The Progressive Populist Today Blog

Monday, December 11, 2017

What is the relationship between domestic & foreign policy in the current administration? Is it an incoherent stew or is there a grand strategy?

By Marc Jampole

That the incendiary announcement that the United States was moving its embassy to Jerusalem comes in the wake of the Senate’s passage of the Trump GOP tax giveaway to the wealthy begs the question: Does any relationship exist between domestic and foreign policy in the Trump years? Can we connect the current administration’s domestic policy to shift wealth to the wealthiest and permanently entrench the wealthiest as a ruling elite to our bellicose, go-it-alone, anti-Muslim foreign policy? Is there a grand design? Or is it just an incoherent stew of bad ideas?

To a great degree, domestic and foreign policy always work hand and glove in the United States. For the most part, both have always served the interests of the ultra-wealthy and a coterie of large companies in industries long used to mixing in politics such as energy, metals extraction, telecommunications and defense.

The current foreign policy abandons attempts to solve world problems collectively and replaces it with an angry isolationism that tries to bully or bluster to get its way. It appears to represent a radical turn from the approach of at least the last three administrations, but if you scratch the surface…la plus sa change, as the French say. We seem always to have a ton of troops and advisors in a number of foreign countries. We still employ a large number of private companies to perform military functions. We still seem to do the bidding of Saudi Arabia and therefore demonize Iran. Diplomacy may be gone. We may be courting authoritarians and snubbing allies. But we’re still flexing our military muscle, still fighting several senseless wars. We still employ a large number of private companies to perform military functions. We still seem to do the bidding of Saudi Arabia and therefore demonize Iran. Diplomacy may be gone. We may be courting authoritarians and snubbing allies. But we’re still flexing our military muscle, still fighting several senseless wars.

But what does our foreign policy—both what continues and what is new—have to do with domestic issues?

As it turns out, our continued military misadventures that transcend regimes have four profound connections to domestic affairs, all of which have both political and policy implications.

First and most obvious, the defense industry plays a large role in our politics. No candidate from either party has strayed very far from espousing the central tenets of our foreign policy since the end of World War II, which of course call for tremendous annual expenditures for the military. Our sainted President Obama, for example, was a leading proponent of developing a new generation of nuclear weapons and raised no objections to robot weapons that decide on their kill without human intervention. The acquiescence to or support of the defense industries by all leading politicians results in a greater likelihood that we will use the weapons.

For the most part, politicians from both parties also buy into the long-time U.S. policy of being the arms master to the world, selling more military weaponry to other countries than the rest of the nations of the world combined. Often these sales, by private military corporations, take place only because of U.S. loans to the purchasing government.Thus our federal budget is stretched and our politics distorted by the influence of military contractors.

Besides draining our treasury of funds that could be used to help people, both in the United States and throughout the world, our large military expenditures and our long-time policy of being the arms master of the world contribute to the overall “culture of guns” that exists in America. We are armed to the teeth and have armed the world to the teeth. The political and policy dynamics of selling guns abroad and guns in the United States reinforce each other: America, armed to the teeth, land of freedom and defender of freedom.

In other regions of the world, our arms mongering causes disruptions. In the United States, it leads to a slaughter unseen in any other nation of the world. Then again, no other nation in the world has so many guns in active circulation. Every study shows that the more guns a society has, the more people will die and be injured by guns. Our elected officials seem to accept the casualties in the United States in the name of a single freedom proclaimed as inviolable through a gross misinterpretation of an amendment to the constitution ratified more than 200 years ago, long before the invention of automatic weapons and bump stocks.

Our foreign policy also helps to justify our domestic police state apparatus, and has done so since the end of World War II when we decided we were better off with the Soviet Union as an enemy than as a friend. When we don’t have an enemy, we manufacture one, or expand a minor threat such as ISIS into a major one. Government uses international affairs as the rationale and justification for all manner of intrusion into our lives, such as eavesdropping on the phone calls of American citizens, executing secret searches, tracking library card use, seizures of private property, classifying millions of documents as top secret and cracking down on undocumented immigrants.

Finally, foreign affairs serves as a distraction from domestic issues. Traditionally, people come together in a war. They’re ready to make sacrifices for the good of the country.They forget or are willing to postpone consideration of pressing domestic issues such as healthcare, minimum wage and growing inequality. The common enemy—be it real or imagined—takes our mind off domestic concerns. Think North Korea and the fear of nuclear attack.

