The Progressive Populist Today Blog

Friday, March 1, 2019

Selections from the March 15, 2019 issue

COVER/Daniel Ross
Factory farms pollute the environment and poison drinking water

EDITORIAL
Curb the deadbeat dictator

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
Kaepernick, Reid and the heritage

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen p. 5
What happens when a hog lot moves in near you?

DISPATCHES
Trump approval tops 50% in only 17 states;
Trump presidency continues to devalue his brand;
Green New Deal doesn’t mention farting cows;
CNN hires Republican operative to head 2020 election coverage;
Drug seizures show empty promise of Trump border wall;
Supreme Court limits civil asset forfeiture;
Coast Guard officer accused of plotting murder of prominent Dems and media personalities;
US hints at military intervention after Venezuelans block 'aid'
NC cout attacks fruits of illegal gerrymandering;
Trump's shameless fli-fop on high=speed rail;
Didn't see the death of clouds coming ...

JIM GOODMAN
The Green New Deal outlines the change society needs

ART CULLEN
Help wanted: Rural America needs immigrants

JILL RICHARDSON
Take it from me: Addiction doesn’t start at the border

JOHN YOUNG
A border crisis sized to TV screens

JIM VAN DER POL
We need more people, and fewer factories, in farming

LEO GERARD
Standing together on trade with China

JASON SIBERT
Make arms control great again

BOB BURNETT
Next steps

MARK ANDERSON
Spending bill saves sensitive areas from border wall

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
High class robbery

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Mexican pollution pours under border wall

WAYNE O’LEARY
They’re off and running

JOHN BUELL
Resetting the doomsday clock

FR. DONNELL KIRCHNER
Going over Trump’s wall might lead to better things

ROB PATTERSON
A soft focus on Quincy Jones

BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
We won’t go back

ED RAMPELL
A super supernatural socialist show

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Punxsutawney Phil sees Trump’s shadow and cries

PAUL ARMENTANO
Marijuana can help fight opioid abuse

Thursday, February 14, 2019

Editorial: Don’t Play Trump’s Game

Donald Trump and the Republicans obviously want to run against socialism and “open borders” in 2020. Democrats shouldn’t let Trump set the terms of the debate, but should run on progressive populist solutions to improve economic opportunities for working Americans.

“We renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country,” Trump said in his State of the Union speech Feb. 5.

Republicans already are claiming that Democrats, given half a chance, would turn the US into another Venezuela. At the same time the increasingly authoritarian Grand Oligarch Party pushes to build an Iron Curtain along our southern border.

Of course, Republicans have been calling Democrats socialists ever since Franklin D Roosevelt and his advisers drafted the New Deal to revive the economy from the Great Depression in the 1930s — and the accusation that Roosevelt was a socialist was a source of amusement and/or resentment for real socialists ever since. But, socialist or not, voters re-elected FDR three times as the New Deal revived the economy from the Great Depression and saved many a family’s farm and livelihood.

FDR’s government did not take over the means of production, which is the actual definition of socialism, but the New Deal provided support for farmers, created public works programs that put millions of Americans back to work, set up Social Security, which included unemployment insurance, welfare programs and income for disabled people and retirees, and it gave workers the right to organize into unions and bargain collectively. Above all, FDR’s New Deal saved capitalism by regulating it, and the plutocrats never forgave him.

The New Deal coalition dominated Congress through the 1960s, although Southern Democrats and Republicans formed coalitions to roll back the rights of labor organizations with the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 and resisted other liberal initiatives. The New Deal’s last hurrah was Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program, which included the Civil Rights Act and the War on Poverty in 1964, the Voting Rights Act and Medicare in 1965, Medicaid in 1966, as well as consumer and environmental protections, as he got Congress to create the Department of Transportation as a cabinet-level agency and provided federal funding for education, affordable housing, rural development and the arts and public broadcasting.

Opposition to the War in Vietnam and backlash against passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in the South and among conservative Democrats in the North gave Republicans an opportunity to exploit divisions in the New Deal coalition. That helped Richard Nixon win the presidency in 1968, but Democrats continued to control Congress until 1981, when Republicans gained a majority in the Senate to work with Ronald Reagan during the first six years of his presidency. But Republicans lost the Senate in 1987 and it was not until 1995, in the third year of Bill Clinton’s first term, that Republicans managed to get control of the House and Senate.

In 1999, the Republican Congress, with Clinton’s signature, repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which had separated commercial and investment banks, preventing commercial banks from getting involved in speculative stock deals and investment banks from accepting federally insured deposits. The financial services industry made it through eight years of free-market capitalism under George W. Bush before excessive risk-taking by banks, dealing in subprime mortgage debt securities, caused the financial crisis of 2007-08, which spread to a global economic downturn.

It fell to Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress to clean up the mess the free-market Republicans left them, and they proceeded to pass an $800 billion economic stimulus package in February 2009. Obama also approved loans for General Motors and Chrysler to continue operations while they reorganized in March 2009. The stock market bottomed out in March 2009 before beginning the climb back up; the unemployment rate peaked at 10% in October 2009 before the economic recovery kicked in. By November 2012 unemployment had dropped to 7.7% and it continued to drop in Obama’s second term, down to 4.7% when he left office in January 2017.

