A lay sermon on voting against Trump and for Democrats on November 6

By Marc Jampole

In Jewish tradition, the Tree of Life, the name of the synagogue where an anti-Semite with an AR-15 killed 11 worshipers, is the Torah. For example, the final song before closing the synagogue ark after reading from the Torah calls the Torah a “tree of life. The passage goes ”It is a tree of life onto them that lay hold of it, and happy is every one that retaineth it.” (from the 1958 Hebrew Publishing Company edition of the Synagogue Service New Year and Atonement)

The Torah—or the Five Books of Moses or the Pentateuch, as it is also known—records the mythic history of the Jewish people from the birth of the universe through the exodus from Egypt and the wandering in the desert for 40 years before entering the Holy Land. But beyond the narrative, the Tree of Life is a guide for how to live one’s life. Rabbis have identified 613 specific commandments in the five books, most of which have been subject over the centuries to repeated interpretation to bring them up to date to cover situations, technologies and times that have changed dramatically since the original writing of the Torah, about 2,600 years ago. Each time someone follows any one of the 613 commandments, he or she performs a “mitvah,” a good deed. The idea of the Torah as a book of action as much as a book of history is central to all branches of Judaism.

I don’t believe I’m wrong to propose that action in the world—be it prayer, acts of kindness or bravery of making your voice known, dominates the way Jews live in the world, be they Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist or atheist. Moses stresses the importance of acting in the world in his very last speech to the Jewish people, at the end of Deuteronomy. I’m going to give two translations, first the standard one you can find on the internet: “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, so that we may follow all the words of this law.”

Now the slightly more formal translation in the 1962 Jewish Publication Society of America translation: “Concealed acts concern the Lord our God; but with overt acts, it is for us and our children ever to apply all the provisions of this Teaching.”

There’s a double message here. First that our salvation and our objectives on earth can only manifest themselves through action. It doesn’t matter what you say or what you think. You are judged on what you do. It sounds very existential to me, which may explain why so many atheists of Jewish background insist they are good Jews and that there are a number of Synagogues for atheist Jews across the country.

The second message is just as clear: Our actions should depend on the real world—the things that are revealed. This affirmation of science and the application of facts stands in stark opposition to certain other religions that expect us to ignore facts in favor of faith, which, as Emily Dickinson once pointed out, “is a fine invention when gentlemen can see, but microscopes are prudent in an emergency.”

The countdown of the 2018 midterm election has seen so many truly disturbing events that the more religious among us may have come to believe we are living in apocalyptic times. The brutal assassination of Jamal Khashoggi; the wave of pipe bombs sent to public figures whom Donald Trump has constantly demonized in speeches and tweets; the racist murder of two African-Americans outside a supermarket in Kentucky; the dreadful Tree of Life slaughter. Many others probably feel as I do—as if I’m on the ropes of a fight ring and am being hit on the jaw time and again by a heavyweight boxer. That the violent and hateful rhetoric of Donald Trump and the Trumpites running for office has engendered an atmosphere of permission for the crimes and hate speech is hard to dispute. Since the latest mass murder and hate crimes, Trump and his administration have put the pedal to the metal in advocating various forms of racism both directly and using coded language and action. In talking with Pittsburgh Jewish leaders, Trump said that he, like them, likes to negotiate, an anti-Semitic slur. Mike Pence invited a spiritual leader who is a Jew for Jesus to pretend to be a rabbi and give a speech at a memorial ceremony for the Tree of Life dead, a poke in the eye to virtually every Jew. Trump used his authoritarian streak to ratchet up the hate when he asserted that he could overrule the 14th amendment and outlaw birthright citizenship with an executive order. We wake up each morning asking ourselves, what fresh hell will come today?

While the Torah is clear that we shouldn’t wait around for a miracle of faith, but act, its writers could not have anticipated the complex challenges of a post-industrial world in which the ultra-wealthy have made a devil’s pact with racists and the authoritarian right. But I infer a very clear application of the Torah’s message: Vote, and do not vote for liars and those who dispute scientific truth.

Scientific truth, of course includes a belief in global warming and the idea that racial constructs are meaningless. It includes an understanding that immigrants—legal and illegal—raise the wages and employment of everyone and commit fewer crimes than the native born. It recognizes that single-payer universal healthcare leads to lower healthcare costs; that lowering taxes on the wealthy does not create jobs; and that the more guns in a society, the more people are killed and injured by guns. It dismisses outrageous lies like the Saudi arms deal will create a million jobs, the caravan of refugees 900 miles from the border represents a national threat, or the United States is the only country to grant birthright citizenship. It discounts all racial and cultural stereotyping. In other words, to vote for truth requires us to reject Trumpism in its whole and its parts.

For Americans of good faith, be they Jewish or non-Jewish, believers or atheists, that means one thing and one thing only: wherever you are, vote straight line Democratic. I know that no Democrat will align exactly with your positions, but 2018 is one year when must vote by party, not individual, if we are to defeat the evil of Trumpism. Hold your nose and cast your ballot for that imperfect candidate, as long as she/he is a Democrat. The future of our country depends on it.

