Bernie Sanders Dominates as Analyses of Fundraising Data Show Vermont Senator With Widespread Support Across Nation

The data "contradicts both the mainstream narrative and some national polling data that suggest that only a centrist Democrat could succeed in this political environment."

Eoin Higgins, staff writer

Individual donors to Democratic candidates for the party's 2020 presidential nomination overwhelmingly gave to Sen. Bernie Sanders, according to analyses released Friday. 

The New York Times, in a map produced by the paper's reporters, found that Sanders, an Independent from Vermont, dominates most of the country as the primary or secondary recipient of nearly all donations from Americans in all states—though his support is strongest in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, the eastern Great Plains, and the West.

"The movement is so strong that NYT has to create a separate map that excludes @BernieSanders from it," tweeted Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir.

The L.A. Times went into further detail in a piece which allows readers to zero in on their zip codes for hard numbers. The Wall Street Journal showed who had the most small dollar donations across the country (unsurprisingly, the majority of the country went to Sanders in that regard).

And a study from The Center for Public Integrity and FiveThirtyEight demonstrated that the senator is the recipient of donations from one out of every three Democrats donating to primary candidates, irrespective of how many other candidates they're donating to.

The mappable data from the Times, said independent researcher Kristin Johnson, whose work on localized donations helped predict the upset win of Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) in her 2018 primary against then-incumbent Mike Capuano, "contradicts both the mainstream narrative and some national polling data that suggest that only a centrist Democrat could succeed in this political environment."

"Sanders clearly has an advantage from the supporter database and name recognition he amassed during his 2016 presidential campaign," added Johnson. 

Progressives immediately pounced on the Times report as an indication of the strength of Sanders' support.

"Total number of donors would seem to me to be the most relevant (and least classist) way of gauging enthusiasm, rather than the cash totals CNN et al gush over every quarter," said journalist Adam Johnson.

Sanders' donor advantage was so overwhelming in the Times data that the paper "had to make two maps—one excluding Bernie Sanders—because Bernie had too many donors to show other candidates donation patterns," as Greenpeace International's Matt Browner Hamlin pointed out on Twitter. 

The breadth of Sanders' appeal, especially through the middle of the country, spurred the senator's Iowa communications director to challenge the conventional wisdom that "the Midwest doesn't want or support progressive policies."

The report also showed strength for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) across the country, though not as robust as that for Sanders. 

Of other Democrats, South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a relative political unknown before this year's breakout presidential run, former Vice President Joe Biden, and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) all dominated the country's wealthier hotspots. Former Rep. Beto O'Rourke dominated Texas and Sen. Amy Klobuchar her native Minnesota. 

Sanders' strength may be even greater than the maps show, however, as the Times admitted that "information about donors giving $200 or less directly to a campaign is not available."

The senator is raking it in from a plurality of Democrats contributing to campaigns, according to a study by The Center for Public Integrity and FiveThirtyEight: 

Nearly one out of every three donors who have given to any presidential campaign have donated to Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont Democrat who has by far the largest number of donors of any of the Democratic candidates. (That doesn't mean they gave exclusively to Sanders — many people have given money to multiple Democratic candidates.) 

The study also found that "Democrats are far from wearing their donors out" and have more to give. 

"At least 2.4 million people have together pumped about $209 million into the campaigns of major Democratic presidential contenders during the first half of 2019," the report said.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/02/bernie-sanders-dominates-analyses-fundraising-data-show-vermont-senator-widespread?cd-origin=rss&utm

'This Is a Huge Deal': Majority of House Democrats Have Signed on to Medicare for All

"Amazing what a little bold leadership can do."

Jake Johnson, staff writer

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/02/huge-deal-majority-house-democrats-have-signed-medicare-all?cd-origin=rss&utm

Progressives celebrated a "huge landmark" in the fight for a humane healthcare system in the United States after news broke Thursday that a majority of the House Democratic caucus has signed on to the comprehensive and bold Medicare for All Act of 2019.

"Medicare for All is now the official Democratic Party position in the U.S. House, as the legislation now has 118 sponsors—an official majority of the House Democratic caucus," tweeted David Sirota, speechwriter for Sen. Bernie Sanders, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and the lead sponsor of the Medicare for All Act in the Senate.

