The first day of summer doesn’t begin until Wednesday but United Parcel Service already is looking ahead to the colder seasons with plans to charge retailers an extra fee for orders placed around Black Friday and Christmas.

And consumers could end up carrying that extra weight if retailers decide to pass on the cost by raising shipping fees.

Online shopping has become so successful that UPS and other delivery services are a fundamental service that keeps the retail season moving. On a normal daily average, UPS handles 19 million packages. During the peak holiday season, that number jumps to more than 30 million packages a day.

UPS says to meet demand, it’s had to add planes, trucks and thousands of employees. The company claims the surcharges are necessary to offset the additional cost of delivering all those holiday packages.

Between Nov. 19 and Dec. 2 this year, UPS says it will add a 27-cent charge on all ground packages sent to homes. Those dates include Black Friday, which is Nov. 24, and Cyber Monday, which is Nov. 27.

Consumers then get a two week reprieve from the additional charge but the fee makes a comeback to usher in the final holiday rush.

UPS says from Dec. 17 to Dec. 23, it will charge an extra 27 cents for each ground shipment, 81 cents for next-day air and 97 cents for two- or three-day delivery.

The delivery fee could backfire on UPS, as The Wall Street Journal reports:

“Patrick Gill, chief executive of the high-end fishing gear site TackleDirect.com, said news of the surcharge was frustrating since it is going to be applied when his site needs lower rates to compete against Amazon.com , Wal-Mart Stores and others.

“This will add up to be another unaccounted for expense during the holiday season,” Mr. Gill said. “It will force us to push some product away from UPS in some cases.”

A possible way around the surcharge could be the ship-to-store option. Because businesses generally receive more deliveries, the cost per package is typically lower.

The holiday season will be here in no time. Why not start that shopping list now? Surely someone you know needs a tacky summer vacation souvenir.

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Uber is a mess — the “bad boy” ethos shattered, a nervous breakdown in its place. This week, the CEO announced he is taking a sudden leave of absence. A former U.S. attorney general released a brutal audit of the startup’s culture. It’s a terrifying moment for many investors who want that $70 billion unicorn to make them rich or richer — not implode.

But there is one Uber investor who stands out for how she decided to speak up. It was not very Silicon Valley-like of her, but Freada Kapor Klein wanted to turn the crisis into a teachable moment. And while this week’s events could lead her to say “I told you so,” she has a different takeaway.

Let’s rewind a few months. Kapor Klein decided to write an open letter to Uber — which she published with her husband — after a young woman shared an explosive account of sexual harassment at Uber headquarters.

Kapor Klein is a venture capitalist, or a VC. That means she makes money by betting on technology startups. Uber is one of those startups. She has committed to “impact investment” — businesses that can turn a profit while also making the world a better place. For too many years, she says, critics would question her on Uber, and she stayed silent. She tried to influence the company from the inside, though she didn’t see a real will among leadership to change. While “Silicon Valley prides itself on pattern recognition,” the letter said, Uber had “toxic patterns” that needed to stop.

Kapor Klein thought she was just saying what insiders knew: This is not a one-off. Turns out, her peers didn’t like that and wanted her to pay for it.

“I could imagine that they wouldn’t love the Uber letter,” Kapor Klein says in an interview with NPR in mid-March. “But then that they would decide the next step they ought to go, is go after our high growth, hot startups and try to get them away from us!”

She’s just learned that other VCs are trying to poach one of her hottest investments, and they’re citing the Uber letter to do it, basically saying: this investor throws her own people under the bus.

“I mean, it’s one thing to go pitch them. It’s another to say, ‘Get away from Kapor. See, they’re going to do this to you,’ ” she says.

It may be counterintuitive, but in Silicon Valley, the land that created tweeting, there is a code of silence among the rich. People are here to make money, not to agitate. She violated that code.

But she won’t back down. She tells me I should call a shortlist of her most powerful peers and demand they respond on the record. “Go to Sequoia, go to Benchmark, go to Kleiner, go to Accel, go to Andreessen, go to Khosla,” she names the kings of much-storied Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Calif.

She’s sitting inside the Kapor Center for Social Impact — a name that spells out the intent of the place. Kapor Klein and her husband bought this four-story building in central Oakland — what’s become the edge of Silicon Valley as tech expands beyond Cupertino, Mountain View and San Francisco — and it houses an investment arm, research and philanthropic projects.

