Trump doesn’t waste any time cashing in on tax victory to ask wealthy and ultra- wealthy investors for his cut. His meeting with David Koch is ignored by news media, of course.

By Marc Jampole

There wasn’t anything in the news about what Donald Trump did the day after the Senate gave the current Administration an enormous win by passing a tax bill which will produce the greatest shifting of wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthy in American history.

You might assume that like on most days, Trumpty-Dumpty played a little golf and tweeted inanities. But if you check his schedule posted online you’ll see that he jetted to New York for three fundraisers. The narcissistic ignoramus to whom the Electoral College gave the most votes last year took a victory lap with both tiny-fingered hands outstretched palms up for cash.

At 11:20 am on December 2, The Donald delivered remarks at a Trump campaign breakfast, raising money for his reelection, a slush fund that will no doubt end up feeding Trump businesses. Next at 12:35 pm came a speech at a National Republican Committee fundraiser. We can assume that the money raised at that event will fund Republican Party operations and races.

The last fundraiser, at 1:50 pm, is the most intriguing of all. All the schedule says is that Trump “speaks to a smaller group of RNC donors.”

Wonder who that smaller group was and where they met? By luck of the draw, I can give you that information.

They met in the apartment building next to the one in which my wife and I live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The reason I know this fact is that our street was blocked off for a few hours by sand trucks and was swarming with local police and Secret Service agents, one of whom told us it was Trump who was coming. A special receiving tent was erected at the side entrance to the building where the overgrown orange infant was headed. No one was allowed to walk on the street, and when we left, we were told that to get back into our building, we would have to supply identification. Just as we were leaving for the afternoon, we saw a procession of limousines arrive. At the end of the article you can find two photos that suggest how elaborately authorities cordoned off the area for Trump’s visit.

The building in question is 740 Park Avenue, a long-time New York symbol of ultra-wealth. 740 Park has its own Wikipedia page and a book has been written about it, 740 Park: The Story of the World’s Richest Apartment Building by Michael Gross. Some of the current or former inhabitants of 740 include Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (whose grandfather built it), John D. Rockefeller, Saul Steinberg, Steve Schwarzman, Ronald Lauder, Ronald Perelman, Vera Wang, John Thain and Steve Ross, most of whom are certified billionaires.

While the Donald may have been visiting any of the thirty odd ultra-wealthy tenants in this venerable Art Deco building, I will state with extreme confidence he was there to see David Koch, of the infamous Koch brothers, the main organizers of the juggernaut of rightwing money that has funded conservative think tanks, backed conservative politicians and advocated for lower taxes and deregulation for the past few decades.

As Jane Mayer’s Dark Money details, the Koch brothers, sons of an original founder of the John Birch Society, are the primary organizers of the 40-year campaign of a small coterie of billionaires to change the American political agenda for their own selfish ends. Her book explains the process by which our country has reached the point at which it is overwhelmingly centrist-looking-left but controlled by right-wingers, especially at the state level. It explains how the Democrats could outvote the Republicans by millions and still not have a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. It explains why the mass media focuses on inessential issues such as the deficit or promulgates ridiculous myths such as the social value of lowering taxes and the idea that science is unsure about global warming.

In her update of Dark Money that includes what happened in 2016, Mayer reports that the Kochs kept a billion dollars in their and their associates’ pockets during the last election cycle that they had planned to spend to sway the 2016 presidential election for just about any Republican candidate other than Donald Trump. Yet even though the Kochs sat on their hands in the 2016 election, they are now deeply embedded in the Trump Administration. Mayer reports that the Trump administration is crawling with Koch operatives and lobbyists. Mike Pence was the Koch’s first choice for president in 2012 and has received significant financial support from the Kochs in the past. The Kochs set new CIA Director Mike Pompeo up in business and have provided him with financial support throughout his political career. Then there’s the cabinet, that skewers towards the kind of anti-regulation, pro-oil, climate deniers that the Koch Bro’s love to love. Did Trump say he would “drain the swamp” or “join the swamp?”

In the meeting with Koch and friends, we can only imagine the self-serving bombast with which Trump overstated his role in getting the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” (AKA the “Despoiling of the Middle Class by the Wealthy Act”) passed. He certainly didn’t turn any Democrats, and I doubt that he was the reason that the hypocrites John McCain and Jeff Flake decided to vote for the tax heist. I doubt it was Trump who convinced Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins that 13 million was an acceptable number of Americans to lose their healthcare to fund vast tax giveaways to millionaires, multimillionaires and billionaires. And he certainly didn’t influence the public or businesses, since every survey showed that the vast majority of Americans and American business owners and operators were vehemently opposed to the bill. In retrospect, his main role in force feeding this dangerous legislation through Congress was to keep embarrassing himself with tweets about his various feuds that dominated the top of the news, pushing the awful details of the tax bill to less prominent coverage.

It could be a coincidence that Trump paid homage to Koch and pals the day after the Senate passed the bill, since the signs that there would be no parking on Saturday December 2 had been up on Park Avenue all week. On the other hand, the timing was convenient. Not even waiting 24 hours to beg for money seems completely in character for the crass, tone-deaf Trump.

Trump wants money from David and Charles Koch and their ultra-wealthy cronies, to be sure—for his reelection, for his various business ventures that can profit from campaign expenditures and for the dozens of lawyers he is employing related to the Mueller investigation into Trump’s probable collusion with the Russians during the election and his ham-handed attempts to cover it up. I imagine he would also like Koch to support candidates least likely to vote for impeachment.

I doubt that the erratic, pompous, crude and ignorant Trump mixed all that well with the patrician and hardheaded Koch crowd. I see so many funny ways the meeting played out—Did Koch serve fast food hamburgers because he knows that’s what the Donald likes to eat? Or did Trump take one look at a spread of various tapas, sushi or crudities and dig into his pocket for a candy bar? What comparison to his own garish nouveau riche home and hotels did he make upon seeing the Koch’s furnishings? How crude was he in asking for the bucks? How many overblown guarantees did he make?

