The Fix is Out

in

Recently, three federal appeals courts, in North Carolina, Wisconsin and Texas, affirmed what Republican state legislatures have barely even tried to conceal – that voter identification laws hurriedly imposed in the wake of Barack Obama’s election had one purpose: the disenfranchisement of poor and minority voters whose singular offense is to vote largely for Democrats. Critics have long maintained that the laws were a partisan solution to a non-existent problem. The most comprehensive investigation reviewed one billion ballots and found 31 credible cases of fraud. “Election fraud happens,” wrote the study’s author – citing vote buying, coercion, fake registration forms, voting from the wrong address, ballot box stuffing by local officials – but ID laws aren’t aimed at preventing those things. They’re after something else.

“[B]ecause of race,” wrote Judge Diana Motz of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, “the legislature enacted one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina history."

But last month’s decisions have created a new problem for at least one candidate. The system is “rigged,” announced Donald Trump. “People are going to walk in, they are going to vote 10 times maybe. Who knows?”

No, they’re not going to vote 10 times, but they are now more likely to vote once – and these are folks who don’t like the Republican nominee very much. A recent poll, for example, found him getting 1% (!) of the black vote; another pegged his unfavorability rating among black voters at 94%.

So it seems the system is a little less “rigged” than it was a month ago.

War on Coal

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Increasingly absent in the bombast and bizarre behavior of this campaign is a discussion of issues that separate the candidates and their parties – issues that once defined the boundaries of political debate. I’d like to examine some of them in upcoming posts. First up: energy and the environment.

When I traveled through the Rust Belt last month, people talked of the “war on coal” in very personal terms. Since the 19th century, coal had been the engine that drove the steel industry that provided jobs and prosperity. Now coal is under attack, the mills have closed and the jobs are gone, victims, I was told, of environmental over-regulation and cheap foreign competition. Sixty years ago, for example, the steel industry employed over 13,000 full-time workers in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, alone. Today, 500 are left.

Those jobs are not coming back, a retired newspaper editor told me. “Natural gas, not regulators, killed the coal industry,” he said, and almost three-quarters of the steel used in the U.S. is still produced in the U.S., “just not here.”

And we forget, too, the horrendous cost of coal: miners’ short lives and black lungs, dark clouds of filthy air, streams of undrinkable water – and the removal of entire mountaintops, perhaps the single most destructive industrial practice ever conceived.

We need to move beyond arguments that pit the economy against the environment, beyond treating the earth as a pit from which to rip resources and a cesspool into which to dump waste. As a nation, we need to move beyond coal, but not without investing in the lives of those people and families who produce it.