Saturday, December 12, 2020

Editorial: Biden’s Cabinet Choices

While Joe Biden proceeds to fill his cabinet, lame duck Donald Trump is trying to plant right-wing supporters into federal agencies to sabotage Biden’s presidency. 

Some on the left are concerned about Biden’s picks, but they are relatively predictable as Biden turns mainly to veterans of the Democratic establishment. For example, Antony Blinken, Biden’s choice for secretary of state, served as deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state and is in the foreign policy establishment.

Blinken broke with Biden to support the armed intervention in Libya and has argued that Israel should keep receiving US military aid even if it refuses to honor international agreements. Blinken believes diplomacy needs to be “supplemented by deterrence” and has shown little interest in reining in the sprawling US global military presence. But this time Biden will be president.

Janet Yellen is a good choice as treasury secretary, if for no other reason than Biden could have done a lot worse. Some on the left had hoped for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, but Biden may have figured Warren is needed in the Senate, and Yellen is a respected economist and former Federal Reserve chair who is relatively apolitical. She is not an advocate of austerity policies and has spoken of the need for the government to extend “extraordinary fiscal support” during the pandemic. 

John Kerry as special envoy for climate may show Biden takes climate change seriously, since Kerry does believe climate change is a problem — which is a welcome change from the Trump years — though many environmentalists are concerned that Kerry favors a market-based approach to putting a price on carbon.

Avril Haines is the choice for director of national intelligence, with experience in the intelligence community, working for the Bush and Obama administrations in jobs for the National Security Council, the State Department and the CIA. In her stint as deputy CIA chief during the Obama years, she oversaw the use of drones, which has raised concerns of human rights groups. But her main job will be to restore nonpartisanship to intel agencies after four years of deep partisanship under Trump.

Alejandro Mayorkas as secretary of Homeland Security is likely to roll back the Trump administration’s cruelest immigration policies, in addition to stabilizing the agency after the turmoil and politicization. Mayorkas, who was brought to the US as a baby by parents fleeing Cuba in 1959, was one of the original architects of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). But a 2015 DHS inspector general report that found Mayorkas inappropriately helped several companies obtain employment visas — which Mayorkas disputed — may be brought up by Republicans.

Biden reportedly plans to name recently retired Gen. Lloyd Austin III as secretary of defense. As the chief of US Central Command, he oversaw US military operations across the Middle East for three years before his retirement in 2016, but appointing a recently retired general would violate long-standing traditions and a law that stipulates that the Secretary of Defense must be a civilian. That law was waived in 2017 to confirm Gen. James Mattis as Trump’s first defense secretary. We’d rather re-establish the tradition of civilian control of the Defense Department. If Austin’s nomination runs aground, a good alternate candidate would be Jeh Johnson, a former general counsel of the Department of Defense from 2009 to 2012, when he quit. He was nominated as secretary of Homeland Security in October 2013.

Biden may be choosing moderates to avoid tough confirmation fights in an intensely partisan Senate. He also can’t afford to lose any Democratic senators in a chamber that Democrats will only narrowly control if they win the two Georgia runoff races Jan. 5. The close Senate buried lefties’ hopes for Bernie Sanders as labor secretary and Warren’s bid for treasury. Biden also must be careful about promoting House members, as the Democratic majority has narrowed to four seats in the House, with two races remaining to be decided.

Biden has decided on Xavier Becerra, the progressive Democratic attorney general of California, as secretary of health and human services. Becerra has been a leader of the 20 states and D.C. who are trying to protect the Affordable Care Act from being dismantled by Republicans. As HHS secretary, Becerra will oversee the federal effort to acquire and distribute sufficient doses of COVID-19 vaccines to take care of the population, handle insurance coverage and cost issues and work to restore the ACA from years of undermining. The former congressman has also been vocal about fighting for women’s health and advocating for lower drug prices by use of “march-in rights” to effectively rescind exclusive patents for medicines whose research and development was funded by government agencies. 

Becerra has been a supporter of Medicare for All, but he is expected to support Biden’s call for strengthening and preserving the ACA (and possibly reducing the age of eligibility for Medicare). Frankly, progressives are unlikely to have the votes to get Medicare for All passed in the House, much less the Senate, even if Vice President Kamala Harris is available for the tie-breaking vote. Democrats will need reinforcements in the 2022 election.

One of the Republican targets is likely to be Neera Tanden, Biden’s choice for Office of Management and Budget. Tanden is a moderate liberal who heads the Center for American Progress, but some on the left see her as too moderate, and her advocacy for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primaries grated on many Sanders supporters. She also has made snarky tweets during the Trump years that have riled some thin-skinned Republican senators.

Former neocon Max Boot wrote in the Washington Post Nov. 24 that, after the past four years, “it was a disorienting experience to read the rundown of President-elect Joe Biden’s selections for senior national security posts. Where, I wondered, were the unqualified businessmen? The grifters with the FBI hot on their tails? The Twitter trolls? The fanatics? The sycophants? The relatives of the president?” 

Even though Trump is still spouting lies about vote fraud, he’s on his way out and it’s good to look forward to waking up in the morning without worrying what the president had done overnight. 

There is room for optimism with the new administration. Biden started out as a moderate liberal who often moved to the middle to work toward bipartisan proposals during his 36 years in he Senate, but VoteView, a database at UCLA that tracks roll-call votes on an ideological map, rated Biden 75% liberal over 18 congressional sessions, which made him the 25th most liberal senator during that period. He was in the middle of the Democratic caucus. While he was never the socialist that Republicans tagged him, neither was he the corporatist that leftists called him, as Biden had an 86% positive lifetime score with the AFL-CIO through 2008, when he was elected vice president.

We believe Biden will to listen to progressive advocates and he is capable of promoting populist policies. His work is cut out for him to fix the damage Trump has wreaked in the past four years — including the sabotage Trump and his enablers have done since the election to wreck the economy and make the nation ungovernable. Electing the two Democrats in the Senate runoffs in Georgia would make Biden’s job easier and make progressive action at least conceivable. If Mitch McConnell is still the Senate majority leader when Biden is sworn in, it won’t be good news for anybody left of center (including those who work for a living but have been conned into believing that the Trumpublicans care what happens to them). — JMC



From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2021


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Selections from the January 1-15, 2021 issue

 COVER/Ava Kofman 

Trapped inside an assisted living facility during the pandemic: ‘We don’t even know who is dead or alive’

EDITORIAL
Biden’s Cabinet choices


FRANK LINGO 
Trump leaves EPA sabotaged

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

DON ROLLINS
Bet the old gray mule: Trump won’t go away

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen  
Time for the grown-ups to take charge

DISPATCHES 
Giuliani’s COVID infection may shut down legislatures in three states. 
Trump loses Georgia for the third time. 
Possible movement on pandemic stimulus in Congress. 
Trump gangs bring guns, threats to ‘Stop the Steal’ protests.
Repubs move to stymie Biden at FCC.
Trump failed to secure enough Pfizer vaccines.
Two Trump henchmen named to Pentagon advisory board ....

ART CULLEN 
Ok. You have a cellphone. But are you really better off?

SARAH ANDERSON and MARGOT RATHKE
Biden could cancel student debt. Will he? 

JILL RICHARDSON 
We need a safety net for parents

JOHN YOUNG
Free to pray, free to spray?

TOM CONWAY 
How Americans can help frontline workers battling COVID-19

JOHN GEYMAN, M.D.  
Trump’s fantasy about COVID-19 keeps killing Americans. What can be done?