Kapor Klein is 64 years old, petite with jet black eyes and curly hair to match. She is tense as she recounts the blowback, her folded hands resting on a conference table made of reclaimed wood. Meanwhile her dog is napping by her feet, sprawled on a gray carpet made of recycled fishing nets. (She designed the building to be green.)

Dudley’s snoring breaks her concentration, and she lets out a laugh. He’s a rescue dog, but sometimes she claims he’s a therapy dog. “You can see why. Doesn’t he make you feel better?”

She wakes him up and the two go in search of her husband and business partner, Mitch Kapor. When they find him, he happens to be meeting with the president of Silicon Valley Bank — who is trying to not get in the middle of the couple’s conversation. But Kapor Klein reels him in, telling him about the letter and the response. Greg Becker politely offers his take: “Yeah, people compete … anyway they can, right? That’s — unfortunately it’s human nature … .”

Kapor Klein points to her dog, who is now rubbing his enormous cream coat against the banker’s leg, and she teases: “I thought it was just dogs that did that. Dogs, not humans.” Her husband ends the conversation by saying: “It’s a dog-eat-dog world.”

This is his way of acting as her buffer — she, the one who pushes; he, the one who moderates.

Mitch Kapor is a bit of a legend, by the way. In the 1980s he founded Lotus, the famous spreadsheet maker. Some compare him to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

He pulled Kapor Klein into the tech world when he hired her to fix Lotus’ culture in 1984, to make it the most progressive employer in the U.S. Quite the job description. She would lecture her boss about how he carries himself at work, how he should be “more sensitive” about his power, how he could make or break an employee’s day just with eye contact.

The couple didn’t get together until years later, when she sought him out for career advice; and his first marriage fell apart. He asked her out on a date. He had a son. She was 43 and didn’t have kids. She assumed it was a summer fling and warned him, date two, that she’s not “stepmom material.”

Turns out, it wasn’t a fling.

Her life’s work is to change the culture of Silicon Valley — a place she feels has gone backward in time. There are far fewer women in computer science today than in the 1980s. Blacks and Latinos are missing too. Kapor Klein faults the investor class, which holds on to the myth of meritocracy, that they are the hyper-rational conduits of capital and it so just happens that white men are the most worthy.

She shares a hokey saying she’s heard one too many times: “We don’t care if you’re orange or blue; the only color we care about is green.”

If all Kapor Klein did was critique, she’d be irrelevant here. This place values people who build things. And that is what she is doing. The building feels like an alternate universe — one where tech somehow looks like the rest of America.

On one floor, there’s the investment team. Their portfolio includes Genius Plaza — the hot startup that others now want to poach. It’s an online education platform founded by Ana Roca Castro, a woman from the Dominican Republic (which is exotic in these parts). She’s landed major contracts with national agencies throughout Latin America, and is working to get into more U.S. schools.

Castro, who is based in Albany, N.Y., describes Kapor Klein as “protective,” an early investor who tries to shoo away others who don’t share their values. Asked if that could mean possessive, the tech founder disagrees. “When someone is territorial they want nobody around,” but in multiple instances, Kapor Klein has opened doors she didn’t know to knock. “She’ll be the first to push me, saying, ‘Don’t be afraid.’ “

Kapor Klein keeps an eclectic inner circle. It includes a former head of the NAACP; the woman who filed (and lost) a high-profile sexual harassment lawsuit against a leading venture capital fund; and Ulili Onovakpuri. The 32-year-old advises the health care portfolio, deciding which startups get money. But their relationship started when she was a teenager. Her now long-time mentor gave her a scholarship to UC Berkeley. (Kapor Klein launched the IDEAL Scholars Fund, for high-achieving minority students, after California ended affirmative action in schools.)

Round the corner, social scientists are running data on why people leave tech, looking for holes in the leaky pipeline, so to speak. (They later published this study.)

Downstairs, Gabriel Chaparro — who ran the center’s SMASH math and science program for students of color at Stanford — shares the lesson he wants to drill into young minds.

