Selections from the December 15, 2017 issue

COVER/Steven Rosenfeld
Watch out for the next big attack on our voting systems

EDITORIAL
GOP owners seek payback

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS  
We were there

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Step out of that caootprint

DISPATCHES
What does the internet look like if net becomes less neutral?
Open internet one of few things standing between us and Trump’s authoritarian rule;
Corporate news largely ignored FCC plan to kill net neutrality;
War over direction of bank watchdog;
Trump disrupts Navajo code talker reception with ‘Pocahontas’ slur;
Trump plays golf three times more than Obama;
Solar and wind energy now cheaper than coal and nukes;
No one wants KXL pipeline, but Nebraska approves it anyway;
Coal baron convicted in mine disaster mulls Senate run;
Comcast hints at plan for paid fast lanes after net neutrality repeal

ART CULLEN
Change is due

JILL RICHARDSON
Washington’s war on poor grad students

JIM VAN DER POL
Rural race to the bottom

ROBERT BOROSAGE
Republicans in Congress think you’re an idiot

JOHN YOUNG
Your basic, average, ordinary, garden-variety cult

SAM PIZZIGATI
The true cost of inequality

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Newspeak in Trumplandia: Block grants

SAM URETSKY
Fish heads and chicken feet in your future?

BOB LORD
This tax plan is going to cost a lot more than advertised

WAYNE O’LEARY
Republican death obsession

JOHN BUELL
Origins of an invulnerable base

SETH SANDRONSKY
White-on-white crime

N. GUNASEKARAN
Trump’s Asia visit: behind red carpet reception

JIM GOODMAN
Stop pretending estate tax has anything to do with family farmers

ROB PATTERSON
Simon still rhymin’ after all these years

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
The new, improved Sophia (not Loren)

MOVIES/Ed Rampell
Thanks don’t cure PTSD

MEDEA BENJAMIN
Cubans start small businesses, but US hurts them 

and more ...

GOP trifecta of inequality: increase deficit, cut programs & raise middle class taxes to fund tax cut for wealthy

By Marc Jampole

Imagine stand-up comic Henny Youngman, king of the one-liners, describing the Trump GOP tax proposals with one of his classic bits:

 So how big is the tax break for the wealthy in the new tax bill?

Why it’s so big that raising the deficit by trillions of dollars won’t cover it…

Why it’s so big that raising taxes on the middle class won’t cover it…

Why it’s so big that gutting Medicare, Medicaid, the State Department and other government programs won’t cover it…

That’s right folks, the Republicans have hit the trifecta of inequality. Raising taxes on the middle class, increasing the deficit and gutting important programs that help every American so that the wealthy can get another tax break. Each represents a wealth exchange in which the ultra-rich get richer and someone else gets poorer. Any of these three wealth exchanges would in and of itself injure the economy while creating greater inequality of wealth. Making all three is likely to send the country into a deep recession or a real depression.

The Trump GOP plans are perfectly crafted to offend all democratic principles: The richer the person, the bigger the tax break. The larger the corporation, the bigger the tax break. The more someone’s wealth is in capital such as financial assets and real estate—as opposed to salary—the bigger the tax break.

The GOP says that when you lower taxes, rich folk and corporations invest in creating more jobs and in paying better salaries. That’s not what history says. History tells us that rich folk pocket the money and then invest it in the secondary stock market (meaning it doesn’t help the company whose stock you bought although it helps the senior executives with lots of stock options; the company only benefits from the initial sale of the stock); buy government bonds to fund the deficit that their tax break created; and dump it into other assets like fine art, yachts, apartments in Manhattan and beach front properties. Meanwhile, money will have been taken out of the economy, as all the spending done by laid off government workers, recipients of government aid and the middle class before tax hikes will be gone. Within a few years of passage of either the House or the Senate version of “The Great Heist of 2017,” a new asset bubble will form then burst after which the economy will go into a rapid tailspin. Just like 1929, 1987 and 2008.

The wealthy pay historically low rates on their income in the United States, even after two mild tax increases during the Obama years. In the 1950’s, when the economy mostly boomed and there was less inequality of wealth than at any other time in American history, rich folk paid 91% of incremental income in federal income tax. Remember that means that they only paid 91% on the income over a certain amount, maybe a million dollars, truly a lot of money in those days. With all progressive income tax systems, everyone pays the same amount within income levels. The top rate always applies only to income above that limit. Everyone pays the lowest rate on their income up to that limit.

Studies by Thomas Piketty and others have established that the economy actually grows when we raise taxes on the wealthy—that is, until we raise them too much and it begins really to cut into spending and investment in job growth. And what’s the point when raising taxes on high tax brackets begins to hurt the economy? Piketty computed it to be a taxation rate of 70%, or roughly twice what the current maximum tax on income is.

In other words, instead of decreasing taxes on the wealthy, Congress should be raising them—and then investing the money in the kind of things that we did with our tax money in the 1950’s and 1960’s: pure scientific research, infrastructure improvement (focusing more on mass transit and less on roads and airports this time), public school and university education, energy development (solar and wind instead of nuclear), healthcare and helping the disadvantaged.

Many of the Republicans know that, if passed, their tax bill will sink the economy and increase inequality of wealth in the United States. Most don’t care because they serve as mere factotums to the ultra-wealthy who finance their campaigns and provide them with cushy sinecures after they retire from elected office. Today Republican candidates and elected officials—and many Democrats, too–count dollars not votes and represent a narrow constituency consisting of a handful of selfish multi-billionaires.

FCC enables more media consolidation. The result will be less real news.

