Selections from the April 15, 2017 issue

COVER/Sophia A. McClennen
Beware the Trump brain rot

EDITORIAL
Time to expand Medicare

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
Dakota pipeline just another Trump deal

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Guns and politics don’t mix

DISPATCHES
Trump sets pace on lies, FBI probes Russian ties;
Trump budget hurts his voters;
Trump budget devastates rural communities;
Repubs seek to bridge impasse on health plan;
White House installs political minders at key agencies;
Trump plan to zero out public broadcasting would hurt 'Trump Country';
Economy grows as CO2 emissions drop, mocking Trump climate policy;
GOP senator thinks EPA cuts will keep agency from 'brainwashing our kids';
Faith leaders aren't happy with Trump budget;
Longtime cop detained by CBP ...

BOB BURNETT
Indivisible: Social action startup 

JILL RICHARDSON
The press is essential, whether presidents like it or not

JOHN YOUNG
From the mind of Steve Bannon? No, Mel Brooks

NORMAN SOLOMON
Let’s give the CIA the credit it deserves

ROSIE SORENSON
Crikey! Trump grabs attention of British Parliament

MAX B. SAWICKY
Hands off Medicaid!

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Proposed: A health-to-income ratio

SAM URETSKY
Regulation isn’t what threatens economy

BOOKS/Seth Sandronsky
Community empowerment

WAYNE O’LEARY
Welcome to conservative health reform

JOHN BUELL
Enemy of your enemy is not your friend: Russia, CIA, and American Democracy 

ROB PATTERSON
The power of fame

MOVIES/Ed Rampell
‘Hidden Figures,’ ‘Moonlight’ and ‘Neruda’ all top 2016 Progie Film Award winners
and more ...

Beware Trump Distractions

Donald Trump was supposed to be basking in the good reviews of his speech to the joint session of Congress on Feb. 28, which included a dozen false or misleading statements (see Dispatches), but he impressed many commentators by sticking to the script better then he has in the past.

However, continuing questions about Russia’s involvement on Trump’s behalf before the election keeps roiling the administration. Before Trump’s big speech, Michael Flynn was forced to step down as his national security adviser when it became clear that Flynn had lied about talking to the Russian ambassador after the election to undermine President Obama’s sanctions on Russia. Then, the day after the speech, Trump’s choice for attorney general, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, chairman of the Trump campaign’s National Security Advisory Committee, who had denied during his Senate confirmation hearing that he had talked to Russians before the election, was forced to recuse himself from the investigation of Russian interference in the election because, it turned out, he actually had talked to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the Republican National Convention in July, and again in his Senate office in September. Sessions still insists he did nothing wrong.

Trump has had success in using the con-man’s trick of misdirection to distract the public from damaging news, as he creates his own alternative reality.

Still, Trump’s bizarre pre-dawn tweets on March 4 accusing then-President Obama of ordering Trump’s phones tapped before the election had many observers scratching their heads. Trump produced no evidence of such a wiretap; he apparently was relying on claims made by right-wing radio talker Mark Levin and Breitbart.com that Obama and his administration used “police state” tactics last fall to monitor the Trump team. Obama’s spokesmen categorically denied that the president had ordered the wiretap, which he could not do on his own, nor did he seek a court order for such a wiretap, as the law would require.

If anything, Trump’s tweets reinforced reports that the FBI in October had obtained a court order authorizing a wiretap of Trump campaign officials, which would have required the investigators to convince a judge there was evidence of illegal activity by the Trump campaign -- if not Trump individually.

Despite the widespread doubt cast on Trump’s claims, he was pleased March 5 that his allegations against Obama were the dominant story in the Sunday newspapers, instead of the Sessions story, the Washington Post reported. Trump was angered later in the day as few Republicans were defending him on the Sunday talk shows.

“The president knows the media cannot ignore him when he says something so inflammatory, and he believes there will be no real consequences for him if it turns out that everything he said was nonsense. After all, there haven’t been up until now,” James Hohmann wrote for the Post.

“Moreover, Trump’s core supporters also got a new talking point. Whenever they’re confronted with the links between Trump associates and Russia, millions of people are now going to reply that the real story is Obama’s wiretapping — even if that claim is shown definitively to have no basis in reality.”

Trump had some success with his controversial executive order on Jan. 27 that effectively barred people from seven Muslim-majority nations and all refugees from entering the US, even if they had visas or “green cards.” A Morning Consult/Politico poll in early February found 55% approval of the travel ban, though other polls showed majorities opposing the ban, but most polls show an overwhelming majority of Trump’s Republican base supports him, many of whom say he is following through on his campaign promises.

After federal courts, including the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Feb. 9, blocked enforcement of the travel ban, Trump privately signed a new ban on March 6 that imposes a 90-day ban on the issuance of new visas for citizens of six majority-Muslim nations (letting Iraq citizens in this time). He is also suspending the admission of refugees for at least 120 days and set a cap on 50,000 refugees in a year, down from the 110,000 cap set by the Obama administration. But the order remains a thinly veiled Muslim ban — and it still doesn’t target nations whose citizens participated in the 9/11 attacks.

There is less support for Trump’s order that immigration agents start rounding up undocumented immigrants. A CBS News Poll Feb. 23 found that a majority think not enough is being done to ensure that foreigners who enter the US from other countries are not a risk to security, but 60% think that undocumented immigrants currently living in the US should be allowed to stay and apply for citizenship, while 23% would require them to leave the US. Only 43% of Republicans support deporting all illegal immigrants, but that likely comprises Trump’s base.

A more equitable solution to the immigration problem would be to go after the businesses that employ undocumented people — particularly those who then don’t deduct or pay their share of payroll taxes for the undocumented.

Meanwhile, David Johnson of Campaign for America’s Future noted, the pro-corporate and anti-worker agenda unfolds:

The new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, scrapped a crucial greenhouse gas rule requiring oil and gas companies to report methane pollution, which was part of the Paris climate deal, which Trump wants to scrap. Trump’s budget proposes to pay for a $54 billion increase in military spending with deep cuts to other agencies. A proposed 25% cut to the EPA budget would dramatically cut climate-change programs and those designed to prevent air and water pollution as well as lead contamination.

Trump’s budget would slash the EPA program that pays for Great Lakes pollution cleanup by 97%, from $300 million to $10 million. Trump is reportedly proposing cuts of 90% for programs to restore the Chesapeake Bay, the Puget Sound and San Francisco Bay. Grants to states for lead cleanup would be cut by 30%, to $9.8 mln, Reuters reported. Spending for enforcement of environmental protections would be cut 11% to $153 million..

The Trump administration also proposes a 17% cut in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which would require steep cuts to research funding and satellite programs.