“You’re going to step into places where there’s a line of people and none of them look like you. But you’ve earned your space. So get in that line, push them aside,” he says. “You can’t just look at that line and say I don’t fit in there. Make your fit.”

It’s a very Silicon Valley way of being. It’s how Uber CEO Travis Kalanick broke the yellow cab industry in city after city.

In some ways, Kapor Klein wants young people who grew up poor to channel Silicon Valley’s sense of entitlement — the idea that it’s OK to fail; that failure is necessary; and that one deserves support anyway. She herself doesn’t come from money. She grew up on a U.S. Air Force base in Biloxi, Miss., and one of her earliest memories was seeing, at age 3, her 7-year-old brother bloodied, beaten for being a Jew. She knew then the world isn’t fair.

The Uber row isn’t her first in Silicon Valley. To some extent, she’s used to it. She is rich (she won’t disclose how rich) and travels in wealthy circles, where people have strong feelings about money. She remembers a billionaire who suggested she’s spending too much on her do-gooder education programs. She recollects telling him, “Well, you probably write a check that’s somewhere between five and 10 times that amount of money for private kindergarten for your child.”

She’s quick to point out, though, that she jabbed because she was asking him to donate. If there wasn’t a specific ask, a concrete step she was advocating, she said she would hold back.

NPR did approach leading investors (as Kapor Klein suggested) to get their take on Uber, her letter, and what’s the real problem. One was willing to go on the record.

“If you are a shareholder in a company and a stakeholder in a company, you would want to speak with one voice and you would want to work on the problem primarily,” says Jason Calacanis. “To kind of blindside a company with a post like that means now the company not only has to solve the problem, they have to react to that position publicly.”

Calacanis is an influential angel investor, and author of a new book on how to invest. While he respects Kapor Klein’s work with the underprivileged (he’s invited her to speak about it to his startups), he says that the way she spoke out created a “negative atmosphere” — a media circus.

And, Calacanis adds, it takes a hard-charging CEO to build the Uber empire. Soft questions around culture, an inclusive culture — those come later. “After you’ve won, or won a decent amount of market share or won the early fights, I think you have to shift gears a bit. And I think that’s what Uber’s going through.”

Kapor Klein disagrees — and Uber’s monumental meltdown is arguably proof she was right. But when I sit down with her in April, as the drama continues to unfold, she’s become hesitant. Uber reached out to her for help, after her letter. Now, as I ask questions about it, she’s being tight-lipped.

Asked if she is uncomfortable, she says she is, “because my goal now is to help Uber and any other company that really genuinely wants to change. I don’t know what snippets you might use, how they might hear that, and whether that’s going to hamper the efforts.”

Kapor Klein wants the world to understand: Yes, she spoke out when others would not. But no, Uber isn’t the only problem child in Silicon Valley. They just happened to get caught. This week she and her husband issued a statement to that effect, saying “the company deserves some room” to work on itself.

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More than 190 Democrats in Congress have joined together to sue President Trump on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

They say Trump is violating the U.S. Constitution by profiting from business deals involving foreign governments — and doing so without congressional consent. And they want the court to make it stop.

Trump has “repeatedly and flagrantly violated” the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told reporters on a conference call.

The clause says that “without the Consent of the Congress,” the president can’t accept benefits “of any kind whatever from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

Blumenthal said Trump “has never sought the consent of Congress” for the profits from deals in the more than 20 countries where he has business operations.

Just one example he offered: Trump has sought — and obtained — valuable trademarks from China’s government, but did not clear those transactions with Congress.

Blumenthal, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said it took “a lot of research” involving legal experts to determine who would have legal standing to successfully sue the president. “We have standing that no one else has” because the Constitution makes it clear “the consent of Congress is absolutely essential,” he said.

The Democrats believe that Trump “must either sell his vast holdings … or he must tell us and disclose now” all of the benefits he gets from foreign governments, he said. They want to see the president’s tax returns and business records.

This suit is just the latest in a series of legal efforts to force Trump to fully separate himself from this business interests. Other suits have been filed by a public-interest group representing private businesses and the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia representing their jurisdictions.

That means Trump is now facing a triple threat in court, with plaintiffs coming at him from 1) the private sector, 2) the state level and 3) Congress. Each group must try to convince a court that it has the legal standing to challenge a president.

