Best part of inauguration: the sparse crowds. Worst part: Trump’s fascist-inspired speech

There were many moments when I found the imagery and words of the inauguration inspiring, and they were all the same moment: the views of the sparse crowds. The Pence family walking by empty grandstands. The aerial comparisons of the jam-packed mall in 2009 and the deserted mall of 2017. The news that groups rented more buses to bring people to the Saturday anti-Trump march—the Women’s March—than to the inauguration itself. Nationwide more people will take to the streets in Washington, D.C. and nationwide to protest the policies of the new administration than to celebrate it. 

These images warm my heart because they prove that the United States is still a free country. 

If we were living in a dictatorship, the streets would have been crowded with cheering admirers. Censorship would have suppressed the reporting of the comparison photographs and factoids. The surveys that show Trump’s unprecedented unpopularity would have been rigged to pretend the man is universally beloved. 

The mass revulsion and renewed activism motivated by the Electoral College’s decision to elect this unqualified no-nothing gives me cause for optimism, although I can’t help but wonder how many of the marchers voted for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson or stayed home on Election Day. 

Both a friend of mine and I noticed that in most of the video streams and photographs (but not the one gracing the front page of the New York Times), the Trump family looks grim and unhappy. I shrugged it off as the typical awe and trembling that the nouveau riche feel when confronted by century-old traditions which fill them with the anxiety of those who believe in their hearts that they are unworthy. They focus on playing their role to perfection, which gives them a certain stiffness and seriousness of purpose. Contrast with the smiles, kidding and other grace notes that have brightened the inaugural performance of every other president in my lifetime. Of course all of them, even Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, were long-time insiders who participated in transfer of power ceremonies before and knew how government worked.   

My friend, a practicing psychotherapist, saw an unhappy family in strife. For unhappy families, milestones and public events often provide a battlefield for playing out their problems. Mentally stable people, no matter how pissed off or disappointed they are at their spouse, child or parent, will hide behind a public mask. We know Hillary Clinton learned to do that during the 1990’s. But the more troubled a family or an individual, the less they can control themselves in public settings. Does family unhappiness explain the first family frowns? Before their grand entrance, did Trumpty-Dumpty berate everyone with commands, chides and insults? 

As to Trump’s speech, I think MSNBC’s Chris Matthews put it best. It was Hitlerian. 

Not so much specifically Hitlerian, but with many attributes of speeches given by fascists and totalitarians since human history began, including:

·       References to the people as an organic unity that feels, moves, suffers and exults together. “We share one heart, one home, and one glorious destiny” sent a shudder down my spine because it fit right into a speech by Mussolini or Hitler. Or the ancient Greek tyrant Pisistratus, for that matter.

·       Explicit and implicit linking of the people to the ruler, as if the ruler is the people and the people are the ruler.

·       The big lies, which in the inauguration speech focused on the current state of the country. To the degree that there ever was “American Carnage,” it has ended over the past 25 years, as crime rates, shooting of police by others and terrorism have gone way down. The education system is not flush with cash, as Trump averred. As the unemployment rate and income equality suggest, the problem is not a lack of jobs, but the low wages paid for most jobs nowadays. We have not, as Trump claims, depleted the military.

·       The cry to put the country first, unlike what the old regime did, at least according to the incoming fascist dictator. “America First,” the rallying cry of the virulently anti-Semitic American fascists in the 1930’s and 1940’s, sounds no different from the Nazi proclamation to put “Deutschland űber alles.”

·       The evocation of a special destiny for the country, the idea that the country is better, purer, more advanced. Both times that Trump declared American exceptionalism he implied or stated that it’s god’s will: the first time when he called us a “righteous public,” and more explicitly when he said that “we will be protected by God.”

·       Glorification of a past that never existed. The past to which Trump refers is industrialized America during the twentieth century. Yes, we were an industrial nation, but always because we exported. As Sven Beckert’s magisterial Empire of Cotton demonstrates, the United States built its economy on trade from its very origins. Our manufacturing flourished in the 20th century because we were able to sell our goods everywhere. The other major inaccuracy in discussing our past was the idea that everything was wonderful back then—it was only wonderful for workers once they unionized, and then only for whites. 

Embedded in the fascist rhetoric that both tore down the current state of the country and glorified the national ideal, were a mere three policy recommendations. Let’s pretend that we’re living in a logical world and consider those three initiatives the cornerstones of the Trump Administration:

1.      Protectionist trade policies

2.      War against “radical Islamic terrorism”

3.      Investment in rebuilding our infrastructure of roads, bridges and highways 

That’s a paltry program compared to what Regan, both Bushes, Clinton and Obama laid out in their inaugurations. Paltry, and mostly wrong-headed. Protectionist trade policies have been a contributing factor to most depressions in American history, as trade wars close off markets. Singling out Islam suggests a religious war, not a fight against terrorism. Rebuilding our infrastructure is something I and other left-wingers have been advocating for at least a decade. Too bad Trump didn’t say that he would pay for it by raising taxes on the wealthy, nor note that a national building program gives the country the opportunity to create the infrastructure needed for a post-fossil fuel economy.   

But unlike other inaugural addresses, Trump’s remarks seemed less about describing a program and more about reminding people how lousy their lives were and how great they will be now that the big man is in charge. 

While Trump channeled fascism in his inaugural address, his Administration got started with two symbolic acts that reminded me of Hemingway’s dictum not to confuse motion with action. Trump signed an executive order that allows agencies to dismantle those parts of the Affordable Care Act it is legal for the president to dismantle. No specifics, no commands, no timetables. Thus no real action.  

All references to global warming suddenly disappeared from the White House website the moment the transfer of power occurred. But again, the act was symbolic at best, since the White House did not countermand any single regulation or rule. 

I recently wondered if the Trump Administration would engage only in symbolic acts of branding and rebranding.  I speculated that the kind of gridlock that this approach to running the country both reflects and initiates would be the best-case scenario for a Trump Administration. So far, so good.  

Our best hope for Trump years is that he does nothing but what he does best: Brand & rebrand

I’ve sat in front of a blank screen for the past hour trying to grapple with the enormity of what has happened: An ignorant, autocratic, erratic, irrational, racist, misogynistic narcissist has assumed the presidency of the United States and with it control over a vast rule-making administration.

