Why some left-leaners like charter schools & why they shouldn’t. It comes down to confusing Alinsky & Friedman

By MARC JAMPOLE

Whenever I contemplate the fact that many leftists and left-leaning centrists believe charter schools are a good idea, I am reminded of Reinhold Niebuhr’s premise in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness that it is not the evil children of darkness who cause most of the world’s problems, but foolish, misguided or uneducated children of light, i.e., well-intentioned good people.

Make no mistake about it, from day one the charter school movement has been a darling of contemporary children of darkness, very wealthy families seeking to lower their taxes or make more money by privatizing public schools and the right-wing ideologues who support them. People like the DeVoses, the Princes, the Anschutzes, the Bradleys, the Kochs. I think you get the idea—the selfish ultra wealthy, as dark a group of people as the average leftist or lean-leaner could imagine. These are the people who originally funded the charter school idea, set up think tanks and grass roots associations to campaign for charter school funding and got public relations agencies to make sure the mainstream news media thought this failed idea was more successful than it actually was. These people know in their greedy little hearts that the charter school idea is the big right-wing lie in education policy discussions, similar to the big lies in other important policy areas, such as climate change denial, intelligent design, voter fraud claims, abstinence only training, budget deficit panics and the idea that lowering taxes on the wealthy stimulates the economy. All are discounted ideas of America’s children of darkness that persist and, in the case of charter schools are thriving, in practice and public discussion.

One reason more charter schools are popping up around the country despite their widespread failures and scandals is because of support from well-intended children of light, including a good number of left-leaning centrists and leftists, such as President Obama, Hillary and President Bill, Andrew Cuomo, Howard Dean and Marian Wright Edelman. A survey by Stanford’s Hoover Institute found that 58% of Democrats liked charter schools in 2016.

The advocacy of charter schools by left-leaning politicians can’t be because of charter school performance, since studies show that the students in more than 70% of all charter schools across the country perform at lower or the same level as the students in the competing public school, 31% performing worse. Many of the approximately 29% of charter schools whose students manage to do better than those in their public school alternative have fixed the game. They discourage kids with disabilities from applying or weed out students who are less successful; for example, one Arizona charter school that U.S. News & World Report placed in the top 10 of all high schools across the country starts with 125 students in sixth grade but has a mere 21 in the graduating class. The administration presumably weeded out low performers, who then returned to their traditional public school, artificially raising the performance of the charter school and lowering the performance of the traditional public school. Improvement at a mere 29% of schools, up from a miniscule 17% in 2009, makes charter schools a failure. Only ideologues who prefer to create their own reality would continue a program that fails to work 71% of the time and actually makes things worse about a third of the time. On top of all that, it turns out that charter schools are more segregated than regular public schools. I have an article in the autumn issue of Jewish Currents that goes into greater detail on the disadvantages of charter schools and other right-wing educational reforms such as cyber schools and school vouchers, but I think you get the idea: charter schools are bad.

I can understand why many desperate parents of modest or little means with children in schools of few resources in poor districts might be attracted to the line of bull professed by charter school operators, many of whom are for-profit companies whose investors will make their dough by spending less on the children and lowering compensation for their teachers. Just like subprime mortgages, payday loans and for-profit vocational schools, charter schools target the most vulnerable and sell them a bill of goods.

But what about sophisticated left-leaners, policy wonks like the Clintons and Obama? I think there are three reasons so many mainstreamers seem comfortable with charter schools: First, out of respect for minority communities among whom they think there is a lot of support for charter schools, mainly because the mainstream news media and charter school lobbyists tell them so. In point of fact, there is an organization that purports to represent African-Americans who like charter schools, called the Black Alliance for Educational Options, but it receives most of its support from the ultra-right, ultra-white Bradley Foundation. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Movement for Black Lives, an umbrella group for 50 organizations, have come out vehemently against charter schools.

Secondly, embracing charter schools is part of centrist Democrats’ slow dance away from unions. It’s not that Democrats don’t like unions, it’s that they don’t think about them as a central part of their core constituency anymore. Union issues have become an afterthought. Centrist Dems don’t consider the impact on unions when deciding how to shape policies, in or out of power; e.g., NAFTA. When unions protested that the impetus behind charter schools was to kill public school unions and thereby lower teachers’ salaries, the centrists probably thought it was more union obstructionism, or perhaps veiled racism since charter school folks were falsely touting how minorities could take hold of and thereby improve their children’s education. Maybe they have vague memories of accusations of union racism that marred the first controversy over locally controlled schools, in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn in 1968, long before conservative billionaires started funding the charter school movement. On the one hand, who can blame the centrists Dems, given that so many union members abandoned the Democrats for Trump? On the other hand, it’s inconceivable to imagine a progressive movement or a large middle class in this country without a vibrant, large and politically active union workforce.

The last reason is the most subtle, and perhaps the most important. Leftists and left-leaners who have supported charter schools look at its superficial features and see the model for community organizing advocated by the sainted Saul Alinsky. In his Rules for Radicals and elsewhere, community organizer Saul Alinsky proposed to effect progressive change and empower people by organizing them around existing community organizations or symbols for direct nonviolent action against a well-known (“useful”) enemy. The Alinsky model asks the community itself to determine the precise goal of the organizing.

That does seem a lot like charter schools, doesn’t it? The existing organization or symbol is the public school. The community as represented by the school’s board of directors—all community members and parents at the school—determine the goals. The enemy is the public school/union bureaucracy. The nonviolent direct action is to take over the school. The empowerment results when the community has more control over how its children are educated.

No wonder charter schools excited sixties and seventies radicals turned establishment types like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It sure does sound like solid gold Alinsky.

But it’s not even cheap brass plating. It’s an illusion. Underneath the radical left exterior, the operation of a charter school is a conveyance for privatization by which control of all decisions rests in the hands of private businesses, either for-profit companies or non-profit companies whose administrators make big bucks. Since state and national standards drive virtually all curriculum decisions, virtually all the decisions the community boards make come early and involve window-dressing, e.g., make it a Spanish-language school or mandate uniforms. The board can’t dictate that the school not teach evolution or teach that the South won the Civil War. The board can’t restrict minorities or those with handicaps from attending the school, although the for-profit school administration has been known to do so by where they market the school and what they require of applicants. Maybe that’s why charter schools are more segregated than traditional public schools.

Everything else is driven by the administration installed by the charter school operator with whom the community board has contracted. Like many boards of directors in the private sector, the community board becomes a rubber stamp for the senior management. As long as the operator fulfills the terms of the contract, it can pretty much do what it likes. And that almost always involves hiring less experienced teachers and fewer certified teachers, nonunion in most cases, paying them less, and providing them with fewer professional development opportunities. Cut and take profit. It’s how government privatizers make a living, be it in education, prisons or the military, and it’s central to the crony capitalism practiced by the contemporary Republican Party.

In a sense, much like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the charter school movement is Milton Friedman masquerading as Saul Alinsky.