The proposed cuts to NOAA, the nation’s premier climate science agency, would eliminate funding for a variety of smaller programs, including external research, coastal management, estuary reserves and “coastal resilience,” which seeks to bolster the ability of coastal areas to withstand major storms and rising seas.

Trump’s FCC chairman plans to undo “net neutrality,” which will help four giant companies consolidate control of the Internet. By undoing the rules that create a level playing field online, Trump’s FCC will empower companies like Comcast to decide who gets Internet access, and at what price. This could have an impact on people’s ability to organize online.

Republicans have introduced the National Right-to-Work Act in Congress. This would defund labor unions by removing requirements that workers benefitting from union contracts pay dues to cover the union’s costs of negotiating, administering and meeting the union’s obligations under the contract.

Populist activists also have reservations about Trump’s commitment to negotiate trade deals that protect worker rights and the environment. “Trump promised to ‘drain the swamp,’ but right now, he seems poised to allow the same corporate leaches that created NAFTA and subsequent pacts to rewrite the new ones,” said Arthur Stamoulis, executive director of Citizens Trade Campaign.

So look beyond the tweets and Trump’s alt-reality to the rest of the damage the Grifter in Chief is planning for America. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2017

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Populist.com

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Selections from the April 1, 2017 issue

COVER/Amanda Marcotte
West Texas says no to wall

EDITORIAL
Beware Trump distractions

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DAVE ZWEIFEL
Wisconsin’s image has turned upside down

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Homeschoolers want fed check, no balance

DISPATCHES
‘Trumpcare’ plan would leave millions uninsured;
Trump’s way: always attack, attack, never apologize;
Recess actions spur health care accountability;
Trump’s disregard for truth;
Trump tosses more than 90 regs ...

DON ROLLINS
Putin’s aggression ringing alarm bells 

OLIVIA ALPERSTEIN
It’s only my health

JOHN YOUNG
The big faker and his big date with big data

MARK ANDERSON
The border game

JOHN KIRIAKOU
CBP demands ID to get off domestic flight

MAX B. SAWICKY
Is Trump a Populist? 

BOB BURNETT
Coping with Trump stress disorder

SAM PIZZIGATI
Policing America’s plutocracy

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Lunchtime for the president

SAM URETSKY
Billions for defense, not one cent for arts

ROSIE SORENSON
That’s a fact, Jack

WAYNE O’LEARY
Labor loses its way

JOHN BUELL
Trump and his corporate media accomplices 

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Oh Canada! Get off our back!

BOOKS/Seth Sandronsky
Cooperators then and now

TERRY STULCE
The cowardly states of America

ROB PATTERSON
Bob Dylan finally gets some recognition

MOVIES/Ed Rampell
Life of a Salesman: Is this the enemy?

and more ...

If election proves country not ready for woman prez, we’re lucky to get Trump instead of someone on same page as Ryan & McConnell

By Marc Jampole

I had the strangest dream last night.  

I was sitting on a bench against the wall in a large ballroom filled with people dressed in formal wear. I was watching the glitterati and listening to the band play swing music when Donald Trump sits down beside me, shakes my hand and starts to brag about what a great job he is doing to make the country safe. He stands erect, looking strong and in control in his blue silk suit, power red tie, large gold cufflinks and spit-polished black wing-tips. He’s friendly and self-assured. His eyes cast the kind of look people give to those with whom they have reached a complete understanding. 

I start to rip him a new one. I tell him the country is already safe and that he is threatening the economy with his immigration policy, his threat of tariffs, his meddling in the Affordable Care Act and his desire to lower taxes on the wealthy.  

Trumpty-Dumpty looks shocked and embarrassed that someone disagrees with him. He winces at every fact I cite as if they were darts piercing his flesh. He tries to respond to me after I spout that all crime, violent crime, and terrorist acts have declined, but he can only manage to sputter weakly the words “carnage” and “Chicago,” then falls silent. His body, once projecting power, seems to soften and sink into itself. 

I’m reciting a list of studies that prove public schools outperform private ones when suddenly he jumps on my lap and starts to cry. He bawls like a toddler, furiously kicking out his hands and feet, now suddenly short and stubby, and shaking his head. He turns to me, his lower lip protruding like a pregnant abdomen, his cheeks wet with running tears.  

That’s when I wake up.  

That’s the dream, exactly as I experienced it.  

The background to my nocturnal encounter with a Trumpian incubus was an epiphany I had earlier in the evening: that the country might be lucky that Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote. Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Mario Rubio or any other Republican would have been worse, because unlike Trump, all are vocal supporters of cutting back Social Security and Medicare benefits and all would have been happy to throw people off healthcare insurance or give them significantly worse coverage. Trump has said he is against cutting Social Security and Medicare and that his healthcare plan will give universal coverage at lower costs. Moreover, we already see that Trump’s unprofessional and chaotic style of leadership impedes legislative action. I imagine that Cruz or Bush would have taken a much more organized approach. 

Trump has done many terrible things, to be sure, and is promising more. But other than immigration, we can be fairly certain that other Republicans would have done much of the same. Dismantling environmental and financial regulations, denying rights to transgender people, stopping investigations of police misconduct, building up the military, cutting social welfare programs—all the Republicans wanted these things. The difference is they were competently knowledgeable about how to get things done in government. They also seemed sane and therefore commanded more intellectual respect.  

The premise upon which I build my (completely facetious) case that Trump may be a blessing in disguise is that the United States is not ready for a female president and that any Republican—the oily Cruz, the mealy Bush, the self-righteous Kasich, the dim-witted Rubio—would have beat Hillary Clinton by virtue of the fact that they are men and she is a women. It’s a dismaying and horrifying thought—that so many men and women would refuse to vote for a woman, or would hold a woman to a much higher standard of conduct and achievement than they would a man. But how else to explain how someone with Hillary Clinton’s track record, beliefs, record of ethical conduct and obvious skills could lose in the Electoral College to an ignorant, inexperienced, erratic, racist, misogynistic and self-centered buffoon? 

Large numbers of people voted against their best interest. They voted for their worst instincts. They voted for lies. All, so they could vote for a man. 

Very depressing. 

I think I’ll go back to sleep and verbally slap The Donald around a bit.                                                                                                                  

Want to improve your children’s chance of academic success? Research says send them to public schools

By Marc Jampole

I’m not sure whether it was the author or the headline writer, but someone in the New York Times produced a headline that certainly constitutes false news: “Dismal Results from Vouchers Surprise Researchers.” The problem with it is that those researchers who have been paying attention already know that public policy driving families to put their children into private schools will achieve dismal results. Objective researchers in the pursuit of knowledge aren’t, or shouldn’t be surprised that kids using vouchers to attend private schools experience declines in academic performance. Perhaps Kevin Carey, who wrote the article, or the unknown specialist who composed the headline, meant to say that it surprised right-wing policy wonks and political pundits, who for the better part of a quarter of a century have been pushing vouchers, charter and private schools as a means to destroy teachers’ unions and produce new income streams for businesses. 