 

Erratic though he may seem, Trump’s cabinet speaks to a consistent agenda: lowering taxes on the wealthy and making it easier for a handful of large businesses in a handful of industries to operate while turning the federal government into one giant business-making machine for cronies. Trump’s cabinet promises to take national the disastrous Kansas experiment under Governor Sam Brownback—starving government to the point that it can’t even deliver basic services such as public education. We’ve seen how this approach to governing has failed not only in Kansas, but in states around the world.

 

Since Trumpty-Dumpty has made the same deal with the devil that other economic rightwingers have made since at least the middle of the 19th century, we will also get a large dose of nativism and racism in how we pursue social and economic policy. Besides the dangers created by cutbacks to funding, the harsh administration of justice and more voter suppression laws,  minorities, immigrants and women also face the ire of Trump’s “basket of deplorables.”Reflecting Trump’s own loose-tongue explicitness, this latest generation of hate-mongers seems ready to become more overt in both word and deed under a Trump presidency.

 

I believe that, despite voter suppression laws and the rise of the militant white power movement (AKA the alt-right), history, demographics and the facts are on the side of social democrats. Eventually the demographic majority in favor of the left’s platform will turn into a voting and electoral advantage on the state and national levels.  I am, for example, convinced that even if Trumpty-Dumpty survives the next four years without assassination or impeachment voters will sweep him out of office, perhaps even denying him the Republican nomination.

 

But unfortunately, Trump, Jeff, Betsy, Paul and their cohorts could do a lot of damage in a very short amount of time.

 

One of any of a large number of actions that Trump and the GOP-led Congress have threatened to do would be disastrous:

·       Ending the current healthcare system without putting in place either a single-payer system or a system that looks like the current one down to virtually every detail.

·       Lowering taxes on the wealthy, with or without gutting safety net and other government programs.

·       Installing a Supreme Court that will continue to grant rights historically reserved for human beings to corporate entities, while constraining the rights of actual individuals.

·       Replacing our public education system with a voucher-based system good for either assembly-line, for-profit charter Mac-schools or parochial private schools.

·       Turning our back on the Paris Accord and promoting the development and use of fossil fuels instead of moving towards alternative fuels.

·       Walking away from international trade agreements and creating barriers to trade except for those related to the environment, safety and compensation for workers.

 

Like he does with his bankrupt companies, when Trump leaves office, either in disgrace or in a cloud of gilded faux glory, he will leave it to others to fix what he has broken.

 

But that’s the way of the world. Who suffered when Athens decided to go to war more than the slaves and hoplites who had to do the fighting? It is the poor and the innocent who suffer in wars, not the rich old men (and now women) who send them to fight or order others to attack and plunder their lands.  Who suffers when a Chief Executive Officer, driven by ego and blinded by his (and now sometimes her) ignorance does something stupid like expand too quickly, take on too much debt or borrow money to pay bonuses? The CEO walks away with a golden parachute and the workers lose their jobs and sometimes get shorted on their pension. (Anecdotally, years ago I observed a president of a Fortune 500 company fueled by a cocaine habit drive his company into a chapter 11 bankruptcy and massive layoffs; when he was fired, he walked away with a large severance package).

 

It’s also not the first time in world history that a large population has fallen under the spell of a mendacious charlatan. Nor the first time that a society has lived by a series of lies or myths.  I would assert that since World War II, we in the United States have based our society on a few wrong-headed ideas that turn out to be based more on ideological belief than facts:

1.    All emotions, rituals and human relationships can be reduced to commercial transactions.

2.     The suburban lifestyle built on cars, malls and few public spaces is superior to the urban lifestyle built on diversity, mass transit and lots of public spaces and institutions.

3.     The free market provides better solutions to social needs and challenges than government does.

4.     There is something suspicious, antisocial and/or uncool about intellectualism, intellectual endeavors, learning and science.

 

Celebrity culture represents the logical endpoint of the confluence of these false beliefs, and Donald Trump represents the apotheosis of celebrity culture a failed businessman who plays a successful one on TV, someone who is famous merely for being famous, gallivants from one expensive place to another acting out his inner demons in front of a national audience. Entertaining to some, but not the way to run either a business or a government.

 

While ignorant, bullheaded, self-centered, vindictive and crass, Trump also has a genius in one area—branding, which on an operational level consists of making people want something more than they should by attributing to the thing values and meaning that go beyond its use value. “More than they should” is the important concept here, because in the case of an end to the Affordable Care Act or the building of a wall between the United States and Mexico, the average person should not want to see it happen at all. This one skill Trump has may prove to be the salvation of the country during his years in office.

 

My best case scenario for the Trump rule is that he focuses on branding and nothing else. For example, the entirety of the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act could be replaced by itself but with new names—the exchange could be called a “Freedom Market.” The standards that insure that no one will buy a worthless policy could be called the “Patients’ Bill of Rights.” The individual mandate could be relabeled a user fee—those who go to expensive hotels and vacation resorts should be used to user fees for something they don’t use!

 

In a similar way, the Trump Administration might rightfully conclude that the cost to modernize our stock of nuclear weapons is too expensive and instead institute a program that pretends to modernize but really decommissions hundreds of our unneeded thousands of nuclear warheads. Trump could call it “Peace through Strength.” The Donald could also very easily do nothing to change our immigration intake process and still call it extreme vetting, wait six months and declare victory in the war to protect our borders, using statistics that reflect the Obama years. Same with crime.

 

Our best hope, then, is that Trump remains true to his inner Barnum and spends his time in office doing nothing but bullshitting people (and engaging in feuds, of course). Maybe his family and friends will cash in, but we survived Jackson’s, Grant’s, Harding’s and Bush II’s gang of thieves. We can survive a little more kleptocracy and an administration full of empty slogans.

 

Gridlock never looked so good.

 

 

Trump’s reply to John Lewis comment displays usual Trumpian ignorance of facts and symbols

John Lewis said what a lot of us have been thinking: that Trump is not a legitimate president because of voter suppression laws in a handful of states that broke to Trump by micro-thin margins and decided the results of the Electoral College. The Georgia Congressman also implied that Trump delegitimizes himself with his behavior and language towards minorities, immigrants and women. Finally, Lewis rejects Trump’s vision for America as its putative symbolic leader for the next eight, four, two or one year(s) that he’s president.