View the full list of co-sponsors.

"This is a huge deal," tweeted activist Shaun King.

Single-payer advocates applauded both the persistent grassroots organizing by nurses and others and the leadership of Sanders and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.)—the lead sponsor of the Medicare for All Act in the House—for making the achievement possible.

The milestone comes after Medicare for All featured prominently during both nights of the 2020 Democratic presidential debates in Detroit this week.

Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) made forceful arguments in support of Medicare for All in the face of attacks from right-wing Democrats and disingenuous questions by CNN moderators.

In an op-ed for the Washington Post Thursday, Jayapal hit back at Democratic opponents of Medicare for All, accusing them of distorting the facts and "using one-liners from industry front groups and Republican playbooks."

"As the debates continue, I hope that my fellow Democrats will take a good look at our bill and get the facts right," wrote Jayapal. "The Medicare for All movement has overwhelming public support, unprecedented grassroots organization, and a serious plan that is ready to change our healthcare system right now."

As Common Dreams reported Wednesday, Jayapal expressed her frustration with fellow Democrats who she said are using the Medicare for All label, which has widespread appeal, to push plans that fall far short of the fundamental goals and principles of Medicare for All.

Though she didn't mention Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) by name, Jayapal's criticism appeared to be directed at the California Democrat's healthcare plan, which would preserve a significant role for private insurance.

"For-profit industry does not have a role in determining one's right to healthcare," Jayapal tweeted. "Anything less is not Medicare for All."

In her Washington Post op-ed, Jayapal also took aim at other half-measures "such as a public option," which "might sound appealing but would still leave more than 10 million people without coverage while keeping in place a costly private-insurance middleman that eats up 25 to 30 percent in administrative waste and profits."

"If we want to achieve true universal healthcare while containing costs," Jayapal wrote, "Medicare for All is the only answer."

A Record-Breaking Tornado Season Is Pummeling Mobile Home Residents

July 30, 2019 | Bobbi Dempsey

https://talkpoverty.org/2019/07/30/tornadoes-mobile-homes-south/

“Our home is a 28×80 four-bedroom, two-bath that we got used three years ago. It was in like-new condition for a 15-year-old home,” said David Kelley, who lives in Beauregard, a town in Lee County, Alabama, that suffered major losses during a cluster of 34 tornadoes that caused 23 deaths on March 3, 2019. His mobile home sustained significant damage. “The storm knocked it off its foundation and cracked some of the metal piers underneath the house. It destroyed the roof and rafters and busted some of the floor joists,” he said.

That storm was one of a record 1,263 tornadoes in the U.S. tracked by the National Weather Service in the first half of 2019. Many of those storms have been concentrated in the Southeastern part of the country, in a region dubbed “Dixie Alley.”

Tornadoes in the South can be particularly deadly because there’s a relatively high percentage of the population there living in mobile homes — and most of those homes are spread out in rural areas, meaning lots of people with few options to escape the path of powerful tornadoes.

Bottom of Form

Alabama and the Carolinas are consistently among the top five states with the most residents living in mobile homes — as well as in modular or manufactured housing, which is intended to be in a fixed location, but is similarly dangerous in severe storms. According to the Manufactured Housing Institute, residents of manufactured housing have a median household income of just under $30,000 per year.

Protecting these low-income, far-flung populations with limited resources from major storms isn’t easy. That made them a subject of particular interest to researchers involved in a recent University of Maryland studyexamining mobile homes.

The first challenge people face is receiving critical information in time to allow them to take action. The researchers found standard tornado warnings are falling short in protecting residents. In particular, mobile home residents were less accessible on social media and more dependent on their local TV meteorologist.

Researchers also found the majority of mobile home residents had incorrect assumptions about what they should do during a storm, with many believing myths and misconceptions that could be dangerous like “if you’re driving, you should take shelter under a bridge during a tornado.”

The researchers recommended that National Weather Service Weather Forecast Offices should work more closely with local newscasters to address this information gap. Similarly, forecasters could prioritize actions that mobile home residents can take to deal with limited physical supplies and inadequate shelter.

But educational campaigns can’t solve the problem completely, because residents (and the communities where they live) face significant planning challenges due to lack of resources and available services.