NANCY J. ALTMAN and LINDA BENENSCH 
Social Security: Something to give thanks for in 2020

SAM PIZZIGATI 
The rich are cheering Wall Street’s latest records. Americans of modest means are draining 401(k)s


ROBERTO Dr. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ  
An open letter to Spain

SETH SANDRONSKY 
Seeing hillbillies

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas  
Scientists: A breed to nurture

SAM URETSKY 
Biden may have trouble putting the house divided back together again

JOEL D. JOSEPH 
How President Biden can convert Trump voters

WAYNE O’LEARY 
The election’s real winner

JOHN BUELL 
America’s not-so-model elections: So much for exceptionalism

JASON SIBERT 
Trump made China great again


N. GUNASEKARAN
Democracies under threat during pandemic


BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel  
Unplug the jukebox

ROB PATTERSON 
Public libraries remain a public asset


MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell  
‘Make the earth Greta again!’


SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson  
It’s not like chicken soup will cure you

and more ...

Friday, November 27, 2020

Editorial: Give Trump the Bum’s Rush

 As the old saying goes, Donald Trump wanted to remain president in the worst possible way. And Rudy Giuliani lost what was left of his reputation helping Trump peddle lies about voter fraud right up to the courthouse door, but then he and other lawyers on Trump’s legal team were forced to admit to judges that they didn’t have any evidence that the election was stolen. 

We should be thankful that Democrats turned out nearly 80 million votes to swamp the Trump cult, flipping five states that Trump carried in 2016 — not only Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the so-called “Blue Wall” that Hillary Clinton lost, but also Arizona and Georgia. That might have put the election out of range of Republicans who thought they might steal it for the Great Misleader. 

Since the voters gave Biden 306 credits in the Electoral College — 36 more than the number needed to win the presidency — Trump and his toadies needed to convince Republican legislatures in at least three states to repudiate the will of their respective voters. If it had been a matter of one or two states, Trump’s Republican enablers might have been tempted, and we would have seen Republican leaders joining in a chorus rationalizing the legitimacy of overriding the popular vote.

Two weeks after it became apparent that Biden would win Pennsylvania, putting him past the 270 electoral credits needed to win the presidency, Trump was refusing to concede and he wouldn’t let federal agencies cooperate with Biden’s transition team. Instead, Trump’s attorneys tried to delay the certification of Biden’s victories in the five contested states, with bogus charges of large-scale fraudulent voting, loudly claimed in tweets and press conferences. But Trump’s lawyers were unable to produce actual evidence at court hearings, and the lawsuits fell like a row of dominoes. Finally, Nov. 23, Emily Murphy, administrator of the US General Services Administration, notified Biden she was authorizing the transition process to begin, which may be as close as Trump gets to conceding the election.

We may have been saved this year by the incompetence of Trump and his lawyers, but we can’t count on that happening again. Smarter fascists are waiting in the wings of the Republican caucus and “GOP” leaders are no more committed to the principles of democracy in the United States than they were committed in 2016 to the principle that no Supreme Court justice should be seated during an election year.

While Trump’s lawyers were delaying the inevitable, his agency heads were laying booby traps that Biden’s appointees will have to find and defuse when they take over in January. 

Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, shortly after Trump was inaugurated promised an unending battle for “deconstruction of the administrative state,” to transform Washington and upend the world order.

As part of that process, the Trump administration drove many career civil servants from their jobs and replaced them with Trump loyalists who will try to stall or undermine Biden’s agenda. The new president may be able to replace many political appointees when he moves into the White House, but more Trumpers will be protected by civil service laws that stipulate they can be removed only “for cause.” The Biden administration must document those causes.

Getting rid of Trump is a major victory, but it won’t solve the problem with the Republican Party, which has been going fascist over 40 years. Republicans have controlled the message ever since the Reagan administration did away with the Fairness Doctrine, which required the holders of broadcast licenses to present controversial issues of public importance and do so in a manner that was fair and balanced. The new policy allowed conservatives to consolidate radio and TV networks and replace liberal voices on talk radio with right wing talkers who stick to the message that Democrats only care about gays, radical feminists, Blacks and Latinos, and don’t care about white people — particularly white men. Conservatives have expanded in the last decade to Spanish-language stations as well, which may have swung Florida to Trump by convincing Latinos that Joe Biden was intent on bringing Venezuela-style socialism to the US — even though Biden doesn’t even support Medicare for All. 

Democratic funders in 2004 built Air America Radio to bring progressive talk to the radio, and it helped Barack Obama win election in 2008, but two years later, progressive radio talker Thom Hartmann recently noted, the “Democratic funders declared victory and abandoned the network; it died in 2010. Now, only conservative talk radio is heard in 90% of the country.” 

You can still listen to progressive talkers, such as Hartmann, Stephanie Miller, and Randi Rhodes over the Internet on apps such as TuneIn or Progressive Voices, as well as SiriusXM’s Progressive Channel, but progressive talk should be broadcast from radio stations across the country instead of leaving the interior of the US to Rush Limbaugh, who is carried on 600 stations, and others of his ilk spread over 1,500 conservative talk radio stations, compared with fewer than 100 stations featuring progressive talk.

“If Democrats don’t get their media and intellectual infrastructure act together, the hard-right narrative being promoted by America’s most toxic media will continue to swing elections across the country,” Hartmann wrote.

With an estimated $14 billion spent on the 2020 election, and nearly two thirds of that spending by Democrats or left-leaning PACs, some of that money might better have been spent buying radio stations that could fill in the information gap in red states (many of whom used to elect Democrats). There is a liberal audience there. 

The FCC should reinstate the Fairness Doctrine; restore local and national caps on the ownership of commercial radio stations; and provide greater local accountability over radio licensing. In the meantime, Democratic funders should make another run at buying radio stations that would help get equity in talk radio voices.

Also, while Biden has been expressing his hope to unify the nation, that should not preclude the establishment of a commission or special prosecutor to identify crimes committed by Trump and members of his campaigns and his administration. Trump certainly should be prosecuted for his role in ordering his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to violate federal campaign finance laws in making payments to keep two women quiet about their sexual relations with Trump before he ran for president. In a court filing December 2018, a US attorney noted, “[A]s Cohen himself has now admitted, with respect to both payments, he acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1,” a.k.a. Donald Trump. 

Cohen was sentenced to three years in federal prison and fined $50,000 after pleading guilty to tax evasion and campaign finance violations. He served a little more than a year before his release from prison in May, due to concerns about the coronavirus, to serve the rest of his sentence under house arrest. If Cohen deserved to go to prison (and Trump let him take the fall), so should the Grifter in Chief.

Hey, maybe Robert Mueller will get to finish writing his report when Trump is no longer immune from prosecution. And maybe Mueller can add a third volume on Bill Barr’s obstructions. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2020


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Selections from the December 15, 2020, issue

 COVER/Hal Crowther

America the inscrutable: Trump’s almost gone, but ... 

EDITORIAL 
Give Trump the bum’s rush


GENE NICHOL
History’s election and North Carolina

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

DON ROLLINS 
Four myths and a word of encouragement

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen  
Don’t wait to admit COVID danger from your ICU bed. 

DISPATCHES
Disgruntled Trump suppporters threaten to boycott Georgia Senate runoffs. 
Trump team cuts ties with lawyer who threatens to ‘blow up Georgia’ with ‘Biblical’ lawsuit. 
Aaron Van Langeville has more spine than entire GOP caucus in Congress. 
Trump’s one last effort to cut Social Security. 
Biden urged to clear out Trump loyalists. 
Biden and Dems try to lead while McConnell holds nation hostage.
Obamacare is enrolling and expanding.
Ranking Democrat calls for prosecution of Trump crimes ...