 

When not trying to bully women or his campaign adversaries, Trump often takes off on figures with halos over their heads, people who both the religious and non-religious consider saint-like: A Gold Star family. The Pope.

 

And now John Lewis.

 

On both the factual and the symbolic level, Trumpty-Dumpty’s recent tweet attacking Lewis was as wrong as wrong can be. After mischaracterizing Lewis’ vibrant and relatively wealthy Congressional district as a crime-infested rat hole, Trump said “All talk, talk, talk—no action or results.”

 

John Lewis. No action?

 

On the factual level, the district itself belies Trump’s accusation that Lewis doesn’t spend time helping it.

 

On the symbolic level, John Lewis epitomizes the man of action. Remember that when police officers and soldiers put themselves in harm’s way, they carry weapons and are willing to use them and, if American, they typically outnumber the other side.

 

But John Lewis went out to face the enemy with nothing but the courage of his conviction that peaceful disobedience was the most powerful weapon to achieve social, civic and economic justice. When he led the demonstrators across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama that bloody Sunday in 1965, he knew he was going to take a bad beating, and he took it. He took it for Dr. Martin Luther King, who didn’t march that day. And he took it for the civil rights movement. He took it for the entirety of the United States and for everyone who ever believed that the right to participate fully in society belonged to all men and women, regardless of their color, religion or condition in life.  I’ve read the Gospels and a lot of history and I’m still not convinced that such a man as Jesus Christ ever existed. I definitely question the concept of a person suffering for the sins of the collective. But if there were ever a Christ-like human being, it was—and is—John Lewis.

 

The simplified form of the twentieth century philosophy called existentialism is “You are what you do.” By that measure, Lewis is an existentialist’s existentialist, the highest form of the man of action.

 

While John Lewis has lived his life as the embodiment of true heroism, every public act of Donald Trump’s existence manifests the extreme narcissism and greed of a spoiled but very dull four-year-old. While John Lewis has dedicated himself to the ideals of helping others, Trump and his cabinet of billionaires and multi-millionaires have dedicated their time on earth to selfish ends or to rolling back the gains made by Lewis and others to bring social and economic equity to all.

 

Some people are bemoaning that Trump is an accidental president, a product of a bizarre series of one-off events. Others blame racism and misogyny for the still hard-to-imagine horror of 60 million people voting for him. Still others say Republicans fixed the Electoral College vote with voter suppression laws. All of these explanations for why this ignorant loutish racist who lost the popular vote by almost three million still ended up president is enough to delegitimize his moral authority for John Lewis. And for tens of millions others, too.

 

Including me. Donald Trump may assume the office of the presidency in a few days, but he’ll never be my president.

 

On the other hand…if he would keep and extend Obama’s energy and environmental policies; fund infrastructure improvement with new taxes on the wealthy; veto all legislation that would end the Affordable Care Act or the individual mandate or cut funding to Planned Parenthood; come out in favor of the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian mess; embrace the Iraq nuclear deal; advocate raising the minimum wage and lifting the cap on incomes assesses Social Security taxes; nominate Merrick Garland as Supreme Court justice; encourage parents to give their children timely vaccinations, stopped using Twitter to create prosecute personal feuds, stopped dissing our allies while praising Vladimir Putin…

 

In other words, if Trump acted presidential, I would consider him president.

 

Fat chance of that. 

 

 

When news media changed the definition of objectivity, they opened door to ignorance & Trumpism

Once upon a time, the news media defined objectivity as presenting the facts, and just the facts, usually substantiated by at least two reliable sources. Then the right-wing, led by its own sometimes vibrant sometimes moribund cadre of media, hammered mainstream media that its side wasn’t getting a fair hearing.  

According to Nicole Hemer’s Messengers of the Right, which covers the development of the right wing media from the end of World War II until the ascent of Rush Limbaugh and his various imitators, the right wing began assaulting the idea that the mainstream news media was objective from the early days of William Buckley’s National Review and Regenery Press, which published right wing screeds about communism and the evils of labor unions and government regulation, usually financed by their trust fund authors or bulk purchases by corporations run by right wingers.  But the real assault on objectivity began in the 1970’s, about the time that the right wing added cultural issues such as abortion to its agenda. In place of objectivity in coverage, the right-wing proposed balance—presenting all sides of the issue.  

The right wing never admitted it, nor did anyone notice at the time, but the critique of factuality as the central value of reporting correlated with the general compliant that the mass media were too “liberal,” by which they meant “left-wing” or “collectivist.” The right was subtly admitting that liberal positions were right, because the facts supported them. The news media only print facts. The facts skew liberal.   

Thus the right wing pushed the notion that judging by the facts in and of itself didn’t create objectivity. 

Their substitute definition of objectivity—balanced reporting—required journalists to quote the one crackpot who doesn’t believe in global warming when they had already talked to two thousand who do. Stories that should have been about how to we are addressing human-caused global warming instead rehashed whether it existed or not. This balanced approach enabled many lies to sneak into news coverage on a wide range of issues, including women’s reproductive rights, immigration, crime, science, education and health care. The biggest band leader for balance was, of course, Fox News, which did not balance its coverage but applied major pressure on other media to balance theirs. That brings us to the current situation in which most Americans have their choice of right-wing news or news that presents both the right and the left without evaluation of the truth, validity or factual basis of either side.

Remer doesn’t speculate on why the mainstream news media responded to the exhortations to replace facts with balance as the guide star of journalistic objectivity and integrity, but I’m pretty sure that two motivations drove the mainstream news media; 1) The inherent controversy in “presenting both sides” is more dramatic than a technical discussion and therefore more like entertainment; 2) Writing he said-she said stories is easier than becoming an expert and developing an in-depth discussion of an issue. 

From letting people tell lie in these balanced stories to accepting their lies without question, as the media has done with trump, was a small step. Balanced reporting allowed Trump to flourish because he is a master of phrasing every argument as an “us-versus-them” battle, or, to be more specific, the great Donald versus them. 

