or perhaps it is the recognition that extreme partisan gerrymandering will get them re-elected even if they, as Trump claimed, shot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue.

The multiple and continual attempts at repealing Obamacare actually got worse as each new proposal rolled out, with the final Graham-Cassidy bill effectively denying 30 million Americans health care. All of the proposals had the one feature of gutting Medicaid, which is primarily designed to serve the least among us, low-income people, those with disabilities, the elderly, children, and pregnant women. All of this effort was solely to be able to pass an even more massive tax cut for the top 1% and the Republicans' business cronies.

The lies about health care were also continual - more people would be covered, pre-existing conditions would still be covered, states would fill the Medicaid gap despite having billions less money. And the lies continue with this latest tax cut proposal - it's a middle class tax cut, the rich will pay more in taxes, the tax cuts will pay for themselves and more, repealing the estate tax helps family farmers. And that's not even mentioning the thousands of other lies, from the petty, like the inauguration crowd, to the more serious, like the number and depth of Russian contacts or the reasons for firing Comey.

Of course politicians have and will always shade the truth. But the GOP has entered a new sphere where the lies are so provably and evidently false but still get trotted out as matters of faith and fact. As I have written before, that in itself is a statement of power - the power to "create" the truth when everyone can see it's false.

But the lies are also interspersed with occasional and brutal honesty about what Republicans really think. They simply don't believe we can afford or should even offer healthcare for everyone, despite being the only major industrialized country that doesn't. "The poor will always be with us...There is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves." When it comes to unfunded tax cuts, the deficit is "a great talking point when you have an administration that’s Democrat-led. It’s a little different now that Republicans have both houses and the administration."

The enormous hubris is also there, from Trump's abuse of the Emoluments Clause and use of his office for personal enrichment to the excesses of virtually his entire cabinet, with their penchant for taxpayer-funded private jet travel as its latest manifestation. Perhaps this is best encapsulated by Ryan Zinke's statement that his use of private planes at taxpayer expense was just "a little BS" and, to take him totally out of context while still quoting his spirit correctly, "I am above the law."

While primarily limited to Trump, the overt racism, which has always been at the edge of an auditory dog whistle, is also out in the open. The reaction to Charlottesville, the treatment of  immigrants, and now the implication that Puerto Rico is too lazy to recover when their island and 20% of its economy has been wiped out are all clear indications of that.

I could go on for hours with hundred of examples of all of the above. What is abundantly clear is that the Republican party is unable to govern and the President is unable to lead. Bret Stephens blames that on the years of fomenting rage in the base, saying, "Anger is an excellent emotion for pushing ratings and winning elections and a terrible one for agreeing to compromises and crafting legislation". Josh Marshall blames it on the "'nonsense debt'. Republicans had spent years pumping their voters up on increasingly extreme and nonsensical claims and promises. This worked very well for winning elections." It does not work when you have to follow through on the nonsense.

While the inability to govern may save millions from losing health care, it could cost the lives of thousands in Puerto Rico and, potentially, millions more in South Korea. It is a double-edged sword. But as the failures keep mounting, the response from both Trump and the GOP will be to foment even more anger and resentment, tell even greater lies, and become even more dismissive of the Americans who don't vote for them. To admit the con is to commit political suicide. Someday, hopefully sooner rather than later, the anger and lies will be overshadowed by failures and will no longer be a viable strategy for Republicans to keep winning elections.

Natural Weekends - The Geology Of Yellowstone

GOP Policies Put Northeast Transportation Corridor At Risk

Way back in 2010, when Chris Christie was trying to begin to burnish his conservative credentials in order to some day run for President, he was in a bind. The New Jersey highway transportation fund used to maintain the state's roads and bridges was woefully underfunded and it would require a hike in the ridiculously low gas tax in order to replenish it. But that would be a tax hike, an anathema to conservatives, and something Christie just could not broach if he wanted to woo the right of his party. So Christie did what all good Republicans do these days. He gutted an investment in the future to pay for his political ambitions today.

The program Christie decided to raid was something called the ARC project which would have built two new rail tunnels into Manhattan from New Jersey, potentially completed by 2018 and allowing necessary repair and upgrade work on the two existing tunnels that have been in service for over 100 years. Christie's decision effectively killed the project. Again, like all Republicans these days, Christie couched his decision to pull out of the ARC project as a bold stroke of fiscal responsibility, claiming, falsely, that New Jersey would bear 70% of any cost overruns when the actual number was 15%. Instead, Christie used the nearly $2 billion from ARC to replenish the state's transportation fund.

That decision proved to be fateful when Hurricane Sandy ravaged those two ancient tunnels, and, at some point soon, Amtrak will be forced to close one of them for extensive repairs, assuming the infrastructure inside the tunnels does not collapse first. In the end, the whole charade was for naught anyway. Christie was eventually forced to raise the gas tax last summer after it again ran dry, and after Christie forced a government shutdown. In fact, Christie's entire tenure as New Jersey's governor has seen the erosion of the state's transportation infrastructure.

After a six year delay, a new plan, called the Gateway Project, was created last year for the necessary new rail tunnels. But the project may not be completed until 2030, if at all. That's because the project will rely on some degree of federal funding. The current agreement provides for the states of New York and New Jersey to bear 50% of the cost of the project, with federal funding to fill the rest. Under a Republican-controlled Congress and the inept and heartless Trump administration, that funding will probably not be forthcoming.

Without that funding, the project can not even begin, much less finish. Every year of delay probably adds about $100 million to the overall cost and increase the chances that one of the existing tunnels will collapse, creating a transportation nightmare for the entire Northeast Corridor. But it will all be OK, because Republicans will get the tax cuts they want.

Texas State Government Gives Middle Finger To Houston

About a month ago, after Harvey had finally moved on from Houston and the Gulf Coast, I wrote that the problems for that area were just beginning rather than ending. Little did I think that the Republican dominance of state government would be one of the problems that Houston would confront. But I guess you can never underestimate the abject cruelty and naked partisanship of hardcore Republicans these days.

Right now, Houston's sidewalks and front yards are littered with waste, some of which may be toxic, that needs to be collected and disposed of. FEMA will pick up a large portion of this cost but the city of Houston would still be on the hook for around $25 million. The city's emergency funds have already been depleted and its Democratic mayor believes that it will need between $50 million and $100 million for its full recovery effort. Accordingly, the mayor proposed a temporary property tax hike in order to raise the money the city needs. That was, of course, met with immediate and strong opposition.

