110 Of these, only sixty—or .07 percent—were denied LDEQ posts bulletins of environmental permits received and has a "Check Permit Status" feature on their website, which has 89,787 records for individual permits. The earliest permit in the database is from 1967; the newest is from December 2013. Some permits apply for a few years, others are decades long. The database only has a few entries for the 1970s, and relatively fewer entries in the 1980s and 1990s than for later—no explanation for this was given.
110 detection levels were sometimes set high in the one and low in the other In one 2013 study of dioxin levels in Mossville, the black township near the Arenos' home in Bayou d'Inde now being displaced by Sasol, state scientists compared dioxin rates there (where a high rate was expected) with a comparison group in another highly industrial area, Lafayette. Then the scientists declared that dioxins in one highly industrialized place (Mossville) were "no higher than the comparison group" (Lafayette). Strangely, "detection levels" were set high in Mossville (so that instruments didn't register trouble until levels were high) and low in the area it was compared to. Given this, measures were not comparable. Sometimes the findings were simply recorded as "not available." Meanwhile, an independent 2008 study by Dr. Wilma Subra, a well-known chemist, reported dioxin levels in the blood of Mossville residents three times higher than in the nation as a whole. Wilma Subra, Results of the Health Survey of Mossville Residents and Chemicals and Industrial Sources of Chemicals Associated with Mossville Residents Medical Symptoms and Conditions (New Iberia, LA: Subra Company, 2008). A Spanish study found nearness to the source of waste to be strongly correlated to tumors of the pleura, stomach, liver, kidney, and other organs; the study took place between 1997 and 2006. See Javier Garcia-Perez, et al., "Cancer Mortality in Towns in the Vicinity of Incinerators and Installations for the Recovery or Disposal of Hazardous Waste," Environment International 51 (2013): 31-44. A similar study of childhood cancers in Great Britain associated childhood cancers with prenatal or early postnatal exposures to oil-based combustion gases. E.G. Knox, "Oil Combustion and Childhood Cancers," Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 59, no. 9 (2005): 755—60. Claims of a causal relationship between nearness to industry and illness are usually hard to prove and are not accepted in court.
110 hut not dangerous for "children six and under" Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, Health Consultation: Calcasieu Estuary Sediment Sample Evaluation, Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, EPA Facility ID: LA0002368173 (Baton Rouge, LA: Office of Public Health, 2005).
110 "Analyses reported as non-detects were analyzed using method detection limits that were higher than the comparison values used as screening tools" Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, Public Health Assessment, Initial/Public Comment Release, Review of Data from the 2010 EPA Mossville Site Investigation (Baton Rouge, LA: Office of Public Health, 2013).
110 the report was written by one set of state officials for another The protocol was prepared by the Louisiana Department ot Health and Hospitals, which collaborated with the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry, and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
110 Discard "juices which contain the fat... to further reduce exposure" Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry, and Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, Protocol for Issuing Public Health Advisories for Chemical Contaminants in Recreationally Caught Fish and Shellfish (Baton Rouge, LA: Office of Public Health, 2012), 24, http:// www.dhh.louisiana.gov/assets/oph/Center-EH/envepi/fishadvisory/Documents/LA_Fish_Protocol_FINAL_Feb_2012_updated_links.pdf.
114 our distance from necessity tends to confer honor In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen (New York: Macmillan, 1899) noted that honor, as human beings construct and imagine it, is based on their degree of detachment from economic need and usefulness. So thin women were admired the closer they came to starvation, and thus showed they didn't fear it. In the realm of higher learning, Veblen argued, the more abstruse or useless the topic, the more honorific. The horse was thought more beautiful than the cow because the horse was useless and the cow was not. Perhaps each region, class, and racial group has its own expression of this principle.
8: The Pulpit and the Press: "The Topic Doesn't Come Up"
118 has 82 churches—one for every 1,423 residents See search results for "Lake Charles, LA" and "Berkeley, CA" on Churchfinder.com (accessed August 6, 2015), http://www.churchfinder.com.
119 "I hope that we recognize our economic successes as a blessing from above" "Bertrand Excited About Future of Southwest Louisiana," American Press, January 27, 2015, B4.
120 Abraham's Tent, a local food pantry and soup kitchen The soup kitchen itself is largely supported by church donations. A group called 635 Campus Ministries at McNeese State University puts on fundraisers for the organization. "Abraham's Tent Opens New Facility to Feed the Hungry," Jambalaya News, December 22, 2014, http://lakecharles.com/2014/12/abrahams-tent-opens-new-facility-feed-hungry.