Charter schools have proven to be a failure. It’s time to move on, to shut down all existing charter schools and reintegrate those schools and the students in them, into their traditional public school district.

But ending a school-reform-gone-bad is not enough. We also have to address what made the charter school attractive in the first place—not the racism, but the lack of resources in public schools. We need to invest in more teachers in elementary schools, where it is well-established in the real world that smaller classes are better for the students. We need to buy schools more computers, updated non-Texas-vetted text books, more enrichment such as music and art materials and teachers, equipment and supplies for special magnet schools and other resources that public schools now lack in many areas. It might be helpful to tax rich school districts statewide to support poor school districts, to in a sense, mandate equity in public education.

There are lots of things we can do to improve our public schools and make sure that every student gets the best and most appropriate education. Virtually all of these ideas involve increasing spending. The only thing that will really help our education system that doesn’t involve spending more money is to end all charter schools.

Tell your Rep & Senators to cut military spending below $400 billion a year, with no funds for new nukes or automated weapons

By MARC JAMPOLE

The agenda of the Trump Administration and Congressional Republicans includes raising military spending by billions of dollars. A lot of that money will go to developing a new generation of smaller, “smarter” nuclear weapons and to developing weapons that will inflict damage on the enemy without prior command by a human, so called automated weapons systems—robot weapons.

Both new weapons systems raise grave questions of morality and ethics, starting with the fact that each has characteristics that make its use easy to justify. Instead of slowly dismantling our nuclear capability or letting it go obsolete, which President Obama pledged to do, the plan—approved by Obama—is to spend more than a trillion to build smaller nukes that inflict pinpoint damage, which would enable generals to make the claim that they are almost conventional and therefore okay to use. I can imagine a future Buck Turgidson (from Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 masterpiece “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”) assuring a future president that the bomb he wants to drop on Pyongyang will only kill 20,000 and not the 146,000 killed by the Hiroshima blast, and that the radiation fallout will be negligible and limited to a small area, maybe the size of France.

Automated weapons incite a number of ethical challenges. We can anticipate that decision-making weapons will be as susceptible to bugs, hacking and programming errors as other sophisticated systems based on digital technology, such as bank databases, credit card companies, government servers, clouds and the Internet. Triggered by a hacker or by a bug in one of millions of lines of code, a robot could turn on us, kill the wrong target or mindlessly start slaughtering innocents.

There is also the moral issue of agency. The very thing that makes automated weapons so attractive—we can send them into battle instead of live soldiers—also underlies the essential immorality of using robots to kill other humans. It’s so easy to kill an animated figure on a screen in a video game. And then another, and then another, each of them so realistic in their detail that they could almost be human. Pretty soon you’ve knocked off hundreds of imaginary people. Not so easy, though, for most of us to pull a trigger, knowing that a bullet will rip through heart of someone standing ten feet away and end their existence. Perhaps we instinctively empathize with the victim and fear for our own lives. Or maybe most of us kill with difficulty because the taboo against killing is so strongly instilled in us, that moral sense that taking the life of another human being is wrong, sinful.

The problem with all advanced military technologies is that they turn war into a video game, and by doing so distance the possessors of the technology from their adversaries. Whether the attack is by conventional bomber, missile, drone or the decision-making robot weapons now under development, the technology turns the enemy into video images. Remote warfare dehumanizes the enemy and makes it easier to kill lots of them without giving it a thought. The bombardier doesn’t see the victims below, or if he can, they look like specks. The operator of the drone is even farther away from his intended victims. The operator of robots even more so.

Developing either or both of these advanced weapons systems will lead to an arms race with any number of other countries, including China, Russia and Iran. History and their own actions suggest to me that neither China nor Iran really want to spend any more money on military spending than they have to. But they will, if they have to, we can be sure of that. Let’s not forget that as countries develop new systems to keep pace with us, the chance grows that these weapons of mass destruction will fall into the hands of countries led by irresponsible leaders such as North Korea and…and…and, on my god!, the United States.

Seriously (or at least not mordantly funny)…it’s not enough merely to cut development of nuclear and automated weapons from the Pentagon budget. Pentagon spending has been at historically high levels for more than a decade. When we correct for inflation, every year since 9/11 we have spent from 20-55% more than the average annual outlay for defense 1962-2018 (est.). The average is $486.9 billion and includes the most expensive years of the Viet Nam War and the build-up under Reagan. We’ve spent about $600 billion annually the last few years, and the Pentagon wants to boost that to about $650 billion.

Over the last 10-year period for which we have statistics (2004-2014), the United States spent more on the military than China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, India and Saudi Arabia combined, Plus, our NATO and other major allies collectively spent almost as much as we did.

What’s worse—most military build-ups in American history have lasted five to ten years. Our current orgy of spending on weapons and wars has lasted 16 years and counting. The best source I have found for facts and figures on military spending is the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), the Quaker’s lobbying arm.

As FCNL reminds us, besides making the world a much more dangerous place, military spending makes no economic sense. Each billion dollars spent on the military creates about 12,000 jobs, including 6,800 direct jobs. These job numbers created by military spending are paltry in number compared to the jobs generated by the same investment in education (25,000 jobs, including 15,300 direct), health care (17,000; 8,400 direct) or clean energy (17,000; 7,900 direct). To an advanced economy, spending on defense is almost the 21st century equivalent of a potlatch, the ceremonial festival held by the Kwakiutl and other Northwest American Indian tribes in which the host enhanced his (and it was always a “his”) social status in the tribe by the destruction of his personal property. I write ”almost” because our military potlatch also kills other human beings, many of them non-combatants.

The military establishment, Trumpty-Dumpty and his team, most Republicans and many Democrats proclaim that we have to boost military spending because of the dangers in the world. Remember that the military establishment speaks in a self-serving voice. Trump and the GOP are the same people who tell you that our cities are warzones, when crime is at historic lows everywhere save Chicago, Milwaukee and Baltimore. They are the people who tell us that immigrants create crime waves, when immigrants have a much lower crime rate than those born here. They are the people who tell you it was better for American society for rich folk to get a tax break than for 22 million people to get health care. They want to cut spending on education, health care, food stamps and other social welfare programs and they don’t seem to care a gnat’s buttocks about infrastructure, but when it comes to arms, it’s more, more, more, more and more.

But we’ve done more, and it has left the country broke and with little if nothing to show for our wars and military excursions except death, destruction and a loss of reputation. Meanwhile, a cheap economic boycott and a little diplomacy produced the truly transformative nuclear deal with Iran.

We can remain the world’s strongest nation while improving our economy by cutting military spending to about $400 billion a year. I’ve selected that amount for several reasons. It’s one quarter less than the average for the past 55 years. More to the point, it’s what we spent in the mid-1970’s. For those too young to remember, the mid-1970’s was not only the era in which we spent relatively little on the military, it also saw earnings for the average American worker peak. It was when America experienced the least inequality of wealth and income.