“Mobile home residents in our study reported statistically significantly lower perceived access to shelter and self-efficacy to take shelter compared to fixed home residents,” the researchers noted. Developing emergency evacuation plans is challenging in areas where many residents may lack reliable vehicles or other resources, or may be reluctant to leave their homes and belongings unattended for what may turn out to be a false alarm. It’s also hard to assemble an emergency kit when you can’t afford things like weather radios, hand tools, back-up batteries and chargers, or extra quantities of medications — let alone bigger items like generators.

Kelley said that in rural areas like his, residents often lack the time — and sometimes the transportation or ability — to get to a community shelter, even if they know where one is. “I wish every rural home had to have a storm shelter of some sort. We had four and a half minutes warning with this storm,” he said.

We had four and a half minutes warning with this storm.

“It’s great to have community shelters available, but if people don’t have transportation to get there, or wait till they have confirmation of an approaching tornado before they move, the shelters are not effective,” said David Roueche, an assistant professor of structural engineering at Auburn University — located in Lee County. He specializes in researching wind damage and ways to make structures better protected from high winds.

He led a team that analyzed the impact of the March 3 storm, and specifically looked at the 19 out of 23 victims who lived in manufactured homes. Their investigation revealed that all of the manufactured homes involved either had degraded anchors, had anchorage systems that apparently didn’t meet state code, or lacked ground anchors entirely. Anchors are devices – generally made of metal, sometimes coupled with concrete – that are used in conjunction with straps or tie-downs to secure the structure to the ground.

“We know it’s a problem. What can these people do? We can enforce stricter building standards to give people a much better chance of survival in their home. We can install micro-community storm shelters — as in, smaller shelters that serve a street, or a cluster of relatives — but this all takes money that the residents don’t have. So how do we prioritize the limited pre-event mitigation funding from FEMA or other groups? What other funding mechanisms can we use? These are the questions we’re asking right now,” he said.

While progress has admittedly been slow, Roueche said he is encouraged by results seen in communities such as Moore, Oklahoma, which adopted enhanced building codes to strengthen their homes, with minimal impact on home prices. He is also a proponent of storm-vulnerable inland areas adopting the same Department of Housing and Urban Development building standards recommended in Florida and coastal regions, since climate change and unusual weather patterns have increased the incidence of extreme storms in a wider range of locations.

With nowhere else to go, Kelley said his family has no choice but to stay in their home while it is being repaired. “It is coming along slow but steady,” he said. He created a memorial area on a section of his property, where he will plant 23 fruit trees — one for each of the lives lost in the storm. The memorial also has a pond and chairs where people can come and remember the victims or just enjoy some peaceful solitude.

Kelley said he hopes it will provide some comfort to local residents.

'July Has Re-Written Climate History': Month Could Go Down as Planet's Hottest Ever

"As temperatures rise, so will we," says 350.org.

Andrea Germanos, staff writer

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/02/july-has-re-written-climate-history-month-could-go-down-planets-hottest-ever?cd-origin=rss&utm

The World Meteorological Organization said Thursday that July 2019 may go down as the hottest month the planet has seen thus far in recorded history.

"July has re-written climate history, with dozens of new temperature records at local, national, and global level," said WMO chief Petteri Taalas.

Using data from Europe's Copernicus Climate Change Program from the first 29 days of the month, the WMO said that July at least equaled—and may have broken—the dubious record set in July 2016.

2016, however, was marked by the occurrence of an El Niño phenomenon, which can contribute to warmer temperatures. 2019 is not. 

July's warmth followed the planet's warmest June ever recorded, according to global scientists. What's more, said the WMO, 2015 to 2019 are on track to be the warmest five years on the books.

WMO's Taalas, in his statement, noted the string of recent events that coincided with the warmer temperatures.

"The extraordinary heat was accompanied by dramatic ice melt in Greenland, in the Arctic, and on European glaciers," he said. "Unprecedented wildfires raged in the Arctic for the second consecutive month, devastating once pristine forests which used to absorb carbon dioxide and instead turning them into fiery sources of greenhouse gases."

The WMO also pointed to the July heatwave that gripped Europe, during which cities like Paris notched new record highs. The countries of Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands broke national records for warmest temperatures.