But the proposal for a temporary tax hike would not have been necessary if the state government actually cared about the city of Houston. The state of Texas is flush these days, with the government sitting on a $10 billion surplus. But, in response to an emergency request for Houston's mayor, Republican Governor Greg Abbott indicated that none of that rainy day budget should be touched until the 2019 legislative session. Abbott says that Houston's mayor "has all the money that he needs" and that "In times like these, it’s important to have fiscal responsibility as opposed to financial panic." Republican State Senator Paul Bettencourt represents Houston but echoes Abbott, saying Houston should be "using the funds that are already there to avoid a tax increase." Of course, the reason Houston's mayor is asking to tap the state's rainy day fund is because its own funds are not there.

This attitude toward Houston is nothing new. The state's education funding system leaves Houston and other large cities at a disadvantage. The state also intervened to ensure that the city had no idea what kind of dangerous materials were being used in and around Houston, contributing to the disaster at the Arkema plant. The state government's lack of involvement also contributed to the lack of a real development plan and a real flood control program that could have mitigated the Harvey disaster.

This attitude infuses the Republican party at almost all levels and signifies the urban/rural divide throughout our country and politics. As Christopher Hooks writes about Texas, "we have a state government that sees its largest generators of economic activity — the six metropolitan areas in which more than half of the state lives — as some kind of threat, either because of their values or the demographic and political threat they represent to the Republican Party. You might hope Harvey would temper that, but don’t hold your breath." Sadly, as the disaster in Puerto Rico makes clear, the comment applies to more than Texas.

The Plight Of Puerto Rico

As the crisis there deepens and more and more Puerto Ricans become more and more desperate, this next week will be critical in preventing what is an enormous natural disaster from turning into an enormous humanitarian disaster. Puerto Ricans are running out of water, food, medicines, and fuel. It is a credit to the population there to see orderly lines stretching for blocks in order to get necessary supplies. But it is hard to see that kind of civility maintaining itself for weeks on end.

What is clear is that FEMA was in no way prepared to handle a natural disaster on a scale like this. Puerto Rico is basically the size of the state of Connecticut but located 1,000 miles from the US mainland. FEMA would have difficulty dealing with a disaster that essentially destroyed the power, communication, and agricultural infrastructure of Connecticut. It is in no way prepared to handle that kind of emergency one thousand miles away from the US mainland where easy evacuation of those who have lost everything and supplying relief with trucks and buses is not possible. The only quick method to supply relief is by air to an airport that is already severely damaged.

But the fact that the Trump administration has not mobilized additional federal resources, such as the military, and has only just today waived the Jones Act in order to deal with the disaster is just another reminder of how poorly Puerto Rico and other US territories have been treated and managed over the years. Some of that is Puerto Rico's own making but much of it is enabled by fictions that the netherworld of being a US territory create. Puerto Ricans are US citizens but they have no federal representation. They are covered by US laws, except laws that apply to the states. They are self-governing except when the federal government intervenes.

Even before the hurricane, Puerto Rico was an island in serious decline. It was already suffering an economic crisis, having $72 billion in debt and another $51 billion in pension obligations and only a $100 billion GDP. It still has a population larger than 21 states but a poverty rate twice that of Mississippi. In the past 10 years it has lost 9% of its population. It was suffering from a serious brain drain, as 20% of the working age population had left in the last 20 years. Births have plummeted, its population is aging, and the island has a greater percentage of its population over 60 years of age than any US state. As we saw in the aftermath of Katrina, New Orleans' population was still 20% lower ten years after the hurricane than it was before. Puerto Rico will suffer a similar, if not worse, fate. The people who can afford to leave the island now can and will, leaving the island even poorer and probably older.

The seeds of Puerto Rico's economic crisis actually go back to the territory's constitution, written all the way back in 1952. The version passed by Congress stated that expenditures should not exceed revenues, in other words, a strictly balanced budget. Perhaps intentionally, however, the Spanish translation of the constitution states the expenditures should not exceed total resources. Resources and revenues are clearly not the same thing. This mistranslation allowed the territory to use its own government bonds to balance the budget, essentially borrowing to fill the gap between expenditures and revenues.

This was not an issue or even a problem as the territory maintained balanced budgets for the next two decades. But, in response to the recession in 1974, Puerto Rico started borrowing to fill the budget deficit ,only they hid that borrowing behind a façade of balanced budgets by routinely overestimating the amount of revenue to be received, primarily through taxes. The fact that those estimates continually fell short did not keep the territory from pretending the budget would balance.

This might not have been a problem because Puerto Rico was also constrained by a debt limit that restricted the level of borrowing to just 10% of the tax value of the territory's property. But, as the island began to prosper, Congress repealed that law in 1961 and allowed the Puerto Rican government to set its own debt limit. That was followed by the island's boom time as an abundance of low wage workers along with huge tax breaks for capital intensive industries such as pharmaceuticals, oil, and petrochemicals helped the island's economy grow by leaps and bounds.

Then, in the late 1990s, the US government forced a phase-out of those tax breaks, leaving just one important one in place. That remaining tax break was the tax exempt status on Puerto Rico's municipal bonds.  The phase-out of the tax breaks created capital flight from the island as companies began to leave in droves. At the same time, the tax exempt status of those Puerto Rican bonds provided higher interest rates for yield-seeking buyers. Mutual funds and hedge funds bought those bonds as fast as Puerto Rico could create them even as jobs were fleeing the island.

Accordingly, in 2000, the island found a way to even evade its own, self-imposed debt limit with the creation of so-called "appropriation bonds", issued by government-owned entities but technically not a direct obligation of the government even though they relied on government appropriations to repay the debt. However, just like FNMA and FHLMC agency debt in the US, investors treated those bonds as though they were backed by the government.

When the legality of appropriation debt was challenged in 2006, the government created COFINA which assumed some appropriation debt and then added an additional $15 billion in debt over the next six years. COFINA debt is now backed by the territory's sales tax which was raised from 7% to 11.5% in July of 2015, becoming the highest sales tax rate in the US. That again helped shrink the economy and prompted even more flight from the island.

With its overwhelming obligations, the optimal solution would have been for the government to bite the bullet and declare bankruptcy, beginning negotiations to restructure the debt more realistically. But that turned out not to be possible because US Bankruptcy Code only includes "states". So Puerto Rico wrote its own bankruptcy rules. Creditors challenged those rules and in 2016 the Supreme Court ruled that Puerto Rico was not allowed to write its own bankruptcy rules but, at the same time, it could not take advantage of US bankruptcy law because it was not a state. The only option was to pay the loans back in full. Meanwhile, Puerto Rico privatized two major toll roads, the San Juan airport, and other state assets to provide one-time boosts to its cash flow at the expense of future revenue.

Finally, last year, Congress appointed what amounts to a financial control board to help Puerto Rico control its spending, find some way to restructure its debt, and deal with its pension shortfall. That, of course, means even greater austerity and more flight from the island.