And you’d be doing a mitzvah.

Editorial: Can Truth Catch the GOP?

Republicans across the country have followed Donald Trump’s lead in lying their butts off about everything from the threat of immigrant invasion to the Republican role in improving the economy. Trump has been a nonpareil in the field of mendacity, making more than 5,000 false or misleading claims as president, as of mid-September, by the Washington Post’s count. He has told as many as 125 lies in one day. Trump has lived in a “post-truth” world since he got into politics, but he stepped up the pace since Labor Day as he campaigned to support Republicans for the mid-term congressional elections. Among his most outrageous lies were claims that, after 10 years of opposition to the Affordable Care Act, the Republicans will help Americans with pre-existing conditions keep health insurance coverage and they will protect Medicare from Democratic efforts to expand the single-payer health coverage.

Trump wrote a column for USA Today Oct. 10 that claimed “Democrats want to outlaw private health care plans, taking away freedom to choose plans while letting anyone cross our border.”

Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post noted that “almost every sentence contained a misleading statement or a falsehood,” including many claims that already had been debunked.

“Medicare-for-All is a complex subject, and serious questions could be raised about the cost and how a transition from today’s health-care system would be financed,” Kessler wrote. “Trump correctly notes that studies have estimated that the program — under the version promoted by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — would cost $32.6 trillion in costs to the federal government over 10 years.”

But if that means Medicare for All Would cost an average of $3.26 trillion per year, the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) estimates that the US already spends nearly $3.5 trillion on health care annually. And that’s with nearly 10% of the population uninsured, and the uninsured portion expected to increase after Republicans last year upended Obamacare’s “individual mandate” and removed subsidies to health insurance companies that kept premiums down.

Under Medicare-for-All, costs in theory would go down for individuals, state governments and others, so overall national health expenditures may not increase and could even decrease.

On paper at least, Sanders’ plan would improve benefits for seniors, not take them away. He would eliminate deductibles and cover dental and vision care and hearing aids, which are not covered under current law. Then, over the course of four years, the eligibility age would be lowered in stages until every American was covered.

Trump claimed he kept his campaign promise to protect patients with pre-existing conditions. In fact, he lobbied the Republican Congress to repeal the ACA, which would have gutted regulations prohibiting insurers from charging more, withholding benefits or denying coverage to people with serious medical conditions.

The ACA repeal failed by one vote in the Senate, but Trump used his executive authority to undermine pre-existing protections in other ways — by reversing regulations that kept cheap, skimpy plans off the insurance market, for example, and by asking the federal courts to deem the existing regulations unconstitutional.

Trump claimed “Democrats have already harmed seniors by slashing Medicare by more than $800 billion over 10 years to pay for Obamacare.”

In fact, the ACA strengthened the near-term outlook of the Medicare Part A trust fund. The law includes a 0.9% payroll tax increase on wages and self-employment income of wealthier Americans — above $250,000 per couple or $200,000 for a single taxpayer. That was estimated to raise an additional $63 billion for the Part A trust fund between 2010 and 2019. The net result was that the “insolvency” date was extended by 12 years.

Far from protecting Medicare, Trump proposed $350 billion in cuts to the Medicare budget — and about $540 billion in Medicare cuts were assumed in the budget plan the House GOP approved. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recently said Congress would need to cut back Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to reduce the federal deficit that has soared since the Republican Congress approved $1.5 trillion in tax breaks for billionaires.

For years, House Republicans, led by Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) have pushed for a significant overhaul of Medicare that would switch the program to “premium support” — or vouchers for retirees to pay for a range of plans offered by insurance companies through a “Medicare exchange.”

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that, under the House Republican Medicare plan, by 2030 the government would pay just 32% of health care costs, less than half of what Medicare currently pays. The other 68% would have to be shouldered by retirees.

Republicans recognize that the protections for pre-existing conditions are very popular and they are now trying to rewrite history on their opposition to the regulations.

US Rep. Martha McSally, Republican nominee for Arizona’s open Senate seat, last year voted for repeal of the ACA, including regulations that blocked insurers from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions. She reportedly stood up in the GOP conference meeting May 4, 2017, and told her colleagues it was time to “get this f***ing thing done!” In an Oct. 16 debate with US Rep. Krysten Sinema, the Democratic nominee, McSally insisted that she voted to protect people with pre-existing conditions, because the GOP replacement bill included some funding for states to help people with pre-existing conditions pay for higher premiums insurance companies would be allowed to charge — and she accused Sinema of lying when she brought up McSally’s ACA repeal vote.

The Republican animosity toward the ACA caused 20 Republican state attorneys general to file a lawsuit trying to eliminate protection for pre-existing conditions. and the Trump administration is declining to oppose the suit — in effect endorsing it. One of the attorneys general suing to dismantle the ACA is Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who is now running for the Senate posing as a defender of Missourians with pre-existing conditions. Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nevada, voted for a similar bill that would have destroyed Obamacare but he’s also misrepresenting himself in his re-election campaign.

