Democracy requires a shared Sense of Responsibility

William Martin 

"Now that the impeachment proceedings have reached a pause, it is time to take a deep breath and consider the big picture.

The evidence presented so far is overwhelming. President Trump allegedly used $391 million of military aid and a dangled White House visit to extort the Ukrainian government into opening a bogus investigation for Trump’s own personal and political gain. Those allegations have been corroborated by multiple sources — none of whom qualify as partisan shills. The evidence comes from a summary of a phone call released by the White House itself; from a series of high-level advisers and ambassadors that Trump appointed himself; and even from a guy who liked Trump so much that he gave his inauguration fund $1 million. (Trump drained the swamp by returning the million-dollar favor with a coveted ambassadorship).

But does evidence even matter anymore? If it doesn’t, what does that say about the state of our democracy?

In a mid-November Marist/NPR survey, 65 percent of respondents answered “no” to the question: “Can you imagine any information or circumstances during the impeachment inquiry where you might change your mind about your position on impeachment?” 73 percent of Republicans and 68 percent of Democrats said there was literally nothing they could imagine that would cause them to change their point of view. Seriously?

This is particularly telling for Republicans who oppose impeachment. After all, some Democrats may argue that the burden of proof has already been reached to support impeachment. But for Republicans who oppose it — who believe that burden of proof has not yet been reached — they are saying that there is nothing imaginable that could cause them to ever support impeachment. That’s akin to acknowledging that Trump was right when he claimed he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose of any of his supporters. With hardening attitudes, compromise and consensus become impossible — and democracy withers.

Democracies require a shared sense of reality. To solve problems, you have to agree they exist. And to impeach presidents, Americans of all partisan stripes need to know when damning facts are staring them in the face. That’s no longer the case.

Instead, Americans inhabit two separate realities — or, more accurately, one group inhabits a fantasy world that exists parallel to reality. Last week, Trump’s handpicked ambassador to the European Union testified that there was a nefarious quid pro quo with Ukraine, and that “we followed the president’s orders.” The ambassador implicated the president in an egregious abuse of power. In response, Fox News hosts and Trump’s Twitter feed erupted into celebration, boasting that the damning testimony had somehow exonerated Trump. (It had not).

The Marist/NPR poll exposed this dynamic: Eighty-seven percent of respondents who support impeachment said the hearings made them more likely to support impeachment, while 85 percent who oppose impeachment said the hearings made them less likely to support impeachment. Crimes, it seems, are now in the eye of the beholder. Not a good sign for a democracy that is built upon the rule of law.

But beyond such dire polarization, there’s another sobering threat to our democracy: apathy. This is not new. In 2016, roughly 3 in 10 American adults voted for Hillary Clinton. Roughly 3 in 10 adults voted for Trump. That means 4 in 10 Americans did not vote. Apathy beat both candidates.

Opinion | Impeachment: Why so much is at stake
The impeachment inquiry into President Trump has exposed troubling cracks in the political system. (Video: Joy Sharon Yi, Kate Woodsome/Photo: Danielle Kunitz/The Washington Post)
During impeachment proceedings, there has been a particularly insidious form of apathy showcased by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who said he refuses to read any evidence related to impeachment. “I’ve written the whole process off. . . . I think this is a bunch of B.S.,” he said. Graham will likely soon be a juror in a Senate trial. Imagine if a juror in a normal trial refused to even look at the evidence. He would be held in contempt of court. Instead, Graham will probably just be reelected in 2020.

But Graham’s apathy is contagious. The more that elected leaders signal they aren’t paying attention to an historic impeachment process, the more that voters think it’s acceptable to tune out, too. Thirty-seven percent of adults nationally have said that they are not paying much attention to impeachment hearings. Republicans are more likely to be ignoring the proceedings than Democrats.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to work. The Founding Fathers envisioned impeachment as a remedy to presidential misconduct. They anticipated a figure such as Trump, a demagogue who used the awesome powers he held to advance himself rather than the United States. They planned for a corrupt president, but they didn’t have a backup plan if his rise coincided with a complicit Congress.