By Marc Jampole

We typically blame the decline of the news media in the 21st century on one of two factors: the growth of the Internet as a 24/7 source of news and the proliferation of fake and false news.

But given much less attention is the consolidation of news media and news-gathering operations. It used to be that the federal government had strict regulations about the number of radio and television stations any company could own and forbade ownership of both newspapers and broadcast stations in the same town. Even when single newspapers came to dominate many towns, there were typically many different organizations searching for and presenting the local and national news. A series of laws and new regulations over the past 35 years—aka the Reagan Era—has consolidated media ownership.

The key law was the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which enabled companies to own more stations. Larger companies bought smaller ones and suddenly instead of hundreds of owners of TV and radio stations across the country, there were only dozens.  We saw the impact on radio as Clear Channel, and recently Sinclair Broadcasting, and other companies owned by right-wingers gained control of the editorial policies of more and more stations.  Pretty soon the range of opinion on radio narrowed and moved extremely right. While Rush Limbaugh began making a name for himself before 1996, it was the consolidation of media ownership that led to the domination of talk radio by Rush and his clones—Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Michael Medved, ad nauseum.

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) took a major step in making the problem worse by voting to allow a single company to own both print and broadcast media in the same town. The FCC also voted to increase the number of TV stations one company can own in any given market. It was a close vote, 3-2, on party lines. Don’t be embarrassed if OpEdge is the first you’ve heard of this awful decision. It received very little coverage; the New York Times buried the news on page two of the business section.

The Obama Administration FCC also announced its intentions to end the restriction on ownership of both print and broadcast media in 2011, but eventually backed down. This time, under its brand new Trump-blessed FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, an Obama appointee to the FCC known for his pro-broadcasting industry views, the FCC has made good on the threat.

The rationales today and in 2017 are similar: That local media needs to consolidate to be able to compete against the giants of Facebook and Google. Pai, for example, has argued that local media companies would have a better chance to compete against Internet behemoths by combining local market resources.

The argument is completely specious for two reasons. First of all, most broadcast stations and daily/weekly newspapers are already owned by large chains. It’s not the case that the various media in Cincinnati will join forces to do one great job on local news. Instead, one national giant that also controls Toledo, Ohio, Syracuse, New York and four dozen other localities will end up owning all the media in Cincinnati. The new rule will surely lead to ever greater concentration of media outlets in the hands of fewer companies.

The second problem with Pai’s argument is the confusion of news-gathering with news media. Despite the alarming decrease in the number of daily newspapers over the past few decades, the number of absolute media outlets has increased: Internet news sites, cable news and specialty weekly and monthly pubs have more than made up for the decline in newspapers.

The problem is that while media outlets have increased, news-gathering on both the local and national level has decreased, as recent studies by the Pew Foundation and the FCC . And consolidation of media outlets is a major cause. When a company buys more than one newspaper, it can use the same news-gathering staff for all the news, except for the news that pertains to each newspaper’s particular readership, something most often defined by locality. All the newspapers in the Gannet or Tribune chains get the same national and international news and columnists. But each local paper has to find its own local news, typically in competition with the three or four local TV stations, the local business paper and the local alternative weekly.

Now that a single company is allowed to own all of these local properties, the company will be stronger, but primarily because it is able to cut costs through using the same news room to cover stories. The impact on overall news production will be horrific: Instead or more editorial boards deciding what is newsworthy, one will. Instead of three or more points of view on a story, there will be only one. Instead of three or more sets of reporters trying to dig deeper, only one will—that is, on those stories that the editors and business sides decide is worthy of delving. Instead of three or more sets of opinions on local issues, only one. Finally, instead of three or more organizations with ties to differing networks of national and international news gathering, there will be but one. The result will be less reporting.

Instead of actual reporting, what we’ll see once large media companies start buying up local properties is more of the same filler that has been replacing real news for the past 15 years or so, including more opinion pieces like this blog; more coverage of celebrities and sports; more repackaged how-to’s and advice columns; more part-and-parcel use of news release, fact sheets and “articles” produced by the government, rightwing think tanks, large companies and public relations firms; and more “sponsored” news reports, which are advertisements pretending to be news.

If the FCC and the current administration really cared about freedom of the press and creating a stronger marketplace of ideas, instead of allowing companies to buy more media properties, it would implement regulations and put pressure on Congressional leaders to break up the media industry oligarchy and stop the pilfering of free content that occurs on Facebook and Google News that denies news-producing media outlets needed revenues. Unfortunately, it would take Congressional action to do most of what I’m recommending:

• Limit ownership of media properties to a total of 10 properties, including television and radio stations, newspapers, news magazines, cable networks and websites, and push for expedited divestiture by the current media giants.
• Prohibit companies from owning more than three cable networks, and make all cable networks provide at least two hours of news coverage a day.
• Prohibit companies owning ISPs from also owning media outlets.
• Reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine, which used to make every broadcast television and radio outlet to devote some airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. The Fairness Doctrine was the law of the land from 1949 until 1987, when the Reagan FCC voted to end it.
• Allocate billions of dollars in aid to nonprofit or small for-profit media outlets to produce original reporting and fund it at least partially by taxing social media services and Internet service providers (ISPs) like Spectrum and FIOS for their “free use” of news.
• Legalize strict principles of journalistic ethics and start to prosecute journalists and media company executives for knowingly disseminating fake and false news. I propose to walk a fine line between censorship and responsible reporting. But by focusing exclusively on the reporting of facts and not the spouting of opinions, I think we can protect true freedom of the press.

