Saturday, August 18, 2018

Selections from the September 1, 2018 issue

















Tuesday, August 14, 2018

With school districts all over the country putting armed guards into schools, it’s only a matter of time before a school guard shoots down an African-American parent


By Marc Jampole

Try going to Google News and entering “armed guards in schools” and you will gain access to hundreds of articles about school districts nationwide taking additional security measures for the upcoming academic year. Most often mentioned is the posting of armed guards—usually one per school, but bringing guns into schools is not the only step school districts are taking to attempt to prevent a mass murder at their facilities. Across the country, local and national news media are reporting an increase in locked doors, buzz-in systems for visitors, hand-held metal detectors, active shooter lockdown drills and staff training. Districts are mandating the use of clear backpacks, increasing student mental health services and doing random searches.

Except for expanding mental health services and placing armed guards in schools, all of these changes involve restricting the freedom of individuals. Students and visitors will have to go through security. Others will be forced to buy new backpacks or have to undergo random searches of their lockers and backpacks. It’s indeed ironic how easily American legislators are to restrict individual freedoms, except the freedom to own guns. By contrast, our leaders fear any and all restrictions on corporations, even those that protect the health and safety of individuals.

My first emotion in perusing article after article about new security measures mixes amusement with anger. I’m amused in an ironic way that school boards can so quickly find money to increase security after years of claiming poverty, but angry that the same money—and more—has not been made available for decades to improve education. The frown gets the best of the chuckle when I consider that some if not most education systems may be paying for the new guards by cutting teachers or postponing purchases of new computers or textbooks. For decades, state and federal governments have been shaving public school budgets or letting money be reallocated to the failed educational experiment called “charter schools.” We have slowly tried to starve public education, so it’s particularly unfortunate that we feel obliged to spend money on addressing a safety problem in the schools that is of our own making.

Keep in mind that it’s possible that the districts spending the most on added security are the wealthy ones that can afford it, those that haven’t seen enrichment programs and small class sizes go by the wayside in the wake of shrinking budgets. That wealthy kids enjoy both better education and better protection merely reinforces the inequity of income, wealth and opportunity that is destroying the American dream and the dreams of most Americans.

The big question is will the added security measures work? The answer will depend on how we define success. If we look just at school shootings, it’s anyone’s guess, because the various factors interact in complex ways. Which of these measures really help and which only make us feel good? How effective will the authorities be in addressing the sickos whom enhanced mental health counseling identifies? Will the primarily white Christian terrorists who commit these acts figure out ways to get around the new security measures? Can a security guard deal effectively with a crazed killer brandishing one or more AR-15s who has no fear of his own death?

The only prediction I will offer is that the sooner or later an African-American father trying to visit a guidance counselor at a primarily white school will be shot down by a security guard. 

If we, however, don’t limit ourselves to schools, but ask a broader question, Will new security measures lead to an overall reduction in gun violence?, the answer is clear. No way. Because so many schools are bringing guns onto campus, the number of guns in circulation in the country will increase. An increase in the number of guns will lead to an increase in gun violence and gun deaths. Every shred of research done on the topic in the United States and across the world has always come to the same conclusion: The more guns in a society, the greater the gun violence, the fewer guns, the less gun violence. The unintended consequence of placing more armed guards at any public location has to by definition be an increase in gun violence, even if that increase doesn’t come where the guards are posted.

Thus, arming school personnel will contribute to a reduction of gun violence and deaths if and only if we take measures to reduce the number of guns elsewhere in society. I’m fairly certain that a comprehensive package of federal gun control laws would do more to make our children safe in schools—and elsewhere—than the best efforts of all the school boards across the country to “harden” the campus with guards, buzzers, drills and searches.

I’m the left-wing nut who wants to outlaw all private ownership of firearms and make hunters and recreational target shooters rent or store their guns at hunting lodges, gun clubs and shooting ranges. But even my radical eyes can see that there are a number of actions we can take that allow individuals the privilege of owning firearms yet keep people safe, including:
·      Ban private ownership of all automatic and semi-automatic weapons and require those who currently own such weapons to sell them to the government or face still jail time.
·      Improve the gun national registry and increase participation by the states.
·      Increase to seven days the waiting period to purchase guns and extend the waiting requirement to all gun purchases, even those at gun shows and on the internet.
·      Require all individuals to pass a rigorous written and operational test before being allowed to buy or own a gun, similar to a driver’s test, and retest every 5-10 years.
·      Require all gun owners to carry firearms insurance.
·      Ban open and closed carry at all schools, universities, downtowns, malls, theatres and other public places.
·      End all “stand your ground” laws.

I have expressed the radical form of virtually all these ideas to limit and control guns in United States. More moderate versions in all cases are approved by large majorities of Americans, including majorities of gun owner. Both surveys and my extensive anecdotal evidence find that virtually all gun owners would have no problem with longer waiting times. Most don’t see any reason for anyone to own an AR-15. Most would be happy to keep guns away from known bad actors, those with ties to terrorist organizations, domestic abusers and the mentally ill. 


The only impediment in the way of reducing gun violence are our elected officials who are too frightened to oppose the National Rifle Association (NRA) or depend on NRA largess for their election. Pundits assume that Russia funneled tens of millions of dollars to the NRA to help elect the Republican candidate for president in 2016. But think about it. By fostering greater ownership of firearms and therefore greater gun violence, the NRA weakens the United States, with or without the excesses of Donald Trump.

Thursday, August 9, 2018

Italy weakening its child vaccination law is a broader part of the retreat from science and knowledge that’s happening in Italy, the United States and elsewhere


By Marc Sample 

More bad news this week for the children of the world. Italy is relaxing its child vaccination law, which means fewer Italian children will get the basic panel of vaccinations needed to protect them from some very terrible diseases such as polio, diphtheria and Hepatitis B.