In addition to its own economic problems, the island also suffers from what is essentially a colonial legacy of neglect and exploitation. The Jones Act, which Trump was finally forced to waive today, is a regulation from 1920 that was designed to protect the US merchant marine fleet in the aftermath of World War I. According to Vox, "One section of the law requires goods transported by ship from one US destination to another to be carried on US-flagged ships that were constructed in the United States, owned by US citizens, and crewed by US legal permanent residents and citizens". While that law may have made sense in 1920 when US ships carried one quarter of the world's products, not so much in 2017, when US ships carry just 2%. The Jones Act makes shipping between US ports anywhere from two to four times more expensive and a boon to the trucking and railroad industries today. Bizarrely, it is far more expensive to ship goods from the US mainland to Puerto Rico than to, say, Jamaica. Another negative effect of the Jones Act is that it kept Puerto Rico from becoming a major shipping terminus as well, despite being uniquely positioned to become one.

The end result, not only for Puerto Rico but for Alaska, Hawaii, and other territories, is a cost of living far higher than it need be. One estimate is that the Jones Act helps add to the 13% higher cost of living on Puerto Rico. In the US Virgin Islands, which are exempted from the Jones Act, the cost of US made goods is about half what it is in Puerto Rico.

Between the neglect of the federal government and the island's economic crisis, infrastructure in Puerto Rico was already in poor shape. The storm has already led to the breaching of the Guajataca Dam, owned by a bankrupt state-owned entity and uninspected in the last four years. The power infrastructure on the island was in even worse shape. 47% of the power comes from oil-burning power plants. Another 51% comes from a mixture of coal and natural gas plants. All those fuels have to be imported.  Because the now bankrupt Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) spends so much money on importing fuels, maintenance of the grid has suffered. Puerto Ricans have the second highest electric rates in the US after Hawaii yet suffer nearly five times as many blackouts as any state. This on an island with abundant sun and wind, the perfect place for a real investment in renewables.

In 1980, the Supreme Court enshrined the territories as second-class citizens when it ruled that it would not violate the equal protection laws of the Constitution to have US territories excluded or limited in the amount of federal block grants they can receive. That ruling further impeded Puerto Rico from investments in infrastructure, something even states struggle with today.

Now, the island is in ruins. Agriculture has been decimated. The power may be out for six months. Flight from the island will be massive. A humanitarian and health crisis may come in the next week or two. The bondholders want their money back but there will be nothing to give. The obvious solution, one that was unfortunately rejected by Puerto Ricans, was to become a state. There is no chance of that happening now. Another is to demand a massive haircut from the bondholders and a huge infusion of investment from the federal government. That will not be coming from a Trump administration either. Which will probably leave Puerto Rico as an island left behind, aging, poor, with no services and a shrinking economy even further cramped by mandatory austerity. 

Nelson Denis wrote in an essay earlier this year , "After one hundred years of citizenship, Puerto Ricans are prohibited from managing their own economy, negotiating their own trade relations, or setting their own consumer prices. Puerto Rico has been little more than a profit center for the United States: first as a naval coaling station, then as a sugar empire, a cheap labor supply, a tax haven, a captive market, and now as a municipal bond debtor and target for privatization. It is an island of beggars and billionaires: fought over by lawyers, bossed by absentee landlords, and clerked by politicians." And now that capitalism and colonialism have sucked nearly every drop of blood from the island and Maria has decimated what's left, all that remains will be an empty shell of what was.

Wall Street Wants Us To Repeat The Financial Crisis

A few days ago, I wrote that Trump's approach to the Iran nuclear deal threatened to repeat the mistakes of the Bush administration with North Korea, helping us end up in the crisis we are in now. That amnesia may likely end up with us facing a similar standoff with Iran a few years down the road.

But there is one area in American politics where amnesia is willful, instantaneous, and permanent and that involves the financial industry. It has only been a decade since the financial crisis and we are still dealing with the devastating aftermath of the Great Recession it created.

Earlier this summer, the House voted to repeal a new CFPB rule that would have prevented financial firms from forcing its customers into arbitration and instead open the opportunity for customers to join in class action suits against financial firms that engage in malfeasance and illegal activity. Democrats believe that McConnell, already under the gun for the failure of health care and his preferred Alabama Senator, will be feeling the heat to give his donors and, by extension, himself a win and will force a vote to repeal the rule in the Senate any day now.

One of the reasons that Equifax and Wells Fargo, a continually recidivist corporate criminal, receive just a slap on the wrist and remain in business is simply because its victims can not band together to sue the company. Instead, each individual customer who has been fleeced by these companies must go through an individual arbitration procedure. These forced arbitration procedures are incredibly biased in favor of corporations, sometimes the company actually chooses the arbitrator, and forces the individual consumer to waste their own time and often money simply trying to get back the money that was stolen from them. The system also ensures that the company will pay no punitive damages, except perhaps getting a minimal slap on the wrist from the regulators.

Of course, the Republicans are simply responding to their donor base with this effort. The financial industry has given over $100 million just to the 24 Senators sponsoring this repeal bill. In addition, corporations in general have spent over $1 billion in efforts to get this Congress to roll back as many Obama-era rues as possible. The House has already voted to unwind many of the Dodd-Frank regulations although the Senate has not yet taken that bill up.

Two days ago, we discovered that Citibank was reviving one of the most reviled and destructive instruments from the financial crisis, the synthetic CDO. As Tyler Durden writes, "For those who have forgotten how Synthetic CDOs work, below is a quick primer.  To summarize, you go out and find a bunch of suckers willing to backstop trillions of dollars worth of credit risk in return for a few bps in annual premium payments.  You then tranche out the risk being taken by the CDO investors so that those at the top can get a AAA-rating and, in return, tell their investors that they're taking no risk at all.  Those investors then lever up their capital another 10x so they can make 8% returns on a 'risk-free' investment." As we saw a decade ago, it usually turns out those returns are not risk free at all.

Citibank was one of the banks who had to be bailed out during the financial crisis due to its exposure to similar instruments backed by mortgages. But, don't worry, Citibank promises things will be different this time. The bank believes "[t]he deals are tailored in a way that insulates it from any losses, while giving yield-starved buyers a chance to reap returns of 20 percent or more. The market today is also just a fraction of its size before the crisis, and few see corporate defaults surging any time soon." Where have we heard that all before. The last guy I remember offering 20% returns was Bernie Madoff. And, while the bank may insulate itself somewhat from the losses, that surely does not apply to the investors, i.e. suckers.

Of course, now that Citibank has opened Pandora's box once again, other banks are quickly looking to follow suit. BNP Paribas is also eager to get in the action and others will surely follow.