ART CULLEN 
An electoral map awash in red

OLIVIA ALPERSTEIN 
Don’t trash the Affordable Care Act — expand it


JILL RICHARDSON 
Put empathy back in the White House

JOHN YOUNG 
My Joe Biden double fantasy

ROBERT C. KOEHLER
Biden’s mandate is for deep solutions, not donor-class fetishism of bipartisan compromise


GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet  
Circular firing squads

TOM CONWAY 
‘They’re holding the whole country hostage’: How Mitch McConnell flouts the will of the American people

RICHARD D. WOLFF  
Why capitalism was destined to come out on top in the 2020 election


NORMAN SOLOMON  
Corporate Democrats are to blame for congressional losses — so naturally they’re blaming progressives

CHUCK COLLINS  
We must protect essential workers from billionaire pandemic profiteers


ROBERTO Dr. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ  
Why the wall must come down

SETH SANDRONSKY 
Report: Race-ing to the bottom

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas  
Pragmatism: the new order mantra

SAM URETSKY 
We don’t have to wait for a vaccine to stop COVID spread

SARAH ANDERSON and MARGOT RATHKE 
Low-income voters showed up for Biden. Now they need relief

WAYNE O’LEARY 
Short-circuiting the judiciary

JOHN BUELL 
The piggybank still has many coins

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson  
Brother Trump’s cathedral of redemption and golf retreat


BOB BURNETT 
2020 presidential election: Cleaning up loose ends


BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel  
Capitalism’s strange fruit

ROB PATTERSON 
Looking back at ‘Mrs. America’

DICK POLMAN 
Trump flunky Rudy is on gravedigging duty


MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell  
New movie musical about 1919 Canadian General Strike takes timely ‘Stand!’


FRANK LINGO 
Trump’s dump: An eco-legacy

and more ...

Saturday, November 14, 2020

Editorial: Take the Win, but Keep Fighting

 

Is America a failing nation? If so, we hope Joe Biden can stop the bleeding and stabilize our democracy. 

No sooner had the Associated Press declared Joe Biden had enough votes in Pennsylvania to put him over the 270 electoral count needed to make Donald Trump a one-termer, than detractors began to belittle the accomplishment.

Democrats didn’t get the “Blue Wave” blowout in the presidential race that pre-election polls suggested was coming. House Democrats lost several seats, which will reduce their majority in the next Congress, and Democrats’ hopes of regaining control of the Senate faded. It appears likely that Sen. Mitch McConnell will remain as majority leader, with an effective veto over Biden’s cabinet appointees and any federal judicial nominees. 

It took four days after Election Day for Democratic mail-in ballots to make clear the former vice president would flip Pennsylvania, along with Michigan and Wisconsin in the Upper Midwest, to rebuild the “Blue Wall.” Mail-in ballots also turned the Trump tide in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada.

Trump still refuses to concede and intends to appeal to the Supreme Court to set aside the election, even though his lawyers have turned over no evidence of fraudulent voting by Democrats. As comedian John Fugelsang said, “It’s not over until the last lawsuit is laughed out of the last courtroom.”

Don’t minimize the accomplishment that Biden got more than 78 million votes, the largest total of any presidential candidate. He needed them as Trump drew more than 72.7 million votes. That placed Trump second on the all-time list, which we attribute to 40 years of Republicans undermining public education. Also, since the Reagan administration did away with the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, Republicans have seized control of commercial talk radio, particularly in rural areas, so you can drive up I-35 from Dallas to Minneapolis and never hear a good word about Democrats on talk radio. It shows in election results in states along the way.

We still find it hard to believe 72 million Americans decided, “Yeah, I want for more years of Trump running America like one of his businesses,” but the important thing is that Donald Trump ended up as the big loser. And after watching Trump lie about the mail-in ballots being “illegal” and “fraudulent,” anybody who is still proud of voting for that bloated con man and chronic liar should examine their consciences as well as their gullibility.

Democrats picked up two Senate seats, as former astronaut Mark Kelly beat interim Sen. Martha McSally in Arizona and former Gov. John Hickenlooper beat Sen. Cory Gardner in Colorado, but in Alabama Sen. Doug Jones (D) was swept away in the Trump tide by former Auburn football coach and political newcomer Tommy Tuberville.

Other Senate pickup opportunities faded as polls showed Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon (D) ahead of Sen. Susan Collins heading into the election, but Collins finished 7.7 points ahead of Gideon. Polls showed former North Carolina state Sen. Cal Cunningham (D) leading US Sen. Thom Tillis in the weeks leading up to the election but Tillis was leading Cunningham by 1.7 points a week after the election with ballots still being counted.

Cunningham conceded to Tillis Tuesday night, and Sen. Dan Sullivan (R) had 57.5% of the vote, with mail-in votes still being counted a week after the election, against Dr. Al Gross, an orthopedic surgeon and former commercial fisherman, so Republicans will have 50 seats in the Senate. 

That leads the leadership up to Georgia. which will have two runoffs Jan. 5. Sen. David Perdue (R) got 49.7%, 1.8 points ahead of Jon Ossoff (D) but Perdue needed 50% of the vote. In the second race, Rev. Raphael Warnock (D) finished first in a 20-person field with 32.9%, ahead of interim Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R), who got 25.9%, and US Rep. Doug Collins (R), who got 20%.

There was infighting among House Democrats over why they lost at least eight incumbents, with centrists blaming progressives for pushing far-left views while progressives blamed centrist party leaders for resisting policies that would appeal to workers, such as expanding Medicare to cover everybody and passing a Green New Deal to create jobs and save the climate. 

We think Democrats were lucky to gain 40 seats in the 2018 surge, unseating many Republicans in suburban districts. This year, Trump said Biden and Dems were pushing “Venezuela-style socialism,” would “defund” the police and would let suburbs be overrun with BLM and antifascist protesters. It’s nonsense, but it may have spurred Republican turnout. However, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the GOP would regain many of the House seats they lost in 2018. A week after the election, Democrats had 218 seats, a bare majority, with 16 contests remaining to be decided.

Biden has not embraced his “mandate” to promote a socialist agenda. Instead, he is determined to work on a bipartisan basis with Congress. His work will be cut out for him with McConnell, who has styled himself as the “Grim Reaper” of progressive legislation. If Mitch declines to cooperate, Biden can use executive orders to undo damage done by Trump and he can make temporary appointments.

Biden’s top priority is to confront the COVID-19 pandemic, restore the integrity of the Centers for Disease Control and return the US to the World Health Organization. He’ll rejoin the Paris climate accords, which Trump quit because he believes climate change is a hoax. Biden can reinstate executive orders protecting DREAMers. And he can reinstate environmental regulations that Trump’s lobbyist-run agencies gutted to accommodate polluting industries.

Biden also needs an attorney general who will investigate criminal wrongdoing in the Trump administration, including establishing who was responsible for delaying the US mail, which is a crime, even if it isn’t involved in sabotaging an election. 

On Nov. 10, the Supreme Court heard a case brought by Republican state officials and the Trump administration to finally destroy the Affordable Care Act. At stake is affordable health insurance for millions of Americans and coverage for pre-existing conditions for millions more during a pandemic.

If the court trashes the ACA, 20 million Americans could lose their insurance, increasing the ranks of the uninsured by 70% and wreaking havoc on the health care system. Senate Republicans will finally have to come up with a health insurance alternative. 

Meanwhile, if McConnell blocks passage of a major stimulus bill to help people who have lost their jobs during the pandemic and keep the economy going, Democrats should make sure the public blames the Republicans for the failure in 2022 — as they failed to do in this election. 

In his victory speech Nov. 7 in Wilmington, Del., Biden renewed his commitment to unifying and serving all Americans at a time the nation is deeply divided along partisan lines. “The Bible tells us that to everything there is a season — a time to build, a time to reap, a time to sow. And a time to heal,” he said. Left unsaid is that, if Republicans reject healing, 2022 will be the time to clobber. 