I am not very optimistic about any of my recommendations being pursued by either a Republican or Democratic administration and Congress. Politicians of both parties have cozy relationships with the mainstream news media and conservative ones seem not to mind that so much in the rightwing media is false or fake news. Thus we face an ironic future in which there are many ways to access the same limited and somewhat flawed set of facts and conjectures about current events, society and government activity.

We like to conceive of history as a steady progress of human ingenuity solving problems and bringing an ever higher standard and quality of life to more and more people. But our 10,000 years of recorded history has seen many eras in which people were far worse off economically than the decades and centuries before, for example, during the 300 year transition from medieval times to the industrial revolution during which the world experienced the “Little Ice Age.”

In the same way, we have not seen steady progress in the spread of knowledge. After the death of Charlemagne, for example, Europe entered a centuries-long epoch in which scientific knowledge and literacy declined and intellectual activity retreated into monasteries.

It seems to me that America is are entering another intellectual dark age, in which people in general will know less, be able to reason less effectively and have less access to the gamut of human knowledge, from science to the arts. It’s not just the consolidation of the media and the decline in the number of news-gathering operations that is driving the drift towards ignorance. The large number of ideologically inclined think tanks churning out false research. The gradual starving of public schools. The increased involvement of for-profit corporations both in operating schools and in supplying material such as learning guides to public and private schools. The blurring of the distinction between the entertainment and news divisions of media companies and between advertising and news. The politicization of text books. The denial of basic scientific facts by one of our two major parties. The continued glorification of celebrity and mocking of intellectual achievement in the mass media. Virtually every trend in the marketplace of ideas is making Americans less educated, less informed and less capable of sifting through assertions and understanding which are reliably factual information and which are sheer nonsense.

Editorial: Resistance Strikes Back

It’s been a long year since Russian Internet trolls and Republican voter suppression tactics combined to deliver the White House to Donald Trump. Voters on Nov. 7 finally got the chance to express their outrage at the trail of lies, mindless tweets and broken promises left by the Grifter in Chief.

It wasn’t much of a surprise that Democrats would win back the governor’s office in New Jersey, after outgoing Gov. Chris Christie (R), who once had presidential ambitions, bottomed out with a 15% approval rating. Being Christie’s lieutenant governor didn’t help Kim Guadagno, as Democrat Phil Murphy won with 55.6% of the vote.

The most widely watched race was in Virginia, where Dems should have expected an advantage since the outgoing governor is a Democrat and Hillary Clinton won the state by 5.3 points in 2016.

But Republican nominee Ed Gillespie adopted Trump campaign themes such as appeals to white supremacism, neo-Confederates, immigrant bashers and climate science deniers and, in the weeks before the election, polls showed Gillespie running neck and neck with Democrat Ralph Northam.

When the votes were counted on Nov. 7, not only did Northam beat Gillespie by nine points, but exit polls showed twice as many voters (34%) said they cast their ballots to express opposition to Trump, as the 17% who voted to express support for Trump.

Women, young people and minority voters provided the margin of victory for Northam. Men were 51% of voters and favored Gillespie by two points, but that’s down from Trump’s nine-point edge among men last year. And women favored Northam by 22 points, up from Clinton’s 17-point advantage last year. Gillespie won white voters by 15 points, but that was down from Trump’s 24-point advantage last year, while black voters, 20% of Virginia’s electorate, went 87% for Northam. The vote was still polarized by geography, as cities and D.C. suburbs supported Northam while almost two-thirds of voters in the mountainous and western parts of the state supported Gillespie.

Democrats also won the two other statewide elections in Virginia — for lieutenant governor and attorney general, and they picked up at least 15 seats in the state House of Delegates, which Republicans had ruled with a 66-34 majority that was now cut down to a one-vote majority, with recounts in three districts that could flip the House to the Dems. Eleven of the Democratic winners were women, including the first Asian American, two Latinas and transgender Danica Roem, who beat the chamber’s self-proclaimed leading homophobe, Bob Marshall, by focusing on better roads in the district.

The downside of the election is that Virginia voted by a margin of nearly nine points for Democrats but still fell short of a legislative majority because of gerrymandered district lines. Democrats will face similar obstacles in trying to turn around Republican majorities in Congress and other state legislatures next year. Democrats need to flip 24 seats now held by Republicans to regain the majority in Congress, but Nick Stephanopoulos, an expert on gerrymandering, told the New York Times Democrats, could get 54% of the national House vote and still see the Republican maintain control.

In the Senate, Republicans have a two-vote majority, and that majority may be reduced if Alabamans decide on Dec. 12 they would rather not send accused child molester Roy Moore to the Senate. (Many evangelical “Christians” say the accusation that Moore molested a 14-year-old girl 38 years ago is no major bar to service if the alternative is a Democrat such as Doug Jones, former federal prosecutor of the KKK.)

Next year, Democrats will be defending 23 Senate seats, along with two independents allied with the Dems, while Republicans have only eight seats up for election. Democrats hope to gain the Arizona seat Jeff Flake is giving up, as well as the Nevada seat Dean Heller holds. Longshots are Ted Cruz’s seat in Texas and the Tennessee seat Bob Corker is giving up, but Dems also have to defend Sens. Bill Nelson in Florida, Joe Donnelly in Indiana, Claire McCaskill in Missouri, Jon Tester in Montana, Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, Joe Manchin in West Virginia and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin.

Unfortunately, the main lesson Republicans probably will draw from the recent election is that voter suppression has not gone far enough. Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach are helming a special presidential task force to develop new methods of keeping Democrats from voting or preventing the counting of their votes.