Defense industry influence, the gun culture, the excuse for creating a security state, a distraction from domestic problems. These four links between domestic affairs and foreign policy transcend administrations and have existed since at least the Truman Administration. Recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, getting into a name-calling contest with an erratic lunatic with a finger on the bomb, escalating the war in Afghanistan again and trying to wiggle out of the Iran nuclear deal may make us quake from fear that our foreign policy has gone rogue, but the main outlines of the post-war bipartisan consensus to be both the world’s bully and its arms dealer persist, as does the pernicious interaction between foreign policy and domestic affairs that is the necessary outcome of that overarching strategy.

Friday, December 8, 2017

My mistake: Trump didn’t have private meeting w/David Koch & friends the day after Senate passed tax reform. It was another Park Avenue billionaire, Stephen A. Schwarzman

By Marc Jampole

It turns out that my guess as to who hosted the private meeting Donald Trump had at 740 Park Avenue the day after the Senate passed the Trump GOP massive tax cut for the wealthy was wrong.

I said it was probably David Koch, and that Trumpty-Dumpty no doubt has his hand out for a little sugar from the windfall Trump’s Republican Party was giving the Koch family and their pals.

But the New York Times is reporting—six days after the meeting—that the host was Stephen A, Schwarzman, the billionaire founder of private equity behemoth Blackstone Group, another trust fund baby who has turned his head start into an estimated $11.2 billion in net worth. The Times report claims that the group included old New York friends and real estate colleagues, a tip-off that at least part of the article is spun from air or that almost no one attended, as Trump doesn’t have many if any New York friends or real estate colleagues after his buffoonish public behavior before and during “The Apprentice,” thousands of lawsuits involving legitimate New York businesses he stiffed and his six bankruptcies that cost plenty of New York real estate interests lots of money. New York’s wealthy and powerful elite have considered The Donald a joke since before one of his ex-wives first called him The Donald.

Supposedly many in the group who met with Trump at Schwarzman’s luxury apartment, urged Trump to pressure the Republicans in Congress to roll back plans to end the tax deduction for state and local taxes. Ending the deduction is expected to cost high-tax, high-benefit states like New York, California and New Jersey billions of dollars—part of the way Republicans are planning to pay for the enormous tax break they are giving to everybody assembled in Schwarzman’s apartment except for the servers and security.

My bad guess as to whom Trump visited matters not to the points I was trying to make when I—alone among news reporters and pundits—reported the meeting earlier this week. Whatever else was discussed, we can be sure that Trump had his hand out. We can also rest certain that whoever else was in the plush environs of the Schwarzman residence with Stephen A. and the Donald, they were multi-millionaires or billionaires aligned with conservative causes. The self-seeking and self-satisfied moneyed elite whose opinion matters more to Republicans and many Democrats than the will of the people.

And we can rest assured that self-interest was in the minds and on the lips of everyone present. Remember that it was Schwarzman who in 2010 compared President Obama’s proposal to increase taxation on “carried interest” profits to Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939. I guess he needs all that money to indulge his well-documented hobby of collecting expensive antiques and fine art furniture.

The question remains as to who was riled enough about my OpEdge article and had the juice to force a “correction” at the head of a front-page Times article. The article was about the fact that Trump is going against many other New York moneybags in wanting to end the state deduction. The fairly lengthy piece never returns to the meeting, or even to Schwarzman. The mention of the meeting was a factoid throwaway that was entirely unnecessary for the article and a fairly weak beginning to it.

So who wanted the record corrected? Was it Koch, who doesn’t seem to want to have any public association with the erratic and ignorant leader of the current administration? Or was it Schwarzman, who in the past has embraced his connection to Trump and his role as a Trump advisor? I doubt it was Trump himself, who would have no reason to correct a small inaccuracy in a blog reaching 40,000 people, and every reason in the world to pretend to the American people that he doesn’t spend a lot of time trawling for dollars amongst the ultra-wealthy. Although I have strong circumstantial evidence that the Times has ripped off my OpEdge and Jampole Communications ideas before, I doubt it was the Times that started the ball rolling after seeing my article, because the Times always knew Trump was headed to the Big Apple to beg for cash. It published two photos that referenced Trump’s day-after-the-tax-heist trip in the Sunday paper without explaining the reason for the visit. Of course maybe after seeing the OpEdge article, the Times editors realized they had an interesting little factoid they could use to flesh out a broader story.