Remer’s book walks an interesting tightrope. It focuses on the right wing media’s various players, their media mix and marketing techniques, their internal squabbles, especially on whether to cut ties with the proto-alt-right John Birch Society and to support Nixon, their suspicions that the media was too left-wing, and their attempts to influence elections, political parties and mainstream media. But very little is said about the actual positions that the right-wing media held, except that they believed in the ascendancy of individual rights over what’s good for society and they disliked unions. The opposition to the civil rights movement, government regulation and all social welfare programs, including Social Security; the belief that communists had infiltrated the government; the flirtation with racist organizations; the ultra-hawkish militarism; and the belief that an elite of highly educated white men should lead society—none of these planks in the right wing media’s platform in the 1950’s and 1960’s are worthy of discussion in Remer’s telling of the story. It’s a bit like discussing the Donald Trump phenomenon without talking about the lies, lechery and lawsuits.

 

Editorial: Investigate Real Election Wrenchers

Donald Trump has perhaps protested too much — first that there was no proof that Russia hacked the emails of Democratic Party officials and then, even if the Russians were responsible for exposing Democratic secrets, there was no proof that it helped Trump win the election, and it was the Democrats’ fault for getting hacked.

It is easy enough to believe the 17 US intelligence agencies who agree that the Russian government was behind the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails and the transfer of stolen texts to WikiLeaks for dissemination by Julian Assange, even if the US spymasters don’t reveal how they tracked the caper.

Russian President Vladimir Putin had a grudge against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom he blamed for encouraging mass protests in Russia after disputed 2011 parliamentary elections challenged Putin’s rule. Also, some of Putin’s friends among the Russian oligarchy reportedly have a substantial financial interest in Trump’s business deals.

Assange also reportedly blamed Clinton for pushing to indict him on espionage charges for his role in the release of military and diplomatic documents provided by former US soldier Chelsea Manning in 2010 and 2011. But Assange has not been indicted, and Assange would have a strong defense in any such criminal prosecution that he was protected as a journalist in publishing the material. He’s been a guest of the Ecuadorean embassy in London since 2012 to avoid prosecution for alleged sex crimes in Sweden.

The hacking by the Russians was a heavy-handed interference in the US election, but it was far from an act of war that some have claimed. And although the disclosures helped reinforce the meme that Clinton and her associates were playing fast and loose, and treated Bernie Sanders unfairly, it probably didn’t sway the election.

Sanders, in an interview with the Washington Post (Oct. 24), played down the importance of the leaked emails, saying there was little among them that surprised him, including one in which Clinton ally John Podesta called Sanders a “doofus.”

“Trust me, if they went into our emails — I suppose which may happen, who knows — I’m sure there would be statements that would be less than flattering about, you know, the Clinton staff,” Sanders said. “That’s what happens in campaigns.”

Sanders said the leaks confirmed what he knew all along.

“It’s amusing,” he said. “We said that the Clinton campaign was heavily influencing what the DNC was doing regarding debates, and that’s exactly what had been happening. None of that is a shock to me. Was I shocked to find out that the DNC was partial toward Clinton? Not exactly. That’s something we knew from day one.”

Despite the hard-fought Democratic primary, Sanders reconciled with Clinton at the Democratic convention and hit the campaign trail to urge his supporters to vote for her.

A much greater impact in swinging the election can be traced to the letter FBI Director James Comey released 10 days before the election that appeared to revive the claims that the use of private email servers by Clinton when she was secretary of state might result in criminal charges. That stopped Clinton’s momentum, and kept the race close enough that the Republican suppression of the votes of hundreds of thousands of black, Latino, Asian Americans and working-class whites helped Trump overtake Clinton in the key states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Investigative reporter Greg Palast reported that Interstate Crosscheck, a program started by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, an adviser to Trump, raised questions about 7.2 million potential voters in 30 states controlled by Republicans. They ended up kicking 1.1 million — overwhelmingly people of color as well as Muslim Americans — off the voting rolls before election day.

Interstate Crosscheck was designed by Kobach to compare voter lists from each state in an effort to identify people who may have voted in more than one state. But Palast noted that the “double voters” were found by simply matching first and last names, so Michael Bernard Brown is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Anthony Brown. The same goes for common Latino names. Mark Swedlund, a database expert whose clients include eBay and American Express, was shocked by Crosscheck’s “childish methodology.” He said, “God forbid your name is Garcia, of which there are 858,000 in the US, and your first name is Joseph or Jose. You’re probably suspected of voting in 27 states.”

Potential double registrants were sent a postcard and asked to verify their address by mailing it back. “The junk mail experts we spoke to said this postcard is meant not to be returned. It’s inscrutable small print, doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t even say you’re accused of voting twice. It just says, please confirm your voting address,” Palast told The London Economic Nov. 15, “and most people of color, poor voters don’t respond to this sort of mailing, and they know that.”

“Many didn’t discover that their vote was stolen until they turned up [on election day] and found their name missing. In the US they are given something called a provisional ballot, but if your name is not on the voter roll, you can fill out all the provisional votes you like they’re not going to count your vote. They can’t even if you’re wrongly removed.”

Those who didn’t reply were purged from the voter lists, and in many key states the number of people purged by Crosscheck was much larger than Trump’s margin of victory. For example, in Michigan, the number of people purged from the voting rolls — at least 50,000 — was nearly five times times larger than Trump’s margin of victory — around 10,700 votes. And a record 75,355 ballots, mostly from heavily Democratic Detroit and Flint, were not counted because optical scanners used to count votes did not read the ballots, Palast noted Dec. 18 in a report for Truthout.org.

Even after Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, put up millions of dollars for a Michigan recount using human eyeballs where the scanners missed the marks, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, a Republican, issued an order that no one could look at the ballots cast in precincts where the number of votes and voters did not match – “exactly the places where you’d want to look for the missing votes,” Palast noted. Schuette also ordered a ban on counting ballots from precincts where the seals on the machines had been broken – in other words, where there was evidence of tampering. “Again, those are the machines that most need investigating,” Palast said. The result: Recount crews were denied access to 59% of Detroit precincts.

This story was repeated in Wisconsin, where an estimated 300,000 eligible voters lacked the voter ID required to get to the polls. And even if they managed to cast a ballot, they were counted with the same Opti-Scan system as Michigan, Palast noted. Uncounted votes, sometimes called “spoiled” or “invalidated” ballots, were concentrated in Milwaukee, where most of the state’s blacks live. Stein put up over $3 million of donated funds for the human-eye review in Wisconsin, but GOP state officials told Milwaukee County to recount simply by running the ballots through the same blind machines. Not surprisingly, this replay produced the same questionable result of a 22,871-vote win for Trump, Palast noted.

