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In Canada last week, I talked to a young conservative who told me it was all but impossible to get his folks to understand how far gone the culture is. When he tells them actual facts about what the groomer Left is doing here and there, they refuse to believe him. They cannot accept that such a thing can be happening. You can understand how someone would arrive at that conclusion if, like many older people, they get all their news of the world from the mainstream media, which serves mostly as a Narrative-curator. That is to say, it functions to prevent normies like that man's parents from understanding what the Left is actually doing to us.

Remember when we were all told that one is bigoted to object to Drag Queen Story Hour, and to say it was a matter of sexually grooming children? Now we are at Phase Two, where the drag queens aren't reading to kids, but performing for them. Lo, look at this video from a "family-friendly" drag event yesterday in Chattanooga, at the WanderLinger Brewery. In this clip, a little girl strokes the crotch of a male drag performer, to explore:

At what point will we be able to call this what it is -- grooming -- without backlash? Answer: never. I believe there is no point at which the Left will condemn any of this. You might have seen the other day the clip in which Spain's progressive Minister of Equality said that children have the right to have sex if they choose it. This is the ultimate end point of today's Left. Do I think that any but a small minority of left-wing people believe that? Of course not! The problem is that for the people in control of left-wing discourse and policy, there are no enemies to the Left, and no apparent limiting principle. In her important new book The Case Against The Sexual Revolution, the English feminist writer Louise Perry -- no conservative she -- writes:

When you set out to break down sexual taboos, you shouldnt be surprised when all taboos are considered fair game for breaking, including the ones youd rather retain. The claim from Foucault and his allies was never that violently coercing children into sex is OK. Rather, they claimed that sexual desire develops earlier in some children than in others and that it is therefore possible in some cases for children to have sexual relationships with adults that are not only not traumatic but mutually enjoyable. The claim, therefore, was not that consent is unimportant but, rather, that children are sometimes capable of consenting. And they pointed out, correctly, that paedophiles are a maligned sexual minority who suffer greatly as a result of the taboo maintained against them. Their project, therefore, was not a detour from the progressive path but in fact logically in keeping with it. The principles of sexual liberalism do, Im sorry to say, trundle inexorably towards this endpoint, whether or not we want them to.

Again, Perry is not a conservative, or a religious person, but she has the common sense to recognize that the principles of the Sexual Revolution have been harmful for women, children, and the vulnerable. If you don't understand this, you won't understand why early Christianity was so radical about sex and sexuality. As I wrote in a popular 2013 essay in this space:

It is nearly impossible for contemporary Americans to grasp why sex was a central concern of early Christianity. Sarah Ruden, the Yale-trained classics translator, explains the culture into which Christianity appeared in her 2010 bookPaul Among The People. Ruden contends that its profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-Puritan descending upon happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun.

In fact, Pauls teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture of the timeexploitive especially of slaves and women, whose value to pagan males lay chiefly in their ability to produce children and provide sexual pleasure. Christianity, as articulated by Paul, worked a cultural revolution, restraining and channeling male eros, elevating the status of both women and of the human body, and infusing marriageand marital sexualitywith love.

Christian marriage, Ruden writes, was as different from anything before or since as the command to turn the other cheek. The point is not that Christianity was only, or primarily, about redefining and revaluing sexuality, but that within a Christian anthropology sex takes on a new and different meaning, one that mandated a radical change of behavior and cultural norms. In Christianity, what people do with their sexuality cannot be separated from what the human person is.

I hope you'll get Ruden's book. She's a Quaker, and very much not a right-winger. But she grasps that the sexual taboos instituted and upheld by early Christianity were necessary to establish a social order that protected the weak. Me, given human nature, I doubt very much that it will be possible for our post-Christian culture to retain those necessary civilizational taboos without religious backing. In other words, absent a real religious revival, the perverts and groomers of "family friendly" drag shows, the radical left politicians, and the woke capitalists (I'm looking at you, WanderLinger, the Craft Brew That Made Grooming Famous), are likely to prevail.