And the Republican assault on affordable comprehensive health care continued Oct. 22 when the US Department of Health and Human Services announced new rules that will give state governments more leeway to gain waivers from some of the federal health-care law’s core requirements, giving residents access to cheaper, skimpier plans

The mainstream corporate media must step up its efforts to hold Trump and other Republicans to account for their reckless disregard and even contempt for the truth. But even when a Democrat calls Trump on his lies, pundits make excuses for Trump. That happened when Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., called Trump’s bluff and published results of a DNA test that showed evidence of her Native-American ancestor. As her mother had told her and her siblings, Warren’s grandparents had to elope to get married, because her grandfather’s family didn’t approve of her grandmother’s Native blood. Trump mocks her as “Pocahontas.”

Vote Democratic Nov. 6; or vote early if you can, and get a couple frienda to vote, too. This is no time to complain about “the lesser of two evils.” A Democratic Congress at least can mitigate the damages Lying Donnie would do during the next two years, and they might just save your health care. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2018

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Selections from the November 15, 2018 issue

COVER/Thom Hartmann
Republicans are coming for your Social Security and Medicare

EDITORIAL
Can truth catch the GOP?

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

GENE NICHOL
The Kavanaugh ‘Victory’

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
You want Big Pigs across from your back yard? 

DISPATCHES
Journalist murder apparently won’t sour Trump relations with Saudis.
GOP seeks to weaponize Central American immigrant threat.
GOP’s desperate strategy: Mimic Trump’s fear of immigrants.
Civil rights organizations ramp up election effort to protect voting rights.
Deficit due to GOP wars and tax cuts, not Social Security and Medicare, Dems say.
Trump pullout from arms treaty rankles Russians.
Two-thirds of Americans support legalizing marijuana.
Justice says Trump claim thast Obama had his 'wires tapped' was unfounded.
Global warming causes climate change ... 

JOHN YOUNG
Hear no climate change; speak no climate change; see no climate change

JILL RICHARDSON
Voting matters, but staying engaged matters more

ART CULLEN
Dysfunctional display in Farm Bill standoff

JIM VAN DER POL
Commons vs. Capitalism

JIM GOODMAN
Do Republicans hate all protesters?

LEO GERARD
Americans want a manufacturing overhaul and they want it now

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Is the World Trade Organization unfair to the US?

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Pressing concerns

BOB BURNETT
Global climate change comes home

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Gullible patients, gullible voters: The tale of ketamine

SAM URETSKY
Aging well can be expensive

WAYNE O’LEARY  
America’s conservative judiciary

JOHN BUELL
Democratizing the court — and the entire body politic

ROB PATTERSON
Growing up with Vietnam

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Bringing back the backlash (as if it ever went away)

MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
‘The Oath’ plays totalitarianism for laughs

BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Reckless: Kissinger and the Vietnam War

SETH SANDRONSKY
California union nurses help with Hurricane Michael recovery

Our Middle Eastern policy favors Saudi Arabia over Iran and that makes absolutely no sense

By Marc Jampole

The reaction of Donald Trump and other administration officials to the butchering of U.S. resident and Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabian security staff illuminates the larger absurdity of American foreign policy in the Middle East.

Whether it’s not believing it happened, accepting the Saudis’ several sanitized versions of the brutal assassination, or minimizing the transgression and soft pedaling the reaction to this barbarism, Trump, his factotums and right-wing pundits give two reasons for putting their faith in the Saudi version: the money Saudis pay U.S. companies for arms and the strategic importance of Saudi Arabia in U.S. foreign policy. In the age of fracking, few talk about Saudi oil.

Putting money above morality and a free press merely demonstrates—for what seems like the five hundredth time this year—the amoral corruption of Trumpism. Democrats, mainstream journalists and many government officials across the globe rightly see the depths of depravity in going easy on the Saudis. Perceptive commentators have noted that Trump’s frequent violent language against reporters may have made the Saudis believe that they had “permission” to use torture and murder to silence one of the regime’s strongest critics while issuing a de facto warning to other journalists questioning Saudi actions in Yemen and elsewhere. Strangely, no one has yet compared the dismemberment of Khashoggi—likely initiated while he was still alive—to the ISIS beheadings of a few years back.

But I’ve yet to see any U.S. politician or pundit push back on the assertion that Saudi Arabia holds a strategic importance in U.S. policy. That strategic importance is tied to constraining Iran, the Saudis fierce rival in the region for the hearts and minds of Moslems. Thus what most people, including Democrats, really mean by “strategic importance of Saudi Arabia” is “we’re choosing Saudi Arabia over Iran.” And what a crazy decision that is in so many ways.

Let’s start with past harm to the United States. An ally of the Unites States before the 1979 revolution, Iranian students took 52 Americans hostage a few days after that revolution started. Iran held the 52 Americans for 444 days. Although the hostages were beaten and lived in fear, every single one of them came back alive. Since then, there has been no documented case of any American dying at the hands of the Iranian military or police. It is true that Iran has supported political groups engaged in violence against America and its allies, but giving groups money and arms is far different from pulling the actual trigger. If it wasn’t, we couldn’t justify our support and military sales to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and other countries which have committed atrocities.