The private businesses say they are being harmed because Trump’s D.C. hotel is presenting unfair competition, i.e., foreign officials take their business to Trump to win his favor. And Maryland’s attorney general says that state’s National Harbor resort — just across the river from Washington — also faces unfair competition.

But the Democratic lawmakers are focused on what they call the harm being done by being stripped of the consent power granted by the Constitution.

Trump has stepped back from daily management of the Trump Organization, but he has moved the assets into a trust, headed by his two oldest sons and a business associate. Trump is the sole beneficiary of the trust, and his son Eric Trump has said the president gets regular updates on profits.

On Monday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer was asked about the attorneys general lawsuit, and he replied that Trump’s business interests “do not violate the Emoluments Clause.”

Spicer noted that the lawsuits are being brought by Democrats. “It’s not hard to conclude that partisan politics may be one of the motivations” for filing suit, Spicer said.

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Updated at 8:19 p.m. ET

President Trump is preparing to announce changes in U.S. policy toward Cuba, possibly tightening restrictions on travel and trade that were loosened under former President Barack Obama.

Trump is expected to announce the changes in Miami on Friday.

The move was confirmed by a congressional source with direct knowledge of the situation.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has been leading the push for a more restrictive policy, along with his fellow Cuban-American, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla.

The changes could make it more difficult for Americans to visit the island and for U.S. companies to do business there. The Obama administration ended decades of economic and diplomatic isolation of Cuba, in hopes that renewed engagement would lead to reforms in the communist country.

The White House declined to discuss the pending changes.

“When we have an announcement on the president’s schedule, we’ll let you know,” said spokesman Sean Spicer. “But just stay tuned.”

Advocates for greater engagement with Cuba warn the administration’s changes could be costly.

“This is the opposite of ‘America First.’ This is America last,” said James Williams, who leads the nonpartisan lobbying group Engage Cuba.

He warns that reduced travel and trade with Cuba could cost thousands of American jobs.

Travel to the island is already limited to visitors in 12 authorized categories, but there is little enforcement. And with renewed commercial air service, visits to Cuba have soared.

The administration is considering stepped up policing to discourage pleasure travel and limiting visitors to one trip per year.

Williams says that would be especially hard on Cuban-Americans with relatives on the island.

“Imagine, your mother is sick in Cuba,” Williams said. “You might have to decide between going to see her in the hospital bed before she dies or going to the funeral. And that is just tragic.”

Polls suggest a majority of Americans support greater engagement with Cuba. Last month, 55 senators sponsored legislation that would further relax travel restrictions.

The opening has also led to modest changes in Cuba, with increased revenue for small-business owners and Internet hot spots in Havana.

“I think Cubans in Cuba will be terribly disheartened” by the renewed restrictions, said Carlos Gutierrez, who served as commerce secretary under former President George W. Bush. “This decision will not play well anywhere, except for in those very cloistered spots in South Florida where Sen. Rubio and Mario Diaz-Balart have constituents.”

Shortly before Trump’s inauguration, Rubio said in a statement that he was heartened the new administration would reverse “the failed Cuba policy of the last two years.”

When the Obama administration policy was first rolled out in late 2014, Rubio blasted the move.

“Just as when President Eisenhower severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, the Castro family still controls the country, the economy and all levers of power. This administration’s attempts to loosen restrictions on travel in recent years have only served to benefit the regime,” he said in a statement. “But most importantly, the regime’s brutal treatment of the Cuban people has continued unabated. Dissidents are harassed, imprisoned and even killed.”

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Colstrip, Mont., is about 750 miles away from Seattle, as the crow flies. Politically, the two places may be even further apart. And yet, they’re connected.

If you’re turning the lights on in the Pacific Northwest, some of that electricity may be coming from Colstrip. And if you’re in Colstrip, wondering how long your own lights will stay on, you’re likely looking west.

America’s energy system is a web, connecting inland to coast and urban to rural. And as that system shifts, people are starting to ask: What — if any — support should a town like Colstrip get from places like Seattle or the federal government as the town enters an uncertain future?

Despite the recent promises from the Trump administration to bring the coal industry back, America’s energy system is shifting increasingly toward natural gas, wind and solar. Economics are driving the change. But so are politics.