"This is not science fiction," said Taalas. "It is the reality of climate change. It is happening now and it will worsen in the future without urgent climate action."

Groups including 350.org, Fridays for Future, and Extinction Rebellion are ready to deliver that message with a bullhorn in global climate actions scheduled for September 20 and 27.

"As temperatures rise, so will we," said 350.org on Twitter Friday.

"The hottest month in human history means it's time for the boldest climate action possible from our leaders," added the group.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres echoed the call for swift action.

"This year alone, we have seen temperature records shattered from New Delhi to Anchorage, from Paris to Santiago, from Adelaide and to the Arctic Circle. If we do not take action on climate change now," he said, "these extreme weather events are just the tip of the iceberg. And, indeed, the iceberg is also rapidly melting."

"Preventing irreversible climate disruption is the race of our lives, and for our lives," said Guterres. "It is a race that we can and must win."

CNN’s Industry Spin Shows Need for Independent Debates

AUGUST 2, 2019

JULIE HOLLAR

https://fair.org/home/cnns-industry-spin-shows-need-for-independent-debates/?awt_l=7pV2m&awt_m=gb0AYn5zcmOI_TQ

CNN painfully demonstrated this week why we need independently run presidential debates. With its ESPN-like introductions to the candidates, and its insistence on questions that pit candidates against each other, CNN took an approach to the debates more befitting a football game than an exercise in democracy.

The CNN hosts moderated as if they weren’t even listening to what candidates were saying, inflexibly cutting them off after the inevitably too-short 30-to-60-second time limit—in order to offer another, often seemingly randomly selected, candidate the generic prompt, “Your response?” At times, these followed on each other so many times it was unclear what the candidate was even supposed to respond to, or why.

CNN started its first debate (7/30/19) by challenging Bernie Sanders to respond to an attack on Medicare for All from Rep. John Delaney.

But worse than the entirely unhelpful format was the heavy reliance on right-wing assumptions and talking points to frame the questions. Over the two nights, healthcare dominated the debates; the first night (7/30/19), CNN‘s Jake Tapper kicked off the questions with one to Sen. Bernie Sanders:

You support Medicare for All, which would eventually take private health insurance away from more than 150 million Americans, in exchange for government-sponsored healthcare for everyone. Congressman Delaney just referred to it as bad policy. And previously, he has called the idea “political suicide that will just get President Trump re-elected.” What do you say to Congressman Delaney?

Debate moderators will typically start with top-polling contenders and challenge them to defend their positions. Doing so with attacks from a contender polling below 1%, however, would seem unusual—except that in this case, the candidate unpopular with the public voiced an opinion very popular in corporate media.

The second night of  the Detroit debates (7/31/19) also started out with CNN attacking Medicare for All—this time forcing Kamala Harris to respond to criticism from Joe Biden.

It was a particularly noteworthy tactic, given that the next night (7/31/19), which also started off with healthcare, CNN lobbed the first challenge to Kamala Harris (polling around fourth place) in the form of an attack on her version of Medicare for All from the top-polling Biden campaign—letting the front-runner start off on the offensive.

Tapper queried multiple candidates the first night about raising taxes on “middle-class Americans” to pay for Medicare for All, and when the floor came back to Sanders, he rebuked Tapper: “By the way, the healthcare industry will be advertising tonight, on this program, with that talking point.”

Tapper quickly cut him off, but CNN‘s commercial breaks that night, as observers pointed out, indeed featured healthcare industry ads. In one, the Partnership for America’s Healthcare Future—an industry group—ran an ad talking about how Medicare for All or the public option means “higher taxes or higher premiums; lower-quality care.”

In other words, CNN debate viewers got industry talking points on healthcare from CNN moderators, bottom-tier industry-friendly candidates given outsized speaking time, and industry advertisements.

Meanwhile, on the first night, CNN asked more non-policy questions (17)—primarily about whether some Democratic candidates were “moving too far to the left to win the White House”—than questions about the climate crisis (15). Across both nights, the 31 non-policy questions overwhelmed questions on important issues like gun control (11) and women’s rights (7).

The second round of debates may not have enlightened the public much about the candidates, but they made one thing clear: We desperately need serious, independently run debates, not over-the-top industry-friendly spectacles of the sort put on by CNN—and endorsed and gate-kept by the major parties.