Compare the harm inflicted on the United States by Saudi Arabia. It is common knowledge that virtually all of the 9/11 hijackers who killed almost 3,000 Americans were Saudis who received monetary support from other Saudis. Less well-know are the many direct and indirect ties between the 9/11 perpetrators and financers and Saudi government officials.  can now add Jamal Khashoggi to the toll of dead American residents attributable to Saudi Arabia.

Now let’s consider the assets of our friend the Saudis compared with our enemy the Iranians. Saudi Arabia is a desert country of 33 million with lots of oil and no other natural resources. It has no history of democracy and its educational system does not produce graduates with marketable skills. Besides oil, Iran has a wealth of natural resources, an historically strong, Western-looking middle class, and a well-educated population of 81.5 million. Iran held elections with real meaning for decades until a U.S.-supported coup d’état helped to install Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as dictator in 1953; today there are semi-free elections in Iran. Saudi Arabia occasionally has local elections to offices without any power.

While neither country offers the freedoms we are used to in the West, Iran is definitely a more open society than Saudi Arabia. The cultural history of Saudi Arabia—dominated by nomadic tribes and Islam—has little in common with the West, whereas Iran is Persia, whose civilization is one of the foundational precursors of European thought and culture. Persian/Iranian history is rich in important non-religious thinkers and writers. Other than Mohammed the Prophet and his first prominent followers, who has the Arabian Peninsula produced? Look at the Wikipedia articles titled “List of Saudi Arabian Writers” and “List of Persian Writers.” The Arabian list has 37 names; the Persian has 188, including some I recognized as literary masters: Ferdowski, Omar Kayyám, Saadi, Hafez, Leila Kasra, Muhammad Iqbal.

As usual, our foreign policy has no basis in history. Our saber-rattling for years only goaded Iran to invest more in its military and to developing nuclear weapons. Economic sanctions, however, brought Iran to the table and led to the Iran Nuclear Treaty, which the Trump Administration has unfortunately shredded. Theocrats may often have the last word in Iran, but the middle class and business classes put enormous pressure on the elected government and the religious leaders to provide a growing economy. (The Saudis, of course, don’t face that demand since the sheer wealth of the Saudi Princes enables them to put more than half the population on welfare.) So why the heck do we need to arm anybody to counter Iran, when economic threats have worked just fine? Sure, the military arms industry will suffer, but that shouldn’t matter to any government that feels a responsibility to its people and the world. A foreign policy based on bellicosity often leads to war.

But don’t expect the horrific killing of Jamal Khashoggi to change basic U.S. policy. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Prince Muhammad bin Salman, AKA MBS (as in “more BS”) step down as head of government, maybe returning in five or 10 years, maybe forever exiled from political leadership for committing the sin of not covering up his bloody tracks. But the U.S. will continue to consider the Saudis as allies and Iran as a mortal enemy, at least as long as the industrial military complex dominates our political process.

Bad idea of the year, consumer division: Banks now trying to get children hooked on debit cards by enabling parents to use them for giving allowance

By Marc Jampole

If there’s an award for bad idea of the year, non-politics division, the early frontrunner must certainly be giving children their allowance on debit cards. Pushed by banks and app developers, the debit card spares parents the annoying task of getting cash to give the kids for their weekly or monthly allotment or as payment for chores. It also allows them to see all the purchases the kid makes and restrict purchases from certain stores. Many of these new cards attached to apps also give parents the option of designating some of their payments to savings accounts. The past few weeks have seen a very small but persistent media campaign about the paperless allowance, including an article in the New York Times’ “Your Money Advisor” column.

According to the Times’ sympathetic article, financial advocates say that the main benefit of the cards “is that they can prompt parents to talk with their children about money.” Prompt, by the way, means reminds. So even the so-called advocates admit the cards fulfill no real function, since any online calendar or the bugging of the kids for their cash can serve to prompt the parent. Of course, we can’t forget the convenience of not having to stop at the ATM or bank to make sure you have the bucks to pay the little dears. Just load up the cards.

These so-called financial advocates must represent the banks and app companies, because they certainly don’t represent families.

Forget about the fees, which give parents and children less buying power. The prepaid cards deny children the opportunity to learn firsthand what money is and what it can do: With a card, the child is unable to see money accumulate or understand what it means to exchange money for a product or service. With a card, the child doesn’t get the experience—and pleasure—of going to the bank to deposit or withdraw money and seeing principle grow in the passbook or knowing when you see the new deposit appear online the number and denomination of dollars and change it represents. The card thus denies the child the opportunity to use money to learn basic math and financial skills.