It’s been frustrating, as editor of The Progressive Populist, to listen to Trump being described as a populist who would protect American workers and “drain the swamps” in Washington. Populists believe that people are more important than corporations, and the government needs to be strong enough to keep corporations in line. Trump has always been a grifter with authoritarian leanings and a history of stiffing contractors, fighting unions and looking out for No. 1. But it’s getting easier to show Trump is a charlatan as he has packed his administration with half a dozen former executives of Goldman Sachs as well as pro-corporate administrators at federal agencies to prevent health and human services, environmental protection, public schools, federal lands and fair labor and housing standards. And Trump on Nov. 13 named Alex Azar, a former pharmaceutical executive who has repeatedly opposed measures to restrain drug company profiteering, to succeed Tom Price as secretary of Health and Human Services.

The Resistance has organized largely on the Internet, with the progressive press helping to identify the targets. The coalition and Dems in Congress have racked up a pretty good record in the first year, knocking down attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, and fighting Trump and the GOP Congress to a virtual standstill on the worst of the bad bills so far. But the billionaires have told their Republican Congresscritters they’d better get a big tax cut or they’ll cut off funding for campaigns, so Republicans came back with a 2018 budget that would cut $1.5 trillion from health care spending, including $1 trillion from Medicare and $473 billion from Medicare, to set up those tax cuts, regardless of Trump’s campaign promises to protect those health programs. And we’ll see what House Speaker Paul Ryan has in store for Social Security.

Plutocrats have been working for more than 80 years to overturn the New Deal’s reforms that regulated capitalism and enabled the recovery from the Great Depression. In the 1980s Ronald Reagan provided the opportunity for the plutocrats, as they broke the unions that provided major backing for the Democrats; the National Labor Relations Board backed the unionbusters; and Reagan’s Federal Communications Commission killed the Fairness Doctrine, which since the end of World War II had required broadcasters to provide balanced coverage of controversial issues of public importance to prevent fascists from rising in the US. The demise of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 allowed conservative broadcasters to consolidate control of the airwaves, with few opportunities for liberal and progressive voices. Now Trump’s FCC is moving to give corporations control of the Internet, and put more toll booths on the information superhighway, while Trump and other right wingers have worked to undermine the credibility of critical news media as “fake news.” Lately he has called for licensing journalists, taking another page from the fascist playbook of the 1930s.

The Grand Oligarch Party will keep coming with bad ideas, the money to promote them in the corporate media and financial backing for politicians who will do their bidding — and they don’t play fair. The Progressive Populist will try to restore the good name of populism. The Resistance will have to keep fighting back by getting the word out whichever way they can. But it was a good first year. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2017

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Selections from the December 1, 2017 issue

COVER/Lucian K. Truscott IV
You don’t cut taxes with two wars and 240,000 troops overseas

EDITORIAL
The Resistance strikes back

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
Young Evangelicals blurring theological lines

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Food for thought: Why not thought for food?

DISPATCHES
McConnell concedes GOP tax plan will increase taxes on many;
GOP tax plan is all unicorns;
Landmine in GOP tax bill would give fetuses personhood;
GOP plan raises tax on graduate students;
Obamacare grows despite Trump’s sabotage;
Maine voters opt for Medicaid expansion;
GOP ready to push Trump judicial choices through;
Dems win with serious, affirmative agenda;
Big Oil loses big in Washington State ...

ART CULLEN
Rural despair

JILL RICHARDSON
Gun control shouldn’t be this hard 

BOB BURNETT
Trump’s tax cut challenge

SAM PIZZIGATI
If you want to collect Social Security, Trump’s tax plan is an outrage

OLIVIA ALPERSTEIN
What real tax reform could look like

RICHARD ESKOW
Dems want to ditch leaders and move left; they’re right

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Forests and trees

BARRY FRIEDMAN
American voices: The Resistance, year one

MARK ANDERSON
Is a groundwater ‘trade deficit’ gurgling under our feet?

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Emergency rooms as Realtors: A micro point of light on the healthcare horizon

SAM URETSKY
It’s never too early to discuss public safety

WAYNE O’LEARY
That Kennedy tax cut

JOHN BUELL
President Trump: Nuclear business as usual?

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Robots create made in the USA jobs

BOOK REVIEW/Seth Sandronsky
Sports safety advocacy

BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Questions before the Resistance

ROB PATTERSON
Royal flush

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
A tale of three Harveys

MOVIES/Ed Rampell
Stars, survivors, relatives, remember Hollywood blacklist’s 70th anniversary

Sexualizing young girls while condemning adult-child relations: Outing Roy Moore highlights historical flip-flop

By Marc Jampole

Society has made an historical flip-flop in two paired values we hold about teenaged girls, especially aged 12-16.

In the old days, there was little wrong with a 32 year old man courting a 14 or 16 year old girl. As a citizen of the 21st century, I personally find it both distasteful and weird, a signal of an immature male adult. But in the old patriarchal days, the age difference didn’t matter that much. As recently as the late 1940’s, my Syrian grandfather—born and weaned in Aleppo—married off my 16 year old aunt to a man in his late twenties.

In those days, however, the sexuality of young girls was deemphasized, especially in middle and upper class families. Their dress was more modest. In some cultures, girls were educated separately or isolated from males of all ages. In some cultures, dates were chaperoned. For the most part, only bad girls manifested their sexuality.