Certainly Carey, who directs the education policy program for the ostensibly non-partisan think tank New America, must have read The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools, a 2013 study by Sarah Theule Lubienski and Christopher A. Lubienski that demonstrates without a doubt that public schools outperform private schools when we correct raw data to account for wealth, per student spending, disabilities and other factors. I wouldn’t expect the Times headline writer to know of this important book, as a Google search at the time it came but revealed just one review in the mainstream media. The media doesn’t like to review books that disprove the current political nonsense, whatever it is.   

Using two recently generated large-scale national databases, the Lubienskis show that demographic factors such as wealth and disabilities explain any advantage seen in private school performance in the 21st century. Private schools have higher scores not because they are better at educating children but because their students come mostly from wealthy backgrounds. After correcting for demographics, the Lubienskis demonstrate conclusively that gains in student achievement at public schools are great and greater than those made at private ones. The Lubienskis take on the critics of real educational reform, the politicians and other factotums of the rich who don’t want to do anything that requires greater spending on students, such as teacher certification programs and curriculum and instruction advances. The Lubienskis show that these reforms do work.  

The latest research reported by Carey in his Times article concerns the results on standardized tests of students who have used voucher programs to enroll in private schools. Vouchers, which right-wingers and Republicans have been pushing for years, give money earmarked for public education to families, which they pay to private schools to educate their children. The never-proved principle underlying vouchers, first proposed by right-wing economic mountebank Milton Friedman, is that giving parents choice will improve public education by forcing it to compete with other schools.  

Over the past few years, Republican legislatures have implemented widespread voucher programs in a number of states such as Indiana, Louisiana and Ohio. As Carey reports, vouchers have largely failed to improve school performance, and in fact, have harmed the performance of many children:

·         Indiana children who transferred to private schools using vouchers “experienced significant losses in achievement” in math and saw no improvement in reading.

·         Children, primarily poor and black, who used vouchers to switch to private schools in Louisiana, achieved negative results in both reading and math; elementary school children who started at the 50th percentile in math and then transferred via voucher to a private school dropped to 26th percentile in one year.

·         A study financed by the right-wing, anti-union Walton family and conducted by a conservative think tank found that Ohio students using vouchers to attend private schools fared much worse when compared to their peers in public school, especially in math.

·         It turns out that the best charter schools, another variation on school choice liked by the right wing, are those that are nonprofit public schools open to everyone and accountable to public authorities. The more “private” a charter school, the worse its student perform. 

There could be many explanations for the lousy performance voucher students in private schools achieved compared to public schools, but I think it comes down to the simple fact that the teachers tend to be more experienced, more educated and more professional in public schools. Why is that? Because they are better paid.  

In the real world, the best get paid the most. The best lawyers tend to make the most money. The best accountants tend to make the most money. The best writers—business and entertainment—tend to make the most money. The best musicians tend to make the most money. Forget the obscene fact that Beyoncé makes about 200 times what the concertmaster for the New York Philharmonic and the masterful jazz pianist Orrin Evans do. They both do quite well when compared to the average piano teacher who gives lessons at the Jewish Community Center or YMCA.  

Public school teachers make more money than private school teachers. Doesn’t it make sense that they would therefore do a better job and that public schools would therefore do better in quantitative comparisons?  I know that there are some very competent and dedicated private school teachers, but in general, how could the aggregate of private school teachers keep up with public school teachers, who make so much more money? 

The reason that public school teachers make more money is one of the primary reasons right-wingers want to dismantle public schools: unions. Right-wingers hate unions because they force employers to pay better wages to employees, leaving less profit for the company’s owners and operators. In unionized workplaces, employees make a far larger share of the pie than in nonunionized ones. Thus by leaving public schools and going into private ones, children leave an environment in which their teachers are highly paid but administrators make less than they would in the private sector for an environment in which teachers are paid less and administrators more, and if the school is for-profit, money is siphoned off as profit for investors. By definition, less money is spent on education in private schools.  That is, unless the tuition is so high that the voucher covers only a small part of it, in which case the voucher is merely a subsidy to the wealthy, who likely would have sent their children to the chichi expensive private school no matter what. 

The reason companies bust unions is greed. Greed also plays a major role in the insistence against all facts and reasoning that school choice will solve every educational challenge. Choice is the preferred answer because it doesn’t involve spending more money and raising taxes.  In fact, over time, vouchers can be used to cut educational budgets if the stipulated voucher amounts do not keep up with inflation.  

Despite the fact that taxes on the wealthy are still at an historic low for a western industrial democracy, rich folk and their political and policy factotums do not want to raise the taxes needed to create an educational system that works for everyone. Here are some of the things that we could do with added tax revenues earmarked to public education:

·         Smaller classroom sizes for elementary and middle school children.

·         Computers for every student in every class.

·         A return to the days of art, music and other enrichment programs.

·         New textbooks that reflect the latest findings in science and social science.

·         More special programs for both the disabled and the gifted and talented.

·         True school choice, which involves vocational programs in the technology, hospitality and healthcare industries for high school students. 

Keeping their taxes low and busting unions are not the only reasons well-heeled ultra conservatives advocate for vouchers. Some, like our current Secretary of Education, hope to profit by investing in for-profit schools. Others, and again Secretary DeVos is among them, want to use public funds to finance the teaching of religion in private religious schools. Perhaps not ironically, moral education of the masses and suppression of unions seem always to go hand-in-hand since the industrial revolution of the 19th century. In this sense, religion is a form of social control and a social solvent that dissolves the perception of class differences. 

Thus, when you hear Trumpty-Dumpty, DeVos and other supporters of voucher programs for education spout their pious homilies, remember that they have absolutely no interest in providing our children with a high-quality education that prepares for a meaningful life and rewarding career. Nor are they dedicated to a higher principle they call freedom that trumps all other concerns in a free society. Remember, there are all kinds of freedoms, such as freedom from hunger, from ignorance, from illness, from pain. Be it education or healthcare, when they cry freedom, they only mean freedom of choice or freedom to make money unencumbered by social concerns. 

No, it’s neither an interest in America’s children nor dedication to principle that motivates the rich folk behind the school choice movement. It’s simple greed.

Editorial: Trump: Evil or Incompetent?