Will the local media report on this? Nope -- unless it's to publicize how Chattanooga bigots are attacking this delightful diversity-celebrating event, and diversity-supporting business. Again, it's all about supporting the Narrative.

Similarly here:

It's obvious that this mob is black. Most of these videos we get these days, of mobs ransacking and looting stores, feature black faces. That's not manufactured; that's reality.

But this is a reality that our media refuse to see. Blacks can only ever be victimized; they can never be the victimizers. That's how the narrative goes. As Wes Yang points out in his Twitter commentary on the above clip:

He's right. We can only be grateful that cameras caught examples of police brutality against black people. Any healthy society needs to know this kind of thing happens, so it can reform itself. But we should also be aware that cameras capture anti-social, criminal realities that do not fit into a progressive narrative. From time to time, the media will air discourse about so-called "food deserts" in predominantly black cities. A "food desert" is an urban neighborhood where supermarkets are rare or non-existent, dramatically reducing the variety of food available to local residents -- especially exiling fresh fruits and vegetables from those neighborhoods.

The off-the-shelf progressive explanation is "racism," of course. A decade ago, I was at a social event in which I met an executive within a large supermarket chain, and asked him why food deserts exist. He told me that it was a matter of shoplifting. He said it made no sense for a business like his to stay out of black neighborhoods, unless they were losing money there, or the cost of doing business was too high. And, he said, it was: shoplifting meant it was too costly to open supermarkets in urban black neighborhoods.

Nobody ever talks about that. That man never would have said that had he known he was talking to a journalist. I thought about that the other day when I had to go by the Apple store in my city, for the first time in a long time, and noticed something I had not seen before: two uniformed off-duty sheriff's deputies guarding the front of the store. I asked a sales clerk about that, and he said it's to guard against the kinds of mobs that ransacked the Wawa. He said it hasn't happened at that particular store, but it has happened at other Apple stores.

("These thieves really do well," he said. "They steal these" -- he pointed to the display models -- "but they aren't fully functional. They're just for display. Then they turn around and sell them to people on the street who think they're getting a real computer, iPhone, or iPad.")

These looters are usually all-black mobs. Sometimes Latinos join in. Maybe an odd white person, an Antifa type. But unless I've missed some key videos -- and maybe I have -- the black people are dramatically overrepresented among looters. Why is that? The racist answer is that black people are inherently prone to criminality. That's a racist lie. The more accurate answer is that this is what you get in a subculture where the idea of law and order has broken down. In Britain, there are loads of white criminals raised in housing estates, who exemplify the same kind of yob criminality. Where responsible fathers cease to exist as part of the social fabric, law and order eventually goes away, because young men do not have a force to teach them, and to compel them, to channel their masculine aggression into socially positive directions.

We can talk endlessly about why this happened to black America, but the fact is, what you see above is something that ordinary people of all races will take into account when they make decisions about where to live, and where to invest. It is a historical fact that many urban areas burned out in the riots of the late 1960s did not recover economically. It was the sociological version of investors learning that they had built businesses on top of an earthquake fault. Nobody wanted to take the risk to rebuild and reopen businesses in areas where the social fabric was so weak that rioting and looting could erupt overnight -- and the people in a neighborhood would prey on themselves.

A Texas friend who passed through Baton Rouge a couple of years ago, and who stopped with his wife to visit me, e-mailed recently, after the random murder of an LSU student on the edge of the black part of town, that the government of this city had better get on top of this crime problem. He mentioned that when he came through town, he was really unsettled by how dangerous it felt. A Nashville friend who had also stopped in with his family to visit me on a roadtrip, told me the same thing. Violent crime in Baton Rouge is a black thing, both in terms of the perpetrators and, mostly, the victims. But if Louisiana's capital city gets a reputation as being crime-ridden, it's going to cause it to go into decline.

