COVER/Laura Paddison
US has a dire shortage of affordable homes, and Trump wants to make it worse
EDITORIAL
Show Mueller’s work
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Trump’s symbiotic relationship with big media
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Strain on small colleges is another blow for rural America
DISPATCHES
Trump seeks revenge as Russia probe threat wanes;
Trump campaign warns networks against booking some Democrats;
Trump really can’t stand Puerto Rico;
Clean energy cheaper than coal;
Coal companies veto Trump nominee who opposed coal bailout;
Midwest flooding will cost billions in damages;
Trump policies are destroying the American farm and no one knows how to stop it;
DACA flight attendant released after 6 weeks in ICE custody ...
BOB BURNETT
Trump and the economy
JOHN YOUNG
The payoffs almost no one talks about
JILL RICHARDSON
Politicians are finally catching up on marijuana
ELIZABETH HENDERSON
Organic farms are under attack from agribusiness, weakened standards
ART CULLEN
Rural America is ready for some sort of a new deal, preferably green
JOHN SARBANES and MICHAEL BRUNE
To clean up the planet, clean up Washington
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Transform the court
JOEL D. JOSEPH
The Trumps and Jared Kushner cheated their way into elite colleges
LEO GERARD
The big cheat
GENE NICHOL
Legacy preferences
BOOK REVIEW/Seth Sandronsky
Making a better world
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Flag overboard
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Yes we can fleece the customer
SAM URETSKY
Why is it urban liberals vs. rural conservatives
NORMAN SOLOMON
‘Speaking truth to power’ is no substitute for taking power
WAYNE O’LEARY
The left’s achilles heel
JOHN BUELL
Clear Jared Kushner — and the rest of us
KENT PATERSON
Mexican border workers rattle the NAFTA economy
ROB PATTERSON
Time for the left to start rallying too
ROB PATTERSON
Browse a bookstore while you can
FILM REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Citizen Pulitzer: Patron Saint of the oppressed
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
How many days would it take?
CHUCK COLLINS
Bring back Eisenhower socialism
Thursday, March 28, 2019
Monday, March 25, 2019
Trump supporters and the GOP are building a house of cards on Attorney General William Barr’s four-page interpretation of the Mueller report
By Marc Jampole
We don’t have the Mueller report yet, but we do have the quick-and-dirty analysis of it
by an attorney general who got the job because of his previous strong public statement
against the idea of a special counsel and a long-held disposition to declare all
presidential actions as legal.
by an attorney general who got the job because of his previous strong public statement
against the idea of a special counsel and a long-held disposition to declare all
presidential actions as legal.
Trump supporters and other Republicans seem delighted in Barr’s version of the
conclusions, but they have built themselves a house of cards which tumbles as soon as
we look at the recent history of special counsel investigations.
conclusions, but they have built themselves a house of cards which tumbles as soon as
we look at the recent history of special counsel investigations.
First to the house of cards: Barr declares that there is insufficient evidence that the
Trump campaign explicitly asked Russian to swing the election to Trump. It’s true that
the events that have been made public such as the infamous Trump Tower meeting and
Trump’s public request that the Russians help find Hilary’s so-called missing emails
suggest that there’s a lot of smoke. But the standard for finding fire when it comes to
Republicans colluding with foreign entities to swing presidential elections is extremely
high. We know that South Vietnam’s reluctance to come to the negotiating table in 1968
helped Nixon win. We know that Iran not freeing the hostages in 1980 helped Reagan
win. And we know that Russian interference in the 2016 election helped Trump win. In
all cases, there is strong documentation that the representatives of the Republican
campaign in each case met with foreign entities. But in all cases, Congress and the
American people found that the idea of a major party colluding with a foreign power was
so horrific that the proof had to be absolutely incontrovertible—some would say a
standard too high ever to be met in the real world.
Trump campaign explicitly asked Russian to swing the election to Trump. It’s true that
the events that have been made public such as the infamous Trump Tower meeting and
Trump’s public request that the Russians help find Hilary’s so-called missing emails
suggest that there’s a lot of smoke. But the standard for finding fire when it comes to
Republicans colluding with foreign entities to swing presidential elections is extremely
high. We know that South Vietnam’s reluctance to come to the negotiating table in 1968
helped Nixon win. We know that Iran not freeing the hostages in 1980 helped Reagan
win. And we know that Russian interference in the 2016 election helped Trump win. In
all cases, there is strong documentation that the representatives of the Republican
campaign in each case met with foreign entities. But in all cases, Congress and the
American people found that the idea of a major party colluding with a foreign power was
so horrific that the proof had to be absolutely incontrovertible—some would say a
standard too high ever to be met in the real world.
Trump actually gets off easier than Nixon or Reagan when it comes to considering a
possible collusion, because the idea that Trump was an unwitting stooge or a useful
idiot is just as believable as that he knowingly colluded. Russia may have conducted
their nefarious assault on U.S. elections because Putin and his advisors felt strongly
that a Trump presidency would weaken the United States. His history overflows with
examples of not only his stupidity and his willingness to break laws, but also of a vanity
that makes him brag about things that didn’t really happen. Then there’s his obvious
ignorance of law dictating how governments and political parties operate that may
excuse him. It’s thus believable that Trump did not collude/conspire.
possible collusion, because the idea that Trump was an unwitting stooge or a useful
idiot is just as believable as that he knowingly colluded. Russia may have conducted
their nefarious assault on U.S. elections because Putin and his advisors felt strongly
that a Trump presidency would weaken the United States. His history overflows with
examples of not only his stupidity and his willingness to break laws, but also of a vanity
that makes him brag about things that didn’t really happen. Then there’s his obvious
ignorance of law dictating how governments and political parties operate that may
excuse him. It’s thus believable that Trump did not collude/conspire.
