February 11, 2017


News and Views


http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump-voter-fraud-allegations-start-look-deranged

Trump voter-fraud allegations start to look ‘deranged’
By Steve Benen
02/10/17 05:00 PM


The fact that Donald Trump continues to talk incessantly about the election from three months ago doesn’t bother me. The fact that Donald Trump continues to embrace and repeat delusional conspiracy theories about the election worries me a great deal.

On Thursday, during a meeting with 10 senators that was billed as a listening session about Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, the president went off on a familiar tangent, suggesting again that he was a victim of widespread voter fraud, despite the fact that he won the presidential election.

As soon as the door closed and the reporters allowed to observe for a few minutes had been ushered out, Trump began to talk about the election, participants said, triggered by the presence of former New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who lost her reelection bid in November and is now working for Trump as a Capitol Hill liaison, or “Sherpa,” on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch.

According to the Politico article, the president told attendees that he and Ayotte would have won New Hampshire – both narrowly lost in reality – were it not for “thousands” of “illegally” cast ballots. Trump reportedly added that he believes these voters were “brought in on buses” from neighboring Massachusetts.

There was, according to one of Politico’s sources, “an uncomfortable silence” in the room after Trump made the comment.

Which is the proper response under the circumstances. As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes put it, these ridiculous presidential assertions, bolstered by literally no evidence, are clearly “deranged.”

Worse, they’re part of a pattern.

Let’s not lose sight of what we learned just two weeks ago. As the New York Times’ Glenn Thrush reported, the president, resentful about coming in second in the popular vote, repeated the delusional idea that he secretly came in first after accounting for votes from undocumented immigrants. When Democrats at the meeting balked, Trump shared his proof: an anecdote he heard from Bernhard Langer, a professional golfer the president characterized as a friend.

The witnesses described the story this way: Mr. Langer, a 59-year-old native of Bavaria, Germany – a winner of the Masters twice and of more than 100 events on major professional golf tours around the world – was standing in line at a polling place near his home in Florida on Election Day, the president explained, when an official informed Mr. Langer he would not be able to vote.

Ahead of and behind Mr. Langer were voters who did not look as if they should be allowed to vote, Mr. Trump said, according to the staff members – but they were nonetheless permitted to cast provisional ballots. The president threw out the names of Latin American countries that the voters might have come from.

The anecdote, the aides told the Times, “was greeted with silence.”

Trump isn’t great at picking up on social cues, so let’s make this plain: when Trump shares these delusional conspiracy theories, adopted because they make him feel better about the fact that he came in second, it makes those around him uncomfortable and worried about the president’s stability.

He doesn’t understand the silence, so he keeps raising ridiculous assertions, which he appears to sincerely believe, despite the growing gap between his ideas and our reality.

It’s an uncomfortable subject, but the need for an awkward national conversation is growing more apparent.


DO GOOGLE THE FOLLOWING PHRASE FOR A LARGER AMOUNT ON TRUMP AND CONSPIRACY BELIEFS THAN I HAD REALIZED. I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT HE WAS MAINLY JUST A “PATHOLOGICAL LIAR,” AS SANDERS RECENTLY SAID; BUT THIS ARTICLE AND HIS REPETITION OF CERTAIN STORIES DO SEEM TO SHOW THAT HE MAY BE MORE MENTALLY DISTURBED THAN WE HAD DARED TO ADMIT. ONE OF HIS STORIES FROM THE PAST IS THAT HE WAS IN A CITY HOTEL – I DON’T REMEMBER WHERE ANY MORE – WHEN THE NEWS OF 9/11 BROKE. HE CLAIMED THAT HE PERSONALLY SAW A LARGE GROUP OF MUSLIMS BREAK OUT IN CELEBRATION AT THE NEWS.

THE MAYOR OF THAT CITY DENIED THAT IT HAPPENED. THAT STORY ALWAYS SOUNDED HIGHLY UNLIKELY TO ME. HOW CONVENIENT IT WAS THAT HE HAPPENED TO BE THERE TO SEE THAT. THE STATEMENT IN TODAY’S ARTICLE THAT ALL OF THOSE “ILLEGAL” VOTERS CAME IN ON BUSES IS EQUALLY UNLIKELY. I KNOW THAT TRUMP SUPPORTERS WILL PROBABLY SAY THAT MSNBC IS “LIBERAL FAKE NEWS,” BUT I DON’T BELIEVE THAT. BESIDES, THE FACT CHECKERS HAVE STATED THAT MSNBC IS A RESPECTED SOURCE.

Explore:
“The MaddowBlog, Conspiracy Theories, Donald Trump”




http://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-indicates-he-may-sign-a-new-travel-ban/

Trump indicates he may sign a new travel ban
By JAN CRAWFORD CBS NEWS
February 10, 2017, 6:39 PM

President Trump said on Friday that he may sign a brand-new travel ban next week, rather than waiting for the courts to deal with his first one.

Mr. Trump says speed is essential to national security, but his ban was placed on hold last week by a federal judge and Mr. Trump lost a second round Thursday in a Court of Appeals.

trump-travel-ban-gaggle-2017-2-10.jpg
President Trump and First Lady Melania aboard Air Force One on Friday, Feb. 10, 2017. CBS NEWS

Aboard Air Force One on Friday, Mr. Trump vowed he would soon impose tougher screening procedures -- and possibly a new executive order -- adding to comments he made earlier in the day at the White House.

“We will be doing something very rapidly, having to do with additional security for our country, you’ll be seeing that sometime next week,” Mr. Trump said in a press conference.

President Trump, Shinzo Abe tout historic alliance
Play VIDEO
President Trump, Shinzo Abe tout historic alliance

The appeals court ruling kept Mr. Trumps executive order on hold while courts consider whether it’s legal for him to impose a temporary ban on refugees and immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim nations

The Obama administration had previously identified those seven countries as of most concern for terrorism -- and Mr. Trump said the temporary ban was necessary while national security officials reviewed Mr. Obama’s vetting procedures.

Sources say one possible option -- stepping up that review even without a travel ban in place and coming up with tougher new vetting measures -- hat [sic] would make much of the executive order unnecessary and would avoid legal problems ahead.

What's next for Trump's travel ban
Play VIDEO
What's next for Trump's travel ban

“There is a concern that the reckless manner in which President Trump did this order and the litigation that ensued will cause the courts to put limits on perfectly legitimate authorities,” said Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution.

Now there’s a chance the entire California-based federal appeals court ‎could review Thursday’s ruling by the three judges, and Mr. Trump also could ask the Supreme Court to intervene -- but, at this preliminary phase, that is unlikely.

© 2017 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Jan Crawford
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Jan Crawford is CBS News Chief Political and Legal Correspondent. She is from "Crossroads," Alabama.



I’M UNHAPPY TO SEE GREAT DISORDER BEING USED AS A POLITICAL TOOL, BUT IT IS CLEAR THAT THE REPUBLICANS ARE MAKING SOME CHANGES IN THEIR ACTIONS. THAT’S CALLED THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE. LET’S FACE IT. IN THE PRIVACY OF THEIR POLITICAL OFFICES, THEY CAN ERASE ANGRY EMAILS, BUT WHEN RAUCOUS CROWDS ARE REPORTED IN THE NEWS, THE TRUTH OF IT CAN’T BE HIDDEN, SO EVEN SENATORS LOOK AT THE POSSIBILITY OF CHANGING THEIR STANCES. SOME CALL THAT KIND OF THING “UNAMERICAN,” BUT TO ME IF IT’S THE ONLY EFFECTIVE THING TO DO, THEN DO IT.


http://www.cbsnews.com/news/in-the-trump-era-some-congressional-town-halls-are-packed-with-protesters/

In the Trump era, congressional town halls are packed with protesters
CBS NEWS
February 10, 2017, 7:22 PM

Protests are being heard in Congressional town halls across the country.

“Do your job! Do your job!” protesters shouted in Utah’s third district. GOP Rep. Jason Chaffetz is not used to getting booed in his reliably red district. But on Thursday night, he knew what was coming -- because his GOP colleagues have faced similar anger in their districts.

At a town hall meeting in California’s fourth district, audience members shouted “boo!” at GOP Rep. Tom McClintock. In Colorado’s 6th district, Rep. Mike Coffman told his constituents “let’s not yell at each other.”

cordes-angry-town-hall-2-2017-2-10.jpg
Colorado’s Rep. Mike Coffman at a town hall meeting. COURTESY OF SEAN FRAME, EL DORADO PROGRESSIVE

“Putting the insurance companies back in charge is wrong,” an audience member told Rep. Justin Amash about the Republican push to repeal Obamacare.

In Grand Rapids on Thursday night, Amash stood his ground.

“We need to find ways to handle this issue not at the federal level,” Amash responded.

But others, like Coffman, beat a hasty retreat.

“He snuck out, and he snuck out early! He snuck out early,” a bystander said.

cordes-angry-town-hall-3-2017-2-10.jpg
Protesters outside a town hall meeting. CBS NEWS

McClintock had to be escorted out by police.

“This is what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!” people shouted outside McClintock’s town hall.

Most of the protesters are frustrated Democrats, taking a page from the Tea Party movement that sprung up to oppose Obamacare in 2009.

In Florida this weekend, Gus Bilirakis was confronted by a pediatrician, who said Obamacare had helped his patients.

Health care is not the only flashpoint. Chaffetz was also grilled about the president’s travel ban, and his conflicts of interest.

The protests are already having an impact. Some Republicans are talking are [sic] repairing Obamacare rather than replacing and and President Trump said repeal and replace would happen almost immediately, now he says it could be 2018.




GO TO POLITICO FOR THE FOLLOWING LONG, BUT INFORMATIVE, ARTICLE ON THE ALT-RIGHT

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/alt-right-trump-washington-dc-power-milo-214629

The Alt-Right Comes to Washington




THE BRITS SINCE BREXIT AND TRUMP

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/theresa-may-has-no-good-options-214697

LETTER FROM THE U.K.
Theresa May Has No Good Options
Post-Brexit Britain may need the United States more than ever. But kissing The Donald’s ring comes with consequences.
By ALEX MASSIE January 26, 2017

Friday, British Prime Minister Theresa May will become the first foreign leader to visit Donald Trump in Washington since he became president. With a nod to Trump’s Scottish bloodlines, the prime minister is expected to present him with a quaich, a two-handled ceremonial cup traditionally used for drinking whisky that is supposed to be a token of trust and friendship. Whether the teetotaler Trump will appreciate this gesture is one thing; whether that trust and friendship can actually be established is entirely another.

The special relationship, after all, is in a very special quandary. Trump’s “America First” rhetoric has horrified almost all of America’s traditional European allies. His suggestion that NATO is “obsolete” and his happiness to countenance the complete collapse of the European Union threatens to abandon more than a half-century of U.S. foreign policy. Even though Trump has endeared himself to the Brexiteers, who cheered his recent declaration that Britain was “so smart” to leave the EU, Trump is far less popular in Britain than even George W. Bush was at his worst. During the campaign, May herself complained that Trump’s rhetoric about Muslims was “divisive, unhelpful and wrong”; one of her chiefs of staff called Trump a “chump,” and the other said he had no interest in “reaching out” to Trump.