Not long ago, I had dinner with a former juvenile court judge in this city, a liberal Democrat who told me that if you want to go into deep despair about the future of Baton Rouge, spend some time in juvenile court. He told me about a case in which he had brought before him a twelve-year-old black boy -- they're almost always black kids -- in cuffs, because he had committed a violent crime. His mother was also present for her son's trial, and she too was in cuffs, because they had to bring her out of parish prison to attend the court session. The man told me that for so many black youth in our city, family, in the sense we have all understood in for time out of mind, no longer exists, and hasn't for a generation or two.

So yeah, let's talk about how "white supremacy" and "whiteness" are the most important problems facing black America, and America in general. As with the drag queen/LGBT question, the Left has no model of discourse in which it can hold black people themselves responsible in any meaningful way for the problems in black America. The Left model says it can only ever be the fault of whites. I am aware that there is a Right model that denies that structural or institutional racism has anything to do with it. I reject that model too! But "structural racism" is not looting the Wawa. "Institutional racism" is not murdering people in the cities at rates unseen for years. Those are abstractions to most people; reality is what gets people killed, and their businesses destroyed.

If violent crime, or if disgust with grooming, causes a big right-wing political backlash in this country, you watch: the media are going to tell us that this just goes to show what a racist, bigoted country we have become. That's the only way they can interpret reality: through that ideological lens. Recently in North Dakota, a middle-aged liberal man admitted to running over and killing a teenage Republican kid with his car because the kid was Republican. Have you heard about this on the national news? Of course you haven't, unless you watched Fox. We all heard about the white racist right-wing extremist who struck and killed an anti-racist protester in Charlottesville years ago -- and we should have heard about it, because it was an abhorrent crime. Yet it seems with the US media, political violence can only go one way: from Right to Left.

Last night I re-watched one of my favorite movies, The Big Short, Adam McKay's riveting, extremely entertaining account of the insanity that led up to the 2008 economic crash. If you haven't watched it in a while, or at all, please do. It feels very much of the moment, not only economically, but culturally, and in terms of war-and-peace (Ukraine, Russia, etc.). What the movie illustrates is the bubble mentality of all the people involved in the financial system. They built an entire system on fraud, on lies, and deliberately blinded themselves to what they were doing. They were all making too much money to see otherwise. Even though (as we all know now) they had ample reason to know what they were doing, and to know that they were taking advantage of hard-working little guys in packaging and selling garbage securities, they did it anyway, because it felt great. The protagonists of the film -- all of them real people, profiled by Michael Lewis in his non-fiction book of the same name -- all got very rich because they could see what was happening, did not want to live by lies, and made big financial bets against the system.

Here's a clip from the film, in which an older banker, played by Brad Pitt, chastises two younger bankers he has helped make a huge deal. These two younger bankers know that the system is going to crash, and placed massive bets that it would happen. They know that they'll be rich, and they are cheering for themselves. The older banker, Ben Rickert, slaps them around over it:

I don't know what it would mean to "short" American culture over the lies our elites tell themselves about what's happening -- that is, the d ideological lies about race, sex, and gender that they tell themselves, and expect us all to live by, even though they are obviously untrue to anybody with eyes to see and ears to hear. To repurpose a line: the principles of identity-politics liberalism do, Im sorry to say, trundle inexorably towards collapse, whether or not we want them to. But a social and cultural crash is definitely coming, probably triggered by the next economic crash. There will be no room for "I told you so," because the pain that will have been inflicted on people by these evil gender ideologues, criminals and those that carry water for them out of a misguided sense of racial justice, and the political parties that either promoted them (Democrats) or feared to attack them (many Republicans) -- that pain will have caused immense destruction in people's lives.

And for what? I can understand why the Wall Street people lived by their exploitative lies: because they were getting filthy rich. But why lie to ourselves about these other things? Who benefits?

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One more time: watch the Chattanooga video of the child stroking the crotch of the man dressed as a woman at the Pride event in Chattanooga, and tell yourself with a straight face that this is not grooming. I dare you:

UPDATE: Apparently young people sacking Wawas is a thing in Philadelphia. This is why some people can't have nice things.