Because the child knows or will find out that the parent can use the card to monitor and veto purchases, the child loses the sense of ownership over the money. When the parent designates some of the allowance to savings, it’s not the child saving, it’s the parent. The child is the active saver only when she-he sees the money and makes the decision to put some away. Part of learning how to handle money is to make mistakes with the small amounts children get for their allowance. Parental supervision of how every penny of an allowance is spent is an ultimate form of helicopter parenting, keeping children intellectual slaves to their parents long after they should be stretching out and starting to take responsibility for themselves.

One app company makes cards for children as young as six. Imagine a six-year-old who never gets to convert ones to fives or to count out fifty pennies and stuff them in a paper roll. Moreover, think of the kind of consumer this child will grow into. A consumer who has primarily used debit cards. One who is used to paying fees, and in fact probably grows up not even knowing that his use of the card comes with fees. A consumer whose concept of money is completely abstract. One whose math skills may not translate into a practical understanding of what buying power is and means. In other words, a consumer trained to be a financial rube. Perfect for banks and retailers.

Frankly, I don’t see any use for a debit card, because federal laws free banks to pile on fees. No-fee credit cards I like, but only if you do what I have done since I got my first credit card 48 years ago—pay off the entire balance at the end of every month to avoid incurring any interest or fees. But use of both credit and debit cards should wait until a child has basic math skills and has demonstrated financial responsibility. Most college kids are forced to use credit cards to make purchases at their universities. That’s soon enough to be introduced to this very complicated and fee-ridden way of keeping track of your money.

Editorial: Mean Drunk Justice

There were plenty of reasons to keep Brett Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court, but Charles Grassley wasn’t interested in any of them. Sen. Grassley had one job and that was to get Kavanaugh out of his Judiciary Committee by any means necessary, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would take it from there.

After Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s emotional testimony that Kavanaugh and his friend, both drunk, tried to rape her at a 1982 house party in Bethesda, Md., when she was 15 and Kavanaugh was 17, Kavanaugh came back with explosive and contemptuous denials. He emphasized that he liked beer but had not been a blackout drunk in high school or college, no matter what his best friend wrote of their drunken high school exploits; his college roommate said Kavanaugh was a heavy drinker who became aggressive and belligerent when he was drunk. Kavanaugh certainly came across at the hearing as a potentially mean drunk.

Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., in what passes for Republican moderation, made his support for Kavanaugh conditional on an FBI investigation of the charges. The Republican leadership reluctantly agreed, and referred the case to the White House, which apparently told the FBI to make a few calls, but barred interviews with Ford, the two other women who have openly accused Kavanaugh of sexual abuse, or potentially corroborating witnesses, much less Kavanaugh.

Republican leaders knew a wide-ranging inquiry would be disastrous for Kavanaugh’s chances of confirmation, and his problems telling the truth under oath are documented: He had lied repeatedly to the Judiciary Committee in 2004 and 2006 about using documents stolen from Democrats to prepare judicial nominees when he worked on George W. Bush’s White House staff; he lied about which judicial nominees he worked with; and he lied in denying his role developing Bush-era detention and interrogation policies. And that was before the Sept. 27 hearing where he apparently lied about his drinking and sexual history.

So a whitewash was called for and, sure enough, two days before the deadline, the FBI returned a one-page report shown only to senators sworn to secrecy. Apparently they didn’t find proof Kavanaugh raped the girl and didn’t go into whether he committed perjury. Flake and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, two of three Republicans who claimed to be on the fence, said that was good enough for them. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, jumped off the fence, but Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., running for re-election in a state Trump carried by 42 points, supported Kavanaugh, leaving McConnell two votes to spare.

It was an ugly process throughout. Minority President Trump couldn’t resist the opportunity to mock Dr. Ford at a rally Oct. 2 in Mississippi. He may have been playing to the crowd, but he also distracted attention from the New York Times’ blockbuster report that same day exposing shady business dealings of Trump and his family. Far from being the self-made real estate developer who parlayed a $1 million loan from his father into a multi-billion-dollar business empire, it turned out that father Fred Trump used his children to dodge taxes and Donald received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler — he was a millionaire by age 8 — and continuing to this day.

But the master of distraction carried the day as his cruel mockery of Ford, and the laughter of the Mississippi crowd, overshadowed the Times report in the broadcast news.

So Kavanaugh was picked by a president who won 46% of the popular vote and he was confirmed by senators representing 44% of the population. That’s no way to run a government — much less maintain respect for the Supreme Court’s supposed neutrality.

If Democrats take control of the House, they should hold hearings on the administration’s manipulation of the FBI investigation and the extent to which Kavanaugh lied to the Senate.

If Democrats regain the White House and control Congress after the 2020 elections, they should move to expand the size of the court to offset the two illegitimate justices — Kavanaugh as well as Neil Gorsuch. “Changing that majority would not constitute politicizing the court because conservatives have already done this without apology,” E.J. Dionne wrote in the Washington Post Oct. 7.

A simple act of Congress could increase the number of Supreme Court justices to 11 or more.

“Court packing” will cause Republicans to shriek, but the size of the court was changed seven times during the 19th century and Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937 proposed to increase the court’s size by six justices after a conservative bloc on the Supreme Court overturned many of his New Deal programs during his first term.

