Month: April 2021

Axios reports that Janet Yellen has a modest proposal:

Janet Yellen will use her first major address as Treasury secretary to argue for a global minimum corporate tax rate, Axios has learned, as she makes the case for President Biden’s plan to raise U.S. corporate taxes to fund his $2 trillion+ infrastructure plan.

Why it matters: Convincing other countries to impose a global minimum tax would reduce the likelihood of companies relocating offshore, as Biden seeks to increase the corporate rate from 21% to 28%.

Perhaps. But so long as the corporate model for organizing capitalist enterprises hold firm, businesses will, like water, seek the lowest cost points in hopes of maximizing profit. They will seek to externalize costs and internalize profits. Ask Walmart.

That’s not to say trying to tame the beasts is not worth the attempt, but manage your expectations.

The bottom line: By trying to convince other countries to impose a global minimum tax, Yellen is acknowledging the risks to the American economy if it acts alone in raising corporate rates.

● “Together we can use a global minimum tax to make sure the global economy thrives based on a more level playing field in the taxation of multinational corporations, and spurs innovation, growth, and prosperity,” she will say.

Sure. But successful (for some) as it is, corporate capitalism itself still needs an upgrade. It will lean toward a Tom Sawyer model until that’s no longer part of its DNA. The beasties won’t be satisfied until we are paying them to work for them.

What Republican leaders object to is accepting Americans they consider inferiors as equals. (And they relish calling liberals elitists.) Those attitudes are a matter of heads and hearts so long as they don’t act on them, although those attitudes underly subtle and not so subtle discriminatory systems.

But voting? Sharing political power with people they consider inferiors? Oh, hell no!

This whole hubbub over Georgia’s voting restrictions? It’s about power shifting away from those who have more to those who have less. Georgia Republicans are not the only ones wetting their pants over the prospect of sharing power. Check out Texas:

Senate Bill 7 passed with support from all 18 Republican state senators and opposition from all 13 Democrats. The bill limits extended early voting hours, bans drive-thru voting and forbids local election officials from encouraging voters to submit vote-by-mail applications.

If signed into law, the bill would likely impact Texas’ largest cities where voters have often faced long lines during recent elections. Some of the state’s largest counties expanded early voting hours and created drive-thru polling locations to allow more people to vote in the 2020 elections.

That’s a bridge too far.

Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project, expressed concerns about the effect SB 7 may have on voter turnout.

“Texas has, typically, one of the lowest turnout rates in the country to the extent that there are people that think that that’s a problem and think that there should be more participation.” Henson said. “This legislation works in the opposite direction of solving that problem.”

Many Texas Republicans believe the bigger problem is voter fraud. Supporters believe the bill will stop people from cheating in elections.

In their fevered minds.

We use race too easily as a simplfying assumption to explain such behavior as erecting barriers to voting. But it is also about power. Who has it. Who doesn’t. Who is the alpha. Who are the rest. Money is shorthand for it. So is race. Those in power mean to keep it.

Some truths are not self-evident at all. Studies confirm that the more one has, the less likely one is to accept them. The more one has, the more likely one is to be “self-oriented and more willing to behave unethically” in one’s self-interest, researcher Paul Piff tells Michael Mechanic in The Atlantic:  

Political scientists such as Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens have found notable differences in the policy preferences of affluent versus middle-class Americans, not only on purely economic matters like taxation but also on public-education funding, racial equity, and environmental protections, all of which the rich have been significantly less likely to support. This matters because of the influence the rich have over government officials. In one study, Gilens, now a professor at UCLA, combed through thousands of public survey responses and discovered that, on issues where the views of wealthy voters diverged significantly from those of the rest of the populace, the policies ultimately put in place “strongly” reflected the desires of the most affluent respondents—the top-earning 10 percent. Those policies, the study concluded, bore “virtually no relationship to the preferences” of poorer Americans.

Wealthy people are less likely than poor ones, in lab settings at least, to relate to the suffering of others. When people experience compassion, it turns out, our hearts actually slow down. In 2012, Piff’s then-colleagues Michael Kraus and Jennifer Stellar hooked volunteers up to ECG machines and showed them two short videos: a “neutral” video of a woman explaining how to construct a patio wall and a “compassion” video of children receiving chemotherapy treatments for cancer. Relative to the wealthier participants, the poorer ones not only reported feeling greater compassion for the kids but also exhibited a significantly larger slowdown in heart rate from one video to the next.