Link:
Groomers, Looters, And Other Progressives - The American Conservative

When Bernie Sanderss presidential campaign ended in the spring of 2020, observers wondered what would become of the many thousands of activists who had been part of the Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020. On the left, there were concerns that, without a central, unifying candidate, the energy that had amassed around progressive electoral organizing would dissipate. Now, two years beyond the end of the campaign and with midterm elections right around the corner, we can start to make some judgments about the state of progressive electoralism, post-Sanders.

While there are fewer headline-grabbing victories than in the early days of the surge in electoral organizing, the movement to elect progressives at every level of government, in every corner of the country, is still alive and well. To get a clear picture, though, one has to look at the local, as well as the national level.

This year, election results for progressive candidates at the national level have been a mixed bag, at best. This became evident early in 2022: in Texas, Jessica Cisneros failed, again, to defeat anti-abortion Democrat Henry Cuellar in her closely watched congressional primary (and subsequent runoff election). Meanwhile, in Texass 35th congressional district, progressive Greg Casar handily won his primary. (Hell have an easy contest in November and will join Congress in January.) And so it continued throughout the year. In Pennsylvanias 12th district, Summer Lee narrowly defeated the more moderate (and AIPAC-supported) Steve Irwin. Meanwhile, New Yorks 10th congressional district was an absolute train wreck of personal ambition and competing progressive lobbies, allowing the establishment-friendly Daniel Goldman to secure a win with just 25 percent of the vote.

The shaky performance among progressive congressional candidates has provided ample fodder for widespread despair. In fact, almost since the current phase of electoral progressivism began surging in the United States, in 2016, many of its opponents have been quick to identify harbingers of its impending burnout.

Critics of electoral progressivism argue that the Trump years presented an anomalous backdrop against which the left could politic; or that leftists can only win in low-turnout elections; or that progressive candidates used the element of surprise to take down entrenched incumbents, a tactic that has produced diminishing returns as the establishment reorients around it. High-profile losses, like Cisneros in Texas or Nina Turners special election defeat, in 2021, seem to support these claims.

At a more local level, though, the picture is different. In state and municipal elections across the country, progressive and openly socialist candidates have scored numerous victories in contested primary elections this year. Whats even more striking is that candidates are succeeding in districts reflecting a wide diversity of demographic configurations. These results fly in the face of the orthodoxy that left-wing candidates can only win in diverse, young, urban areas.

In Delaware, a state known more for its corporate-friendly tax policy than its radical politics, four Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members won primaries for the state house and senate, with two other non-member DSA-endorsees winning state seats as well. In Colorado, considered a swing state until late in the last decade, two self-identified democratic socialists, one running on a police abolition platform, won races for the Colorado state house. In Wisconsin, two democratic socialists will enter the state house while others made gains on county councils, establishing a small but significant bloc of socialists elected in a state that Joe Biden won by just half a percentage point in 2020.

These victories come as the terrain for progressive electoralists has gotten more complex over the last four years. In 2018 and 2020, progressives largely went on the offensive, aggressively pursuing vulnerable incumbents and channeling the power of a new generation of organizers eager to keep their recently developed electioneering skills sharp between the 2016 and 2020 Bernie Sanders campaigns.

In 2022, however, progressives found themselves having to play defense for their incumbent candidates as much as they were going on the offensive. In Montgomery County, Maryland, DSA member and state delegate Gabriel Acevero faced opposition from his own district colleagues, as two delegates in his multicandidate district tried to replace Acevero with a third, more establishment-friendly delegate. (They failed; Acevero won reelection in July.)

In New York City, newly elected Mayor Eric Adams leveraged his bully pulpit to back, among others, a challenger who sought to unseat State Sen. Jabari Brisport (that challenge was also unsuccessful). Members of the Squad in Congress Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman have also had to defend their seats against well-funded opponents whose backers would greatly prefer a representative less hostile to corporate interests.