Media Downplay Climate Disruption’s Ever-Growing Role in Driving Migration

JULY 30, 2019

JOSHUA CHO

https://fair.org/home/media-downplay-climate-disruptions-ever-growing-role-in-driving-migration/?awt_l=7pV2m&awt_m=gb0AYn5zcmOI_TQ

Journalists routinely dehumanize human beings crossing the southern border by comparing them to natural disasters like a “flood” or “deluge.” But while migration has always been a natural phenomenon, the increasingly forced migration of people escaping deteriorating conditions is an unnatural disaster driven, in part, by climate disruption.

The New Yorker (4/3/19) reported on how droughts, floods and changes to weather patterns have contributed to crop susceptibility to diseases and pests, degraded soil quality and shortened growing seasons. Reuters (5/2/19) covered UN estimates that 2.2 million people Central Americans have been affected by poor harvests as a result of climate change, with up to four in every five families having to sell animals and farm equipment to buy food in the past year.

It would be easy for even a diligent news consumer to not know that climate change is one of the central factors driving refugees to cross the border, since it’s usually not mentioned at all in most alarmist reports about the so-called “border crisis” (New York Times, 4/10/19; Wall Street Journal, 5/8/19). In fact, although a few good articles have been dedicated to making the connection (e.g., New York Times, 4/13/19; Washington Post, 4/16/19), it’s usually absent even among reports purporting to explain why people are making the dangerous journey.

Politico (3/28/19)

Politico’s “Here’s What’s Driving the ‘Crisis’ at the Border” (3/28/19) and Vox’s “The Border Is in Crisis. Here’s How It Got This Bad” (4/11/19) both correctly note that the Trump administration’s claims about “unprecedented numbers of undocumented immigrants” crossing the border from Central American countries like Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are “untrue,” because, as Vox put it, the

total number of people coming into the US without papers is still lower than it was for most of the 20th century, and substantially lower its turn-of-the-century peak.

However, the strained resources from more families and children crossing the border, as well as the complications of the asylum process, figure heavily into their explanation for how the crisis “got so bad”—rather than the five-year drought ruining the crops of maize, coffee, bananas and beans depended on by mostly subsistence farmers, also known as campesinos, in Central America. The drought is also disrupting the traditional seasonal migration to harvest coffee in Honduras that Central American families have used to ease poverty, forcing them to flee to the US instead (Al-Jazeera, 5/13/19).

Politico’s report explained the border crisis with statements from Republican and Border Patrol officials noting how the “rise in families” and the “greater volume of children among the new Central American migrants” are creating a “capacity crisis,” unlike the less-needy single adult males from Mexico who “constituted most border migrants” a decade earlier, with increased asylum applications creating a longer immigration process.

Vox’s report observed that “we don’t have apples-to-apples data,” because there’s “substantial evidence that the raw number of children and families entering the US is higher than it’s ever been,” while also noting that “crushing poverty” and “gang violence” are factors, in addition to many migrants themselves not knowing “what asylum is,” or why they “might not qualify for it.”

Atlantic (6/26/18)

The Atlantic’s account, “Today’s Migrant Flow Is Different” (6/26/18), likewise explained that “the crux of the recent crisis at the border” is that there are

fewer male migrants in their 20s or 30s making the crossing, and many more families, newborns, children and pregnant women escaping life-or-death situations as much as poverty.

That’s how the outlet differentiated today’s “migrant flow” from previous decades, where Central Americans were fleeing “economic misery in their war-torn states.” The Atlantic actually mentioned that “previous US policies contributed to the extreme insecurity in their home countries,” but only discussed the US policy of deporting “tens of thousands of convicted criminals to Central America in the early 2000s,” and nothing else regarding why “thousands of Central American families” are “stuck between a rock and a hard place.”

Time’s “‘There Is No Way We Can Turn Back’: Why Thousands of Refugees Will Keep Coming to America Despite Trump’s Crackdown” (6/21/18) and NBC’s “Why Are So Many Migrants Crossing the US border? It Often Starts With an Escape From Violence in Central America” (6/20/18) described, not inaccurately but incompletely, migrants escaping “high levels of violence” from organized crime groups like “street gangs” and “drug cartels,” in addition to citing “corruption, weak and unstable government institutions,” and the “unrelenting turmoil of the region.”