Republicans accused Obama of being a socialist, of course, so the term has lost much of its sting — so much that young Americans who have grown up since the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics are more likely to associate socialism with prosperous democratic socialist states, such as Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

Axios reported Feb. 2 that centrist potential Democratic candidates for president are rethinking their plans because the “rising Democratic enthusiasm for big government liberalism” might limit their appeal.

“Michael Bloomberg and former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, each of whom were virtual locks to run, are having serious second thoughts after watching Democrats embrace ‘Medicare for All,’ big tax increases and the Green New Deal,” Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei reported for Axios. “Joe Biden, who still wants to run, is being advised to delay any plans to see how this lurch to the left plays out. If Biden runs, look for Bloomberg and McAuliffe to bow out, the sources tell us.”

The Axios writers also noted polling in Iowa “by a prominent 2020 hopeful found that the Democratic electorate has moved sharply left. For instance, the polling found that ‘socialism’ had a net positive rating, while ‘capitalism’ had a net negative rating.”

If so, good feelings toward socialism might reflect national trends. A Gallup Poll found for the first time in August 2018 that Democrats have a more positive view of socialism than capitalism. In 2016, 56% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents had a positive view of capitalism and 58% had a positive view of socialism. By 2018, only 45% had a positive view of capitalism while 57% were positive about socialism.

Among Americans aged 18-29 in the Gallup Poll, 45% were positive about capitalism while 51% were positive about socialism, but older Americans favored capitalism over socialism, with people aged 30-49 favoring capitalism (57%) over socialism (41%), people aged 50-64 favoring capitalism over socialism 60% to 30% and people aged 65 and over favoring capitalism 60% to 28%.

A supermajority of Americans also support taxes that hit the rich. A Fox News poll in January found 70% of voters support raising taxes on those with incomes of over $10 million and 65% support higher taxes on those with incomes over $1 million.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, who actually calls himself a democratic socialist, got over 12 million votes and narrowly lost the Democratic nomination in 2016 to centrist Hillary Clinton. With high-profile victories of democratic socialists last year, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York’s 14th Congressional District, the Democratic Socialists of America’s membership has grown from 7,000 members to over 50,000 since 2016.

Support for socialism may have grown in the past few years, but Democrats don’t need to spend time and resources trying make the case for socialism among voters over 30. Democrats should embrace the time-tested brand of progressive populism, which has promoted greater equity among people, rights for labor and farmers, regulation of capitalism, improved social services and universal health care in the United States for the past century.

Above all, Democrats should tell voters what they’ll do if they get back in power. And a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, expansion of Social Security benefits to raise all retirees above the poverty level, and federal grants that make university education affordable for everybody who can make the grade — all paid by higher taxes on the superrich — is a good start. But we’ll let the capitalists keep their corporations, as long as they’ll behave. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2019

Populist.com

Selections from the March 1, 2019 issue

COVER/Elizabeth Henderson
Why sustainable agriculture should support a Green New Deal

EDITORIAL
Don’t play Trump’s game

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
New journalism and the truth behind the facts

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Plant milkweed and trees for life

DISPATCHES
Trump tax ‘cuts’ may become political disaster.
Trump tells at least 28 lies in State of the Union speech.
NAFTA rewrite would lock in high med prices.
Black Virginians support Gov. Northam in blackface scandal.
Green New Deal reflects 2016 Democratic platform, but stronger.
Senate Leader McConnell linked to Russian oligarchs as sanctions lifted.
Loss of newspapers leads to political polarization.
ICE confirms asylum seekers on hunger strike ae being force-fed.
Trump trade war pushes farmers into record number of bankruptcies.

JIM VAN DER POL
Nursing the soil back to life

JOHN YOUNG
Third-party math is Trump’s fondest calculation

JILL RICHARDSON
People who seek mental health treatment should be applauded

ART CULLEN
Can candidates define the national conversation for 2020 amid the chaos?

ART CULLEN
What is a ‘Green’ New Deal?

BOB BURNETT
State of the Union 2019: Two visions

JOEL D. JOSEPH
States should squeeze college coaches to lower tuition and house students

PETER CERTO
People who care about democracy don’t plot coups abroad

GENE NICHOL
A minimal wage

JOSH HOXIE
How the age of billionaires ends

JAMES EGGERT
The real crisis

FR. DONNELL KIRCHNER
What is right and what is wrong?

SAM URETSKY
How little pharma grew up

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Canaries and the politics of immiseration

SETH SANDRONSKY
Activists, banks and for-profit immigrant prisons

WAYNE O’LEARY
Corruption incorporated

JOHN BUELL
The return of the strike?

KENT PATERSON
The hot honeymoon of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador

BARRY FRIEDMAN
Can we all just lighten up about Howard Schultz?

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Tidying up with Trump

ROB PATTERSON
Blacklist and blue

BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Fear ... and loathing, but mostly fear

THEATRE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
‘Birds of Passage’ depicts the devastation of drug trafficking for South America’s indigenous people

Wednesday, February 6, 2019

Private insurers will make a lot of money off Medicare-for-all, but that’s okay: everyone will be covered and overall costs will go down

By Marc Jampole

There are a number of myths floating around the mainstream news media that portray Medicare-for-all as politically unviable, too expensive and impossible to implement.