Yet, May can no longer ignore The Donald. Unless you’re Vladimir Putin, you deal with the American president you have, not the one you might like to have in the Oval Office—that’s the starting point for every international leader in the Age of Trump. In fact, May, who is herself new to international politics, may need to lean on the United States more than other prime ministers did. Having voted this summer to abandon the European Union, the British must cling tightly to their Anglophone alliances and trade partnerships.

All this puts May in an impossible spot: How can she endear herself to her most powerful foreign partner when he is loathed in her own country, and many of its longtime European partners? This is a high-risk business, with huge potential for humiliation.

True, there are risks for Trump. If he cannot establish a strong working relationship with Britain, his chances of doing so with any other country (well, except maybe Russia) must be reckoned negligible. A meeting with the British prime minister is, as far as Trump is concerned, diplomacy steadied with training wheels. If he still falls, it will be telling. Americans and foreigners alike will further doubt his statesmanship, and his less-than-steady start in office could get even shakier.

The dangers for May, however, are more significant. It’s not just the clash between Britain’s national interest, which demands a good working relationship with the new American administration, and its national pride, which demands that she keep her distance from Trump. Making matters more awkward is the fact Trump thrives on, and indeed may only respond to, unctuous flattery. May, who has relished being described as “a bloody difficult woman,” is at risk of seeming Trump’s patsy. At the Republicans’ congressional retreat in Philadelphia on Thursday, she already seemed to go all-in for Trump, declaring that it was an honor to be present as “dawn breaks on a new era of American renewal.” “Haven’t you noticed? Opposites attract,” she quipped earlier to reporters. If May has to eat an uncommonly gristly sandwich, then so be it.

Brexit adds a further complication. President Barack Obama infuriated pro-Brexit Britons over the summer when he suggested that leaving the European Union would relegate Britain to “the back of the queue” for any further U.S. trade deals. Trump, by contrast, has said a one-on-one U.S.-UK deal can be done quickly, and that Britain is “at the front of the line.” Pro-Brexit British conservatives are determined to see in Trump a man with whom they can do business. (One cabinet minister told the Spectator, “Trump has come along like the tooth fairy. This is one massive, magnificent gift.”) That puts enormous pressure on May—who has chosen the slogan “global Britain” to define her administration, promising to make the country a champion of free trade—to make real progress on a deal with Trump, the prospects of which are uncertain.

It is hard to square that goal, however, with a president elected, at least in part, because of his overt hostility to free trade. Besides, nothing in Trump’s character indicates he appreciates, let alone values, the concept of mutual advantage. He loves deals, but the joy of the deal comes from screwing the other guy. Everything appears to be a zero-sum game to Trump. In that respect, any warm words Trump and May exchange in the White House demand skepticism. What Trump does will be far more important than what he says. The flag-waving sections of the British press have cheered Trump’s decision to return a bust of Winston Churchill to the Oval Office, but that kind of symbolism is cheap, easy and close to meaningless.

Maybe, just maybe, Trump will recognize that even he needs friends, and that perhaps no country is better placed to guide an inexperienced U.S. president than America’s old wartime ally. Obama reportedly advised May to gently educate the new president in the ways of the world, and maybe Trump will listen. For May, that strategy carries unmistakable echoes of former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s assertion that “These Americans represent the new Roman empire, and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go.” That was as patronizing as it was delusional; May must avoid the same mistake of overestimating Britain’s importance and the Americans’ desire to listen.

Addressing congressional Republicans on Thursday, May flattered her audience while lacing her remarks with a considerable measure of self-delusion. “So as we rediscover our confidence together,” she said, “as you renew your nation just as we renew ours, we have the opportunity—indeed, the responsibility—to renew the special relationship for this new age. We have the opportunity to lead, together, again.” It is hard to read this as anything other than wistful pining for a world long since gone, but remarkably the British government seems to be taking the idea seriously.

For more than 60 years, the Anglo-American alliance has been the centerpiece of British foreign policy. And Friday’s meeting at the White House will surely produce kind words and flattering headlines hailing a new era in the so-called special relationship. In the post-Brexit era, that relationship looms larger than ever. Britain cannot move away from the Atlantic alliance, but in the age of Trump, nor can we rely on it.

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Alex Massie writes for the Spectator, the Times and other publications.




BELOW IS AN ARTICLE THAT EVERYBODY WHO CARES ABOUT KEEPING THIS COUNTRY A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY NEEDS TO READ, ESPECIALLY THE MAINSTREAM “LIBERAL” DEMOCRATS WHO STUBBORNLY AND SMUGLY DECIDED THAT PUTTING BERNIE SANDERS ON THE DEMOCRATIC 2016 TICKET AS VICE PRESIDENT WAS NOT SOMETHING THAT THEY “NEEDED” TO DO, AND NOT SOMETHING THAT HE DESERVED. TO THEM, FROM WHAT SEVERAL HAVE SAID, HE WAS AN INTERLOPER TRYING TO TAKE OVER THE PARTY RATHER THAN THE FORERUNNER IN THE PROGRESSIVE FIELD. BESIDES, LET’S FACE IT, HE MESSED UP HILLARY’S CORONATION.

THEY RESENTED HIM BADLY; AND AS A RESULT, THE ONE OTHER POPULIST OUT THERE, TRUMP, WON THOSE VOTES OF THE “FORGOTTEN [WHITE] PEOPLE.” THE DEMOCRATS ARE STILL IFFY ABOUT OPENING UP THEIR RANKS TO A MUCH GREATER INFLUENCE BY THE FEW TRUE PROGRESSIVES WHO ARE STILL IN THE PARTY. THEY SIMPLY WOULD NOT LOOK AT THE TRENDS. HILLARY EXHIBITED AN OBNOXIOUS LEVEL OF “CONFIDENCE,” AND THAT TURNS PEOPLE OFF COLD. BUT WORST OF ALL, SHE HAD MISCALCULATED BADLY IN HER STRATEGY. AS TRUMP POINTED OUT, SHE DIDN’T CAMPAIGN MUCH IN THE LIGHTLY POPULATED RURAL AREAS, WHILE TRUMP DID JUST THE OPPOSITE.

DUE TO A LONG DROUGHT, ECONOMICALLY, AND WITH TOO FEW JOBS THAT PAID A LIVING WAGE, PEOPLE WERE FRIGHTENED AND ANGRY. AMERICA WAS READY TO THINK ABOUT SOMETHING NEW, EVEN A SOCIALIST. BERNIE SANDERS HAD NO GREAT AMOUNT OF MONEY NOR ANY SOCIAL PRETENSIONS, BUT WAS A WELLSPRING OF WISDOM, VERBAL CLEVERNESS AND INEXHAUSTIBLE HOPEFUL ENERGY. HE’S ALSO A FIGHTER, AND WE NEED THAT NOW. THE DEMS, ON THE OTHER HAND, HAD BECOME TOO RICH AND POWERFUL TO BOW DOWN AND REPRESENT THEIR ORIGINAL CONSTITUENCY HONESTLY, WHEN THOSE PEOPLE NEEDED THEM MOST. TRUMP, ON THE OTHER HAND, FLATTERED THEM. “I LIKE THE UNDEREDUCATED” HE QUIPPED. WELL-TO-DO WHITES, SO FREQUENTLY, AREN’T “NICE” IN THE WAY THEY TREAT “THEIR INFERIORS,” AND THERE IS HATRED BUILDING AGAIN OVER THAT.

IF WE DON’T START LIVING UP TO OUR NOBLE IDEALS, WE MAY VERY WELL BE AB0UT TO LOSE OUR “CITY UPON THE HILL.” THIS ARTICLE GOES DEEPLY INTO THE CHANGES IN THE GROUP CONSCIENCE OF ORDINARY AMERICANS, AND BY THAT, I MEAN THEIR COMMONLY HELD BELIEFS. IN RURAL AREAS, THEY TEND TO BE PEOPLE OF FAITH AND NOT OF GREAT INTELLECTUAL PROWESS.

THE MAIN REASON FOR THAT IS THAT ONLY THE MIDDLE CLASS AND ABOVE CAN SEND THEIR KIDS TO COLLEGE, AND IN A PERIOD OF FEWER AND FEWER JOBS, WHEN SCHOLARSHIPS DON’T COVER EVERYTHING, POOR KIDS GENERALLY HAVE TO “WORK THEIR WAY THROUGH SCHOOL.”

I HOPE THIS SITUATION WILL CHANGE AS MIDDLE CLASS FOLKS STOP TAKING THEIR SOCIAL POSITION FOR GRANTED AND BEHAVE LESS UNKINDLY TOWARD THE POOR. THAT SUPERIOR ATTITUDE IS WHAT PEOPLE REALLY DON’T LIKE.


http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/blue-red-state-democrats-trump-country-214647

LETTER FROM PEPIN COUNTY

‘What Do You Do if a Red State Moves to You?’
Many Americans woke up after the election to discover that they lived in Trump Country. In one corner of Wisconsin, shocked liberals can’t escape an uneasy feeling: They were the reason why.

By MICHAEL KRUSE January/February 2017

Photograph -- Andrea Myklebust, one of Pepin County’s Democrats. | Photographs by Danny Wilcox Frazier

Pepin County, Wisconsin—The morning after Donald Trump was elected president, Andrea Myklebust’s sheep needed new hay. Distraught by the results from the night before, feeling like this was the first day of a suddenly altered American reality, she walked down the driveway of her farm to meet the man who brings her feed for her flock. Myklebust didn’t know for sure, but she suspected he had voted for Trump, a person she considered odious, dangerous and unqualified for the job he had just won. She said nothing about the election, and neither did he, as they talked only about where to drop the bales of hay—a brief exchange during which, she told me, she tried to “rearrange” her facial expression into something “neutral,” “friendly.” She could do only so much, though, to mask her despair. The sculptor, shepherd and weaver had moved from Minnesota’s Twin Cities because she found this area’s rolling hills bucolic and welcoming—and now, and for the first time in her 11 years here, she felt uneasy.

When I met Myklebust, 51, in late November, these sentiments had not softened. She described the history-twisting election of 2016 in stark, before-and-after terms, unable to fathom how anybody could have voted for Trump, much less three-fifths of the people with whom she shares her adopted home in Pepin County. “There is sort of a baseline assumption of common sense and decency that’s been thrown into question in a way I never expected it to be,” she said. “And it’s a struggle. You have to continue to interact with people, and you have to wonder: Do you really have hate in your heart in this way? Really? At the core, I didn’t believe this about us.”


The population of the county is barely more than 7,000 people, which can give it an everybody-knows-everybody sort of allure. But in this tiny county, the smallest in Wisconsin, wedged against the east bank of the Mississippi River, Myklebust and so many other Democrats and progressives woke up November 9 jilted, deeply confused about where they lived—where they had lived for years, decades, even their entire lives. Wisconsin, after all, hadn’t voted for a Republican for president since 1984, and Pepin County itself had gone blue in every presidential election since 1972. This put it near the top of a sizeable, nationwide list of similarly flipped counties—the rural, out-of-the-way spots on the map that made Trump president. It left those on the losing end of the tally roundly stunned.