Limiting Pentagon spending to $400 billion a year must come with a stipulation that none of it be spent on developing a new generation of nuclear weapons or automated weapons. Yet even without these expensive programs for mass destruction, the Pentagon will still have to cut elsewhere, and that’s a good thing. There’s a lot of fat, especially in military contracts to for-profit companies to fight senseless, goalless wars in the Middle East.

But we’ll benefit from cutting the Pentagon budget to the bone only if government spends the money represented by those cuts to create new jobs. Congress can’t let the private sector—AKA rich folk—try to create jobs via tax cuts, because they won’t. They’ll put the added cash in their pockets or in Jeff Koons paintings, high-tech stocks and never-occupied apartments overlooking Central Park.

Now that I have convinced you that instead of increasing military spending, we should be decreasing it, here’s the call to action: Tell your elected officials.

Contact your two senators and your congressperson and make demands as explicitly as possible:

1. Stop all research and development in automated weapons and new nuclear weapons.
2. Cut the total military budget for the next 10 years to $400 billion a year, no inflation increase.
3. Use the more than $200 billion in savings per year on education, mass transit and the development of alternative fuels.

I would recommend contacting these elected officials once a month until there is a budget vote later this year. And you might want to donate some money to FCNL, which seems to be leading the charge on the issue of reducing military spending.

Trump is almost the same person as Teddy Roosevelt in personality and character, except Trump speaks loudly & carries no stick at all

By Marc Jampole

Since the election pundits have from time to time compared Donald Trump to various former presidents, most frequently Andrew Jackson because both were racist populists with tempers who liked talking tough and using the military. But I’ve also seen writers find similarities in Trump’s temperament to both Adamses, in incompetence to Buchanan and in dishonesty and political strategy to Nixon. Trump himself has spoken of his accomplishments as worthy of a Lincoln, which to people who live in the real world is akin to claiming an average Little League baseball player is as good as Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays (or Giancarlo Stanton and Mike Trout for younger readers). 

Not surprisingly, no one has mentioned Theodore Roosevelt, probably because TR is depicted as a hero and one of our greatest presidents in most history books and the American public already realizes how unprepared and incompetent Trump is for the job he has now held for about eight months.  

But as Stephen Kinzler’s depiction of TR in hisentertaining and illuminating The TrueFlag reminds us, Trump and Teddy share so many personality, character and class traits that you might think they’re the same person. The True Flag discusses the debate surrounding the Spanish-American War and its bloody aftermath in which American soldiers tortured, raped and slaughtered their way to victory against rebels in the Philippines, the first time the United States used its military might to make acquisitions beyond the borders of the contiguous 48 states. The book focuses on the imperialist arguments made at the end of the 19th century by TR, Henry Cabot Lodge and the yellow journalist William Heart, who with Joseph Pulitzer pretty much invented fake news. They and many others were in favor of projecting American military might, holding possessions in which the inhabitants could not have free elections and extending U.S. control to peoples considered racially and culturally inferior. On the other side, the peaceniks believed fervently that the U.S. should not pursue military adventurism and that it was unconstitutional suppress the voting rights of people in other lands; they included such luminaries as Mark Twain, former President Grover Cleveland, Jane Adams, Andrew Carnegie and the distinguished Senator Carl Schurz. 

Nowhere in The True Flag does Kinzler mention Donald Trump, but the picture he paints of TR is so similar to the Donald we have seen for the past 30 years that you could swear it was Trump being described.  

Let’s start with their backgrounds. Both TR and Trump were born in the lap of luxury with a silver spoon in their mouth, on third base and thinking they hit a triple. Filthy rich.  The Roosevelt family had what’s called old money. Very old money. The original Roosevelt arrived in the New World from Holland sometime in the years just before 1650 and bought a lot of land in mid-town Manhattan, the original source of the family wealth. Trump family money also originally came from real estate—developing and managing properties. 

Inherited money gave TR and Trump immediate access to the public through the news media and to political circles that would not be available to most people. Both used that access to expatiate about controversial topics, going to war and projecting America’s might in TR’s case and, for Trump, spreading the bold-faced, racially-tinged lie that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. 

But access doesn’t necessarily translate to respect. For the most part, the ruling elite, including the Republican Party, disliked both and found both to be a royal inconvenience, and with good reason: The Rough Rider was and Trumpty-Dumpty is a self-centered and loud-mouthed buffoon who often spoke/speaks without thinking and acted/acts impetuously. The center of TR’s world was TR, who thought himself the best man for every job and burned to wield the power of the presidency. Sound familiar? Many in the Republican Party at the turn of the 20th century feared that the irresponsible Roosevelt would gain the power that he so blatantly sought. Same for Republicans during the 2016 primary and election season. 

But while despised by the political, civic and intellectual elite, TR and Trump were/are highly popular with large segments of the American public, thanks to the news media. In TR’s day, the media meant newspapers, of which there were many, many more across the country than today. Interestingly enough, Teddy’s rise in the public esteem was fueled to a great extent by one media giant, William Randolph Hearst, who owned and ran a media empire of newspapers based on sensationalizing the news and saber-rattling for wars of conquest. Hearst grew to dislike Teddy, especially after Hearst also became infected by political ambition. 

Here’s where the similarities get really sick: Both Theodore Roosevelt and Donald Trump built their reputations on fabrications. TR was the warrior, the hero, the Rough Rider who led a band of volunteers up San Juan Hill against the Spanish Army in Cuba. In fact, the hero spent a total of two afternoons in battle. His one casualty was an escaping unarmed prisoner surrounded by TR’s men who he shot in the back several times. Kind of sounds like big game hunting.  

Most of us now know that when Donald Trump agreed to be the business mogul featured in the original “Apprentice” he was a failed real estate developer and casino operator in multiple bankruptcies and a mess of financial trouble. It was the mass media—the television show and the entertainment and celebrity media that covered it—that established his reputation as a business master of the universe, thus giving Trump the platform to pursue his sometimes successful and sometimes disastrous branding business. 

Two frauds that the media turned into celebrities. 

The last similarity: both were accidental presidents. The Republican Party made Teddy McKinley’s VEEP to remove him from power and the public eye. The plan backfired when McKinley was assassinated and Roosevelt assumed the presidency. Let’s not dwell too long on the long string of freak occurrences that enabled Trump to win the electoral college despite losing the popular vote by about three million, including the wave of voter suppression laws, the interference by the Russians, the weakness of the other Republican candidates and former FBI Director James Comey’s ridiculously stupid twin decision to release information about the Clinton probe but not about the Russia-Trump connection.   

A consideration of the differences between the two men is sobering, because it reminds us that the problem with Donald Trump is his not his emotional frailties but his political positions and the reasons he holds them. 

Roosevelt believed in science and in weighing the evidence, which among other things, informed him of the need to protect the environment from the degradations of human beings. He backed down from his imperialism once he became president and had more information and experience (and perhaps the power after which he lusted). TR was well-read. His beliefs in domestic matters tended towards the progressive, which in those days meant minimizing the power of large corporations and setting the rules to create fairness for workers and consumers.  