122 named as the -poorest town in America Jack E. White, "The Poorest Place in America," Time, August 15, 1994.
123 "hunting... fishing in and around Louisiana, frogging" See "Meet the Staff," First Pentecostal Church, Lake Charles (accessed August 28, 2014), http://firstpentecostalchurchlc.org/about-us/meet-the-staff.
123 I found no mention of activities concerned with the polluted environment The church websites included those for Living Way, First Pentecostal Church of Lake Charles, Eastwood Pentecostal, Apostolic Temple, First Pentecostal Church of Westlake, Grace Harbor Lighthouse, First Baptist Church, Victory Baptist Church, South City Christian Church, and Trinity Baptist Church. None of the church websites mentioned ministry work related to environmental issues.
123 leading organization of the religious right with a political voice "Evangelical" churches differ from other Protestant churches in that they are grounded in the literal word of the Bible, especially the New Testament. Since the 1990s, evangelical leaders Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, and, more recently, David Lane have helped crystallize opinion on issues such as immigration, the right to abortion, and marriage equality through such organizations as the Moral Majority, Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family, Faith and Freedom Coalition, and the American Family Association.
123 score of 10 percent or lower on the environmental scorecard of the League of Conservation Voters A study by Glenn Scherer found that in 2003, 40 percent of the U.S. Congress—45 senators and 186 members of the House of Representatives—earned 80-100 percent approval ratings from the nation's three most influential Christian right advocacy groups: the Christian Coalition, the Eagle Forum, and the Family Resource Council. And many in that 40 percent averaged very low scores (10 percent or less) on conservation measures from the League of Conservation Voters. See Glenn Scherer, "Christian-Right Views Are Swaying Politicians and Threatening the Environment," Grist.org, October 28, 2004, http://grist.org/article/scherer-christian.
124 supported hy various corporations, including ExxonMobil Bill Moyers, "Welcome to Doomsday," New York Review of Books, March 24, 2005.
124 calling for care of the environment—"creation care" In a 2008 national survey of religious groups, the Bliss Center for Applied Politics at the University of Akron asked people if they agreed or disagreed with the following strongly worded statement: "Strict rules to protect the environment are necessary even if they cost jobs or result in higher prices." The least support came from traditional evangelical Protestants, among whom only 40 percent agreed. The most support came from "liberal faiths" (72 percent). John C. Green, The Fifth National Survey of Religion and Politics (Akron, OH: The Ray C. Bliss Center for Applied Politics at the University of Akron, 2008), http://www.uakron.edu/bliss/research/archives/2008/Blissreligionre
port.pdf.
125 many share these beliefs with Madonna Some 50 million Americans, mostly evangelical, believe in the rapture. Belief in the rapture became widely popular in the United States in the 1970s with the publication of Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth, and later through Jerry Jenkins and Tim La-Haye's series of twelve novels called Left Behind, which sold 62 million copies. See Scherer, "Christian-Right Views."
125 the Second Coming "probably" or "definitely" will happen by the year 2050 Andrew Kohut, Scott Keeter, Carroll Doherty, Michael Dimock, Michael Remez, Robert Suls, Shawn Neidorf, Leah Christian, Jocelyn Kiley, Alec Tyson, and Jacob Pushter, "Life in 2050: Amazing Science, Familiar Threats: Public Sees a Future Full of Promise and Peril," news release, Pew Center for the People and the Press, June 22, 2010.
125 alcohol, drugs, and even suicide Gina Kolata, "Death Rate Rising for Middle Aged White Americans, Study Finds," New York Times, November 2, 2015. The rate was highest for high school-educated forty-five- to fifty-five-year-olds.
126 shortened by three years—and truly, it seems, by despair Sabrina Tavernise, "Life Spans Shrink for Least Educated Whites in U.S." New York Times, September 20, 2012.
127 "green energy tyranny" Fox News commentary by George Russell, December 19, 2011, "Exclusive: EPA Ponders Expanded Regulatory Power in Name of 'Sustainable Development,'" http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/12/19/epa-ponders-expanded-regulatory-power-in-name-sustainable-development.