“Totally shocked,” said Wally Zick, 71.

“Blew me away,” said Jen Peterson, 36.

“My mom said, ‘What happened to our blue state?’” said Alex Johnson, 24. “I said, ‘Trump set it on fire.’”

Welcome to Pepin | Wisconsin’s smallest county is a mostly rural area that had voted blue in every presidential election since 1972. So Democrats were shocked when Pepin went for Donald Trump. | Danny Wilcox Frazier for Politico Magazine

Terry Mesch, 67, has lived here since 1976 and oversees the local historical society. He knows the story of the county better than practically anybody, and yet he was “dumbfounded,” he said, telling me he walked into his polling spot on the day of the election and voted alongside people whose names he knows. The results that rolled in later that evening were not at all what he was expecting. More than that, they came with an unsettling realization: “I said to myself, ‘I don’t know my own neighbors.’”

Democrats and progressives thought they lived in one kind of place. It turns out they live in another. That’s true in the nation as a whole, and it’s particularly, poignantly true here. Pepin County at first glance doesn’t seem like much of a microcosm of America—it’s 98 percent white, the overall population hasn’t changed in 120 years, and the unemployment rate this past fall was an infinitesimal 3 percent—but what I found in a week of talking to farmers and small-business owners, longtime residents and transplants, was a startlingly precise reflection of the national rift that animated Trump’s campaign. “Stronger Together” versus “Great Again.” Move-ins versus natives. Urban versus rural. The loss wrought by long-term change here isn’t so much a visible picture of a closed, rusted factory as it is a less measurable communal decline in morale, a slow seep of self-worth, a perceived slippage of relevance in the national conversation.

As Donald Trump takes the oath of office—a phrase that still has the power to make those on the left shudder in shock—an easy way to process the election is that people in rural areas all over America loathe Washington and New York and San Francisco and Hollywood and finally had a chance to show it in a big way. But Pepin County is one of those rural areas, and the resentment isn’t just directed at the coasts. It’s local. Here, the urban elite isn’t a faceless, distant other: It’s the enclave of liberal, mostly Twin Cities newcomers who have moved here over the past few decades—not just an abstract political imposition, but an actual physical presence. It has spawned anger and bitterness, a simmering undercurrent of alienation among many people locally born and raised. It has made “Democrat” mean something it didn’t mean a generation ago. And it was made manifest on November 8.

Pepin County represents not only the most compelling reasons Trump won but also the reasons so many liberals were so surprised. If more people from more places had been talking to the people of Pepin County—and if the people of Pepin County had been talking more to one another—the notion of a Trump victory wouldn’t have seemed farfetched in the least. But my interviews, with Democrats and Republicans alike, started to feel to me like listening to disconnected halves of conversations that had never occurred. And still weren’t.

“We have found a whole community here,” said Pat Carlson, Wally Zick’s wife, “of very like-minded—it’s going to sound elite—but bookish, artsy, I’d say compassionate … organic foodies, the whole nine yards. It’s all transplants. It’s mostly liberals.” As for this election, and the locals, she continued, “I think they thought the liberal elite was looking down on them, and I guess, in some ways, we were. Because we couldn’t believe anybody would vote for Trump.”

Zick described a fault line here between the old and the new, the people who have lived in the county forever and the move-ins from over the Minnesota border, clustered primarily on the southwestern end of the county. “They don’t come here,” Zick said. “We don’t go there.”

“We don’t know them,” Carlson, 72, said.

“I could ask them, ‘Why did you vote for Trump?’” Zick said. “Then what would I do about it?”

“You don’t want to make them mad,” Carlson said.

***

The way it is, I heard over and over in my time in Pepin County, is not the way it was.

Small family farms, mostly dairy farms, which traditionally were not only the lifeblood but also a psychological backbone, are long gone—replaced by agribusiness. The overall number of farms has gone down, the average size gone up. “Get bigger, get better, or get out,” Earl Butz, Richard Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, once famously (or notoriously) said. Global competition in a more connected world changed agriculture as it did almost every other industry.

The 2 percent of the population in Pepin County that isn’t white are mainly Mexicans who milk the cows now, instead of the people who used to: the sons and daughters of the farmers. These migrant laborers have been fixtures on farms in Wisconsin for going on 20 years, and few locals are clamoring for their jobs. “The white boys won’t do that kind of work,” not anymore, Mesch told me. But none of that changes the fact that one page of the county’s weekly newspaper packed with pictures of dads with their kids and the deer they shot is followed by another page stocked with classified ads that say things like “NIGHT MILKER WANTED,” “Hablo Espanol.”

Meanwhile, many of the smartest, most enterprising youth from Pepin County—as in so many counties like it—have been leaving for college and never coming back. School enrollments are down, and districts have consolidated, leaving behind in smaller communities hurt feelings and ripped-away sources of pride. “The farm families have declined, and so have the school populations,” said Mesch, who keeps an office in the cold, old, wood-framed courthouse in Durand, the county seat. “They feel like they’re losing their identity.”

‘Trump set it on fire’ | The election results left some locals—like Wally Zick and Pat Carlson, top; Alex Johnson, bottom right; and Terry Mesch, bottom left, the head of the local historical society—wondering if they even knew their own neighbors.
‘Trump set it on fire’ | The election results left some locals—like Wally Zick and Pat Carlson, top; Alex Johnson, bottom right; and Terry Mesch, bottom left, the head of the local historical society—wondering if they even knew their own neighbors. | Danny Wilcox Frazier for Politico Magazine

“It’s been a steady decline for years—probably since the mid-’80s,” Sue Wolf told me. When I met her, she was the fourth-generation family proprietor of Wolf’s, an independent clothing store on Durand’s Main Street, which is a familiar faded tableau of the decay of small-town America—a few bars, a shuttered theater, local commerce smothered by scattered chain-owned big-box options. “It wasn’t a sudden crash. It’s been a slow, steady burn.” In December, Wolf’s closed after 112 years in business.

The withering of old Pepin County has coincided with the influx of the move-ins. Minneapolis and St. Paul are an hour-and-a-half drive and a world away, and the people who have come from “the Cities,” as the people here call them, are typically retirees or close to it, and often well-off enough to restore old houses or build big new ones. The economy around them, geared more toward their wallets and tastes as well as those of tourists, relies on wineries, galleries, bed and breakfasts, seasonal art festivals—and a pie shop run by the husband-and-husband team of Steve Grams and Alan Nugent.

If there is a de facto capital of Pepin County’s politically progressive newcomers, it is the village of Stockholm, winter population 66. And its social hub, just down the hill from the renovated farmhouse where Zick and Carlson live, is the Stockholm Pie & General Store, which sells artisanal cheese, craft beer and pricey slices of a double lemon pie that Gourmet magazine called “one of the 53 best things we ate” in 2012.

This is where I met with Bruce Johnson. He moved here, from the Cities, too, six years ago, with his wife, who is a filmmaker. He serves on the Pepin town board, and he also is the leader of the Pepin County Democrats. Johnson is searching for answers.

It was a “change election,” he said. Bernie Sanders won the Democratic primary here in April, handily, and some of his supporters either ultimately didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton or didn’t show any enthusiasm for doing it. Clinton didn’t campaign anywhere close to Pepin County, or anywhere in Wisconsin, period, in the months leading up to the general election. People felt ignored. Also, Johnson surmised, a limited media landscape contributes to “a lot of low-information people.” I had grown accustomed to hearing postmortems that emphasized economic stress, and Johnson granted that. The unemployment rate might be low, but so are wages, he said, pointing out that many here have to make long commutes to get paid more than $11 or $13 an hour. Toward the end of his accounting, though, he zeroed in on the idea of “cultural insecurity.”

He talked about an incident two years ago in which a 64-year-old Laotian Hmong man from an adjacent county was out hunting squirrels and wandered into the woods on the land of a 43-year-old local, who saw him, attacked him and nearly beat him to death. The incident inflamed tensions about race and outsiders. And he talked about a recent squabble over the creation of an area ATV club. Some newcomers argued the machines would make too much noise and lower their property values. There was “opposition from a lot of the liberals who live in fancy houses on the bluffs,” he said. Some of them, he added, “rarely talk to the locals”—even while trying to impose their ideas and sensibilities. The locals, Johnson said, understandably “feel hurt by the people who look at them as rural rubes.”

Myklebust had popped into the pie shop, and she joined the conversation.

“This is a place in transition—I mean, look at this,” she said, glancing around Stockholm Pie. “It’s a hipster pie place, run by a gay couple.”

The politics of pie | Parts of Pepin have seen the arrival of progressive newcomers like Alan Nugent, left, and Steve Grams, a married couple who own a pie shop. But in towns like Durand, it’s a different story; Wolf’s clothing store, at right, recently closed after 112 years in business. | Danny Wilcox Frazier for Politico Magazine

Katherine J. Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, recently wrote a book about this. The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker came out just last March. It’s based on research she did from 2007 to 2012, when she essentially kept inviting herself to informal but regular gatherings of people in more than two dozen rural communities around the state—and listened. For decades, Wisconsin has been politically malleable, but the window for Cramer’s work ended up being particularly fascinating and telling. When she started, the state had a Democratic governor and two Democrats in the U.S. Senate, and its voters had picked a Democrat for president in four straight elections; by the time she finished, Democrat Russ Feingold had lost his 18-year spot in the U.S. Senate, and Wisconsin’s governor was Scott Walker, a union-busting, public-employee-attacking Republican. In her book, she wrote about “rural consciousness” and “multifaceted resentment against cities.”

But even Cramer was surprised by the extent of the resentment stemming from a growing rural-urban divide, and now its consequences. “I did go into the evening saying that Hillary Clinton was going to win,” she admitted to me. The reason Clinton lost: “It’s people looking around,” Cramer said, “and then making the assessment that their way of life is under threat.”

“It feels like somebody is coming from the outside and changing their world,” said the area’s state senator, Kathleen Vinehout, a Democrat. It feels that way because it is that way.

“People are wondering just what their place will be in this 21st-century global economy,” said the congressman who represents western Wisconsin, Democrat Ron Kind. “This is very unsettling for a lot of folks.”

“It’s more than the loss of a job or a wage,” Cramer added. “It’s the death of an expectation of a certain kind of life. … Across society, what’s seen as up and coming, successful, whatever you want to call it—it’s not you anymore.”

And what I heard in Pepin County, again and again, is that they’ve had it. In conversation after conversation with people who have lived here forever and who voted for Trump, some people were more measured and diplomatic than others—but the same blunt, base feelings kept coming up.

“Where’s the richest place to live?” said Gerald Bauer, 74, born and raised on a local dairy farm, who now is the vice chairperson of the county board of supervisors. “The area around Washington, D.C.—that’s wrong.”

And here these city people have come, with their money and their politics, right to Pepin County, which now has its very own liberal left coast. “The ones that move in try to change everything,” said Gary Samuelson, 72, “and the people who’ve been here a long time don’t care too much for change.”