Congress should investigate the role Russian hackers and disinformation played in the election, and investigators should look into whether there was coordination between Russian officials and the Trump campaign, though Republican leaders are not inclined to do so. But they are even less inclined to investigate the role voter suppression and faulty voting machines played in keeping eligible Americans from voting and having their ballots counted. Democrats should deny Trump’s legitimacy until the GOP comes clean. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2017

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Selections from the February 1, 2017 issue

COVER/Harvey J. Kaye
GOP sees its own rendezvous with destiny

EDITORIAL
Investigate real election wrenchers

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

DON ROLLINS
Will Paul Ryan be next in line?

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Green energy soars but ranchers’ ledgers bleed red

DISPATCHES
Trump companies owe more than $1.8B;
Report: Russian mobsters bailed out bankrupt Trump;
House GOP revives old rule to purge fed workers;
Trump calls Obama envoys home;
Warren: no confirmation without ethics;
Session could roll back drug legalization;
Trump is still lying;
Obama goes out with economy still growing;
Trump cedes millions of clean-energy jobs to China;
Global warming made every state red in 2016;
Plenty of questions about election results;
Cons will spend $10M to bully Dem sens to confirm Trump's court pick;
Discovered notes prove Nixon treason. 

JILL RICHARDSON
I’m not cheering the end of 2016

BOB BURNETT
Five Resistance resolutions
JAMES A. HAUGHT
White Evangelicals are fading, powerful, baffling

SAM PIZZIGATI
Waging class war in comfort

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas 
Needed: A stake to kill the vampire-myths

JOHN YOUNG
Trump will make it up as he goes along

WAYNE O’LEARY
Hamilton’s curse

JOHN BUELL
Fake news and the new McCarthyism

N. GUNASEKARAN
Trumps ‘America first’ policies will hit Asia

BOOKS/Seth Sandronsky 
Citizen Governance Rising

BOOKS/Heather Seggel
Survival guides for the resistance

RANDOLPH T. HOLHUT
Farewell, Joe Shea, online news pioneer and defender of the First Amendment

ROB PATTERSON
Following British Procedurals

ROSIE SORENSON  
Мы все Русс ... (We’re all Russian now)

MOVIES/Ed Rampell
Poetry in motion: Neruda

and more ...

Trump & GOP behave like children on Take Your Kid to Work day, focus on “make-busy” work instead of solving problems

There might be some possibility of convincing Donald Trump and the Republicans not to build a wall along the Mexican border if they sincerely felt threatened by an invasion of undocumented immigrants. Once they learned that more of the undocumented have been leaving the country than entering over the past few years, once they computed the true cost of a new wall, once they saw the Department of Justice estimates of the low number of people a wall would prevent from entering—all of these facts might sway them to change their minds and not pursue this enormously expensive boondoggle. 

Unfortunately, Trumpty-Dumpty and his GOP cohorts act not out of a misguided effort to solve a non-existent problem, but for two intertwined cynical reasons. Most GOP members—but perhaps not the unread and inexperienced Trump—know that undocumented immigrants are not a security threat to the United States and that between Presidents Bush II and Obama, we have already pumped up border patrols, rounded up and deported the “bad guys,” and instituted “extreme vetting.” They continue to use the wall as a political catalyst to enrage and frighten voters, and especially those prone to Nativist or racist views. They can’t be convinced the wall is nonsense, because they already know it and don’t care. That’s why the GOP and Trump are proposing anaccelerated timetable for starting construction on a wall instead of quietlydropping it as another in many empty campaign promises. 

The second reason has to do with money. Trump represents the apotheosis of the post-Reagan Republican Party in many ways, but no more so than in his belief that the real function of government is to collect taxes for use by private industry, one of the pillars of Republicanism since the days of Ronald Reagan. Trump is the ultimate crony capitalist. He has bragged in the past of buying the support of politicians. Many of his developments received governmental aid of one sort or another. Many of his cabinet members, most notably the incoming Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, have dedicated their careers to privatizing essential government functions.  

And have no doubt about it, building a wall is the ripest, juiciest, lowest hanging fruit on the tree of government largess to corporations because it doesn’t take much more expertise than knowing how to set rebar and pour concrete to do it. If we were talking about building a fighter jet, the government would have two companies from which to choose. Not many more if we were talking about investing billions of dollars in improving our cybersecurity. But there are dozens of large and small contractors in every state with the experience and capabilities to build Trump’s wall. That means that there are going to be many opportunities for Trump and Republican members of Congress to reward their friends with contracts for building the wall. It’s going to be the biggest swindle of the American people since Bush II’s Iraq War, which was in large part fought by what used to be called mercenaries, i.e., private firms contracted by the Department of Defense to provide key military services that the military once did for itself. 

While it provides a lot of government contracts, the new wall between the United States and Mexico will make no one safer nor keep many people out. It’s nothing more than “make-busy” work. 

It seems as if Trump and the Republican congress have prioritized this kind of “make-busy” work as the most important platform promises to get started fulfilling. They are behaving as a bunch of ten year olds cutting scrap paper or moving files to help mommy at her job on “Take Your Kid to Work” day. Besides authorizing the funds to begin building a wall, the Republicans are hell-bent in repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which will likely turn out to be another make-busy waste of time.  

Here’s why: The problem is that Congress has only three choices in repealing Obamacare:

1.      Take away the health insurance of 20 million Americans, while putting three million people out of work, increasing the cost of health insurance for everyone else and increasing the deficit.

OR

2.      Go to a single payer system (which FYI wouldn’t really hurt insurance companies if we followed the German model, but will have a great financial effect on physicians and hospitals)

OR

3.      Reconstruct a system that looks pretty much like Obamacare: a delicate balance of taxes, incentives, subsidies and important benefits that the American public have quickly come to believe are birthrights, such as accepting people for coverage with pre-existing conditions, not having a lifetime cap on coverage and keeping children on parents’ insurance until age 26. Ending coverage for pre-existing conditions would in and of itself lead to an estimated 53 million people losing their healthcare insurance. 

The cynical GOP know the first option will lead to certain defeat at the polls and that the second one looks too much like socialism, so my prediction is that the GOP’s version of healthcare reform will resemble what we currently have, with the possible addition of a very small voucher program to justify the clamor that the healthcare system must operate more on free market principles. 

That means that like the wall, the GOP’s healthcare reform process will likely waste a lot of time—and money—in meaningless activity.  