Supporters of Donald Trump object to comparisons of the so-called President of the United States with Adolph Hitler, but Trump does appear to have taken a page or two from Hitler’s playbook as he seeks to exert power and undermine the press’s role as a check on his demagoguery. Trump’s frequent dismissal of the mainstream press as “fake news” and the new charge, “enemy of the American people,” is reminiscent of the Nazi Party’s use of “Lügenpresse” (lying press) to defame the anti-Hitler press in Germany in the 1930s, claiming they were opposing the “will of the people” — and some Trump supporters actually shouted “Lügenpresse” at the journalists traveling with Trump during the campaign in October.

In an article for the Los Angeles Review of Books (Feb. 5), Hitler biographer Ron Rosenbaum, who wrote Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil, said that during the campaign he declined requests to draw comparison’s between Hitler and Trump. “While Trump’s crusade had at times been malign, as had his vociferous supporters, he and they did not seem bent on genocide,” Rosenbaum wrote, but after the election things changed. “Now Trump and his minions are in the driver’s seat, attempting to pose as respectable participants in American politics, when their views come out of a playbook written in German.” The playbook, he noted, is Mein Kampf, and “Hitler’s method was to lie until he got what he wanted, by which point it was too late.”

“There is, of course, no comparison with Trump in terms of scale,” Rosenbaum wrote. “His biggest policy decisions so far have been to name reprehensible figures to various cabinet posts and to enact dreadful executive orders. But this, too, is a form of destruction. While marchers and the courts have put up a fight after the Muslim ban, each new act, each new lie, accepted by default, seems less outrageous. Let’s call it what it is: defining mendacity down.”

We hope we’re not alarmist in comparing Trump to Hitler. Maybe Benito Mussolini is a better model for Trump’s ambitions.

There also is the argument that his administration isn’t competent enough to work the levers of power. Trump recklessly imposed a ban on entry into the United States of travelers from seven predominantly Muslim nations, including those who had visas or held green cards as permanent residents of the US, without consulting professionals at the departments of State, Homeland Security or Justice. He fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates after she said she wouldn’t defend the travel ban because she was not convinced it was lawful. (Trump got someone else to handle the appeal, but the 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals panel apparently agreed with Yates.)

Then Trump let retired Gen. Michael Flynn remain as national security adviser for two weeks after acting AG Yates had warned the White House that Flynn had misled Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the US. Flynn apparently was recorded discussing with the ambassador the lifting of sanctions against Russia, while Flynn was still a private citizen, which would be a violation of federal law. Trump only took action to oust Flynn after reports of the FBI’s investigation of Flynn were leaked to the Washington Post — and Trump and other White House officials later blamed the leakers more than Flynn.

Trump’s performance at his 77-minute press conference on Feb. 16 was remarkable for his hostility to the press as well as what has been his reckless disregard, if not outright contempt, for the truth.

The Grifter in Chief wants his supporters to believe they can’t trust anything they read in mainstream newspapers or TV, but reputable newspapers and TV news programs admit their errors. Trump rarely acknowledges his misstatements, even after they are pointed out. And there are plenty. Of 370 Trump statements examined by PolitiFact, the independent fact checker run by the Tampa Bay Times , it found that only 4% were true and 12% were mostly true, while 50% were rated either “false (33%) or “Pants on Fire” lies (17%). Trump was the biggest liar among presidential candidates from either party in the past election cycle.

Trump claimed that a new Rasmussen poll showed his approval rating at 55% and going up, but other polls show Trump with significantly lower approval ratings, such as Gallup (40%) and Pew Research Center (39%). “Trump’s overall job approval is much lower than those of prior presidents in their first weeks in office,” Pew said. “Nearly half (46%) strongly disapprove of his job performance, while 29% strongly approve.”

Trump dismissed those findings, tweeting, “Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election. Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting.”

So the good news is that less than 40% of Americans may be falling for Trump’s con. The bad news is that 26.7% of eligible voters can swing an election, as happened on Nov. 8, because only 60.2% of the voting-eligible population actually cast a ballot. And Trump supporters appear to be happy with his job performance so far, as a CNN/ORC poll released Feb. 7 showed 90% support among Republicans. The same poll showed his job approval was 44% overall, and 53% of the general public disapproved of the way Trump is handling his job.

Trump isn’t helped by gaffes such as occurred during a Feb. 18 rally in Melbourne, Fla. when he referred to a supposed tragedy in Sweden. “We’ve got to keep our country safe,” he told his supporters. “You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?”

Swedes were baffled. Nothing particularly bad happened on Feb. 17 and there were no terrorist attacks in the recent past. “Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking? Questions abound,” Carl Bildt, a former prime minister and foreign minister, wrote on Twitter.

On Sunday, Feb. 19, Trump offered his own clarification, writing on Twitter, “My statement as to what’s happening in Sweden was in reference to a story that was broadcast on @FoxNews concerning immigrants & Sweden.”

In that story, Fox News host Tucker Carlson interviewed Ami Horowitz, a filmmaker who asserts that migrants in Sweden have been associated with a crime wave. “Sweden had its first terrorist Islamic attack not that long ago, so they’re now getting a taste of what we’ve been seeing across Europe already,” Horowitz said.

It was not clear what Horowitz was referring to, but the New York Times noted that in 2010, a suicide bomber struck central Stockholm, injuring two people. The bomber was an Iraqi-born Swede who had developed an affinity for Al Qaeda. But that attack occurred long before the current wave of migrants to Sweden.

Part of the problem may be that Trump doesn’t like to read or sit still for intelligence briefings; he reportedly gets most of his information from watching cable TV news, particularly Fox News and Morning Joe on MSNBC. So he is one of those Fox News viewers who are more likely to be misinformed about public policy issues than other news consumers, as several studies have found.

In the most recent such study, in May 2012, Farleigh Dickinson University, in its PublicMind survey of 1,185 nationwide respondents, found that someone who watched only Fox News would be less informed on domestic issues than all other news consumers, including those who didn’t watch any news broadcasts. On international questions, Fox News viewers were also least informed, behind MSNBC and people who didn’t watch broadcast news.

But Trump apparently still trusts Fox News more than the Central Intelligence Agency. Maybe he’s modeling Rufus T. Firefly.

Democrats and Republican congressional leaders should set up an independent commission to find out what communications occurred between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, the extent of Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether Trump’s financial dealings in Russia and other nations amount to a conflict of interest. Republicans who don’t stand up to Trump now will end up handcuffed to him in the next election. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2017

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

Selections from the March 15, 2017 issue

COVER/Joseph Erbentraut
Farmers rethink support for Trump

EDITORIAL
Trump: evil or incompetent?