The synthetic CDO is yet another example of how far the big Wall Street banks have strayed from their real purpose. Rana Foroohar had an op-ed piece in the NY Times that described these failures. According to Foroohar, "[L]lending to Main Street is now a minority of what the largest banks in the country do. In the 1970s, most of their financial flows, which of course come directly from our savings, would have been funneled into new business investment. Today, only about 15 percent of the money coming out of the largest financial institutions goes to that purpose. The rest exists in a closed loop of trading; institutions facilitate and engage in the buying and selling of stocks, bonds, real estate and other assets that mainly enriches the 20 percent of the population that owns 80 percent of that asset base. This doesn’t help growth, but it does fuel the wealth gap." The synthetic CDO is just another financial instrument that creates wealth at the expense of others without providing any new investment in the real economy.

Foroohar continues, "Small community banks, which make up only 13 percent of all banking assets, do nearly half of all lending to small businesses. Big banks are about deal making. They serve mostly themselves, existing as the middle of the hourglass that is our economy, charging whatever rent they like for others to pass through. (Finance is one of the few industries in which fees have gone up as the sector as a whole has grown.) The financial industry, dominated by the biggest banks, provides only 4 percent of all jobs in the country, yet takes about a quarter of the corporate profit pie."

Earlier this week, James McDonald, the newly installed head of enforcement at the CFTC, the agency responsible for overseeing trading in commodities, futures, currencies, and complex derivatives like synthetic CDOs, said that the agency will increasingly rely on firms to self-report their own misconduct. The original plan was to reduce penalties by up to 75% for firms that volunteered information and cooperated with the CFTC in investigating malfeasance. Now, however, the commission will reduce penalties and perhaps eliminate them entirely on a case-by-case basis. According to McDonald, "when they [the banks] detect misconduct their decision whether to voluntarily report it often comes down to their perception of whether they’ll be treated fairly...We need to give the relatively low-level criminals an incentive to cooperate with us".

The CFTC, a chronically underfunded and understaffed agency, was given new powers under Dodd-Frank and became an aggressive regulator under the Obama administration, uncovering an enormous scandal in the setting of the primary worldwide interest rate benchmark, LIBOR, that involved most of the biggest banks in the world colluding in setting rates for their own benefit. The CFTC also uncovered similar collusion in setting the benchmark for swaps, ISDAFIX, as well as collusion by the dealers in the swaps market to squeeze potential competitors out of the profitable market by not providing them liquidity. In addition, all the major banks were engaged in a similar collusion to fix the global foreign exchange market benchmark. None of these investigations and resulting fines and settlements were driven by banks' self-reporting.

The majority of those banks had plenty of evidence about what was occurring but still refused to cooperate with the CFTC until it became clear the agency already had the goods on them. The idea that any of these banks would self-report is laughable. The LIBOR and foreign exchange collusion went on for years and yet no one reported it and the reason was not because the firms feared they would be treated unfairly but because they were making too much money unfairly to report it, especially knowing that they could simply pay whatever the fine might be and continue to do business. Under the Trump administration, we may not even get the fines anymore.

It's clear the financial industry has far too much power already compared to what it actually produces for this country. Because of that, we are going to give that industry even more power and recreate the conditions that led us to the greatest financial crisis since the 1930s. Alan Greenspan said this in the wake of the financial crisis, "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions... are in a state of shocked disbelief." When it happens again, we shouldn't be shocked, just appalled and even angrier. This will not end well.

Basketball Bribery Scandal Is A Corporate Corruption More Than Sports Scandal

The fallout from the latest college basketball bribery scandal has just begun. Just now, Rick Pitino, the legendary coach currently at Louisville, has essentially been fired, as the school put him an administrative leave. Other head coaches and athletic directors are likely to follow Pitino into the unemployment line and it's quite possible that some programs may once again receive the NCAA's death sentence, despite the organization's incredible reluctance to use it.

One part of this scandal is fairly typical of what we have seen in the past. Coaches are bribed to steer potential pro athletes to specific agents or financial advisers. That is not new.

But, to my mind, the bigger scandal here is the willful and organized involvement of Adidas in the bribery scheme. This is not just the usual NCAA sports scandal where the coaches and/or boosters are paying players to come and play at their school or taking a kickback for steering players to specific agents. This is a multinational corporation that has probably paid out millions in bribes to coaches, schools, and players in order to further its business goals. This will get billed in the press as a college sports scandal but, in reality, it is more of a corporate corruption scandal. That becomes doubly true if you believe that big-time NCAA athletic programs are really a corporate power on its own, rather than sport.

There has always been corruption in big-time college sports, primarily because there is big money involved and the drivers of that income, the athletes, are not paid for the value they produce. But the seeds of this particular scandal lie in the decision by colleges to sign exclusive apparel contracts, starting with shoe companies. Once that happened, the apparel's brand became associated with that particular team and now the apparel company had a real incentive to make sure the college program continued to maintain its status on the elite level. In addition, the coaches also gained leverage over those same apparel companies and could involve the company in bringing a potential recruit to the school. It was the perfect storm.

Not only was Adidas paying athletes to go to specific Adidas-sponsored programs but it was also paying coaches to steer potential pros to sign Adidas contracts. Adidas released a statement that claimed it was "unaware of any misconduct and would fully cooperate with authorities to understand more". But the amounts of money involved seem like it would be hard for the corporate head office to not notice. Just one recruit received $100,000 to attend Louisville, with the additional promise that the recruit would sign with Adidas if and when he turned pro. That was just one recruit, so we can only imagine what the total dollar amount of Adidas bribes will come to.

These initial charges are probably just the tip of the iceberg. We are already hearing that people are coming forward with additional information. And it is also not clear whether this particular bribery scandal is limited to basketball. Basketball's smaller roster makes it a more inviting target but the same conditions that created this scandal also exist in football as well, though probably not to the same degree. In addition, if Adidas was engaging in this type of behavior, we can imagine that the other apparel companies were probably doing the same thing. In such a competitive industry, it is hard to see how any of its competitors would let Adidas get away with that competitive advantage.

The media is and will treat this as a college sports scandal because that is where the personalities are. But it is more so another example of the impunity which corporations continually and willingly break the law and treat those criminal activities as simply the cost of doing business. Because that is all it is. Just like the NCAA, the DOJ is just as reluctant to again implement the corporate death penalty. Perhaps this case will force that change.

In Replay Of Wall Street Crisis, Equifax CEO Walks Away With Millions

My print version of the New York Times has a headline today that would be funny if it weren't so painful for over 140 million Americans. The headline reads, "Replacing Its C.E.O., Equifax Tries To Turn Page". It's nice to see how easily Equifax thinks it can turn the page. If only that were true for the millions of Americans who have had to navigate freezing their credit reports and face the possibility of identity theft for years to come.

The Equifax CEO, Richard Smith, has been pushed into voluntary retirement, and he agreed to forgo his 2017 bonus. Poor guy. Of course, he will still be retiring with over $18 million in pension benefits. He will still hold over $23 million in Equifax stock. He will still keep the proceeds of the $19 million in stock he dumped earlier this year, perhaps with knowledge of the security breach. He will still receive his prorated salary for 2017 of $1 million. In addition, he still retains a variety of stock options that will vest over the next few years which could total another $90 million.