From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2020


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Selections from the December 1, 2020 issue

 COVER/Jake Johnson

With McConnell-led GOP holding Senate, progressives fear ‘disastrous’ obstruction as Covid spreads and planet burns

EDITORIAL
Take the win, but keep up the fight


LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
When the Constitution’s the problem, not the answer

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen  
The election is over. Now move forward

DISPATCHES
McConnell backs Trump refusal to concede. 
Atty. Gen. Barr resurfaces to pursue ‘voting irregularities.’ 
Trump fires defense secretary who opposed US troops on American streeets. 
Biden & Harris start transition, but get no cooperation from Trump. 
Progressive Caucus aims to show clout. 
Progressive Dems say left proposals are winners. 
Trump lets Georgia jettison Obamacare.
Trump retained majority of white women voters.
World media responds to Trump's election sabotage ...


ART CULLEN 
It’s been a strange trip. Four years ago, who would’ve thought Biden might win Iowa?

ROBERT MORRISON
Trump sold out workers like me

JILL RICHARDSON 
The great irony of Trump’s taxes

JOHN YOUNG 
Paying the bill for all that is Trump

ALLAN NAIRN 
Trump’s GOP worked harder to stop people from voting than they did to stop COVID-19 from spreading

ROBERTO Dr. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ
Beyond congrats, a brown line is needed for Biden-Harris


GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet  
Election Day diary: Dark mood for a dark moment

THOM HARTMANN 
This election proves the need for right to vote


JASON SIBERT
Return to a foreign policy that seeks peace


KATHERINE WILKINSON  
Putting out wildfires, now and tomorrow


BOB BURNETT 
America’s Hitler

SETH SANDRONSKY
Rideshare company rules: California’s Proposition 22 wins

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas  
At last: Something states can do, easily, to improve health

SAM URETSKY 
Don’t blame Great Barrington

ELAINE SHELLY 
If only the election had been about health care

WAYNE O’LEARY 
High court hijinks

JOHN BUELL 
Lessons from bank bailout: Remember the borrowers


JESSICA CORBETT 
As US officially quits Paris Accord amid election uncertainty, progressives say ‘make this disastrous decision temporary’

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson  
Proud Boys

BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel  
Sometimes you can choose your family

ROB PATTERSON 
Documentary shows Johnny Cash straying from the line


MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell  
Viewers of the world, unite!

FRANK LINGO 
Rescue and recovery

and more ...

Friday, October 30, 2020

Editorial: Finish Strong for Freedom

Donald Trump may have been as surprised as anyone when he won the 2016 presidential election. He got 46.1% of the vote, finishing second in the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, who got 48.2%, 2.8 million ahead of the reality TV star. But because of the peculiarities of the Electoral College, Trump’s narrow victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by a margin of less than 80,000 votes across those three states put him in the White House. 

No sooner was Trump inaugurated than he started his re-election campaign. But he never tried to win over the people who voted for Clinton, instead writing them off as enemies. He campaigned on a populist platform of protecting American jobs, but he ruled as an autocrat. More than 300,000 American manufacturing jobs were lost during Trump’s presidency, as his trade war alienated our allies, China found new sources for commodities such as pork and soybeans and the trade deficit increased 22% since 2016. 

Meanwhile, Trump loaded his Cabinet with corporate lobbyists who cut regulations and threatened worker safety and public health. He passed a tax cut that mainly benefitted billionaires and corporations, but also created a new tax incentive to offshore jobs. His lackeys sabotaged the US Postal Service. He proposes to defund Social Security and Medicare if re-elected. Of course, he has shown himself incapable of controlling the coronavirus — even in the White House.

Trump’s approval since his inauguration peaked at 45.8% in April, in the FiveThirtyEight average of polls, while disapproval has mostly stayed above 50% since a few weeks after his inauguration. 

We certainly aren’t going to call the election in advance, after what happened in 2016, but we are guardedly optimistic. Joe Biden, who would repeal those tax cuts for corporations and individuals making more than $400,000 a year, is leading Trump in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Biden also is narrowly ahead in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and even in Texas. And early voting is at record levels, with nearly 60 million casting their ballots as of Oct. 25, suggesting a surge of support for Democrats. But it will take a strong finish to crush the Great Misleader by a margin that makes it impossible for Republicans to steal the election. 

Democrats need to flip at least three Senate seats to regain the majority. Dem challengers are leading in Arizona, Colorado and Maine and are in tossups for two Georgia seats, Iowa, Montana, North Carolina and South Carolina. Democrats also making strong races in Alaska, Kansas and Texas. On defense, Gary Peters faces a tough re-election race in Michigan and Doug Jones faces a tougher race in Alabama. 

Biden says he wants to work with both parties in the next Congress, but former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid advised his longtime Senate colleague to take “no more than three weeks” to test bipartisanship before moving to end the filibuster, so Democrats can overcome Republican obstruction. In an interview with the Associated Press, Reid said there is just too much that needs to be done in the country to wait around trying to reach agreements under the decades-old Senate practice of requiring 60 votes to advance legislation.

When he was majority leader, Reid was forced to end the filibuster on administrative and most judicial nominees in November 2013 after then-Minority Leader Mitch McConnell used the filibuster to block virtually all of President Obama’s executive and court appointees. Democrats still kept the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, as well as legislation. When Republicans gained the majority in 2015, McConnell resumed blocking Obama’s court appointees, including seven appeals court vacancies and 42 district court vacancies. 

In the most notorious case, after Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, McConnell refused to allow the Senate to consider Obama’s choice of Merrick Garland, Chief Judge of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, in March 2016 to replace Scalia on the Supreme Court. McConnell argued that a Supreme Court nominee should not be considered during an election year. 

Republican senators never gave Garland a hearing and threatened to keep the Supreme Court seat open through a Hillary Clinton administration, if necessary. That threat became moot when Trump was elected, but McConnell further greased the skids by eliminating the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, allowing the Republican Senate majority to barrel over Democratic opposition to confirm Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. 

In his first debate with Biden, Trump said it was Obama’s and Biden’s fault that he was able to name so many judges. “I’ll have so many judges because President Obama and [Biden] left me 128 judges to fill,” he said Sept. 29. “You just don’t do that.” (The actual number of judicial vacancies he inherited was 105, PolitiFact noted. Many of those occurred too late to be filled by Obama, even if the Republicans hadn’t been blocking them.)

Republicans blew off their claimed principled opposition to filling a Supreme Court vacancy in an election year when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died Sept. 18. On Sept. 26, Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett, who was finishing her third year on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Her nomination was rushed through the Judiciary Committee. 

During four days of hearings, Barrett evaded answering Democrats’ questions about her positions on issues that might come before the court. Then Republicans changed the rules on the Judiciary Committee to approve Barrett’s nomination with no Democrats present for the vote. Senate Republicans voted 51-49 to cut off debate Oct. 25. The next day they confirmed Barrett Oct. 26 with a 52-48 vote, followed by her swearing in at the White House. 

Meanwhile, McConnell still has not found enough time on the Senate agenda to consider bills for coronavirus relief, despite bills that have been on his desk since May. The House bills would provide relief for people who have lost jobs during the economic collapse, as well as money for local and state governments that have lost revenue and face the prospect of laying off essential workers, stimulus checks for families and money to pay for COVID-19 tests and contact tracing. 

Supporters of the filibuster say it encourages bipartisan consensus by requiring bill sponsors to get at least 60 senators to allow the legislation to proceed. However, the filibuster was instituted in the early 20th century to let conservative senators thwart popular initiatives.

Barack Obama has endorsed the effort for change. During the funeral this year for Rep. John Lewis, Obama announced his support for ending the filibuster, calling it a Jim Crow-era relic that was used to stall voting advances for Black people.