Universal vaccination would pretty much wipe out virtually all ten of the diseases against which the Italian government wants all children to get vaccinated. A recent Italian law requires all parents and guardians to provide written proof that their children have been vaccinated against these ten ailments. The law followed an outbreak of more than 5,000 cases of measles in Italy in one year, 34% of all cases in the half billion person European Union, an outsized number: Italy’s population represents only 12% of the EU. The medical community in Europe and around the world was delighted by the new legislation.

But the new Trump-like League- Five Star coalition government of Italy has decided to loosen the rule.Now parents will only be required to confirm verbally that their children have received vaccinations against these ten scourges.  Matteo Salvini, Deputy Prime Minister and member of the anti-immigrant, far-right League, has been quoted as saying the ten obligatory vaccinations “are useless and in many cases dangerous, if not harmful….I confirm the commitment to allow all children to go to school.

With that kind of encouragement, we can be certain that lying will go up and child vaccinations will go down. Sadly, illnesses and deaths among Italian children will soar.

The ten diseases, BTW, are polio, diphtheria, tetanus, hepatitis B, haemophilus influenzae B, measles. mumps, rubella, whooping cough and chickenpox. 

The origin of the contemporary anti-vaccination movement in both Italy and the United States was a fraud perpetrated on the medical community and the families of the world by a British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield in 1995. Wakefield published a study in The Lancetclaiming children who had the Mumps/Measles/Rubella vaccination were more likely to have bowel disease and autism. He followed it up with another article in 1998. But the good doctor had cooked the books. By 2004, the medical community realized that Wakefield was full of it. That hasn’t stopped anti-vaxers from spouting his bogus research ever since.

When a celebrity or politician talks nonsense about the supposed dangers of vaccination, well-meaning, uneducated parents listen and sometimes decide not to vaccinate, putting both their children and the entire community in danger. That’s why I still believe that while it came early in his campaign, perhaps the most odious, horrific lie that Donald Trump has told to the American people was when he claimed in a debate that he personally knew someone whose child became autistic after being vaccinated. Impossible. Overwhelming clinical evidence proves beyond all doubt that there is absolutely no connection, correlation or relationship between vaccinations and autism. Trump was telling a lie that, like all Trump lies, a sizeable slice of the American public willingly will swallow in one gulp. How shameful to put children at risk to pander to a disproven idea.

But Trump routinely puts children at risk, sometimes with the sadistic glee of a cat batting a mouse around between its paws. The current Nationdetails five distinct ways that his administration imposes “sometimes fatal burdens of children—especially black and brown ones.”The article mentions the separation of children from their families at borders; the travel ban which, as it turns out, has a disproportionately negative effect on children; work requirements for recipients of health and welfare aid; a rolling back of Department of Education efforts to rein in unfair disciplining of African-American children; and efforts to scuttle the World Health Organization resolution favoring breastfeeding. Bullies always pick on people who can’t fight back, so it makes sense that Trump and his followers target children for their cruelty.

The tragedy of what will happen to many children is not the only alarming aspect of this change in the Italian law. The news media is reporting that the medical and scientific community believes that the statements of government officials and the vote to loosen the law increases distrust of science in Italy.  

Americans know, or don’t know, something about the distrust of science. The mass media has been sowing it for years by giving coverage to wacky theories like vaccinations cause autism; treating global warming as an open questions years after science decided the issue; giving a platform to creationists; routinely denigrating intellectual endeavors; writing in feature story after feature story that school is boring; and attributing negative traits to intelligent people, e.g. socially maladroit, physically unattractive, unathletic, unstylish and awkward.

Trump, of course, has taken this anti-truth, anti-science crusade to a new level. This failed businessman turned celebrity routinely lies and uses those lies to develop and implement policies that flaunt science and scientific research. He and his administration make up lies about immigrant crime, the unfairness of current trade agreements, climate change, the renting of children to allow bad guys to cross borders, the benefit to the economy of tax cuts, the reasons behind epidemic of mass shootings, and just about everything else.  The latest addition to the hit parade of mendacity is the claim that dropping the gas mileage standards on trucks and car will benefit the economy. Trumpites have a deep distrust in experts of all kinds, especially experts who speak against their cherished beliefs, superstitions and prejudices. 

The death of newspapers. The rise of the irrational as a force in social media. The decline in the number of people reading books. The gutting of scientists and other professional experts from key government positions. The continued decline in government support of public schools and colleges. Everywhere we see signs of a retreat from knowledge.

It’s happened before in world history, for example in Western Europe after the death of Charlemagne when most intellectual endeavors retreated to monasteries under the auspices of a superstitious church or during the later years of the Song dynasty when the examination system to decide who would run the country was corrupted by wealthy people wanting to make sure their children were well-positioned. Willful ignorance of the facts on the ground is probably a significant factor in the decline of all civilizations and countries. Decline always comes with extreme pain, and those who suffer most are almost always the children.

Tuesday, August 7, 2018

The real tragedy of separating children from their parents will come years from now when the kids suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder



By Marc Jampole

These past few days, I’ve been feeling a special empathy with the children whom the United States government ripped from their families at the border and sent to special facilities. My empathy comes from knowing in the most intimate way possible some of the emotional challenges that these children will face throughout their lives.

You see, I’ve been having one of my occasional bouts of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) caused by traumatic events I suffered during my childhood. My PTSD manifests itself as sudden feelings of unexplained anxiety or full-blown panic attacks in which I lose all control of my ability to focus, have hot and cold flashes at the same time, feel as if I’m going to burst out of my skin, and am unable to focus on anything. I’ll spend hours alternatively pacing and trying to remain still long enough to get some work done or sleep. I sometimes also experience sudden feelings of guilt, shame and anger, all typical of survivors of war, natural disasters, epidemics, famine, family suicide or childhood trauma.