Equifax has reserved the right to retroactively fire Smith for cause which would cause him to lose large portions of his retirement package, Even so, Smith will not be suffering. And Equifax, of course, is desperately hoping that Smith will be able to quietly go into the night. The reality is that Equifax should get the death penalty as it has failed in the only job it really had which was protecting our confidential data. But it won't because it's too big already, providing credit scores in 19 countries, and because shutting it down would just increase the oligopoly power of Experian and TransUnion.

Equifax and the other credit agencies take our information without asking, make unilateral decisions about our financial health, sell that information, and then charge us to see our information that they sold. Donald Trump is railing about people taking a knee during the national anthem in protest of minorities getting essentially murdered by police, and corporate criminals like Smith walk away scot free. For the elites, especially white elites, there is never any accountability. We are truly screwed.

GOP Voter Suppression And Gerrymandering Leading To Tyranny Of The Minority

Glen Grothman, an obscure Republican House member from Wisconsin, was remarkably prescient in a prediction he made way back in April of 2016. Grothman predicted that Wisconsin's new voter ID law would finally put the state in play for a Republican presidential candidate. And, indeed, Grothman was correct as Donald Trump ended up winning the state by a mere 22,000 votes.

A new study out of Wisconsin estimates that between 9,000 and 23,000 voters in Wisconsin's two largest counties did not vote because of the state's restrictive voter ID law. Extrapolating the results statewide means that around 45,000 voters around the state were kept from voting by the new law. While it is impossible to know exactly who those disenfranchised voters would have voted for, prior studies of voter ID laws show that it abnormally restricts younger, newly registered, and minority voters, all of whom are normal Democratic constituents. It should also be noted that the approximately 45,000 voters who didn't vote because of the voter ID law is approximately 45,000 more than the number of instances of voter fraud that the state found that prompted the law in the first place. That voter fraud number was zero.

Wisconsin has been ground zero for the largely successful Republican efforts to maintain power by aggressive partisan gerrymandering and restricting the franchise for Democratic constituencies. The Republican tactics in the state have finally generated a Supreme Court case that challenges the partisan gerrymandering that manages to keep Democrats in the minority in the legislature despite winning the majority of the vote. For example, in the 2012 elections, Democrats won 53% of the vote across the state but ended up with just 40% of the seats in the Wisconsin Assembly.

In her outstanding debut op-ed piece in the NY Times today, Michelle Goldberg highlights the fact that our current electoral system, enshrined in the Constitution, has empowered "the tyranny of the minority". This is not just the Constitutional protections for the minority party in government, but rather our electoral system has allowed the minority to actually end up as the majority. In the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton won 3 million more votes than Donald Trump but did not become President. Democrats won over 50% of the votes for the House of Representatives but Republicans ended up with over 55% of the seats.

As one constitutional scholar notes, "Given contemporary demography, a little bit less than 50 percent of the country lives in 40 of the 50 states. Roughly half the country gets 80 percent of the votes in the Senate, and the other half of the country gets 20 percent." It is now estimated that even an eight point preference for Democrats in the 2018 election may still not be enough to overcome partisan gerrymandering and retake the House. And it is not going to get any better anytime soon. Sherrod Brown warns that Democrats could win the popular vote by 5 million and still lose the Presidency in the Electoral College. It is estimated that, by 2040, just 30% of the population would live in 35 states, meaning that 30% would have a veto and filibuster-proof margin in the US Senate over 70% of the population.

Goldberg's solutions, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact that awards a state's electoral votes to the popular vote winner and the Fair Representation Act that would eliminate current House districts and replace them with larger districts with multiple representatives, allowing for more diverse views and third party representation, do not appear to enacted any time soon. Small states will surely not be interested in abandoning the Constitution's small state bias. And neither effort would do anything about the radical gerrymandering that keep state legislatures under GOP control.

Goldberg hints at the danger this situation presents to the stability of our democracy, citing a poll that shows a third of California residents actually favor secession. Should that happen, you can be sure other large Democratic states would also follow suit. That would probably be the most peaceful solution but it is hard not to see that other disenfranchised and under-represented voters might choose a more violent path.

To let Goldberg summarize, "Our Constitution has always had a small-state bias, but the effects have become more pronounced as the population discrepancy between the smallest states and the largest states has grown...But America is now two countries, eyeing each other across a chasm of distrust and contempt. One is urban, diverse and outward-looking. This is the America that’s growing. The other is white, provincial and culturally revanchist. This is the America that’s in charge." Under our present electoral system, it is hard to see how this house will still stand.

Manafort Revelations Lost In Trump's NFL Dispute

Donald Trump may be a despicable narcissist, to say the least, but his experience in the tabloid world of New York has made him a master manipulator of the media. His attacks on Steph Curry, Colin Kapernick, and other protesting NFL players has put him in the unlikely position of actually uniting the NFL owner and players in condemnation of Trump and his racist and divisive rhetoric.

While the efforts of Kapernick and others to highlight the racism and inequality in not only the US judicial system but most aspects of US life is laudable in itself, Trump has managed to twist it into a discussion about disrespecting the troops and the flag, taking the cowardly position in the last refuge of the scoundrel that he is.

More importantly, he has managed to totally deflect attention from the stories about Paul Manafort that emerged late last week that further indicated just how deeply the Trump campaign was willing to collude with the Russians. For those not politically involved, I would guess that the Manafort story never even hit their radar and will just become part of Trump's "Russian hoax" defense down the line.

Just one month after Manafort attended the infamous meeting that Don Jr. had set up with the Russians in the hopes of receiving damaging information from them about Hillary, Manafort offered Oleg Deripaska, a top Russian oligarch closely tied to Putin, "private briefings" on the Trump campaign. Just days later, at the Republican national convention, the Trump campaign demanded its one and only change to the Republican platform and that was to eliminate the language calling for "providing lethal defensive weapons" to Ukraine. In summary, in a little over a one month span, you have a meeting where the Russians offer to help the Trump campaign, Manafort offers to privately brief the Russians on the Trump campaign strategy, and the GOP platform gets changed to water down support for Ukraine. You can draw your own conclusions about whether that shows a pattern of collusion.

But then the whole issue of how Manafort even came to be Trump's campaign manager is rather opaque. To say that Manafort was an interesting choice to lead the Trump campaign is more than just an understatement. After all, the last US Presidential campaign that Manafort had even had any kind of role at all was Bob Dole's in 1996 and in that campaign where he was simply an adviser. Manafort was basically a lobbyist who specialized in working for the some of the worst foreign leaders imaginable, from Jonas Savimbi to Ferdinand Marcos to Mobutu Sese Seko. Around 2005, Manafort started working for the Russian-backed leader of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, as well as signing a $10 million contract with that very same oligarch to whom he offered private briefings in order to advance Russian interests in Eastern Europe and engage in work that would "greatly benefit the Putin Government." Admittedly, Manafort's specialty was making these unpopular leaders and dictators more popular one way or another but that was in environments far different than a US presidential campaign.