By contrast, Trump is poorly read and educated and holds a basket of deplorable beliefs about immigration, crime and the economy that are rooted in the myths of the 1950’s, and by myths I mean beliefs that were wrong then and not held now. On global warming and environmental regulations, he has ignored basic science and the advice of virtually every reputable expert in favor of his own irrational beliefs. He looks past the crime statistics which shows an enormous long-term decline and instead believes in the harsh image of crime in the cities depicted in the tabloid newspapers that he read in the 1960’s and 1970’s, before the days of cable news.  

Which brings us to the issue of racism. TR made and Trumpty-Dumpty makes a large number of racist statements. Racism was inherent to the Rough Rider’s imperialism and lurking behind many Trump’s beliefs and actions. But TR’s racism reflects the mainstream thinking of his era. Like Woodrow Wilson and much of the Progressive movement, TR believed in the inherent superiority of white people of European descent. Racism tars his reputation, but most every other white American was racist at the time. I doubt that TR would be an overt racist today, since all his views, even his foreign expansionism, were mainstream. By contrast, Trump’s racism puts him out of the mainstream. Virtually every Trump statement or action to be condemned by other Republicans has involved denigration of or harm to African-Americans, Muslims, Mexicans or other non-white minorities. He flirts with racist groups that hold views that are so far out of the mainstream as to be an anathema to virtually everyone else.  

Finally, despite his heavy-handed narcissism, Roosevelt ended up being one of our better presidents, rated by some among the top ten. In contrast, by ending DACA and U.S. support of the Paris agreement, disrupting relations with long-term strategic allies, cracking down on immigrants, trying to kill the individual health insurance markets created by the Affordable Care Act, threatening the civil rights of the transgendered and rolling back environmental, business and educational regulations, Trump has already done enough damage to America and the world to rate as the second worst person ever to win the electoral college or succeed a dying or resigning president. All he has to do to slide below Harry Truman to the very bottom of the list is convince the American military to drop a nuclear bomb on some enemy. 

The lesson, again, in comparing these two highly narcissistic individuals is that it’s not the state of Trump’s emotions that should be of concern, but his politics. It’s his harmful, racist and misogynist stands and beliefs that are most dangerous to the future of the United States.

Editorial: End the Civil War Now

Let us pray that Heather Heyer is the last casualty of the Civil War. The 32-year-old social justice activist from Charlottesville, Va., was killed and 19 others were injured when an Ohio man described as a Nazi sympathizer drove a car into a crowd of anti-racism protesters after the “Unite the Right” rally to preserve a Confederate statue in Charlottesville.

Maybe we’re just cockeyed optimists, but we think there is some cause for hope 152 years after the surrender of the Confederate States which had waged a war against their countrymen to preserve slavery.

After all, the US elected and re-elected Barack Obama as president, and even if aggrieved whites form the base of Donald Trump’s political power, Obama’s stature has only increased in the seven months since Trump’s inauguration. Obama’s favorability rating has increased from 58% when he left office in January to 63% in a June Gallup poll. Trump’s approval rating was 38% in a poll released Aug. 19, while 58% disapprove of him.

The next few years will determine whether Trump and the Republican Party will succeed in their efforts to suppress votes of black, Latino and women voters to preserve white male hegemony.

The Republican Party wasn’t helped on Aug. 12 when the “Alt-Right” showed up in Charlottesville with the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazis as prominent allies and ready for a public battle.

Dozens of white nationalists, taking advantage of a state law allowing the open carrying of weapons, marched to the Charlottesville rally dressed in camo with tactical vests and military-style semi-automatic rifles. Some of the counter-protesters also were armed, which may have contributed to the local police’s decision to stand on the sidelines as protesters attacked one another with clubs, poles, smoke bombs and pepper spray. Luckily, nobody was shot. But the presence of guns pretty much limited the prospects that there would be much free speech going on at Emancipation Park.

The estimated 500 white supremacists arguably lost to the anti-fascists and social justice activists in the battle of Charlottesville. Klan insignias and swastikas don’t play well with the American public, and after the battle, as Klansmen and Nazis dispersed back to their hometowns, some found that their faces being connected with Nazi imagery had a bad effect on their academic or business careers. Sad.

One week later, fewer than 100 alt-righters showed up at Boston Commons to rally for “white solidarity” in a city that was notorious for racial divisions in the 1970s, but they didn’t get much buy-in from locals on Aug. 19. Ralliers were surrounded by 40,000 counter-protesters who repudiated white supremacy in a largely peaceful confrontation. A big difference from Charlottesville was that the rally permit’s restrictions included bans on backpacks, sticks, and anything that could be used as a weapon. Charlie Pierce noted at Esquire.com that Boston police intervened when protesters surrounded the ralliers, and the police escorted the ralliers out of the area, with the assistance of the local affiliate of Black Lives Matter, who helped to maintain order.

Trump’s response was to tweet, “Looks like many anti-police agitators in Boston. Police are looking tough and smart. Thank you.”

There were some scuffles between marchers in black masks and bandanas and riot police who separated them from the ralliers, Pierce noted, but when police officers escorted a white-haired gent wearing a T-shirt that said “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” out of the crowd, which was chanting “shame,” Police Superintendent Willie Gross said, “You see? That guy was exercising his First Amendment rights and the people around him were exercising their First Amendment rights. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.” And marcher after marcher came up and posed with Gross for selfies. He congratulated all of them on the stand they were taking against what he called “hate speech.”

Democrats need to renew their appeal to working-class and middle-class whites who have been left behind by “neoliberal” trade policies and unionbusting promoted by Republicans since the 1980s. Those moves have reduced trade unions’ bargaining power, which hurt workers of all races, but white workers have been encouraged to blame their precarious economic situation on competition from undocumented immigrants at home and low-wage workers abroad, and ignore corporate bosses that play them off against each other.

Bernie Sanders showed last year that an economic populist message is still potent among Democratic voters, and Donald Trump’s populist rhetoric probably helped him win just enough white working-class votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to tip the Electoral College his way. But those working-class whites are now realizing that Trump was lying, as he does, and an NBC News/Marist poll Aug. 13-17 in those three key states showed Trump’s job approval was 36% or less, while 63% or more said they were embarrassed by Trump’s conduct. Voters also prefer a Democratic-controlled Congress in all three states.

But allies of the Klan and Neo-Nazis remain in the White House. There won’t be any relief for at least a year and a half, until we get another shot at changing Congress, and then in 2020, when we get a chance to throw out Trump or his successor. In the meantime, Republicans will be working to fortify their position. The 55% of voters who disapprove of Trump’s response to the Charlottesville attack, according to a CBS News Poll Aug. 14-16, need to make sure they vote in 2018 to start holding Trump and his minions accountable.