FDR’s threat in 1937 got a couple conservatives to back down and the court allowed, among other things, Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act and a federal minimum wage. Roosevelt is said to have failed in his “court-packing scheme,” but he won the war against the “economic royalists” whose excesses brought about the Great Depression.

Eighty years later, the economic royalists returned to power under Lying King Donald and they hope Kavanaugh will be a solid fifth vote to reverse the progressive reforms that helped build the world’s greatest middle class. Republican royalists, with occasional help from conservative Democrats, have been undermining unions, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act and New Deal reforms that regulated the financial industry, even after the reckless use of financial derivatives in the early 2000s nearly brought down banks that were “too big to fail,” requiring a massive bailout.

Too many working-class Americans have been lured to support the Republican royalists by “culture war” issues such as opposition to abortion, gay rights and gun control, which have obscured the damage Republicans have done to their economic interests.

Republican undermining of unions since the Reagan administration has reduced organized labor’s role as a balance to corporate power, at the expense of working people. The threat of strikes forced unionized industries to increase wages and benefits, and it also forced non-union employers to increase their wages to keep unions out of their business. The system made the US the envy of the world in the economic boom after World War II, as the typical worker’s wages increased along with productivity improvements from the late 1940s through the 1960s, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reported. But in the 1970s, that started to change. From 1973 to 2017, net productivity rose 77%, while the hourly pay of typical workers essentially stagnated — increasing only 12.4% (adjusted for inflation). That corresponds with the decline in union bargaining power.

When Trump got a $1.5 trillion tax cut, which heavily favors billionaires and corporations, through Congress in late 2017, Trump promised it would benefit everyday workers. Of course he was lying. The EPI found for the first half of 2018 very little increase in private-sector compensation — and that was mainly because some businesses used bonuses to attract or keep workers in a time of low employment. Overall compensation rose 7 cents per hour in the first six months of 2018 but actual W-2 wages fell 25 cents per hour.

That’s what depending on the good faith of bosses gets you — breaking even, at best, during a time of full employment and an “economic boom” on Wall Street. And Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court to make sure the “free market” is all you can count on.

Vote Blue no matter who. Even Joe Manchin, who might waver, will do on Nov. 6 as long as he votes for a Democratic majority leader and a Democratic Judiciary Committee chairman in January. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2018

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Selections from the November 1, 2018 issue

COVER/Kevin Robillard
Democrats have a shot at winning the Senate — and blocking Trump’s court picks

EDITORIAL
Mean drunk justice

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

DON ROLLINS
College unrest: Why Joe Hill, Mother Jones and Cesar Chavez are smiling

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
You know the type. Do you want him on the court?

DISPATCHES
Kavanaugh fight turns Fox News white supremacist.
Kavanaugh accuser reacts to confirmation.
Prominent conservative says GOP must be destroyed.
GOP mulls Murkowski reprimand.
Dems have narrow edge in key House districts.
Climate report predicts crisis as early as 2040.
Dairy farmers say NAFTA redo won’t solve milk problems.
Postal unions fight privatization. Steel booming but workers fuming.
Steel is booming, but workers are fuming.
No 'States' Rights' fo Trump when California wants open internet.
FCC's 5G vote blasted as handout to carriers.
Trump attacks Dems for immigration billl that does't exist.
Trump says China can pay for pre-existing conditions.
Wait, Judge Kavanaugh told us he would be fair and impartial ...

ART CULLEN
Iowa is a trade casualty

JILL RICHARDSON
We need to talk about masculinity

JOHN YOUNG
The toxic public unraveling of a would-be justice

MARTHA BURK
The mean drunk and the mendacity

BENJAMIN DANGL
Trump’s NAFTA 2.0 is a win for big oil — but a huge loss for workers and the environment

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Brett Kavanaugh does not have proper judicial temperament or neutrality to be a Supreme Court Justice

BOB BURNETT
A tipping point: Kavanaugh and Trump

DALLAS KNAPP
Tax carbon or watch temperature continue to rise

HARD TRUTH/Sally Herrin 
Out of time

FRANK CLEMENTE 
Under cover of Kavanaugh, Republicans passed the huge tax cuts for the wealthy

GEORGE FARADAY
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Time to do more than just protest immigration policies. Comment on a bad new regulation Trump wants to inflict on immigrants

By Marc Jampole

The latest Trump scheme to suppress immigration is to give immigrants a Sophie’s choice—two equally onerous options: either forgo all government benefits or forgo the option of becoming a citizen.

Immigrants must meet many qualifications before they can obtain permanent residency and citizenship. Part of the process is the requirement to undergo what is called the “public charge assessment,” which evaluates, on a case-by-case basis, whether an individual applying for permanent residence is likely to become dependent on the government for public assistance. If an applicant is categorized as a potential “public charge,” immigration services can reject their green card application. The “public charge assessment” has been part of federal immigration law for decades, but up to now has always been narrowly defined. The proposed rule, however, would make the assessment consider many more federal programs than in the past, including, for the first time, health and nutrition programs.