However one wishes to interpret the smoke of collusion and conspiracy, Mueller found
no smoking gun. But reducing a 22-month investigation to that one sentence is a weak
foundation for what Trump supporters and other Republicans, including Barr, are saying
now. Their argument goes like this:
1. Mueller found no proof of collusion or conspiracy.
2. Collusion/conspiracy was the underlying crime.
3. Since there was no underlying crime, it was impossible for Trump to have obstructed
justice, even if there are strong indications that he obstructed the investigation.
no smoking gun. But reducing a 22-month investigation to that one sentence is a weak
foundation for what Trump supporters and other Republicans, including Barr, are saying
now. Their argument goes like this:
1. Mueller found no proof of collusion or conspiracy.
2. Collusion/conspiracy was the underlying crime.
3. Since there was no underlying crime, it was impossible for Trump to have obstructed
justice, even if there are strong indications that he obstructed the investigation.
Over the past few days, I have heard some version of this argument delivered by both
avid Trump supporters and other Republicans. The logical conclusion to this line of
thought, of course, is that all the emerging investigations of Trump should stop, or at
least those investigations related to collusion/conspiracy and obstruction.
avid Trump supporters and other Republicans. The logical conclusion to this line of
thought, of course, is that all the emerging investigations of Trump should stop, or at
least those investigations related to collusion/conspiracy and obstruction.
But if we look back at the history of impeachment we have to conclude two important if
usually unspoken principles of American justice as applied to presidents:
1. Obstruction of an investigation equals obstruction of justice.
2. Obstruction of an investigation is not only an impeachable offense, it may be the
only offense for which a president can end up being impeached in the real world.
usually unspoken principles of American justice as applied to presidents:
1. Obstruction of an investigation equals obstruction of justice.
2. Obstruction of an investigation is not only an impeachable offense, it may be the
only offense for which a president can end up being impeached in the real world.
Let’s look at history: The articles of impeachment against Andrew Johnson had nothing
to do with obstruction of an investigation and Johnson was not impeached. The articles
of impeachment against Nixon focused exclusively on the Watergate cover-up (i.e.,
obstruction). Does anyone doubt that Nixon resigned because he knew he was certain
to be impeached by the Senate, and then convicted by the House of Representatives?
Not for green-lighting a third-rate burglary, but for leading the cover-up, i.e., for
obstruction. The articles of impeachment against Bill Clinton only mention obstruction of justice, for a simple reason. Kenneth Starr and his crew had spent years going through
Clinton’s past looking for both high crimes and misdemeanors and found nothing. Zilch.
A clean record. All Clinton did was lie about having a consensual affair with an adult
woman. Messing around on your wife is not illegal, meaning that Clinton was
impeached for obstruction of justice and not for any underlying crime.
to do with obstruction of an investigation and Johnson was not impeached. The articles
of impeachment against Nixon focused exclusively on the Watergate cover-up (i.e.,
obstruction). Does anyone doubt that Nixon resigned because he knew he was certain
to be impeached by the Senate, and then convicted by the House of Representatives?
Not for green-lighting a third-rate burglary, but for leading the cover-up, i.e., for
obstruction. The articles of impeachment against Bill Clinton only mention obstruction of justice, for a simple reason. Kenneth Starr and his crew had spent years going through
Clinton’s past looking for both high crimes and misdemeanors and found nothing. Zilch.
A clean record. All Clinton did was lie about having a consensual affair with an adult
woman. Messing around on your wife is not illegal, meaning that Clinton was
impeached for obstruction of justice and not for any underlying crime.
The history of impeachment proceedings and politics therefore suggest that Trump
supporters and other Republicans are dead wrong to suggest that Trump can’t be
charged with a cover-up because there was no underlying crime proven, or that the
cover-up isn’t impeachable because there was no crime. They have built a house of
cards that tumbles as soon as we remove the false foundation that a cover-up exists
only when we have proof of an underlying crime. The cover-up is in and of itself
impeachable, and as history has shown, perhaps the only crime that a president can
commit that will lead to impeachment.
supporters and other Republicans are dead wrong to suggest that Trump can’t be
charged with a cover-up because there was no underlying crime proven, or that the
cover-up isn’t impeachable because there was no crime. They have built a house of
cards that tumbles as soon as we remove the false foundation that a cover-up exists
only when we have proof of an underlying crime. The cover-up is in and of itself
impeachable, and as history has shown, perhaps the only crime that a president can
commit that will lead to impeachment.
Thus it comes down to how we interpret Mueller’s evidence, which Mueller himself
refused to do. So far, only William Barr and his staff have attempted to cull through the
hundreds of pages of Mueller’s analysis. Barr admits that there are signs of a cover-up,
but he has decided to give Trump the benefit of the doubt. Would Kenneth Starr have
made the same decision regarding Bill Clinton with the same basis of facts? What about
Leon Jaworski about Nixon? Or Jeff Sessions about Trump?
refused to do. So far, only William Barr and his staff have attempted to cull through the
hundreds of pages of Mueller’s analysis. Barr admits that there are signs of a cover-up,
but he has decided to give Trump the benefit of the doubt. Would Kenneth Starr have
made the same decision regarding Bill Clinton with the same basis of facts? What about
Leon Jaworski about Nixon? Or Jeff Sessions about Trump?