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

DONALD ROLLINS
Medicare ‘reform’ versus Populist tradition

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Profits in prison

DISPATCHES
California weighs single-payer health bill;
Trump truth found wanting at Florida rally;
Newt’s time bomb claims Obama’s regs;
Reality setting in on Obamacare;
Trump’s first-month travel expenses cost more than Obama’s annual costs ...

JILL RICHARDSON
American Hellscape

JOHN YOUNG
Subpoena Trump; Put him under oath

SARAH ANDERSON
To save Main Street, tax Wall Street

KENT PATERSON
Mexico’s stormy winter of 2017

RICHARD ESKOW
Steve Mnuchin is no Joe Kennedy and he’s unfit for his new gig

HAL CROWTHER
An inoperable tumor

BOB BURNETT
Trump’s immigration policy leads to war

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Deflecting the Trumpercar

SAM URETSKY
Does intelligence have a future?

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Is Judge Neil Gorsuch a closet liberal?

WAYNE O’LEARY
Jingoism as foreign policy

JOHN BUELL
Courts and Constitution as saviors? 

SETH SANDRONSKY
Rethinking infrastructure

ROSIE SORENSON
That’s a fact, Jack

ROB PATTERSON
Police stories

MOVIES/Ed Rampell
‘Do not resist’: the post-9/11 iron heel of the state

and more ...

At emotional heart of transgender bathroom issue is dignity versus anger. In Trump’s world, anger wins out

By Marc Jampole

The latest Trump-GOP assault on human and civil rights has arrived: the rollback of Obama administration rules that have allowed transgendered students to use the schools’ public bathrooms of the sex with which they identify. 

Legal arguments on the issue seem always to reduce to the question of whose rights are more important—the transgendered person’s right to use the bathroom of choice or the rights of those offended to they think that a person of another sex might be in the bathroom with them. I was originally on the wrong side of this issue, believing that  bathroom use should follow the genitals. A close gay friend of mine pointed out the danger to transgenders who want to appear in public looking like the sex with which they identify and thus risk a beat-down if they use a bathroom that corresponded to the sex on their birth certificate.  Moreover, when we consider that all pertinent female business is conducted in stalls and that a transgender with female genitals would have to use a stall in a men’s room, we realize that the harm caused to others is imaginary in all senses of the word, whereas the harm suffered potentially by all transgendered people is very real.  

Making the trangendered use the bathroom of the sex on their birth certificates thrusts on them a decision between four terrible choices, all informed by rejection and fear: 1) Appear in public as what you are and do not use the bathroom, no matter how badly you have to go; 2) Appear in public as what you are, use the bathroom and risk harm; 3) Appear in public “in hiding” by dressing like the sex on your birth certificate; 4) Don’t go out in public. By contrast, no such terrible decision is thrust upon those who object to the transgendered using the bathroom of the sex with which they identify. First of all, it is extremely unlikely they will encounter a transgendered individual, since so few exist. Secondly, if they do encounter one wherever the location, they won’t know the person is transgendered for certain, even if they suspect or think they know. For the most part, the offended party has to be consciously looking to be offended and consciously inferring something offensive. 

A “who’s harmed” analysis thus falls heavily on the side of protecting the rights of the transgendered. 

At the heart of the transgender bathroom issue, however, is the basic meaning of human dignity in our society. The dictionary meaning of dignity is the quality of being worth something, of being honored and esteemed. In other words, dignity is intricately tied to society and to interactions between people. Dignity is the feeling we have that others respect us as free and individual, consider our feelings, think we are law-abiding, are not laughing at us and do not think we have committed a social mistake. 

All dignity, in the bathroom and elsewhere, is mostly a social construct. In some societies, people have no problem doing their business in the open in front of others. And even in our society, we have a sliding scale of what we’ll do and who we’ll do it in front of. Things that are okay in front of a sibling or lover might not be okay in front of strangers. What’s okay at age five may be taboo at age 15.  We may temporarily suspend our definition of bathroom dignity when in the armed forces or on a camping trip. Lyndon Johnson sat on the can with the door open talking to aides as a sign of his power over others.   

As a society, Americans put a price tag on bathroom dignity when we decided not to make public bathrooms a series of small water closets or a big room with a number of completely closed off stalls. These private rooms would enable public facilities to become unisex.  In both Spain and the Netherlands, I found that the stalls in public bathrooms were almost everywhere individual rooms with real locks and even door knobs; and when they were mere stalls, the walls and doors extended from floor to ceiling.  Even in the one or two public bathrooms in which there was space at the top or the bottom of stalls, it was never more than an inch or so. And in both countries, the toilets were always well stocked and clean—even in bus and train stations. Spanish and Dutch societies display respect for the individual reflected in the privacy they give everyone to do what is a very private action for most people. Contrast with America, where high school students in many public urban high schools today have to sit on the porcelain throne in a low-walled, doorless stall. 

In America, we would rather cut corners, save a little money and provide less private public bathroom facilities. If Americans valued dignity in the bathroom as much as the Spanish and Dutch do, the challenge of accommodating the bathroom needs of the transgendered in public places wouldn’t exist.  

A failure to value individual human dignity results in placing the hypothetical rights of those offended by the thought of seeing a transgendered person in the bathroom over the real rights of the transgendered, who will certainly lose dignity by looking like a woman in the men’s room, or like a man in the women’s room. They may also lose a pound of flesh or a few teeth, as well. Safety issues aside, a thirst for dignity is at the heart of the desire of the transgendered to use the bathroom of the sex with which they identify.

By contrast, the emotional component of being offended by a transgendered person in the bathroom is anger, which may be caused by a variety of factors: because the transgendered person is different, because the viewer’s religious sensitivities have been offended, perhaps as a reaction to her-his own confused sexual feelings that contradict what her-his role models say is morally right.   

Thus, by not allowing the transgendered to use the bathroom they want to use, the Trump administration has said it values the anger of some over the dignity of others, which is par for the course for Trumpty-Dumpty. It’s worth noting that lots of thinkers have proposed the idea that if one group is denied dignity or the concepts associated with dignity by a society, everyone in effect is denied it. No one has ever said that about being denied the right to be angry, although the right to express anger in legal, nonviolent ways is protected under the First Amendment. It’s in the nature of a free society to favor the rights of those who offend more those who take offense. 

Let’s speak truth to power. Those who want to overturn the Obama transgender rule are doing so for religious or moral reasons. They want to impose their religious value system on the rest of the country. At heart, they oppose all forms of sexuality except heterosexual relations, and those should preferably be between a man and woman who are married to each other. If they can’t outlaw the transgendered, they want to chase them into dark corners, not only so they won’t have to see them, but also to make the lives of the transgendered harder than they already are.  Moreover, opposition to transgender rights serves as wedge for a slew of other prejudices - against gay marriage, other LGBTQ rights, abortion, birth control. 