127 "[the EPA] could be part of the apparat of the Soviet Union" "Lou Dobbs on the EPA: As It's Being Run Now, It Could Be Part of the Apparatchik of the Soviet Union," MediaMatters, June 6, 2011, http://mediamatters.org/video/2011/06/06/lou-dobbs-on-the-epa-as-its-being-run-now-it-co/180331.
127—128 compared the rise in EPA air quality standards to an "enemy attack" on America Todd Thurman, "Charles Krauthammer Destroys Global Warming Myths in 89 Seconds," Daily Signal, February 18, 2014, http://blog.heritage.org/2014/02/18/charles-krauthammer-destroys-global-warming-myths-89-seconds.
128 its oratory was inflammatory A study by media watchdog MediaMatters analyzed the video archives of Fox News in May 2014 for references to the Environmental Protection Agency; they found seven citations of a Chamber of Commerce study critiquing the EPA's 2014 proposed climate standards and one citation of the National Resource Defense Council's study finding that stricter standards would save money on household energy bills and create jobs in clean energy industries. It also claimed that "every member of Congress who Fox News quoted or interviewed about the carbon standards also received money from oil and gas, mining industries, or electric utilities in the 2014 election cycle," with the three biggest recipients being Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Representative Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), and Senator James Inhofe (R-OK). See Laura Santhanam, "Report: Fox News Enlists Fossil Fuel Industry to Smear EPA Carbon Pollution Standards," MediaMatters, June 6, 2014, http://mediamatters.org/research/2014/06/06/report-fox-news-enlists-fossil-fuel-industry-to/199622.
128 lifted focus away from such a child's needs See Candace Clark, Misery and Company: Sympathy in Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
130 the company had hired spies to infiltrate RESTORE James Ridgeway, "Environmental Espionage: Inside a Chemical Company's Louisiana Spy Op."
130 a Maryland-based security firm Ibid. Headquartered in Easton, Maryland, BBI—or Beckett Brown International, as it was then called (the owners since changed the name to S2i)—also served other clients (Halliburton, Monsanto, the National Rifle Association), billing records revealed. Materials accessed through a lawsuit also showed that BBI mentioned other "possible sites" for its work—Center for Food Safety, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, and Environment and Justice, an organization begun by Lois Gills, who exposed the toxic waste thrown in New York's notorious Love Canal.
130 What was that Ibid. It emerged during the lawsuit that the company also "destroyed documents showing the full extent of the spill and the company's part in it."
130 in a series that began with "Condea Vista Hired Spies" Theresa Schmidt, "Condea Vista Hired Spies," KPLCTV, May 29, 2008, http://www.kplctv.com/story/8399515/condea-vista-hired-spies; Theresa Schmidt, "Spy Targets Call for Action," KPLCTV, May 30, 2008, http://www.kplctv.com/story/8404443/spy-targets-call-for-action; Theresa Schmidt, "Motion Filed to Force Disclosure of Spy Details," KPLCTV, June 4, 2008, http://www .kplctv.com/story/8433538/motion-filed-to-force-disclosure-of-spy-details; Theresa Schmidt, "Attorneys Seek Disclosure of Spy Operation," KPLCTV, December 3, 2008, http://www.kplctv.com/story/9366858/attorneys-seek-disclosure-of-spy-operation.
130 -which mentioned the 2008 expose in passing A Lexis-Nexis search for articles on this from 1980 to the present uncovered no coverage of the event other than the Ridgeway piece in Mother Jones.
9: The Deep Story
135 I don't believe we understand anyone's politics, right or left, without it The deep story crystalizes pre-existing feeling. It provides what T.S. Eliot calls an "objective correlative," which he describes as "a chain of events which shall be the formula (for a) particular emotion... such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1920), 100. Metaphors are ways of organizing the situations that feed "emotional formulas." See Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. A metaphor is not imposed by reality, but seems, to the individual, to fit reality. Politics, I argue, gathers itself around a deep story—a metaphor in motion. 1 add the idea that the deep story implies a special corresponding self, which, once established, we guard by managing our emotions. I also add the idea that every deep story implies an area of amnesia, non-story, non-self. See also The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, 44.
136 white, older, Christian, and predominantly male, some with college degrees, some not David R. Gibson, "Doing Time in Space: Line Joining Rules and Resulting Morphologies," Sociological Forum 23, no. 2 (June 2008): 207-33.