Manafort apparently showed up on Trump's radar screen after a meeting with a Trump confidant and fellow real estate investor, Thomas Barrack. As Josh Marshall notes, the impression that Trump campaign gives is that Barrack pushed Manafort for the job. But the details are sufficiently vague enough to consider the alternate view that Manafort pitched Barrack for help getting the job. That particular viewpoint is supported by the fact that Manafort proposed to do something for Trump that he had apparently never done before in his professional career, that is to work for free. Interestingly, he also expressed an interest in getting engaged in US politics once again, an interesting choice for someone who had primarily worked for overseas client since the Reagan Adminstration.

It's also quite possible that Trump already had knowledge of Manafort even before Barrack pitched him to the Trump campaign. Manafort was a partner with Roger Stone when Manafort was working with some of those notorious foreign leaders and Stone may have also talked up Manafort. Manafort's deal with Deripaska in 2005 also coincided with the Trump Organization's development of Russian and/or Russian-aligned investors in Trump properties with the help of Michael Cohen and Felix Sater. Considering how shady Manafort's business deals were, it would not be surprising to have Manafort directing potential Russian money-launderers to the Trump Organization, especially as Manafort himself had real estate dealings and eventually an office in Trump Tower. That, however, is pure speculation that Robert Mueller is hopefully investigating.

But Manafort's clear willingness to collude with the Russians during the campaign along with his interesting and out-of-character choice of working for free brings us to the shocking question raised by former CIA chief of staff Jeremy Bash last week, namely that Manafort and Flynn were actually Russian agents.

Originally, the Trump campaign was solely designed to boost the "Trump" brand. After all, that's pretty much all that Trump had left. He did not develop real estate any more as he could not get loans from any reputable bank, the exception being DeutscheBank. Duping gullible people into giving him money, for example Trump University, and licensing the "Trump" name along with money laundering was how he continued to make money. His PAC was explicitly told at the start of the primary campaign that "the goal was to get The Donald to poll in double digits and come in second in the delegate count. That was it." The whole campaign was designed not to win necessarily, but to line Trump's pockets. So it is no surprise that many of the Trump's advisers, beyond his family, were there to do the same.

If Manafort was getting paid by Trump, he was surely getting paid by someone. That was his MO and the most likely employer would be Deripaska and the Russians. Manafort was in a monetary dispute with Deripaska when he came to Trump and was rumored to owe the oligarch millions, although Manafort contends he was owed the money. Either way, the Trump campaign offered him an opportunity to clear the debt and it certainly looks like he took it.

In his interview last night with Hillary, Chris Hayes laid out the common theory that there was probably no direct collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Rather, no direct collusion was necessary because they both had the same common interest and that was damaging Clinton as much as possible. But that theory gets harder to hold on to as more and more evidence of contacts and offers of collusion come out. In addition, more evidence mounts that the Russian propaganda efforts may have required more sophisticated targeting than the Russians were capable of. And despite constantly proclaiming that there is nothing wrong with having good relations with Russia, Trump and his campaign have gone to extraordinary lengths, even obstructing justice, to hide the contacts they did have with the Russians and shut down the investigation.

Of course, none of this is being explored in the media today. Instead, we are talking about the NFL and the flag. That does not diminish the importance of what Kapernick was calling attention to. But it speaks to the ability of the mainstream media to still be led by the nose by Trump.

After Trump's UN Speech, Why Would Anyone, Ally Or Enemy, Trust US Anymore

George Santayana is credited with the saying that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". For Americans, the capacity for willful amnesia seems to be boundless and, correspondingly, our capacity for repeating the same mistakes again and again seems unlimited.

While the North Korea is always depicted as a rogue regime, and there is no doubt it is brutally cruel and has no regard for anything other than the continuation of the regime, there was a time when the North Koreans nuclear threat was largely contained and able to be monitored. That was just 15 years ago.

The North Koreans initial nuclear adventurism began early in the George H. W. Bush administration when the Koreans began building a nuclear reprocessing facility that would give them the capability to make weapons-grade plutonium. When the North Koreans completed the facility early in the Clinton administration, they were ready to up the ante by threatening to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT), expel international inspectors, and begin to process plutonium. After using both the carrot and the stick approach, Clinton, with help from Jimmy Carter, was able to hammer out an agreement where the North Koreans would re-enter the NNPT, lock of the spent fuel rods needed for plutonium, and allow inspectors back in. In addition, the US, South Korea, and Japan agreed to provide North Korea with two light water nuclear reactors, enormous amounts of fuel oil, and an agreement not to invade North Korea. Most importantly, when the second reactor was delivered, North Korea would send its fuel rods out of the country, effectively ending its ability to create plutonium and build a nuclear bomb.

That might have been the end of North Korea's nuclear ambitions except that the US and its allies decided not to keep their end of the bargain. In the US, funding for the nuclear reactors was never provided and South Korea pulled its financing for them as well. Japan dropped out when the North Koreans launched a satellite over Japan as a test of its missile technology. When a North Korean submarine ended up on South Korea's coast, South Korea stopped the fuel shipments too. In response, the North Koreans started to export its missile technology to Pakistan in return for centrifuges that could be used to enrich uranium. The Clinton administration again entered into negotiations to restrict those missile exports, this time with support from a new South Korean leader, but time ran out on those talks when G.W. Bush "won" the 2000 election.

The Bush administration's position was hostile, not only to the North Koreans, but also to the new South Korean leader who was eager to normalize relations with the North as much as possible. Bush made that position clear with his famous "axis of evil" speech that included North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. Meanwhile, it was becoming clear that the North Koreans were violating the spirit of the Clinton agreement, which covered the creation of plutonium, with the purchase of centrifuges capable of enriching uranium. When confronted by the Bush administration, the North Koreans readily admitted that they had those centrifuges but that they were still abiding by the agreement they had made with Clinton, including keeping those spent fuel rods locked away.

Needless to say, that was the excuse Bush needed. The US announced that it was pulling out of the agreement that Clinton made because of those centrifuges, although Bush waited to make that announcement until he had received Congressional approval to invade Iraq. The nuclear reactors would never be delivered, the fuel shipments would stop, and the US encouraged other countries to isolate North Korea economically. In response, the North Koreans pulled out of the NTTP, restarted the nuclear reactor, threw out the inspectors, and unlocked the fuel rods.

The response from the Bush administration was essentially to do nothing, primarily because, by this time, all the focus was on creating momentum for the war in Iraq and North Korea's nuclear program would just be a distraction in that effort. Instead, the North Korean nuclear program was rolling again and has continued to grow, reaching the crisis point we see today.