If affluent people are less moved by the suffering of others, they should be less likely to help those in need, and this too seems to be true both in the lab and outside it. While wealthy families donate significantly more money to charity on average than poor families do, they tend to give away a smaller share of their income. “As wealth goes up, the stinginess seems to increase,” Piff said.

And the tendency toward being a royalist, to put it bluntly.

The psychologists Kraus and Keltner have found that people who rank themselves at the top of the social scale are significantly more likely to endorse essentialism, the notion that group characteristics are immutable and biologically determined—precisely the sort of beliefs used to justify the mistreatment of low-status groups such as immigrants and ethnic minorities. Countless studies, Kraus writes, point to an upper-class tendency toward “self-preservation.” That is, people who view themselves as superior in education, occupation, and assets are inclined to protect their group’s status at the expense of groups they deem less deserving: “These findings should call into question any beliefs in noblesse oblige—elevated rank does not appear to obligate wealthy individuals to do good for the benefit of society.”

A layperson perusing the literature on wealth and behavior might conclude that wealthy people are assholes, but that’s not really fair. “When I’m talking about these findings, it can just sound like flat-out rich-bashing, which I’m not interested in doing,” Piff said. One can be extraordinarily rich and not exhibit these patterns, or be quite poor and exhibit them. The effects that he and his colleagues describe are “small to medium,” and they are averages.

But they are real. Even toward the bottom of the social order.

We are in the end animals. So status, pecking order? It’s part of the wiring. It runs deep.

Now that kids are back in school they’re getting COVID and spreading it around. Who could have ever guessed that would happen?

Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb on Sunday said that a rise in coronavirus infections among young people is driving new outbreaks in some states, but he does not believe there will be a “true” fourth wave of the pandemic.

“What we’re seeing is pockets of infection around the country, particularly in younger people who haven’t been vaccinated and also in school-aged children,” Gottlieb said in an interview on “Face the Nation,” noting the rise in cases among school-aged kids in Michigan, Minnesota and Massachusetts. 

“You’re seeing outbreaks in schools and infections in social cohorts that haven’t been exposed to the virus before, maybe were doing a better job sheltering, now they’re out and about getting exposed to the virus and they’re getting infected,” he continued. “The infection is changing its contours in terms of who’s being stricken by it right now.”

And yet they ALL, including Gottlieb, said that it was perfectly safe for adults to go back into classrooms without vaccinations and they would not get COVID if they just wore a mask and opened a window. These people insisted that teachers were being nothing but whiners for not wanting to sit in rooms all day with people who are unlikely to be following the guidelines to the letter in poorly ventilated rooms in the middle of winter.

All they asked for was to be given the vaccine which was well on the way before they returned. But no. They were browbeaten and insulted and the unions that are charged with protecting them as workers were vilified. It took massive resistance to get the states to prioritize school employees for the vaccines. Why?

Common sense said their assurance that it was perfectly safe was fatuous nonsense. A few studies in rural America were not enough to reassure anyone, but the pressure was so intense to open schools that the scientists just folded and the media went into a full scale frenzy. It was patently obvious that nobody had any idea whether kids would be spreaders of the disease or how many would get sick or have long term consequences because we had been protecting them throughout the pandemic by keeping them at home!

This was a big failure of the system during this thing but it did reveal just how low people hold public school teachers in their esteem. We already knew it by the fact that they refuse to pay them a living wage even as they are required to assume massive college loans and continue their education while almost always holding down two jobs just to pay the bills. And we knew that nobody would ever do anything about the violence they are exposed to in our rampant wild west of a gun culture that is so often focused on schools. But this was something else. They were told that they needed to not only put their own lives on the line, as they already do, but they needed to expose their families to a deadly virus based on thin science as well.

Everyone is wringing their hands over the lost education of their kids. I wonder if they’ll still be paying attention to the schools six months from now. Somehow, I doubt it.

Here’s more:

Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm once strongly supported the idea of kids returning to the classroom full-time.

