Postcards from the class & culture wars (7.24.18)

“The earth moves closer to the sun every year — you know the rotation of the earth. … We’re moving closer to the sun.”

“Every time you have that soil or rock or whatever it is that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise, because now you have less space in those oceans, because the bottom is moving up.”

“Huge, immediate gains for wealthy shareholders combined with tepid increases in business investment and decreases in real wages don’t paint a flattering picture of the tax cut’s impact so far.”

“So far during the recovery from the Great Recession, the top 1 percent of families have captured 41.8 percent of all income growth.”

“It’s a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride.”

“The appearance on Metaxas’ show is far from the only connection Butina has had to American evangelical circles of power.”

“MGM Resorts International has filed lawsuits against more than 1,000 victims of the worst mass shooting in the United States in order to avoid liability.”

“MVM, Inc. has a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to provide ‘unaccompanied alien children (UAC) transportation services’ worth $162 million.”

“Then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s staff sought to protect him from exposure to toxic formaldehyde from an office desk last year, emails show — just months before his top political aides blocked the release of a report on health dangers from the same chemical.”

“Now that Myanmar has been more or less normalized on the world scene and Aung San Suu Kyi has moved out of the realm of idealized hero for global white liberals into someone totally cool with genocide, the workers of Burma are now making clothing for the world’s population and suffering the same terrible conditions and lives that their neighbors do.”

“Despite our nation’s vast wealth and and the tremendous amount of resources spent on health care services, women in the United States die within a year of childbirth more than women in any other nation with an advanced economy.”

“Basically no one cares about the lives of the people involved in producing our meat.”

“A consumer movement isn’t going to improve conditions for these workers. What will improve it is a higher minimum wage, a humane immigration policy, and a real regulatory regime.”

“Here are a few more words that need to be used more in characterizing Trump and his practices, words writers avoid as though saying what is true, rather than Trump himself, ‘coarsens’ our public discourse: Cowardly.  Lazy. Cheater. Hateful. Stooge.”

“Nelson Mandela was an evil man.”

“To think human trafficking is worse now than it’s ever been in the history of this world is to forget that the Atlantic slave trade happened.”

“At what point does, say, Fox News qualify as a church?”

“Over the past year, Bannon has held talks with right-wing groups across the continent from Nigel Farage and members of Marine Le Pen’s Front National (recently renamed Rassemblement National) in the West, to Hungary’s Viktor Orban and the Polish populists in the East.”

“It’s not so much any one thing on this list as the combination of them all pointing in the same direction.”

“The Trump era, then, does not create a new problem for evangelicals and their image; it’s simply casting a very bright light on what has always been there, at least for the past forty years or so.”