The biggest misconception is that there would be no place for the politically powerful private insurance companies if everyone is on the government plan. This myth proposes that the eradication of private insurers makes passing a Medicare-for-all bill virtually impossible. If it did pass, consumer choice in plans would be severely limited, because private sector competition creates choice. Yet even a cursory look at the real world proves that only people with no actual experience of Medicare could seriously entertain the idea that Medicare-for-all would eliminate private insurers.

Private insurance has been an integral part of Medicare for decades, in three ways:

Private insurance companies offer supplemental plans that pay for the 20% of medical costs that Medicare doesn’t cover.
Private insurers also sell Medicare Advantage plans, which replace Medicare coverage with coverage through a private insurance company that Medicare pays for. Typically these plans offer a dental and eye benefit and wellness programs, but they also usually force participants to use a limited healthcare network of physicians and facilities. All of the Advantage plans saddle participants with co-pays.
Private companies offer prescription drug policies (Medicare Part D).

I doubt an American single-payer system could exist without the support of private companies. What’s more, private companies should embrace the Medicare-for-all concept. Although they will be forced to offer less profitable policies, tens of millions more people will be covered, a bonanza opportunity for private healthcare insurers. Moreover, the more people who are covered, the lower the overall cost of healthcare coverage, which will cut costs at the level of the individual insurance provider.

The next myth is that Medicare-for-all will give people less choice. Nothing could be further from the truth. For one thing, people don’t get that much choice to begin with. Virtually every private healthcare insurer offers the same portfolios of benefits, with the same perks like wellness classes and on-line tools and apps, differing only in the size and composition of their provider networks and the combination of deductibles and co-pays they require. Everyone offers annual physicals. No one will pay for custom shoes unless the patient has diabetes. Cardiac stress tests, yes. Coronary calcium tests, no.

In fact, I would assert that Medicare offers more choice than private commercial insurance. For the past 15-20 years, it has been impossible to find a commercial plan that didn’t have co-pays or deductibles. I know, because I tried many times, having gotten use to buying healthcare plans without co-pays or deductibles for the employees of my company before the insurers did away with premium-only policies. (BTW, my company always paid the entire premium for employees and their families.)

By contrast, Medicare offers people the option of buying a supplemental plan—from a private insurance company—that pays all the costs that Medicare doesn’t cover without a deductible or a co-pay. That’s the kind of choice that appeals to this American!

Perhaps the most egregiously wrong-headed myth about Medicare-for-all is that it will be so expensive that it will bankrupt the country. That makes no sense, assuming that the money that companies and individuals now pay for commercial insurance goes towards taxes to pay for Medicare-for-all. It’s true that more people will be covered, but research and the results of Obamacare show that the more people who are covered, the lower the cost to insure each. The uninsured tend to wait until they are very sick to seek medical care, often using the very expensive emergency department. Society pays for those costs in one way or the other. It is much less expensive when people get regular check-ups, get their flu shots and other needed vaccinations, and are encouraged to go to the doctor as soon as they get sick. Most economic estimates predict that Medicare-for-all will eventually drive down the cost of medical care.

But who will pay? That’s the big question and the big fear. The answer, however, should be obvious: raise the Medicare tax on both employers and employees so that the additional tax collected is somewhat close to the current total cost for non-Medicare related commercial policies. We could exempt employees earning under a certain amount, but not their employers. We would, of course, have to make certain the tax applied to sole proprietors, freelancers and the companies who hire gig economy employees. At the end of the day, though, rich folk will tend to subsidize a Medicare-for-all system, while poor people will pay less than what they use. The same will be said for healthy people and young adults who will use the system less and the elderly and infirm, who will use it more.

This solution will leave some companies and individuals paying less for healthcare than they currently do and some paying more. But let’s remember that when governments decided to standardize weights and measures, merchants with scales that were “light” made less money as they adjusted what a pound meant up and merchants with “heavy” pound scales made more as they started selling “pounds” that weighed less. Likewise, when governments decided to prevent bakers from putting sawdust in bread—some bakers made more money and others made less. When American governments in the first half of the 20th century decided to tax mass transit systems while subsidizing the construction of highways, some companies and individuals made more money and some made less. When a government decides to go to war, change a safety standard, ask for a new piece of paperwork, or do just about anything, someone is going to make more money and someone is going to make less. That’s the nature of all economies. Don’t mistake these comments as an argument against regulation, though: the decisions of companies and consumers also always economically benefit certain parties and hurt others. Just ask towns when factories move away or the employees of small downtown stores when Wal-Mart builds a super store at a nearby mall. Or the people who manufacture Cleveland Cavalier paraphernalia.

Political questions always come down to who benefits and who pays. In the case of Medicare-for-all, a system can be created in which everyone, including the private insurance industry, benefits, except those rich folk who don’t like to subsidize the health care of others, those racists who don’t like society to help minorities, and those fanatics deathly afraid that people will like Medicare-for-all so much that they’ll start doubting the ideology of the free market which to many conservatives is their most cherished religious belief. In other words, only those who believe in or benefit from the politics of selfishness should fear Medicare-for-all.