“They don’t share our views on anything,” Vic Komisar, 41, the president of the ATV club, said of the people from Minnesota. “They got this picture that we’re all country bumpkins, the locals are, that we’re not educated. The people who move in talk down to the natives. I don’t know how you want to word that, but that’s the persona given off.”

Komisar said he frowned upon some of Trump’s rhetoric, calling him an “oddball.” But one thing he liked a lot: “I think he’s going to stand his ground on—how the hell do I want to word this?—I don’t think he’s gonna get ran over by the social agenda.” He cited gay marriage, the legalization of marijuana and Black Lives Matter. “It shouldn’t be center stage with troops overseas and the economy. We got other things to worry about than Black Lives Matter having a protest. Come on—we got bigger issues. To me, that’s what it’s been for eight years. I’m not a racist. I’m not a homophobe. I’m not any of those things. But OK, you guys have your rights—can we move on?”

***

When these feelings collide with politics, it’s the Democratic Party that tends to take the hit. Once, the party was a coalition of farmers and workers and union members, along with urbanites and minorities. A lot of farmers in Pepin County come from longstanding Democratic families. But over time, the party has come to represent a way of seeing America with which people here have trouble identifying.

John Andrews, 68, was the sheriff in Pepin County for 28 years. He is a Republican. He used to be a Democrat, though—and not just any Democrat, but the boss of the Pepin County Democrats, the position currently held by Bruce Johnson. Andrews told me he switched parties in the mid-2000s after the newcomers started coming to the meetings. “They actually took over the party,” he said.

He agrees with Komisar’s opinion concerning the overemphasis on “the social agenda.”

“When the people came in—and the things that they were trying to push on the rest of us—that’s why I left,” Andrews added. “I didn’t want to deal with these people. I didn’t want to be a part of what they were a part of. You’re talking about people from the Cities who are very progressive. I call them tree-huggers, a bunch of tree-huggers. They referred to us, meaning the people who’ve lived here and worked here all our lives, as a bunch of hicks. They just think they’re a little bit better than everybody else, and that we’re not as smart.”

“These [Confederate flags] were popping up everywhere,” said Matt Anderson, 34, an artist who grew up in Pepin County. He had seen the occasional bumper sticker, but flags were new.

“These [Confederate flags] were popping up everywhere,” said Matt Anderson, 34, an artist who grew up in Pepin County. He had seen the occasional bumper sticker, but flags were new. | Danny Wilcox Frazier for Politico Magazine

In Pepin County, I met predominantly two kinds of Clinton voters: the Twin Cities progressives, and aging farmers or their descendants. Alex Johnson is the Democrat who said Trump had lit Pepin County “on fire.” He’s an earnest farm kid who was salutatorian at Pepin High. And he’s a Democrat—because his father was a Democrat, and his father was a Democrat because his father was a Democrat. And that was because of the Depression, when a lot of people needed help, and farmers in Pepin County and elsewhere got some from President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the federal government.

Phyllis Seyffer grew up in Pepin County, too. “My dad was a solid Democrat, a dairy farmer,” she told me. Why? “The Depression,” she said.

When I sat down with John Caturia, a retired dairy farmer, he said the same thing: “A generation ahead of us went through the Depression, and the Democratic Party brought it out of the Depression and gave people some hope and gave them a chance to make a living.”

Alex Johnson is 24. But Phyllis Seyffer is 74. And John Caturia is 86. “There aren’t very many of them left anymore, people my age,” Caturia said.

This has left the Democratic coalition in Pepin County shaky and shrinking, a tenuous mash-up of voters who nominally support the same party but are increasingly bound only by an accident of geography.

The result is something Alex Johnson can see on his computer screen. A voracious reader of Wisconsin Blue Books, state-specific almanacs, he was a political science major at Edgewood College in Madison and is a politics junkie. Instead of counting sheep to go to sleep, he told me, he counts U.S. senators, starting in Hawaii, heading east—usually, he said, he’s out by Colorado. And over the year and a half leading up to the election in November, he put together an extensive, cross-tabbed database of all of the county’s votes stretching back to 1970.

“It’s been trending Republican since 2008,” he said, calling up his spreadsheet when we met in the lobby of his grandmother’s single-story apartment building. The high-water mark for Democrats here was John Kerry in 2004, and Barack Obama got significantly fewer votes in 2012 than he did in 2008, barely edging Mitt Romney.

And during the past decade-plus, in between the presidential years, Johnson stressed, the trend line couldn’t have been clearer. As Wisconsin veered Republican—Feingold losing, Walker winning—it was Obama’s vote totals that started to look like the outliers, not the other way around. By last April, in the Wisconsin primaries, any candidate judged to be same old, same old was a nonstarter. Sanders beat Clinton here by a margin almost identical to his victory statewide. Trump lost Wisconsin to Ted Cruz—but he didn’t lose Pepin County.

Meanwhile, as Clinton never came to the state for a rally or speech in the months prior to the general election, Trump arrived in close-by Eau Claire right before Election Day. His November 1 visit was dismissed by pollsters and pundits as a pointless exercise in a state he was slated to lose. “I will fix it, I will fix it, I will fix it,” he told the crowd packed into Zorn Arena. “We’re one week away, think of it, one week, from the change you’ve been waiting for your entire life.” The people chanted for him: “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

Mixed allegiances | Although some Pepin families have been Democratic since the Depression, resentment toward new residents from the cities helped flip voters to Trump. Clockwise from upper right: Vic Komisar, Lynn and Phyllis Seyffer, Gary Samuelson and Gerald Bauer. Image

Mixed allegiances | Although some Pepin families have been Democratic since the Depression, resentment toward new residents from the cities helped flip voters to Trump. Clockwise from upper right: Vic Komisar, Lynn and Phyllis Seyffer, Gary Samuelson and Gerald Bauer. | Danny Wilcox Frazier for Politico Magazine

In the end, in Pepin County, Trump beat Clinton by 862 votes—a gaping 24 percentage points. Clinton got 532 fewer votes in 2016 than Obama got in 2012. The only municipalities in the county that she won were the villages of Pepin and Stockholm, relative bastions of liberalism. The Democratic share of the vote was down from 2012 everywhere, in every single municipality. But there were lots of new voters, too, middle-aged white men whom poll workers had never seen. I went to the clerk’s office and asked to read through the rolls. The total number of votes in Pepin County was 3,781—and there it was: 398 of them came from people who registered on Election Day.

“Very unusual,” clerk Marcia Bauer said.

But the only thing that surprised John Andrews, the disgusted Democrat-turned-Republican, was that other people were surprised.

“It’s so simple,” he told me. “The people here are good, honest, down-to-earth people, good citizens. The elitists, they don’t understand. … If they would get out and talk to the working class, they would understand.”

***

It’s possible that Pepin County’s Democrats could have—even should have—seen the tide coming in over them. “I was seeing eight Trump signs in yards,” said Tom Simpson, 35. “You saw no Hillary signs.”

Almost all the Democrats I talked to, though, found ways to justify this disparity, to convince themselves this wasn’t the kind of place they lived. “Somehow,” Jen Peterson said, “even though I’d seen all of them, I just assumed everybody who didn’t have signs was going to vote the other way.”

“I think I had a little bit of denial going on when I saw these Trump signs everywhere,” said Jean Accola, an artist who lives outside Durand and has been in Pepin County since 1980. “It was just hard to believe that decent people could vote for that man.”

Not all the Trump signs were actual signs that bore his name. Myklebust, for instance, showed me a picture on her phone that she had taken driving by a house in Durand. Out front, next to the cars with Trump bumper stickers, was a flagpole. At the top of the pole was an American flag. Right below the American flag was a Confederate flag. It’s not something Myklebust had seen before.

Helen Kees, 65, Pepin County born and raised, called the Confederate flag at that house and others she saw elsewhere around the county “a new thing.”

“I think it was always the undercurrent,” she said. In her opinion, though, Trump’s candidacy brought it to the surface. “I think prejudice and bigotry and racism have been unleashed.”

“These things were popping up everywhere,” said Matt Anderson, 34, an artist who grew up in Pepin County. He had seen the occasional bumper sticker, but flags were new.

It made Phyllis Seyffer think about her ecumenical quilting group. She usually tries to steer clear of talk about politics, but one day earlier last year, she told me, she brought up the president. “The only thing I said at quilting was, ‘I think we’re going to miss Obama,’” she said. “And it got real quiet.” She knew what they thought. “At quilting, I’d hear things about Obama,” she said. “It was never ‘Obama.’ It was, ‘That black man is at it again.’”

And it made Simpson think about things he overheard people saying here at bars at times over the past eight years—people, he told me, “who bitched about the ‘nigger’ running the country, and now want you to give Trump a fair chance.”

Small-town life | Two girls play video games at Six String Saloon in Maiden Rock, a town just across the Pepin County line.
Small-town life | Two girls play video games at Six String Saloon in Maiden Rock, a town just across the Pepin County line. | Danny Wilcox Frazier for Politico Magazine

I, too, had seen the house in Durand with the Confederate flag, and one afternoon, as I was driving by, I saw people on the porch and stopped and parked. I introduced myself to them, and they introduced themselves to me—Randall and Carolyn Tyra, husband and wife, a retired machinist and a Wal-Mart cashier, in their late 50s.

In a light rain that was starting to turn into sharp, icy pellets, the stars and bars of secession were still flying high.

“It’s heritage, not hate,” Carolyn Tyra said.

Heritage? In Wisconsin?

Randall, who has a hook for a hand because of an oil rig accident, told me he’s from Texas and then explained what the flag means to him. “The red is the blood of Christ,” he said. “The white border is the protection of God, OK? The blue X is—what’s the saint?” He looked at his wife for help. “Saint Anthony?”

Carolyn couldn’t recall. “It’s not anything to do with the KKK or anything like that,” she said.

“Everything’s religious except for the stars,” he said. “It’s nothing hate. It’s religious. It’s God.”

Their talk about the Confederate flag, though, morphed quickly into sentiments that would have fit well in Cramer’s book about rural identity and the politics of resentment, the same feelings I had heard from Trump voters all over Pepin County.

“The media wasn’t saying what we were seeing. Everybody on this street but one house had Trump signs up,” Carolyn Tyra told me. The media, the people in the cities, the people from the Cities in their own county—“they all think we’re stupid,” she said, “and the common blue-collar worker doesn’t want to be treated like we’re stupid.”

And as much as the Tyras and those like the Tyras in Pepin County were voting for Trump, they were also voting against all of that. One evening, for example, during my time in Pepin County, less than 20 miles from Stockholm Pie, past cows in fields and cars in yards, past silos and still-standing Trump signs, I found myself in the tucked-away hamlet of Arkansaw, at a bar called the Rec Hall, where the regulars had on flannel and camo and a rifle was being raffled off. On the stool to my left was a man named Scott Sievwright.

