I have been telling you for decades now that based on objectively verifiable social outcome data Red State Republican governance is always inferior to Blue State Democratic governance and always produces significantly less wellbeing for the people who live in those Red States. In every election it always amazes me that the voters in Red States don’t seem to understand this and, by voting for Republicans, they are assuring their lives will be more stressed and miserable. Here is yet more proof of what I am saying.
Summary: For at least the last 40 years, pay and job quality for workers across the South has been inferior compared to other regions—thanks to the racist and anti-worker Southern economic development model.
Key findings
For over four decades, the typical worker in the South has been paid less than their counterparts in every other region of the country.
The share of workers in the South who are paid less than $15 per hour—22% in 2021—is substantially higher than that of any other region.
Workers across the South are the least likely to receive employer-provided health insurance or a pension compared with workers in other regions. They are also least likely to have paid sick leave.
The South has by far the lowest rates of union coverage; the states with the lowest rates in 2023 are South Carolina (3%), North Carolina (3.3%), and Louisiana (5.1%)—compared with 11.2% nationally.
Why this matters
Lower wages and less access to health insurance, pensions, and paid leave for workers are deliberate outcomes of the Southern economic development model. Southerners from all backgrounds—across race, ethnicity, gender, immigrant statuses, and income levels—must come together to demand a new economic model that centers and empowers workers and families.
MARGIE MASON AND ROBIN MCDOWELL, Investigative Reporters - Associated Press
Stephan:
As I have written and published,(see SR Archive) the American Gulag is the largest in the world with the largest number of prisoners under lock and key of any country in the world. And this system has produced another effect. Slavery has not ended in the United States, particularly the Southern Red States, where they literally force prisoners to work for no pay whatever or a few pennies long hours on what were formerly slave plantations. It is that blatant. It is all incredibly racist as well.
Prison guards ride horses that were broken by inmates as they return from farm work detail at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, La. Credit: Gerald Herbert / AP
Beneath the blazing summer sun on a former slave plantation, Lamont Gross and fellow prisoners stooped in long rows, picking vegetables by hand under the watchful eyes of armed guards on horseback. He said breaks were short and infrequent, with nothing to protect workers from the heat.
“I saw guys collapse,” Gross said of his days on the so-called farm line at Louisiana’s state penitentiary, where men work for pennies an hour or nothing at all and face punishment if they refuse. “There were dudes that got heat stroke. There were dudes with underlying conditions, older or had some sort of disability, but they had to go out there, too.”
As daily temperatures hit record highs across much of the South, a federal judge took an unusual step, challenging the treatment of mostly Black incarcerated workers in the fields.
America’s largest maximum-security prison, known as Angola, […]
Recently I have done articles on the Incel movement of celibate men, and yesterday I published a piece on the “Boy Sober” movement of women. Now this. Increasingly younger men and women are not making having children a priority in their lives. The net-net of this is that our population is going to get older — which has all kinds of negative implications — and, except for immigration, smaller. To remain stable in its population a country has to have 2.1 children born for every death. The fear of the 1970s that America would be devastated by overpopulation turns out to be a fear-based fantasy and miscalculation by futurists.
Credit: The New York Times
When Jurnee McKay, 25, imagines having children, a series of scary scenarios pop into her mind: the “horrors” of childbirth, risks associated with pregnancy, a flighty potential partner, exorbitant child care costs.
Abortion care restrictions are also on her list of fears. So Ms. McKay, a nursing student in Orlando, decided to eliminate the possibility of an accidental pregnancy. But the first doctor she consulted refused to remove her fallopian tubes, she said, insisting that she might change her mind after meeting her “soul mate.”
“For some reason,” she said, “society looks at women who choose not to make life harder for themselves as crazy.”
Next week, she will speak with another doctor about sterilization.
Like Ms. McKay, a growing number of U.S. adults say they are unlikely to raise children, according to a study released on Thursday by the Pew Research Center. When the survey was conducted in 2023, 47 percent of those younger than 50 without children said they were unlikely ever to have children, an […]
David Corn, Washington, DC, Bureau Chief - Mother Jones
Stephan:
J.D. Vance is one of the weirdest people in the history of American politics. Spend a few moments Googling his quotes, and what he believes. The Republican Party in 2024 is running a crook and a weirdo, and in Project 2025 they tell you exactly what they have in mind for your future. It strikes me as one of the most bizarre tickets any country has ever seen.
J.D. Vance Credit: Julia Nikhinson / AP
During his acceptance speech at the Republican convention last week, Sen. J.D. Vance, the GOP vice presidential candidate, praised Donald Trump’s call for “unity.” But this year, Vance endorsed a new book co-written by a far-right conspiracy-monger that calls progressives “unhumans” and claims they are waging an “Irregular Communist Revolution” against American civilization.
The book, Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), was written by Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec. Posobiec is a well-known alt-right agitator and conservative media personality who promoted the bonkers Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Lisec is a professional ghostwriter. And their book professes to be a history of communist and leftist revolutionary abuses over the decades—but with a twist. They claim, “For as long as there have been beauty and truth, love and life, there have also been the ugly liars who hate and kill.” And these “people of anti-civilization” have always gone by different names: communists, socialists, leftists, and progressives. The […]
Oliver Milman and Nina Lakhani, Environmental Reporters - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan:
This report in The Guardian describes both the shame and the corruption of the United States and other rich countries, and the servitude of the many to the few. It assures we will not meet the Paris accord for climate control. As it says, “the oil and gas rush, led by the richest countries, risks demolishing hopes that the world can stay within internationally agreed-upon limits aimed at preventing catastrophic heatwaves, wildfires, flooding and other impacts. No new oil and gas project can proceed if the Paris agreement, which calls for global temperatures to be restrained to a 1.5C (2.7F) rise above preindustrial levels, is to be met, according to the International Energy Agency.” What this means is that your life and mine, and the lives of our children and their children have been condemned to the misery, death, and forced migration climate change will create for humanity, so that a tiny percentage of the world’s population can stay rich.
A surge in new oil and gas exploration in 2024 threatens to unleash nearly 12bn tonnes of planet-heating emissions, with the world’s wealthiest countries – such as the US and the UK – leading a stampede of fossil fuel expansion in spite of their climate commitments, new data shared exclusively with the Guardian reveals.
The new oil and gas field licences forecast to be awarded across the world this year are on track to generate the highest level of emissions since those issued in 2018, as heatwaves, wildfires, drought and floods cause death and destruction globally, according to analysis of industry data by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).
The 11.9bn tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions – which is roughly the same as China’s annual carbon pollution – resulting over their lifetime from all current and upcoming oil and gas fields forecast to be licensed by the end of 2024 would be greater than the past four years combined. The projection includes licences awarded as of June 2024, as well as the oil and gas blocks open for bidding, under evaluation […]