NBC’s report mentions that “the conditions” in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras came to “Americans’ attention in full force” in 2014, when “tens of thousands of children arrived on their own” at the US border, without discussing that year’s climate change–related drought. A year later, NBC (7/9/19) would note 2014 as the year the drought began, as it cited immigration analysts and UN reports finding that “roughly half” of all adults apprehended at the border worked “in agriculture,” with a “lack of food” being the primary reason people leave.

Bloomberg (7/5/19)

Bloomberg (7/5/19) offered the victim-blaming headline “Why Roots of US Border Crisis Lie South of Mexico,” and noted that Honduras and El Salvador have among the “highest murder rates in the world.” It depicted Central American migrants as seeking economic opportunity, noting that 60 percent of the population in Honduras and Guatemala lives below the national poverty line, and characterizing those countries as “a hotbed of poverty, corruption, gang violence and extortion.”

In all these reports, the US’s contributions to the violence and corruption in Central America during the Cold War, and more recent US support for a 2009 military coup in Honduras deposing the democratically elected left-wing President Manuel Zelaya, and its funding for death squads in the country, are completely obscured. This despite the evidence (Migration Policy Institute, 4/1/06) that US-backed violence in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador during the Cold War “institutionalized” a migration pattern to North America that had been “very minor” beforehand.

But if these reports shrouded the connection between US foreign policy and the “violence” and “unrelenting turmoil” in the region, they more deeply buried the connection between increasing violence and climate change.

In fact, the Pentagon has long viewed climate change as a “threat multiplier,” and an indirect factor that could prompt outbreaks of violence in countries already staggering under the weight of other problems (Guardian, 3/31/14). Military planners point to the Syrian civil war—which has killed hundreds of thousands—as an example of how climate change contributes to violent conflict, with the worst drought there in 500 years creating massive internal displacement that led to government repression and sectarian violence (Inside Climate News, 6/13/19).

Guardian (10/30/18)

And while poverty is often featured along with “violence” among the list of things Central American refugees are fleeing, corporate media rarely discuss why so many people there are impoverished, and the connection to the ongoing climate catastrophe. In contrast, the Guardian(10/30/18) informed readers:

“The focus on violence is eclipsing the big picture—which is that people are saying they are moving because of some version of food insecurity,” said Robert Albro, a researcher at the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University.

“The main reason people are moving is because they don’t have anything to eat. This has a strong link to climate change—we are seeing tremendous climate instability that is radically changing food security in the region.”

Migrants don’t often specifically mention “climate change” as a motivating factor for leaving, because the concept is so abstract and long-term, Albro said. But people in the region who depend on small farms are painfully aware of changes to weather patterns that can ruin crops and decimate incomes.

Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are part of the Dry Corridor, a region where droughts, tropical storms and flash floods are common, but climate change is influencing the severity and frequency of these disasters, and consecutive droughts can devastate the livelihoods of campesinos completely dependent on what they grow for survival. Unlike in the US and Europe, there are no crop insurance or aid programs, and often no irrigation systems either, to assist people in difficult times (Public Radio International, 2/6/19).

Climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh (Grist, 4/23/19)—lead author of a Stanford University study finding that the economic gap between the richest and poorest countries is about 25 percent greater than it would’ve been without anthropogenic climate change—stated that “most of the poorest countries on Earth are considerably poorer than they would’ve been without global warming.”

Climate change is also a major—yet often omitted—reason for the record number of African migrants crossing the US/Mexican border fleeing violence and poverty. The EU has exacerbated this, mirroring the Trump administration’s policy of making it as painful as possible for refugees to apply for asylum by making civil war–torn Libya the main processing center for applications (Foreign Policy, 6/26/19).

The UN’s 2019 Sustainable Development Goals Report found that “extreme poverty today is concentrated and overwhelmingly affects rural populations,” and that it’s increasingly being “exacerbated by violent conflicts and climate change.” It also found that 413 million out of the estimated 736 million people still living in extreme poverty are in Sub-Saharan Africa, where most of the new migrants are coming from, and the region with “the highest prevalence of hunger,” as the number of undernourished people increased from 195 million in 2014 to 237 million in 2017.