With all due respect to Barr, there is plenty of public evidence of obstruction. His conclusions represent the efforts of one man, one with a known predilection to having an extremely high bar of proof when it comes to presidential actions. Before we let Trump off the hook, we need others—many others—to look at the Mueller report and perhaps the raw data behind it, too. At this point, that’s the job of the House of Representatives. We can assume, thankfully, that its investigators take longer than 48 hours to do their analysis, and that they will take into account the history of impeachment proceedings in deciding whether to drop the obstruction issue.
Friday, March 15, 2019
Editorial: Dems Fight for the Vote
Alarms have been raised by “concern trolls” that Democrats are at risk of alienating voters by overreaching with their aggressive agenda as the new House majority.
While the corporate media like to push the story that Democrats are in disarray, House committees have stepped up investigations of the Trump campaign’s ties with Russia as well as the Trump administration’s attempts to obstruct the special prosecutor’s investigation. Meanwhile Democrats are proceeding with plans to promote expansion of Medicare to cover all Americans, set Congress on course to address climate change as well as create new economic opportunities with a Green New Deal, and passed a major bill to increase voting rights and reform campaign procedures to reduce candidates’ dependence on lobbyists to finance their campaigns.
The electoral reform bill, known as HR 1, the “For the People Act,” passed by a party-line vote of 234-193 on March 8. It includes provisions for publicly financing federal elections and requiring candidates for president to release their tax returns.
The bill has been a top priority for Democrats since the party won back the majority in the House in November, in an election marked by challenges to voting rights, including voter suppression efforts by the Georgia Secretary of State’s office under Brian Kemp, which may have provided the margin of victory for Republican Kemp in the race for governor over Democrat Stacey Abrams.
The bill would create a national voter registration system, including expansion of online voter registration, and end aggressive voter purges and election day voter registration. It would provide funding for states to adopt paper ballots, restore voting rights for ex-felons and declare Election Day as a federal holiday. It also would institute new donor disclosure requirements for political organizations and a 6-to-1 matching system to multiply small-dollar donations to federal campaigns.
The bill also prohibits gerrymandering by requiring independent commissions instead of state legislatures to draw congressional maps and would allow federal workers to take up to six days of paid leave to work at polls.
While the public likes most of the provisions in the bill, it is unlikely to advance in the Senate. Every Republican in the House voted against the bill, because conservatives know they are increasingly unlikely to win in fair elections, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he will not bring the election reform bill, which he characterized as a “radical, half-baked socialist proposal,” up for a vote in the Senate.
At least it was another victory for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who held the Democratic caucus together for the electoral reform bill, which some moderate House Democrats said went too far. Ten days earlier, all but two Democrats voted for another potentially controversial bill — requiring federal background checks for nearly all firearms sales and transfers, which the House passed 240-190. That bill is popular, but it also is expected to die in the Republican Senate, which is beholden to the National Rifle Association.
Democrats seem to take little risk in passing bills that are popular but face a roadblock in the Senate. It gives voters a reason to want to see Democrats take back the Senate and the White House.
There also is little reason to be pessimistic about Democrats’ chances of beating Trump, who has never had an approval rating of 50% or more since he’s been president. When he took office in January 2017 he had a national approval rating of 45.5%, according to an weighted average of polls reviewed by FiveThirtyEight.com. But even that anemic level of approval quickly began to founder and bottomed out at 36.5% in December 2017 (which finally settles the question of how many people one can fool all of the time).
Trump’s ratings have fluctuated since then, with approval in the high 30s to low 40s, while disapproval has remained in the low 50s. As of March 12, FiveThirtyEight.com showed him with 41.7% approved and 53.5% disapproved, which is not a good look for a president seeking re-election. In January, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found 56% of Americans said the will “definitely not” vote for Trump’s re-election. And this was before many Trump supporters discovered Trump’s billionaire tax cuts didn’t reach them.
Perhaps more important, Trump has seen his approval ratings plunge in states he carried in November 2016. When he took office, he had a net positive rating in 38 states, according to Morning Consult’s tracking poll, but in January 2019, Trump’s positive states were down to 17, while 31 states had a net negative and two states — Nebraska and Texas — were tossups at 48% approval and 48% disapproval. Two years ago, Trump had a 23-point net positive in Nebraska while Texas was a 20-point net positive for him.
Alaska, Kansas and Montana, all 24-point net positives for Trump in January 2017, were only one point positives for him this past January. Among the states still positive toward Trump, but within single digits, are Indiana and North Dakota, both within four points.
Among states Trump won in 2016 that are now net negative on him are Georgia, down 20 points since 2017, to one point net negative (47-48); Missouri, down 21 points since 2017, to two points negative (47-49); Florida, down 26 points, to four points negative (46-50); North Carolina, down 22 points, to four points net negative (46-50); Ohio, down 20 points, to six points negative (45-51); Utah, down 33 points, to six points negative (45-51); Arizona, down 28 points, to eight points negative (44-52); Pennsylvania, down 20 points, to 10 points net negative (43-53); Iowa, down 23 points, to 14 points net negative (41-55); Michigan, down 23 points, to 15 points net negative (40-55); and Wisconsin, down 22 points, to 16 points net negative (40-56).