The Kochs already have just about everything they wanted from the 2016 election. The tax law will save them tens of millions of dollars right away, and billions more for their heirs at their deaths. The current administration is rapidly undoing a generation of regulations that protect the environment and level the playing field between large corporations and everyone else. The federal government is turning its back on climate change policies. The Department of Education is focusing its energies on privatization. There can be no doubt that the Koch crew would feel more comfortable with Mike Pence as president, or Paul Ryan if Pence has to resign because he helped to collude or cover-up. They’ll be less happy if the Democrats sweep in 2018 and Nancy Pelosi ends up in the White House. My guess then is that once Mueller has presented his evidence of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” Republicans will abandon Trumpty-Dumpty, impeach and convict if Trump does not resign first.

Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, or the current occupant of the Oval Office—whoever is officially in charge by the summer of 2018, the Kochs and their fellow billionaires will continue to pull the strings. And one way or another, the 2018 election—like that of 2000, 2010 and 2016—will be one of the most important in U.S. history. Times are desperate for America, and certainly for the left. The side that wants a polluted, poorly educated nation of rich and poor has the money and the structural advantage they gained from gerrymandering after the 2010 election and creating a multitude of state laws that make it harder to register and to vote. All the American people have is the vote itself.

Editorial: GOP Owners Seek Payback

While corporate media focused on whether Al Franken’s wet kiss and mock lechery of a Playboy model/radio host during a 2006 USO tour of the Mideast before he was a senator, for which Franken has apologized, was the moral equivalent of Roy Moore’s past as an accused child molester and seducer of teenagers when he was an assistant district attorney in Gadsden, Ala., Republicans in Congress were proceeding with plans to pass a tax bill that cuts Medicare and Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for billionaires and corporations.

Republicans claimed, under their tax overhaul, American families, on average, would see their taxes cut by $1,300 in 2019, but the middle one-fifth of earners — earning $50,000 to $87,000 a year — would get a tax cut of $850, on average. People in the top 1% of incomes, who make more than $750,000 a year, would see a cut of $34,130, on average.

But the tax bill also repeals the individual mandate to buy insurance, which frees up more than $300 billion in federal funds over the next decade for tax cuts but results in 13 million fewer people having insurance, and higher insurance premiums for others, according to projections by the Congressional Budget Office.

The tax bill is expected to add $1.4 trillion to the national debt, which would trigger automatic spending cuts to Medicare ($25 billion the first year), student loans, military pensions, agricultural subsidies and supports, Customs and Border Patrol and other programs totaling $150 billion per year under the “Pay As You Go” rule. The last time Medicare was cut like this, in 2013, Sarah Kliff noted at Vox.com, patients lost access to critical services such as chemotherapy treatment.

The Medicare cuts could be waived by Congress, but Republicans, on near-party-line votes, in October approved a budget that cuts $473 billion from Medicare and $1 trillion from Medicaid over the next decade to shake loose money for the tax cuts.

“This tax bill deserves a broader name. Its policies will cause millions of vulnerable Americans to lose coverage, disrupt care for the elderly, and potentially change the health care system in other ways we can’t fully predict,” Kliff wrote. “… The tax bill could, for some seniors, become a bill that sharply limits their access to health care.”

The CBO examined how the changes in federal spending would affect different income groups and found the groups that will be hit hardest are — surprise! — the working poor. According to the estimates, anyone making less than $30,000 a year would feel the pinch starting in 2019. By 2021, families earning $40,000 or less a year would be paying more in taxes and/or receiving less in services, creating a net savings for the federal government.

By 2025, individual tax cuts would be phased out, so benefits would be substantially less for the middle class. The average tax cut for all families then would be just $300, and 50.3% of American households would see their taxes increase by this point. Those in the middle quintile of earners would see a tax cut of just $50, on average, and 65.6% of these people would see their taxes go up while their government services are reduced and their health insurance costs likely would be shooting up by 10% or more annually. People in the top 1% of income earners, however, would still get a tax cut of $32,510, on average, and would receive 61.8% of the total tax benefits from the plan. After the tax breaks for the lower income groups expire in 2025, the corporate tax rate would remain at 20%, down from the current 35%.

“The whole purpose of this tax increase is to make it possible for Senate Republicans to pass a tax cut that overwhelmingly benefits the very wealthiest taxpayers — on party lines, without any Democrats,” Brad Sargent noted at the Washington Post. “The whole point of zeroing out the tax cuts for lower-income groups, resulting in a tax hike for so many people [after 2025], is to fund the continued corporate tax cuts, so they don’t add to the deficit in the long run, allowing Republicans to pass the bill via a simple majority vote.”

Bruce Bartlett, a former domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan, noted in the Washington Post that “the stealth goal of the GOP tax cuts is to start down the path toward gutting the New Deal and the Great Society — and if tax cuts pass, they might get away with it.”
The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that both the Senate and House bills would reduce federal revenue by $1.4 trillion. That roughly matched the CBO’s findings.

Trump and Republicans claim the tax cuts will stimulate economic growth to make up for the tax cuts, but that is a fantasy. Unemployment already is down to 4.1%, which is considered full employment. Republicans say cutting taxes will force wages up, but “supply-side” economics hasn’t worked that way in the past.

Bartlett noted that wages fell steadily after the corporate tax rate was cut to 34% from 46% in 1986 under Reagan. Wages also fell in Britain after it cut corporate tax rates; tax savings primarily go to corporate executives and shareholders, he noted.

A better way to get wages up would be to keep the tax rates where they are and use the revenue to bring the nation’s infrastructure up to standards. Any tax cuts should be targeted at lower-income workers, who would put the money back into the economy, rather than putting the windfall into CDs or hedge funds, as the wealthy would do.

A supply-side tax plan was disastrous to the Kansas economy after Gov. Sam Brownback (R) convinced legislators in 2012 to slash income and business taxes to spur investment and economic growth. Instead, state revenues went into a free-fall, which forced the state to slash university budgets and cancel highway projects and required the state to borrow $1 billion to shore up the state’s public pension fund.