Dahlia Lithwick noted at Slate, “If you were sickened and horrified by the images of Nazis openly marching through a town and its university, brandishing weapons and symbols of mass extermination, please know that Donald Trump and his attorney general are attempting to enact and effectuate policies that ring in the key of ‘You will not replace us’ every single day. Their programmatic efforts to disenfranchise minority voters, gerrymander minority voting districts, end affirmative action, ban transgender soldiers from serving in the military, increase deportations, curb immigration, and foment racially discriminatory policing, sentencing, and incarceration systems are all the modern-day equivalent of this week’s ugly battle cry, ‘You will not replace us.’”

Some Republicans in Congress distanced themselves from the Nazi rhetoric, and they may have been embarrassed by David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader who tweeted “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth,” after Trump balanced the blame for the Charlottesville mayhem. But few Republican officeholders were willing to challenge Trump directly for his pandering to the alt-right — knowing that the GOP owes much of its political success to the exploitation of white fears of losing ground to minorities, ever since Richard Nixon adopted the Southern Strategy in 1968 after President Lyndon Johnson got a Democratic Congress to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts.

Trump played to those fears when he raised the question of whether leftists, if they ever rid the country of statues commemorating Confederate figures, would try to pull down statues to other slaveowners, such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Washington and Jefferson, though slaveholders, were founders of the United States. The Confederate statues commemorate traitors and were raised many years after the Civil War in an effort to intimidate black Americans from pursuing their right to vote and other rights as citizens.

We think local and state governments should decide whether to continue to honor the rebellion against the US that cost more than 600,000 lives and continues to generate hard feelings to this day.

Southern towns should embrace an end to hostilities and replace Confederate statues that were installed during the Jim Crow era with monuments to people who have worked to heal society. Just don’t expect Donald Trump to be part of that healing. — JMC

Art by Kevin Kreneck

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2017

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

Selections from the September 15, 2017 issue

COVER/Michael Winship
The Grand Old Party’s over. Make way for the Trump Party.

EDITORIAL
End the Civil War now

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
Willie Nelson is dying... again?

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Look among ourselves for leadership

DISPATCHES
GOP hopes to pivot to tax breaks for the rich;
Trump muddies self in Charlottesville comments;
W.H. aides rationalize that they keep Trump from doing crazier things;
Republican groups pay nearly $1.3M to Trump properties;
Trump travel drains Secret Service budget, agents do without pay;
US wind and solar power prevented up to 12,700 deaths;
Trump announces new Afghan strategy, no details;
UT Austin removes 3 Confederate statues overnight;
New study minimizes effect of wage increase on blue-collar jobs ...

ART CULLEN
There’s no denying climate change

JILL RICHARDSON
It’s not about ‘white culture’

JOHN YOUNG
Trump’s foot was on that accelerator

LEO GERARD
No more trickle-down trade deals

BILL JOHNSTON
Unions need to get back to organizing

BOB BURNETT
6 months of Trump, 6 lessons learned

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Let the creeps speak. But push back loudly.

THOM HARTMANN
Why the GOP sides with the Klan and the Nazis

ROBERT BOROSAGE
Movements are driving democratic party debate

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Unintended consequences of trade with China

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
I miss you, Bernie Sanders

SAM URETSKY
Madmen test MAD theory on nukes

WAYNE O’LEARY
Chuck Schumer’s new new deal

JOHN BUELL
North Korea and Cold War politics

N. GUNASEKARAN
Job loss as capital offensive

JESSICA PIERRE
No, Affirmative Action isn’t keeping white students down

JASON SIBERT
Socialists see an opening for change

ROB PATTERSON
All that glitters is not good for democracy

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Designer schemes: The genie is out of the bottle

MOVIES/Ed Rampell
New film about fighting in Ferguson’s streets

BOOKS/Seth Sandronsky
Living well is the best revolution

and more ...

Editorial: Keep the Heat on GOP

Now that Republicans have failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act — albeit by a one-vote margin in the Senate — Donald Trump wants to hurry the collapse of the nation’s health care program by shortchanging insurance companies who were promised subsidies for keeping costs low. Trump also has sent mixed signals on whether penalties will be enforced on people who don’t buy health insurance, as the law requires.

If enough insurance companies withdraw from the program and/or premiums soar because of sabotage, Trump thinks, ObamaCare will fail, and then Democrats will be forced to accept his terms on a replacement. But some Republican senators, looking at polls that show Americans are blaming Trump and the GOP for the cracks in the ACA, are in the mood to try to fix the program and Democrats should be ready with progressive options.

While we think Medicare for All is the ultimate solution, bills by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) to implement that are unlikely to get a serious hearing in the Republican-controlled House or Senate this year. Democrats might be able to build a groundswell of support for a proposal to let people buy Medicare and/or Medicaid coverage if private insurance companies fail to offer adequate coverage.

Toward that end, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) on Aug. 3 introduced the Medicare at 55 Act, which would allow people 55 and older to buy in to Medicare. Co-sponsors include Democratic Sens. Tammy Baldwin (Wis.), Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.), Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Jeff Merkley (Ore.), Patrick Leahy (Vt.), Jack Reed (R.I.) and Al Franken (Minn.).

Stabenow’s office suggests the new bill would likely generate cost savings for those between the ages of 55 and 64, since private insurers are permitted to charge that cohort three times the rates of their younger people due to the generally higher cost of providing them coverage. Americans aged 55 to 64, on average, pay more than $1,200 a year in out-of-pocket medical costs that Medicare would alleviate, according to the Health Care Cost Institute, Daniel Marans reported at HuffingtonPost.com.

House Democrats, including Reps. Jon Larson (Conn.), Brian Higgins (N.Y.) and Joe Courtney (Conn.) plan to introduce a similar Medicare Buy-In and Health Care Stabilization Act. The bill would let Americans aged 50 or older buy into Medicare for as little as $8,212 a year — a significant savings for a 60-year-old currently purchasing a high-ranking “gold” plan on the exchange for an estimated $13,308, according to the congressmen’s offices.

Republican Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and John McCain get full credit for voting against Mitch McConnell’s repeal of the Affordable Care Act — but so do the 48 senators in the Democratic Caucus (including independent Sens. Angus King of Maine and Sanders) who stuck together in defense of the ACA. And the progressive Resistance made sure the Democrats stayed in the corral as well as rounding up the three maverick Republicans who were willing to vote for the interests of their constituents, instead of the billionaire funders of the GOP who were demanding repeal of the capital gains surcharge and other taxes that pay for much of the ACA.

That leaves flaky Republican senators such as Dean Heller of Nevada, who pledged at the end of June that not only would be oppose the Republican plan to repeal and replace the ACA, he would oppose the procedural motion that would allow the Senate to proceed to debate on the bill. A month later, he voted for the “motion to proceed” and he also voted for the “skinny repeal” bill, which would cause an estimated 328,000 Nevadans to lose health care. Heller also voted with 49 other Republicans in March for a bill that would allow states to block more than $200 million in Title X funding from going to Planned Parenthood or any other organization that provides abortions — even if the medical service had nothing to do with abortions. Four million Americans rely on Title X family planning services, but many might have trouble finding a family planning clinic.

