Who Has Passports... And Who Doesn't? And For Which Party Do They Vote?

It was hardly great literature but former Florida Congressman Robert Wexler's autobiography, Fire-Breathing Liberal, made some points that stuck with me. One was about passports, congressional passports, something we covered here before a couple of times, like in this brief mention in 2009 as I was getting ready for a trip to Albania:

There aren't many members of Congress who have traveled extensively out of the country. In his delightful book, Fire-Breathing Liberal, Rep. Robert Wexler marvels at how many of his Republican colleagues seem to think not possessing a passport is a badge of honor! Last weekend I spent some time with Rep. Barbara Lee who is no longer surprised when she talks with Republicans who haven't been-- and don't want to be-- outside of the U.S. The opposite extreme would be one member who certainly qualifies for the Century Club, Rep. Alan Grayson. When I told him I was going to Mali he was able to give me some travel tips for remote, seldom visited villages like Bandiagara and Sanga, and a few weeks ago he told me about some odd customs I can expect to experience in Albania.

And again in 2010 as NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg railed against provincial GOP isolationists:

Visiting China this week, Bloomberg, NYC's globalist, multinational mayor, growled about congressional attempts to prevent China from illegally dumping solar panels into the American market with the express purpose of driving U.S. firms out of business. “If you look at the U.S., you look at who we’re electing to Congress, to the Senate-- they can’t read,” he said. “I’ll bet you a bunch of these people don’t have passports. We’re about to start a trade war with China if we’re not careful here,” he warned, “only because nobody knows where China is. Nobody knows what China is.” Former Rep. Robert Wexler, then a member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, made the same observation in his book, Fire Breathing Liberal, about Know Nothing members of Congress, including members of his committee, for whom not having a passport-- or even eating "foreign" food-- was a badge of honor. Wexler endorsed Charlie Crist for the open Florida Senate seat and Crist lost to one of the bunch of Know Nothings Bloomberg was whining about, Marco Rubio, who's waltzing into the Senate-- and, many fear, the national stage-- after a 49% win, Crist and Kendrick Meek splitting the non-teabaggy vote.

A tip from Paul Krugman last week, America's Superiority Complex, had me thinking about Wexler again as I read a post by Richard Florida, America's Great Passport Divide. You'll notice on the map above that, generally speaking, the states with the smallest percentage of passport holders-- i.e., states with people who don't travel outside the country-- are also the states that elect Republicans that most regularly. Mississippi is the worst, closely followed by West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama and Arkansas.

"It’s a fun map," writes Florida. "With the exception of Sarah Palin’s home state, it reinforces the  “differences” we expect to find between the states where more worldly, well-travelled people live versus those where the folks Palin likes to call “real Americans” preponderate. Mostly to entertain myself, I decided to look at how this passport metric correlates with a variety of other political, cultural, economic, and demographic measures.  What surprised me is how closely it lines up with the other great cleavages in America today." And, as he says, the statistical correlations are striking across a range of indices.

People in richer states tend to hold passports and people in poorer states tend to not. Same for educated people versus ignorant people. The kinds of folks who elect Haley Barbour, Mitch McConnell, Jim DeMint, Jeff Sessions, David Vitter don't hold college degrees-- or passports. They watch Glenn Beck instead and listen to Hate Talk Radio.

States with higher percentages of passport holders are also more diverse. There is a considerable correlation between passports and the share of immigrants or foreign-born population (.63) and also gays and lesbians (.54). The more passport holders a state has, the more diverse its population tends to be.  And yes, these correlations hold when we control for income.

What about politics? How does passport holding line up against America’s Red state-Blue state divide? Pretty darn well, actually. There is a considerable positive correlation between passports and Obama voters (.59) and a significant negative one (-.61) for McCain voters.  It appears that more liberally-oriented states are more globally oriented as well, or at least their citizens like to travel abroad. Again, the correlations hold when we control for income, though they are a bit weaker than the others.

...And finally, states with more passport holders are also happier. There is a significant correlation (.55) between happiness (measured via Gallup surveys) and a state’s percentage of passport holders. Yet again, that correlation holds when we control for income.

There are stark cultural differences between places where international travel is common and those where it’s not, and we can see them playing out in the cultural and political strife that has been riving the country over the past decades. Think of John Kerry, who was accused of looking and sounding “French” and George W. Bush, who’d hardly been overseas before he became president, or for that matter Barack Obama, with his multi-cultural global upbringing, and Sarah Palin, who had to obtain a passport when she traveled to Kuwait in 2007. The trends in passport use reflect America’s starkly bifurcated system of infrastructure. One set of places has great universities and easy access to international airports; another an infrastructure that is much further off the beaten track of the global circulation of capital, talent, and ideas.

Passport holding provides a window into America’s big sort-- in fact it serves as a robust indicator for all the other things that so divide us.