But the Grand Oligarch Party is all about the triumph of hope over experience, and while moderate Republicans joined with Democrats in the Kansas Legislature to pass a $1.2 billion tax increase over Brownback’s veto this past year, all five of Kansas’ US House members and both of its US senators have expressed support for Trump’s plan.

A survey of 42 academic economists by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business found only one economist agreeing with the Republican claim that “US GDP will be substantially higher a decade from now” than under the current baseline. In fact, 52% disagreed or strongly disagreed that the bill would lead to significant economic growth, and 36% were uncertain.

One of the selling points is that the bill would reduce the tax rate on corporations to 20%, but that rate would be for “C corporations,” the larger business entities. For small business owners in sole proprietorships, partnerships, LLCs and “S corporations,” which generally report “pass-through income,” the tax break would be limited to the first 30% of income, with at least 70% of the business owner’s income continuing to be taxed at the highest rate. And many independent contractors, such as truck drivers, would have to incorporate to continue to deduct business expenses.

Both versions would reduce deductibility of state and local taxes. The Senate bill would end all state and local tax write-offs, and the House bill would repeal deductions of state and local income taxes while preserving the deduction for property taxes.

The Senate narrowly passed this monstrosity of a tax bill 51-49 just before 2 a.m. Saturday, Dec. 2. The text was released to senators late Friday night, shortly before the final vote, but the Republican leaders refused to give senators or the public time to read the bill. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said she got the amendments not from senators, but from a lobbyist, implying that lobbyists saw the bill before Democratic senators. Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) was the only Republican to vote against the tax scam.

The only reason the bill is being rushed into law is the billionaires who fund Republican politicians are demanding a payback on their investment and they’ve told Republican members of Congress if they don’t pass the tax cuts the political contributions will dry up. The bill will go to a conference committee, where House and Senate negotiatos will work out the differences in the bill, unless the House agrees to the Senate amendments, so lay into your House member Mondaypo: call them via the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121. Call your senators at the same number.

Monied interests too often override public interest to enact bad legislation. Tell your Representative and Senators you aren’t fooled by this tax break for the wealthy. In any case, We the People must reject the US Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United, which made it legal for corporations to own legislators. Promote an amendment to the Constitution that firmly establishes that money is not speech and only human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights. To help restore democracy, see MoveToAmend.org. But go there before Dec. 14, when the Federal Communications Commission plans to repeal net neutrality and leave you at the mercy of your corporate internet service provider. — JMC

(Editor's Note: This was updated from the print edition.)

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2017

---

Populist.com

Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us

---

Copyright © 2017 The Progressive PopulistPO Box 819, Manchaca TX 78652

Selections from the December 15, 2017 issue

COVER/Steven Rosenfeld
Watch out for the next big attack on our voting systems

EDITORIAL
GOP owners seek payback

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS  
We were there

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Step out of that caootprint

DISPATCHES
What does the internet look like if net becomes less neutral?
Open internet one of few things standing between us and Trump’s authoritarian rule;
Corporate news largely ignored FCC plan to kill net neutrality;
War over direction of bank watchdog;
Trump disrupts Navajo code talker reception with ‘Pocahontas’ slur;
Trump plays golf three times more than Obama;
Solar and wind energy now cheaper than coal and nukes;
No one wants KXL pipeline, but Nebraska approves it anyway;
Coal baron convicted in mine disaster mulls Senate run;
Comcast hints at plan for paid fast lanes after net neutrality repeal

ART CULLEN
Change is due

JILL RICHARDSON
Washington’s war on poor grad students

JIM VAN DER POL
Rural race to the bottom

ROBERT BOROSAGE
Republicans in Congress think you’re an idiot

JOHN YOUNG
Your basic, average, ordinary, garden-variety cult

SAM PIZZIGATI
The true cost of inequality

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Newspeak in Trumplandia: Block grants

SAM URETSKY
Fish heads and chicken feet in your future?

BOB LORD
This tax plan is going to cost a lot more than advertised

WAYNE O’LEARY
Republican death obsession

JOHN BUELL
Origins of an invulnerable base

SETH SANDRONSKY
White-on-white crime

N. GUNASEKARAN
Trump’s Asia visit: behind red carpet reception

JIM GOODMAN
Stop pretending estate tax has anything to do with family farmers

ROB PATTERSON
Simon still rhymin’ after all these years

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
The new, improved Sophia (not Loren)

MOVIES/Ed Rampell
Thanks don’t cure PTSD

MEDEA BENJAMIN
Cubans start small businesses, but US hurts them 

and more ...

GOP trifecta of inequality: increase deficit, cut programs & raise middle class taxes to fund tax cut for wealthy

By Marc Jampole

Imagine stand-up comic Henny Youngman, king of the one-liners, describing the Trump GOP tax proposals with one of his classic bits:

 So how big is the tax break for the wealthy in the new tax bill?

Why it’s so big that raising the deficit by trillions of dollars won’t cover it…

Why it’s so big that raising taxes on the middle class won’t cover it…

Why it’s so big that gutting Medicare, Medicaid, the State Department and other government programs won’t cover it…

That’s right folks, the Republicans have hit the trifecta of inequality. Raising taxes on the middle class, increasing the deficit and gutting important programs that help every American so that the wealthy can get another tax break. Each represents a wealth exchange in which the ultra-rich get richer and someone else gets poorer. Any of these three wealth exchanges would in and of itself injure the economy while creating greater inequality of wealth. Making all three is likely to send the country into a deep recession or a real depression.

The Trump GOP plans are perfectly crafted to offend all democratic principles: The richer the person, the bigger the tax break. The larger the corporation, the bigger the tax break. The more someone’s wealth is in capital such as financial assets and real estate—as opposed to salary—the bigger the tax break.