Those numbers should not give Republicans confidence going into the 2020 elections. When they expect to have to fight for Utah, Texas and Nebraska, that not only is good news for the eventual Democratic presidential nominee. It also presents opportunities for Democrats in House and Senate races against Trump enablers, when Republicans will be defending 22 Senate seats while 12 Democratic seats will be up for election.
If Democrats win the White House, they’ll need to gain at least three seats to gain control of the Senate. Sen. Doug Jones is the Democrat facing the toughest re-election fight, in Alabama, but endangered Republican incumbents include Cory Gardner in Colorado, Susan Collins in Maine and Martha McSally in Arizona. If Trump pulls down the ticket, other endangered Republicans could include Joni Ernst in Iowa, David Perdue in Georgia, an open seat in Kansas as Pat Roberts is retiring, Steve Daines in Montana, Thom Tillis in North Carolina, an open seat in Tennessee, where Lamar Alexander is retiring, and it makes it worthwhile for Dems to find a candidate to challenge John Cornyn in Texas. And Mitch McConnell was the third least popular senator, with 47% disapproval and only 38% approval in Kentucky, as of January, according to Morning Consult, so Democrats should find a good candidate to put up against him.
With those states up for grabs, Republicans figure they can’t afford to risk fair elections. So, with HR1, the “For the People Act,” buried deep in the bowels of the Senate, you can expect Republicans to devise new ways to keep likely Democrats from casting ballots in 2020. So far, 14 candidates have announced they’re running for the Democratic nomination for president and at least 10 more are considering a run. Any of them would be better than Trump and his gangster associates. Please, this time, don’t make reckless charges about rival Democrats that you can’t take back after the nomination is decided. — JMC
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While the corporate media like to push the story that Democrats are in disarray, House committees have stepped up investigations of the Trump campaign’s ties with Russia as well as the Trump administration’s attempts to obstruct the special prosecutor’s investigation. Meanwhile Democrats are proceeding with plans to promote expansion of Medicare to cover all Americans, set Congress on course to address climate change as well as create new economic opportunities with a Green New Deal, and passed a major bill to increase voting rights and reform campaign procedures to reduce candidates’ dependence on lobbyists to finance their campaigns.
The electoral reform bill, known as HR 1, the “For the People Act,” passed by a party-line vote of 234-193 on March 8. It includes provisions for publicly financing federal elections and requiring candidates for president to release their tax returns.
The bill has been a top priority for Democrats since the party won back the majority in the House in November, in an election marked by challenges to voting rights, including voter suppression efforts by the Georgia Secretary of State’s office under Brian Kemp, which may have provided the margin of victory for Republican Kemp in the race for governor over Democrat Stacey Abrams.
The bill would create a national voter registration system, including expansion of online voter registration, and end aggressive voter purges and election day voter registration. It would provide funding for states to adopt paper ballots, restore voting rights for ex-felons and declare Election Day as a federal holiday. It also would institute new donor disclosure requirements for political organizations and a 6-to-1 matching system to multiply small-dollar donations to federal campaigns.
The bill also prohibits gerrymandering by requiring independent commissions instead of state legislatures to draw congressional maps and would allow federal workers to take up to six days of paid leave to work at polls.
While the public likes most of the provisions in the bill, it is unlikely to advance in the Senate. Every Republican in the House voted against the bill, because conservatives know they are increasingly unlikely to win in fair elections, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he will not bring the election reform bill, which he characterized as a “radical, half-baked socialist proposal,” up for a vote in the Senate.
At least it was another victory for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who held the Democratic caucus together for the electoral reform bill, which some moderate House Democrats said went too far. Ten days earlier, all but two Democrats voted for another potentially controversial bill — requiring federal background checks for nearly all firearms sales and transfers, which the House passed 240-190. That bill is popular, but it also is expected to die in the Republican Senate, which is beholden to the National Rifle Association.
Democrats seem to take little risk in passing bills that are popular but face a roadblock in the Senate. It gives voters a reason to want to see Democrats take back the Senate and the White House.
There also is little reason to be pessimistic about Democrats’ chances of beating Trump, who has never had an approval rating of 50% or more since he’s been president. When he took office in January 2017 he had a national approval rating of 45.5%, according to an weighted average of polls reviewed by FiveThirtyEight.com. But even that anemic level of approval quickly began to founder and bottomed out at 36.5% in December 2017 (which finally settles the question of how many people one can fool all of the time).
Trump’s ratings have fluctuated since then, with approval in the high 30s to low 40s, while disapproval has remained in the low 50s. As of March 12, FiveThirtyEight.com showed him with 41.7% approved and 53.5% disapproved, which is not a good look for a president seeking re-election. In January, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found 56% of Americans said the will “definitely not” vote for Trump’s re-election. And this was before many Trump supporters discovered Trump’s billionaire tax cuts didn’t reach them.
Perhaps more important, Trump has seen his approval ratings plunge in states he carried in November 2016. When he took office, he had a net positive rating in 38 states, according to Morning Consult’s tracking poll, but in January 2019, Trump’s positive states were down to 17, while 31 states had a net negative and two states — Nebraska and Texas — were tossups at 48% approval and 48% disapproval. Two years ago, Trump had a 23-point net positive in Nebraska while Texas was a 20-point net positive for him.
Alaska, Kansas and Montana, all 24-point net positives for Trump in January 2017, were only one point positives for him this past January. Among the states still positive toward Trump, but within single digits, are Indiana and North Dakota, both within four points.