Our attitudes about the normalization of adult-child marriage and the sexualization of young girls have both done a complete 180 over the course of the past century, not a sharp turn, but a slowly accelerating curve. Nowadays, we rightfully frown on sexual and romantic relationships between children and adults. From at least the 1970’s onward, there might exist some relationships between girls under 16 and boys between 18-24, but no gap as wide as 32 and 14, or 32 and 17 for that matter.

Yet American mass media sexualizes young women on a daily basis. No, change that to on a nanosecond-by-nanosecond basis. By the time a girl attains 14, she has been introduced to a wide array of clothes, cosmetics, toys, books, electronic games, advertisements and movies that reduce her and other young girls to sexual objects. Sexualization begins as early as four and five for girls participating in youth beauty pageants. Fulfilling or enhancing your sexual being unleashes a literal cornucopia of needs that products and services can provide, so it is a powerful tool for marketers and advertisers. As our consumer society has advanced, so has the sexualization of women—and men to a lesser extent—of all ages.

Through much of human history, the distinction between childhood and adulthood was not as stark as it has been in the 20th and the 21st century industrialized societies. Many children worked in prior centuries and there were few if any organized groups of or for children. Society in general was much less child-centered than today, for two reasons (if my memory of reading books on the subject has not failed me): Firstly, many children died in childbirth, which hardened people to death and caused them to invest less emotional energy in their children’s lives. Just as important, however, were the more constrained economic circumstances before the industrial revolution and then the great redistribution of wealth downward in the first two-thirds of the 20th century. As people have had more disposable income, they have gradually focused more of their expenditures on their children. A contemporary Thorsten Veblen would say that we are engaging in conspicuous consumption to demonstrate how much we love our children and how well-off we are. Children have joined—and perhaps started to replace—women on the fetishized pedestal of consumerism.

Today’s society has it three-quarters right. There should be a separation between childhood and adulthood. Societies in which children are protected and adults are expected to be responsible and independent corresponds to our developmental needs as primates with a long maturation process for our progeny.

In addition, open attitudes about sex, sexuality and sexual identity lead to healthier individuals and a healthier society. But while our advances towards a society accepting of everyone’s sexuality is positive, the market-driven sexualization of young girls is not. It forces young girls to be overly concerned with their bodies at a time of life when the body is rapidly changing and before their brains have developed enough to address the multiple sophistications of sexual relations in our complex society.

Additionally, we are seeing the lines between childhood and adulthood blurring over the past twenty years. Instead of adulthood being thrust prematurely on adolescence as in pre-industrial times, youth and adolescence have been extended into the twenties and the thirties, as more and more adults retain their entertainments and predilections of childhood. I’ve recited the litany of adult infantilization many times over the past few years, most recently a few weeks back.  Every year, more adults read Harry Potter and other adult fiction, watch movies about super heroes and fantasy worlds or about adult men—and now women—remaining adolescents, wear Halloween costumes to work, collect My Little Ponies and Legos, enjoy cosplay and participate in sleepovers in museums. Every year, more children remain at home or move back to live with their parents, often for economic reasons, but often also a sign of immaturity. All of these and many other cultural phenomena suggest that adults are thinking and acting more like children and that childhood is expanding to engulf part if not all an individual’s adult life.

The most telling sign that American society is becoming infantilized is that enough Americans voted for a 70-year-old infant with a child’s emotions, emotional needs, thought processes and level of education that a majority of Electoral College members could feel free to vote for him. Again, the dictates of consumer capitalism are to blame: it’s easier to convince a child to buy some shiny new, but useless, bauble than it is to convince an adult.

To be sure, our society has advanced to the point that victims feel they can come forward and identify their abusers. Coming forward of course discourages these creeps because they know in their hearts what they are doing is wrong and that, if made public, their actions will ruin their careers. Coming forward also prevents predators from becoming repeat offenders. The fall of Harvey Weinstein, Roy Moore, Kevin Spacey and all the other recently-outed prominent dirtbags gives us hope that we will soon have a society that is both non-sexist and non-sexually exploitive. That it came so soon after the election of an avowed sexual harasser and abuser only shows how much Americans were shaken by the results of the 2016 presidential election. All good.

But at the end of the day, the advances we have made in our mores through creating certain barriers between childhood and adulthood, having a more open society in sexual matters and now openly confronting sexual predators are corrupted and partial offset by our consumer-driven economy of conspicuous consumption that reduces all human experience to the buying of goods and services.

New York Times has split personality: conservative news coverage and liberal editorials

By Marc Jampole

I can’t imagine that the New York Times editorial staff and news department ever talk to each other. They might not even read each other’s work. If they did, the Times might have to split into two publications or engage in a civil war as fiercely fought as the one between the rapidly-industrializing northern states and the traitorous slave-owning south 150 some odd years ago.

The Times editorial staff is reliably left-leaning, taking the Democrat’s side on environmental, immigration, healthcare, foreign policy, taxation, infrastructure, consumer protection, global warming and other key issues. It typically endorses Democratic candidates. The people writing the Times editorials tend to recognize and put a good deal of credence into legitimate research, which drives them further into the arms of left-leaners, since on virtually all issues, the facts speak loudly against rightwing positions.

The news department, however, displays a Republican bias that goes back at least to the 2010 midyear election, if not years earlier. In 2010, remember, the Times covered many Republican primaries but very few Democratic ones; printed exaggerated totals for the Tea Party March on Washington and underplayed the two left-leaning marches that drew about as many people each as the Tea Party did; and totally botched the job of explaining how those currently with health insurance would benefit from the Affordable Care Act.

The Times news staff usually doesn’t lie—that would be against journalistic ethics. Well maybe Judith Miller did stretch the truth in 2003 beyond recognition when she published as facts Bush II propaganda about Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction.