My occasional symptoms are not the only manifestations of PTSD that inflict sufferers. Far from it. Here are some worse ones: Substance abuse, flashbacks, bad dreams, extreme depression, sleeplessness, loss of memory, sudden bouts of aggression, an inability to form relationships and a lack of trust in others, even loved ones. Everyone can experience these problems from time to time, but when they last more than a month and someone has been involved in a shooting war, raped, escaped a flood or lost their home, it’s a safe bet that they have PTSD.  

Experts like to estimate the percentage of people who have had a specific trauma who end up suffering from PTSD, e.g. only (only!) 30% of Vietnam War veterans will display PSTD symptoms during their lives. Overall, the medical community believes that about 10% of the population will have PSTD, with the occurrence more common in women. I think all the official percentages of those experiencing traumatic conditions who end up with PSTD are low. Lots of people just suffer in silence, or they present symptoms that are poorly understood, e.g., the horde of men who came home from World War II and turned into distant, unemotional fathers and focused their waking hours solely on their careers and/or hid their fears and anxieties inside a bottle. As significant as underreporting is under-diagnosis: society has a vested interest in minimizing the psychic damage to those who fight wars; women who suffer sexual abuse; and the poor, usually minorities, who face food insecurity or have been moved out of their neighborhoods by urban planning or gentrification.

Whatever the unalloyed numbers are, only a fool or an ideologue would deny that a large percentage of the children torn from their families at border crossings will be scarred for life, unhappy, unable to achieve their potential, prone to depression or substance abuse, perhaps always feeling like a lonely outsider. These are human tragedies that didn’t have to occur.

But wait, the cynic among us, will say. These children were refugees from natural disasters or violence, so they already have undergone much trauma. These self-serving apologists seem to forget the special bond between children and their parents. Before the teen years, children’s lives revolve around their parents, who protect them, shelter them, feed them, love them, teach them basic values and provide them with models of human behavior. There’s a lot that parents do to protect children from trauma. They can do without so their children get what they need. They can turn a flight from terror into an adventure. They can articulate a rosy vision of the wonderful future in their new home. They can hug them and tell them they love them and that everything is going to turn out fine.

War, famine, terror, flooding, food insecurity, a sudden plunge into poverty—all children or young adults will handle any trauma better when part of a loving (or even not so loving) family when they face these evils.

But to do it without a parent? To be alone in a large cage inside a windowless building, being herded around by ominous-looking strangers, not knowing if and when you’ll ever see your family—the center of your life—again, not knowing where they are? Why were you torn away from them? When will you see them again? Why won’t they come get you? Don’t they love you anymore?

No matter how horrible a child’s life has been, it gets worse when it is taken from its family. Always.

The Trump Administration has tried an odious argument in favor of parent-child separations, stating that in many cases, the adults aren’t really the parents, but drug dealers who bought, borrowed or stole the children to make it easier to get through border control. Oh, sure there are. Just as there really was at least one woman on welfare who drove a late-model, fully-loaded Cadillac in the late 1970s. And I’m sure that Willie Horton really did commit a violent crime while on parole. But like Reagan’s welfare queen and Bush I’s paroled violent offender, the child who is part of an elaborate ploy to gain illegal admittance to the United States is a statistical anomaly. Studies show that there has never been very much welfare fraud and that most cons on parole say clean. And I’m quite certain that virtually all children who arrive at the border with adults are coming with their parents or another close family member, and not a drug dealer.

Reagan, Bush I and Trump all argued from anecdote and not from fact. The fact is that the United States started doing the “extreme vetting” Trump called for during the 2016 presidential campaign long before Trump demanded that we build a wall along the Mexican border. The proof of it is in the fact that immigrants—legal and otherwise—commit far fewer crimes per capita than native-born Americans. Under Clinton, Bush II and Obama, we developed a state apparatus which is quite good at keeping out bad actors. Breaking up families has not helped fight drug smuggling. It has done nothing but increase misery and assure that perhaps thousands of children will have emotional problems later in life. There was never any reason to automatically separate children from their parents at border control points.

Except of course, to assuage the base urge to be cruel to the downtrodden.

The cruelty of creating thousands of future PTSD sufferers is part of the greater cruelty of turning away refugees at the border. It reminds me of the cruelty with which southern sheriffs enforced Jim Crow laws or attacked Civil Rights protesters. It reminds me of the cruelty with which German soldiers treated Jews, white masters treated African-American slaves, and conquerors have treated the conquered throughout the ages. It’s as if the perpetrator of pain took—and takes—a special sadistic pleasure in hurting others.

In all cases, the underlying reason for the cruelty may have been humanity’s essential bloodthirstiness, but the excuse was that these were lesser people or not people at all—animals as Trump sometimes calls non-European immigrants.

But human beings are not animals. Those who think that some people are animals or no better than animals or want to treat them as animals are despicable human beings. The real deplorables, to take a phrase from the winner of the 2016 presidential popular vote.  

American policy at home and abroad should not be to create more victims of PSTD, but to reduce the circumstances that lead to this psychic ailment.


Friday, August 3, 2018

Will Catholics follow Pope Francis and clamor against the death penalty? And will the Church now campaign against state execution like it has against abortion?


By Marc Jampole
 
By making the opposition to capital punishment part of church law, Pope Francis cited a moral reason to oppose the death penalty: because “it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” Of course, morality is the first victim when people feel threatened. Fear stokes a certain American blood-thirstiness that made a majority of Americans approve the mass incarceration laws of the 1990s and the Bush II torture regime. Fear-induced bloodthirstiness has swayed large numbers of Americans to support the current administration’s mean-hearted treatment of immigrants and refugees.
 

Pew studies show that currently 54% of all Americans and 53% of Catholics favor the state killing people convicted of certain crimes. Only 39% of all Americans and 42% of Catholics oppose the death penalty. Will the Pope’s announcement change minds? Past experience suggest the answer is, “not many,” unless the Catholic Church engages in an aggressive campaign to promote the new position. Even that might not work, considering how many rightwing politicians depend on fear-mongering about crime, drugs, immigrants and terrorism to get elected.
 