We’ll never know, just as we’ll never know what was really said at the meeting. I doubt, however, the conversation veered anywhere close to discussing government actions that would help the vast majority of Americans not worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.

Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Behind Trump GOP grand plan to reduce deficit by cutting spending on social welfare, healthcare & Social Security is idea that the poor are inferior & undeserving

By Marc Jampole

As many others have pointed out, the Republican Party hasn’t wasted any time letting the other shoe drop. They’re dancing their standard two-step of first creating a deficit by cutting taxes on the wealthy and then wailing that the deficit is hurting the economy; of course, the only way to fix it by cutting government spending on social welfare programs.

Reagan pulled this swindle in the 1980’s. Bush did it in the first decade of the 21st century.

And now the Republicans are about to take the first step of the same old swindle by giving the ultra-wealthy the largest tax cut in American history. Most everyone knows that the Trump GOP plan is to pay for this new federal largesse to our least needy in three ways: 1) Cutting spending; 2) Raising taxes on the middle class; 3) Creating a deficit.

Typically, the GOP waits a few years before calling for slashing federal spending, but this crass and brazen new Trump-led GOP has already begun to call for deep cuts to close the large and soon to get larger deficit. Both Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan have explicitly said that the next step is to radically shrink Medicare and Social Security.

Yes, Social Security. Remember, Reagan tried to go after the government run insurance program into which employees pay 6.25% of their earnings (up to a very low $118,500 annually) for the promise of a steady check once they retire. Social Security provides the bulk of retirement income for most Americans. The best Reagan could do was raise the tax, trim benefits and enable the federal government to borrow money from the Social Security Trust Fund. Since then, Republicans routinely treat Social Security as if it were part of the budget, and not a separate Trust Fund.

Bush II went after Social Security literally the day after his second inauguration and it backfired. Obama’s Simpson-Bowles Commission wanted to lower Social Security benefits as a way to pay for the great tax cut to the wealthy it was proposing. That went nowhere fast.

Now the Republicans are ready for another assault on Social Security as part of a broader plan to get the federal government out of the business of helping anyone except those who don’t need the help. There’s little chance they’ll succeed in doing much more than raising the retirement age or trimming the benefit. Too many people depend upon on Social Security, so like any head-on assault against the Affordable Care Act, an attempt to end or radically change Social Security will fail. Little nibbles at its edges, however, have succeeded before, so even as the GOP fire-bombers ask for a radical change such as privatization, the so-called moderates will be pushing to nip and tuck the program—lowering annual increases, raising the retirement age, increasing the tax, anything but raising the cap on income assessed the Social Security tax, which would of course hurt rich folk.

One reason that Social Security is so hard for the GOP to attack is that everyone uses it, and so it is impossible for the GOP to pretend that only the undeserving receive Social Security benefits, like they do with welfare, food stamps and Medicaid.

For those unhip to the language of racial coding, when the Republicans label a group like food stamp recipients as underserving, they mean “of color,” and more recently also “immigrant.” They revel in assuming that most recipients of aid from the government are minorities, and then playing on the racism that many whites still harbor—the secret feeling that whites are superior and, the not-so-secret fear that minorities are taking away the good jobs, the promotions and the college acceptances, deserving none of it. In fact, whites born and raised in the good ole U-S-of-A make up the overwhelming majority of the recipients of virtually all social welfare programs. But if the GOP can convince their base that only minorities—the undeserving—receive the benefit, they have a good chance of keeping their support.

We can already see the GOP begin to demonize the poor. Many news and opinion articles are repeating some of the odious things Republicans have been saying to justify cutting social welfare programs. Comments by Senators Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch that blamed the poor for their predicament have rightfully received widespread condemnation. Grassley said that poor folk would be rich if they spent less on booze, women and movies. Hatch chided poor children without healthcare for “not lifting a finger” to help themselves.