Monday, February 4, 2019

In defiance of Nov’s blue wave & will of the people, NRA pursues challenging NYC’s strict gun law & Trump acts to make it easier to sell AK-15’s abroad

By Marc Jampole

The blue wave that swept Democrats into office on the local, state and federal levels has given progressives and centrists hope that legislatures will soon start passing tougher gun control laws.

Meanwhile back at the ranch—or in Trump’s case, the garish, overpriced resort—those who want to expand the sale of guns and the rights of gun owners to create unsafe environments for everyone else are winning two major victories, both of which will lead to an increase in gun-related crimes, deaths and acts of terrorism in the United States and around the world.

When I write “in the United States,” I specifically mean my home town of New York City. As Amy Davidson Sorkin describes so well in her “Talk of the Town” article in the February 4 New Yorker, the New York state affiliate of the National Rifle Association and two Bronx gun owners are trying to get the Big Apple’s gun law declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law is so tough that gun owners can take their guns out of their home only if they are unloaded and in a locked case. It will be the first time the Court will be considering gun rights since its awful 5-4 decision in D.C. v. Heller that proposed that the Second Amendment gave people an absolute right to bear arms that had nothing to do with serving in a government militia. With Brett Kavanaugh on the court, it’s likely that the New York City gun law will be overturned.

I take this lawsuit personally. In fact, it pisses me off bigly. One of the reasons I moved back to New York seven years ago after being gone for decades was because of the extremely tough gun control laws. It’s a no-brainer to figure out why New York has among the very lowest rates of crime, violent crime and murders anywhere in the United States. It is effectively illegal to carry a gun in the street and there is a relatively low level of gun ownership. Every legitimate study on the issue shows that the lower the number of guns in a locality, region or country, the fewer deaths and injuries from guns; the higher the number of guns, the higher the deaths and injuries from guns. No wonder New York is so safe. I can’t be the only New Yorker offended to the quick that these Bronx bozos and the NRA want to force their minority views on the overwhelming number of New Yorkers who like to be able to walk the streets and ride the subway safely. Keep in mind that large majorities of Americans, including gun owners, want stronger gun control laws, including the banning of assault weapons like AK-15’s and wait periods for all gun purchases.

Gun sales are down in the United States, primarily because gun owners loaded up on weapons during the Obama years, when they feared administrative action to regulate firearms ownership. But while enjoying success in corrupting and intimidating legislators on all levels of government, the NRA has not been able to grow its market, as the number of gun owners has declined steadily over the past 50 years. Of course, each of these gun owners own more guns than they used to. There are, however, still only so many guns the shrinking number of gun owners can afford to buy.

Luckily for U.S. firearms manufacturers and unfortunately for everyone else, the Trump administration intends to rescue them from a shrinking market by making it easier to sell AR-15s and other weapons to individuals in other countries by loosening export regulations and oversight. Many American gun and ammunition manufacturers that sell primarily to consumers will no longer have to register with the State Department, which currently licenses international arms sales, or to pay the department an annual fee. Instead, those sales would be licensed by the Commerce Department, which has a simpler process and does not charge a fee. According to the New York Times, the State and Commerce Departments privately told Congress that they intend to finalize the new rule soon. Once the administration gives Congress formal notice of the rule change, lawmakers will have 30 days to decide whether to intervene. It’s unlikely that Congress could permanently prevent the rule from going into effect unless the Democrats controlled both houses.

So it looks as if the federal government is going to facilitate the spread of the epidemic of mass shootings from the United States to the rest of the world.

As is usual with gun laws and gun violence, the hands of both major parties are dripping in blood. The Times reports that the Obama administration originally wanted to make a similar change. They were about to complete the rule when the Sandy Hook massacre occurred. Even though the rule change affects sales outside the United States, the Obama administration thought it was politic to drop the idea.

Trump uses threats to public safety that don’t really exist to justify building a wall along our southern border with Mexico that we don’t really need. Yet he and the Republican Party ignore the pressing need to strengthen gun control laws. Instead, they create more of a danger to the public by supporting laws, regulations and lawsuits that make it easier to buy guns or give gun owners more rights in the public square.

Let’s face it. The GOP has become the party of death and the culture of death. While both parties are dominated by militaristic thinking, the Republicans spend far more on the armed forces than the Democrats and start more wars, which after all, help their crony defense contractors and suppliers. Republicans are just as enthusiastic about helping commercial gun sales, as shown by their eager embrace of every proposed law and regulations of the gun lobby.

But the conservative predilection for death goes well beyond support for gun manufacturers and policies that kill people. We can start with their approach to healthcare, which denies coverage to people who can’t afford it to save wealthy taxpayers a few bucks. The GOP’s environmental and energy policies support the coming death of other species and millions of people in areas suffering extreme weather events. The GOP’s support for gutting social welfare programs shows a mean-spirited disregard for human life. The immigration policy if taken to its extreme will lead to the death of the American economy, since native-born Americans are reproducing at very low rates which, if unaugmented by immigration, will result in a rapidly shrinking population within a few years.

Even the GOP’s support of laws that prevent abortions is pro-death. Here’s my reasoning: You can’t die unless you are born. By forcing unwanted births and then shredding the social net that helps children in impoverished circumstances, anti-abortion laws almost by definition add to the toll of human suffering, including some number of unnecessary premature deaths.