The GOP says that when you lower taxes, rich folk and corporations invest in creating more jobs and in paying better salaries. That’s not what history says. History tells us that rich folk pocket the money and then invest it in the secondary stock market (meaning it doesn’t help the company whose stock you bought although it helps the senior executives with lots of stock options; the company only benefits from the initial sale of the stock); buy government bonds to fund the deficit that their tax break created; and dump it into other assets like fine art, yachts, apartments in Manhattan and beach front properties. Meanwhile, money will have been taken out of the economy, as all the spending done by laid off government workers, recipients of government aid and the middle class before tax hikes will be gone. Within a few years of passage of either the House or the Senate version of “The Great Heist of 2017,” a new asset bubble will form then burst after which the economy will go into a rapid tailspin. Just like 1929, 1987 and 2008.

The wealthy pay historically low rates on their income in the United States, even after two mild tax increases during the Obama years. In the 1950’s, when the economy mostly boomed and there was less inequality of wealth than at any other time in American history, rich folk paid 91% of incremental income in federal income tax. Remember that means that they only paid 91% on the income over a certain amount, maybe a million dollars, truly a lot of money in those days. With all progressive income tax systems, everyone pays the same amount within income levels. The top rate always applies only to income above that limit. Everyone pays the lowest rate on their income up to that limit.

Studies by Thomas Piketty and others have established that the economy actually grows when we raise taxes on the wealthy—that is, until we raise them too much and it begins really to cut into spending and investment in job growth. And what’s the point when raising taxes on high tax brackets begins to hurt the economy? Piketty computed it to be a taxation rate of 70%, or roughly twice what the current maximum tax on income is.

In other words, instead of decreasing taxes on the wealthy, Congress should be raising them—and then investing the money in the kind of things that we did with our tax money in the 1950’s and 1960’s: pure scientific research, infrastructure improvement (focusing more on mass transit and less on roads and airports this time), public school and university education, energy development (solar and wind instead of nuclear), healthcare and helping the disadvantaged.

Many of the Republicans know that, if passed, their tax bill will sink the economy and increase inequality of wealth in the United States. Most don’t care because they serve as mere factotums to the ultra-wealthy who finance their campaigns and provide them with cushy sinecures after they retire from elected office. Today Republican candidates and elected officials—and many Democrats, too–count dollars not votes and represent a narrow constituency consisting of a handful of selfish multi-billionaires.

FCC enables more media consolidation. The result will be less real news.

By Marc Jampole

We typically blame the decline of the news media in the 21st century on one of two factors: the growth of the Internet as a 24/7 source of news and the proliferation of fake and false news.

But given much less attention is the consolidation of news media and news-gathering operations. It used to be that the federal government had strict regulations about the number of radio and television stations any company could own and forbade ownership of both newspapers and broadcast stations in the same town. Even when single newspapers came to dominate many towns, there were typically many different organizations searching for and presenting the local and national news. A series of laws and new regulations over the past 35 years—aka the Reagan Era—has consolidated media ownership.

The key law was the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which enabled companies to own more stations. Larger companies bought smaller ones and suddenly instead of hundreds of owners of TV and radio stations across the country, there were only dozens.  We saw the impact on radio as Clear Channel, and recently Sinclair Broadcasting, and other companies owned by right-wingers gained control of the editorial policies of more and more stations.  Pretty soon the range of opinion on radio narrowed and moved extremely right. While Rush Limbaugh began making a name for himself before 1996, it was the consolidation of media ownership that led to the domination of talk radio by Rush and his clones—Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Michael Medved, ad nauseum.

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) took a major step in making the problem worse by voting to allow a single company to own both print and broadcast media in the same town. The FCC also voted to increase the number of TV stations one company can own in any given market. It was a close vote, 3-2, on party lines. Don’t be embarrassed if OpEdge is the first you’ve heard of this awful decision. It received very little coverage; the New York Times buried the news on page two of the business section.

The Obama Administration FCC also announced its intentions to end the restriction on ownership of both print and broadcast media in 2011, but eventually backed down. This time, under its brand new Trump-blessed FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, an Obama appointee to the FCC known for his pro-broadcasting industry views, the FCC has made good on the threat.

The rationales today and in 2017 are similar: That local media needs to consolidate to be able to compete against the giants of Facebook and Google. Pai, for example, has argued that local media companies would have a better chance to compete against Internet behemoths by combining local market resources.

The argument is completely specious for two reasons. First of all, most broadcast stations and daily/weekly newspapers are already owned by large chains. It’s not the case that the various media in Cincinnati will join forces to do one great job on local news. Instead, one national giant that also controls Toledo, Ohio, Syracuse, New York and four dozen other localities will end up owning all the media in Cincinnati. The new rule will surely lead to ever greater concentration of media outlets in the hands of fewer companies.

The second problem with Pai’s argument is the confusion of news-gathering with news media. Despite the alarming decrease in the number of daily newspapers over the past few decades, the number of absolute media outlets has increased: Internet news sites, cable news and specialty weekly and monthly pubs have more than made up for the decline in newspapers.

The problem is that while media outlets have increased, news-gathering on both the local and national level has decreased, as recent studies by the Pew Foundation and the FCC . And consolidation of media outlets is a major cause. When a company buys more than one newspaper, it can use the same news-gathering staff for all the news, except for the news that pertains to each newspaper’s particular readership, something most often defined by locality. All the newspapers in the Gannet or Tribune chains get the same national and international news and columnists. But each local paper has to find its own local news, typically in competition with the three or four local TV stations, the local business paper and the local alternative weekly.

Now that a single company is allowed to own all of these local properties, the company will be stronger, but primarily because it is able to cut costs through using the same news room to cover stories. The impact on overall news production will be horrific: Instead or more editorial boards deciding what is newsworthy, one will. Instead of three or more points of view on a story, there will be only one. Instead of three or more sets of reporters trying to dig deeper, only one will—that is, on those stories that the editors and business sides decide is worthy of delving. Instead of three or more sets of opinions on local issues, only one. Finally, instead of three or more organizations with ties to differing networks of national and international news gathering, there will be but one. The result will be less reporting.