Among states Trump won in 2016 that are now net negative on him are Georgia, down 20 points since 2017, to one point net negative (47-48); Missouri, down 21 points since 2017, to two points negative (47-49); Florida, down 26 points, to four points negative (46-50); North Carolina, down 22 points, to four points net negative (46-50); Ohio, down 20 points, to six points negative (45-51); Utah, down 33 points, to six points negative (45-51); Arizona, down 28 points, to eight points negative (44-52); Pennsylvania, down 20 points, to 10 points net negative (43-53); Iowa, down 23 points, to 14 points net negative (41-55); Michigan, down 23 points, to 15 points net negative (40-55); and Wisconsin, down 22 points, to 16 points net negative (40-56).
Those numbers should not give Republicans confidence going into the 2020 elections. When they expect to have to fight for Utah, Texas and Nebraska, that not only is good news for the eventual Democratic presidential nominee. It also presents opportunities for Democrats in House and Senate races against Trump enablers, when Republicans will be defending 22 Senate seats while 12 Democratic seats will be up for election.
If Democrats win the White House, they’ll need to gain at least three seats to gain control of the Senate. Sen. Doug Jones is the Democrat facing the toughest re-election fight, in Alabama, but endangered Republican incumbents include Cory Gardner in Colorado, Susan Collins in Maine and Martha McSally in Arizona. If Trump pulls down the ticket, other endangered Republicans could include Joni Ernst in Iowa, David Perdue in Georgia, an open seat in Kansas as Pat Roberts is retiring, Steve Daines in Montana, Thom Tillis in North Carolina, an open seat in Tennessee, where Lamar Alexander is retiring, and it makes it worthwhile for Dems to find a candidate to challenge John Cornyn in Texas. And Mitch McConnell was the third least popular senator, with 47% disapproval and only 38% approval in Kentucky, as of January, according to Morning Consult, so Democrats should find a good candidate to put up against him.
With those states up for grabs, Republicans figure they can’t afford to risk fair elections. So, with HR1, the “For the People Act,” buried deep in the bowels of the Senate, you can expect Republicans to devise new ways to keep likely Democrats from casting ballots in 2020. So far, 14 candidates have announced they’re running for the Democratic nomination for president and at least 10 more are considering a run. Any of them would be better than Trump and his gangster associates. Please, this time, don’t make reckless charges about rival Democrats that you can’t take back after the nomination is decided. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2019
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us
Copyright © 2019 The Progressive PopulistPO Box 819, Manchaca TX 78652
Selections from the April 1, 2019 issue
COVER/Austin Frerick
Fixing our food system — and reviving rural America — means breaking up big ag
EDITORIAL
Dems fight for the vote
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Methodism revisited: No turning back
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Don’t Bern the Dems’ hopes
DISPATCHES
Trump budget reneges on promises to protect Social Security and Medicare;
Republicans reserve the right to bash Muslims, minorities;
Trump tells blackface joke at RNC fundraiser;
Trump tops 9,000 lies;
Rate of illegal crossings from Canada rising nearly as rapidly as US border with Mexico;
Sunday morning talk shows ignore Trump massage parlor scandal;
Trump asks UK to drop food and environmental standards for post-Brexit trade deal;
Household net worth falls by lagest amount since Great Recession ...
JIM VAN DER POL
Sustainable farms depend on soil health
JILL RICHARDSON
Starving kids won’t help them study
ART CULLEN
Julián Castro is resetting the Latino image in Iowa
NANETTE SENTERS
GM is closing my plant. What are politicians going to do about it?
JOHN YOUNG
What percent of Cohen’s testimony don’t you believe?
SARAH GERTLER
Criticizing Israel isn’t anti-semitic. Here’s what is.
SAM PIZZIGATI
Have the rich always laughed at stiff taxes?
BOB BURNETT
Costing the Green New Deal
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
How to slay the Medicare beast: A handy guide
SAM URETSKY
Millennials are changing the world, whether you like it or not
BARB KALBACH
Rural America needs Medicare for All now
WAYNE O’LEARY
The ‘S’ word
JOHN BUELL
Reclaiming the peace dividend
N. GUNASEKARAN
Nuclear tensions increase after failed Trump-Kim summit
SETH SANDRONSKY
Public pensions finance immigrant detention
ROB PATTERSON
Elvis Costello’s worn out genius
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Who listens to the negro?
ED RAMPELL
Hollywood’s ‘other’ awards ceremony
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Trump fall down go boom
KARLA MOLINAR-ARVIZO
Worse than the wall
Fixing our food system — and reviving rural America — means breaking up big ag
EDITORIAL
Dems fight for the vote
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Methodism revisited: No turning back
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Don’t Bern the Dems’ hopes
DISPATCHES
Trump budget reneges on promises to protect Social Security and Medicare;
Republicans reserve the right to bash Muslims, minorities;
Trump tells blackface joke at RNC fundraiser;
Trump tops 9,000 lies;
Rate of illegal crossings from Canada rising nearly as rapidly as US border with Mexico;
Sunday morning talk shows ignore Trump massage parlor scandal;
Trump asks UK to drop food and environmental standards for post-Brexit trade deal;
Household net worth falls by lagest amount since Great Recession ...
JIM VAN DER POL
Sustainable farms depend on soil health
JILL RICHARDSON
Starving kids won’t help them study
ART CULLEN
Julián Castro is resetting the Latino image in Iowa
NANETTE SENTERS
GM is closing my plant. What are politicians going to do about it?