The Democrats aren’t much better when it comes to killing people outside the country, but their domestic policies for the most support the health and well-being of the population.

I would like to write that never has a political party been so dedicated to death and so fascinated by destruction as the current edition of the GOP. But then I remember our genocide against the Indians, our dropping of two atomic bombs on Japanese cities, slavery’s destruction if human life. That’s just in U.S. history, and doesn’t consider the Soviet Union, England, France, China or Rwanda. The collective thinking of individuals that occurs in political parties too often falls prey to the dark nightmares of its most blood thirsty members.

Thursday, January 31, 2019

If Schultz runs for president, will business-oriented Republicans planning to hold nose & vote for Trump instead desert the Donald for Mr. Café Latte?

By Marc Jampole

In daydreams I imagine a 2020 Democratic presidential ticket consisting of some combination of Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, Jay Inslee, Amy Klobuchar, Jeff Merkel, Chris Murphy and Kamala Harris trouncing Trump or whoever the GOP nominates in 2020. Sometimes I throw Corey Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand into the mix, or reluctantly configure a ticket that includes pre-boomers Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. My craziest fantasy is that Democrats nominate Hillary and she gets her, and the country’s, sweet revenge.

Really, I’d be delighted with just about any Democrat considering a presidential run, except for Beto or Tulsi. But like most people I know fed up with Donald Trump’s stupidity, racism, anti-intellectualism, bad policies and possible treason, I’d hold my nose and even vote for these inexperienced and undistinguished centrists rather than chance another term of ignorant and autocratic insanity.

But this week, those dreams turned ugly as I pondered the very real possibility that in November of 2020 Americans have the choice of a qualified Democrat versus two unqualified conservatives, Howard Schultz and Donald Trump. If Schultz runs, most experts and pundits expect him to filch more voters from Democrats than from Republicans, for one simple reason: Schultz, who proclaims he is a Democrat, will split the anyone-but-Trump vote. Non-racist centrists and conservatives planning to vote Democratic will flock to the Starbuck’s founder instead. In both 2000 and 2016, votes for third-party candidates handed the election to an unqualified Republican candidate who got fewer votes than a qualified Democrat.

I’m not sure whether this analysis is correct. We know that many business-oriented Republicans—you know, those who only care about low taxes on the wealthy and no government regulation of business—voted for Trump rather than any Democrat. It’s possible that those voters, fearful that a Democratic president will reverse Trump’s regulatory rollback and enormous tax cut for the well-heeled, are currently planning to vote Trump again, but will see Schultz as a “responsible” business-friendly alternative. In such a scenario, Schultz hurts Trump.

No one really knows what Mr. Café Latte’s influence on voters will be, but whatever it is, an independent Schultz run complicates the race into something other than Trump versus decency and science.

Schultz qualifications are as illusory as Beto’s. That he is at all qualified to be president is as ridiculous as the false but highly publicized notion that Hillary or Warren are not likeable or that Octavio-Cortez acts inappropriately. But as long as the mainstream and right-wing news media keeps pumping out these myths, the American public will have to shift through the deceptive labeling and conflation.

If Schultz runs, the media will have a field day repositioning the Democratic candidate, making her/him seem far more left-wing than he/she really is. They will keep jabbering that Schultz is a centrist, someone who represents a middle position between the generic Democrat and Trump.

His statements about issues so far put Schultz at the far right of the Democratic Party, inhabiting a space similar to Beto or West Virginia’s Joe Manchin: He thinks the national debt is the most important problem facing the country. Remember, just about every politician who has ever stated that the deficit was our biggest threat, or a bigger threat than global warming or wealth inequality, has proposed cutting Social Security and Medicare to close the deficit. While Schultz favors same-sex marriage, gun control and a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, he has stated explicitly that universal healthcare—“Medicare for all”—is un-American. His negative comments about Alexandria Octavio-Cortez’s realistic and fiscally responsible proposal to raise marginal tax rates to 70% suggests that his stated support of comprehensive tax reform probably means he wants the middle class and poor to pay more and the rich to keep paying a miniscule portion of their fair share. He wants to enhance border security, but is against building a wall.

There are a lot of issues about which Schultz hasn’t thought or has only expressed superficial or fuzzy ideas, unlike the typical candidate who has a long list of positions and specific proposed legislation before forming an exploratory committee. Whereas Harris, Gillibrand and Warren will be able to give you detailed policy analysis on every major or minor issue, for the most part Schultz hasn’t thought through much, not even his aversion to budget deficits.

And yet the news media takes him seriously!

Schultz’ billions of dollars and public visibility as the creator of one of the most prominent 21st century brands gives him several unfair advantages over other candidates for president. First and foremost, his money and prominence enable Schultz to capture the imagination of the news media, much as Trump did. He is immediately considered serious, regardless of his lack of policy or government experience. The quality of his ideas matters not. Now in Schultz’s case, he really has had great success in business, unlike Trump who has run every business he ever managed into the ground except for his forays into entertainment and branding. But over the history of the United States, there has been absolutely no correlation between success in business and success in government. More important, only one president never either served in the military or in government before his election. That, of course, is the disaster who won the Electoral College vote in 2016.