Catholics in westernized nations, like their Jewish and Muslim cousins, find it an easy matter to reject religious teachings when it’s convenient for them to do so. A year ago, the Gutmacher Institute reported that 98% of all Catholic women will use birth control methods banned by the Church sometime in their lives. Another Gutmacher study showed that about 24% of all women who have abortions are Catholic. An older Gutmacher survey found that about 2.2% of Catholic women have an abortion each year, compared to 1.8% of Protestant women. About eight years ago, the National Center for Health Statistics reported that 61% of all American women will live in a sexual relationship with someone without the benefit of marriage sometime in their life; based on how Catholics compare to others when it comes to capital punishment, birth control and abortion, we can safely assume that the percentage among Catholics who cohabitate is about the same as the overall population. Thus, Catholics are used to using a “just say no” approach to the teachings of their religion.
 

We can only hope that the Catholic Church throws at least as many resources behind advocating against capital punishment as it has to oppose a woman’s right to control her own body.
 

Morality is just one of several reasons to oppose capital punishment. Here are some of the others:

·         It doesn’t work as a deterrent. The preponderance of the evidence from the studies done on the deterrent effect of capital punishment show that the fear of being executed does not stop murders. And it turns out that, as with a lot of research supporting rightwing positions, many studies claiming to show that capital punishment does deter people from taking the lives of others have severe methodological and mathematical errors. One researcher reran the numbers used in a survey supposedly proving that capital punishment works as a deterrent and found that it actually increased the murder rate!

·         Capital punishment is irrevocable: Juries make mistakes all the time. When the mistake is uncovered, the wrongly convicted person usually eventually gets out of jail. But society can’t reverse an execution.

·         Our adversarial legal system makes executing someone an expensive process. Executing an inmate on death row costs much more than sending an inmate to prison for life without the possibility of parole. Those sentenced to death are guaranteed by the Constitution to a very long, thorough and expensive judicial process before taking the needle. It costs states millions of dollars for each execution.

·         It is unfair, or at least will remain unfair as long as racism and poverty exist. The racial bias to capital verdicts in the United States has existed since record-keeping of such matters began. Wealthy people can afford expensive attorneys, whereas poor people often have to settle for overworked public defenders. The unfairness of capital verdicts reflects and magnifies the unequal treatment of minorities and the poor throughout the judicial system.

·         Virtually all other countries have abolished the death penalty: About 140 nations worldwide, including the vast majority of countries in Western Europe and the Americas, have abandoned capital punishment. The United States remains in the bad company of Iraq, Iran, China and other human rights abusers as countries still engaging in state execution. In the 21st century global village, capital punishment may have become “cruel and unusual punishment” and therefore inherently unconstitutional.

·         It demeans society. Capital punishment reduces society to the level of the murderer. As a society, we are supposed to be better than our worst elements.  Sparing the killer’s life makes us more human and more humane than the killer, and increases the value that our society puts on human life. Sparing the killer is an affirmation of our social contract to live in peace. Sparing the killer tells him or her, and the world, that when we say that human life is holy we mean it.
 

Of course, what the Pope is saying supersedes all these reasons. Even if capital punishment served as a deterrent, it would still be immoral. Even if it were no longer expensive for society or biased against racial minorities and the poor, it would still be immoral. Even if every country in the world allowed state executions, it would still be immoral.

Saturday, July 28, 2018

Editorial: Lying Don Gets Buggy

So Donald Trump’s annual performance review with Russian President Vladimir Putin, closing out his Chaos Tour of Europe, didn’t go as planned. Things appeared to go OK during their two-hour closed-door meeting in Helsinki. The two autocrats emerged smiling for a press conference in which Trump refused to condemn the Kremlin for meddling in the 2016 presidential election, as determined by US intelligence agencies. Instead, he said,“I think the United States has been foolish. I think we’ve all been foolish. I think we’re all to blame.”

Trump repeated a phrase he often uses — that there has been no collusion — and he said accusations of collusion continue to hurt relations between the two countries. Putin, who admitted that he wanted Trump to win the election, gave him a soccer ball from the 2018 World Cup finals, which Russia hosted.

The following day, after Trump returned to the White House, controversy mounted over his assertion that he believed Putin’s word over the findings of the US intelligence community. Trump tried to walk back his remarks, in part, by claiming that “other people” could have also meddled in the 2016 presidential election. Trump also claimed he had simply misspoken by one word during his press conference in Finland. The president explained that he had intended to say he did not see any reason why it “wouldn’t” be Russia.

“I thought that I made myself very clear, but having just reviewed the transcript, I realized that there is a need for some clarification,” Trump said. “The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t, or why it wouldn’t be Russia.’”

Trump also asserted on July 17 that he had “full faith” in US intelligence agencies and also supported their conclusion that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.

Two days later, Putin apparently put Trump on probation and gave him 90 days to restore his pro-Russia attitude, as the White House announced the Russian tyrant was invited to visit the D.C. branch in the fall, possibly to clarify some of the secret agreements they reached in Helsinki, as some of Trump’s Cabinet members had no idea what was up and Trump wasn’t telling.

[After this was written, the White House backtracked and pushed the potential second meeting until next year, possibly at the urging of Republican congressional leaders who weren't looking forward to the visuals of Putin visiting Washington and advertising Russian ties with the Grand Oligarch Party shortly before the mid-term elections. However, Putin on July 27 said he has invited Trump to visit Moscow.]

Trump might get back in Putin’s good graces, but this is no time to despair about the prospects of restoring democracy in America. It should be enough to note that Trump is an habitual liar, as the Washington Post has recorded more than 3,300 false or misleading claims since Trump took office in January 2017, including 74 in one speech at July 5 campaign rally in Montana, which must be a record. Voters can direct a change of course back towards truth and democracy in the mid-term election coming up in November. Since it is clear Republicans won’t check Trump’s excesses it will be up to Americans to put Democrats back in control of Congress.