Trump’s war on immigrants comes home. Guess what? It’s part of a larger war on our economy & values

The other day I was at a friend’s house when her housekeeper Kelly (not her real name) announced that my friend would probably never see her again. It turns out Kelly is an undocumented worker from a Caribbean country, something my friend never knew since she contracted with a cleaning service, which she assumed handled employment procedures and policies.  

Kelly is leaving America now before she is captured in a routine Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) round-up and deported. Her reasoning is impeccable: If she leaves now, she can take her possessions. If she waits until she is picked up, she will likely lose everything not in her immediate possession. The fact that all three of her children in her home country now have good middle class jobs and she has a grandchild back home helped to tip the scales in favor of leaving America.  

Kelly is one frightened lady. She quickly reeled off ICE raids she has heard have occurred recently: at the Atlantic Avenue subway station, a major transportation hub in Brooklyn; in Brighton Beach, home of many Russian immigrants; throughout Queens, which is the most ethnically diverse place in the galaxy. She rattled off location after location where immigrants tend to congregate that have been felt the wrath of the ICEmen and ICEwomen coming. 

Kelly wasn’t reacting to the raids per se, but to the increased publicity about the raids. My encounter with her came before Trump’s Draconian executive order greatly expanded the categories of undocumented immigrants who would be priorities for deportation. The statistics show that Trump’s ICE is not picking up or deporting undocumented individuals with any greater frequency than Obama’s ICE did. Of course, one of the dirty little secrets of the Obama Administration was the zeal with which his Department of Homeland Security rounded up and deported the undocumented. Kelly, who has never been in trouble with the law anywhere for anything, is reacting not to statistics, or even to her own experiences. Her fears primarily are a response to Donald Trump’s troglodytic chest-thumping and ugly threats. And she is not alone. As the news media have reported, immigrant communities across the country are feeling an overwhelming anxiety over raids and deportation, greater than what they have ever felt before.    

We ended up having a lengthy conversation with Kelly. Besides cleaning houses for the service, she also has independent clients, which makes her, as she put, “an entrepreneur.” She certainly displayed many traits of successful entrepreneurs like practicality and a certain business cunning. It also turns out that Kelly is well-versed in current events and seems to know more about immigration trends, the economy and the constitution than the blowhard who won the vote in the Electoral College in the last presidential election. A talented person who is a great asset to her clients and to the overall community. America is a lesser nation without her. 

According to all studies, America will be a lesser nation without the millions of people Trump wants to deport.   For example, about seven years ago, a study by economist Giovanni Peri for the Federal Reserve Bank (THE FED) of San Francisco found that when immigration increases, the wages of the average U.S. worker increases a little and that the productivity of the entire economy improves. More recently, Peri and another economist, Andri Chassamboulli, have found that deporting undocumented immigrants decreases employment and would lower the wages of native born Americans, while legalization of the undocumented would increase both employment and wages for American citizens. In other words, sending the undocumented home, as the Trump Administration wants to do, hurts the overall economy and all workers. 

Most of the upper middle and solidly middle class people who supported Hillary Clinton (who we should never forget was one of the most qualified presidential candidates in American history and defeated Trump by almost three million votes in the popular election) have expressed sincere empathy with immigrants, Muslims, poor women, those without college diplomas and others who seemed the likeliest victims of Trumpian and Republican wrath, greed and stupidity. Many of those who are well off without being rich have acted on that empathy by attending demonstrations, writing Congressmen and donating to organizations fighting Trump’s policies or helping its victims.  

I think for the most part, though, those of the upper middle and solidly middle part of the wealth spectrum thought they wouldn’t be hurt by a Trump Administration, especially once the stock market started to soar. They have jobs, healthcare, money in the bank, and ancestors who came from Europe. I think many have felt a little guilt over the fact that they would probably continue to thrive under Trump’s America. I have no studies on this issue, but see a lot of evidence of it on social media. 

But there’s no reason for those who are well off but not rich to feel guilty, because the big hurt Trump and the GOP are planning for America will affect everyone but the very rich. As more immigrants—legal and otherwise—return or are returned to their native countries, the economy will shrink. Business and individuals will find it harder to fill the jobs that immigrants tend to take because native born Americans don’t want them—housekeepers, dishwashers, taxi drivers, short-term laborers, farm workers. Meanwhile, the Republican plan to “fix” the Affordable Care Act will end up raising the cost of health insurance for everyone, even those few people who did not benefit from its implementation. Dismantling pollution regulations will also raise healthcare costs for everyone, as more people will get sick. Wait. There’s more! If Trump gets his way and tariffs on imported goods rise, everyone will end up paying a lot more money for everything they buy. Everything. Lowering taxes on the wealthy will not create any more jobs in the private sector, if the history of western capitalism since before the 19th century holds true, but will reduce government jobs as programs shrink to pay for the additional tax cuts. Lower taxes on the wealthy will soon enough create another bubble in the stock market and/or other assets, as rich folk search desperately for places to park all the extra money they have. History again tell us what will happen. The bubble will burst. Billionaires may lose a couple of hundred million. Those in the upper middle class may lose their retirement savings. The economy will be savaged, putting millions of people who aren’t independently wealthy out of work all along the income spectrum. 

There’s a whole mess of pain coming for everyone but the ultra-wealthy. 

 

Not first time GOP illegal deal with foreign government has helped it win a presidency. Nixon & Reagan did it.

If the past serves as any predictor, the Senate will not impeach Trump for the large number of contacts his factotums had with Russian intelligence officials before the election, even if we discover that Trump struck a deal to have Russian hackers help him win the election. 

No matter that such a deal would be treasonous and clearly against the law. No matter that such a deal would offend our sense of fair play. No matter that such a deal would go against the best interests of the United States. 

It’s par for the course for Republican candidates to ask foreign powers to intervene in American presidential elections. It’s what Nixon did in 1968, when he persuaded the South Vietnamese government not to come to the negotiating table in Paris until after the election. In one of the closest elections in history, it’s clear that Nixon’s Democratic opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, would have won if his boss, Lyndon Johnson, had been able to declare that peace talks had begun. Nixon promised the South Vietnamese government that if it refused to negotiate until after the election he would get it a better deal. What he gave us instead was seven more years of war, illegal bombing and the ultimate abandonment of his South Vietnamese partners. 

