Interesting

Category: USA (Page 1 of 18)

A beautiful, broken America.

‘American Exceptionalism’ as defined in Wikipedia, is the belief that the United States is either distinctive, unique, or exemplary compared to other nations.

Wikipedia’s most popular English language articles of 2024

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Wall Street is betting that, during Trump’s second term, more people will enter the United States than are deported from it

Only 6% of Wall Street investors surveyed by Goldman Sachs expect net immigration will turn negative during Trump’s second term. Investors are betting that, even with Trump’s promised crackdown, more people will enter the U.S. than are deported from it.

Matt Egan, writing for CNN »

Over a fifth of investors told Goldman they think immigration under Trump will exceed the pre-pandemic rate of roughly 1 million per year.

Literacy in the USA

The National Literacy Institute »

Illiteracy has become such a serious problem in our country that 130 million adults are now unable to read a simple story to their children

  • 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2022
  • 54% of adults have a literacy below 6th grade level
  • 45 million are functionally illiterate and read below a 5th grade level
  • 44% of the American adults do not read a book in a year
  • The Top 3 states for highest child literacy rates were Massachusetts, Maryland, and New Hampshire, in that order (highest to lowest).
  • The Bottom 3 states for child literacy rates were Louisiana, Mississippi, and New Mexico, (highest to lowest).

More » The National Literacy Institute »

Joe Biden’s administration just set tariffs of up to 271.2% for solar panels from Southeast Asia

Climate change be damned.

This from the World’s second largest emitter of carbon dioxide greenhouse gas emissions. Expect more, worst, from the Trump administration.

Reuters »

U.S. trade officials announced on Friday a new round of tariffs on solar panel imports from four Southeast Asian nations after American manufacturers complained that companies there are flooding the market with unfairly cheap goods.

It is the second of two preliminary decisions that President Joe Biden’s Commerce Department is making this year in a trade case brought by Korea’s Hanwha Qcells, Arizona-based First Solar Inc and several smaller producers seeking to protect billions of dollars in investments in U.S. solar manufacturing.

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Pete Hegseth’s Secret History

Jane Mayer, writing in The New Yorker »

After the recent revelation that Pete Hegseth had secretly paid a financial settlement to a woman who had accused him of raping her in 2017, President-elect Donald Trump stood by his choice of Hegseth to become the next Secretary of Defense. Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, issued a statement noting that Hegseth, who has denied wrongdoing, has not been charged with any crime. “President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his administration,” Cheung maintained.

But Hegseth’s record before becoming a full-time Fox News TV host, in 2017, raises additional questions about his suitability to run the world’s largest and most lethal military force. A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.

Read the whole article at The New Yorker »

Article also archived here »

Trump’s choice for FBI director — Kash Patel — speaks volumes about his real second-term agenda

Tom Nichols, writing for The Atlantic »

Of course, this means the FBI would struggle to do the things it’s supposed to be doing, including fighting crime and conducting counter-intelligence work against America’s enemies. But it would become an excellent instrument of revenge against anyone Trump or Patel identifies as an internal enemy—which, in Trump’s world, is anyone who criticizes Donald Trump.

The Russians speak of the “power ministries,” the departments that have significant legal and coercive capacity. In the United States, those include the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the FBI, and the intelligence community. Trump has now named sycophants to lead each of these institutions, a move that eliminates important obstacles to his frequently-expressed desires to use the armed forces, federal law enforcement agents, intelligence professionals, and government lawyers as he chooses, unbounded by the law or the Constitution.

Whole article archived here »

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