In the week since President Trump announced that he would withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement, a broad coalition of cities, states, businesses and universities have promised to uphold the agreement and reduce their carbon emissions. “We’re still in,” is their motto. Washington state was already in. It has a commitment to use less coal.

Colstrip is a coal town. And even though the challenges it’s facing existed long before Trump’s announcement, people there are angry about the push to change America’s energy demands. They feel like they don’t have a say. And they fear they’ll be left behind.

A town built on coal

Colstrip is a company town that’s built on coal — coal that’s scraped from beneath the surrounding sage-covered hills and trucked or transported past tree-lined streets and idle train cars, to a towering four-unit power plant at the heart of this tidy, tucked-away town. It’s there — at the second-largest coal-fired power plant in the West — that the coal is burnt, heating water to steam, generating 2,094 megawatts of electricity that travels by wire across Montana to the greater Pacific Northwest.

“That’s who we are,” says Lu Shomate, the director of the town’s historical center. “If it wasn’t for the coal, and then the generation of course, none of us would be here.”

And what’s here, she says, is good. Colstrip isn’t some dusty, dreary, down-and-out town.

There’s an 18-hole golf course, a 32,000-square-foot recreation center and 32 parks that are all free to the town’s 2,300 residents. The streets are wide and clean. The estimated median household income in Colstrip is $84,145. In Montana overall, it’s $47,169.

But recently, things have started to change. A lawsuit filed by two environmental groups alleged that the Colstrip Generating Station hadn’t updated its technology to meet air quality requirements. A couple of the utilities that own the plant settled, agreeing to close the older two of the plant’s four units by 2022. There have since been indications it could happen sooner.

On top of that, the two biggest customers for Colstrip’s power — Washington and Oregon — announced long-term commitments to get off coal.

The combined uncertainty has sent real estate values in Colstrip plummeting, leaving people in sunken mortgages. Kerri Kerzmann, who helps run the town’s before-school programs for coal workers’ children, says her house has gone from being worth “a couple hundred thousand dollars,” to maybe $60,000 or $70,000 now.

Resident and activist Lori Shaw says a “crisis fatigue” has set in.

“You’re so used to being on the edge for so long,” she says, “It’s almost like you forget to panic anymore, even though it is panic-worthy. It’s like, yeah, I know we might lose everything next month. What’s new?”

Shomate says the same thing that’s happened in Appalachia and other parts of blue-collar America is starting to happen here: “The middle class is being ripped apart.”

Shomate, Kerzmann and others in Colstrip want a plan to help the town now and as it transitions into an uncertain future. All say that coal should be part of that plan, but they know it can’t be the only part.

“We know there are better ways of doing things, so let’s work on that together,” Shomate says. “But we’re not getting that support. It’s just: shut it down, dirty, filthy coal.”

Planning for an uncertain future

A plan for a town like Colstrip requires resources. It needs money. And if you ask people here where that money should come from, they’ll point west.

“There would be no Facebook. There would be no Bill Gates. None of that would be in Seattle without low-cost, reliable power that comes from Colstrip, Mont.,” says Duane Ankney, a state senator who represents the town in the state legislature.

The reality is a bit more complex. Hydroelectric power provides the bulk of Washington’s energy. But coal has historically played a role there as well.

The construction of the power plant in Colstrip, which began operating in 1970s, was actually spurred by power companies in the Pacific Northwest that wanted another source of electricity for the region’s fast-growing energy demands. Before that, it was the Northern Pacific Railroad that turned this coal-rich patch of prairie into a company town to provide coal for the rails.

Today, Washington-based Puget Sound Energy owns one-third of Colstrip’s electric output, enough to power 500,000 homes in western Washington.

That history is well-known in Colstrip and it factors largely into the local sentiment that outsiders should be partly responsible for the town’s future.

At Alison’s Pantry, a coffee shop in town, Hugh Mannix and a group of older men who call themselves the “Rusty Zippers” sneer when they talk about Washington’s efforts to get off coal.

“So we can put up with all the pollution and they get the gravy,” Mannix says. “And that’s gone on for 40 years. And we took it. We run with it. We made it successful and now these prima donnas out there can just walk away? Well, no. Pay your way out of it now.”

Ankney, the state senator, proposed a bill in Montana’s legislature earlier this year that would require utilities to do just that.