Asking a foreign power to fix an election is also what Ronald Reagan did in 1980. It is well documented that Reagan representatives and the Iranian government struck a deal to postpone release of the American hostages that Iranian radicals took a year earlier. If the Iranians had released the hostages in October, there is no doubt that the surge of positive feeling sit would have sent through the electorate would have turned the election in President Carter’s favor. But Reagan offered the Iranian government something it desperately wanted: guns to battle Iraq.  So Reagan made an illegal bargain to sell weapons to a country that at the time was officially an enemy. And what did it do with the money? It used it to support the Contras, a rightwing ragtag guerilla force trying to overthrow the democratically elected government of Nicaragua. Like Nixon, Reagan piled illegality on top of illegality by helping the Contras despite the fact that Congress had voted specifically to ban U.S. military aid them. 

During both the Nixon and the Reagan Administration, plenty of people inside and outside of government knew about these treacheries. There were hearings on what became known as Iran-Contragate, but Reagan got a pass, as everything was blamed on subordinates and the Washington establishment pretended that Reagan knew nothing about supplying the Contras. Nixon was and remains untouched by his treasonous negotiations that went against what the American government was trying to do and what the American people wanted it to do. In retrospect, undermining the negotiations and policy of the sitting American government seems like a worse offense than the third-rate Watergate burglary, especially since both involved cover-up operations. 

Thus it would be a major break in precedence for a Republican Congress to attempt to dismiss Trump from office for committing treason while a candidate. There may be a Congressional investigation or two about Trump’s pre-election dealings with the Russian government. Other, lesser heads may roll. But while treason is a cause for impeachment, treason while a candidate evidently is not.

 

 

Editorial: Trump’s Bait and Switch

Scared stupid is no way to run a democracy, but it seems to work for Donald Trump.

In his first two weeks in power, the Grifter in Chief appealed to the fear and ignorance of his supporters in renewing his insistence that a wall (or maybe a big fence) will be built on the Southern border, and that Mexico somehow will be forced to pay for it, but if it’s financed with a tariff, or “border tax” on Mexican goods, American consumers would end up paying for the wall. And his arbitrary ban on travel to the US from seven predominantly Muslim countries where Islamic terrorists are known to operate, even if travelers have valid visas or green cards after a rigorous review by the State and Homeland Security departments, has the practical effect of banning Muslim refugees as well as ordinary visitors from nations where the Trump Organization doesn’t have properties, even though nobody from those seven nations have attacked Americans in the United States, while citizens of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon were responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and citizens of those nations are still welcome here.

Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency under Bill Clinton and director of the Central Intelligence Agency under George W. Bush, wrote in the Washington Post Feb. 5 that Trump’s executive order on immigration, which apparently was drawn up without consulting professionals at the State and Homeland Securities departments, “was ill-conceived, poorly implemented and ill-explained. To be fair, it would have been hard to explain since it was not the product of intelligence and security professionals demanding change, but rather policy, political and ideological personalities close to the president fulfilling a campaign promise to deal with a threat they had overhyped.”

Trump’s travel ban also handed radical islamic groups, such as al Qaeda and Islamic State, a propaganda windfall as they have sought to depict the US as waging war against Islam.

Trump hasn’t been doing much better in talks with US allies. On Jan. 27, in what White House officials later said was a joke, Trump told President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico that he would deploy US troops to Mexico if the Mexican government failed to control “bad hombres down there.”

Then, in a Feb. 1 telephone call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Trump boasted about his election victory, then complained about a deal Turnbull reached with then-President Obama to take 1,200 refugees Australia has been holding, many from Iraq and Iran. Trump accused Turnbull of sending us the “next Boston bombers.” Then he hung up on Turnbull after only 25 minutes of what was supposed to be an hourlong conversation.

Trump’s foreign-policy debacles have perhaps distracted from his abandonment of his promise to clean up Wall Street. Instead, he’s appointed a half-dozen current and former executives from Goldman Sachs to White House posts after he repeatedly attacked Hillary Clinton’s ties to the investment bank during the campaign.

But after meeting with Wall Street executives on Feb. 3, Trump shed his populist pose he had when he signed a directive calling on the Labor Department to reconsider its new “fiduciary rule,” which requires financial advisers to act in their clients’ best interests, instead of steering them into investments in which the advisers have a financial interest. He also issued an executive order designed to weaken the Dodd-Frank financial reform, enacted in 2010 in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

“Both moves are very much in line with the priorities of congressional Republicans and, of course, the financial industry,” Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times Feb. 6. “For both groups really, really hate financial regulation, especially when it helps protect families against sharp practice.”

Krugman noted that the Obama administration in 2015 concluded that “conflicted investment advice” has been reducing the return on retirement savings by around one percentage point, costing ordinary Americans around $17 billion each year, with that money going largely into the pockets of various financial-industry players. “And now we have a White House trying to ensure that this game goes on.”

On Dodd-Frank, Krugman noted, Republicans would like to repeal the whole law, but probably don’t have the votes. “What they can do is try to cripple enforcement, especially by undermining the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose goal is to protect ordinary families from financial scams.”

The bureau was established over Republican opposition and it is designed to deal with problems that afflict consumers in good times and bad. And it has increased transparency, reduced fees, and exposed fraud, such as the Wells Fargo scandal, in which the bank was found to have signed up millions of customers for accounts, credit cards and services without their consent or knowledge.

Gary Cohn, the Goldman Sachs banker appointed to head Trump’s National Economic Council, says the fiduciary rule is like “putting only healthy food on the menu” and denying people the right to eat unhealthy food if they want it.

Trump says the financial reforms hurt credit availability. “I have so many people, friends of mine that had nice businesses, they can’t borrow money,” he said, without elaborating. “It would be interesting to learn what these ‘nice businesses’ are, Krugman noted, as bank lending has been “quite robust” since Dodd-Frank was enacted, but “US banks have generally shunned Trump’s own businesses — from which, by the way, he hasn’t separated himself at all — perhaps because of his history of defaults.”

‘Pro-Lifers’ Need to Expand Life

Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch, a right-wing appeals court judge, to the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court is widely considered a payback to conservative Christians dedicated to outlawing abortion.

Democratic senators should stand united to stop Republicans from completing their theft of the vacant seat on the high court, which has been open for a year while Republicans refused to consider Obama’s moderate nominee, Merrick Garland. If Republicans follow through on their threat to elimate the Senate filibuster rule to seat Gorsuch, then the filibuster doesn’t mean much anyway.

Republicans would have been sitting on Hillary Clinton’s nominee for the Supreme Court if Catholics hadn’t ended up voting 52% for Trump, a swing of five points from 2012.