But late last fall, the U.S. began seeing its first cases of B.1.1.7, the so-called British variant of COVID-19. Now Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, has done a 180 on the subject.

“It’s a totally different virus in the sense of what it’s doing epidemiologically,” he said. “I think school openings today are going to greatly enhance transmission of B.1.1.7 in our communities, and I predict that within weeks we will be revisiting this issue, unfortunately, after we’ve had substantial transmission.”

In Massachusetts, that substantial transmission has yet to be seen but may already be happening.

On Monday, April 5, elementary school students go back to five-day-a-week in-person learning by order of the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education [DESE]. Middle and high school students go back later in the month.

Those orders have not changed, despite the fact COVID-19 cases among students and staff in Massachusetts schools have steadily risen for weeks. At the beginning of March, student and staff infections numbered 476 total. Last week, DESE reported 1,045 infections: 801 students and 244 staff.

Massachusetts only performs variant checks on a small number of positive COVID-19 tests, so it’s hard to say whether B.1.1.7 is dominant here. Thus far, the state Department of Public Health has reported to the CDC finding 712 cases of B.1.1.7 and more cases of the P.1 variant than any other state: 58.

But in Osterholm’s native Minnesota, health officials said B.1.1.7 rapidly gained ground last month, such that it’s now probably responsible for more than half of all infections there.

“We’re certainly seeing outbreaks in youth sports,” said Dr. Beth Thielen, a virologist and specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Minnesota. “School-based outbreaks are sort of cropping up, and I do think that that is quite worrisome.”

Also worrisome to Thielen, aside from the increased transmissibility of B.1.1.7, it seems to cause worse disease.

“Working in the hospital, and I can speak from personal experience, that I’ve seen some more severe cases in younger individuals than I have at prior points in the pandemic,” Thielen said. “I think there are some worrying trends that have been reported in multiple locations that suggest there may, in fact, be more severe disease and more transmissibility.”

What also concerns both Osterholm and Thielen is that the CDC school reopening guidance issued in mid-March seems to be based on safety data from what amounts to a different COVID-19 era, that is, the pre-B.1.1.7 time.

At that time, two things seemed to be true: the COVID-19 circulating at the time seemed less infectious to children, and Massachusetts school districts were largely operating under modified conditions with the primary goal of de-densifying classrooms so as to minimize possible exposure to the virus.

New CDC ‘back-to-school’ guidelines ease up on classroom distancing from six feet apart to at least three feet, which is what will allow for all students to return to in-person learning in Massachusetts and elsewhere.

They’ve known about these variants for months. The least we could have expected is that the scientists have told the public that they really didn’t know instead of insisting that schools could be reopened and adults were perfectly safe as long as the kids adhered to mask wearing and social distancing all day long which everyone knew was a pipe dream. And to not say upfront that adults in schools should be in the first tranche of essential workers to be vaccinated if you wanted to open up schools was just daft. The Biden team took too long to get there too for reasons that are still obscure but which I think had to do with the media attacking them for being pawns of the teachers’ unions. Not good moment.

Now that we have the new variants spreading around it looks like kids are getting this and nobody knows what means. If we could have just held on until everyone got vaccinated a lot of pain and anxiety could have been avoided. The vaccination rollout is so successful it’s entirely possible that will happen in just a couple more months. How sad.

And comes out licking his chops:

I'm sure that Fox News will eventually stop booking Pete, but in the meantime, he'll keep doing this:pic.twitter.com/6ONqZY8WWu

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) April 4, 2021

He’s very good at this and I suspect they’re going to have him out there a LOT to sell this infrastructure bill. Let’s hope so, anyway. Some people just have a gift for that sort of thing and he’s one of them.

This AP profile today is obviously a beat sweetener but the fact is that Buttigieg has shown himself, so far, to be an effective team player even as his ambition emanates from him in waves. It will be interesting to see him at work.

Costs to the taxpayers for golf outings in the first 41 days of their presidency:

Bush 41: $0
Obama: $0
Trump: $578,640
Biden: $0

And let’s not forget that most of that money went directly into Trump’s pocket since he realized early that he could ding the taxpayers for his week-end forays to his own properties. The man never left a penny on the sidewalk.