Instead of actual reporting, what we’ll see once large media companies start buying up local properties is more of the same filler that has been replacing real news for the past 15 years or so, including more opinion pieces like this blog; more coverage of celebrities and sports; more repackaged how-to’s and advice columns; more part-and-parcel use of news release, fact sheets and “articles” produced by the government, rightwing think tanks, large companies and public relations firms; and more “sponsored” news reports, which are advertisements pretending to be news.

If the FCC and the current administration really cared about freedom of the press and creating a stronger marketplace of ideas, instead of allowing companies to buy more media properties, it would implement regulations and put pressure on Congressional leaders to break up the media industry oligarchy and stop the pilfering of free content that occurs on Facebook and Google News that denies news-producing media outlets needed revenues. Unfortunately, it would take Congressional action to do most of what I’m recommending:

• Limit ownership of media properties to a total of 10 properties, including television and radio stations, newspapers, news magazines, cable networks and websites, and push for expedited divestiture by the current media giants.
• Prohibit companies from owning more than three cable networks, and make all cable networks provide at least two hours of news coverage a day.
• Prohibit companies owning ISPs from also owning media outlets.
• Reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine, which used to make every broadcast television and radio outlet to devote some airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. The Fairness Doctrine was the law of the land from 1949 until 1987, when the Reagan FCC voted to end it.
• Allocate billions of dollars in aid to nonprofit or small for-profit media outlets to produce original reporting and fund it at least partially by taxing social media services and Internet service providers (ISPs) like Spectrum and FIOS for their “free use” of news.
• Legalize strict principles of journalistic ethics and start to prosecute journalists and media company executives for knowingly disseminating fake and false news. I propose to walk a fine line between censorship and responsible reporting. But by focusing exclusively on the reporting of facts and not the spouting of opinions, I think we can protect true freedom of the press.

I am not very optimistic about any of my recommendations being pursued by either a Republican or Democratic administration and Congress. Politicians of both parties have cozy relationships with the mainstream news media and conservative ones seem not to mind that so much in the rightwing media is false or fake news. Thus we face an ironic future in which there are many ways to access the same limited and somewhat flawed set of facts and conjectures about current events, society and government activity.

We like to conceive of history as a steady progress of human ingenuity solving problems and bringing an ever higher standard and quality of life to more and more people. But our 10,000 years of recorded history has seen many eras in which people were far worse off economically than the decades and centuries before, for example, during the 300 year transition from medieval times to the industrial revolution during which the world experienced the “Little Ice Age.”

In the same way, we have not seen steady progress in the spread of knowledge. After the death of Charlemagne, for example, Europe entered a centuries-long epoch in which scientific knowledge and literacy declined and intellectual activity retreated into monasteries.

It seems to me that America is are entering another intellectual dark age, in which people in general will know less, be able to reason less effectively and have less access to the gamut of human knowledge, from science to the arts. It’s not just the consolidation of the media and the decline in the number of news-gathering operations that is driving the drift towards ignorance. The large number of ideologically inclined think tanks churning out false research. The gradual starving of public schools. The increased involvement of for-profit corporations both in operating schools and in supplying material such as learning guides to public and private schools. The blurring of the distinction between the entertainment and news divisions of media companies and between advertising and news. The politicization of text books. The denial of basic scientific facts by one of our two major parties. The continued glorification of celebrity and mocking of intellectual achievement in the mass media. Virtually every trend in the marketplace of ideas is making Americans less educated, less informed and less capable of sifting through assertions and understanding which are reliably factual information and which are sheer nonsense.

Editorial: Resistance Strikes Back

It’s been a long year since Russian Internet trolls and Republican voter suppression tactics combined to deliver the White House to Donald Trump. Voters on Nov. 7 finally got the chance to express their outrage at the trail of lies, mindless tweets and broken promises left by the Grifter in Chief.

It wasn’t much of a surprise that Democrats would win back the governor’s office in New Jersey, after outgoing Gov. Chris Christie (R), who once had presidential ambitions, bottomed out with a 15% approval rating. Being Christie’s lieutenant governor didn’t help Kim Guadagno, as Democrat Phil Murphy won with 55.6% of the vote.

The most widely watched race was in Virginia, where Dems should have expected an advantage since the outgoing governor is a Democrat and Hillary Clinton won the state by 5.3 points in 2016.

But Republican nominee Ed Gillespie adopted Trump campaign themes such as appeals to white supremacism, neo-Confederates, immigrant bashers and climate science deniers and, in the weeks before the election, polls showed Gillespie running neck and neck with Democrat Ralph Northam.

When the votes were counted on Nov. 7, not only did Northam beat Gillespie by nine points, but exit polls showed twice as many voters (34%) said they cast their ballots to express opposition to Trump, as the 17% who voted to express support for Trump.

Women, young people and minority voters provided the margin of victory for Northam. Men were 51% of voters and favored Gillespie by two points, but that’s down from Trump’s nine-point edge among men last year. And women favored Northam by 22 points, up from Clinton’s 17-point advantage last year. Gillespie won white voters by 15 points, but that was down from Trump’s 24-point advantage last year, while black voters, 20% of Virginia’s electorate, went 87% for Northam. The vote was still polarized by geography, as cities and D.C. suburbs supported Northam while almost two-thirds of voters in the mountainous and western parts of the state supported Gillespie.

Democrats also won the two other statewide elections in Virginia — for lieutenant governor and attorney general, and they picked up at least 15 seats in the state House of Delegates, which Republicans had ruled with a 66-34 majority that was now cut down to a one-vote majority, with recounts in three districts that could flip the House to the Dems. Eleven of the Democratic winners were women, including the first Asian American, two Latinas and transgender Danica Roem, who beat the chamber’s self-proclaimed leading homophobe, Bob Marshall, by focusing on better roads in the district.