Sievwright told me he had grown up nearby and had never left; he paid his bills cutting wood and working part-time for a dairy farmer. He told me he had voted for Obama in 2008, Romney in 2012 and Trump in 2016, but it was clear he held no politician in high regard. He said Bill Clinton “sold us out with that NAFTA crap.” He said George W. Bush had “f----d us good.” He said Obama’s eight years “sucked.” He called Hillary Clinton “a mean ol’ heifer.” And he expressed hardly any confidence that Trump would do well as president or make his own life better. “I don’t think he’ll get a second term,” Sievwright said. “It’ll be turmoil for four years. He’s like a firecracker in a keg of dynamite.”

Why, then, I wondered, did he vote for him?

He put down his brandy in a plastic cup and looked at me.

“Why not?” he said flatly. “Let it blow.”

The main point, Sievwright told me, was this: “The bastards out here in the country are sick of the bullshit.”

I mentioned I had spent part of the afternoon down in Stockholm, at the pie shop. Sievwright didn’t pause. “I know about the pie store,” he said. “You got lesbians and yuppies—that’s great—but stay where you are. I don’t quite agree with that whole shit. I don’t. This country makes laws to protect them. That’s retarded. Protect the gays and lesbians? You want to be gay or lesbian? Stay in the closet.”

He took a sip of his drink.

“That’s that end of the county, though,” he said.

***

A few winters back, Pat Carlson (“… I think they thought the liberal elite was looking down on them …”) ran into Gary Samuelson (“… the ones that move in try to change everything …”) at the Stockholm post office. They’re at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but they’re generally genial, and their conversation about the snow and ice led to daydreaming about warmer locales to which they might flee until spring. Arizona came up. “Oh,” Carlson said, in Samuelson’s recollection, “I could never live in a red state.” Now, sitting at his dining room table, Samuelson smiled. “I’m so tempted to ask: What do you do if a red state moves to you?”

Small-town life | Two patrons eat lunch at Stockholm Pie & General Store in the village of Stockholm.
Small-town life | Two patrons eat lunch at Stockholm Pie & General Store in the village of Stockholm. | Danny Wilcox Frazier for Politico Magazine

It’s a Pepin County, Wisconsin, version of a question Democrats and progressives are grappling with all over America. When I met with Carlson and Zick, I asked, half-joking, if they were considering moving. Their answers were serious. “We have thought about California,” she said. “Yesterday I investigated Hawaii.” Part of their thinking is due to the harsh winters. Now the election is a factor as well. “This adds some impetus to our planning,” he said.

Zick, a retired chemist, is the priest at a small Liberal Catholic Church he started not far from their house. If anybody came to him seeking sanctuary in Trump’s America, he would offer it, he said, although he worried out loud that he believed certain Trump voters might retaliate. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said, “if they burn the church down some day.” Arson was not something he was ever worried about before.

A short walk away, at Stockholm Pie, I talked more with Alan Nugent and Steve Grams. The gay couple have been here, move-ins from Minnesota, for 11 years. “When we moved here,” Grams said, “you were born here, you went to school here, you got married here, you had your children here, you died here.” They heard quiet pushback from around the county when they arrived, along with other newcomers, including a concentration of gay newcomers, in their village—“a lot of this, ‘Ooh, those outsiders, you know who they are,’” Grams said. They have been together for more than 20 years and got married in December 2013 in Red Wing, Minnesota—over there because it wasn’t legal to get married in Wisconsin until the following summer. But they told me they’ve never been the victims of any overt hostility in Pepin County. They were never afraid.

That began to shift the night of November 8.

“Common courtesy and decency say you reject that,” Grams told me. “But people didn’t.”

“It’s a different world being an openly gay married couple in a rural place,” Nugent said. “If someone was able to justify voting for Trump, it makes me very fearful about what else they’re capable of doing.”

Other liberals I talked to in Pepin County weren’t so much fearful as they were feeling out of sorts and out of place. Many of them, after all, had moved to a state with an utterly different political makeup, when Walker wasn’t governor yet, when both U.S. senators from Wisconsin were Democrats. “Everything was Democratic-led,” said Dwight Jelle, 56, an energy consultant who built his house in Pepin County in 2002 and moved from Minneapolis full-time in 2010. “Now it’s the exact opposite. Which makes it challenging. Throwing Trump on top of that is a bit daunting.”

From the beginning, though, ever since Jelle and his wife made Pepin County their home, they have found the fissure between the move-ins and the locals frustrating. Jelle has tried to address this. He is currently the chairperson of the county’s board of supervisors, but his involvement in local government has helped only so much, and sometimes it means he hears the distrust even more than other newcomers: “‘Why are you in office? You’re not from here. How long have you lived here? I’ve lived here all my life’—that sentiment is definitely here,” he said. “One of the things that drives us crazy”—Jelle and his wife—“is that we can’t be part of the Pepin County original culture. It’s just: ‘We’re not from here, we’re from the Cities.’ So that’s where that cultural divide is.”

I asked Jelle if he, post-election, like Carlson and Zick, has considered leaving.

“Part of me,” he admitted, “wants to move the river, just move the river over a few miles”—meaning the Mississippi, so he would live in Minnesota again. But no. No plans to leave. “It would be easier,” he said, “but it wouldn’t be worth it. We’ll stick it out.” The solution, he explained, is not to try to talk less to different kinds of people but to try to talk to them more.

Steve Anderson told me something similar. He’s 66, another Minnesota move-in, but a stereotype-buster, too—a Vietnam veteran, a retired firefighter, a self-described “working class liberal.” When he moved here, 11 years ago, he joined the volunteer fire department serving Stockholm and the surrounding countryside. He became chief. He even started smoking again, he told me, just so he could share cigarettes with his fellow firefighters when they went outside after meetings. “That helped bridge the gap,” he said. He also, along with Jelle, is on the board of supervisors. And he’s not moving anywhere, either. “These are the same people I’ve always known,” Anderson said. “I still think they’re good, good-hearted people. I think they’ve been sold a bill of goods, and I think they’re going to regret their vote, but …”

Flocking together | In a place as small as Pepin, says Andrea Myklebust, who owns the farm at left, “You have to engage with people with whom you disagree.” | Danny Wilcox Frazier for Politico Magazine

After I left Pepin County, I called Myklebust, the sculptor and weaver who owns the sheep. She had told me at the pie shop that she felt “militant”—far more than she ever has. “‘Radicalized’ is a word I’ve used about how I’m feeling,” she told me on the phone.

What she sees as a grave threat to the republic, she said, is why she will not be moving back to Minnesota. “This is America, and I’m going to fight for it,” she explained. “And I’m going to fight in the ways that I do. It doesn’t involve violence. It doesn’t involve hate. It doesn’t involve guns. But I’m going to fight. Because this matters. I’m going to fight down to the last conversation.”

She’s going to fight, she said, by trying not to fight—by being a move-in who talks more to the locals, by interacting more with her neighbors around Pepin County who don’t think the way she thinks. Democrats and progressives in cities on the coasts were surprised by this election because they’re so removed from the Pepin Counties of the country. Here, though, it’s different. Proximity could be opportunity.


“When I was in the city, you could choose to ignore people,” Myklebust said. “Here, the person with whom you have strenuous political differences is also the person who drives the ambulance or the fire truck or teaches your kids at school. You have to engage with people with whom you disagree. We have to figure that out—if America is going to survive as a democracy. It sounds dramatic to say, but that’s really where we are.”

If nothing else, she said, her sheep need their hay. The man with whom she didn’t talk specifically about the election on November 9, the man for whom she tried to “rearrange” her facial expression, a man who didn’t return my calls—Myklebust needs to keep talking to him.

“I have to be able to continue to buy hay from him,” she said.

Why?

“It’s beautiful hay,” she said. “It’s dry, and it’s grassy, and it’s got just a little bit of clover in it. It’s beautiful, and it’s perfect.”


Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico.



http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/germanys-far-right-rises-again-214543

Germany’s Far Right Rises Again
Purged from German politics 70 years ago, nationalism is back. And many fear where it could lead.
By YARDENA SCHWARTZ
December 21, 2016

Photograph -- AP Photo

MUNICH—Five days after Donald Trump became the next president of the United States, the South Munich chapter of Germany’s far-right party, Alternative for Deutschland, held its first meeting since the U.S. election. In a traditional Bavarian tavern on a quiet residential street, 50-some party members and supporters drank beer and celebrated the victory that they felt was, in many ways, their own.

The theme of the meeting was supposed to be the local elections in May, when the AfD is expected to pick up seats in several of Germany’s state parliaments. (The party currently holds seats in 10 of Germany’s 16 state parliaments, up from five one year ago.) But instead of local elections, talk that night centered almost exclusively on Donald Trump.

Dirk Driesang, a member of AfD’s federal board, stood to address the packed restaurant, where party placards reading “AfD Loves Deutschland” adorned every table. He began with Trump’s roots in Germany. The president-elect’s grandfather Friedrich was born and raised in Kallstadt, a village in the Southwest. Friedrich eventually was deported, Driesang smiled as he told the crowd, for evading his mandatory military service. But that was fine because his grandson had gone on to do in the U.S. what the AfD hopes to do in Germany.

“America First is coming to Deutschland,” boomed Driesang, his adaptation of Trump’s campaign slogan giving way to resounding applause.

Among all of Germany’s political parties, the AfD was alone in cheering Trump’s surprise victory. The cover of Der Spiegel on November 12 depicted Trump’s head as a fiery meteor on course to destroy Planet Earth. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s first remarks on the U.S. election results included a lecture on the very definition of democracy. But the AfD, whose dramatic rise over the past two years has been fueled by much the same anti-immigrant, anti-Islam and anti-establishment elements that elevated Trump to power in the United States, saw the real estate mogul’s win as a good omen for their controversial movement to make nationalism popular in Germany again—for the first time since World War II.

“This election result gives courage for Germany and Europe,” read AfD Chairwoman Frauke Petry’s statement on November 9. “Just as the Americans did not believe the manipulations of their mainstream media, citizens in Germany also have the courage to make their decision in the election booth themselves and not to remain resigned at home.”

Now, the party is poised for a historic result in next year’s national elections, in which Merkel faces her stiffest challenge yet. After narrowly missing the 5 percent needed to enter national parliament in the 2013 elections, polls now suggest the AfD will receive 16 percent of the national vote in 2017, making it the third-largest political party in Germany, after Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and the Social Democratic Party (SPD), part of Merkel’s grand coalition. The terror attack that killed 12 people at a Christmas market in Berlin on Monday is expected to bolster the AfD even more, and in turn, lower support for Merkel, who has been criticized for welcoming nearly 1 million migrants in 2015 alone, without proper background checks.

That level of success for a far-right party in the country that gave rise to Adolf Hitler would represent a political earthquake for Europe—and a national trauma for Germans, who have sought to expunge and confront their history in the 70 years since World War II. The country’s politics have been solidly liberal since the reunification of Germany in 1990. But over the past two years, as Merkel has welcomed Muslim refugees and led the bailouts of struggling European economies such as Greece, populist sentiments have surged—and the AfD is now reaping the rewards.

The AfD’s platform is a collection of right-wing themes: EU reform, closed borders and a return to the Germany of yesteryear, before what many of its members and supporters refer to as the “Islamization” of Europe. The party seeks to ban large minarets and the call to prayer, and require Muslim preachers to undergo government vetting. “Islam does not belong in Germany,” the platform states.