Former GOP congressman turned Independent Charlie Dent reflects on John Boehner’s new book. He starts off by noting that he never thought Trumpism sprang out of nowhere, which is true. But I’m not sure he still sees exactly how this whole thing evolved:

Instead, Trump was a consequence of the shifting dynamics in the United States — and specifically within the GOP — that allowed an anti-establishment candidate to rise to power and act on his worst impulses while in office.In simpler terms, Trump was gasoline on the proverbial fire.

Former House Speaker John Boehner, in excerpts from “On the House: A Washington Memoir,” provides clear evidence that the Republican Party was already struggling with its identity and ideology long before Trump was a serious candidate for political office.

In the 2010 midterm elections, when the Tea Party-affiliated candidates gained a number of seats in Congress, Boehner wrote, “You could be a total moron and get elected just by having an R next to your name — and that year, by the way, we did pick up a fair number in that category.”

Unfortunately, those Boehner labeled “morons” gained an outsized voice within the House GOP conference, bringing their extreme views and conspiracy theories to Congress.

They pushed for legislation that had no chance of passing — including defunding Obamacare while President Barack Obama was in office and Democrats controlled the US Senate — and attempted to obstruct the raising of the debt ceiling, which would have led to fiscal Armageddon.

Their views were further amplified by a right-wing media ecosystem eager to support these congressmen. As Boehner notes, Fox News talent, like Sean Hannity, and Fox News leadership, at the time Roger Ailes, were all too willing to provide those fringe members primetime placement every evening. After all, giving a public forum to those members to rant about their latest contrived outrage was good for ratings — and the network’s bottom line.

What made a number of these Tea Party members — many of whom formed the Freedom Caucus — so difficult to work with was their seeming lack of interest in actually governing. Instead, many of them were consumed with developing their media personas. Former US Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, first elected in 2006, was one such example.

Boehner writes that her political rise was emblematic of conservative media’s ability to make “people who used to be fringe characters into powerful media stars.” Rather than laying out policy plans to address issues facing everyday Americans, the rejectionist wing of the GOP was more interested in airing grievances, stoking anger and settling political scores. In contrast, I spent most of my days focused on doing my committee work, serving my district’s interests and largely avoiding national media attention.

However, Boehner and I could not ignore the threat these extremists posed to our party. At the time, government was divided. President Obama and US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid were the most powerful Democratic voices in Washington DC. The only check on their liberal agenda was the House Republican majority. Together, both sides would need to engage in difficult negotiations and ultimately compromise to govern effectively.

But there was one glaring problem. For many of these rejectionist members, compromise was tantamount to capitulation or surrender. In fact, several of these members referred to me as the leader of the “Surrender Caucus.” What earned me that label was my willingness to fund the government, prevent a catastrophic default on America’s full faith and credit, vote for emergency assistance to victims of Hurricane Sandy, enact a reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act that included protections for LGBT Americans — and other sins too numerous to mention.

Sadly for Boehner, he never stood a chance. How could he possibly succeed in negotiations when a block of roughly 40 GOP House members undermined him at every opportunity and weakened his position in any meeting with Obama, Reid or even Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi?

As Boehner often said, “If I don’t have 218 votes, I don’t have s**t.” And his inability to keep the Republican caucus united meant he was often left as the very kind of leader he warned against. “A leader with no followers is just a guy taking a walk,” he’d quip to me. But he was absolutely right — the party was fracturing, and there was no clear sense who would emerge as the new leaders. My personal breaking point occurred in September 2013 in the run-up to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’ futile and self-serving government shutdown.

At that time, I observed how a freshman US senator in his first year in office plunged the nation recklessly into turmoil, cheered on by an all too willing conservative media echo chamber, seemingly to advance his own naked presidential ambitions. Is it any wonder that Boehner referred to Cruz as “Lucifer in the flesh“? What’s worse, too many GOP members of Congress who knew better joined this foolish march out of fear.

Yes, so much of the story of the transformation of the Republican Party has been built on fear — fear of fringe colleagues, fear of fringe elements of the base and fear of fringe primary challengers. Sound familiar? No one could exploit fear better than Trump himself.

In 2016, Trump turned fear into the highest form of political power. And these intransigent fringe GOP elements, who were very good at telling Boehner what he could not do, suddenly had the keys to the castle.