The downside of the election is that Virginia voted by a margin of nearly nine points for Democrats but still fell short of a legislative majority because of gerrymandered district lines. Democrats will face similar obstacles in trying to turn around Republican majorities in Congress and other state legislatures next year. Democrats need to flip 24 seats now held by Republicans to regain the majority in Congress, but Nick Stephanopoulos, an expert on gerrymandering, told the New York Times Democrats, could get 54% of the national House vote and still see the Republican maintain control.

In the Senate, Republicans have a two-vote majority, and that majority may be reduced if Alabamans decide on Dec. 12 they would rather not send accused child molester Roy Moore to the Senate. (Many evangelical “Christians” say the accusation that Moore molested a 14-year-old girl 38 years ago is no major bar to service if the alternative is a Democrat such as Doug Jones, former federal prosecutor of the KKK.)

Next year, Democrats will be defending 23 Senate seats, along with two independents allied with the Dems, while Republicans have only eight seats up for election. Democrats hope to gain the Arizona seat Jeff Flake is giving up, as well as the Nevada seat Dean Heller holds. Longshots are Ted Cruz’s seat in Texas and the Tennessee seat Bob Corker is giving up, but Dems also have to defend Sens. Bill Nelson in Florida, Joe Donnelly in Indiana, Claire McCaskill in Missouri, Jon Tester in Montana, Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, Joe Manchin in West Virginia and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin.

Unfortunately, the main lesson Republicans probably will draw from the recent election is that voter suppression has not gone far enough. Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach are helming a special presidential task force to develop new methods of keeping Democrats from voting or preventing the counting of their votes.

It’s been frustrating, as editor of The Progressive Populist, to listen to Trump being described as a populist who would protect American workers and “drain the swamps” in Washington. Populists believe that people are more important than corporations, and the government needs to be strong enough to keep corporations in line. Trump has always been a grifter with authoritarian leanings and a history of stiffing contractors, fighting unions and looking out for No. 1. But it’s getting easier to show Trump is a charlatan as he has packed his administration with half a dozen former executives of Goldman Sachs as well as pro-corporate administrators at federal agencies to prevent health and human services, environmental protection, public schools, federal lands and fair labor and housing standards. And Trump on Nov. 13 named Alex Azar, a former pharmaceutical executive who has repeatedly opposed measures to restrain drug company profiteering, to succeed Tom Price as secretary of Health and Human Services.

The Resistance has organized largely on the Internet, with the progressive press helping to identify the targets. The coalition and Dems in Congress have racked up a pretty good record in the first year, knocking down attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, and fighting Trump and the GOP Congress to a virtual standstill on the worst of the bad bills so far. But the billionaires have told their Republican Congresscritters they’d better get a big tax cut or they’ll cut off funding for campaigns, so Republicans came back with a 2018 budget that would cut $1.5 trillion from health care spending, including $1 trillion from Medicare and $473 billion from Medicare, to set up those tax cuts, regardless of Trump’s campaign promises to protect those health programs. And we’ll see what House Speaker Paul Ryan has in store for Social Security.

Plutocrats have been working for more than 80 years to overturn the New Deal’s reforms that regulated capitalism and enabled the recovery from the Great Depression. In the 1980s Ronald Reagan provided the opportunity for the plutocrats, as they broke the unions that provided major backing for the Democrats; the National Labor Relations Board backed the unionbusters; and Reagan’s Federal Communications Commission killed the Fairness Doctrine, which since the end of World War II had required broadcasters to provide balanced coverage of controversial issues of public importance to prevent fascists from rising in the US. The demise of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 allowed conservative broadcasters to consolidate control of the airwaves, with few opportunities for liberal and progressive voices. Now Trump’s FCC is moving to give corporations control of the Internet, and put more toll booths on the information superhighway, while Trump and other right wingers have worked to undermine the credibility of critical news media as “fake news.” Lately he has called for licensing journalists, taking another page from the fascist playbook of the 1930s.

The Grand Oligarch Party will keep coming with bad ideas, the money to promote them in the corporate media and financial backing for politicians who will do their bidding — and they don’t play fair. The Progressive Populist will try to restore the good name of populism. The Resistance will have to keep fighting back by getting the word out whichever way they can. But it was a good first year. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2017

---

Populist.com

Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us

---

Copyright © 2017 The Progressive Populist PO Box 819, Manchaca TX 78652

Selections from the December 1, 2017 issue

COVER/Lucian K. Truscott IV
You don’t cut taxes with two wars and 240,000 troops overseas

EDITORIAL
The Resistance strikes back

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
Young Evangelicals blurring theological lines

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Food for thought: Why not thought for food?

DISPATCHES
McConnell concedes GOP tax plan will increase taxes on many;
GOP tax plan is all unicorns;
Landmine in GOP tax bill would give fetuses personhood;
GOP plan raises tax on graduate students;
Obamacare grows despite Trump’s sabotage;
Maine voters opt for Medicaid expansion;
GOP ready to push Trump judicial choices through;
Dems win with serious, affirmative agenda;
Big Oil loses big in Washington State ...

ART CULLEN
Rural despair

JILL RICHARDSON
Gun control shouldn’t be this hard 

BOB BURNETT
Trump’s tax cut challenge

SAM PIZZIGATI
If you want to collect Social Security, Trump’s tax plan is an outrage

OLIVIA ALPERSTEIN
What real tax reform could look like

RICHARD ESKOW
Dems want to ditch leaders and move left; they’re right

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Forests and trees

BARRY FRIEDMAN
American voices: The Resistance, year one

MARK ANDERSON
Is a groundwater ‘trade deficit’ gurgling under our feet?

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Emergency rooms as Realtors: A micro point of light on the healthcare horizon

SAM URETSKY
It’s never too early to discuss public safety

WAYNE O’LEARY
That Kennedy tax cut

JOHN BUELL
President Trump: Nuclear business as usual?