Mr. Café Latte’s money enables him to ignore the primaries, and thus avoid the sifting through of candidates and positions that a political party does before agreeing on a nominee. Obama, Hillary, Bush II and even the Donald fought heavily contested primaries. By virtue of his billions, Schultz can automatically declare himself a finalist. Like so much in today’s society, it’s the privilege of instant credibility that is reserved only for the ultra-wealthy.

If Schultz is a patriot and not another billionaire full of himself, he will either run in the Democratic primaries or declare himself out of the race. If he truly cares about the United States, he will realize that his independent candidacy will only make things easier for Donald Trump. If he truly respects our American democracy, he won’t use his money to cut in line, but follow the system of primaries and caucuses that we have established after a few centuries of trial and error.

Saturday, January 26, 2019

Editorial: No Ransom for Hostages

Donald Trump’s effort to extort $5.7 billion for a border wall under the pretext of compromise is another exercise of his bad-faith negotiating style. Trump, in a White House speech Jan. 19, proposed to extend temporary protection for young immigrants and refugees in exchange for the money for the first stage of his proposed border wall, despite lingering questions about the need for such a wall along the Lower Rio Grande Valley, given its impact on the regional environment and commerce.

Democratic leaders were not consulted before the speech, so Trump’s proposal appeared to be a compromise with Vice President Mike Pence and First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner. Anyway, it was a non-starter. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called it “simply more hostage taking,” but Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he would bring up the bill with Trump’s proposal for a vote in the Senate. McConnell had refused to let the Senate vote on bills passed by the Democratic House to reopen the government.

As a practical matter, Democrats would gain little by accepting the temporary relief Trump offered for young immigrants and refugees, since the Supreme Court on Jan. 18 declined to review lower court rulings that kept President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in effect for at least one more year. And a trial in federal court in New York challenging Trump’s decision to end Temporary Protected Status for thousands of Haitians concluded Jan. 10 with internal government emails showing the administration was so determined to end the program that it ignored its own government’s research flagging health and safety concerns. A decision is expected after March 1.

Perhaps to allow Trump to pose as a moderate on immigration, right-wing commentator Ann Coulter criticized Trump’s proposal for a three-year extension of protection for DACA recipients and refugees who hold Temporary Protected Status. “Trump proposes amnesty,” she said. “We voted for Trump and got Jeb!” Coulter was largely responsible for getting Trump to renege from his agreement to accept a bipartisan continuing resolution that would have prevented the government shutdown in December.

Democrats see no incentive to reward Trump’s strong-arm tactics, particularly as recent polls show a majority of the public doubts the need for the border wall and blames Trump and the Republicans for the closures that left 420,000 “essential” workers toiling without knowing when they would get a paycheck, 380,000 other employees “furloughed,” without knowing when they would get back on the payroll, and millions of employees of federal contractors laid off with no prospects for getting paid.

Trump has tried to harness chaos in his business career, and the shutdown distracts from Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump’s corrupt campaign and ties with Russian oligarchs, but polls show the public is getting tired of Trump’s antics. A Washington Post/ABC News poll released Jan. 13 showed 53% of Americans say the president and his party deserve the blame for the government shutdown, while another 29% point their finger at the Democrats in Congress.

In the Post/ABC poll, conducted Jan. 8-11, support for the wall has increased over the past year, from 34% in January 2018 to 42% this January, but a majority (54%) still oppose the wall. And only 24% are buying Trump’s line that there is a security crisis at the border. Nearly half (47%) said there is a serious problem but not a crisis.

Trump’s chronic bad faith frustrates attempts to build compromises. He is, after all, a notorious liar with, at best, a reckless disregard for the truth. The Washington Post has three reporters in its Fact Checker department working full time analyzing Trump’s false claims. They have tallied 8,158 false or misleading claims by Trump in the two years he’s been president, as of Jan. 20, including more than 6,000 such claims in the president’s second year — and many of the false claims have been repeated, in some cases, more than 100 times after the misstatements were pointed out. (That compares with 18 false or misleading claims the New York Times found President Barack Obama had made over eight years.) And Trump already has reneged on at least two deals he has made with Democrats on protecting young immigrants who were brought to the US as children, and he has flip-flopped on other offers.

On Sept. 13, 2017, after Trump said he would end DACA, and he called for a comprehensive immigration reform bill, he reportedly agreed with Senate Democratic Leader Schumer and House Democratic leader Pelosi on the broad strokes of a DACA-border security deal that didn’t include Trump’s wall, only to see the White House walk it back the next day.

Trump on Jan. 9, 2018, at a bipartisan meeting in the White House, called for a bipartisan agreement on DACA, family-based migration, the diversity lottery and border security. On Jan. 11, Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) informed Trump six bipartisan senators had reached a compromise, which included a path to citizenship for eligible young immigrants, the first year of Trump’s border wall funding, ending the diversity visa lottery and reallocating those visas, and restricting the ability of former DACA recipients to sponsor other family members. Trump invited them to the White House, but in the meantime he was talked into rejecting the deal, and in the meeting he made his now-infamous “s**thole countries” comment.