Behind the racism of these comments is a secondary code that the news media does not pick up on, and in fact often enables. To a much smaller, but much richer base than the uneducated white wage-working class, goes this secondary message: It’s not just minorities and immigrants who are inferior, undeserving and responsible for their own dire condition—it is anyone who isn’t rich. The rich got that way through their hard work, deserve what they have and don’t deserve to have it taken away from them—no matter what.

The idea of the deserving rich and the underserving poor predates Ronald Reagan’s politics of selfishness. It is a mutation of what sociologists call the “Protestant ethic.” The Protestant ethic starts with the idea that it’s not prayer or ritual or even faith that gets you into heaven, but good works in the real world. But one form of Protestantism, Calvinism, added the concept of “predestination” that those deserving god’s grace and a glorious afterlife were predetermined. As early as the Dutch Golden Age—decades before social thinkers were using Darwin’s theories to justify letting the wealthy prey on everyone else in a deregulated, laissez-faire market economy—the Protestant ethic underwent a secular inversion, at least in business circles and among the clericals feeding at their trough. The idea arose that becoming a success, and specifically a financial success, was a sign of goodness and god’s grace. Conversely, the poor manifested their inferiority by virtue of being poor. In a sense, everyone becomes self-made, untethered from their social background and wealth and the vagaries of chance. We know you’re inherently good because you’re rich. We assume that the poor remain so because they are inherently bad. The virtue of the “self-made multimillionaire,” as the right-looking-center publication The Economist once described Mitt Romney.

Of course the real world is far different, full of virtuous teachers, professors, nurses, home health aides and other educators and care-givers who make less money than they would as corporate attorneys or investment bankers. It’s also full of virtuous bus drivers, security guards, construction workers, janitors, telemarketers, cashiers, burger flippers and other low-paid jobs who work just as hard as corporate CEOs, hedge fund managers, advertising executives and professional athletes, but make much less money.

The wealthy have been playing one form or another of the “we deserve it” card since the emergence of modern democracy. Racism makes it easier to play because a racial inferior is by definition undeserving. But the ultra-wealthy merely use racism to divide and conquer. Believe me, they—and by “they” I mean the Trumps, Kochs, DeVoses, Mnuchins, Mercers, Anschutzes, Scaifes and their ilk—have just as much disdain for all poor people as the poor uneducated cracker cruising white power websites has for minorities.

Trump doesn’t waste any time cashing in on tax victory to ask wealthy and ultra- wealthy investors for his cut. His meeting with David Koch is ignored by news media, of course.

By Marc Jampole

There wasn’t anything in the news about what Donald Trump did the day after the Senate gave the current Administration an enormous win by passing a tax bill which will produce the greatest shifting of wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthy in American history.

You might assume that like on most days, Trumpty-Dumpty played a little golf and tweeted inanities. But if you check his schedule posted online you’ll see that he jetted to New York for three fundraisers. The narcissistic ignoramus to whom the Electoral College gave the most votes last year took a victory lap with both tiny-fingered hands outstretched palms up for cash.

At 11:20 am on December 2, The Donald delivered remarks at a Trump campaign breakfast, raising money for his reelection, a slush fund that will no doubt end up feeding Trump businesses. Next at 12:35 pm came a speech at a National Republican Committee fundraiser. We can assume that the money raised at that event will fund Republican Party operations and races.

The last fundraiser, at 1:50 pm, is the most intriguing of all. All the schedule says is that Trump “speaks to a smaller group of RNC donors.”

Wonder who that smaller group was and where they met? By luck of the draw, I can give you that information.

They met in the apartment building next to the one in which my wife and I live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The reason I know this fact is that our street was blocked off for a few hours by sand trucks and was swarming with local police and Secret Service agents, one of whom told us it was Trump who was coming. A special receiving tent was erected at the side entrance to the building where the overgrown orange infant was headed. No one was allowed to walk on the street, and when we left, we were told that to get back into our building, we would have to supply identification. Just as we were leaving for the afternoon, we saw a procession of limousines arrive. At the end of the article you can find two photos that suggest how elaborately authorities cordoned off the area for Trump’s visit.

The building in question is 740 Park Avenue, a long-time New York symbol of ultra-wealth. 740 Park has its own Wikipedia page and a book has been written about it, 740 Park: The Story of the World’s Richest Apartment Building by Michael Gross. Some of the current or former inhabitants of 740 include Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (whose grandfather built it), John D. Rockefeller, Saul Steinberg, Steve Schwarzman, Ronald Lauder, Ronald Perelman, Vera Wang, John Thain and Steve Ross, most of whom are certified billionaires.