Of course, there is a risk in doing away with the filibuster, since Republicans could do a lot of damage if they got control of the White House and both chambers of Congress again, but that means people must get out to vote regularly to promote and keep senators who support the public good. 

Under Trump, Republicans have packed the courts with partisan right-wing hacks at every level. Biden, resisting efforts to draw him into endorsing the expansion of the Supreme Court, has proposed a bipartisan commission to study reform of the federal judiciary. 

Biden also has resisted calls to expand Medicare to cover everybody, preferring to improve the ACA, but he supports lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 60. If, as expected, the radicalized Supreme Court invalidates the Affordable Care Act, Democrats should replace it with Medicare for All that covers all medical expenses, as the Canadian system does. Biden can explain that the Supreme Court made him do it. (Biden can also blame the greedy insurance companies. If they don’t like working under Obamacare rules, let’s see how they like losing the market entirely.) — JMC.

From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2020


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Selections from the November 15, 2020 issue

 COVER/Lisa Song and Lylla Younes, ProPublica 

The EPA refuses to reduce pollutants linked to coronavirus deaths

EDITORIAL
Finish strong for freedom


NORMAN SOLOMON
Why a former Green Party candidate is on a very long fast — urging progressives to vote for Biden to defeat Trump

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS 
Nukes: The devil that never left

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Save family farms, because Wall Street won’t

DISPATCHES 
Trump can’t change subject from COVID-19. 
COVID cases surge after Trump ‘superspreader’ rallies. 
Trump plans post-election purge. 
Trump still has no health care plan. 
Trump tops 22,000 lies as prez, but Washington Post can’t keep up. 
Early voting encourages Dems. 
Lincoln Project rejects threat.
Trump targets civil service.
Secret Chinese bank account remains problem for Trump.
Poll: Pennsylvanians support clean energy ...


ART CULLEN 
A cure for the wintertime blues

SARAH ANDERSON
Farmers and meatpackers are teaming up


JILL RICHARDSON 
Voter suppression in a pandemic election

JOHN YOUNG 
Your take on Trump now, corruption lady


TOM CONWAY 
Hanging by a thread

JOHN GEYMAN 
Trump’s fantasy about COVID-19 keeps killing Americans. What can be done?


ROBERTO Dr. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ  
Foundational lies & foundational myths: Or the ‘genius’ of the ‘Founding Fathers’

RICHARD D. WOLFF 
How fascism has converged with capitalism to redefine government


ANDREW MOSS
Preparing for a contested election

SAM PIZZIGATI  
Biden’s tax plan would make America more equal

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas  
The Great Barrington Declaration meets Eugenics

SAM URETSKY 
Infrastructure week put off again

JOHN L. MICEK
Democrats keep healthcare front and center

WAYNE O’LEARY 
Myth of the great Trump economy

JOHN BUELL 
Negotiations amidst an emerging evictions crisis

SATIRE/Frank Lingo 
Trump’s legacy


JOEL D. JOSEPH 
Barrett should not get that promotion


BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel  
Truth vs. journalism? Spotting a hoax?

ROB PATTERSON 
Jane Fonda still trends left

SETH SANDRONSKY 
Filming movement politics

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson  
Mother knows best

MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
‘Totally Out of Control’ chronicles COVID ‘response’ a.k.a. Trump’s genocidal negligent homicide of the American people

GENE NICHOL 
Losing heroes

and more ...

Thursday, October 29, 2020

Zuzu’s Petals or Pottersville — The Choice is Ours

By ROBIN STREICHLER


Kelly Stewart Harcourt’s Aug. 27 letter to the NYT Editor calls out the hypocrisy of an RNC speaker, Natalie Harp, comparing Trump to the character George Bailey whom Harcourt’s father played in the film, It’s a Wonderful Life. In her letter she wrote, “Given that this beloved classic is about decency, compassion, sacrifice and a fight against corruption, our family considers Ms. Harp’s analogy to be the height of hypocrisy and dishonesty.”


It is my belief this beloved 1946 American classic film has such amazing longevity because of its powerful message — that George Bailey’s life made a difference. The film shows us that if George Bailey had never been born, many lives would have been shattered and destroyed without his beneficence to uplift them, and the lovely small town of Bedford Falls would have devolved into the corrupt “Pottersville,” aptly named for the town’s most greedy and exploitative resident, Henry F. Potter.


What we may too easily overlook in this film is that in George Bailey’s absence, the town of Bedford Falls was easily taken over by Potter’s corrupt agenda. “How did that happen?” I asked myself. Why did the entire town go down the tubes in the absence of one man? And why was Potter unable to exert his evil influence over the town when George Bailey lived? These are the questions before each of us right now as we do our own soul searching regarding our own participation in our communities and elections.


I invite you to consider that there will always be Potters in the world. But, that is not why communities and societies turn dark and corrupt. The reason Bedford Falls deteriorated into Pottersville was that there were apparently no other “George Baileys” in the town to stop it. All the other people in that town allowed Potter’s corrupt ways to overcome its light and goodness. I am reminded of the quote attributed to the 18th Century Philosopher, Edmund Burke, which in essence states that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.


Make no mistake, our country could be turning into one giant Pottersville before our eyes. Yet, each of us has the power to step into our own inner George Bailey and know that we are not powerless over the corruption and the decay of compassion in our society — that we do not have to turn a blind eye to all the modern-day “Potters” in our world who would do us harm while feeding their own power and pockets.


Like George, each of us can care for each other and our communities with generosity, participate in politics and raise our voices. Each of our lives can make a difference like George Bailey’s life made a difference, touching countless other lives. I believe that the real message of this film is one that can inspire each of us to show up to hold ourselves, our communities and country to the standards Ms. Stewart Harcourt so eloquently identified as “decency, compassion, sacrifice and a fight against corruption.”


Robin Streichler is a Los Angeles writer, editorial cartoonist and environmental health advocate. This originally appeared on Medium. See the original at <https://link.medium.com/N3ygGzLMT9> 




A Satirical Look at the Requirements for POTUS

With the presidential election in full swing, it might be time to reconsider the constitutional requirements for becoming president. The founding fathers thought that if you were a natural-born citizen of the United States, a US resident for 14 years, and 35 years of age or older, you might possess the intelligence, judgment and disposition to become president of the United States. On first thought, it might be reasonable. We would have ample opportunity to evaluate the candidates. We could listen to their speeches, review their past behavior, and make an intelligent decision about which of the candidates would become the best president. And if indeed we made a mistake, the founding fathers gave us the opportunity to correct our mistake by offering us the option of impeachment. Well, maybe not the most effective option.

However, upon reflection, there are many requirements we could impose, but there is one additional requirement that might just be sufficient. Did the candidates pass kindergarten? Not just attended kindergarten, but did they pass or fail? Why is this important? Well, some years ago, Robert Fulghum wrote a book about the importance of kindergarten—“All I Really Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten.” And what were some of those things? “Play fair,” “Don’t hit people,” “Ignorance and power and pride are a deadly mixture, you know,” “It doesn’t matter what you say you believe—it only matters what you do,” and much more.


Do you remember some things you learned in kindergarten? For example: Don’t lie, don’t be a bully, don’t call people nasty names based on their appearance or make fun of their disabilities. Of course, not all of our kindergartners need these lessons, but we know that some of them do. That is why kindergartners and even older children need “adults in the room.” Of course, our kindergarten teachers try to help us learn these things, but sometimes it doesn’t work. What can the teachers do? Well, they might not be able to change the child’s behavior, but they can write FAIL on the report card. Forever — on a permanent record.