Personnel have become more scattered too, as the cadre of left electoralists, lacking a single candidate around whom they can rally, have devoted their time and labor to many smaller campaigns around the country. While these campaigns benefit from their individual expertise, it makes it harder for observers and analysts to figure out whether progressives are still conducting effective and winning campaigns.

Taken together, though, the electoral results from this campaign season hardly paint a picture of a movement in decline. Rather, they suggest a maturing movement exiting its upstart phase and moving into a more established formation, struggling with many of the issues that attend formalized political structures in the U.S. This maturation separates the current progressive surge from previous left electoral efforts which have exhibited little continuity between election cycles. The fact that progressive campaigns and organizations have continued to mount electoral efforts amidst an increasingly forbidding landscape only further attests to a movement that is stabilizing and building for the long term.

There are other important indicators of stabilization, too. In the first place, progressive elected officials are learning how to legislate and beginning to effect real policy changes at the state and local levels. In New York State, for example, progressive legislators, led by DSAers who were elected to state office in 2018 and 2020, have repeatedly introduced bills that would fundamentally alter the relationship between tenants and landlords in that state. This legislative effort is reminiscent of Congresswoman Cori Bushs bold protest in 2021 which helped to extend an eviction moratorium that kept hundreds of thousands of people in their homes. Developing a legislative record, especially one that is based on shared progressive principles, is one of the most heartening signs of a movement that is learning to build for long-term success.

Beyond that, progressive electoral efforts are helping to build a bench of elected officials. Candidates who are elected to local or state office today are set on a possible trajectory toward achieving higher offices and thus a more concrete grip on the levers of power. The U.S. right wing has long understood the importance of building a pipeline of electeds and standard-bearers, but centrist and center-left politicos who comprise the core Democratic Party leadership have apparently not internalized this lesson. (See, for example, the partys inaction over the Biden succession question.) That progressives are attentive to this need is a testament to their vision.

While progressives have seen fewer spectacular wins at the national level in 2022, left electoral momentum continues to propel candidates to victory at all levels, across the country. These modest, countrywide victories evince a movement in a state of evolution, led by activists looking toward the future.

Go here to read the rest:
Progressive Candidates Endured Some National Losses, But Local Wins Offer Hope - Truthout

Progressive offered a rare look inside their strategic playbook in a recent second quarter earnings report. Describing the firms market share in key customer segments, the report highlighted one group as its most significant growth opportunity. They are called the Robinsons, and if youve listened to any recent interviews with Progressive CEO Tricia Griffith, you will likely have heard about them.

The Robinsons are a segment of the property and casualty (P&C) insurance marketplace that includes households who own a home and a car and place the insurance on both with the same insurer as a bundle.

Any bundle of Home+Auto will do even if the household has two cars and two drivers, or one car and one driver, or three cars and three drivers. They all represent the ideal scenario for lifetime value in the eyes of big insurers like Progressive. By bundling auto and home policies for these Robinson families around the nation, insurers unlock the secret formula for retention, advocacy, and steady growth, while perhaps only bearing the expense of taking one onboarding process.

J.D. Power data corroborates this theory. By analyzing data from our annual Auto Insurance Study, which is now in its 22nd year of publication, we were able to find that customers in this Robinsons segment are incredibly lucrative for insurers. Specifically, we found that customer intent to renew with their current insurance provider is 53% among the Robinsons, significantly higher than any other customer segment.

This group also has the longest tenure with their current carrier of any other segment, with 45% of Robinsons having been with their insurance provider for 11 years or more. Additionally, 41% of Robinsons select their carrier in order to bundle home and auto policies, creating a Holy Grail scenario for insurers.

That ability to deepen a relationship at a household level for decades is what insurance executives have in mind when they speak about customer lifetime value.

Future of the Robinson Family in Question

While the concept of segmenting and targeting specific insurance personas is nothing new, the industrys obsession with this segment of potential super bundlers is particularly noteworthy right now because their very existence is at risk. You see, for all the talk of ideal customer profiles, current market dynamics are threatening to break up the Robinsons.