While the Donald may have been visiting any of the thirty odd ultra-wealthy tenants in this venerable Art Deco building, I will state with extreme confidence he was there to see David Koch, of the infamous Koch brothers, the main organizers of the juggernaut of rightwing money that has funded conservative think tanks, backed conservative politicians and advocated for lower taxes and deregulation for the past few decades.

As Jane Mayer’s Dark Money details, the Koch brothers, sons of an original founder of the John Birch Society, are the primary organizers of the 40-year campaign of a small coterie of billionaires to change the American political agenda for their own selfish ends. Her book explains the process by which our country has reached the point at which it is overwhelmingly centrist-looking-left but controlled by right-wingers, especially at the state level. It explains how the Democrats could outvote the Republicans by millions and still not have a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. It explains why the mass media focuses on inessential issues such as the deficit or promulgates ridiculous myths such as the social value of lowering taxes and the idea that science is unsure about global warming.

In her update of Dark Money that includes what happened in 2016, Mayer reports that the Kochs kept a billion dollars in their and their associates’ pockets during the last election cycle that they had planned to spend to sway the 2016 presidential election for just about any Republican candidate other than Donald Trump. Yet even though the Kochs sat on their hands in the 2016 election, they are now deeply embedded in the Trump Administration. Mayer reports that the Trump administration is crawling with Koch operatives and lobbyists. Mike Pence was the Koch’s first choice for president in 2012 and has received significant financial support from the Kochs in the past. The Kochs set new CIA Director Mike Pompeo up in business and have provided him with financial support throughout his political career. Then there’s the cabinet, that skewers towards the kind of anti-regulation, pro-oil, climate deniers that the Koch Bro’s love to love. Did Trump say he would “drain the swamp” or “join the swamp?”

In the meeting with Koch and friends, we can only imagine the self-serving bombast with which Trump overstated his role in getting the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” (AKA the “Despoiling of the Middle Class by the Wealthy Act”) passed. He certainly didn’t turn any Democrats, and I doubt that he was the reason that the hypocrites John McCain and Jeff Flake decided to vote for the tax heist. I doubt it was Trump who convinced Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins that 13 million was an acceptable number of Americans to lose their healthcare to fund vast tax giveaways to millionaires, multimillionaires and billionaires. And he certainly didn’t influence the public or businesses, since every survey showed that the vast majority of Americans and American business owners and operators were vehemently opposed to the bill. In retrospect, his main role in force feeding this dangerous legislation through Congress was to keep embarrassing himself with tweets about his various feuds that dominated the top of the news, pushing the awful details of the tax bill to less prominent coverage.

It could be a coincidence that Trump paid homage to Koch and pals the day after the Senate passed the bill, since the signs that there would be no parking on Saturday December 2 had been up on Park Avenue all week. On the other hand, the timing was convenient. Not even waiting 24 hours to beg for money seems completely in character for the crass, tone-deaf Trump.

Trump wants money from David and Charles Koch and their ultra-wealthy cronies, to be sure—for his reelection, for his various business ventures that can profit from campaign expenditures and for the dozens of lawyers he is employing related to the Mueller investigation into Trump’s probable collusion with the Russians during the election and his ham-handed attempts to cover it up. I imagine he would also like Koch to support candidates least likely to vote for impeachment.

I doubt that the erratic, pompous, crude and ignorant Trump mixed all that well with the patrician and hardheaded Koch crowd. I see so many funny ways the meeting played out—Did Koch serve fast food hamburgers because he knows that’s what the Donald likes to eat? Or did Trump take one look at a spread of various tapas, sushi or crudities and dig into his pocket for a candy bar? What comparison to his own garish nouveau riche home and hotels did he make upon seeing the Koch’s furnishings? How crude was he in asking for the bucks? How many overblown guarantees did he make?