But, really, outside of wartime, the Times reporters don’t lie. They don’t have to. There are so many insidiously hidden ways to support Republicans and their untenable rightwing positions. Some examples:

• Give much more coverage to Republican candidates and primaries than to Democratic ones. It’s happened every election cycle since I started counting in 2010.
• View all issues through the prism of the right’s ideology, like focusing on deficits instead of job creation or the amelioration of suffering during the recent Great Recession. Until quite recently the Times accepted the GOP argument that tax cuts would create jobs; only when it became obvious to everyone that the purpose of the current cuts is to reward wealthy donors has the Times switch gears and focused news coverage on the great inequities that the Trump GOP plan would create or exacerbate.
• Doing positive and sympathetic features on people representing miniscule populations but with rightwing views, like the recent feature on mothers who believe their boys were incorrectly accused of sexual harassment on college campuses or the feature on people who believe that the Affordable Care Act hurt them.
• Focus heavily on rightwing protests, whiles ignoring leftwing protests or trying to normalize or perverting them through isolation. For example, the Times normalized the fact that so many women participated in protests after a serial harasser/molester was awarded a majority of the votes in the Electoral College in 2016 by focusing not on the issues, but on the large number of women mobilized. We can see perversion in the Times joining the rest of the mainstream news media in focusing on the very small number of weird, homeless and incendiary individuals participating in the Occupy occupations, trying to isolate the Occupy movement from the mainstream.
• Keeping in the news controversies that have been decided in favor of the left-center view years, and sometimes decades earlier, as the Times news department did with climate change and the vaccine controversy, and still does with the economic benefit of lowering taxes on the wealthy.
• Cherry-picking the research it publicizes to over-represent studies supporting positions on the right, which often entails misinterpretation of results or publication of bogus research. For example, the Times put a Koch-sponsored George Mason survey of the attitudes of weather personalities regarding global warming on the front page, while completely ignoring a Stanford University study that demonstrated that we could use wind power to supply all the world’s electrical needs with minimal impact on the environment. The Times report on a study of women’s lives a few years ago buried the fact that 62% of all American women now cohabitate without the benefit of marriage sometime in their lives and instead led and featured the meaningless trivia that women who cohabitate may be slightly more likely to get divorced if they later marry. One Times business writer recently explicated Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart’s elaborate theory that a nation’s economic growth stalls when it has too much debt but forgot to mention that Professors R & R made some basic math mistakes which, when corrected, produce numbers disproving their theory.
• Presenting an equal number of experts for both sides of an issue, e.g., quoting two scientists on each side of the global warming issue, when in fact, 95+% of all scientists concur that global warming is occurring and is caused primarily by human activity; or presenting the opinion of a woman who hasn’t vaccinated her children against that of an public health expert.

This weekend, the Times used one its favorite techniques: floating trial balloons for right wing nonsense. These article are always heavy on conjecture and light on facts. They quote unknown sources, accept speculation as the basis for further speculation and make hypothetical conclusions. These articles are often mystery-shrouded incantation of experts, elected officials and organizations considering, debating, analyzing, researching or developing, in other words, a chopped liver of supposition and conjecture.

Over the past few years, the Times has run front-page stories floating the following rightwing ideas: states filing for bankruptcy so they can renegotiate retiree pensions; spending billions updating and expanding our nuclear arsenal; cutting Social Security benefits as part of a plan to reduce the deficit; both Bush II and Obama proposals to increase troops in Iraq on a temporary basis. In some but not all of these examples, the Times is performing its function as “newspaper of record” by floating controversial Administration proposals so that, if met with opposition, the Administration can deny considering them. But in every case, the ideas about which the Times are decidedly rightwing.

This week’s trial balloon is not so much in favor of a rightwing idea and more in support of a discredited rightwing foreign policy apparatus, to wit, Donald Trump’s. The article claims that a team led by soon-to-be-indicted Jared Kushner is putting together a proposal to bring peace to Israel and then Palestinians, one that the Administration thinks has a high degree of success because, as one expert puts it, “the stars are in alignment.” The article details what may or may not be in the proposal, what concessions the Israelis, Palestinians and others may or may not be asked to make, while discussing reasons why all sides may or may not want to or be in a position to accept this as yet undefined “ultimate deal.”

Yes, the Times really uses—and in fact builds the article—the expression “Ultimate deal,” which sounds like standard Donald Trump puffery. It’s the largest, the oldest, the most expensive. The most luxurious, the most powerful, the most intelligent. The best. The ultimate deal.

Oh, and where are we in the process of forming and then getting all parties to accept this ultimate deal? “Mr. Trump’s team has collected “non-papers” exploring various issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and officials said they expected to address…”

In other words, a great big nothing burger.

The purpose of the article, thus is not to propose an obnoxious rightwing policy but to shore up an obnoxious rightwing regime. Even as the Times editorial excoriated Trump for trampling on the Constitution, the front page of the Times news section is puffing up a peace proposal before one even exists to make it look as if the Trump Administration is miraculously solving a problem that has plagued U.S. foreign policy for about 50 years.

Talk about a split personality. That’s Jekyll and Hyde.

Instead of cutting estate tax, we should limit amount that can be inherited. Heirs do nothing to earn inherited money

By Marc Jampole

What did someone inheriting $20 million or $2 billion do to deserve the money?

The same thing my son did to have his unmeasurably high math abilities. The same thing LeBron James did to grow to 6’ 8” and attain genius level highs in natural speed, quickness, eyesight and stamina. The same thing Adele did to have such a good ear for musical notes and an enormous breath capacity.