There are six utilities that have ownership in Colstrip’s plant. All are based out of state.

Ankney’s bill would have required them to help pay for the social costs of decommissioning the plant, by making them have “a plan in place for the workers,” he says. That plan would include money for lost real estate values, tax revenues and to help re-train the workers.

The bill, Ankney says, was about accountability to the state of Montana and to the workers who made the utilities what they are.

“I think that would go a long ways, to cop a phrase, to make America great again. It’s when you have corporate responsibility,” says Ankney, a Republican and retired coal mine superintendent.

The bill failed in Montana’s legislature. It was fought by utilities and environmental groups, who feared that it would scare away future investment in Montana from renewable energy companies.

A related bill, which required that the utilities have a plan and money set aside for environmental remediation at the plant site, passed.

Shaw, the community activist, says it seems like there’s more interest in helping “grass and dirt” than people.

A federal plan

At the union hall in Colstrip, Rex Rogers shares some of the same frustrations as Shaw and others.

Rogers is the business manager for the local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. He represents about 250 workers at Colstrip’s power plant. And he too wants to see a plan in place to help those workers when parts of the plant start to close down.

The irony is that there was a plan: President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

Rogers keeps a copy of it at the union hall. He lifts it — all 1,560 pages — from a wood side table and plops it down on a table in the middle of the room.

“I wouldn’t have printed it, if I’d known how big it was going to be,” he says.

The Clean Power Plan was Obama’s biggest effort to combat climate change. It would have required that states like Montana reduce their carbon emissions. Rogers was on Montana’s team that studied how that would play out on the ground. The expectation, he says, is that it would have forced the closure of the two older units at the town’s power plant.

Put another way: “The impact on Colstrip would have been exactly what we’re seeing now,” he says.

Only now, the Clean Power Plan is gone. Montana was one of dozens of states that successfully sued to stop the plan. Trump has ordered that it be repealed.

“Well the concern with that is, built into the Clean Power Plan was [a section] about transitioning, taking care of the workers and those parts of it,” Rogers says.

Rogers is referring to Obama’s Power+ Plan, which aimed to give resources to “assist communities and workers that have been affected by job losses in coal mining, coal power plant operations, and coal-related supply chain industries due to the changing economics of America’s energy sector.”

It was the Obama administration’s way of saying: We know the market is changing; here’s our plan to help cushion the fall.

Now, Rogers says, the cushion is gone and there’s nothing being proffered by the new administration to replace it.

“Even though we won the ‘war on coal,’ it doesn’t appear that there was anything in that for the workers,” he says.

Rogers’ opinion of the Clean Power Plan is not widely shared in Colstrip. Most people in the town are happy to see it, and other Obama-era regulations on the coal industry, gone or on their way out.

“With Trump in there doing some of the things that he’s doing to eliminate some of those needless regulations, I think it’s going to make a positive impact here,” says Colstrip Mayor John Williams.

If nothing else, he says, it’s nice to have a president who supports coal.

A difficult question

While Trump’s never-say-die approach to the coal industry is refreshing to some, it’s worrisome to others.

“It appears that that comes with a price of: then let’s pretend that the transition isn’t happening,” says Julia Haggerty, a professor at Montana State University. “That, I think, does not do a service to the places that are experiencing the transition.”

Haggerty studies efforts to help struggling coal towns. She’s spent a lot of time in Colstrip and other coal towns in the Mountain West. And she knows how hard it is to even have a discussion about transitions in those places.

“These are purpose-built energy towns,” she says. “So it’s pretty tricky, I think, to ask ‘what comes next?’ That’s often a painful conversation to have because what comes next in a remote, isolated energy-producing town is really a very difficult thing to know.”

She says it’s important that these conversations happen though; that plans are made for the future as the nation moves further away from coal.

Those conversations, Haggerty says, need to include places like Colstrip that have historically provided energy and places like Seattle who no longer want it.

As a professor, she sees students who have very little understanding of where energy comes from and where it’s traditionally come from. That lack of recognition, she says, “to the places and resources that have created enormous wealth for the region, I think, really contributes to the bitterness and the difficulty of these conversations.”

And, she says, it’s contributing to the divisions that exist in America today.

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