Feb. 14, 2018, a bipartisan group of senators unveiled a compromise plan, which included $25 billion for the border and a pathway to citizenship for young immigrants, but the White House lobbied against the compromise, which got 54 votes in the Senate, but fell short of the necessary 60 votes.

As we’ve said before, if Republicans were serious about stopping undocumented immigrants from taking jobs from Americans, Republicans would support reinstating laws making it a crime to hire undocumented aliens. They won’t do that because the Chamber of Commerce won’t allow it, and farmers who provide lip service to the need for a wall along the southern border aren’t looking forward to replacing their undocumented workers who tend their crops and livestock. And Trump’s properties allegedly have hired undocumented immigrants to build and run those properties — including two women who reportedly cleaned Trump’s room at a golf resort in New Jersey.

Ever since Newt Gingrich led a Republican insurgency to power in the House in 1995, closing down the government has been a feature, not a bug, of their budget policy — and Trump has embraced that practice. Seeing 800,000 federal workers going without pay is clearly causing him no distress, and reflects his own business practices.

USA Today June 9, 2016, noted that Trump was involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past three decades — and a large number of those were ordinary Americans who said they had to sue to get Trump or his companies to pay them. Trump told USA Today if a company or worker he hires wasn’t paid fully, it’s because The Trump Organization was unhappy with the work.

Trump on Jan. 14 retweeted an article from the conservative Daily Caller, attributed to an anonymous senior official in Trump’s administration, arguing that 80% of federal workers do “nothing of external value” and that “furloughed employees should find other work, never return and not be paid.” The writer argued the shutdown is an opportunity for Trump to greatly reduce the size of government.

There is need for a good-faith compromise on immigration reform, but we don’t see it happening under Donald Trump. Republicans must join with Democrats to pass a continuing resolution — with a veto override, if necessary — and get those 800,000 federal government employees, as well as more than four million people who work for contractors, back on the payroll. — JMC

Editor's Note: After government employees had been forced to work 35 days without pay, Trump on Jan. 25 announced he would accept a stopgap bill to reopen the government for three weeks while Democrats and Republicans negotiate over border security. Call your senators at 202-224-3121 by Feb. 15 and demand that they stop this nonsense and finally pass the spending bill, regardless of whether there is money for the wall.

From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2019

Populist.com

Selections from the February 15, 2019 issue

COVER/Jonathan Cohn
Progressives will get their debate on Medicare for all — and questions abound

EDITORIAL
No ransom for hostages

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
The demons come to haunt us all

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Shutdown ripples through the community

DISPATCHES
Trump outlined his vision in his inaugural address. Two years later, how’s it going?
Two years into Trump’s presidency, far-right extremism has surged.
Scientists say Trump’s first two years may be fatal for livable climate.
Four volunteers convicted for leaving life-saving supplies for immigrants in Arizona desert.
Nancy Pelosi's popularity surges.
House Dems snub labor choice for trade panel.
Pollution at Texas coal plants poses major threat to health and environment.
Businesses hit hard by Trump shutdown are suddenly silent about GOP lawmakers ...

ADAM TURTLE
Adapt or die: This is the lesson of both evolution and history

JOHN YOUNG
Miles and miles of big, beautiful lies

JILL RICHARDSON
Hollywood’s fat shaming is getting old

ART CULLEN
Epic hypocrisy of Republicans’ sudden distaste for Steve King

SAM PIZZIGATI
Prices, plutocrats, and corporate concentration

LEO GERARD
Tax dollars can buy happiness

JIM VAN DER POL
Geoengineering is no solution to climate change

ED RAMPELL
How will Trump’s presidency end? Seven ways it may.

BOB BURNETT
Trumpty dumpty sat on a wall ...

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Welcoming Cupid!

SAM URETSKY
Can Pelosi dance with Ocasio-Cortez?

CHUCK COLLINS
The government shutdown expands the ranks of ‘underwater nation’

WAYNE O’LEARY
Bigger is not better

JOHN BUELL
Tax justice and the Democratic prospect

N. GUNASEKARAN
Messy urbanization hits Asia’s poor hard

BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Blue waves in the Golden State

ROB PATTERSON
Songs of resistance

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Heck of a job, Donald

SETH SANDRONSKY
Rethinking mythologies

THEATRE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Quills, quips, quibbles, questions — and revolution

JAMES A. HAUGHT
Best and worst

Friday, January 11, 2019

Editorial: AOC’s Modest Proposal

New Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has been living rent-free in the heads of right-wing pundits ever since the Democratic socialist former bartender from the Bronx gained notoriety with her upset win over liberal 20-year incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley in the June 26 Democratic primary. But the right wingers really flipped their wigs when she suggested, during a 60 Minutes interview, that the top marginal tax rate be increased to as much as 70% to finance initiatives such as the “Green New Deal” she is proposing to get a handle on climate change.

The ensuing hubbub showed that some prominent “conservatives” either don’t understand how marginal tax rates work, or they were being intentionally dishonest about it, Aaron Rupar noted at Vox.

After a preview of the interview was released Jan. 4, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), tweeted that Ocasio-Cortez’s tax proposal would result in government seizing “70% of your income and [giving] it to leftist fantasy programs.”