Pass the juice box, Paulie. And don’t horde all the paper clips and staples, Donnie.

Fake news has been around since news has. What’s different now is the assertion that alternate truths exist

By Marc Jampole

For a few months in the early 1980’s my job was to rewrite the long stories form the 11:00 pm news of the night before into 30-second and one-minute versions for the morning news for the San Francisco affiliate of a national news network. Virtually every morning I discovered inaccuracies in the reporting of one particular night beat reporter—her versions always exaggerated the blood and guts, the violence and the horror. She often introduced fake elements into the news. 

Around that time, Ronald Reagan in campaigning for president often invoked the image of the “welfare queen” and was never questioned by the news media. Virtually all mainstream news media allowed Reagan to make his racially tinged claim that welfare fraud was a huge problem without looking at the evidence, which demonstrated that the biggest fraud problem the federal government had in the 1980’s were false claims by physicians. By publishing a smear that could readily be disproven, the news media allowed the fake claim to disseminate across the country and for racism once again to enter a political decision. 

Fast forward to the run-up to the Second Iraq War. All evidence suggests that New York Times reporter Judith Miller knew or at least had deep suspicions that the evidence she was reporting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was completely fabricated. It was fake news and it helped to get us into the most disastrous war in American history. 

In fact, from the Civil War onward, we can find massive evidence in every generation of the news media routinely publishing the lies of government and large corporations without checking the facts, sometimes knowing they were distributing falsehoods and not caring. Sometimes these lies involved the foundational ideology upon which American society operates, such as American exceptionalism, the idea that everyone as an equal shot at success at life and the central importance of the two-parent nuclear family.  

Thus, while I am disturbed and shaken by the damage wrought on the American people by fake news in the latest election cycle, I am not convinced that a Rubicon has been crossed. The quantity of false news has grown and the means by which it can be delivered directly to consumers have multiplied, but the problem of mendacious journalism is as old as town criers and public squares.  

Through the years, both mainstream and tabloid media have disseminated several types of false news:

·        The out-and-out lie: In the mainstream media, only rogue journalists like Brian Williams tell an out-and-out lie or make up a story. When discovered, the profession usually punishes them harshly.

·        Letting an obvious lie pass:  Journalists have always given politicians, business leaders and civic boosters a free pass on their overt lies, for several reasons: 1) Because they agree with what the liar is saying. For example, a basic agreement with the idea of cutting Social Security benefits to fund more tax cuts for the wealthy led to many media to conceal the net effects of the recommendations of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility & Reform in 2010.  2) To create or extend a story or a controversy, which explains why the news media didn’t call Trump on his incessant lying until very late in the presidential campaign. It also explains why they continue to publish the views of a handful of pariah scientists, many paid by corporations, who deny human-caused global warming. 3) To support the government and also ensure that they continue to be able to use government sources, as we can see in the run-up to the Iraq War, when the mainstream media published the ridiculously low government projections on the cost of the conflict, while ignoring the more accurate predictions of a variety of foreign policy experts and economists.

·        Selective coverage: Is it false news to publish so much about the fact that Hillary Clinton had a private server, while suppressing the fact that her predecessors also used private servers, that the Bush II administration consciously destroyed three million emails and that the contents of the Clinton emails exonerated her from any suspicious of unethical or illegal actions?

·        Spinning the coverage: Is it false news to focus on the part of a report or study that supports the media’s worldview while ignoring more significant parts that disprove what the media wants us to believe? Some examples: Headlines and reporting on a Pew study this past summer focused on the fact that four-fifths of the nation’s fastest-shrinking religious group, white evangelicals, were backing Trump, while ignoring the fact that the fastest growing religious group and one of the same size as white evangelicals—those who are atheists—favored Clinton by similar margins. Six years ago, the mass media reported that a National Center for Health Statistics study found that people who cohabit are a mere 6% less likely to be together 10 years after marriage than people who don’t live together before getting hitched.  The media either ignored or buried the real significance of the study: that more than 61% of all women now cohabit with someone else sometime in their lives. Is it false news to declare an ignoramus of the right an expert, while ignoring a widely published left winger considered the world’s top scholar in the field? In this regard, I agree with Mark Hertsgaard who in the Nation special issue on the Obama years say the mass media “deserve a special circle in hell for sustaining the lie that climate change is more a matter of political opinion than of scientific fact.” 

Determining whether or when providing selective information, purposely misinterpreting the facts or communicating the lies of other people (with proper attribution, of course!) constitutes false news involves questions of ethics and epistemology, which is the study of meaning. In passing, let’s note that the United States government has often used false news reports to control or steer events in other countries.  We have dropped leaflets full of lies and spread rumors of deaths or impending revolts. Now it appears that the Russians have victimized us with 21st century versions of our own Cold War weapons. 

We should also keep in mind that it’s pretty much legal to lie in paid advertising or in an opinion piece that appears under one’s own byline. The mainstream news media while professing to have a firewall between the advertising and editorial departments, have often tended to blur the distinction between news and advertising, and between news and opinion.  The Internet has given advertisers greater opportunity to pass off their shill as real news.  

It used to be that the mainstream news media represented a consensus of what its owners—the ruling elite—believed. That consensus shaped the news we received, because there were few alternative ways to communicate to people on either the left or the right, and those alternatives—other print media and radio, were expensive and reached relatively small numbers. We could assume that most of the time, the mainstream news media didn’t lie, and when they did, we knew what the lies were and why, because except for a brief instant during the late years of the Vietnam War, the mainstream media always supported the government or the collective ideology of the ruling elite. As G. William Domhoff and others have pointed out, that elite was not unified, as not every wealthy family and corporate overlord agreed to the basic compromise with labor made by the wealthy during the Roosevelt years, nor with the later push to give minorities and women equal access to the law and the economy.   

To state the obvious, the growth of the Internet, especially social media, has increased the ways that we can inexpensively get both accurate and false information to others.  The right-wing in particular has had a great deal of success spreading lies, false news and misleading interpretations directly to their constituencies. If it’s the right wing that has specialized in false news today, it’s mostly because the right is the side fighting reality, in such areas as global warming and the impact of lowering taxes on the wealthy, or using lies to shore up their argument as with voter suppression laws, government privatization and abortion.  With the facts firmly in the hands of those who once would have been called Eisenhower Republicans, the right has faced the choice of retreating or lying to hold back history and the truth.   