Keep hope alive in the face of Trump devotees who boast that he will win re-election. As of July 22, the Lying Don had an average of 43.8% approval vs. 52.7% disapproval, among 10 public opinion surveys monitored by Pollster.com. A 43.8% approval rate is not a strong base upon which to mount a re-election campaign. An Ipsos/Reuters poll of 2,357 registered voters on July 13-17 showed 85% of Republican approve of the president, while 86% of registered Democrats disapprove of the president, so the election likely will be decided by independent voters, who disapprove of the president by a more than a two-to-one margin — 63% to 27%. The only way Trump can win re-election is if Republicans prevent many of the 52.7% who oppose Trump from voting. And that is their plan, since it worked in 2016 with suspicious victories in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

The more immediate challenge is the mid-term election on Nov. 6, in which control of Congress will be at stake. The Ipsos/Reuters poll showed 44% would vote Democratic while 35% would vote Republican, while 5% would vote for another candidate.

The most important chamber to target is the Senate, where Democrats need a net gain of two seats to regain the majority. Trump won’t be able to offer much help for Republicans, as his popularity has fallen across the board. When he took office in January 2017, Trump had a net positive rating in 38 states, but that was down to 23 states July 11, according to the Morning Consult’s daily tracking poll.

Democrats have a good chance to pick up open seats from Republicans in Arizona and Tennessee, and Republican Sen. Dean Heller looks vulnerable in Nevada. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, also faces a well-funded challenger in US Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-El Paso, but Democrats’ biggest problem is that only nine Republican seats are up for election this year, while 26 Democratic seats are up for grabs.

Republicans see the most vulnerable Democrats as Bill Nelson in Florida, Joe Donnelly in Indiana, Claire McKaskill in Missouri, Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota and Joe Manchin in West Virginia — all states Trump carried. Republilcans will have plenty of campaign funds to take on those and other Democrats, from the billionaires who got the bulk of $1.5 trillion in tax breaks.

Don’t bet on the elections to set up impeachment. It’s hard to tell what Robert Mueller will produce, of course, but it would need to be grim indeed to put the fear of voters in Republicans who, until now, have acted as Trump apologists and enablers.

Realistically, a Democratic House next year could start hearings, and vote out a bill of impeachment with a simple majority vote, but it takes a two-thirds majority in the Senate to remove the president from office. Even if Democrats won four of the nine Senate seats up for grabs in November, that would give them a 53-47 majority — enough to run the chamber, but where would Democrats gain 14 Republican votes to remove the president? And failing to remove the impeached president would result in Lying Don and his cult proclaiming that he had been acquitted of the “witch hunt.”

However, if Democrats regain control of the Senate, they can stop the approval of partisan Republican judges to federal courts, particularly on appeals courts, and they could reject other bad appointees. It would be sweet to see the Democrats impose the “McConnell rule” on Trump’s right-wing judicial nominees — which is why the Republicans will try to confirm as many judges as possible before the end of the year.

As Mueller closes in on Trump and his family, Lying Don likely will get more desperate. In the past week he finally took flak from Republicans and even from Fox News over his disastrous performance in Helsinki and his flip-flop the next day. So Trump tried to change the subject on July 22 with an all-caps message on Twitter, addressed to President Hassan Rouhani of Iran, warning that Iran would face “CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED” if Rouhani continued to threaten the United States.

Trump’s unhinged message was apparently in response to a speech by Rouhani, who warned the US that any conflict with Iran would be the “mother of all wars.”

Rouhani, who has long been considered a more pragmatic leader who was seen as tolerable to moderates, had earlier threatened the possible disruption of regional oil shipments if its own exports were blocked by US sanctions.

Of course, Trump has been spoiling for a fight with Iran, unilaterally withdrawing from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal in May, and announcing that the US would re-impose sanctions on Iran, in violation of the UN-sponsored deal. US trade partners in Europe will have to decide whether to abide with their deal with Iran or submit to Trump’s demands that they also violate the deal.

If “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” as Samuel Johnson said, Trump will become the Scoundrel in Chief in pursuit of “better ratings.” Don’t let him fool you, America. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2018
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Selections from the August 15, 2018 issue

COVER/Vijay Prashad
Trump will send oil and gas prices soaring even higher

EDITORIAL
Lying Don gets buggy

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

DON ROLLINS
Business as usual between Pentagon and big sport. 

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
What is wrong with that man?

DISPATCHES
Consercative Dems seek to move agenda right;
Trump White House considers stripping security clearances of Trump critics. Just one problem;
What if Trump threatened a war and nobody cared?
Fossil fuel lobbyist spend $2B to kill US climate action;
From Supreme Court to ballot, Trump Obamacare sabotage is toxic;
Trump solidifies base, but GOP sheds indy support;
Va. GOP candidate laughed at for claiming Trump is 'standing up' to Russia;
Coal miners contract black lung disease at record rate;
FBI's top cybersecurity officials are jumping ship;
Trump fumes over North Korea failing to honor handshake;
Native Ameican pipeline protesters enter plea ageements to avoid long prison terms ...

ART CULLEN
Climate change is real

JILL RICHARDSON
Soon you can’t use food stamps at farmers markets — but that’s not half of it

JOHN YOUNG
So much like Watergate, and so much worse

BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Give people money

JOSH HOXIE
Our missing $10 trillion

JOHN L. MICEK
Congress too weak to stop trade war

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Beat bad grammar at the ballot box

SAM PIZZIGATI
A sweet new century for America’s most privileged

BOB LORD
How to level the playing field for workers, even with unions hurting

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Dribbling out profits: Of catsup and eye drops

SAM URETSKY
Has it happened here? Can we stop it from happening again? 

BOB BURNETT
Remind me, what do liberals believe?

WAYNE O’LEARY
The not-so-grand old party

JOHN BUELL
Who are the real extremists?