And if an amendment to the constitution is adopted that requires passing kindergarten in order to run for president, any parent who would like to see their child advance to the highest office in the land would most certainly make sure to save those records noting that their child did indeed pass kindergarten.


OK, so it’s a pipe dream, but even if no such amendment is ever passed and we know it won’t be, it might be something to think about when we cast our vote for president of the United States of America.


RFS - Retired Educator, San Diego, CA 

Saturday, October 17, 2020

Editorial: Oust Banana Republicans

 Joe Biden has widened his lead over Donald Trump to double digits in national polls, and he continues to lead Trump in most swing states after the Great Misleader’s disastrous performance in the first (and, most likely, only) presidential debate, followed by Trump’s four-day stay at the Walter Reed Medical Center, where he took experimental treatments and steroids for a touch of the coronavirus, which he now insists he has whipped, although prominent epidemiologists questioned his hasty return to the White House, where at least 34 staffers have tested positive for the virus. 

Hopped up on steroids, Trump has been raving since his return from the hospital. In a latenight Twitter blitz on Oct. 6-7, Trump wondered why Attorney Gen. William Barr had not arrested former President Obama and Biden, apparently because they allowed the FBI to monitor the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russian intelligence assets and government officials during the 2016 campaign, and Russian efforts to get Trump elected. Letting the FBI do its job is “the greatest political crime in the history of our country,” Trump said. And he still wants Hillary Clinton jailed because of her emails. 

Then, in a nearly hourlong interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Oct. 8, after the vice presidential debate, he called Sen. Kamala Harris a “communist” and a “monster.” 

“I thought that wasn’t even a contest last night,” Trump said. “She was terrible. I don’t think you can get worse. And totally unlikeable. And she is. She’s a communist. She’s left of Bernie. She’s rated left of Bernie by everybody. She’s a communist.” (Sanders ran to the left of Harris in the primary. Neither one is a communist — but Trump seems to enjoy hanging out with communists, current and former.) 

In a video released Oct. 7, Trump said he considered getting ill with a virus that has killed more than more than 215,000 Americans to be a “blessing” because he ended up taking an experimental antibody cocktail, still in clinical trials, that is produced by Regeneron under a $450 million contract with the government.

“To me it wasn’t therapeutic — it just made me better, OK? I call that a cure,” said Trump, who appeared to struggle to breathe at times. He then said everyone should have access to the not-yet-approved drug for “free” and that he would make sure it was in every hospital as soon as possible.

Trump also dropped the F-bomb on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show Oct. 9, warning Iran, “If you f*ck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are gonna do things to you that have never been done before.” That was in case Iran struck back at the Trump administration for imposing sanctions on Iran’s banking sector, which European allies warned would stop imports of food and medicine, after Trump withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018. 

Then, after federal agents announced Oct. 9 they had thwarted a plot by Michigan militants to kidnap and possibly murder Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — a conspiracy that allegedly included visits to her home in northern Michigan, training with firearms and explosive devices, and plans to storm the state capitol and take other hostages — Trump continued his criticism of Whitmer.

In April, Trump had tweeted in all caps, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” amidst the lockdown to control COVID-19. He urged Whitmer to negotiate with the militants who had stormed the capitol with assault rifles and tried to get into the legislative chambers. 

After the conspiracy was uncovered, Trump and state Republican leaders appeared to back up the domestic terrorists’ complaints. “Governor Whitmer of Michigan has done a terrible job,” Trump tweeted Oct. 9. “She locked down her state for everyone, except her husband’s boating activities.” 

He falsely claimed Whitmer had called him a white supremacist (although there is substantial evidence to make that case), and he again urged her to “open up your state, open up your schools, and open up your churches!”

Hours after the FBI announced the plot against Whitmer, Republican leaders of both chambers of the legislature joined a right-wing rally on the steps of the state capitol targeting the governor and her efforts to keep the state safe. Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey was forced to explain to the press that the people who attended the rally are not the same people who were involved in the plot to kill the governor, Allison Donahue noted at MichiganAdvance.com.

Whitmer said she’s asked the White House and Republicans in her state to decrease the level of inflammatory rhetoric they put out, which she said helped spark the alleged plot.

Trump closed the week with a rally Oct. 10 on the South Lawn of the White House, where he spoke from a balcony before a crowd of a few hundred attendees, where he spoke for only 18 minutes instead of the promised 30 minutes. The next day, he tweeted that he is “immune” to COVID and “can’t give it,” even though the White House has been fuzzy on details and the CDC recommends isolation for up to 20 days in severe cases, which would seem to cover someone who was hospitalized, administered supplemental oxygen and treated with the steroid dexamethasone, a drug typically used for serious cases. Instead, Trump embarked on a tour of “Super Spreader” rallies that started in Sanford, Fla. Oct. 12 and had rallies planned in Pennsylvania, Iowa, North Carolina and other swing states. 

Of course, Dems fear a repeat of 2016, where polls showed Clinton winning — and she did beat Trump by 2.8 million votes nationwide, but Trump eked out an Electoral College victory by fewer than 80,000 voters in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. This past week, Biden led Trump 51%-41% in Wisconsin and 48%-40% in Michigan in New York Times/Siena polls released Oct. 12 and Biden led 54%-41% in Pennsylvania in a Quinnipiac poll released Oct. 7. In other states Trump won in 2016, Biden was leading outside the margin of error in polls in Arizona, Florida and North Carolina; within the margin of error in Iowa and Ohio; and only 1.5 points behind Trump in the average of polls in Texas. 

Polls are only indicators, of course, but Trump isn’t sneaking up on us this time and Republican elected officials are starting to eye the exits. In Arizona, where Trump trails Biden, Sen. Martha McSally avoided several questions about whether she was proud of her support for Trump during her Oct. 7 debate against Democratic challenger Mark Kelly. She repeated that she was “proud to be fighting for Arizona” and she admitted that Trump’s disrespect of the late Sen. John McCain “pisses me off when he does it.” A recent New York Times/Siena poll showed McSally 11 points behind Kelly, an astronaut and husband of former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords.

Even in Texas, where polls show a tight race between Trump and Biden, combat veteran M.J. Hegar is within single digits of Republican Sen. John Cornyn, and the high-ranking Republican appeared to be distancing himself from Trump when he told the Houston Chronicle Oct. 5 that Trump “let his guard down” on the coronavirus and has created “confusion” by trying to downplay the severity of the pandemic. He added, “[I]t is not easy to try to get things done working with him or the White House.”

Your job is not done when you vote against Trump and Pence. Go on down the ballot and vote against all of his Republican enablers in the Senate, the House and state legislators who also have conspired to make voting more difficult during this pandemic. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2020


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Selections from the November 1, 2020 issue

COVER/Hal Crowther
Take a deep breath: Staring into the abyss

EDITORIAL
Oust Banana Republicans


LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

DON ROLLINS
The creepy parallels between Trump and Falwell, Jr. 

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Where you gonna run to?

DISPATCHES
Trump returns to stimulus talks, but Republicans balk. Let the court decide if it needs packing. President engaged in pay-for-play scams. Dems have plenty of targets in Senate field. Trump-appointed judge smacks down Trump efforts to suppress vote in Pennsylvania. Pope Francis’ encyclical could shake up election. Democrats are swelling early vote, In Florida, despite constitutional amendment, few felons likely to vote. Repubs set up illegal drop boxes in California ...

ART CULLEN
As anxiety turns to madness, we vote

JOHN YOUNG
Oh, so now virus is serious matter


JILL RICHARDSON
The surprising history of marriage in the US

DICK POLMAN
Take a break from typhoid Donny with Uncle Joe’s Gettysburg Address

BOB BURNETT
Biden-Trump: What happens next?