When Bill Clinton went to North Korea in 2009 in attempt to free and again restart talks on the nuclear program, Kim Jong-Il declared, "we [North Koreans] found ourselves missing the earlier, better relationship with the previous Administration." That was not because of the harshness of the Bush administration but instead reflected the missed opportunities in the early 2000s. Some in the Clinton administration believe that real steps toward some degree of normalization of relations with North Korea was in reach but time ran out as the 2000 election approached.

The North Koreans were also quite aware of what was happening to other leaders that made deals with the US. In particular, they point to what happened to Qaddafi in Libya. Eight years after agreeing to give up Libya's weapons of mass destruction, Qaddafi was overthrown by a Western coalition eight years later. They saw Saddam Hussein agree to let UN weapons inspectors in to search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Despite Hans Blix and his team finding nothing, again a US-led coalition invaded Iraq and killed Saddam. From the North Korean point of view, especially in the wake of the collapse of the agreements in the early Bush administration, they believe they will only be safe if they have a nuclear deterrent.

None of this makes Kim Jong-Un's provocations any less reckless and dangerous or his motives any more suspect. But it does help explain the relentless drive the North Korean's have had in getting a nuclear deterrent. The question now is whether Kim will use that capability for more aggressive and offensive actions.

This long history helps to bring us to Iran and Trump's apparent willingness to follow through on his threat and abrogate the Iran nuclear deal. Like North Korea, Iran's missile tests are violating the spirit but not the letter of the agreement. And, like Bush with North Korea, Trump may be using Iranian actions outside the scope of the agreement to end it unilaterally. The Iranians look at the same history as the North Koreans as well as their own history of a devastating war with Iran and the constant saber-rattling from Israel and probably feel the same urgency to get a nuclear deterrent as the North Koreans. The only difference is that Iran will probably not be subject to the re-imposition of the crippling sanctions if Trump unilaterally withdraws from the deal.

The Europeans, who are also a party to the nuclear deal, have no interest in seeing it ended but would instead prefer to see it expanded to address missile development and support for terrorism. But Trump's threats to end the agreement are just part of the continual nightmare that Trump presents for our European allies. His months-long refusal to endorse Article V of the NATO agreement and his refusal to even criticize, much less sanction, Russia for its adventurism in Ukraine and interference in European elections has made Europeans begin to doubt the strength of the US commitment. Additionally, Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement increase the suspicion that the US cannot be counted on to adhere to its agreements when a new administration takes over.

Similarly, Trump's abandonment of TPP disheartened our Pacific allies, Australia in particular, leaving them with the impression that the US might be abdicating influence in the region to the Chinese. Not having an ambassador in Canberra does not help our relationship with the Aussies either. As a result, The Australians may not exactly pivot their foreign policy toward China and away from the US but they will probably be strengthening and deepening their relationship with the Chinese. In addition, Trump's constant badgering of the Chinese to do more to restrain North Korea may reflect political reality but it also reinforces the notion that China is becoming the dominant Asian power.

The reality of a nuclear North Korea, along with questions about the strength and continuity of US foreign policy, will likely lead to nuclear proliferation in Southeast Asia. Assuming Trump abrogates the Iran deal, we may see ourselves in a similar position in the Mideast in another decade, with a nuclear Iran and a corresponding nuclear proliferation. While the Koreans and Iranian are ultimately responsible for their nuclear ambitions, there is no good reason that the US has to consistently repeat its own mistakes that eventually help feed the crises we face.

German Elections Exemplify De-Alignment That Forces Needed Changes On The Center-Left

As expected, Angela Merkel won a fourth term as German Chancellor in elections held yesterday. While Merkel's re-election was no surprise, the results for the far-right nationalist party AfD were. AfD secured over 13% of the vote, becoming the third largest bloc in the Bundestag with 94 seats behind the two major parties, the CDU/CSU bloc and the SPD.

Just like UKIP and, to some degree, France's National Front, electoral success has exposed the fissures in the AfD as its co-leader, Frauke Petry, resigned from the party to serve an independent PM. Her resignation signaled the failure of her efforts to moderate the party in an attempt to actually make it capable of eventually joining a ruling coalition.

More importantly, AfD's success reflects the failure of the CDU/CSU/SPD "grand coalition". AfD was able to not only mobilize traditional non-voters, adding around 1.2 million, but also managed to take away over 1 million votes from the CDU/CSU and around half a million from the SPD. In many ways, AfD's results were probably more of a repudiation of the grand coalition than support for the far-right, xenophobic policies the party espouses. As in the US and, to some degree, the UK, the surge in support for the AfD was located in areas of Germany, especially in the former East Germany, where immigration has been lowest.

The repudiation of a centrist coalition and the rise of right-wing nationalism is something that we have seen across the West in recent elections. AfD, UKIP, National Front, and Trumpism all are an apparent reaction to the failures of the centrist parties on the right and especially on the left to effectively deal with the fallout of the financial crisis and the Great Recession. In the US, UK, France, now Germany, and even in Spain, the traditional ruling parties on the left and the right joined together in protecting the financial industry and then imposing crippling austerity, ensuring that recovery from the financial crisis would be slower and more painful than necessary.

In the UK, Ed Milliband's inability and apparent unwillingness in the 2015 election to defend the economic decisions of the prior Labour government headed by Gordon Brown cost the Labour party dearly. For many in that election, Labour provided no real alternative to the Tory program, except on the margins. Similarly, Hollande's failure to live up to his election promises in taking on European and German austerity essentially destroyed the Socialist Party in France. Even in Spain, the Socialist Party's acceptance of austerity has led to losing its dominance of the left to Podemos. And in the US, the Democratic Party's infatuation with neoliberalism and, under the constraints of the Republican-dominated Congress, its turn to austerity and inability to adequately facilitate the economic recovery arguably led to Donald Trump's election.

The consequence of the rise of these far-right nationalist parties has been, ironically, a return to progressive solutions by the parties on the center left. Jeremy Corbyn and the success of Labour in the last election illustrates this quite clearly. Here in the US, Clinton's loss has allowed the progressive wing of the Democratic party to gain even more influence. As noted earlier, Spain has seen the rise of Podemos, challenging the Socialists for primacy on the left. And, now, in Germany, the SPD is refusing to enter into another grand coalition and is gearing up to be a true opposition party on the left. It is disappointing that it is taking this path at least partly or even primarily to ensure that AfD did not become the strongest opposition party. But it is a necessary step.

As Cas Mudde writes, these elections reflect more of a de-alignment rather than a re-alignment in German politics. I think this applies to the other Western democracies where right-wing nationalism has risen. For the most part, these right-wing nationalist parties primarily find voters among the politically inactive and/or the center right. This note only weakens the center-right but drives those parties further to the right in order to fend off the populist challenge. On the flip side, this de-alignment not only forces the traditional center-left parties to finally distinguish themselves distinctively from the policies of the center right but also gives the progressives within those parties and countries more power and influence.