The AfD’s rise has been stunning, accomplishing in just three years what took other populist European parties—like France’s National Front and Austria’s Freedom Party—more than four decades to achieve. And it could have serious consequences. Unlike France and Austria, Germany, under Merkel’s leadership, has become the widely accepted leader of the liberal West. Now, the pillars of this leadership—from Merkel’s stewardship of the refugee crisis and the euro crisis—are under attack from the country's increasingly popular populist party. That popularity has already led Merkel to veer to the right, hardening her stance on refugees and Islam in Germany.

“What they are managing right now is to make a very radical brand of right wing politics not exactly fashionable, but acceptable in Germany, and that’s new,” says Kai Arzheimer, a professor of politics at the University of Mainz. “They should be taken very seriously, insofar as I think they will do pretty well in the upcoming election. Sixteen percent on the national level is a very strong showing by German standards.”

That is not to say that all Germans are comfortable with the AfD. It’s gaining popularity, but it’s still very controversial. Berlin is filled with anti-AfD stickers and graffiti, and at least one restaurant there has a sign on its window urging AfD supporters to keep out. In Munich, the local AfD chapter holds its meetings on that quiet residential street because no other restaurant in Munich will agree to host it. The mayor of Munich even sent a notice to local business owners, urging them not to rent space to “populist groups,” a clear reference to the AfD.

But it’s precisely this kind of blanket condemnation of the AfD’s populism that galvanizes the party, and has led so many Germans to run so quickly into its welcoming arms.

“There’s a wide section of the German population that hasn’t felt represented by the political establishment and were simply waiting for a party like the AfD to provide an organization around which they could crystallize their anger and their hopes for alternative policymaking,” says Dr. Werner Patzelt, a political scientist at the Technical University of Dresden.

According to analysts, the majority of AfD voters previously supported Merkel, and voted for parties in the chancellor’s ruling coalition. But, says Arzheimer, one-third of AfD voters are formerly non-voters, people who were so disillusioned by the established parties that they simply didn’t vote. Some, he says, even voted for socialist left wing parties in the past.

All of these voters have one thing in common: They are tired of apologizing for their national history. “We have this problem in Germany where you’re not allowed to love your country because if you do you’re considered a Nazi,” says Sarah Leins, a 30-year-old AfD supporter. “We have to overcome this.”

***

Uli Henkel prides himself on the fact that he has couch-surfed in 61 countries, the same number of years he has been alive. When I meet him, he tells me proudly that he is one of Germany’s infamous “Sixty-Eighters.” He giddily shows me a picture of himself as a long-haired teenage hippy, when he took part in student protests against the political establishment in the late 1960’s.

Today, Henkel is devoted to a new rebellion against the establishment. He takes great pride in being German and feels that it’s time for Germans to be allowed to be proud of their country, just like all the people he meets in his world travels.

“This is a normal thing in all countries of the world, but it’s not normal in Germany because in Germany, we always look to what will the rest of the world think? How can we heal the world? We are neglecting the needs of our own people.” Henkel continues, “We fought against the old Nazi Germany. And we overcame it. And I don’t think that because of these 12 black years of history I should always have my head under the table. It cannot mean that three generations later, we don’t have the right to demonstrate against things, to have another opinion than the mainstream opinion.”

Henkel describes this mainstream opinion as follows: “If you’re not in favor of the refugees, if you’re not going to the stations saying, ‘Refugees Welcome,’ if you don’t think that millions of young male Muslim men are good for this country, then you’re racist, then you’re a Nazi.”

After supporting Merkel for many years, Henkel is now a member of the AfD. He says he felt that she turned her back on Germans by letting in so many migrants and giving them so many benefits. The money being spent on asylum seekers and refugees, he says, should be going to German citizens.

As a well-off, well-traveled business consultant, Henkel epitomizes the fact that AfD voters, like Trump voters, cannot be pinned down by the simple labels that have been popular with the German media, which tends to depict AfD supporters as uneducated racists who resent being left behind by globalization.

In fact, many AfD voters are young and well-educated. While thorough party data won’t become available until the national election in 2017, analysts have gained some insight into the average AfD voter from local elections. Based on that data, these analysts say, most AfD supporters are younger than 65. Older voters, they say, tend to show more loyalty to traditional parties, like Merkel’s CDU. According to Jörg Sobolewski, the AfD’s Berlin regional manager, the second largest faction of AfD voters are under 30. Their biggest contingent, said Sobolewski—who is himself 27 years old—are people aged 30 to 65, who make up 25 percent of AfD voters. As for education and professional background, that too defies stereotypes.

“There is not much difference between them and voters of the CDU or SPD (parties in Merkel’s government),” says Werner Patzelt, the political scientist. “It’s not just the so-called blue collar workers, but classic middle class as well.”

The AfD, after all, was not born as an overtly nationalist party. It was founded in 2013 by economists who demanded European Union reform, and opposed the bailouts that led Germany to pay billions of euros to help fledgling economies like Greece and Spain. When the 2015 refugee crisis hit Germany like a tsunami, sending nearly 1 million asylum seekers into Germany that year alone, the party took a hard-right turn, making anti-immigration and the anti-Islamization of Europe its primary focus. That shift led AfD’s founder, economist Bernd Lucke, and other party leaders, to leave what Lucke said was becoming an “Islamophobic and xenophobic” party.

The AfD quickly became the only political voice in Germany to criticize Merkel’s open-door refugee policy, a humanitarian stance that earned her praise from the domestic and international media, but scorn from many of her former supporters. The AfD largely benefited from that scorn.

“Many of the refugees are of Muslim background, and they came to Germany at a time when there were many Islamic attacks in Europe,” says Patzelt, the political scientist. “Since none of the established parties gave expression to these fears, people felt liberated when they saw that the AfD would give expression to their views and would generate significant policy changes in the government.”

***

Sarah Leins is one of those young voters who, like Henkel, supported Merkel before the chancellor decided to shoulder the burden of Europe’s refugee influx, with no limit to the number of asylum-seekers Germany would shelter. There are now 1.4 million asylum-seekers in Germany, more than any other European nation. The German government provides them with an array of social benefits, including free shelter, food (if they are living in government shelters), medical services, approximately 216 euros to cover basic needs and an additional 143 euros a month in pocket money. The government has budgeted 98 billion euros to assist asylum seekers over the next five years.

Leins, 30, lives in hip, liberal Berlin, where September state elections shocked analysts by giving the AfD 14 percent of the vote, the highest share for a far-right party in Berlin since World War II. Merkel’s CDU suffered its worst results in the German capital, winning just 17.5 percent, echoing poor results in other state elections.

“Not only do I feel betrayed, but many people feel betrayed by Chancellor Merkel,” says Leins. After the terrorist attack in her city this week, her feelings of betrayal have only intensified.

It’s not that she doesn’t want to help refugees, Leins says. “But the help we can offer to real refugees is less because we are helping everybody. I think they are encouraged to come and this encouragement is wrong. It shouldn’t be our policy to encourage them to come.”

While Leins says she sympathizes with refugees, she and other AfD supporters say that because most refugees arrive in Turkey, Greece and Italy before coming to Germany, it is proof that they are drawn to Germany specifically because of the financial benefits that await them.

Before the election in Berlin, Leins volunteered to hand out AfD flyers in the streets. Several people called her a Nazi and a slut as they walked by. Leins has lost several friends because of her support for the AfD.

“It’s very hard to be proud of Germany because we have this historical guilt,” she says. “To say you’re proud to be German is to say you’re proud of Hitler and that is absolutely not true.”

Owing to this general perception, despite the AfD's growing support, it was not treated as a serious threat to Merkel's leadership—much like Trump wasn't considered a serious threat to Hillary Clinton. That is, not until recently, now that the swelling support for the party has become impossible to ignore.

Nowhere has this been more obvious than in Merkel’s own recent shift to the right. Earlier this month came the latest example, with her proposal to ban full-face veils “wherever it is legally possible.” The ban on the niqab and the burqa was first proposed by the AfD in 2014, earning it accusations of Islamophobia. The party platform rejects the Islamization of Germany because, it claims, many Muslim beliefs—for example the treatment of women—go against Germany’s “free, democratic social foundation, our laws and the Judaeo-Christian and humanistic bases of our culture.”

Merkel’s backing of the burqa ban was an obvious appeal to right-wing voters. Yet it was also a symbolic one, as the burqa is almost nowhere to be found in German society. In fact, much of the so-called Islamization of German society that is feared by AfD supporters is largely overstated, says Kai Arzheimer, the professor of politics at the University of Mainz. Muslims account for about 5 percent of the German population, he noted, adding that many of them are not religiously observant.

But for many German voters, statistics matter less than what they see in their cities and streets; and they, like many Trump supporters, blame immigrants for many of the changes they don’t like.

Joel Bussman, a 22-year-old AfD supporter, laments Germany’s increasing multiculturalism, particularly its impact on his hometown in the region of North Rhine-Westphalia—where German police are now on a manhunt for the suspect in Monday’s attack in Berlin.

“By inviting the whole world here, not everything will be better. More like everything will get worse,” says Bussman, a university student in Berlin. “The place I’m from used to be the heart of German mining and steel production, much like Pennsylvania in the USA. Today there’s no industry left, no jobs left. It’s pretty much a multicultural melting pot with almost no Germans left. When you walk the streets there you see mostly foreign people. There are almost no German shops anymore, which I find quite disturbing.”

Merkel’s other rightward shifts have been less headline-grabbing, but arguably more significant. Over the past year, Germany has, for instance, increased border patrol, decreased social benefits for refugees, deported asylum seekers and facilitated a deal with Turkey to stem the flow of refugees arriving in Europe.

Could policies like these help Merkel and the CDU win back some moderate AfD supporters? Perhaps, but it’s probably too late for her to reverse most of her losses. Until her recent concessions, says Patzelt, Merkel reacted to the threat of the AfD mainly by saying, “‘Well if populism is growing, then exactly because of this, in the political center we have to oppose all right wing policies.’ This is the course she has taken and it is a course that has proved so unsuccessful,” he says, adding that this solution has done more to strengthen the AfD than weaken it.

This means that, for now, the pressure on Merkel’s right flank isn’t going away. There is almost no doubt among the political analysts I spoke with that Merkel will win reelection in 2017. But the AfD could end up being the strongest party in the opposition, which would give it a powerful voice in Germany’s parliamentary politics for the next four years.

It also means that Merkel will have to decide: Move right to stop bleeding political support, or continue to live up to her reputation as an icon of Western liberalism. Just after Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. elections, the New York Times suggested Merkel might be “The Liberal West’s Last Defender.” But with the far right on the rise again in Germany, it’s hard to see how that reputation will last.

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Yardena Schwartz is an award-winning freelance journalist and Emmy-nominated producer. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, TIME, among other outlets.