JOHN YOUNG
What percent of Cohen’s testimony don’t you believe?
SARAH GERTLER
Criticizing Israel isn’t anti-semitic. Here’s what is.
SAM PIZZIGATI
Have the rich always laughed at stiff taxes?
BOB BURNETT
Costing the Green New Deal
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
How to slay the Medicare beast: A handy guide
SAM URETSKY
Millennials are changing the world, whether you like it or not
BARB KALBACH
Rural America needs Medicare for All now
WAYNE O’LEARY
The ‘S’ word
JOHN BUELL
Reclaiming the peace dividend
N. GUNASEKARAN
Nuclear tensions increase after failed Trump-Kim summit
SETH SANDRONSKY
Public pensions finance immigrant detention
ROB PATTERSON
Elvis Costello’s worn out genius
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Who listens to the negro?
ED RAMPELL
Hollywood’s ‘other’ awards ceremony
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Trump fall down go boom
KARLA MOLINAR-ARVIZO
Worse than the wall
Friday, March 1, 2019
Editorial: Curb the Deadbeat Dictator
After President Donald Trump declared a national emergency on the southern border, the real crisis involves whether the Republican Party will enable the Great Misleader to assume dictatorial powers.
Trump claimed extraordinary power under the National Emergencies Act (NEA) of 1976 to redirect money Congress had appropriated for other uses to build a wall along the border with Mexico. Trump is using the law, whose constitutionality is uncertain, to fulfill a campaign promise that he would build the wall (despite his promise that Mexico would pay for the wall) — and also to distract from the progress of Robert Mueller’s probe of his business and political ties with Russian oligarchs. The White House plans to divert $3.6 billion from military construction projects to the wall, as well as $2.5 billion from counternarcotics programs and $600 million from a Treasury Department asset forfeiture fund.
Combined with $1.375 billion authorized for fencing in the spending package Congress passed, Trump would have about $8 billion for barriers, significantly more than the $5.7 billion he had demanded from Congress.
When Trump announced the national emergency, he may have undercut his argument that the border situation was urgent. “I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster,” he said. “I just want to get it done faster, that’s all.”
A bipartisan group of 58 former senior national security officials issued a statement Feb. 25 saying that “there is no factual basis” for Trump’s proclamation of a national emergency to build a wall on the US-Mexico border.
If anything, border crossings have decreased dramatically over the past 20 years, with 467,000 apprensions in 2018, compared with one million as recently as 2006. Border cities in the US boast relatively low crime rates. Nothing going on there requires the use of armed forces — and the use of the US Army to enforce domestic immigration laws may be a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of military as a domestic police force.
The NEA provides that Congress can terminate a “national emergency” by passing a joint resolution. The Democratic House has started that process, and they might get the four Republican senators they need to pass the resolution in the Senate, but they probably would need to override the president’s veto with two-thirds majorities, which would require a substantial number of Republicans to stand up to the would-be dictator.
In case Republicans won’t stand up for the constitutional separation of powers, 16 states, led by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, have sued in federal court to block Trump from stealing federal funds appropriated for their states for other uses.
Trump has cited concerns that the US was being flooded with murderers, drug runners, kidnappers and other offenders from Central America. During his Rose Garden announcement of the emergency declaration, he claimed there was an ongoing “invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people,” including gang members he called “monsters” and migrants who have killed US citizens.
But according to new US Immigration and Customs Enforcement figures obtained by the Washington Post, the nation’s immigration jails were not filled with such criminals. As of Feb. 9, days before the president’s declaration, nearly 63% of the detainees in ICE jails had not been convicted of any crime.
Of the 48,793 immigrants jailed on Feb. 9, ICE data shows, 18,124 had criminal records. An additional 5,715 people had pending criminal charges, officials said, but they did not provide details. ICE also did not break down the severity of the crimes committed by or attributed to detainees.
An average of 59% of detainees in custody during this fiscal year had no criminal history, according to ICE.
Of course, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security does not have a much better record on telling the truth than Trump’s White House. DHS officials still are unable to say how many children were abducted from their parents at the border since the Trump administration took over, or what happened to hundreds of them.
The Office of Inspector General of the US Department of Health and Human Services reported in January that HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement received at least 2,737 separated children before a June 2018 federal court order required ORR to identify and reunify separated children in its care as of that date, but thousands more children may have been separated during an influx that began in 2017, before the accounting required by the court. The Trump administration not only failed to track separated families in a single database, but the agencies say they lack the resources to find out what happened to all the separated children. Some of them may have been put up for adoption without their parents’ consent.
Salvadoran officials in August 2018 said three minors from El Salvador separated from their parents after crossing the US border were sexually abused in “shelters” in Arizona, the Associated Press reported. In late July, the news website ProPublica reported that police had received at least 125 reports since 2014 of sex offenses at shelters that mostly house migrant children.
One of the most damaging impacts of the Trump presidency is the normalizing of lying. Republicans have been inoculating their supporters against believing what they call the “liberal media” for more than 40 years, ever since they blamed the mainstream news media for supporting the movement to oust President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal. But the Republican disinformation campaign has been supercharged under Trump, who has taken the use of lying to a level undreamed of in generations past — at least in the United States.
The Washington Post has a team of three fact checkers assigned to examine political statements on a bipartisan basis, but the bulk of their effort has been trying to hold Trump to account for false or misleading claims, which as of Feb. 17 numbered 8,718 in the 25 months since he was inaugurated.