In the Senate, where Republicans have a 52-48 majority, Democrats face a daunting challenge in the 2018 election, as 23 Dems and two independents who caucus with them are up for re-election. Republicans have eight seats up for re-election.

The conventional wisdom is that Democrats might be able to pick up two seats — those now held by Dean Heller in Nevada and Jeff Flake in Arizona. But if Democrats win those races and hold onto the 25 seats already in the Democratic Caucus, the GOP would still control the Senate with Vice President Pence casting the tie-breaking vote. That’s why Democrats also need to target Ted Cruz in Texas, where US Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-El Paso) is challenging Cruz in a Bernie Sanders-style insurgent campaign. Otherwise, Dems can take on Roger Wicker in Mississippi, Deb Fischer in Nebraska, Bob Corker in Tennessee, Orrin Hatch in Utah or John Barrasso in Wyoming, at even longer odds.

Republicans are expected to target Democratic senators in Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia, all of which states voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 and Trump in 2016. The GOP also covet seats from Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, states which voted for Trump in 2016. Republicans also might target Democrats in New Mexico, Virginia, Maine and New Jersey. And they likely will fund a challenger for Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts in an attempt to take her down a peg.

If Democrats manage to gain control of the Senate, they could jam the plutocrats’ hopes to pack the federal judiciary with right-wing judges appointed to lifetime terms. There are currently 138 vacancies, including 19 on appeals courts. Trump is getting his nominees directly from the right-wing Heritage Foundation and, frankly, they’re not sending America’s best lawyers. The oligarchs also hope to steal another Supreme Court seat that might solidify a right-wing majority on the high court for the foreseeable future.

To gain three seats and the Senate majority for the Dems will require a “wave” election, and with Trump’s approval ratings at record lows (36.6% at 200 days into Trump’s Administration) and congressional approval even lower (20% in a July Gallup poll), it is time for Democrats to go on the offensive with a populist economic agenda that promises Democrats will look out for the working Americans who are targeted by Trump’s proposed budget cuts and administrative policy betrayals.

Congressional Democratic leaders have taken a good first step with their “Better Deal” agenda, which promises a crackdown on corporate monopolies, infrastructure projects to create 10 million jobs, an increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour, guaranteeing paid sick and family leave and lowering the costs of prescription drugs by allowing Medicare to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies.

Even better is the “People’s Budget: A Roadmap for the Resistance,” drafted by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which revives Franklin Roosevelt’s promise of an economic bill of rights—to decent work, affordable housing, world-class public education, guaranteed health care and retirement security. The People’s Budget lays out an ambitious jobs and public-investment agenda — $2 trillion to rebuild America over 10 years, debt-free college, seeding a green industrial revolution and more — and pays for it by increasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations to make them pay their fair share.

If Republicans hold onto their Senate majority, and perhaps even add a few next year, they can take another swipe at replacing the Affordable Care Act with one of those monstrosities that were narrowly defeated in the Senate. That means the health care of millions of working families is still threatened. Make every Republican candidate defend their support for Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell’s craven health deforms in the next election year. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2017

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Populist.com

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

Selections from the September 1, 2017 issue

COVER/Amanda Marcotte
Trump’s pileup of fake conspiracies conceals the real one

EDITORIAL
Keep the heat on the GOP

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
Donald Trump and Captain Ahab

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Republicans inaction leaves rural hospitals endangered

DISPATCHES
Trump failing rural Americans by erasing climate change from USDA;
Union promises to fight defeat at Nissan Mississippi plant;
Senate confirms anti-labor pick to labor board;
Trump’s new appeals court judge compared abortion to slavery;
Trump may shut down government over border wall;
Trump urged Fox News to air bogus story;
Trolls celebrate mosque bombing while Trump stays silent;
Vatican shot across the bow for hard-line US Catholics ...

ART CULLEN
The noise machine never quiets down

JILL RICHARDSON
A tale of two beaches

BOB BURNETT
Trump: Bring back the 1950s

ROB PATTERSON
Saving America from the wrongs of the right: A six point plan

JOHN YOUNG
Now playing in Washington: ‘The Unconscionables’

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Give me something new

SETH SANDRONSKY
Progressive health care advances in the Golden State

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Willie Sutton for a new age

SAM URETSKY
Trump’s pox Americana

MARK ANDERSON
Distractions keep Congress from addressing infrastructure

WAYNE O’LEARY
The single-payer imperative

JOHN BUELL
Moving beyond resistance

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Trump administration fails to buy American

BARRY FRIEDMAN
What if Trump did that?

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
The complete idiot’s guide to pardoning a turkey

ROB PATTERSON
Terry Gross still sets the standard on interviews

MOVIES/Ed Rampell
‘An Inconvenient Sequel’ raises some inconvenient truths about Gore

and more ...

Editorial: Stop GOP Genocide

Republican failure to repeal or replace the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) is a testament to the staying power of a federal entitlement: once granted, it is extremely difficult to take it away.

The ACA offered to expand Medicaid coverage for low-income families whose income is less than 138% of the federal poverty level (FPL), starting in January 2014. People making up to four times the poverty level, which is $20,420 for a family of three in 2017, could qualify for subsidies to help them buy insurance through the state exchanges. But when the Supreme Court in June 2012 ruled that the federal government couldn’t force the states to expand Medicaid, 25 states where Republicans were in charge took advantage of the court’s permission to refuse the federally-funded expansion. They didn’t care that the rejection of Medicaid expansion would result in 7.78 million people who would have gained coverage remaining uninsured and between 7,115 and 17,104 more people would die annually from treatable illnesses.

Texas was the largest state to opt out of Medicaid expansion, as Republicans blocked more than two million working Texans from getting federally financed health care. The Harvard/CUNY study estimated that between 1,840 and 3,035 Texans’ lives would be lost annually, or as many as 12,000 so far. In Florida, Republicans kept 1.2 million working poor Floridians from getting insurance, which has resulted in between 1,158 and 2,221 deaths annually since then. That puts the lie to the Republican claim to be “pro-life.”

As of 2017, six more states had accepted the expansion, leaving 31 states and D.C. expanding Medicaid while 19 states continue to withhold federally financed health care from the working poor.

The Senate Republican bill would increase the number of uninsured Americans by 14 million in 2018 and 22 million by 2026, the Congressional Budget Office projected. The increase in the number of uninsured would result in 18,100 excess deaths in 2018, 22,900 excess deaths in 2020, and 26,500 extra deaths in 2026, researchers from Harvard’s School of Public Health found, estimating a total of 208,500 unnecessary deaths over the next decade.

A few Republican senators whose states have gotten used to the Medicaid expansion have kept the bill from advancing so far, but if bringing back John McCain in the midst of cancer treatment to cast a vote to throw millions of working stiffs off Medicaid doesn’t do the trick to free up tax cuts for billionaires (as McCain ended up disappointing Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and siding with the Democrats, along with Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska), Donald Trump has said he favors letting “Obamacare” fail — and in Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price, Trump has the right man in place to make sure it fails!