But false news has turned elections before, most notably the elections of 1824, 1888 and 2000, all of which happen to have ended with the loser in the popular vote installed in the White House. False news has led us into wars and justified horrible acts such as dropping the atom bomb and constructing a global torture gulag.  

It would take a massive research project to measure the percentage of news in any given era that involves lies, so we don’t really know whether there is more false news today than there used to be. We do, however, know that:

·         There are more ways to disseminate both false and true news than there used to be.

·         There is less real news being reported than in any decade since World War II, as the organizations that report shrink and those that merely disseminate—with or without spin—have grown.

·         Many fewer people get their news from the mainstream than used to, to the point that we know longer have a consensus as to what constitutes hard news, the news cycle, news authorities and news ethics.

·         43% of Internet users have passed along false news; 10% have done so knowing what they were forwarding was full of lies. 

In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman presents study after study that demonstrate that people will believe an anecdote that supports their beliefs over a factual study that disproves them. The prevalence of false news, like rumors and urban myths, feed into the deep need of people to assert their perceptions as reality. What’s troubling in this context, is the kind of false news that predominates today.  Birtherism, voter fraud, Clinton illegalities, immigrant hordes—the racist, anti-science and misogynist explicitness of most false news is more troubling than the fact that false news exists.    

The real question is whether we have reached a tipping point at which the amount of false new overwhelms truth and leads to a breakdown of the system. If that is what we are seeing, it merely reflects the amount of false information that currently determines government and industrial policy. People thinking that the Chinese invented the idea of global warming to hurt the West is not significant until our government and corporate leaders believe it and act on that false information.  

The most alarming part of the rise of false news to my mind is not the increase in false ideas floating in the public sphere, but the growth in the idea that there are multiple truths, an idea first floated by the Bush II administration. I think it was Dick Cheney, but it may have been another Bush II henchperson who said that the administration made its own reality and by the time the world caught up, it would remake reality again. 

As long as we agree that truth exists, truth will eventually win out, although often after a lot of pain and suffering by innocent people. But once we assert that truth can be constructed and that two or more truths can exist simultaneously when it comes to anything other than emotions, we are sunk as a society. 

Donald Trump: Our accidental president is a national embarrassment & a national tragedy

By Marc Jampole

In imagining presidential candidates at the beginning of 2016, if someone had said to me that an erratic and narcissistic sociopath would garner even a million votes, I would have considered it a national embarrassment, regardless of that candidate’s political stances. 

Same feeling if even one million people had voted for a candidate without government experience who failed miserably at his profession of real estate development and casino management, be that candidate of the left or of the right. A national embarrassment that a million people would think such a failure to have presidential timber. 

Same feeling of embarrassment if one million people had voted for someone involved in thousands of lawsuits, most involving other people suing him for nonpayment. Or if one million people had voted for a candidate who routinely slurred women, Hispanics and Muslims. Or if one million people had voted for someone who told bald-faced lies about his past and the state of the country in every speech. Or if one million people had voted for someone who used a charitable foundation to make private purchases and bribe government officials. 

Or if one million people had voted for someone who admitted to sexual assault on camera and in doing so committed a serious violation of law by creating a hostile work environment for women. 

Mainstream news media and Democratic politicians can wring their hands all they want about Russian hacking, FBI manipulation, voter suppression laws, the double standard applied to Hillary, fake news, the Stein effect (which turned Michigan and Wisconsin red), Hillary’s mistakes, the news media’s failure to call Trump on his lies and the unfair skewering of the electoral college in favor of rural states—they can harp about all the many unfortunate happenstances that had to align in some kind of disharmonic convergence for Trump to win the electoral college while losing the popular vote by an unprecedented (not “unpresidented”) 2.8 million votes—moan about it all as much as they like, but it does not change the fact that not one million, not ten million, but almost 63 million people voted for Donald Trump. 

That’s a little more than a quarter of all Americans eligible to vote and 46% of actual voters who cast their ballots for someone documented to be an unethical, law-breaking, sociopathic, racist, erratic, misogynistic liar with no government experience. Law-breaking. Erratic. No Experience. Sociopath. Racist. Misogynistic. Lying. Unethical. Any of these eight traits should have disqualified him in the minds of voters. 

No one knows the real reason we elected Donald Trump. Was it a “perfect storm” of coincidences, which besides the ones listed above also included the lack of any mainstream Republican candidate and the absence of Republican super delegates? Was it a moment of mass hysteria or mass anger at the establishment? Was it a brilliantly executed strategy that bypassed the news media by relying on revivalist meeting events and social media? Was it because the Democratic Party based too much of its program on identity politics, a popular explanation among self-loathing progressives and their mainstream media enablers? These self-flagellators seem to forget that walking away from asserting the rights of ethnic, racial and sexual minorities involves selling out the American dream and that the very term “identity politics” undercuts the legitimacy of the injustices that women and minorities still endure.   

In my view, what elected Donald Trump was the merging of two evils which have poisoned the American body politics since the white rich merchants and slave owners whom we call our founders formed the country more than two centuries ago: racism and greed. Many people voted for Trump out of fear and resentment of blacks, Hispanics and Muslims. Many other people voted for him because they wanted to lower taxes, no matter what. The greedy ones have cynically financed a war against multicultural values and science to pander to the racist (and ultra-religious) ones.  Rich folk supporting the beliefs of racist (and culturally conservative) folk in return for support of economic policies that hurt 99% of all Americans has pretty much described the Republican play book since the rise of Ronald Reagan. If the sleep of reason produces monsters, then the reasoning of the Republican Party has produced the monstrous Donald Trump. Or perhaps it’s the reasoning of consumer capitalism. 

Let’s not forget, though, that both racism and greed run deep and long in Americwan history. In fact the white rich merchants and slave owners who created the Electoral College did so to keep real control of governance in as small a set of hands as possible. Other aspects of the Constitution in its original form show favoritism to both the propertied and slave owners. From its very inception, we can view most American history through the lens of either racism or the battle to divide the economic pie between the wealthy and everyone else.  

No matter the explanation for the election of Donald Trump, we should all feel ashamed and embarrassed. That the ballots of one quarter of the voting population should elect such a dangerously unqualified president reflects poorly on our education system, our political parties, our news media, our system of checks and balances, the motives of the ultra-wealthy and our cultural norms. It is our national shame. And once Trump’s cabinet of crony capitalists, retired generals and ideologues springs into action, it will also be our national tragedy.    