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Kavanaugh is a political, partisan jurist

SATIRE/Barry Friedman
From the archives: This week mit Marte Bruger

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Borderline foolishness

ROB PATTERSON
Facebook is so 2016

MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Dystopian racial apocalypse tomorrow: May the purge be with you

SETH SANDRONSKY
Treating immigrants like people

Monday, July 23, 2018

New York Times news staff makes up false narrative that there are extreme differences between left & mainstream Democrats, but never tell us what those differences are


By Marc Jampole


An unstated but obvious unofficial policy of the New York Times is to undercut the Democratic Party in news stories, even as it pretends to support virtually all of the positions that Democrats hold in its editorials.
 

The game this year consists of using the heavily-charged word “socialist” as much as possible to describe the more left-leaning Democrats while playing up a supposed generational divide between more progressive millennials and their centrist-leaning elders. As we will see, it’s a completely false narrative meant to suppress the Democratic vote and drive independents to hold their nose and vote for Trump’s-boot-licking Republicans. (Begging the question: Is that “boot” or “bootie” to which servile GOP candidates have placed their puckered lips.)
 

This Sunday’s Times followed this false narrative to a tee. Both the front page lead story and the lead story of the national news page focused exclusively on the divide between mainstream Democrats and the charismatic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives who have won primaries. Both articles stress that Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and others call themselves democratic socialists; sometimes the articles sometimes drop the “democratic.”
 

The problem is the Times never defines what a democratic socialist is and what democratic socialism stands for.
 

“Socialism,” of course has long been a dirty word in the United States invoking totalitarianism and complete social control to the right-wing and to the many centrists brainwashed by decades of fear of the Soviet Union’s corrupt and autocratic version of socialism. Right-wingers have long labeled such government programs as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps as “socialist” in hopes of convincing the public that because socialism was bad, so were these programs. They’ve labelled regulatory efforts as socialist. Their arguments would fail miserably unless the public accepted the premise that socialism was evil. 

Which of course, it’s not. Historically, socialism referred to the government collectively owning and administering the means of production and distribution of goods. But in the real world, there’s a vast continuum of government intervention and control.  Europe provides a number of models of democratic socialism: governments addressing social challenges such as health care, retirement and education; unions having a greater say in the management of companies or in the development of national industrial policy; greater regulation of businesses to protect the environment or consumers or set standards of employment and wages. The European democracies, Japan, Canada, and—let’s face it—even the United States all have mixed economies that graft various socialist solutions onto private enterprise and the free market.
 

By not getting into any of what constitutes democratic socialism, the Times let’s stand the decades of fear-mongering rightwing demonization of the word “socialism.”   
 

Moreover, the Times attempts to exaggerate the differences between more centrist and more leftist Democrats by never talking about what those differences are. The headline of one of the articles says “Democrats Are Bracing for a Progressive Storm Brewing Far to the Left.” The articles quote a number of Democrats suggesting that extreme differences exist between mainstream Democrats and the candidates subscribing to “hard-left ideology.”
 

Yet in the two articles, which stretch across more than two pages of text and photographs, only three times does the Times mention what position any Democrat has on any issue. A phrase of text and a photo caption point out that Ben Jealous, running for governor in Maryland, is in favor of single payer health care. The other reference is this weird sentence referring to voters in Republican districts: “Across most of the approximately 60 Republican-held districts that Democrats are contesting, primary voters have chosen candidates who seem to embody change — many of them women and minorities — but who have not necessarily endorsed positions like single-payer health care and abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency.” The only way to understand that sentence in the context of the article is to assume that single-payer and a desire to dismantle ICE are extremist positions with which mainstream Dems disagree.
 

The Times never mentions what the differences between the “far left” and the rest of the party are, never does an issue-by-issue comparison. And there’s a good reason for it. There are few real differences, and those that exist are quibbles, at best.  While I’m quite confident that large numbers of Democrats do not want to see ICE abolished, virtually all want to see it reformed. Surveys suggest that most Dems like the single-payer concept when presented to them as “Medicare for all.”
 

Now let’s look at the large number of issues that the Times doesn’t mention. Surveys tell us that that virtually all Democrats:

·         Want to raise the minimum wage. The quibble in the past election cycle was that Bernie wanted to raise it to $15 right away, whereas Hillary wanted to do so over a period of time.

·         Want more government support of public education, especially higher education.

·         Think the tax package passed late last year was a giveaway to the rich and want to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

·         Want to give the Dreamers a path to citizenship and help refugees seeking asylum in the United States.

·         Are against the dismantling of regulations that protect the environment and consumers.

·         Support a woman’s right to an abortion and fear that Roe v. Wade may be overturned.

·         Support the Mueller investigation and want to prosecute any American who collaborated with the Russians to fix the election in favor of any candidate.
 

Most of all, virtually every Democrat wants to rein in Donald Trump by electing a Congress that is not afraid to overrule his actions with legislation and make certain that his appointees are competent and not irrational ideologues or thieving cronies.
 
As we have seen, all Democrats pretty much share the same basic views, especially when contrasted with the Trumpublicans. The only way to conceal this underlying unity, however, is not to mention or talk about issues, something that the Times news staff has proven itself quite capable of doing.