TRUMP’S NEW SHIP BUILDING JOBS AND WORKPLACE SAFETY

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/us-navy-ship-builders-deadly-security-military-214760

THE FRIDAY COVER
The Deadly Danger of Trump’s Naval Buildup
The Navy could soon see a shipbuilding boom. But workers are dying and the contracts keep coming.
By JENNIFER GOLLAN February 10, 2017

Photo by Julie Dermansky

am Ates felt the urge to vomit. A chemical stench filled the engine room of the tugboat in a sprawling Mississippi shipyard. Ates scrambled over to an oval hole in the floor and peered into the dark abyss. Below him, two men were crawling through cramped steel boxes laid out like coffins. They had been told to wipe the inside of the hull with paint thinner.

“Look, y’all need to get out of that tank,” Ates screamed.


He heard hissing. A tangerine fireball erupted through the hole and catapulted him across the boat. The deafening boom reverberated through the rooms of a Super 8 motel more than 2 miles away.

When he came to, he was kneeling. His Wrangler denim shirt was on fire. The skin on his hands and legs had been stripped like corn husks, baring muscle and bone. Blood gushed from his fingertips. It was Ates’ fourth day on the job, the Friday before Thanksgiving 2009. He emerged from a medically induced coma three weeks later and learned that third-degree burns covered half his body. Four other workers aboard the Achievement also were injured in the blast. The two men Ates had tried to save were dead.

A month after the explosion, federal safety investigators still were combing through the charred boat at VT Halter Marine Inc.’s shipyard in Escatawpa, Mississippi, when the shipbuilder hit the jackpot: The U.S. Navy awarded it an $87 million contract to build a hulking 350-foot ship that would gather ocean data to improve submarine warfare.

If Navy officials had waited five more months for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to finish its investigation, they would have learned that one of their prized contractors sent its workers into what it knew was a potential death trap. VT Halter’s financial triumphs offer a striking example of how the Navy and other federal agencies award big business to shipbuilders with proven records of putting workers in harm’s way. For private shipbuilders, many of whom depend on Navy and Coast Guard contracts to remain profitable, there are no long-term consequences for their safety problems, an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.

VT Halter stands out for its deadly accidents. But since October 2008, the Navy and Coast Guard’s seven major private shipbuilders have received more than $100 billion in public money despite citations for serious safety lapses that have endangered, injured and, in some cases, killed workers, Reveal found in its investigation, which included interviews with dozens of workers and a review of hundreds of pages of records from 10 states. So while shipyards such as VT Halter are slapped with fines regularly by one arm of the federal government, they are rewarded routinely by another federal agency that pays little attention to companies’ safety records.

Bram Ates shows the skin grafts on the backs of his hands. Ates used his hands to shield his face when an explosion erupted at a VT Halter shipyard.

Shipbuilding is a dangerous industry. From 2005 through 2015, a total of 76 workers in the private shipbuilding and repair industry were killed. At least a quarter of those deaths involved private shipyards that are regular recipients of federal contracts. Shipyard workers face an injury and illness rate that is roughly 80 percent higher than construction jobs, according to the most recent federal labor figures. Failures by the companies make it more dangerous than it has to be. And the situation is about to get worse.

In his first week in office, President Donald Trump announced his plans for what could be the largest expansion of the Navy’s fleet since the Reagan years. "I’m signing an executive action to begin a great rebuilding of the armed services of the United States, developing a plan for new planes, new ships, new resources and new tools for our men and women in uniform, and I’m very proud to be doing that,” Trump said. During his campaign, he promised to supersize the Navy’s fleet from 274 ships to 350.

About this story

This story was produced by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.

With extra business comes more risks for workers. But there is no increase in oversight. In fact, there’s nothing precluding the Navy from handing out contracts to shipbuilders with safety violations. The Navy and OSHA have no formal system for sharing information on accidents. It’s unclear whether Navy officials are even aware of the safety lapses. However, they could easily look up the information on the public database OSHA keeps on its website. Confronted by Reveal about their apparent lack of interest in worker safety, Navy and Coast Guard officials said it wasn’t their job.

“We are not the overlords of private shipyards when it comes to workplace safety,” said Dale Eng, a spokesman for the Navy’s Naval Sea Systems Command, which oversees ship construction.

The uncomfortable truth is that the Navy has few alternatives when it comes to who builds its ships. It can work only with U.S.-based companies in large part because of national security concerns and because shipbuilding provides a large number of relatively high-paying jobs in regions where shipyards are the major employers.

shipbuilder_contract_chart_4.jpg
That creates an unhealthy codependency: Just a handful of companies are equipped to build the massive boats the government needs, and the shipbuilding industry relies on the military for the majority of its revenue. But while the military and the shipyards each get something out of it, workers remain at a deadly disadvantage. Under a 90-year-old federal law, shipyard workers generally can’t sue their employers, which leaves the shipyards accountable only to OSHA.

In response to Reveal’s findings, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said that if federal contractors can’t keep their workers safe, they shouldn’t get another dollar of government money.

“When the government pays federal contractors hundreds of billions of dollars a year—whether to build a giant ship for the Navy or to run a concession stand at a national park,” said Warren, a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, “the jobs they create should be good, safe jobs.”

***

Joseph Pettey had noticed something strange that day at the VT Halter shipyard. He was supposed to paint in the tugboat’s crawl space, but he realized there were no fans.

He said he told his boss, Danny Cobb, that he wouldn’t do the work without ventilation. “He said, ‘Well, if you don’t spray it, you’re fired,’ ” Pettey said.

The 28-year veteran of shipbuilding didn’t want to get fired. On the Gulf Coast in Mississippi, shipyard jobs pay some of the highest wages for workers without a college degree. But he also didn’t want to breathe in toxic paint fumes—so he grabbed a fan from another ship and headed to the tugboat.

That’s when it exploded. He watched men running from the boat, on fire.

In the seven years since the VT Marine shipyard blast that killed two workers, the Navy has continued to award the private shipbuilder millions of dollars in contracts. Since October 2008, VT Halter Marine and six other private shipbuilders have been awarded more than $100 billion in contracts by the federal government despite citations for serious safety violations.
In the seven years since the VT Marine shipyard blast that killed two workers, the Navy has continued to award the private shipbuilder millions of dollars in contracts. Since October 2008, VT Halter Marine and six other private shipbuilders have been awarded more than $100 billion in contracts by the federal government despite citations for serious safety violations. | Julie Dermansky for Reveal
Pettey told Reveal that in the months after the accident, Cobb directed him to go work at VT Halter’s other shipyards every time OSHA inspectors appeared. “Danny told me if I ever had to talk to them, he told me to limit my answers and don’t go into detail,” Pettey said.

Industrial fans and explosion-proof lights that could have prevented the blast were right there in the shipyard, Pettey said. But they were stashed away in big toolboxes. “This had been going on for years,” he added.

Cobb had a reason not to open them, Pettey said. Top managers at VT Halter earned bonuses if they came in under budget, several former workers said. Pettey said Cobb kept the fans, lights and other safety equipment locked up so he wouldn’t have to buy more. “That comes out of your paint budget. If you go over budget, you don’t get bonused out,” he said.

Robert Gillett, another painter who was working nearby at the time of the explosion, independently verified his account. Fernando Ochoa, a third painter who was there that day, said he saw the explosion-proof lights locked in the toolboxes.

When reached by phone for comment, Cobb scoffed. “He don’t know what he’s talking about. I didn’t keep that stuff locked up. That’s crazy,” he said before hanging up.

In Sickness and in Health
A video released by Reveal.

OSHA ultimately placed the blame for the explosion squarely on VT Halter. Even though the company had the knowledge and equipment to protect its workers, it put them in grave danger, the agency’s director said. The company had dispatched the men into a confined space with flammable vapors without testing the air. It didn’t give them explosion-proof lights. As the men worked, toxic fumes reached more than 600 times the legal limit, according to OSHA.

Mona Dixon, the VT Halter employee who oversaw safety at the company’s three shipyards in Mississippi at the time, told investigators that she assumed air monitoring wasn’t required, documents show. Her qualifications for the job consisted of a safety course at Warren National University, according to her sworn deposition. The online school was a suspected diploma mill that folded in 2009 after failing to earn accreditation. Dixon didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In May 2010, in a statement announcing a $1.3 million fine against the company, Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis said: “This was a horrific and preventable situation. The employer was aware of the hazards and knowingly and willfully sent workers into a confined space with an explosive and toxic atmosphere.” VT Halter ultimately settled with OSHA, agreeing to pay a reduced fine of $860,500 and acknowledging it willfully violated 12 safety rules in the 2009 tugboat explosion that killed two men.

One of them, Alexander Caballero, had come to the shipyard from Puerto Rico in the hope of eventually becoming an underwater welder. He was 25. For Dwight Monroe, the job was a shot at redemption. The 52-year-old was saving up to move into his own apartment after serving more than 25 years in prison for rape.

Just a month before the explosion, a contract worker plunged 40 feet to his death at a VT Halter shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Andre Magee Jr. slammed into the bottom of a dark, wet cargo tank on a barge that was under construction. The 23-year-old had no safety harness or handrails. He left behind 4-year-old twins. The company reached an undisclosed settlement with Magee’s family.

Left: May 24, 2016, VT Halter shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi; right: Clyde Payne, former OSHA director.
Left: May 24, 2016, VT Halter shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi; right: Clyde Payne, former OSHA director. | Julie Dermansky for Reveal
Clyde Payne, who oversaw the OSHA investigation into the tugboat accident and has since retired, was shocked to learn that the government had continued doing business with VT Halter after the explosion. “We’re talking about human life here, not just dollars and cents,” he said. “It sends the wrong message.”

Yet the course of business continued apace. In the seven years since the accident, the Navy has awarded VT Halter at least $345 million in contracts, a figure that makes the OSHA fines seem like a small tax.

A VT Halter spokeswoman declined to make the company’s chief executive available for an interview and did not respond to a half-dozen requests by phone, email and text requesting an interview with another company official.

***

John Williams Jr. was known simply as “Preacher” among his co-workers. He often arrived at work early and prayed in his truck for God to keep his co-workers safe.

A surveillance camera captures the crane accident at VT Halter’s Pascagoula, Mississippi, shipyard that severely injured John Williams Jr., in June 2014.
A surveillance camera captures the crane accident at VT Halter’s Pascagoula, Mississippi, shipyard that severely injured John Williams Jr., in June 2014. | VT Halter
On a muggy afternoon in June 2014, he was helping another crane operator at VT Halter’s Pascagoula, Mississippi, shipyard move a 250-ton bow so it could be attached to the hull of an offshore supply vessel. One crane pulled ahead of the other. Williams’ crane tipped forward. He furiously worked the levers. Behind him, massive weights meant to balance the crane’s load slipped, pummeling the cab and hurling him through the windshield. Williams lay crumpled in a ball, gasping for air. His pelvis was broken. A pocket-sized Bible that he kept in the cab of the crane lay nearby in the dirt.

“I leaned him back, and most of the right side of his face was gone,” said David Smith, the other crane operator. “He was always very cautious and done everything by the book like we were supposed to.” Four other workers also were injured.

Williams lost part of his skull and is now blind. He is 63 but has the mental capacity of a child. He requires 24-hour nursing care. But he is grateful to be alive. "Heavenly Father Lord, we're thankful for this day and for life,” he says in prayer each night before going to bed.