A few hours later, Grover Norquist, head of the Americans for Tax Reform, claimed in a tweet that Ocasio-Cortez “wants 70%” of “your production,” and suggested her proposal is akin to slavery. “It’s hard to believe that Norquist, who has dedicated his professional life to tax policy, doesn’t understand how marginal tax rates work, but he is nonetheless misrepresenting it on Twitter,” Rupar wrote.

Conservatives have attacked AOC for allegedly not being well-versed in policy details, but Rupar noted she succinctly and accurately described how progressive marginal tax rates work while discussing her proposal.

“Once you get to the tippy-tops, on your $10 millionth dollar, sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60% or 70%,” she said. “That doesn’t mean all $10 million dollars are taxed at an extremely high rate. But it means that as you climb up this ladder, you should be contributing more.”

Under the current marginal tax rates, the first $9,525 earned by a single filer is taxed at 10%. Income from $9,525 to $38,700 is taxed at 12%. Income from $38,700 to $82,500 is taxed at 22%. The brackets go up to the top rate of 37%, which for a single filer kicks in at $500,000 ($600,000 for a married couple filing jointly).

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, in a New York Times column Jan. 5 noted that AOC is advocating a tax rate of 70% on very high incomes, “which is obviously crazy, right? I mean, who thinks that makes sense? Only ignorant people like … um, Peter Diamond, Nobel laureate in economics and arguably the world’s leading expert on public finance. … And it’s a policy nobody has ever implemented, aside from … the United States, for 35 years after World War II — including the most successful period of economic growth in our history.

“To be more specific, Diamond, in work with Emmanuel Saez — one of our leading experts on inequality — estimated the optimal top tax rate to be 73%. Some put it higher: Christina Romer, top macroeconomist and former head of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, estimates it at more than 80%.

Krugman noted that when America had very high rates on the rich (as high as 92%) after World War II, the economy did just fine. Since then tax rates have come way down, and if anything the economy has done less well.

“Why do Republicans adhere to a tax theory that has no support from nonpartisan economists and is refuted by all available data? Well, ask who benefits from low taxes on the rich, and it’s obvious,” Krugman wrote.

In 2017, the Economic Policy Institute reported that CEOs at the 350 largest companies in 2016 took home an average of $15.6 million — 271 times what the typical US worker earns. That was up from a ratio of 30:1 before the Reagan-era tax cuts. When Ronald Reagan left office in 1989, CEO compensation averaged 59 times the typical earner. The increasing use of stock options to inflate executive compensation packages has exploded that CEO-to-worker pay ratio since then.

AOC proposed that the top marginal rate of 70% be applied to incomes over $10 million, but that allows a generous ratio of executive compensation at 321 times the median personal income, which was $31,099 in 2017. We would propose that any compensation more than 30 times the median personal income, which would be approximately $932,000, should be taxed at 70%. That would give executives an incentive not only to reinvest earnings in their company, but also to pay their workers more, so they’d get that median income — and the top marginal tax benchmark — up.

After getting the government opened up, the first bill the Democrats hope to pass is a sweeping anti-corruption bill aimed at stamping out the influence of money in politics and expanding voting rights. HR 1 has no chance in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already said, “That’s not going to go anywhere,” possibly because Republicans know they can’t win a fair election any more.

AOC and her progressive allies might not get much of their initiatives past the Republican-dominated Senate, but if the progressive coalition can pass some of these bills out of the House, with the cooperation of new Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership, they can show voters what might be possible if they return Democrats to a Senate Majority and the White House in 2021.

Deadbeat Don Holds Workers Hostage

Another reason why we should not run government like a business was on display during the federal government shutdown. It was no surprise that Donald Trump, who has been a grifter and a deadbeat all his life, sees nothing wrong with leaving nearly five million workers without paychecks for an indefinite period of time.

Trump, who routinely stiffed contractors on his real estate projects, forcing them to sue him to get their payments, has suggested that the shutdown could result in a net savings for the federal government, which shows his misunderstanding of how the government works.

First, most of the federal employees will eventually get their back pay when the impasse is resolved. About 420,000 of the federal workers are classified as essential and are working without knowing when they’ll be paid. About 380,000 federal employees have been furloughed and probably will get back pay when the shutdown is resolved. And they’re not all highly-paid bureaucrats. J. David Cox Sr., president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents about 40,000 Bureau of Prisons employees who have been furloughed in the shutdown, told the New York Times his members get an average take-home pay of $500 a week, which leaves little cushion during a shortfall.

Also, an estimated 4.1 million people work for federal contractors, according to Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University. The contract workers clean offices, serve food and provide security or other services for federal agencies, and they are not expected to receive back pay when the deal is worked out.

In the past, Trump’s father bailed him out of financial trouble until the debts got too great, as Donald managed to lose money on three casinos in Atlantic City as well as the Plaza Hotel in New York City, taking them through bankruptcy a total of six times. Trump said there was nothing wrong with using bankruptcy to handle debts, and insisted he had “used, brilliantly, the laws of the country.” But that’s why he had to turn to Russian oligarchs and Mideastern potentates to finance recent ventures — and now he is desperate to distract the public from the fact that he’s in over his head.

Tell your senators to put the government back to work. — JMC