Thursday, July 19, 2018

In-country with Trump supporters: As long as there are tax cuts and a conservative Supreme Court, they’re happy


By Marc Jampole

I took a brief trip to Pittsburgh this week during the two-day outburst of treasonous remarks by Donald Trump, who first said he believed Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin over U.S. intelligence services, then tried to weasel out of it by focusing on one word of one sentence of a long diatribe, but still managed to get in a dig undermining the intelligence agencies yet again.
Being in Pittsburgh meant I spent some time with two old friends who are Trump supporters. Although both are long-time Republicans, neither is a virulent racist and both are old-fashioned cold warriors, so their support of Trump in light of his denial of Russian tampering in the 2016 elections and the likelihood his campaign colluded with the Russians is both frightening and illuminating.
One of my friends is a high-level professional service vendor in his late 50s whose expertise mostly helps nonprofit organizations. He lives in a distant white suburb and is extremely Christian, building virtually all of his non-work life around his church. My guess is his family’s net worth is about like mine—upper middle class. The other friend is in his late 70s, retired from working for the government in a position in which he primarily interacted with poor people. For decades has also pursued a career in the arts that has made him prominent local presence. He lives in a diverse city neighborhood and has libertarian views on social matters, although he is definitely against a woman’s absolute right to get an abortion. He barely scrapes by on his pension and savings.
There are many things that should have offended these guys about Trump from the first. His all-too-frequent rude comments and multiple marriages and affairs should have disgusted my Christian friend. As a small business entrepreneur, he should have seen through Trump’s bluster and realized the Donald is a bad businessperson except in the narrow specialty of mass-appeal branding. He should have also resented the thousands of lawsuits filed against Trump for breaking contracts with small contractors and suppliers. The racism and treatment of women should have turned off my friend who lives in the city, who has a number of African-American acquaintances and is what I call a “true ladies’ man,” meaning he always has a lady friend because he respects women and treats them as equal, at least in public.
Both of these guys have a hard time accepting reality when it contradicts their beliefs, but in profoundly different ways. The fervent Christian is used to dealing with facts and reality and is ready to accept science, but when the facts undermine his basic beliefs, the scales seem to fall from his eyes for literally a nanosecond before forming again as he retreats into an almost catatonic state in which he keeps repeating a core doctrine. Several times over the years I have tried to convince him that lowering taxes on the wealthy and corporations does not create jobs or grow the economy. I have carefully explained that the government spends all its money, whereas rich folk and business put their extra cash from a tax break into assets that form bubbles, like real estate and secondary stock market. He admitted that he—like me—has put the proceeds from our recent tax break into the secondary stock market, meaning it doesn’t go to any company and creates no new jobs. He had this moment of realization that I was right and then his eyes glazed over and he said in an affectless, hypnotized drone, “Tax cuts are good. We should cut taxes more.” Another time, he and a group of other conservatives who all owned companies that serve nonprofit organizations were complaining that their business was down. I patiently explained that a large number of their clients depend on government contracts and cuts by federal and state governments were choking these organizations. I proposed that we raise taxes to what they once had been so the state had more money to fund these organizations, all of which deliver vital services. Again, I could see the look of epiphany in their eyes—the beam that says, Eureka, “Yes, he’s right!” Then almost in unison, as if members of a cult, they said, “Can’t raise taxes. Must lower taxes more.” My friend’s faith in the false Reaganist creed of cutting taxes is as strong as his faith in the truth of every word in the Bible.
My other friend argues from a cynicism born of no faith in anything. He explicitly states that he prefers to believe a single anecdote that supports his argument than reams of facts and studies that prove that what he thinks is wrong. Now in Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman uses extensive research to show that many if not most people are exactly the same, putting more credence in anecdotes than facts. But hardly anyone admits it as brazenly as my friend, who reasons that all research is suspect because it always reflects the biases of the people or organizations paying for it. He lives in a post-Karl Rove world in which reality is a construct of those strong enough to force their version on everyone else. It was Rove who said, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” My friend’s argues that if all research is inherently corrupt, he might as well believe the stuff that supports his side. It’s the scholarly equivalent of fake news. All news is fake and all pursuits of knowledge are fake. If it sounds like Machiavellian rhetoric, that’s because it is. His true belief may rely on faith, but he maintains it through a cynical and amoral disregard of truth. In this, he resembles Trump.
When I asked them why they continue to support Trump, I get the same answer: Trump has done more good than bad. They mention they like the tax breaks, the Supreme Court justices and placing the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. They also point out that they don’t like the tariffs. No mention of the treatment of immigrants or the massive rollback of regulations that protect the environment and consumers. In a real way, my friends reflect the attitude of Republican leadership, which forgives anything Trump does or says, as long as they get their tax breaks, relief from government regulation and a conservative Supreme Court. If Trump delivers those things, they’ll overlook all of the man’s failings. And that includes treason.

Saturday, July 14, 2018

Editorial: Negotiating with Tariffists

Donald Trump has been throwing his weight around on global trade matters with little apparent long-term planning. He threatened tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. Then, when America’s trade partners retaliated with tariffs on American products, he upped the ante. When he proposed tariffs on $34 billion worth of Chinese imports, Beijing retaliated with tariffs on an equal value of US goods, including beef, pork, soybeans, cars and computer chips. So Trump has threatened to escalate the battle with tariffs on more than $200 billion worth of goods from China.

Trump got a lot of mileage in his 2016 campaign with his co-opting of the populist belief that “free trade” deals have contributed to the misery and inequality afflicting working-class communities in America. That may have made the difference in his razor-thin victories in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

But when, as president, he started the saber rattling, Trump showed little sense of the trouble he was unleashing. “Trade wars are good and easy to win,” he tweeted in March. He had imposed tariffs on solar panels, newsprint and washing machines before he started the war on foreign steel and aluminum. But after he announced tariffs on steel and aluminum from Canada, Mexico and the European Union on “national security” grounds, EU officials announced they would apply tariffs on a series of American goods, including Harley-Davidson motorcycles. When Harley-Davidson announced it would move some production overseas to avoid the tariffs, which would increase the cost of motorcycles by an average of $2,200, Trump urged the company to “be patient.”

Trump, a practiced grifter, advises American businesses and farmers to “be patient” in the same way itinerant driveway pavers collect a down payment, and advise the homeowner to “be patient” when they promise to be back in a week or so to do the work.

Tariffs on Mexico, Canada and the European Union are questionable, as they are traditional allies and do not engage in the sort of predatory trade practices China uses. Trump could use some allies in his attempt to rein in China, but the alienation of US trading partners comes at a time when Trump suggests he is also considering reducing the US commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The Mexican and Canadian tariffs also could wreak havoc on economies that are closely integrated with neighboring US states after 24 years under NAFTA. Goods and services trade with Canada totaled $673.9 billion in 2017, with a net trade surplus of $8.4 billion for the US, owing to its $25.9 billion surplus in services, according to the Office of US Trade Representative.