The Kochs already have just about everything they wanted from the 2016 election. The tax law will save them tens of millions of dollars right away, and billions more for their heirs at their deaths. The current administration is rapidly undoing a generation of regulations that protect the environment and level the playing field between large corporations and everyone else. The federal government is turning its back on climate change policies. The Department of Education is focusing its energies on privatization. There can be no doubt that the Koch crew would feel more comfortable with Mike Pence as president, or Paul Ryan if Pence has to resign because he helped to collude or cover-up. They’ll be less happy if the Democrats sweep in 2018 and Nancy Pelosi ends up in the White House. My guess then is that once Mueller has presented his evidence of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” Republicans will abandon Trumpty-Dumpty, impeach and convict if Trump does not resign first.

Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, or the current occupant of the Oval Office—whoever is officially in charge by the summer of 2018, the Kochs and their fellow billionaires will continue to pull the strings. And one way or another, the 2018 election—like that of 2000, 2010 and 2016—will be one of the most important in U.S. history. Times are desperate for America, and certainly for the left. The side that wants a polluted, poorly educated nation of rich and poor has the money and the structural advantage they gained from gerrymandering after the 2010 election and creating a multitude of state laws that make it harder to register and to vote. All the American people have is the vote itself.

Saturday, December 2, 2017

Editorial: GOP Owners Seek Payback

While corporate media focused on whether Al Franken’s wet kiss and mock lechery of a Playboy model/radio host during a 2006 USO tour of the Mideast before he was a senator, for which Franken has apologized, was the moral equivalent of Roy Moore’s past as an accused child molester and seducer of teenagers when he was an assistant district attorney in Gadsden, Ala., Republicans in Congress were proceeding with plans to pass a tax bill that cuts Medicare and Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for billionaires and corporations.

Republicans claimed, under their tax overhaul, American families, on average, would see their taxes cut by $1,300 in 2019, but the middle one-fifth of earners — earning $50,000 to $87,000 a year — would get a tax cut of $850, on average. People in the top 1% of incomes, who make more than $750,000 a year, would see a cut of $34,130, on average.

But the tax bill also repeals the individual mandate to buy insurance, which frees up more than $300 billion in federal funds over the next decade for tax cuts but results in 13 million fewer people having insurance, and higher insurance premiums for others, according to projections by the Congressional Budget Office.

The tax bill is expected to add $1.4 trillion to the national debt, which would trigger automatic spending cuts to Medicare ($25 billion the first year), student loans, military pensions, agricultural subsidies and supports, Customs and Border Patrol and other programs totaling $150 billion per year under the “Pay As You Go” rule. The last time Medicare was cut like this, in 2013, Sarah Kliff noted at Vox.com, patients lost access to critical services such as chemotherapy treatment.

The Medicare cuts could be waived by Congress, but Republicans, on near-party-line votes, in October approved a budget that cuts $473 billion from Medicare and $1 trillion from Medicaid over the next decade to shake loose money for the tax cuts.

“This tax bill deserves a broader name. Its policies will cause millions of vulnerable Americans to lose coverage, disrupt care for the elderly, and potentially change the health care system in other ways we can’t fully predict,” Kliff wrote. “… The tax bill could, for some seniors, become a bill that sharply limits their access to health care.”

The CBO examined how the changes in federal spending would affect different income groups and found the groups that will be hit hardest are — surprise! — the working poor. According to the estimates, anyone making less than $30,000 a year would feel the pinch starting in 2019. By 2021, families earning $40,000 or less a year would be paying more in taxes and/or receiving less in services, creating a net savings for the federal government.

By 2025, individual tax cuts would be phased out, so benefits would be substantially less for the middle class. The average tax cut for all families then would be just $300, and 50.3% of American households would see their taxes increase by this point. Those in the middle quintile of earners would see a tax cut of just $50, on average, and 65.6% of these people would see their taxes go up while their government services are reduced and their health insurance costs likely would be shooting up by 10% or more annually. People in the top 1% of income earners, however, would still get a tax cut of $32,510, on average, and would receive 61.8% of the total tax benefits from the plan. After the tax breaks for the lower income groups expire in 2025, the corporate tax rate would remain at 20%, down from the current 35%.

“The whole purpose of this tax increase is to make it possible for Senate Republicans to pass a tax cut that overwhelmingly benefits the very wealthiest taxpayers — on party lines, without any Democrats,” Brad Sargent noted at the Washington Post. “The whole point of zeroing out the tax cuts for lower-income groups, resulting in a tax hike for so many people [after 2025], is to fund the continued corporate tax cuts, so they don’t add to the deficit in the long run, allowing Republicans to pass the bill via a simple majority vote.”