The Post did not have a similar team tracking President Barack Obama’s misstatements, but the New York Times reported in December 2017 that Obama made 18 demonstrably false claims during his eight years in office, while Trump told 103 separate lies or falsehoods in his first 10 months as president. (The Post counted 1,876 false or misleading claims in the same period, but it counted each time Trump repeated a lie as a separate occurrence.) A key difference is that when Obama became aware that what he was saying was untrue, he stopped saying it.
“Trump is different. When he is caught lying, he will often try to discredit people telling the truth, be they judges, scientists, FBI or CIA officials, journalists or members of Congress,” David Leonhardt, Ian Prasad Philbrick and Stuart A. Thompson wrote in the New York Times Dec. 14, 2017. “Trump is trying to make truth irrelevant. It is extremely damaging to democracy, and it’s not an accident. It’s core to his political strategy.”
Trump is not only doing damage to domestic politics. America’s historic allies have come to know they cannot trust him, as he has berated and lied about NATO allies, particularly Canada, while cozying up to dictators, particularly Vladimir Putin in Russia.
Republican congressional leaders don’t appear to have a problem with Trump’s strategy. Call your senators and your member of Congress via the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and urge them to uphold the constitutional separation of powers, with a veto override, if necessary. — JMC
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Trump claimed extraordinary power under the National Emergencies Act (NEA) of 1976 to redirect money Congress had appropriated for other uses to build a wall along the border with Mexico. Trump is using the law, whose constitutionality is uncertain, to fulfill a campaign promise that he would build the wall (despite his promise that Mexico would pay for the wall) — and also to distract from the progress of Robert Mueller’s probe of his business and political ties with Russian oligarchs. The White House plans to divert $3.6 billion from military construction projects to the wall, as well as $2.5 billion from counternarcotics programs and $600 million from a Treasury Department asset forfeiture fund.
Combined with $1.375 billion authorized for fencing in the spending package Congress passed, Trump would have about $8 billion for barriers, significantly more than the $5.7 billion he had demanded from Congress.
When Trump announced the national emergency, he may have undercut his argument that the border situation was urgent. “I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster,” he said. “I just want to get it done faster, that’s all.”
A bipartisan group of 58 former senior national security officials issued a statement Feb. 25 saying that “there is no factual basis” for Trump’s proclamation of a national emergency to build a wall on the US-Mexico border.
If anything, border crossings have decreased dramatically over the past 20 years, with 467,000 apprensions in 2018, compared with one million as recently as 2006. Border cities in the US boast relatively low crime rates. Nothing going on there requires the use of armed forces — and the use of the US Army to enforce domestic immigration laws may be a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of military as a domestic police force.
The NEA provides that Congress can terminate a “national emergency” by passing a joint resolution. The Democratic House has started that process, and they might get the four Republican senators they need to pass the resolution in the Senate, but they probably would need to override the president’s veto with two-thirds majorities, which would require a substantial number of Republicans to stand up to the would-be dictator.
In case Republicans won’t stand up for the constitutional separation of powers, 16 states, led by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, have sued in federal court to block Trump from stealing federal funds appropriated for their states for other uses.
Trump has cited concerns that the US was being flooded with murderers, drug runners, kidnappers and other offenders from Central America. During his Rose Garden announcement of the emergency declaration, he claimed there was an ongoing “invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people,” including gang members he called “monsters” and migrants who have killed US citizens.
But according to new US Immigration and Customs Enforcement figures obtained by the Washington Post, the nation’s immigration jails were not filled with such criminals. As of Feb. 9, days before the president’s declaration, nearly 63% of the detainees in ICE jails had not been convicted of any crime.
Of the 48,793 immigrants jailed on Feb. 9, ICE data shows, 18,124 had criminal records. An additional 5,715 people had pending criminal charges, officials said, but they did not provide details. ICE also did not break down the severity of the crimes committed by or attributed to detainees.
An average of 59% of detainees in custody during this fiscal year had no criminal history, according to ICE.
Of course, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security does not have a much better record on telling the truth than Trump’s White House. DHS officials still are unable to say how many children were abducted from their parents at the border since the Trump administration took over, or what happened to hundreds of them.
The Office of Inspector General of the US Department of Health and Human Services reported in January that HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement received at least 2,737 separated children before a June 2018 federal court order required ORR to identify and reunify separated children in its care as of that date, but thousands more children may have been separated during an influx that began in 2017, before the accounting required by the court. The Trump administration not only failed to track separated families in a single database, but the agencies say they lack the resources to find out what happened to all the separated children. Some of them may have been put up for adoption without their parents’ consent.
Salvadoran officials in August 2018 said three minors from El Salvador separated from their parents after crossing the US border were sexually abused in “shelters” in Arizona, the Associated Press reported. In late July, the news website ProPublica reported that police had received at least 125 reports since 2014 of sex offenses at shelters that mostly house migrant children.
One of the most damaging impacts of the Trump presidency is the normalizing of lying. Republicans have been inoculating their supporters against believing what they call the “liberal media” for more than 40 years, ever since they blamed the mainstream news media for supporting the movement to oust President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal. But the Republican disinformation campaign has been supercharged under Trump, who has taken the use of lying to a level undreamed of in generations past — at least in the United States.