Absolutely nothing.

It’s true that Adele and LeBron James (and my son) worked hard to harness their natural abilities, and that’s why they’re paid so much.

But what does an heir do to deserve the money they collect? Take care of the person with the big bucks? But isn’t that what poor people do, too? Take care of their own. Regardless of income level, isn’t that part of the connection between parent and child, brother and sister, aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews?—a connection that is also a contract of mutual care and concern. Even if we take the cold-hearted role of the economist and consider the inheritance solely as another economic exchange, the value of caring does not equal billions or even a few million dollars. All of the health care, home care, financial, legal, grooming, transportation and entertainment services provided for an elderly individual don’t add up to billions, let alone a few million dollars for the average senior, so the absolute ceiling of what an heir “deserves” for care is relatively low.

The argument about the inheritance and taxation of assets and property upon the death of an individual cuts to the heart of the central debate in this country since World War I: Do individuals owe anything to society and how much can society do to control the fates of individuals?

Conservatives want individuals to have unfettered rights, especially in the marketplace, while projecting the individual into what she/he owns and granting individual rights to corporate entities. Behind their exaltation of individuals and individual property rights over all else is the idea that individuals work for what they have and therefore deserve to do with it what they like, unencumbered by rules, taxes or social responsibilities.

Yet no matter how hard the average person works, he won’t be able to play basketball as well as LeBron James or sing as beautifully as Adele. (No matter how much you love or hate her material, no one can deny her vocal abilities.) Both the clerk in the supermarket where I shop and my son the engineer work extremely hard, but my son makes many times more because of a talent he had at birth.

But anyone can inherit, if they’re lucky. All you have to do is have the right family.

Thus, even if you are a strong believer that those who get rich deserve it because of what they did, how can you be opposed to a tax on inheritance? How can you even be in favor of the notion of inheritance?

One of the most selfish, self-serving parts of the Trump GOP bill to lower taxes on the ultra-wealthy—to be paid for by higher taxes on the middle and upper middle classes, higher deficits, and deep cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and a broad range of other government programs—is the proposal to end all federal estate taxes. Currently, estates under $5.45 million for individuals, double for the married, pay no federal inheritance tax. Both House and Senate versions call for removing the cap and exempting all inheritance from federal taxation.

We should be moving in the other direction by raising the estate tax above the current cap to 100%, with 75% of the proceeds payable to the federal government and the rest to the governments of the states in which the individual lived during his adult life, on a proportional basis.

When individuals are alive they have the freedom to give their assets away to whomever or whatever they like—assuming they pay the proper taxes. But once dead, their assets and property should revert to all of society in the form of its representative, the state. Naturally many personal possessions should be kept in the family and some of those possessions have market value. Thus some amount should be exempt from confiscation at death. I think $5.45 million should do it, when you consider that 99.98 of Americans are worth less than that at death.

By all means, we should keep the $5.45 million exemption, so that families can pass on cherished houses, works of art and other personal property that they haven’t already disposed of. But everything above a cap of $5.5 million should revert to the state at death. The net effect of this move will be to force people to unload their assets before death, which will enhance tax revenues sooner but by a smaller amount than waiting. But the principle of working for what you get and only getting what you deserve—something held dear by the right—will be upheld.

The ultimate hypocrisy is Trump GOP response to Las Vegas & Texas church shootings & New York truck mayhem

By Marc Jampole

When a mentally ill ISIS supporter plows a truck into bicyclists in New York, killing eight
and injuring 15, Donald Trump calls for the ending of an immigration program that has
given our country hundreds of thousands of highly productive and patriotic Americans
over the years.

But when mentally ill gunmen perpetrate horror after horror, all Trump and the GOP can
do is ask us to pray and blame it on mental illness. Not a word about making it harder
for the mentally ill to purchase guns. Nothing about prohibiting automatic rifles,
expanding the national no-gun registry, prohibiting perpetrators of domestic violence
and people on the government’s terror list to buy or own a gun, extending gun waiting
periods and making them apply to gun shows or making people take gun tests to own a
gun license.

Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, Charleston, Orlando, San Bernardino, Sandy Hook.
Those are some of the biggest shootings over the past few years. And so far in 2017,
there have been 307 mass murders committed by firearms in the United States. Most of
these were not acts of terrorism. All of them involved guns. Some of these mass
murders could have been prevented by more restrictive gun laws. Others, like Las
Vegas and Sandy Hook, would have been much less destructive if automatic weapons
were prohibited.

Survey after survey shows that most people—and most gun owners—want greater
restrictions on gun ownership. And yet, state legislatures and the Congress refuse to
pass any law restricting gun ownership and in recent years sought to expand gun rights.
As a group, legislators have displayed a craven disregard for life and a dismissive
disrespect for voters. A persistent theme in news media coverage is the fear that
candidates have of offending the voters. More often than not, however, and certainly in
the case of gun control, candidates and legislators don’t care a gnat’s hindquarters
about the voters’ wishes. What they care about is pleasing their corporate masters. The
gun industry was one of the first industries to recognize the value of investing in the
political process. It would be more accurate to write that politicians worry about what
their constituencies think, and leave it to the insiders to understand that big money
interests and not the voters are the constituencies being referenced.

The hard facts support gun control. While a federal law prevents federal dollars from
supporting research into gun violence (yes, Congress did that!), enough research does
exists to demonstrate without a doubt that the more guns in a society, the more deaths
and injuries from gun violence will occur. The causes are various: self-inflicted, friendly
fire, accidents, mass murders. But very few gun deaths and accidents occur in defense
of life and property. The conclusion is obvious: the more we restrict guns, the fewer gun
deaths and accidents we’ll have.