Impeachment, therefore, is about more than Trump, a far-from-perfect phone call, and a shadow foreign policy laced with extortion and bribery. It’s about the essence of our democracy, which can work only if certain conditions are fulfilled. Decisions must be based on evidence rather than partisanship. Presidents must be held accountable when they break the law, not only when the rival party has a two-thirds majority in the Senate. And individual members of Congress should follow their moral compass rather than the one that points to reelection."

The first map of America’s food supply chain is mind-boggling

10.28.19

BY MEGAN KONAR3 MINUTE READ

My team at the University of Illinois just developed the first high-resolution map of the U.S. food supply chain.

Our map is a comprehensive snapshot of all food flows between counties in the U.S.—grains, fruits and vegetables, animal feed, and processed food items.

To build the map, we brought together information from eight databases, including the Freight Analysis Framework from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which tracks where items are shipped around the country, and Port Trade data from the U.S. Census Bureau, which shows the international ports through which goods are traded.

We also released this information in a publicly available database.

This map shows how food flows between counties in the U.S. Each line represents the transportation of all food commodities, along transit routes, such as roads or railways. [Image: Environmental Research Letters (2019)]

What does this map reveal?

1. WHERE YOUR FOOD COMES FROM

Now, residents in each county can see how they are connected to all other counties in the country via food transfers. Overall, there are 9.5 million links between counties on our map. 

All Americans, from urban to rural are connected through the food system. Consumers all rely on distant producers, agricultural processing plants, food storage like grain silos and grocery stores, and food transportation systems.

For example, the map shows how a shipment of corn starts at a farm in Illinois, travels to a grain elevator in Iowa before heading to a feedlot in Kansas, and then travels in animal products being sent to grocery stores in Chicago.

2. WHERE THE FOOD HUBS ARE

At over 17 million tons of food, Los Angeles County received more food than any other county in 2012, our study year. It shipped out even more: 22 million tons.

California’s Fresno County and Stanislaus County are the next largest, respectively. In fact, many of the counties that shipped and received the most food were located in California. This is due to the several large urban centers, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as the productive Central Valley in California.

We also looked for the core counties—the places that are most central to the overall structure of the food supply network. A disruption to any of these counties may have ripple effects for the food supply chain of the entire country.

We did this by looking for counties with the largest number of connections to others, as well as those that score highly in a factor called “betweenness centrality,” a measurement of the places with the largest fraction of the shortest paths.

San Bernardino County led the list, followed again by a number of other California transit hubs. Also on the list are Maricopa County, Arizona; Shelby County, Tennessee; and Harris County, Texas.

However, our estimates are for 2012, an extreme drought year in the Cornbelt. So, in another year, the network may look different. It’s possible that counties within the Cornbelt would show up as more critical in non-drought years. This is something that we hope to dig into in future work.

3. HOW FOOD TRAVELS FROM PLACE TO PLACE

We also looked at how much food is transported between one county and another.

Many of the largest food transport links were within California. This indicates that there is a lot of internal food movement within the state.

One of the largest links is from Niagara County to Erie County in New York. That’s due to the flow of food through an important international overland port with Canada.

Some of the other largest links were inside the counties themselves. This is because of moving food items around for manufacturing within a county—for example, milk gets off a truck at a large depot and is then shipped to a yogurt facility, then the yogurt is moved to a grocery distribution warehouse, all within the same county.

The food supply chain relies on a complex web of interconnected infrastructure. For example, a lot of grain produced throughout the Midwest is transported to the Port of New Orleans for export. This primarily occurs via the waterways of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

The infrastructure along these waterways—such as locks 52 and 53—are critical, but have not been overhauled since their construction in 1929. They represent a serious bottleneck, slowing down innumerable supply chains nationwide, including that of grain. If they were to fail entirely, then commodity transport and supply chains would be completely disrupted.

Railroads are also important for moving grain. Fresh produce, on the other hand, is often moved around the country by refrigerated truck. This is due to the need to keep fresh fruits and vegetables—relatively high value agricultural products—cool until they reach the consumer. In future work, we hope to evaluate the specific infrastructure that is critical to the U.S. food supply chain.

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Megan Konar is assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This post originally appeared on The Conversation.