This was actually coming on long before that. There was always a radical right wing fringe that had a presence in the American politics and was represented in congress. If you want to trace it all the way back to the 1860s you wouldn’t be wrong. But it was Newt Gingrich who brought the modern radical line of thinking into the leadership of the Republican party nearly 30 years ago.

The establishment saw the threat even back then and even made some tepid attempts to depose Gingrich that didn’t work and they basically just gave up. (Gingrich imploded of his own accord after the 98 elections proved to be disastrous.)

The point is that Boehner can’t just blame the Tea Party or Trump. He also benefited from the radicalization of the party as did his wingman Paul Ryan. They just lost control of it when the Tea Party came along as anyone could have predicted. The monster always gets loose.

I’m actually looking forward to reading Boehner’s book, though. His vantage point, however, tainted, was unique and I’ll be fascinated to see how he deals with it. He appears to have decided to tell it as he saw it and that’s interesting in itself.

I’m fairly sure he would say that the US should vaccinate its migrant farmworkers. California is doing that as are some other states. Unfortunately, not all:

The fight to end the coronavirus’ devastation throughout California’s heartland extends to the Mexico border, where migrant farmworkers heading north to pick lettuce, broccoli, carrots and other crops are offered a vaccination as soon as they enter the United States.

California is vaccinating farmworkers on a large scale by taking the shots to where they live and work, protecting a population disproportionately hard hit by the pandemic. Advocates said an initial slow rollout in California has gained momentum in the past few weeks as the flow of vaccine increases and mobile clinics pop up at farms and food processing centers.

Farmworkers are particularly vulnerable because they live in crowded bunkhouses and eat together in dining halls. Those who toil outdoors often travel to the fields together in packed vans or buses. Others work in bustling packing warehouses.

At a recent event at the old headquarters of the United Farm Workers in Delano, a festival-like atmosphere featuring DJs and free food drew some 1,000 people from the Central Valley.

On the border in Calexico, where only essential workers have been allowed to cross since March of last year, volunteers with Salud Sin Fronteras, Spanish for Health Without Borders, inoculate arriving workers.

Farther north, Ernestina Solorio, 50, who picks strawberries in the fields of Watsonville each harvest, was first up at a vaccination site in the backyard of a home. The single mother of four said she lived in fear of getting infected and spent weeks calling clinics about getting a vaccine.

“I kept thinking what will happen to my children if I get sick? Who will cook for them? Who will help them?” she said.

Researchers at Purdue University estimate that about 9,000 agricultural workers in the U.S. have died of COVID-19 and nearly a half-million have been infected.

California was the first state to make agricultural workers eligible for vaccinations, followed by others including Washington, Michigan and Georgia. Arizona hasn’t prioritized farmworkers but some private growers have offered vaccinations. In Florida, the nation’s main citrus provider, farmworker advocates there have pushed to no avail to remove a residency requirement and to declare agricultural workers as essential.

Of course Florida has refused to vaccinate farmworkers. DeSantis also banned private businesses from requiring so-called Vaccination Passports. (Also dealing with a possible radioactive wastewater crisis and appears to be “downplaying” it, but that’s another story.) DeSantis is Trump 2.0 — just as awful but more efficient.

This migrant farmworker population is benefiting from the John and Johnson vaccine because they move around and getting the second dose of the other two can be difficult. Itinerant populations like these farmworkers and homeless people are where that vaccine should be directed for those reasons.

This time last year, comedian @JLCauvin absolutely roasted Trump for wanting to open the country back up in time for Easter pic.twitter.com/QnzQNDXerw

— NowThis Impact (@nowthisimpact) April 4, 2021

This is why the conservative Evangelicals love him so:

That’s real folks, not satire.

More Happy Easter tidings:

Major League Baseball has decided to pull its July All Star game and player draft out of Atlanta over Georgia Republicans’ need to slap ankle chains on Georgia voters of a certain complexion and political leaning. Why, they handed Georgia’s 2020 electoral votes and its two U.S. Senate seats to Democrats!

The “I’ll show you!” caucus of Georgia overseers means to show somebody who’s boss, dammit. These private businesses standing behind civil rights are just defying the natural order!

Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia on Saturday issued a blistering critique of Major League Baseball’s decision to move its All-Star Game out of the state over the new law there restricting voting. https://t.co/ORnDras4Vn

— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 3, 2021

“Somebody git me an axe handle!” Georgia’s current governor might have said (New York Times):

Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia on Saturday issued a blistering critique of Major League Baseball’s decision to pull its All-Star Game out of the state over the new law there restricting voting, arguing that the move would deliver an economic hit to Georgians.

Mr. Kemp, a Republican, framed the battle over voting rights in Georgia as a wholly partisan one concocted by Democrats, rather than a civil rights effort to protect access to the ballot as Republicans try to place new limits on voting across the country.

“Yesterday, Major League Baseball caved to fear and lies from liberal activists,” Mr. Kemp said at a news conference, flanked by the state’s Republican attorney general, G.O.P. members of the legislature and grass-roots activists. “In the middle of a pandemic, Major League Baseball put the wishes of Stacey Abrams and Joe Biden ahead of the economic well-being of hard-working Georgians who were counting on the All-Star Game for a paycheck.”

Liberal agitators! Nobody but your tribe is buying your spin, Brian.

They have a sense of history in Georgia. Old times there are not forgotten. Just recent history. This was North Carolina in September almost five years ago:

The NCAA announced Monday evening it would pull seven championship tournament games out of North Carolina because of a controversial state law that critics say is discriminatory to the LGBT community.

“Based on the NCAA’s commitment to fairness and inclusion, the Association will relocate all seven previously awarded championship events from North Carolina during the 2016-17 academic year,” the NCAA said in a statement.

The organization said “current North Carolina state laws” don’t align with its commitment to “promote an inclusive atmosphere for all college athletes, coaches, administrators and fans.”

Months later, in February 2017:

The NCAA might move all championship events through 2022 out of North Carolina if the state doesn’t repeal its “bathroom bill,” the North Carolina Sports Association says in a letter sent to state legislators.

“Our contacts at the NCAA tell us that, due to their stance on HB2, all North Carolina bids will be pulled from the review process and removed from consideration,” said the letter from Scott Dupree, executive director of the Greater Raleigh Sports Alliance, on behalf of the association.

The state could suffer “upwards of a half-billion dollars” in negative economic impact, the letter said. Counting NCAA events already moved to other states, “we will be faced with a six-year drought of NCAA championships in North Carolina,” the letter said.

Newsweek published a list of sports leagues, entertainment figures, and businesses boycotting North Carolina over its “bathroom bill.” The Associated Press projected the total cost of the boycotts to North Carolina at $3.76 billion. North Carolina eventually issued an ambiguous repeal.

UPDATE: Texas is also slow on the uptake.

It’s a lesson Georgia just learned: Restrict access to voting, and corporations will make your pockets hurt for it.

Looks like Texas didn’t pay enough attention. pic.twitter.com/VjcmrUW94X

— The Recount (@therecount) April 4, 2021

For a primer on just what Georgia’s new voter suppression bill does to inhibit voting by people Republicans consider second-class citizens, the New York Times had a handy tic sheet the other day. After surviving a decade of court fights over GOP gerrymandering and photo ID legislation, after watching courts order districts redrawn and redrawn again in that time, and after boycotts stemming from its infamous “bathroom bill,” North Carolina has been there and done that. After failing to retake one branch of the state legislature last November ahead of the next redistricting, North Carolina Democrats are bracing for another ten years of the same.

North Carolina and Wisconsin have been incubators for Republicans field-testing and court-proofing the best antidemocratic practices Republican mapmakers and strategists can coax from legislative agar. Unmasked and damned proud of it, they they are ready to spread the contagion to every state they control.

“Republican state legislators are sponsoring a blizzard of new voting restrictions, advancing 55 bills in 24 states,” Ed Kilgore explains. ” CBS News and FiveThirtyEight have published helpful state-by-state overviews, and the Brennan Center for Justice has all the details you’d want. But it’s important to look at the general patterns.”

So, lets examine the spike proteins on the beasties headed to state legislatures near you.

Kilgore writes:

This is why the focus on the marquee federal prizes is misplaced even if those races make more compelling television. The real damage is done locally under our noses.