139-140 which celebrates so many black people, women, and immigrants This is in accord with the analysis of Dr. Larry Rosenthal, Director of the Center for Right Wing Studies, Institute for the Study of Social Issues, U.C. Berkeley. See http://www.fljs.org/files/publications/Rosenthal.pdf
141 "they have less income and less net wealth than people their age ten years before" Phillip Longman, "Wealth and Generations," Washington Monthly, June/July/August 2015, 3, http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/junejulyaugust_2015/features/wealth_and_generations055898.php.
141 share of men ages twenty-five to fifty-four no longer in the workforce has tripled Ibid.
141 Oneself, of course See Allison Pugh, The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity (London: Oxford University Press, 2015).
143 the repeated term "millionaire" floated around conversations like a ghost As his wages drastically fell, Bill saw consumer aspirations around the nation rise to those of the 1 percent. In The Overspent American, the economist Juliet Schor notes that when asked to describe the "good life," 19 percent of Americans mentioned a "vacation home" in 1975; 35 percent mentioned it in 1991. A swimming pool? 14 percent in 1975, 29 percent in 1991. A lot of money? 38 percent in 1975, 55 percent in 1991. A job that pays much more than average? 45 percent in 1975, 60 percent in 1991. Juliet Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999), 16.
144 "Working class whites are now regularly portrayed as moronic, while blacks are often hyper-articulate, street smart... and rich" Barbara Ehrenreich, "Dead, White, and Blue: The Great Die-Off of America's Blue Collar Whites," Tom Dispatch.com, December 1,2015, http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176075/tomgram.
145 spontaneous mention of the idea of annoyance at others cutting in line Nils Kumkar, "A Socio-Analysis of Discontent: Protests Against the Politics of Crisis in the U.S. and Germany: An Empirical Comparison," PhD thesis, Department of Sociology, University of Leipzig (unpublished; e-mail commu
nication, November 30, 2015).
146 attitudes toward blacks, immigrants, public sector workers, and others Skocpol and Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.
146 the state's largest minority Public Religion Research Institute's American Values Atlas, Louisiana, http://ava.publicreligion.Org/#religious/2015/States/religion/m/US-LA.
148 equal pay for equal work Melissa Deckman, "A Gender Gap in the Tea Party?" paper prepared for the Midwest Political Science Association Meetings, April 11—14, 2013 (unpublished paper).
149 haves and have-nots The 90—10 distribution figure describes the situation if the federal government were out of the picture—i.e., pre-tax, and pre-distribution of funds through such programs as unemployment insurance, food stamps, and Medicaid. From 1980 to 2012, the U.S. GDP soared while the bottom 90 percent of Americans received no benefit from this growth. During this time, the top 10 percent averaged $260,488 a year and the bottom 90 percent, $31,659. No one I met earned anything like $260,489 a year. The income threshold to the top 10 percent was $118,140 in 2014 (or $115,938 in 2012). And those combining the incomes of both spouses—whatever the education of either—enjoyed incomes that were that high or higher.
150 more profits to top executives and stockholders, and less to workers Robert Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few (New York: Knopf, 2015); John Ehrenreich, Third Wave Capitalism: How Money, Power, and the Pursuit of Self-interest Have Imperiled the American Dream (Ithaca and London: 1LR Press, an Imprint of Cornell University Press, forthcoming 2016); Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, 2007 Average Incomes, U.S. 1980-2012 (in real 2014 dollars). Also see Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2014). Thomas Piketty and his French-American colleague, Emmanuel Saez, base this distribution on income individuals hold in the absence of government activity—so it's what people have if they neither pay taxes nor receive government distributions (e.g., Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps, Medicaid, or earned income tax credits). Also see Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010). Within the United States, it has always been hard to make an extreme leap; an American child born in 1971 to parents in the bottom fifth of the income ladder has only an 8 percent chance of reaching the top fifth—the romanticized rags-to-riches rise. To assess intergenerational mobility, researchers analyzed the tax returns of forty million thirty-year-old Americans and their parents' tax returns of twenty years earlier. Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, "Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity? Recent Trends in Intergenerational Mobility," NBER Working Paper 19844, http://www.nber.org/papers/wl9844. Also see Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez, "Where Is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States," The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2014): 1—71. Social mobility is very influenced by location for low-income young people, though not for their upper-income counterparts. See David Leonhardt, "In Climbing Income Ladder, Location Matters," New York Times, July 22, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-income-ladder-location-matters.html.
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right Page 32