Critics rightly point out that this proposed new regulation will discourage poor people, including virtually all refugees, from crossing the border, and encourage many to return to their country of origin. Critics assume that the regulation won’t affect the wealthy, who don’t need benefits. But that ends up being a miniscule number of immigrants, as most people in all countries are poor or middle class. Much of the middle class in the United States has to take government benefits like subsidized healthcare, disaster relief or unemployment compensation from time to time, so we can imagine that many if not most immigrants will fear having the same experience and therefore face the dilemma of deciding between the security of citizenship or the pressing needs of food, shelter, healthcare, education and disaster relief.

The new regulation will thus negatively affect virtually all immigrants from all countries. To view it as another example of the rich getting special treatment while the poor suffer is to miss the broader problem: that it will lead to far fewer immigrants, which will be disastrous to the American economy. We are already facing labor shortages, which are expected to grow as more baby boomers retire. Caregiving, agricultural, hospitality and construction are just a few of the industries already crying out for new employees.

A heap of current research proves that immigrants—legal and illegal—increase the rate of employment of native-born Americans and also increase the average wages of the native-born. Immigrants also pose less of a crime threat than native-born Americans, since both legal and illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes overall and fewer violent crimes.

In other words, if we stem the flow of immigrants, as the Trump administration intends to do, we shrink the economy and the average wage while increasing the crime rate.

There is still something we can do to prevent this awful new regulation from taking effect. We are in the middle of the comment period on the regulation, a time when anyone—corporations, think tanks and individuals—can publicly comment. By law, the administration must take those comments into account when creating the final rules.

The easiest way to comment is to follow the instructions on a special web page set up by the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), the lobbying arm of the Quakers. Now FCNL is framing the issue primarily as one of rich and poor, and they are absolutely right that the rich will end up having a much easier time to citizenship under this nasty reg. But don’t let that cloud the main point. This regulation will lead to far fewer immigrants at all economic levels, from all countries, which goes against the best interests of every American.

You can also go to a special web page that the pro-immigration nonprofit organization, the Protecting Immigrant Families Campaign, for an easy way to make your comment on the regulation.

The deadline to make comments is October 21, so don’t tarry. Link to FCNL or Protecting Immigrant Families today, follow the instructions, and tell the Trump administration you oppose the reg.

Research shows carbon markets don’t reduce pollution as much as regulation, yet world governments insist of carbon trading to address global warming

By Marc Jampole

The Spring 2018 issue of Jewish Currents had my latest “Left is right” article that uses the latest research to show that the left position on environmental issues is the correct one: that the government has a role in addressing climate change and that the best way to do so is with regulation and not market solutions.

There are no current plans to post the article on the Jewish Currents website, so I thought I would give you a taste of it in hopes that you will buy the issue to read the whole piece, and maybe even start a subscription. Jewish Currents is a leading left-wing journal of politics and the arts.

Here’s the excerpt:

Instead of regulation, conservatives and even some liberals have proposed letting the market fix what the market broke. Their solution is government-administered markets in which an agency gives or sells a set number of permits (or credits) to emit specific quantities of a pollutant over a specific period of time, requiring polluters to hold permits equal to their emissions. Polluters that want to increase their emissions must buy permits from others willing to sell. In this fantasy, polluters who can reduce emissions most cheaply will sell their permits to heavy polluters, achieving the emission reduction at the lowest cost to society. This solution—called “cap and trade”—is embraced by most governments of the world today and many Democrats, including former president Barack Obama.

Tamra Gilbertson and Oscar Reyes, both of the Carbon Trade Watch/Transnational Institute, demonstrate in Carbon Trading: How It Works and Why It Fails that carbon trading markets are ”a multi-billion dollar scheme whose basic premise is that polluters can pay someone else to clean up their mess so they don’t have to.” For one thing, Gilbertson and Reyes argue, the process of setting emission levels is easily tainted by lobbying and politics, resulting in too many permits issued, and major polluters granted additional revenue streams. Moreover, carbon markets do nothing to speed the transition to solar, wind and other alternatives, but merely manage the use of fossil fuels.

As an article of faith, however, right-wingers believe that simple regulation, be it setting efficiency standards for appliances or assessing fines on companies emitting too much greenhouse gas, stifles the freedom to innovate that they fantasize produces more efficient and higher quality solutions. The reality is that companies will “innovate” to meet a regulation just as readily as they innovate to adapt to any market change. The claim that market-based solutions like emissions trading are “less bureaucratic, less centralized, less coercive, and more supportive of innovation than other forms of regulation does not stand up to scrutiny,” write Gilbertson and Reyes.

Recent history serves as some guide here. Starting in the 1990s, both the U.S. and the European Union decided to combat acid rain by reducing the levels of sulfur dioxide in the air. As stipulated by the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, the U.S. established a sulfur dioxide trading scheme, while the European Union instituted a series of strict regulations. Using the cap-and-trade strategy, the U.S. obtained mediocre results, reducing sulfur dioxide emissions by 43.1 percent by the end of 2007. Over the same time span, EU countries reduced emissions by a robust 71%.