NORMAN SOLOMON
The man who would be president: Mike Pence, corporate theocrat

TOM CONWAY
Weaponizing the Supreme Court

SAM PIZZIGATI
How taxpayers funded ‘consulting fees’ for Ivanka Trump

BILL JOHNSTON 
As Veterans Day approaches, vets deserve better than Trump


SETH SANDRONSKY
Small businesses reeling from COVID-19


SARAH ANDERSON
For laid-off workers, Trump’s lies about trade and jobs are hard to swallow


ROBERTO Dr. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ 
If white supremacists secede, will POC follow?

GENE NICHOL
North Carolina’s battle for democracy and decency

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas 
The no-choice election

SAM URETSKY
Safe vaccines can’t be rushed

GEORGE NEWMAN and ROB CAUGHLIN
The next pandemic 

WAYNE O’LEARY
The dark shadow descends

JOHN BUELL
Abolish the debate commission

THOM HARTMANN
Trump’s destruction of America started with Ronald Reagan


N. GUNASEKARAN
In Asia, collapsing health systems and economies call for regional cooperation


SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson 
Kavanaugh, collared

BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel 
Truth, fiction, and freedom

ROB PATTERSON
LBJ’s great society survives

MARK ANDERSON
Others on the ballot seek attention

MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell 
The nobility of mobility: A road trip through racism


SATIRE/Frank Lingo
Old radical, new volunteer

and more ...

Friday, September 25, 2020

Editorial: Call the Republicans’ Bluff

It took less than 90 minutes after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Sept. 18 for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to affirm that he planned to push Donald Trump’s nominee onto the court as soon as possible.

Trump says Republicans need to rush a new justice onto the Supreme Court before the election because he expects the court, with another right-wing vote to reinforce the conservative bloc, will help him steal the election despite his trailing in polls that portend defeat if mailed-in ballots are allowed to be counted. 

“Now we’re counting on the federal court system to make it so that we can actually have an evening where we know who wins. Not where the votes are going to be counted a week later or two weeks later,” Trump said at a rally in North Carolina Sept. 19.

Trump and Republicans have accused Democrats of planning election fraud by voting by mail during a pandemic, when many jurisdictions have cut polling places. There is little evidence that voting by mail contributes to fraud. In fact, Trump has voted by mail and is expected to do so in this election. But Republicans don’t want to make it easier for Democrats to vote in these pandemic days, particularly when Republicans appear headed for a thrashing. So Republicans set about to sabotage the US Postal Service to reduce confidence that mailed ballots will make it to election officials in time.

The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a blow, because it opened the possibility that Trump would get to replace her with a third right-wing justice on the Supreme Court. Republicans have abandoned the pretense that they should leave the filling of a Supreme Court vacancy this close to the election to the next president, as they solemnly claimed in 2016. 

After Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, McConnell said President Barack Obama shouldn’t even bother to nominate a replacement in an election year. After Obama went ahead and nominated Merrick Garland, the respected chief judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in March 2016, eight months before the election, Republicans denied a hearing, agreeing with McConnell that it was too close to the election.

Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2016, defended the rebuff then and reiterated his position this past July, “If I were chairman of the committee and this vacancy occurred, I would not have a hearing on it because that’s what I promised the people in 2016.” But on Sept. 21, he buckled, and said he would support McConnell’s decision to move forward to fill the vacancy before the election. 

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the current Judiciary Committee chair, said in 2016, in defending the rejection of Garland, the rule against seating new Supreme Court judges in election years should apply to Republican presidents, too. “I want you to use my words against me,” Graham said in 2016. “If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said ‘Let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.’”

Trump explained the new rule on Fox “News”: “When you have the Senate, when you have the votes, you can sort of do what you want as long as you have it.” Pretty much the same as the old rule.

If Democratic Leader Charles Schumer can keep all 47 of the senators in his caucus in line, he would need four Republican senators to join the Dems in stopping a Supreme Court promotion this year, but only Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) have come out against filling the seat until after the election and, if Biden wins, they would let him name the new justice. 

Democrats should play hardball in the showdown over the replacement of RBG.

McConnell might be able to marshal the votes to confirm the sixth conservative for the high court, and form a bloc on the high court that Republicans hope will impede progressive legislation for a generation, but Democrats must play their own strong hand, redoubling efforts to not only beat Trump, but also regain a Senate majority. 

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) called for Senate Democrats to eliminate the filibuster if Republicans move to expand conservative majority on the Supreme Court by filling the vacancy.

“Mitch McConnell set the precedent,” Markey said. “No Supreme Court vacancies filled in an election year. If he violates it, when Democrats control the Senate in the next Congress, we must abolish the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court.”

Joe Biden is not promoting that alternative, but Josh Marshall, editor of Talking Points Memo, noted, “It is probably politically best that he not do so. Clearly the very idea of it cuts against every bit of his experience. But he also mustn’t rule it out. The optimal position for him is to focus on the wrongness of another corrupt nomination and say he hopes the President doesn’t force a future Democratic Senate to do so.”

Schumer said Democrats should keep all possibilities “on the table.”

Some Democrats are wary that threatening to expand the court will make the final month of the election a battle over abortion rights, but you can bet abortion opponents already are planning to vote for Trump. But Democrats should raise the alarm that a 6-3 conservative court is likely to overturn the Affordable Care Act in its entirety, including the requirement that insurance covers pre-existing conditions. The conservative bloc might be emboldened to overturn Medicare, Medicaid and even the 85-year-old Social Security Act, which Trump already is trying to defund through his own executive orders suspending the payroll tax that fund the retirement plans. 

If Republicans achieve their dream of overturning Obamacare during the lame duck session, Democrats should get the gumption to expand the court in February with four more liberal justices who will go along if Congress decides to expand Medicare to cover everybody. A new Democratic Congress could remove the ceiling on payroll tax collections (which now stop after $137,700 in earnings). That will prevent the Social Security fund from becoming insolvent in 2035 and also allows expansion of benefits. With a liberal court majority, Congress also can restore the Voting Rights Act and reverse the Census-rigging that the Trump administration has been attempting to enable another decade of Republican gerrymandering.

Republicans will screech that Democrats are trying to pack the court, but Congress has changed the size of the Supreme Court seven times, from the original six justices to as many as 10 in 1863. After the Civil War, Congress in 1866 reduced the number of justices to seven to prevent President Andrew Johnson from appointing new members to the court. In 1869, after Johnson left office, Congress raised the number of justices back to nine, which the court has numbered ever since. 

During the Great Depression, conservatives on the court struck down several New Deal programs during President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term. After his sweeping re-election in 1936, Roosevelt proposed in 1937 that Congress increase the number of judges to as many as 15 members. FDR relented when one of the justices moderated to allow the laws to take effect, and another conservative judge retired, prompting a humorist to quip, “A switch in time saved nine.”

Maybe it’s time for another switch. — JMC

By the way, press critic Eric Boehlert has noted, in his Press Run newsletter, that more than 100 of the nation’s newspapers called for Bill Clinton to resign because he lied about an extramarital affair, but none have called for the resignation of the Great Misleader, Donald Trump. For the record, Trump should quit, or be fired.

From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2020


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Selections from the October 15, 2020 issue

 COVER/Bob Cesca

Trump wants to be President of just the Republican states: But they’re a total mess

EDITORIAL
Call the Republicans’ bluff


SATIRE/Frank Lingo 
Your vote: Democracy or dictatorship

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

DON ROLLINS 
Changing the trajectory of race

ART CULLEN 
Drought, plague, fire: The apocalypse feels nigh. Yet we have tools to stop it.