CNN (4/1/19)

The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization found that the 2015–16 El Niño phenomenon afflicting Central America—a warming of the Pacific Ocean surface that causes hotter and drier conditions there—was the strongest it’s been in 50 years, and was also affecting Sub-Saharan Africa’s food security, with 32 million people in the region unable to acquire food in 2016 due to dry weather conditions. The FAO (CNN, 4/1/19) noted that “evolving climatic patterns characterized by cyclic droughts, floods and cyclones have become more frequent in Southern Africa.”

Corporate media downplaying the ongoing climate catastrophe’s creation of large numbers of climate refugees encourages fatal inaction. The UN is warning of more than 120 million people pushed into poverty by 2030, and a “climate apartheid” scenario where the wealthy countries most responsible for carbon emissions are leaving the rest of the world with a stark “choice” between starvation and migration.

This is not one story, fit for the occasional Sunday piece, but many everyday stories, of which human movement across national borders is only one. Media have a responsibility to not only tell these stories, but to link them to climate disruption, if they intend to be part not of the problem but of the solution.

17 Million Americans Purged From Voter Rolls Between 2016 and 2018, Analysis Finds

"Voters often do not realize they have been purged until they try to cast a ballot on Election Day—after it's already too late."

Julia Conley, staff writer

Millions of Americans are still suffering the consequences of the 2013 Supreme Court decision that loosened restrictions of the Voting Rights Act, giving states with long histories of voter discrimination free reign to purge voters from their rolls without federal oversight.

The Brennan Center for Justice released a study Thursday showing that 17 million Americans were dropped from voter rolls between 2016 and 2018—almost four million more than the number purged between 2006 and 2008.

The problem was most pronounced in counties and election precincts with a history of racial oppression and voter suppression. In such areas voters were kicked off rolls at a rate 40 percent higher than places which have protected voting rights more consistently.

Following the Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, counties with histories of discrimination no longer have to obtain "pre-clearance," or approval from the Department of Justice (DOJ), before they make changes to voting procedures—allowing them to slash their voter rolls liberally, often resulting in voter suppression of eligible voters.

According to the Brennan Center, Shelby County single-handedly pushed two million people off voter rolls across the country over four years after the case was decided.

"The effect of the Supreme Court's 2013 decision has not abated," researcher Kevin Morris wrote Friday.

The Brennan Center said that while there are legitimate reasons for removing names from a state's voter database, such as a relocation to another state or a death, many voters' names—especially those of minority voters—are purged even though they meet the state's requirements for casting a ballot.

"In big states like California and Texas, multiple individuals can have the same name and date of birth, making it hard to be sure that the right voter is being purged when perfect data are unavailable," wrote Morris. "Troublingly, minority voters are more likely to share names than white voters, potentially exposing them to a greater risk of being purged."

"Voters often do not realize they have been purged until they try to cast a ballot on Election Day—after it's already too late," Morris added.

In its report, the Brennan Center included a map showing the counties where the most voters were dropped from the rolls.

17 million Americans were purged from voter rolls between 2016 and 2018.

Indiana purged close to a quarter of voters from its rolls between 2016 and 2018, while Wisconsin and Virginia dropped about 14 percent of voters. More than 10 percent of voters in Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Maine were purged from voter databases.

High rates of voter purging in some states have made headlines in recent months. Georgia's Republican Gov. Mark Kemp came under fire during his election campaign last year for overseeing, as secretary of state, the purging of more than 100,000 voters from the state rolls, including many people of color.

In Ohio, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown was among those protesting this week against an impending purge of as many as 235,000 voters from the state's rolls.

Across the country, the Brennan Center said Friday, election officials must embrace efforts to make voting easier, not harder, and ensure eligible voters don't show up to the polls in upcoming elections only to find out that their name has been purged.

"Election administrators must be transparent about how they are deciding what names to remove from the rolls," said the organization. "They must be diligent in their efforts to avoid erroneously purging voters. And they should push for reforms like automatic voter registration and election day registration, which keep voters' registration records up to date."

"Election Day is often too late to discover that a person has been wrongfully purged," the group added.