That swing in Catholic support away from Clinton may be attributed to Trump’s promise to nominate a Supreme Court justice who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the court decision that legalized abortion in 1973. But single-issue Christian voters who oppose abortion need to answer for electing Republican lawmakers whose only “pro-life” nod is to force women to bear unwanted children, but GOP skinflints don’t want the state to help those children after they’re born as they cut funding for birth control, food, housing, education and medical assistance for the working poor to pay for tax breaks for the rich.

The same goes for Republican governors, like Greg Abbott of Texas, who claims to be “pro-life” but blocked the federally-funded expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act that would have provided health care for a million working poor Texans. A study by researchers from Harvard Medical School, published in January 2014, estimated between 1,840 and 3,035 Texans would die needlessly every year the state denied the medical care — the highest death toll among 25 states who were resisting implementation of “Obamacare” at that time. The study anticipated up to 17,104 unnecessary deaths annually in those states. Today, 19 states still refuse Medicaid expansion. People who consider themselves “pro-life” should work to moderate Republicans in Congress on life after birth. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2017

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Selections from the March 1, 2017 issue

COVER/Nomi Prins
Goldman Sachs conquers Washington

EDITORIAL
Trump’s bait & switch; ‘Pro-lifers’ need to expand life

WILL DURST
Partying like it’s 1939

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

SAM PIZZIGATI
America’s construction carnage

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
We need more like Kathy Ozer

DISPATCHES
Kellyanne Conway's explanation for ‘Bowling Green Massacre’ also a lie;
Trump baselessly accuses media of covering up terrorist attacks;
Trump’s Treasury pick says his bank didn’t robo-sign, court papers say it did;
Trump quickly changed his mind on drug prices, expect the same on Obamacare;
Obamacare sees 9.2M signups;
Pro-life goes both ways;
Cable news channels hike ad rates for shows Trump watches;
Obama era ends with152M at work increase of 9M;
S.D. declares 'state of emergency' to reject ethics reform initiative;
Hawaii Republican leader ousted for rebuking Trump;
Trump's new FCC chief could have big effect on Internet.

JILL RICHARDSON
Ruling by chaos

ART CULLEN
How do you unravel what NAFTA has bound?

JOHN YOUNG
The impermanence of Trump the temp

MATT ROTHSCHILD
10 good omens since Trump’s inauguration

DON ROLLINS
Debtors’ prisons, then and now

GARY LEGUM
Profiles in cowardice

JOHN L. MICEK
Trump’s ban a win for ISIS

CHUCK COLLINS
Trump’s first test on taxes

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Who put the ‘con’ in Conway?

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Alas Pollyanna!

SAM URETSKY
High IQ no guarantee of performance

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Aberration and culmination

WAYNE O’LEARY
Donald in trade land

JOHN BUELL
Resisting Trump; building alternatives

MARK ANDERSON
Globalizers fret over collapse of Trans-Pacific Partnership

J.S. DECKER
Hundreds charged with felony rioting in inauguration protests

ROB PATTERSON
Thanks for the laughs in Trumpland

MOVIES/Ed Rampell
2016’s best progressive films and filmmakers

SETH SANDRONSKY
An America first energy policy? 

and more ...

Times gives torture advocate John Yoo another chance to rehabilitate himself by blaming Trump for doing worse

In its continuing attempt to characterize as illegal the Trump Administration’s ban on immigrants and refugees from seven Muslim countries, the New York Times has either allowed itself to be manipulated by a long-time supporter of torture or doesn’t really mean when its editors frequently write that the Times thinks torture is illegal.

How else to explain why the Times published an opinion piece by torture advocate John Yoo?
Yoo, as some will remember, was the Bush II lawyer who wrote the infamous Justice Department memo that said, among other things, that:

• Waterboarding is not torture
• Torture does not begin until injury to a vital organ
• If the President of the United States orders it, it isn’t torture
• The President is not bound by any international agreements regarding torture.

In his article titled “Executive Power Run Amok,” Yoo goes over some of the actions Trump has already taken that Yoo believes are unconstitutional, such as the orders to build a wall, pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement , fire acting attorney general Sally Yates and halt immigration from selected countries.

The American Enterprise Institute scholar begins his article by stating the obvious: that he is a strong defender of the power of the executive. He explicitly states that he feels himself the heir of Alexander Hamilton in advocating the “unitary executive,” which essentially means that the Constitution grants the president all powers not expressly given to other branches of the government. Using himself to demonstrate how truly unique Trump’s power grab has been, he writes, “But even I have grave concerns about Mr. Trump’s uses of presidential power.”

Yoo, and the Times, are both saying that even this extreme advocate of presidential power thinks Trump has overstepped the bounds of presidential power.

But the power Yoo gave the president was to approve something illegal and immoral, and that’s the problem. By presenting Yoo as yet another expert in presidential power who says Trump is acting against the constitution, the Times gives de facto approval to Yoo and the actions he advocated. Here is the key statement in Yoo’s latest attempt at rehabilitating himself by being a mainstream expert on Constitutional law:

“As an official in the Justice Department, I followed in Hamilton’s footsteps, advising that President George W. Bush could take vigorous, perhaps extreme, measures to protect the nation after the Sept. 11 attacks, including invading Afghanistan, opening the Guantánamo detention center and conducting military trials and enhanced interrogation of terrorist leaders. Likewise, I supported President Barack Obama when he drew on this source of constitutional power for drone attacks and foreign electronic surveillance.”

 

Note all the deception in this paragraph: Like others in the Bush II, he refers to torture as “enhanced interrogation.” He equates torture with invading Iraq and opening a detention center as “extreme” measures taken to protect the country. He calls Gitmo a “detention center,” which kind of misses the point that torture occurred there. He connects his advice that torturing is okay to constitutionally questionable actions Obama took.

All these things are okay, Yoo proclaims, but not what Trump is doing. By accepting Yoo’s premise that action A and B were okay but actions C and D are not, the New York Times accepts Yoo’s assertion that torture is legal if the president orders it.  Yoo did not write, “What I recommended was illegal and so are Trump’s actions.” No, what he is saying is he may have taken it to the extreme, but he remained within the lines, whereas Trump has crossed over into illegality.

This article is not the first time since the revelation of Yoo’s central role in justifying the establishment of a torture gulag that the Times has given him a chance to enhance his reputation by appearing as an expert in its pages. Why does a supposedly liberal newspaper continue to participate in the rehabilitation of this intellectually bankrupt individual? Are the Times editors that stupid that they don’t see they are being used? I know politics makes strange bedfellows, but rightwing, centrist and leftwing scholars, pundits and politicians are falling over themselves to distance themselves from Trump’s obnoxiously racist and stupidly counterproductive immigration ban. Couldn’t the editors find someone else for their daily “Trump is a dangerous ignoramus” guest column?