A toxic combination of record high numbers of serious collisions, skyrocketing used-vehicle valuations and surging repair costs have steadily driven auto premiums higher, sending record numbers of Robinsons back to the marketplace to shop for new, cheaper policies. According to our data, quotes on new auto insurance policies have increased to 11.8% during the past quarter. Worse, weve found that rampant customer frustration with rising auto premiums is driving significant declines in customer satisfaction with home/auto bundles, with nearly one-third (31%) of bundlers now saying that they definitely will switch their home insurer if they switch their auto insurer after an insurer-initiated auto premium increase.

Rising Auto Rates Affecting Bundle Strategy: J.D. Power

Meanwhile, more auto insurance customers than ever are turning to usage-based insurance (UBI) policies to lower their monthly payments. Participation in UBI programs has doubled since 2016, with 16% of auto insurance customers now participating in such programs.

The combined effect of these disruptions to the status quo in the P&C space is a fragmentation of the ultra-valuable Robinsons segment. In theory, that Robinsons family tree, which currently represents an opportunity to bundle a car and a home policy, and maybe even some life insurance and toy policies on things like motorcycles and boats, runs the risk of migrating into a less valuable, less loyal segment.

Targeting Lower Value Customer Segments

Progressive has names for these segments too. There are the Wrights, who look just like a Robinson, except they are not bundling; the Dianes, who rent and have any car and any driver; and the Sams, who seem to only have car insurance, are monoline auto policy shoppers but can have multiple cars. Perhaps not surprisingly, customer loyalty and total lifetime value declines for each segment, with the Wright family typically renewing with the same carrier at a rate of 45% and Dianes and Sams showing the highest degrees of price sensitivity and inclination to shop for a new insurer.

Its clear from Progressives strategy playbook that every savvy multi-line personal insurance carrier would much rather bundle the Robinson family tree than watch them unbundle themselves to take advantage of lower-cost UBI programs. But, the current dynamics of the marketplace may have other plans. That puts the focus for insurers squarely on the overall brand experience their customers are receivingacross all linesand on understanding how changes in one area, such as telematics adoption in an auto policy, can affect the entire customer journey. Bundling small businesses is now a thing too.

If insurers are going to increase their market share in the valuable Robinsons segment, theyre going to need to track every aspect of the Robinson customer experience and act quickly to address any gaps where they could be losing them to cost pressure or some other variable. In the long run, having loyal customers with multiple policies helps grow total premium faster and with less expenses. Keeping the Robinsons happy means that insurers are going to need to adjust course from their current path, to be household-centric versus product-centric.

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The rest is here:
Viewpoint: How Progressives Relationship with The Robinsons Could Be at Risk - Insurance Journal

Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia held apress conference and delivered aspeech on the Senate floor Tuesday making the case for federal permitting reforms and defending his proposed changes from progressive criticism, an indication that hes feeling the heat as opposition to what critics have dubbed the senators dirty deal continues tobuild.

Manchin is getting desperate, its the only reason hed host apress conference like this, argued Jamie Henn, the director of Fossil Free Media. But the more he defends his dirty deal, the clearer it is this is just agrab bag of handouts to his fossil fuel industry donors. Todays performance only strengthens ouropposition.

During his press conference, the West Virginia senator announced that the full text of permitting legislation that hes hoping to attach to amust-pass government funding package will be released Wednesday ahead of apotential vote next week. The Senate Democratic leadership and President Joe Biden agreed to give Manchin avote on the permitting changes in exchange for the oil and gas allys support for the recently passed Inflation ReductionAct.

Manchin complained to reporters Tuesday that his permitting proposalwhich aims to accelerate environmental reviews of fossil fuel projects such as the Mountain Valley fracked gas pipelineis coming under fire from both progressive climate champions such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Republicans eager to deny Manchin and the Democratic Party any legislative wins, even if they back the specificpolicies.

Its like arevenge politics, said Manchin, the top recipient of oil and gas money in Congress. Basically revenge towards one person:Me.