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Robots create made in the USA jobs

BOOK REVIEW/Seth Sandronsky
Sports safety advocacy

BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Questions before the Resistance

ROB PATTERSON
Royal flush

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
A tale of three Harveys

MOVIES/Ed Rampell
Stars, survivors, relatives, remember Hollywood blacklist’s 70th anniversary

Sexualizing young girls while condemning adult-child relations: Outing Roy Moore highlights historical flip-flop

By Marc Jampole

Society has made an historical flip-flop in two paired values we hold about teenaged girls, especially aged 12-16.

In the old days, there was little wrong with a 32 year old man courting a 14 or 16 year old girl. As a citizen of the 21st century, I personally find it both distasteful and weird, a signal of an immature male adult. But in the old patriarchal days, the age difference didn’t matter that much. As recently as the late 1940’s, my Syrian grandfather—born and weaned in Aleppo—married off my 16 year old aunt to a man in his late twenties.

In those days, however, the sexuality of young girls was deemphasized, especially in middle and upper class families. Their dress was more modest. In some cultures, girls were educated separately or isolated from males of all ages. In some cultures, dates were chaperoned. For the most part, only bad girls manifested their sexuality.

Our attitudes about the normalization of adult-child marriage and the sexualization of young girls have both done a complete 180 over the course of the past century, not a sharp turn, but a slowly accelerating curve. Nowadays, we rightfully frown on sexual and romantic relationships between children and adults. From at least the 1970’s onward, there might exist some relationships between girls under 16 and boys between 18-24, but no gap as wide as 32 and 14, or 32 and 17 for that matter.

Yet American mass media sexualizes young women on a daily basis. No, change that to on a nanosecond-by-nanosecond basis. By the time a girl attains 14, she has been introduced to a wide array of clothes, cosmetics, toys, books, electronic games, advertisements and movies that reduce her and other young girls to sexual objects. Sexualization begins as early as four and five for girls participating in youth beauty pageants. Fulfilling or enhancing your sexual being unleashes a literal cornucopia of needs that products and services can provide, so it is a powerful tool for marketers and advertisers. As our consumer society has advanced, so has the sexualization of women—and men to a lesser extent—of all ages.

Through much of human history, the distinction between childhood and adulthood was not as stark as it has been in the 20th and the 21st century industrialized societies. Many children worked in prior centuries and there were few if any organized groups of or for children. Society in general was much less child-centered than today, for two reasons (if my memory of reading books on the subject has not failed me): Firstly, many children died in childbirth, which hardened people to death and caused them to invest less emotional energy in their children’s lives. Just as important, however, were the more constrained economic circumstances before the industrial revolution and then the great redistribution of wealth downward in the first two-thirds of the 20th century. As people have had more disposable income, they have gradually focused more of their expenditures on their children. A contemporary Thorsten Veblen would say that we are engaging in conspicuous consumption to demonstrate how much we love our children and how well-off we are. Children have joined—and perhaps started to replace—women on the fetishized pedestal of consumerism.

Today’s society has it three-quarters right. There should be a separation between childhood and adulthood. Societies in which children are protected and adults are expected to be responsible and independent corresponds to our developmental needs as primates with a long maturation process for our progeny.

In addition, open attitudes about sex, sexuality and sexual identity lead to healthier individuals and a healthier society. But while our advances towards a society accepting of everyone’s sexuality is positive, the market-driven sexualization of young girls is not. It forces young girls to be overly concerned with their bodies at a time of life when the body is rapidly changing and before their brains have developed enough to address the multiple sophistications of sexual relations in our complex society.

Additionally, we are seeing the lines between childhood and adulthood blurring over the past twenty years. Instead of adulthood being thrust prematurely on adolescence as in pre-industrial times, youth and adolescence have been extended into the twenties and the thirties, as more and more adults retain their entertainments and predilections of childhood. I’ve recited the litany of adult infantilization many times over the past few years, most recently a few weeks back.  Every year, more adults read Harry Potter and other adult fiction, watch movies about super heroes and fantasy worlds or about adult men—and now women—remaining adolescents, wear Halloween costumes to work, collect My Little Ponies and Legos, enjoy cosplay and participate in sleepovers in museums. Every year, more children remain at home or move back to live with their parents, often for economic reasons, but often also a sign of immaturity. All of these and many other cultural phenomena suggest that adults are thinking and acting more like children and that childhood is expanding to engulf part if not all an individual’s adult life.

The most telling sign that American society is becoming infantilized is that enough Americans voted for a 70-year-old infant with a child’s emotions, emotional needs, thought processes and level of education that a majority of Electoral College members could feel free to vote for him. Again, the dictates of consumer capitalism are to blame: it’s easier to convince a child to buy some shiny new, but useless, bauble than it is to convince an adult.

To be sure, our society has advanced to the point that victims feel they can come forward and identify their abusers. Coming forward of course discourages these creeps because they know in their hearts what they are doing is wrong and that, if made public, their actions will ruin their careers. Coming forward also prevents predators from becoming repeat offenders. The fall of Harvey Weinstein, Roy Moore, Kevin Spacey and all the other recently-outed prominent dirtbags gives us hope that we will soon have a society that is both non-sexist and non-sexually exploitive. That it came so soon after the election of an avowed sexual harasser and abuser only shows how much Americans were shaken by the results of the 2016 presidential election. All good.

But at the end of the day, the advances we have made in our mores through creating certain barriers between childhood and adulthood, having a more open society in sexual matters and now openly confronting sexual predators are corrupted and partial offset by our consumer-driven economy of conspicuous consumption that reduces all human experience to the buying of goods and services.

New York Times has split personality: conservative news coverage and liberal editorials

By Marc Jampole

I can’t imagine that the New York Times editorial staff and news department ever talk to each other. They might not even read each other’s work. If they did, the Times might have to split into two publications or engage in a civil war as fiercely fought as the one between the rapidly-industrializing northern states and the traitorous slave-owning south 150 some odd years ago.