At least Republican fumbling of health care schemes has increased the popularity of Obamacare as well as acceptance of a federal role in making sure all Americans get health care. An Associated Press/NORC poll in July found that 62% of respondents said it was the responsibility of the federal government to make sure that all Americans have health coverage. That was up from 52% in March.

The same poll found a clear majority of 59% wants to keep Obamacare, but 73% of those who want to keep the ACA said it should be changed to work better.

A Kaiser Family Foundation poll in June found 53% supporting all Americans getting their coverage through a single government plan, such as Medicare for All, while 43% were opposed. But a similar poll by Pew Research Center in June found that 33% support a single national government health program, while 25% support a mix of government programs and private insurance.

Democratic leaders appear to be slow to adopt the Medicare for All solution, but HR 676, the bill which Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) has filed to expand and improve Medicare for all, has 115 co-sponsors, which is more than one-half of the Democratic caucus and is the highest level of support the bill has received since Conyers started filing the bill in 2003. Among the Medicare for All co-sponsors in the House are Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. “We can fight fiercely to protect the Affordable Care Act and also look a little bit farther in terms of establishing Medicare for All,” Ellison said in a May press conference.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is expected to file his own Medicare for All bill, which will put Democratic senators on the spot.

DNC Chairman Tom Perez has said he supports universal health coverage but he doubts Medicare for All is achievable. “I would love, if I were king for the day, to do something akin to Medicare for all. Because Medicare has been a very good program, and it’s helped a lot of people,” he told NBC’s Seth Myers in May.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has said the time has not yet come for a push for single-payer on the national level. “The comfort level with a broader base of the American people is not there yet,” Pelosi said in May. Instead, she suggested that Democrats push for a state-level public option for health insurance. “We must defeat the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. But that is not our only fight,” she said. “We must go further! The Affordable Care Act enables every state to create a public option. I believe California can lead the way for America by creating a strong public option.”

Ellison said he thought it would be good politics for Democrats to run on single payer in 2018. “It’s not the proper role of me at the DNC to tell people what they’re going to stand for, that’s a choice the candidates make for themselves, but I recommend that you win your election and I think a good way to do it is to support Conyers’ bill,” Ellison said.

Defenders of the current private insurance system raise fears that Medicare for All would increase taxes, but putting the US on a single-payer system actually could — and should — cut health care costs. We spend more on health per capita than any other nation ($9,403 in 2014), but still left 33 million uninsured. Canada gives everybody up north equal access to medical facilities, practitioners and procedures at a cost of $4,641 per capita. Still, Canada spent far less of its GDP on health care than did the US — 10.4% compared with 17.8% in the US — which, again. was the highest share of any nation, according to the World Health Organization.

Physicians for a National Health Program proposes to expand Medicare to cover all Americans for all medical care, including mental health, dental care and prescription drugs, without deductibles or copays. The system would be publicly financed, but would rely on existing private hospitals, clinics and practitioners to provide care, much like Medicare does. During a transition period, all public funds currently spent on health care – including Medicare, Medicaid and state and local health care programs – would be redirected to the unified National Health Plan budget. Such public spending – together with tax subsidies for employer-paid insurance and government expenditures for public workers’ health benefits – already accounts for 60% of total US health expenditures. Additional funds would be raised through taxes, though PNHP notes that these would be fully offset by a decrease in out-of-pocket spending and private insurance premiums. Also, doing away with private insurance, which averages 12% overhead, and simplifying administrative costs for doctors and hospitals would save more than $400 billion annually.

Medicare for All won’t go anywhere in this current Congress, but Democrats should promote it to give voters a choice that would work for 2018. At least it might motivate Republicans to work with Democrats to fix the Affordable Care Act and stop letting tens of thousands of working people die for lack of medical care.

By the way, when conservatives demand to know where in the Constitution is the authority for the federal government to provide health insurance, the answer is right up front, in the Preamble, where it says one of the reasons to establish the Constitution is to “promote the general Welfare.” Let’s get after it. — JMC

Editor's note: This has been updated from the print version since the 51-49 Senate vote that defeated the "skinny repeal" bill on July 28, which apparently has stalled the Republican "repeal and replace" effort, at least for the time being.

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2017

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Populist.com

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

Art by Kevin Kreneck

Selections from the August 15, 2017 issue

COVER/Jefferson Morley
A cornered Trump is more dangerous

EDITORIAL
Stop GOP genocide

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
Coming to terms with Big Religion 

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Woe be to WOTUS if POTUS has his way

DISPATCHES
Dems seek to reclaim populist mantle;
Dems continue to flip statehouse seats;
Republican congressmen seek revenge on CBO for Trumpcare report;
South Texas border wall will ‘essentially destroy’ Rio Grande wildlife refuge;
First Amendment faces bipartisan assault;
Medicaid expansion had huge impact on finances of poor;
Energy efficiency is a huge money saver -- but Trump is against it;
Trump warning to Mueller proves, again, it's all about the money;
Trump's new judge compared abortion to slavery ...

ART CULLEN
Heir to Ignoramus

JILL RICHARDSON
Is this how the world sees America now?

JOHN YOUNG
The gang that couldn’t lie straight

LEO GERARD
Republicans working against workers

BOB BURNETT
The resistance bookshelf

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet 
Take back the narrative

GENE NICHOL
Trump targets Peace Corps

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Endgame: How President Trump will go down

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas 
Loving the land of make believe

SAM URETSKY
AIDS advisors quit Trump administration

WAYNE O’LEARY
The worst administration of all time?

JOHN BUELL
Trump, North Korea and historical amnesia

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Son of a gun

SETH SANDRONSKY
California’s capital then and now

ROB PATTERSON
There’s plenty of real news on the web, too

MOVIES/Ed Rampell
New documentary goes beneath the waves to see coral bleaching crisis

and more ...

GOP Donors Demand Return on Investment

One measure of how Congress is controlled by plutocrats is that Republicans are still trying to peddle a “health” bill that has just 17% support nationwide. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll in late June also found 59% disapprove of the Grand Oligarch Party’s bill to replace the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare). The House’s version, which was passed in March on a near-party-line vote, faces similar levels of opposition from the public.

The main reason Republicans are proceeding with their health deform bill is they need that money they’re taking from Medicare and Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for their billionaire donors — in fact, one influential Texas donor told congressional Republicans that his “Dallas piggy bank” is closed until he sees major action on health care and taxes.

“Get ObamaCare repealed and replaced, get tax reform passed,” Doug Deason said June 26 in a pointed message to GOP leaders. “You control the Senate. You control the House. You have the presidency. There’s no reason you can’t get this done. Get it done and we’ll open it back up.”

Both the House and Senate bills originally proposed to repeal a 3.8% surtax on investment income such as dividends, interest and capital gains that exceed $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples and a 0.9% payroll tax on income over $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 that goes into the Medicare trust fund.