On Twitter, Sanders pushed back against Manchins comment and said that defeating the Big Oil side deal is not aboutrevenge.

Its about whether we will stand with 650 environmental and civil rights organizations who understand that the future of the planet is with renewable energy and energy efficiency not approving the Mountain Valley Pipeline, Sanders wrote. The Mountain Valley Pipeline would generate emissions equivalent to 37 coal plants or putting 27 million more cars on theroad.

Its hard for me to understand why anyone concerned about climate change would consider voting to approve such adirty and dangerous fracked gas pipeline, headded.

Manchin insists that permitting changes would carry benefits for both fossil fuel projects and renewable energy development, but climate campaigners and agrowing number of Democratic lawmakers warn the plan laid out in draft legislative language would weaken bedrock environmental laws and endanger communities in the paths of pipelines and other polluting fossil fuelinfrastructure.

Sanders tweeted Tuesday that the Big Oil side deal requires the president to prioritize 25 energy projects for expedited environmentalreviews.

Of those, 19 could be dirty fossil fuel or mining projects and ZERO are required to be renewable energy projects that would reduce emissions, the Vermont senator wrote. That isunacceptable.

In aMonday letter to Sens. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and Tom Carper (D-Del.)the founding members of the Senate Environmental Justice Caucusa coalition of nearly 80 frontline organizations and climate advocacy groups called on the trio to reject Manchins pernicious permitting legislation and any amendedversions.

We firmly believe that nothing can improve abill that would deregulate landmark environmental laws like [the National Environmental Policy Act] and [the Clean Water Act], the letterreads.

A floor fight over the permitting reforms could come as soon as next week, when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is expected to attach the Manchin-backed proposal to acontinuing resolution that must pass by September 30 to avert agovernment shutdown.

Survey data released Monday by Data for Progress shows that 59% of likely U.S. voters believe that lawmakers should consider permitting legislation as astandalone bill, and separate it from amust-pass government spendingpackage.

Thus far, just one member of the Senate Democratic caucusSandershas vowed to vote against any continuing resolution that includes fossil fuel-friendly permittingreforms.

On the House side, 77 Democrats have warned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) not to allow the inclusion of permitting reforms in the continuing resolutionbut only Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) has pledged to vote no if the dirty deal ultimately ends up in thepackage.

If we were to pass this side deal, it would mean more plants like that harming Black and Brown communities, putting pollution in the air where kids cant be in their backyards, Khanna told The Young Turks earlier this month. Were not just talking about some abstract policy here. Were talking about allowing refineries, fossil fuel projects, and heavy industry to destroyneighborhoods.

This story was first posted at Common Dreams.

Read more:
Opposition from Progressives and Republicans Could Sink Manchin's Fossil Fuel Permitting Deal - In These Times

Ill let you in on a dirty secret about journalism: Most of what we write good, bad, or otherwise is as evanescent as yesterdays rain. Readers may get most of their news in digital form rather than paper these days, but the old adage still holds true: Todays news is tomorrows fish wrap.

Every once in a while, though, writers on deadline produce something of lasting value, an insight that illuminates not just today, but the past and the future both, something that helps explain why we are where we are.

Sam Bowman, John Myers, and Ben Southwoods article The housing theory of everything, published a year ago in Works in Progress, is just such a key. Try listing every problem the Western world has at the moment, they wrote. From Covid to slow economic growth to climate change to falling fertility, they all had one root cause in common: A shortage of housing: too few homes being built where people want to live.

Their argument was as simple as it was true: So long as housing supply remains constrained in the most economically productive cities in the US, so would the countrys potential. Whatever else the US wanted to do solve climate change, reduce economic inequality, make it easier for people to have as many children as they wanted fixing the long-running housing problem had to come first. Everything else was just hot air.

Once you begin to understand the housing theory of everything, you start to see it everywhere. Including on a small, well-heeled island off the coast of Massachusetts called Marthas Vineyard where last week scores of migrants were shipped via jet by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in a stunt as inhumane as it was, sadly, likely politically effective for them with many Republican voters.