The facts disprove the main argument of the gun industry that owning a gun keeps you
safe. You may feel safer with a gun in the house or strapped to your side, but you have
actually put yourself at greater risk of injury or death.

Of course, gun ownership is not the only issue in which Trump and the GOP talk and
act against the facts. On immigration, education, the environment and taxation, Trump
and the GOP persist in spewing myths, lies and disproven theories.

There is a second edge to the Trump and GOP hypocrisy, which the events of the past
few weeks have sharpened. When a Muslim or immigrant commit a mass murder, it’s
terrorism. But when a red-blooded American commits a mass murder, it’s the act of a
lone looney. Make no mistake about it: this racialization of mass murder is another
attempt to distract us from the real problems. Sowing resent against Muslims and
immigrants helps to create an us-and- them world in which poor and middle class white
Christians learn to hate and fear people of color instead of hating and fearing the group
that is really hurting them—the rich folk who want to curtail social welfare, infrastructure,
healthcare and education programs that help poor and middle class white Christians
more than any other group.

Europeans in North America have ignored climate in the past, always leading to disaster

By Marc Jampole 

In A Cold Welcome, Ohio State historian Sam White reminds us that the 21st century is not the first time that Europeans in North America have ignored the climate and thereby created human disasters.

In the century after the second European discovery of the New World by Columbus in 1492, several European nations founded a number of settlements in North America, yet any attempt to colonize north of Florida ended disastrously: crop failures, deaths from freezing, famine, cannibalism, retreat. Professor White lays much of the blame on the Little Ice Age, a global cold spell that lasted from the late Middle Ages through the end of the 19th century but peaked in the 16th century. The first wave of the Little Ice Age probably led to the decline of Viking colonies established on Greenland in the 9th century.

But White also documents how European arrogance and ignorance contributed to the many failed attempts of Europeans to settle what later became the United States and Canada in the 16th century, and to the extreme hardships endured by the first settlers in Jamestown, Santa Fe and Quebec. Following the Greeks and Romans, the European science of that time postulated that all geographic regions at every latitude would have the same weather. In other words, New York’s weather would be the same as Madrid’s, Quebec’s weather would be the same as Paris’ and the weather in the north of Canada would be the same as London and Berlin. In every case, of course, the weather was and is much colder and subject to weather extremes in the North American locale than in the European city at the same latitude. It was not until the 20th and 21st centuries that climatologists began fully to understand the subtle interplay of winds, heat, carbon monoxide levels, large bodies of water, the Earth’s position vis-à-vis the sun and humanity’s own actions that forms weather conditions around the world.

Europeans also arrogantly assumed that same crops and domesticated animals they cultivated in Europe would transfer readily to the New World and that they could grow the crops at the same time of year. Thus attempts by the Spanish to grow winter wheat and barley and raise goats and sheep in Florida ended in complete failure. Failing crops led to cannibalism during the “starving time” the English colony at Jamestown endured later in the century.

But Europeans learned the way humans have always learned: through observation of empirical phenomena and the accumulation of evidence. With an assist from the warming climate, Europeans applied the knowledge gained from observation and learned how to survive and thrive in North America, building permanent encampments from the beginning of the 17th century onward.

The contrast with today’s situation is stunning. We have the knowledge we need to tame an increasingly unhospitable land—made less livable by own machinations. In Europe, Africa and Asia, leaders are willing to do what it takes both to reduce the impact of human’s on climate and to address the extreme weather and its potential disastrous impact on human settlements that global warming has and will continue to cause. Everywhere, humans are rising to the challenge, if a bit more slowly than climate scientists and environmentalists want.

Everywhere, that is, except in North America, where Americans, primarily of European descent, want to ignore science and impose their own ignorant beliefs on MotherFather Nature. The agenda of Donald Trump and the GOP don’t just ignore science, but like a spoiled child who refuses to yield to reason, they give a mean-spirited raspberry to the pursuit of knowledge. Look at the anti-intellectual carnage wrought in less than a year since the Electoral College turned its back on its constitutional responsibility to make sure that a madman or tyrant is not inadvertently elected America’s leader (note that I continue to come up with clever ways to avoid using “Trump” in the same sentence as a certain word that begins with the letter “p”): walking away from the Paris Accord, rescinding Obama Administration environmental regulations, dismantling government website pages referring to climate change, censoring scientists and scientific reports and replacing scientists with industrial leaders.

Ignorance and false science stand at the heart of most Trump/GOP proposals. Scientists, social scientists and economists keep shouting many truths other than human-caused global warming at the right. Truths like:

• Lowering taxes on the wealthy does not lead to job growth, wage growth or economic growth.
• The number of gun fatalities in a population is a direct result of the number of guns owned by the population. The more guns, the less safe we are, and the fewer guns, the more same we are.
• When adjusted for poverty and disabilities, U.S. schools outperform most other industrialized countries and public school students do better than private schools students do.
• Immigrants, even illegal ones, lead to job and wage growth for those born in the country; immigrants also have lower crime rates than native-born Americans.

I could go on, but you get the point. A major political party is trying to impose its irrational, childish will on reality, and we know that never works. What’s worse is that right wingers have created a network of mass media outlets and privately-funded think tanks to spew out and publicize false research and theories.

The early European settlers didn’t know any better and so believed their garbage science. They soon learned better, though. It’s ironic and tragic that their ancestors who do or should know better are ignoring the much more developed and detailed science of our current age.