The American dream has proved to be weaker than the American original sins of racism and greed.   

   

Editorial: Carnies vs. Rubes

There are two kinds of people in Donald Trump’s America: carnies and rubes. Trump ran for president as an economic populist who would protect American manufacturing jobs, despite his own history of ducking debts to contractors and outsourcing manufacturing. Now he is filling his Cabinet with plutocratic billionaires who are committed to doing away with public schools, environmental protection and workers’ rights while Republican congressional leaders plan to privatize Medicare, cut Social Security benefits and open up our public lands for more oil and gas drilling.

As of Dec. 9, Trump’s proposed Cabinet had a combined wealth of more than $14.5 billion, plus three generals and at least one nominee who has twice sued the agency he’s now poised to run, Tessa Stuart noted at RollingStone.com. As we go to press, Trump has settled on Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, which will increase the Cabinet’s net worth by another $287 million.

The working-class Americans who voted for The Donald and other Republican carnies in November had better figure out which side they are on. The education will start Jan. 20 and it’s likely to be a crash course.

More people are coming to realize Trump is dangerously unfit to be president. The volatile real estate wheeler-dealer and reality TV star said he wanted to Make America Great Again, but he has refused to release his tax returns or speak candidly about his complex business dealings, including financial interests in at least 25 foreign countries. It appears that his first priority is to make his bank account great again. Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo.com suggested that Trump might not be able to divest his far-flung business enterprises because he’s too “underwater” to do so, or he’s too dependent on current and expanding cash flow to divest or even turn the reins over to someone else. He apparently is more interested in keeping his title as executive producer of The Apprentice, now starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, than he is in attending intelligence briefings. Instead, Trump has delegated the intel details to the vice president-elect, Mike Pence.

Trump has been evasive about how he came to be the beneficiary of the leak of documents from Democratic officials, which US intelligence agencies believe were stolen by Russian hackers and passed on to Wikileaks to damage Hillary Clinton. Trump also was helped by FBI Director James Comey’s release of a letter 10 days before the election that said the agency was resuming its investigation of Clinton’s emails, which reversed her momentum in polls before Comey followed up with “never mind” a few days before the election.

If the Electoral College really was designed to give electors a chance to disregard the votes in their respective states when that state’s voters fall for a charlatan’s bait-and-switch, this would be a good case to test that proposition. But the electors are chosen from partisans who have pledged to support their party’s nominee and they would face tremendous pressure if they wavered. As we write this, a week before the electors are to cast their ballots, only one of 306 Republican electors has said he would not vote for Trump. Another 36 Republican “faithless electors” are needed to deny Trump the presidency. And that likely would just send the election back to the Big Top, to be decided by House Republicans.

Hold the Line on Court Vacancy

Some on the left believe Senate Democrats should attempt to confirm Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in an extraordinary session during the brief period on Jan. 3 when the terms of 34 members of the Senate have expired, but before the new and re-elected senators are sworn in. At that point, David Waldman suggested at DailyKos.com (Dec. 6), the terms of the Senate’s Class III come to an end, leaving 66 currently sworn and serving senators, 34 of whom will be Democrats and 30 who are Republicans.

If Vice President Joe Biden recognized the sitting Democrats as the majority, they theoretically could move to confirm Garland. However, Sean Davis argued at TheFederalist.com (Dec. 7) “it requires one to completely ignore the Constitution, the Standing Rules of the Senate, Senate precedent, and basic common sense.”

For one thing, noted Davis, a Republican former Senate staffer, the 20th Amendment states that “the terms of Senators and Representatives [shall end] at noon on the 3d day of January … and the terms of their successors shall then begin,” no matter what the outgoing vice president thinks.

As much as we hate to see Republicans get away with their refusal to consider Obama’s choice of Garland, the chief judge on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, it might not be a good idea for Senate Democrats to set the precedent of doing away with all the standing rules and Senate precedents in order to cast one vote, when Republicans will end up in control of the Senate a few minutes later, and they’ll keep that majority at least for the next two years — with the precedent set by the Democrats that the majority, however narrow, can ignore rules whenever they wish.

A better course, if Democrats want to play hardball, would be for President Obama to withdraw the Garland nomination and, during the recess between sessions, name Harvard constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe (or some other eminent liberal jurist) as an interim justice.

Republicans have held pro-forma sessions in which no business is conducted at least every three days so the Senate is not technically in recess to prevent such appointments. They would appeal to the D.C. Court of Appeals, which upheld the pro-forma sessions to prevent recess appointments in 2013. But since then, the appeals court has gained four Obama appointees and now, with a 7-4 Democratic majority, the court might revisit the question.

In any case, Senate Democrats should block any Trump appointee to the Supreme Court who does not have moderate bona fides because, as Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell explained last year when he ruled out any hearings on the Garland nomination, the Senate should wait for the people to choose a new president before it fills the vacancy on the Supreme Court. And the people chose Hillary Clinton by a margin of more than 2.8 million votes. Trump will technically be president but he does not have the consent of a majority of the governed. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has noted that there are precedents for the Supreme Court to operate with fewer than nine justices. If Trump wishes to negotiate with Democrats over nominations, that might resolve the matter.

Meanwhile, Democrats still have a popular majority on most core issues, such as establishing the minimum wage as a living wage, protecting Social Security and Medicare, moving toward universal access to health care and public education from pre-kindergarten through college, rebuilding infrastructure, protecting air and water and taking action to reverse climate change. The problem is that people either don’t believe the Republicans really are a threat to their interests, or they don’t believe Democrats will stand up for them.

Democrats have two years to convince working people they will fight for them. The odds are stacked against them in the House, which is gerrymandered in enough states to keep Democrats in the minority at least through 2020. In the Senate, Democrats will be defending 23 seats in 2018, Dem-leaning independents defend two seats and only eight Republicans will be up for election. But as Trump reveals himself to be a charlatan whose campaign promises no longer are operative, the opportunities for Democrats should improve.

Ambitious Dems who are interested in stepping up for a possible White House run in 2020 also have two years to show they are an effective antagonist to the plutocrats and robber barons who run Trump and the Republican Party. Let the games begin! — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2017

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