I was horrified to read in Wexler's book about how Republican yahoos bragged about having never traveled abroad. In truth, they represent their constituents' prejudices and fears very well. And circling back to Krugman, it helps explain easily manipulated antipathy, for example, for "socialized medicine," especially of the Canadian variety, an antipathy that is ingrained all over the solid South.

[Y]ou can see how bad single-payer insurance is by the fact that Americans don’t have to wait as long as Canadians for hip replacements, which in Canada are paid for by the government, while in America they’re mainly paid for by … Medicare.

But what struck me about the whole piece was the assumption that modern medicine in general is something only we lucky free-market Americans have, while in Europe they’re still using leeches or something. In other words, it’s part of the superiority complex you often encounter in U.S. politics; people just know that we’re the best, and won’t believe you when you tell them that actually they have the Internet, cell phones, and antibiotics in Europe too.

Globalization Craze Petering Out

Tomorrow's NY Times features a piece by Larry Rohter about the collapse of Globalization. International capital, cheer-led by Thomas Friedman, in a quest for cheap labor, avoidance of social norms (like environmental standards), and higher margins, seems to have goofed up big time and, as the Times puts it, "globalization may be losing some of the inexorable economic power it had for much of the past quarter-century, even as it faces fresh challenges as a political ideology."

Cheap oil, the lubricant of quick, inexpensive transportation links across the world, may not return anytime soon, upsetting the logic of diffuse global supply chains that treat geography as a footnote in the pursuit of lower wages. Rising concern about global warming, the reaction against lost jobs in rich countries, worries about food safety and security, and the collapse of world trade talks in Geneva last week also signal that political and environmental concerns may make the calculus of globalization far more complex.

“If we think about the Wal-Mart model, it is incredibly fuel-intensive at every stage, and at every one of those stages we are now seeing an inflation of the costs for boats, trucks, cars,” said Naomi Klein, the author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

“That is necessarily leading to a rethinking of this emissions-intensive model, whether the increased interest in growing foods locally, producing locally or shopping locally, and I think that’s great.”

...To avoid having to ship all its products from abroad, the Swedish furniture manufacturer Ikea opened its first factory in the United States in May. Some electronics companies that left Mexico in recent years for the lower wages in China are now returning to Mexico, because they can lower costs by trucking their output overland to American consumers.

When Bush first stole the election in 2000, the cost of shipping a standard 40-foot container from Shanghai to Long Beach was $3,000. Now that the Bush Economic Miracle has begun to kick in, the cost is around $8,000... and rising-- and slower, as the ships cut their speed to save money on fuel. And ocean freighters aren't the only problem. Friday, the price of a barrel of oil closed at $125.10. Let's say it falls all the way back down to $107 a barrel for the rest of 2008. In that case, the aviation industry would merely lose $2.3 billion for the year. A more likely scenario is that oil averages $135/barrel for the rest of the year... in which case the industry loses $6.1 billion. That's the end of that industry.

Shotgun marriage: Robin Hayes and Tom DeLay

Four more years of Bush economics-- aka- a McCain administration-- and we'll probably be bringing back three-masted China Trade clippers that are even older than John McCain is. "The industries most likely to be affected by the sharp rise in transportation costs are those producing heavy or bulky goods that are particularly expensive to ship relative to their sale price. Steel is an example. China’s steel exports to the United States are now tumbling by more than 20 percent on a year-over-year basis, their worst performance in a decade, while American steel production has been rising after years of decline. Motors and machinery of all types, car parts, industrial presses, refrigerators, television sets and other home appliances could also be affected." The U.S. may have to actually rebuild a manufacturing sector. Post-Bush, North Carolina, for example, may be actually gaining good jobs instead of losing them. This is what Larry Kissell has been bashing Bush rubber stamp incumbent Robin Hayes over the head with for almost 4 years!

Until recently, standard practice in the furniture industry was to ship American timber from ports like Norfolk, Baltimore and Charleston to China, where oak and cherry would be milled into sofas, beds, tables, cabinets and chairs, which were then shipped back to the United States.

But with transport costs rising, more wood is now going to traditional domestic furniture-making centers in North Carolina and Virginia, where the industry had all but been wiped out. While the opening of the American Ikea plant, in Danville, Va., a traditional furniture-producing center hit hard by the outsourcing of production to Asia, is perhaps most emblematic of such changes, other manufacturers are also shifting some production back to the United States.

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm reading Robert Wexler's book, Fire Breathing Liberal and I just recalled a part I read a few days ago that has former Mississippi Congressman Ronnie Shows remembering how viciously the "free trader" traitors insisted on shoving their failed orthodoxy down everyone's throat. Although no one is worse on this than Democratic leader Rahm Emanuel, Shows' remembrance involves Tom DeLay (the GOP version of Emanuel) and the aforementioned North Carolina Republican rubber stamp Robin Hayes. Shows is recalling a vote on renewing some horrible trade arrangement with China "that had devastated the textile and furniture industries in North Carolina."