John Williams Jr., of Irvington, Alabama, lost his eyesight and part of his skull in a June 2014 crane accident at VT Halter’s Pascagoula, Mississippi, shipyard.
John Williams Jr., of Irvington, Alabama, lost his eyesight and part of his skull in a June 2014 crane accident at VT Halter’s Pascagoula, Mississippi, shipyard. | Julie Dermansky for Reveal
OSHA fined VT Halter $22,000 for allowing Williams to work without a functioning sensor, which tells crane operators how much weight their cranes are lifting, among other violations. The company had long known of the problem: In the six months leading up to his accident, Williams had noted the sensor was broken in weekly reports submitted to the shipbuilder. VT Halter re-installed the sensor two days before the tipover but did not test whether it was working properly, according to OSHA.

In October, a jury in Mississippi found that VT Halter bore the most responsibility for the accident. The jury’s verdict found Manitowoc Cranes LLC, the crane manufacturer, should bear 40 percent of the responsibility, and Williams, 10 percent. Manitowoc was ordered to pay $3.4 million to Williams and his wife. Manitowoc has requested a new trial. It denied liability, saying the accident was VT Halter's and Williams's fault. VT Halter will pay no part of the judgment because federal law precluded Williams from suing it for negligence.

Most American workers face the same limitations. In the 1920s, shipyard workers joined many others in accepting a tradeoff under federal law: In exchange for severely limiting their ability to sue their employers for work accidents, they could collect prompt, if limited, payments for injuries. In a quirk of law, though, as soon as that ship heads to sea, workers aboard enjoy expansive protections. They can sue their employer if they so much as slip and fall on a wet deck.

“If shipyards were getting sued and they were made to pay a penalty, believe me, they would do more to protect their workers,” said Michael Huey, a workers’ compensation attorney for shipyard workers in Mobile, Alabama.

Beyond VT Halter, chronic safety problems have plagued many of the top private shipyards building and repairing vessels for the American military. Some companies have made no secret of their contempt for regulators.

At Basic Marine Inc. in Michigan, a federal inspector found inoperable brakes on two cranes. The company used the cranes anyway. When federal inspectors visited the shipyard in 2011, Basic Marine’s president sent workers home. The investigators reported that he “kept yelling for us to get the F@#% out.” He told them he would “stick a warrant up our asses,” OSHA investigators wrote.

Part of the problem is that the Navy does not regulate workplace safety in private shipyards. The Navy’s Naval Sea Systems Command, known as NAVSEA in military circles, oversees ship construction and repair. NAVSEA stations about 1,500 staffers at and near private shipyards across the country. Their job: making sure the shipbuilders deliver quality vessels within budget and on time. They are explicitly told they do not enforce federal workplace safety laws for private employees.

“The contractor is responsible for providing safe working conditions for their personnel,” their operating manual states.

When Navy officials spot major hazards, they may report them to the shipbuilders themselves and consider them when awarding contracts. But the Navy’s record of awarding lucrative contracts to companies with repeated accidents suggests it places little emphasis on these concerns.

At least one NAVSEA executive has tried to challenge the laissez-faire approach. In June 2010, dozens of safety officials from private ship repairers sat down to hear a presentation from Jim Brice, then a NAVSEA safety director. He warned that NAVSEA workers and supervisors “are routinely accepting dangerous working conditions because ‘it’s always been that way.’ ”

“Managers do not give safety same level of attention as cost and schedule,” his slides state. “Work environment is poor (e.g., too many safety deficiencies, managers not correcting deficiencies, lack of consequences leads to accepting the conditions).”

The Coast Guard says its focus is on the final product. "We’re making sure that the taxpayer is getting the best asset on time and on budget that meets the requirement of the contract," said Brian Olexy, spokesman for the Coast Guard Acquisition Directorate.

Federal regulations require that the government contract only with companies that show up and do the job. But the federal contracting system was not designed to evaluate companies' past labor violations.

President Barack Obama had tried to address this in his second term by requiring companies seeking federal contracts of $500,000 or more to disclose labor violations from the past three years. But in October, a federal judge in Texas blocked the rules from taking effect. On Feb. 2, the House of Representatives voted to invalidate the rules and prevent future administrations from developing similar measures. The Senate is expected to take a similar vote in the coming weeks.

When the Navy follows through on Trump’s orders to expand, its options for picking and choosing shipbuilders will be limited. Since World War II, the number of shipyards in the U.S. has dwindled as commercial shipbuilders flocked to China and South Korea, where labor is cheaper. Combined with the restriction that U.S. warships be built at home, that leaves eight major shipyards for the Navy, some of which are wholly dependent on the Navy for business.

The financial pressures on shipbuilders can be intense. Shipbuilders must invest enormous capital to keep up their facilities and machinery. In general, they’re also heavily reliant on a few contracts each, and they may be building just a few ships a year. Several of the Navy’s major shipbuilders are one contract away from being “not viable,” Sean Stackley, now the acting secretary of the Navy, told a Senate subcommittee in 2015.

***

The ruthless drive to build boats quickly and turn a profit leads to dangerous decisions, dozens of shipyard workers told Reveal. Speed often pays—for the top brass. But it can be deadly for workers.

A ship in the making at a Huntington Ingalls Industries shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi.
A ship in the making at a Huntington Ingalls Industries shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi. | Aubrey Aden-Buie/Reveal
LeeBoy Thibodeaux of Pascagoula, Mississippi, was always smiling and often greeted his co-workers with a cheerful refrain: “Good morning, America!”

In January 2012, he climbed a ladder to refill a hulking pot with Black Beauty, an abrasive material workers use to clean boats. It was dirty and grueling, but Thibodeaux wanted the work and, in particular, the health benefits to care for his ailing wife. At 66, he was nearing retirement.

OSHA requires companies to have specific written procedures for working with these pressurized pots. But VT Halter had none. A manager had been explicitly warned about two broken bolts that were supposed to help keep the lid on the pot, said Roscoe Stallworth Jr., who was a sandblasting supervisor at the time. The manager, he said, ignored the warnings. Employees also needed to be properly trained to ease the enormous pressure in the pots, but Stallworth said the company didn’t want to slow production or spend money on repairs.

That January morning, the aging pot’s 20-pound cast-iron lid came loose. It rocketed into Thibodeaux, shearing away his face and killing him instantly. His hard hat sailed over a high sandblasting curtain and landed 60 feet away. After Thibodeaux’s death, William Skinner, then the CEO of VT Halter, told The Mississippi Press, “We really don’t have any facts at this time.”

But the facts were obvious to Stallworth.

Had the bolts been working, Stallworth said, “I’m almost positive it wouldn’t have killed him. They didn’t take the time to train people because it cut into the money they could make. It’s all about profit. It’s go, go, go.”

The next day, the shipyard’s workers resumed work. VT Halter replaced its sandblasting pots soon after, Stallworth said. OSHA imposed a $22,300 fine against the company for the accident and other problems. The agency also said Thibodeaux failed to depressurize the pot before opening the lid.

“When someone is killed, it really doesn’t affect the company,” said Beverly Williams, one of Thibodeaux’s daughters, now 43. “They’re going to keep rolling.”

***

Bram Ates escaped death in November 2009 when the tugboat exploded in VT Halter’s shipyard. Now, the 36-year-old is fighting to survive. The South’s humidity is a curse. He can overheat quickly. The burns damaged his nerves and sweat glands, making it difficult for him to control his body temperature. Scars wrap around his body, branding him for life.

Unable to sue VT Halter, Ates received $100,000 in workers’ compensation, roughly what he’d earn in three years in the shipyards. He tried to use that money to set himself up for life, buying a dilapidated home to renovate. But he’s out of money.

No shipyards will hire Ates, deeming his injuries a liability, he said. He takes the odd roofing job. He also fishes in the Pascagoula River, which gurgles near his withered brown-and-aqua house on stilts. His home sits cold and empty, at the end of a dusty dirt road surrounded by pine trees. His power was shut off when he fell behind on his bills. For now, he sleeps on a recliner at his mother’s house.

Bram Ates has struggled with underemployment, post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor’s guilt since a fatal VT Halter shipyard accident.
Bram Ates has struggled with underemployment, post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor’s guilt since a fatal VT Halter shipyard accident. | Julie Dermansky for Reveal
Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and crippling guilt that he could not save his co-workers, Ates is anxious and fidgety. His marriage collapsed after the accident.

“I assumed Halter would keep me safe,” he said. “It turned out I was wrong.”

Now, nightmares jolt him awake. He is sometimes fearful of fire. Strangers stare at the backs of his hands; skin grafts left dozens of bumps resembling sesame seeds. He storms over to people who puff on cigarettes as they pump gas.

The vapors, he shouts, could explode.

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Jennifer Gollan can be reached at jgollan@revealnews.org. Follow her on Twitter: @jennifergollan.

This story was produced by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.




https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/reveal-center-for-investigative-reporting/

LEFT-CENTER BIAS
February 10, 2017


These media sources have a slight to moderate liberal bias. They often publish factual information that utilizes loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes) to favor liberal causes. These sources are generally trustworthy for information, but may require further investigation. See all Left-Center sources.

Faction Reporting: HIGH

Notes: The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) is a nonprofit news organization based in Emeryville, California, and has conducted investigative journalism since 1977. It is known for producing stories that reveal scandals or corruption in government agencies and corporations.. Has won numerous high standard journalism awards.

https://www.revealnews.org/




http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/sanders-experiences-technical-issue-after-joking-cnn-is-fake-news/article/2614573

Sanders experiences 'technical issue' after joking CNN is 'fake news'
By DANIEL CHAITIN (@DANIELCHAITIN7) • 2/11/17 6:57 AM

Sen. Bernie Sanders experienced a "technical issue" during a Friday interview on CNN after he made a joke that the news network was "fake news."

Appearing on "Outfront," the senator was asked to discuss reports that President Trump's national security adviser, Mike Flynn, had discussed sanctions on Russia with the country's ambassador the day before they were implemented by the Obama administration.

"This is a very troubling development," the senator said, adding that it "speaks to the broader issue of Russia's involvement in our elections" and "to the issue of President Trump being buddy-buddy" with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he called "a thug and a murderer."

CNN's Erin Burnett showed him a clip showing Trump saying he hasn't heard anything about new reports Friday contradicting Flynn's assertion that he did not speak with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about sanctions in December.

Asked if this is a problem, Sanders' response was: "Well I don't know. Maybe he was watching CNN fake news. What do you think?" he said, to which Burnett laughed. "It was a joke," he added.

Burnett replied, "I, I know it was a joke. I'm saying you don't buy what he said obviously" — but the senator did not appear to hear what she said.

"Erin?" Sanders asked. "Are we on?"

After a few moments and no resolution CNN cut to a commercial break. When the show returned, the connection with Sanders was re-established and Burnett apologized for the "technical issue" before moving on with the interview.

Trump has repeatedly criticized CNN, among other news outlets, for being "fake news."




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmZpMqMxo2Q

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