The Times editorial staff is reliably left-leaning, taking the Democrat’s side on environmental, immigration, healthcare, foreign policy, taxation, infrastructure, consumer protection, global warming and other key issues. It typically endorses Democratic candidates. The people writing the Times editorials tend to recognize and put a good deal of credence into legitimate research, which drives them further into the arms of left-leaners, since on virtually all issues, the facts speak loudly against rightwing positions.

The news department, however, displays a Republican bias that goes back at least to the 2010 midyear election, if not years earlier. In 2010, remember, the Times covered many Republican primaries but very few Democratic ones; printed exaggerated totals for the Tea Party March on Washington and underplayed the two left-leaning marches that drew about as many people each as the Tea Party did; and totally botched the job of explaining how those currently with health insurance would benefit from the Affordable Care Act.

The Times news staff usually doesn’t lie—that would be against journalistic ethics. Well maybe Judith Miller did stretch the truth in 2003 beyond recognition when she published as facts Bush II propaganda about Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction.

But, really, outside of wartime, the Times reporters don’t lie. They don’t have to. There are so many insidiously hidden ways to support Republicans and their untenable rightwing positions. Some examples:

• Give much more coverage to Republican candidates and primaries than to Democratic ones. It’s happened every election cycle since I started counting in 2010.
• View all issues through the prism of the right’s ideology, like focusing on deficits instead of job creation or the amelioration of suffering during the recent Great Recession. Until quite recently the Times accepted the GOP argument that tax cuts would create jobs; only when it became obvious to everyone that the purpose of the current cuts is to reward wealthy donors has the Times switch gears and focused news coverage on the great inequities that the Trump GOP plan would create or exacerbate.
• Doing positive and sympathetic features on people representing miniscule populations but with rightwing views, like the recent feature on mothers who believe their boys were incorrectly accused of sexual harassment on college campuses or the feature on people who believe that the Affordable Care Act hurt them.
• Focus heavily on rightwing protests, whiles ignoring leftwing protests or trying to normalize or perverting them through isolation. For example, the Times normalized the fact that so many women participated in protests after a serial harasser/molester was awarded a majority of the votes in the Electoral College in 2016 by focusing not on the issues, but on the large number of women mobilized. We can see perversion in the Times joining the rest of the mainstream news media in focusing on the very small number of weird, homeless and incendiary individuals participating in the Occupy occupations, trying to isolate the Occupy movement from the mainstream.
• Keeping in the news controversies that have been decided in favor of the left-center view years, and sometimes decades earlier, as the Times news department did with climate change and the vaccine controversy, and still does with the economic benefit of lowering taxes on the wealthy.
• Cherry-picking the research it publicizes to over-represent studies supporting positions on the right, which often entails misinterpretation of results or publication of bogus research. For example, the Times put a Koch-sponsored George Mason survey of the attitudes of weather personalities regarding global warming on the front page, while completely ignoring a Stanford University study that demonstrated that we could use wind power to supply all the world’s electrical needs with minimal impact on the environment. The Times report on a study of women’s lives a few years ago buried the fact that 62% of all American women now cohabitate without the benefit of marriage sometime in their lives and instead led and featured the meaningless trivia that women who cohabitate may be slightly more likely to get divorced if they later marry. One Times business writer recently explicated Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart’s elaborate theory that a nation’s economic growth stalls when it has too much debt but forgot to mention that Professors R & R made some basic math mistakes which, when corrected, produce numbers disproving their theory.
• Presenting an equal number of experts for both sides of an issue, e.g., quoting two scientists on each side of the global warming issue, when in fact, 95+% of all scientists concur that global warming is occurring and is caused primarily by human activity; or presenting the opinion of a woman who hasn’t vaccinated her children against that of an public health expert.

This weekend, the Times used one its favorite techniques: floating trial balloons for right wing nonsense. These article are always heavy on conjecture and light on facts. They quote unknown sources, accept speculation as the basis for further speculation and make hypothetical conclusions. These articles are often mystery-shrouded incantation of experts, elected officials and organizations considering, debating, analyzing, researching or developing, in other words, a chopped liver of supposition and conjecture.

Over the past few years, the Times has run front-page stories floating the following rightwing ideas: states filing for bankruptcy so they can renegotiate retiree pensions; spending billions updating and expanding our nuclear arsenal; cutting Social Security benefits as part of a plan to reduce the deficit; both Bush II and Obama proposals to increase troops in Iraq on a temporary basis. In some but not all of these examples, the Times is performing its function as “newspaper of record” by floating controversial Administration proposals so that, if met with opposition, the Administration can deny considering them. But in every case, the ideas about which the Times are decidedly rightwing.

This week’s trial balloon is not so much in favor of a rightwing idea and more in support of a discredited rightwing foreign policy apparatus, to wit, Donald Trump’s. The article claims that a team led by soon-to-be-indicted Jared Kushner is putting together a proposal to bring peace to Israel and then Palestinians, one that the Administration thinks has a high degree of success because, as one expert puts it, “the stars are in alignment.” The article details what may or may not be in the proposal, what concessions the Israelis, Palestinians and others may or may not be asked to make, while discussing reasons why all sides may or may not want to or be in a position to accept this as yet undefined “ultimate deal.”

Yes, the Times really uses—and in fact builds the article—the expression “Ultimate deal,” which sounds like standard Donald Trump puffery. It’s the largest, the oldest, the most expensive. The most luxurious, the most powerful, the most intelligent. The best. The ultimate deal.

Oh, and where are we in the process of forming and then getting all parties to accept this ultimate deal? “Mr. Trump’s team has collected “non-papers” exploring various issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and officials said they expected to address…”

In other words, a great big nothing burger.

The purpose of the article, thus is not to propose an obnoxious rightwing policy but to shore up an obnoxious rightwing regime. Even as the Times editorial excoriated Trump for trampling on the Constitution, the front page of the Times news section is puffing up a peace proposal before one even exists to make it look as if the Trump Administration is miraculously solving a problem that has plagued U.S. foreign policy for about 50 years.

Talk about a split personality. That’s Jekyll and Hyde.