Mitch McConnell is trying to secure the 50 votes he needs, along with Vice President Mike Pence’s potential tie-breaking vote, to pass the plan his henchmen have cobbled together, which would cut $772 billion from Medicaid and $117 billion from Medicare to pay for tax cuts for millionaires and cause 22 million Americans to lose their insurance, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. A study in the Annals of Internal Medicine estimates the bill could cause 28,600 people to die annually from lack of medical care due to loss of insurance.

On Thursday, McConnell unveiled a new version of the bill that keeps the taxes on the wealthy but still cuts Medicaid funding by more than 30%, eliminates expansion of the program to cover the working poor and replaces ObamaCare's tax credit subsidies with smaller ones that would be available to fewer people.

To appease Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and other conservatives, McConnell included new provisions that would create a two-tiered health insurance market. Insurers would be able to offer plans that exclude people with pre-existing conditions or charge them higher rates ― or to market plans without comprehensive benefits ― just as long as they sell at least one plan with more comprehensive coverage that is available to everybody at a uniform price, Jeffrey Young reported at HuffingtonPost.com.

Ironically, Republicans have spent the last seven years undermining a health plan that was based on a proposal of the conservative Heritage Foundation in 1989, which was first written into a bill by Senate Republicans in 1993 and passed into law by Republican Gov. Mitt Romney in Massachusetts in 2005. But when Democrats in 2009 proposed the Affordable Care Act, which relies on federal subsidies of private health insurers and an individual mandate to produce universal coverage, Republicans decided they could not support it because it would be part of President Barack Obama’s legacy.

The good news is, if Democrats regain the White House and a majority in Congress they can expand Medicare to cover everybody through the same budget reconciliation process that Republicans are now using to try to repeal ObamaCare.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who promoted universal healthcare during his Democratic presidential campaign, plans to introduce a single-payer plan. Supporters include Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.). In the House, Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) has already gotten 113 co-sponsors for his Medicare For All bill. That’s nearly double the number of co-sponsors the legislation garnered last congressional session. Co-sponsors include Democratic Caucus Chairman Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.) and Assistant Democratic Leader James Clyburn (D-S.C.).

Neither bill will make much headway in the current Congress, but Democrats will have popular opinion on their side if they campaign on expanding Medicare in 2018. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll in June found 53% of the public supporting all Americans getting their coverage through a single government plan, while 43% are opposed. This is up from the level of support for single-payer in Kaiser polls since 1998. From 1998 through 2004, roughly four in ten supported a national health plan, while about half were opposed. From 2008-2009, the period leading up to passage of the ACA, the public was more evenly divided, with about half in favor of a single-payer plan and half opposed. The recent increase in support for single-payer has largely been driven by independents, who increased from 42% support in 2008-09 to 55% in the new poll.

The public also continues to show more support for “Medicare For All” than “single-payer health insurance,” though the gap is narrowing. The February 2016 Kaiser Health Tracking Poll found the public was 20-points more likely to react favorably to the term “Medicare For all” (64% favorable) than “single-payer health insurance system” (44% favorable). The current poll finds 55% support for “Medicare For All” and 53% for “single payer.”

In the meantime, if Republicans fail in their attempt to replace ObamaCare, McConnell has said his party might have to work with Democrats to stabilize the current law.

If that happens, Kevin Drum of MotherJones.com has proposed a three-step plan to fix ObamaCare.

1) Enforce the individual mandate and increase the penalty to 3.5% of income. Drum noted that the point is not to penalize poor people; it’s to get more healthy people into the system.

2) Increase subsidies by 20% and extend them to six times the poverty level, to make insurance more affordable for everyone. (The current law provides subsidies to people making up to four times the poverty level.)

3) In areas where there are fewer than two insurers participating in the exchanges, states should make Medicaid available for the price of an average Bronze plan.
Finally, for-profit insurance companies should be put on notice that they need to prove there is a constructive role for them in providing universal health coverage. So far, they have failed the test and Medicare For All is an increasingly attractive solution.

Vote Purger Leads Election Probe

The FBI is properly investigating ties between the Trump campaign and Russian officials who apparently meddled in the US presidential election. But if there was a conspiracy to hack the election, Republican officials did more damage with their systematic measures to suppress voter participation.

Donald Trump has claimed that millions of illegal voters were responsible for Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote by almost 2.9 million votes last November. So the minority president created the ironically named “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity,” to be chaired by Vice President Mike Pence and vice chair, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who is one of the leaders of the GOP’s systematic disenfranchisement of students, the poor, people of color and other likely Democratic voters. Kobach was a developer of Interstate Crosscheck, which aimed to identify Americans registered in more than one state and purge them from voter lists. Greg Palast has noted that Crosscheck merely matched first and last names of voters in 28 participating states, and it resulted in the purging of 1.1 million names from voter rolls before the 2016 election.

In Michigan, where 450,000 names were purged by Crosscheck, Donald Trump officially won by 10,704 votes. But Palast noted that a record 75,335 votes were never counted, on orders of the Republican attorney general — with most of the missing votes in heavily Democratic Detroit and Flint. There are unanswered questions about voting irregularites in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

Trump may have illegally conspired with Russians who hacked Democratic computers and turned up embarrasing emails. But law enforcement authorities need to discover whether Kris Kobach and Republican election officials on the ground in those battleground states helped to fix the election for Trump. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2017

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Populist.com

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

Art by Kevin Kreneck

Selections from the August 1, 2017 issue

COVER/Hal Crowther
A whiter shade of pale?

EDITORIAL
GOP donors demand return on investment

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
Soft power, hard hearts and the bottom line 

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
12 Steps for democracy

DISPATCHES
Donald Jr. admits Russian lawyer offered dirt on Hillary during campaign;
Trump follows Fox News in faulty attack against Comey;
Trump continues record pace for lying;
Likely EPA pick not conservative enough for climate deniers;
G19 outmaneuvers climate rogue Trump;
Republicans in several states reduce minimum wages;
Corporate media celebrate job loss;
TrumpCare will save Social Security $3B because of the people it kills;
Hobby Lobby's stolen art may have financed Mideast terrorism ...

ART CULLEN
Where did all the cattle, and people, go?

JILL RICHARDSON
America needs service workers — and they need health care

JOHN YOUNG
Mr. Fraud is on the trail of — voter fraud?

RICHARD ESKOW
GOP ‘health’ bill: Death, disaster and gilded age greed


KENT PATERSON
Showdown in the battle for El Paso

BOOKS/Seth Sandronsky 
Workplace democracy and its discontents

WENONAH HAUTER
Don’t be fooled by rosy renewables projections

BOB BURNETT
Searching for the soul of the Democratic Party

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Send in the wedding planners: Health care

SAM URETSKY
Billionaires have their uses in protecting democracy

WAYNE O’LEARY
Donkey in the doldrums and other tales

JOHN BUELL
The many faces of climate science denial

JOEL D. JOSEPH
How to fix NAFTA

JASON SIBERT
Defense establishment needs rent control

MARK ANDERSON
Congress stonewalls bill to stop funding terrorists

ROB PATTERSON
Maher wears thin on ‘Real Time’

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Dear poor people: God is so not into you

and more ...