Natural Weekends - Yellowstone River And Falls

Natural Weekends - The Bison Of Yellowstone

Bison have roamed the areas encompassed by Yellowstone National Park since prehistoric times. Today, they are considered an incredible conservation story as the herd in Yellowstone has been revived from just a couple of dozen to now over five thousand. But I was unaware that the National Park Service (NPS) engages in periodic mass slaughters of the herd. This is all done primarily to protect the cattle ranchers of Montana who are concerned about the disease brucellosis that bison are known to carry. Brucellosis can cause decreased milk production, weight loss, loss of young, infertility and lameness in livestock and the disease can easily spread to humans who eat the infected meat. This spring, the NPS killed around 1,300 bison as they migrated from the park. In addition, hunting bison that stray off the park in search of food in the winter is also allowed. Since 1985, over 5,000 Yellowstone bison have been killed or captured after leaving the park's boundaries.

HHS Intent On Making ACA Re-enrollment As Painful As Possible

As it appears that Cassidy-Graham, the GOP's latest attempt to gut Medicare and strip health care from millions, will likely fail, that will not stop the Trump administration and Tom Price from doing everything in their power to sabotage the ACA.

Trump has continually refused to say he will fund the CSRs, the subsidies for insurance companies that they rely on to provide for low-income enrollees. Price has also reduced the re-enrollment period at the end of the year by a month, ending it in mid-December now for those using healthcare.gov.

And now we hear that HHS will be shutting down the healthcare.gov website for 12 hours every Sunday but one during the re-enrollment period. In addition, the site will also be unavailable for 12 hours on November 1, the first day of the re-enrollment period. All of this is a petty and pathetic effort to make re-enrollment as difficult as possible.

Tom Price can spend $300,000 of taxpayer money using private jets. At the same time, he wants to make sure those same taxpayers have as hard a time as possible getting health insurance. What a pathetic, despicable, and petty human being. A typical Republican these days.

Catalan Independence And The Revival Of City-States

I was having dinner with an English friend last week and, in addition to discussing the Tories internal confusion and sclerosis about how to move along with Brexit, he also pointed at the Catalonian independence referendum in Spain. Now, Catalan separatism goes back to the 1800s and, like the Basques, it is based on the area's own unique culture and heritage apart from Spain as a whole. The movement gained steam after the death of Franco and the emergence of democracy in Spain. Catalonia gained some autonomy in 1979 and even more in a 2006 statute, parts of which were ruled unconstitutional in 2010 after a four year legal battle. That ruling is what prompted the independence referendum scheduled for October 1, a referendum that the Spanish government considers illegal and is actively and ill-advisedly trying to suppress.

In the wake of the financial crisis, economic issues became a more powerful driver for Catalan independence, as much as history, heritage, and a desire for greater autonomy. Barcelona and its environs account for a significant portion of Spain's economy, about 20% of Spanish GDP in 2013, and Catalans have been increasingly unhappy with essentially subsidizing the rest of the country. That was exacerbated in 2012 when the Spanish government rejected a plan to negotiate Catalonia's demand for a better fiscal agreement for the region.

Interestingly, my English friend pointed to Catalonia and Barcelona as an example for London, noting that, compared to the rest of England, the city overwhelmingly supports remaining in the EU. Like Catalonia, London accounts for a significant portion of UK GDP, 22% in 2015 according to estimates. While London is nowhere near as close as Catalonia to actually trying to gain independence, the demand for either greater autonomy or secession has gotten some traction in the wake of the Brexit vote.

If anything the Brexit vote has taught us, it is that separation is an incredibly complex and fraught issue that will be far more complicated than any independence referendum indicates. Catalonia, at least, has had its own regional culture for centuries. London, on the other hand, is the capital of England. Independence for London will be messy and ugly and is still a long, long way off. But there is no doubt that demands for greater London autonomy will grow as will the desire to keep more of the city's taxes working in the city as opposed to the rest of the UK.

However, I do think that the push for Catalan independence and even the discussion of London's secession indicates the increasing urban/rural divide in the West in particular, indicated by the growing economic power of cities at the same time rural areas decline. Regardless of whether they are strictly independent, these urban economic powerhouses will probably have to be given far greater autonomy than they have today. And that will probably be true here in the US as well, as states will have more and more trouble restricting the local city governments as Republicans have done with, say, Cleveland regarding the minimum wage. More likely is the situation we saw in Seattle where the city was left to its own devices on raising the minimum wage.

In some ways, we may perhaps be seeing the beginning of a revival of a modern version of a city-state as a reflection of that increasing urban/rural divide. Obviously, this can and will only apply to a handful of mega-cities, especially ones that create a significant portion of a state's or country's GDP. And, while all of them will not become independent, they are all more likely to become more autonomous and less generous with the economic wealth they generate.

Environmental Racism Is A Local And Global Issue

When it comes to environmental justice, there is always a two-tiered system that favors the haves over the have-nots. Environmental racism is pervasive and is happening on a global scale.

Numerous studies of environmental pollution show that it is far more likely to occur in poor, non-white areas. One study last year determined that just 5% of industrial chemical polluters in the US were responsible for 90% of the pollution and that virtually all those sites were located in poor, minority areas. A further study showed that polluting industries were almost always located in those poor, minority communities after they became low-income and non-white. As the one study noted, these communities became "sacrifice zones," in which polluters "can exist without the focus they might receive in other locations."

Now a new study out of Flint, Michigan shows just how devastating these environmental pollutants can be to the communities they inhabit. In Flint, the water system became contaminated by lead when the city decided to save some money and not treat their lead pipes correctly. According to the Detroit Free Press, "Fertility rates decreased by 12% among Flint women, and fetal death rates increased by 58%, after April 2014." April, 2014 is when the city of Flint converted to using the Flint River with drinking water, stopped treating the lead pipes, and, accordingly, the lead content of drinking water in Flint spiked through the roof. These actions were finally revealed by the state nearly 18 months later and only after independent groups noticed increased lead levels in Flint's citizens. 

But environmental racism is not only a local phenomenon, it is also occurring on a global scale. As Erik Loomis points out, "The reality of climate change is that a global disaster created almost entirely by rich white people in the Global North is going to disproportionately affect the poor of the Global South who had almost nothing to do with it."  We see that so clearly today, where the poorer Caribbean islands are being devastated by hurricanes whose intensity is linked to climate change. The UN is citing climate change as a factor in the drought and the increasing food insecurity in Kenya. In the Pacific, numerous islands in the Solomon Islands have been lost to rising sea levels. 

Meanwhile, the Republican party claims global warming is a hoax and Donald Trump pulls the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Do I have to make a direct connection?