The Republicans wanted this legislation to pass-- but a Republican congressman from North Carolina [Hayes] intended to vote against it. It was a terrible bill for his district. As Shows recalls, "After this member voted against the bill, I watched DeLay walk up to him on the floor and force him to change his vote. The man literally was crying as he cast his vote. DeLay stood right behind him until he changed his vote."

Robin Hayes is a weak, spineless rubber stamp who won't even stand up for his own manhood, let alone for his constituents livelihoods. It's why he nearly lost in 2006-- 60,926 to Larry Kissell's 60,597-- and why Larry is expected to beat him handily in November.

A Peek Inside The Congressional Sausage Factory

It doesn't purport to be great literature, but Robert Wexler's autobiographical Fire-Breathing Liberal has much to recommend it, especially if you're interested in how exactly the sausages get made. A couple weeks ago I picked a few pieces of legislation-- NAFTA, CAFTA, FISA and a couple of Iraq War votes-- to help identify, beyond the simplistic "Blue Dog" appellation, the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. Another bill I could have included was one voted on from 3AM until 5:53AM on November 22, 2003-- the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefits bill written by pharmaceutical lobbyists in return for massive contributions to the GOP. [Notice at that link that for the 2002 cycle Big Pharma bribes rockets up to $29,648,111 and the GOP share, the highest ever, goes to 74%.] Wexler, though, gives it the coverage it deserves, in his guided tour of the sausage factory:

The prescription drug vote began about three o'clock in the morning, a good time to start a vote if you don't want America to see what you're doing, and lasted two hours and fifty-one minutes. It was the longest roll call in the history of the House of Representatives. The Republican leadership was obviously so embarrassed by what was taking place on the floor that C-SPAN, whose cameras normally pan the floor, was not allowed to show the Republican side.

This was a bill the Republican leadership had to deliver to the pharmaceutical industry, at whatever cost. This was the hardest of hardball politics. No one will ever know completely what threats were made on the floor that night to ensure passage of the drug bill, but a few days after the vote, retiring representative Nick Smith (R-MI) wrote on his web site, "members and groups made offers of extensive campaign support and endorsements for my son, Brad, who is running for my seat. They also made threats of working against Brad if I voted no..."

Smith had been specifically targeted by both Denny Hastert and Tommy Thompson, Health and Human Services secretary, who defied tradition by actually coming onto the House floor to lobby. They sat on either side of Smith like bookends, increasing the pressure on him.

Additionally, according to conservative columnist Robert Novak, "Business interests would give his son $100,000 in return for his father's vote."

Yummy sausage? Several readers have questioned whether I'm being fair to call hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate campaign contributions "bribes." How about the $100,000 Big Pharma offered Smith, Sr. for Smith, Jr? Would it be unfair to call that a bribe? Smith, by the way, stuck with extreme right wing opponents-- nut cases like Jim DeMint (R-SC), Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO), John Shadegg (R-AZ), Scott Garrett (R-NJ), Mike Pence (R-IN), Pat Toomey (R-PA) and Tom Tancredo (R-CO)-- in opposing the bill. After his no vote, GOP part hacks, like Duke Cunningham (not yet behind bars for accepting and soliciting massive bribes) "taunted him that his son was 'dead meat.' Months later Brad Smith was defeated in the Republican primary, and eventually Tom DeLay was admonished by the nonpartisan House Ethics Committee for offering political favors-- his support for Brad Smith's campaign-- in exchange for Nick Smith's vote."

There was also some drama on the Democratic side of the aisle since this bill wasn't going to come close to passing without some Democratic votes. And Big Pharma knew just who to turn to: Rodney Alexander (D-LA- $44,499) and Ralph Hall (D-TX- $115,483), each of whom was about to jump the fence and join the Republican Party full time, as well as a gaggle of conservative and easily bribed Dixiecrats and/or Blue Dogs:

Rick Boucher (D-VA- $210,203)
Allen Boyd (D-FL- $90,714)
Bud Cramer (D-AL- $45,533)
Lincoln Davis (D-TN- $31,500)
Chris John (D-LA- $126,218)
Jim Marshall (D-GA- $15,150)
Jim Matheson (D-UT- $149,452)
Collin Peterson (D-MN- $26,500)
Earl Pomeroy (D-ND- $109,499)
David Scott (D-GA- $46,750)
Charles Stenholm (D-TX- $54,350)

Is it bribery? Absolutely. Do the rules governoring campaign finance need drastic-- not McCain-type cosmetic, but drastic-- overhaul? You bet. And without it, there can truly be no democracy. Instead there will always be power-mongers like Tom DeLay, Denny Hastert, Rahm Emanuel, Steny Hoyer, Ted Stevens, Debbie Wasserman Schultz who will serve as bagmen for bribes on behalf of various special interests.