Yet nations persist in creating carbon markets. For example, China recently announced it was forming a giant national market to trade credits for the right to emit greenhouse gases; the New York Times noted that the trading plan “is not a sure bet to succeed.”

The conceptual problem with cap-and-trade is that it is a market mechanism meant to fix an inherent flaw in the market: The health and environmental costs of fossil fuel extraction and use are not assessed to the companies involved, but are spread to society. This flaw in the overall market repeats itself in the carbon-trading market because it is inherent in all markets not to consider hidden costs to third parties. Further, the reduction of pollution to the lowest common denominator of money conceals the absolute value of an unpolluted environment not threatened by excessive warming. When we reduce all values and inputs to money, it is easy to neglect the overall objectives of society — e.g., the protection of people, the ending of hunger, the maintenance of a clean, safe, biologically diverse environment. These values are better expressed and pursued through regulations and mandates established by a democratic government than by the “logic” of the marketplace.

When Conservatives say regulation kills jobs, they are ignoring a pile of research that says otherwise

By Marc Jampole

The Spring 2018 issue of Jewish Currents had my latest “Left is right” article that uses the latest research to show that the left position on environmental issues is the correct one: that the government has a role in addressing climate change and that the best way to do so is with regulation and not market solutions.

There are no current plans to post the article on the Jewish Currents website so I thought I would give you a taste of it in hopes that you will buy the issue to read the whole piece, and maybe even start a subscription. Jewish Currents is a leading left-wing journal of politics and the arts.

Here’s the excerpt:

It is too early to say with 100% ironclad confidence that government intervention can work to address the damage of climate change. But once we accept the premise that it does — as do virtually all governmental and economic experts around the globe except conservatives in the United States —  it is easy to demonstrate that government solution such as regulations and mandates can effectively address a changing climate, while market-based solutions are bound to fail.

The case against government regulation to control and reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases or promote the development and use of alternative energy is built on the myth that every additional government regulation leads to a reduction in jobs and hurts the economy. An overwhelming amount of evidence shows that regulation has little, if any, impact on the number of jobs in the economy in either direction. The best start for reviewing the research on the impact of regulation is Does Regulation Kill Jobs, a collection of 14 articles by a total of 23 leading economic and governmental researchers. In the introductory chapter, the editors conclude that the number of jobs lost through enhanced regulation virtually always will equal the number of jobs gained because of the regulation. They also compare the impact of regulation on jobs in cleaner, less regulated parts of the country with that in dirtier, more regulated areas; these studies indicate relatively few job losses without even taking intoaccount job creation that the regulation produces elsewhere..

As Wayne Gray (Clark University) and Ronald J. Shadbegian (Georgetown University, now at the Environmental Protection Administration) detail in another chapter, the overall effect of pollution abatement on employment is very small: a 10 percent increase in overall abatement costs typically leads to a loss of roughly thirty jobs in industries averaging 40,000 employees. Moreover, they report, the cost to buy, install and maintain pollution-abatement equipment is quite small, measuring about 0.4 percent of all manufacturing shipments (which is far from the entire economy). Coglianese and Carrigan conclude: “The empirical evidence actually provides little reason to expect that U.S. economic woes can be solved by reforming the regulatory process.”

Having failed to prove that regulations remove jobs from the economy — and in fact fully demonstrating that the number of jobs gained through regulation equals the number lost —many economists are now busy trying to quantify the loss in lifetime earnings, self-esteem and other factors that negatively affect those who do lose their jobs.

There can be no doubt that those who lose their jobs because a dirty plant closes down or a toxic material is no longer permitted will suffer, and that there are political costs to that suffering (see: Wisconsin’s, Pennsylvania’s, and Ohio’s swing for Trump in the 2016 election). For every worker who suffers, however, another gains a job in inspection, compliance, or the development and manufacturing of non-polluting technologies. It comes out about even, unless the new jobs pay less, or the newly unemployed receive a lower level of unemployment compensation and other government aid. That’s not a problem with regulation, but reflects critical flaw in America’s advanced free-market economy: a low minimum wage, great inequality in income and wealth, a diminished labor union movement, and the decades-long shredding of the social safety net.

These analyses of jobs lost and gained exclude many substantial benefits of governmental action to address climate change. For that, we can turn to the White House Office of Management and Budget reports to Congress on the benefits and costs of federal regulations.

The agency’s 2016 report, for example, provides a stunning justification for environmental regulation: In the previous ten-year period, thirty-seven EPA regulations produced between $176 billion and $678 billion of benefits (in 2014 dollars) while costing between $43billion and $51billion. That means for every dollar spent on conforming to EPA regulations, the country benefited anywhere from $3.45 to $15.70. Conservatives are ignoring the evidence when they repeat time and time again that environmental regulation hurts the economy and reduces jobs.