Make no mistake, what DeSantis and other Republican governors like Greg Abbott of Texas are doing as they send thousands of migrants to Democratic-led cities far from the border like some Twitter trolling done in real life, with real people is almost entirely for their own political glory. DeSantis received a standing ovation from GOP voters at a political event in Kansas on Sunday.

If DeSantis thought that the mostly Democratic citizens of Marthas Vineyard would respond to his stunt by treating the migrants who arrived on their island the way he would, the governor was mistaken. The migrants, who were fleeing Venezuela, received a warm welcome from locals before they were voluntarily sent onward to a military base for humanitarian support.

As the headline of a Jonathan Chait piece in New York magazine put it, DeSantis tries to prove liberals hate immigrants as much as he does, fails.

But if its clear that the people of Marthas Vineyard or New York City or Washington, DC, dont hate immigrants and will mobilize to welcome human beings who are innocent pawns in a political game, that doesnt mean that they will put their weight behind the policies that are really needed to support the masses of migrants who want to come to the US for a better life.

Thats because perhaps the No. 1 thing that migrants need and for that matter, lots of American citizens as well is more housing in the cities that have jobs. And whatever the leaders of those mostly deep blue cities may say when DeSantis or Abbott drops a busload or planeload of migrants on their doorstep, they seem unwilling to deliver it and too many of their constituents apparently feel the same.

In Marthas Vineyard, the affordable housing problem is so acute that the islands only emergency-room-equipped hospital has been operating with a quarter of its staff jobs unfilled, according to the Washington Post. When the hospitals CEO offered 19 jobs to health care workers in January, every one of them was turned down, in large part because even doctors couldnt afford to find a year-round place to live.

Or take New York City, which I call home and where you can often see Refugees Are Welcome signs in the windows of nice brownstones, side by side with fliers decrying a new development. Between 2000 and 2020, New York expanded by more than 800,000 residents, yet fewer than 450,000 new apartment units and single-family homes were built during that time. Not surprisingly, in May the median rent in Manhattan reached a record $4,000 though if youre willing to make do in Brooklyn, you could get by with $3,250.

And San Francisco? Well, San Franciscos leaders seem to treat housing construction like golf, where the idea is to get the lowest score possible; community opposition and restrictive regulations mean that the city is on track to build just 3,000 housing units this year, with an average building cost that is the highest in the world per square foot. (Though somehow, San Francisco still approved more new housing units per 1,000 residents between 2010 and 2019 than New York.)

Even worse than the cities are many of the suburbs that surround them. In suburban counties from Nassau and Westchester outside New York to the commuter towns surrounding Boston, even fewer housing units were added per 1,000 residents in the previous decade than in New York City itself. That in turn pushes low-income residents farther and farther away from jobs, putting further weight on economic growth.

As The housing theory of everything put it, even as everything from TVs to cars to refrigerators have become cheaper to buy on an hours-worked basis over the past 50 years, housing in major cities has become much, much more expensive. As a result, people who werent lucky or privileged enough to buy at the right moment are forced to spend more and more of their household budget if they want to live in a New York or a Boston or a San Francisco.

Its true that the US does face a border crisis. An average of 8,500 migrants and asylum-seekers are intersecting with officials each day, what Axios termed a strikingly high number, and cities along the border are struggling to deal with the flow.

Its also true that people will keep coming. Between economic factors, the pressure of climate change, and the drive for safety, the flow of migrants from the south is only likely to increase in the years and decades ahead.

Republican officials have their own solution to that challenge: attempt to stop the flow at the border by the harshest methods possible, and make political hay while doing so. If progressives want to live up to their rhetoric, they need to support the policies that will build the housing supply needed to absorb the flow of newcomers and in doing so, help reduce the extreme costs of living that hamper longtime residents as well.

Otherwise, refugees and migrants may be welcomed but they wont be welcome to stay.

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Why housing is the key to a truly humane migrant policy - Vox.com