Bruce Bartlett, a former domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan, noted in the Washington Post that “the stealth goal of the GOP tax cuts is to start down the path toward gutting the New Deal and the Great Society — and if tax cuts pass, they might get away with it.”
The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that both the Senate and House bills would reduce federal revenue by $1.4 trillion. That roughly matched the CBO’s findings.

Trump and Republicans claim the tax cuts will stimulate economic growth to make up for the tax cuts, but that is a fantasy. Unemployment already is down to 4.1%, which is considered full employment. Republicans say cutting taxes will force wages up, but “supply-side” economics hasn’t worked that way in the past.

Bartlett noted that wages fell steadily after the corporate tax rate was cut to 34% from 46% in 1986 under Reagan. Wages also fell in Britain after it cut corporate tax rates; tax savings primarily go to corporate executives and shareholders, he noted.

A better way to get wages up would be to keep the tax rates where they are and use the revenue to bring the nation’s infrastructure up to standards. Any tax cuts should be targeted at lower-income workers, who would put the money back into the economy, rather than putting the windfall into CDs or hedge funds, as the wealthy would do.

A supply-side tax plan was disastrous to the Kansas economy after Gov. Sam Brownback (R) convinced legislators in 2012 to slash income and business taxes to spur investment and economic growth. Instead, state revenues went into a free-fall, which forced the state to slash university budgets and cancel highway projects and required the state to borrow $1 billion to shore up the state’s public pension fund.

But the Grand Oligarch Party is all about the triumph of hope over experience, and while moderate Republicans joined with Democrats in the Kansas Legislature to pass a $1.2 billion tax increase over Brownback’s veto this past year, all five of Kansas’ US House members and both of its US senators have expressed support for Trump’s plan.

A survey of 42 academic economists by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business found only one economist agreeing with the Republican claim that “US GDP will be substantially higher a decade from now” than under the current baseline. In fact, 52% disagreed or strongly disagreed that the bill would lead to significant economic growth, and 36% were uncertain.

One of the selling points is that the bill would reduce the tax rate on corporations to 20%, but that rate would be for “C corporations,” the larger business entities. For small business owners in sole proprietorships, partnerships, LLCs and “S corporations,” which generally report “pass-through income,” the tax break would be limited to the first 30% of income, with at least 70% of the business owner’s income continuing to be taxed at the highest rate. And many independent contractors, such as truck drivers, would have to incorporate to continue to deduct business expenses.

Both versions would reduce deductibility of state and local taxes. The Senate bill would end all state and local tax write-offs, and the House bill would repeal deductions of state and local income taxes while preserving the deduction for property taxes.

The Senate narrowly passed this monstrosity of a tax bill 51-49 just before 2 a.m. Saturday, Dec. 2. The text was released to senators late Friday night, shortly before the final vote, but the Republican leaders refused to give senators or the public time to read the bill. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said she got the amendments not from senators, but from a lobbyist, implying that lobbyists saw the bill before Democratic senators. Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) was the only Republican to vote against the tax scam.

The only reason the bill is being rushed into law is the billionaires who fund Republican politicians are demanding a payback on their investment and they’ve told Republican members of Congress if they don’t pass the tax cuts the political contributions will dry up. The bill will go to a conference committee, where House and Senate negotiatos will work out the differences in the bill, unless the House agrees to the Senate amendments, so lay into your House member Mondaypo: call them via the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121. Call your senators at the same number.

Monied interests too often override public interest to enact bad legislation. Tell your Representative and Senators you aren’t fooled by this tax break for the wealthy. In any case, We the People must reject the US Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United, which made it legal for corporations to own legislators. Promote an amendment to the Constitution that firmly establishes that money is not speech and only human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights. To help restore democracy, see MoveToAmend.org. But go there before Dec. 14, when the Federal Communications Commission plans to repeal net neutrality and leave you at the mercy of your corporate internet service provider. — JMC

(Editor's Note: This was updated from the print edition.)

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2017

Populist.com

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 ...

Friday, November 24, 2017

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.

Monday, November 20, 2017

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.

Sunday, November 19, 2017

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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