According to the Department of Commerce, US exports to Canada supported 1.6 million jobs in 2015 (the latest data available). The tariffs are supposed to protect 140,000 US steelworker jobs.

Goods and services trade with Mexico totaled $616.6 billion in 2017. Exports were $276.2 billion; imports were $340.3 billion with a US deficit of $64.1 billion in 2017. However, the US had a services trade surplus of $7.8 billion, and trade with Mexico supported 1.2 million US jobs in 2015.

US goods and services trade with the EU totaled nearly $1.1 trillion in 2016, making it the largest trading partner with the US, and a net trade deficit for the US of $92 billion, or less than 1%.

The US had a $147 billion deficit on goods trade with the EU out of a total of $686 billion in 2016. But the US had a $55 billion surplus in services with the EU out of a total of $407 billion, and US exports to the EU supported 2.6 million US jobs in 2015.

The largest trade deficit is with China, which did $648.5 billion in trade with the US, and recorded a $385 billion goods and services surplus in 2016. US exports to China supported 911,000 jobs in 2015, with 601,000 supported by goods exports and 309,000 supported by services exports.

Now that Trump has targeted a wide range of Chinese products, the conflict is likely to cause collateral damage among American companies that rely on those products in the global supply chains. The White House also is placing restrictions on investment and on visas for Chinese nationals as leverage to force Beijing to make changes, including opening its markets to American companies and ending its practice of requiring firms operating in China to hand over valuable technology.

The New York Times reported July 5 that companies like Husco International, a Wisconsin-based manufacturer of parts for companies like Ford, General Motors, Caterpillar and John Deere, now face a 25% increase on a variety of parts imported from China. Austin Ramirez, Husco International’s chief executive, said that increase would immediately put him and other American manufacturers at a disadvantage to competitors abroad.

“The people it helps most of all are my competitors in Germany and Japan, who also have large parts of their supply chain in Asia but don’t have these tariffs,” he said.

Farmers also have been hit by Chinese retaliatory tariffs on pork and soybeans — a serious blow, as China has been a market for mor than half of American soybean exports, and fears of the tariffs have pushed down the price of soybeans by roughly 15% in recent months, wiping out potential profits for that crop. American farmers also risk losing key markets in the long term, as farmers in Brazil are boosting soybean production to scoop up the Chinese market.

Progressive Democrats should support the need to renegotiate NAFTA, the World Trade Organization and other trade deals to preserve the authority of governments to regulate business and industry and abolish investor-state dispute settlement panels that can overrule national courts. Progressives should promote a trade policy that protects labor and environmental standards.

But remember that Trump has no principles guiding his trade or immigration campaigns. As a developer, he used undocumented Polish workers in 1980 to demolish a department store to make way for Trump Tower; then he forced them to go to court to get paid. Trump's resort, Mar-a-Lago, in June asked the Department of Labor for 61 H2-B visas for foreign servers and cooks. He used cheap Chinese steel and aluminum in Trump hotels in Las Vegas and Chicago and he has used Chinese factories to make his merchandise. His campaign gets flags from a Chinese factory whose owner said he has already started to make flags for Trump’s 2020 campaign. And White House adviser Ivanka Trump’s foreign-made products on her fashion line won’t be touched by tariffs.

And on May 13, two days after state-owned Metallurgical Corporation of China offered to lend $500 million to Indonesian developers to finance a Trump-branded resort in Indonesia, Trump pledged to help ZTE, a Chinese telecom equipment manufacturer with ties to the Chinese government, recover from a $1.19 billion fine and a ban on dealing with US companies, after ZTE sold technology products in North Korea and Iran, in violation of sanctions, then lied about it to US officials. US intelligence officials also warned of security risks in allowing ZTE phones to be used by government employees. But Trump tweeted: “President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast. Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!”

When asked about the business deal in Indonesia, White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah referred questions to the Trump Organization, saying, “You’re asking about a private organization’s dealings.”

So don’t count on Tariffist Trump to do the right thing. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2018
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Selections from the August 1, 2018 issue

COVER/Kent Paterson
López Obrador’s victory in Mexico raises hopes in Latin America

EDITORIAL
Negotiating with tarrifists

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
Young democratic socialists bringing the heat

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Yes, the planet is at risk

DISPATCHES
Trump freezes Obamacare payments, further undermining affordable care;
Louisiana Medicaid expansion may have saved thousands of lives;
Brett Kavanaugh picked to kill the ‘administrative state’;
Trump administration comes out against breastfeeding;
Pruitt’s successor at EPA may be more dangerous;
Heat waves could rise another 12°F;
Surely Trump will strip citizenship carefully;
Rural groups urge Congess invest in rural business ...

ART CULLEN
Dems must address rural voters

JILL RICHARDSON
Knowing when to turn off the news

JOHN YOUNG
Inside the GOP rationalization chamber

RICHARD ESKOW
How to cover a revolution

MARK ANDERSON
Homeowner seeks court action against fraudulent foreclosures

BOB BURNETT
Telling the truth about immigration

JIM VAN DER POL
There’s more to immigration than people piling up at the border

WENONAH HAUTER
What fossil fuels and factory farms have in common

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Barreling toward dystopia

SAM URETSKY
What they think they know makes Trump supporters dangerous

SETH SANDRONSKY  
Labor rules expand skimpy ‘association health plans’

WAYNE O’LEARY
The wages of Trump

JOHN BUELL
Paramilitary politics and the world’s children

N. GUNASEKARAN
Asia’s environment becoming ‘full-blown crisis’

CLAUDIA ZEQUEIRA
What zero tolerance means for refugee families

ROB PATTERSON
Interest in Hitler heats up

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Gut check

MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
When 1 million Americans voted socialist

BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Too big to fail to catch the irony
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