DISPATCHES 
A.G. Barr threatens to cut off federal funding to three Democratic cities. 
Democrats have a clear shot at Senate majority. 
Postmaster General has rough day in court, in multiple wins for democracy. 
Federal government didn’t try to stop COVID-19.
Trump applauds fed task force for killing Portland killing suspect ...


JIM GOODMAN 
The party formerly known as Republican

JASON SIBERT 
Nuclear arms will have to be addressed


JILL RICHARDSON 
I’m still mad about COVID-19. We all should be. 

JOHN YOUNG
More damning than Nixon’s tapes


TOM CONWAY 
A dire shortage of poll workers imperils American democracy

BOB BURNETT 
Ten potential game changers


SAM PIZZIGATI 
Killing someone is not like missing a golf putt

ROBERTO Dr. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ  
The end times, Walter Mercado and the orange madman

JAMES A. HAUGHT
Watching religion die

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas  
To the pharmaceutical industry: Thank you

SAM URETSKY
Robbing Peter to pay Paul


WAYNE O’LEARY
Cancelling Wilson

JOHN BUELL 
In praise of public debt 

SETH SANDRONSKY 
Federal pandemic aid oversight adequate?


MARY GREEN SWIG, STEVEN L. SWIG, DAVID A. BERGERON and RICHARD “RJ” ESKOW 
How were 46 million people trapped by student debt?


BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel  
Keep it on the square

ROB PATTERSON
Homeland and heartland

THOM HARTMANN 
How big money controls the stories the media tells

MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Unlocking the trauma shall set ye free


SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson  
The commander in chief knows best


NAKIYA WAKES 
What the Flint wanter crisis meant for my family

and more ...

Sunday, September 13, 2020

It is what it is

 

Art by Kevin Kreneck

Editorial: Make Trump the 'Loser'

 Can anything budge the 40% to 43% of Americans who think Donald Trump is doing a good job, despite all the evidence to the contrary?

Trump hasn’t resorted to trying to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York City to see if he could shake his supporters’ loyalty — at least not yet — but the latest test was a report by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic magazine Sept. 3 that accused the president of calling fallen American soldiers “suckers” and “losers,” and ducking out of a trip to a cemetery to honor US marines who died in World War I, during a 2018 trip to Paris, because it was raining and he didn’t want to muss his hair. Trump also reportedly questioned the sacrifice of retired Gen. John Kelly’s son, Marine 2nd Lt. Robert Kelly, and others who died in Afghanistan, when Trump accompanied Gen. Kelly to the son’s gravesite in Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day 2017. Trump reportedly said of the fallen service members, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

Trump also asked his staff not to include wounded veterans in military parades, on grounds that spectators would feel uncomfortable in the presence of amputees. “Nobody wants to see that,” he said.

Trump denied making the statements, despite the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post and even Fox News confirming the story. The Post also found a “former senior administration official” who said Trump had “told senior advisers that he didn’t understand why the US government placed such value on finding soldiers missing in action because they had performed poorly and gotten caught and deserved what they got.” 

Significantly, Kelly declined to speak on the record. When Pentagon officials in a position to know declined to back up Trump, he called military brass “war profiteers.” He claimed enlisted personnel support him, but a survey by Military Times of active-duty military in late July and early August found 49.9% have an unfavorable view of Trump and only 38% have a favorable view. Soldiers support Joe Biden over Trump by four points, which would be an extraordinary turnaround from 2016, when a poll using the same methodology showed Trump led Hillary Clinton by nearly 2 to 1. Sixty percent of veterans voted for Trump in 2016.

As Amanda Marcotte noted at Salon, we know Trump was lying in his denial of The Atlantic’s story because it follows his pathological pattern of telling lies. In his tweeted denials, Trump even claimed he never called the late Sen. John McCain a “loser” for being captured during the Vietnam War, even though there’s a recording of him doing so in July 2015, in the same rant during which he declared, “I like people who weren’t captured.” Trump was so proud of this smear of McCain that he tweeted it out at the time. 

Trump’s other “tell,” Marcotte noted, is that he falsely accuses others of doing what he himself has done. In this case, Trump has spent years bashing athletes who kneel during the national anthem, falsely accusing them of dishonoring veterans and war dead. In truth, the tradition — started by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick — was formed with input from a former Green Beret as a way to speak out against racism and police brutality while still honoring the troops.

Trump’s contempt for the sacrifices of soldiers and their families was shown in 2016 when he smeared the family of Army Capt. Humayun Khan, who was killed in action in Iraq in 2004, when Khan’s parents spoke at the Democratic National Convention, and in October 2017, when he told a grieving widow of US Army Sgt. La David T. Johnson, who was killed in in action in Niger, that “he knew what he signed up for.” Trump then accused Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Fla., who was with widow Myesia Johnson when she spoke with Trump, of lying when she spoke out about it. 

We can add these lies to the 20,055 falsehoods Trump already had claimed as president, by the Washington Post’s tally as of July 9, when Trump was telling an average of 23 false claims a day. They are reflected in polls that show Trump with 43.2% approval, in an average compiled by FiveThirtyEight.com, while 52.6% said they disapproved of Trump, as of Sept. 8. Some 43.1% said they would vote to re-elect Trump, but 50.6% said they would elect Joe Biden. Trump has never had more than 47.8% approval in the poll averages since he’s been president. Disapproval only dipped below 50% briefly in April before Trump’s inability to control the corona virus became apparent. Biden has never trailed Trump since March, and Biden also leads by amounts greater than the margin of error in key swing states Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, along with a narrow lead of 2-3 points in Florida. 

Democrats are justifiably nervous after the disastrous results in 2016, but this time Trump will not be sneaking up on his opponent. Voters have had a good look at Trump, and a majority of them don’t like what they’ve seen. In the 2018 election, Democrats made inroads into the suburbs, which Republicans have counted on to offset Democratic majorities in cities, and Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives. 

As polls this year have shown Biden leading among suburban voters, and Republican control of the Senate is at risk, an increasingly desperate Trump has tried to scare suburbanites with warnings that if Biden is elected, Blacks will start moving into their neighborhoods. But racism doesn’t appear to be moving the needle for Trump. 

If anything, the share of Americans who say racism is a “big problem” in society has increased eight percentage points in the past two years, and has roughly doubled since 2011, Samantha Neal reported for Pew Research Center Aug. 29. 

Overall, 58% of Americans say racism is a “big problem in our society,” while 29% say it is “somewhat of a problem.” Just 12% say racism in the US is a small problem or not a problem, according to a Pew survey, conducted Aug. 15-21. And despite Trump administration attempts to link the Black Lives Matter movement to riots, arson and looting, some of which has been traced to right-wing provocateurs and other opportunists, the Pew poll found 55% of Americans say they support BLM, while 34% oppose the movement. Biden traveled to Pittsburgh, Pa., Aug. 31 to underline that he supports peaceful protests that call for police reform and equal rights, but said those who engage in violent activities or looting should be prosecuted. He also accused Trump of stoking violence in American cities. Biden noted America was unsafe under Trump, with COVID-19 killing thousands of people a week and an economy in tatters.

Biden also traveled to Kenosha, Wis., Sept. 3 to meet with the family of Jacob Blake, a Black man who was gravely wounded after a white policeman shot him seven times in the back. Biden spoke with Blake by phone before meeting with community leaders and again opposed violence and looting, but pledged to “go down fighting for racial equality, equity across the board.”

With Trump’s approval stuck in the low-to-mid 40s, and Dems targeting Senate Republicans in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Montana, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas, along with an open seat in Kansas, Republicans are trying to prevent opponents from voting, reducing the number of pollling places and casting doubts on voting by mail. Many states allow early voting for several weeks in October. Check your early or absentee voting options at Vote.org or call your local election official (usually the county clerk) for details. Don’t wait for Nov. 3. — JMC 

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2020


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