The Washington Post has a team of three fact checkers assigned to examine political statements on a bipartisan basis, but the bulk of their effort has been trying to hold Trump to account for false or misleading claims, which as of Feb. 17 numbered 8,718 in the 25 months since he was inaugurated.
The Post did not have a similar team tracking President Barack Obama’s misstatements, but the New York Times reported in December 2017 that Obama made 18 demonstrably false claims during his eight years in office, while Trump told 103 separate lies or falsehoods in his first 10 months as president. (The Post counted 1,876 false or misleading claims in the same period, but it counted each time Trump repeated a lie as a separate occurrence.) A key difference is that when Obama became aware that what he was saying was untrue, he stopped saying it.
“Trump is different. When he is caught lying, he will often try to discredit people telling the truth, be they judges, scientists, FBI or CIA officials, journalists or members of Congress,” David Leonhardt, Ian Prasad Philbrick and Stuart A. Thompson wrote in the New York Times Dec. 14, 2017. “Trump is trying to make truth irrelevant. It is extremely damaging to democracy, and it’s not an accident. It’s core to his political strategy.”
Trump is not only doing damage to domestic politics. America’s historic allies have come to know they cannot trust him, as he has berated and lied about NATO allies, particularly Canada, while cozying up to dictators, particularly Vladimir Putin in Russia.
Republican congressional leaders don’t appear to have a problem with Trump’s strategy. Call your senators and your member of Congress via the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and urge them to uphold the constitutional separation of powers, with a veto override, if necessary. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2019
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Copyright © 2019 The Progressive PopulistPO Box 819, Manchaca TX 78652
Selections from the March 15, 2019 issue
COVER/Daniel Ross
Factory farms pollute the environment and poison drinking water
EDITORIAL
Curb the deadbeat dictator
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Kaepernick, Reid and the heritage
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen p. 5
What happens when a hog lot moves in near you?
DISPATCHES
Trump approval tops 50% in only 17 states;
Trump presidency continues to devalue his brand;
Green New Deal doesn’t mention farting cows;
CNN hires Republican operative to head 2020 election coverage;
Drug seizures show empty promise of Trump border wall;
Supreme Court limits civil asset forfeiture;
Coast Guard officer accused of plotting murder of prominent Dems and media personalities;
US hints at military intervention after Venezuelans block 'aid'
NC cout attacks fruits of illegal gerrymandering;
Trump's shameless fli-fop on high=speed rail;
Didn't see the death of clouds coming ...
JIM GOODMAN
The Green New Deal outlines the change society needs
ART CULLEN
Help wanted: Rural America needs immigrants
JILL RICHARDSON
Take it from me: Addiction doesn’t start at the border
JOHN YOUNG
A border crisis sized to TV screens
JIM VAN DER POL
We need more people, and fewer factories, in farming
LEO GERARD
Standing together on trade with China
JASON SIBERT
Make arms control great again
BOB BURNETT
Next steps
MARK ANDERSON
Spending bill saves sensitive areas from border wall
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
High class robbery
JOEL D. JOSEPH
Mexican pollution pours under border wall
WAYNE O’LEARY
They’re off and running
JOHN BUELL
Resetting the doomsday clock
FR. DONNELL KIRCHNER
Going over Trump’s wall might lead to better things
ROB PATTERSON
A soft focus on Quincy Jones
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
We won’t go back
ED RAMPELL
A super supernatural socialist show
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Punxsutawney Phil sees Trump’s shadow and cries
PAUL ARMENTANO
Marijuana can help fight opioid abuse
Factory farms pollute the environment and poison drinking water
EDITORIAL
Curb the deadbeat dictator
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Kaepernick, Reid and the heritage
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen p. 5
What happens when a hog lot moves in near you?
DISPATCHES
Trump approval tops 50% in only 17 states;
Trump presidency continues to devalue his brand;
Green New Deal doesn’t mention farting cows;
CNN hires Republican operative to head 2020 election coverage;
Drug seizures show empty promise of Trump border wall;
Supreme Court limits civil asset forfeiture;
Coast Guard officer accused of plotting murder of prominent Dems and media personalities;
US hints at military intervention after Venezuelans block 'aid'
NC cout attacks fruits of illegal gerrymandering;
Trump's shameless fli-fop on high=speed rail;
Didn't see the death of clouds coming ...
JIM GOODMAN
The Green New Deal outlines the change society needs
ART CULLEN
Help wanted: Rural America needs immigrants
JILL RICHARDSON
Take it from me: Addiction doesn’t start at the border
JOHN YOUNG
A border crisis sized to TV screens
JIM VAN DER POL
We need more people, and fewer factories, in farming
LEO GERARD
Standing together on trade with China
JASON SIBERT
Make arms control great again
BOB BURNETT
Next steps
MARK ANDERSON
Spending bill saves sensitive areas from border wall
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
High class robbery
JOEL D. JOSEPH
Mexican pollution pours under border wall
WAYNE O’LEARY
They’re off and running
JOHN BUELL
Resetting the doomsday clock
FR. DONNELL KIRCHNER
Going over Trump’s wall might lead to better things
ROB PATTERSON
A soft focus on Quincy Jones
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
We won’t go back
ED RAMPELL
A super supernatural socialist show
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Punxsutawney Phil sees Trump’s shadow and cries
PAUL ARMENTANO
Marijuana can help fight opioid abuse
Thursday, February 14, 2019
Editorial: Don’t Play Trump’s Game
Donald Trump and the Republicans obviously want to run against socialism and “open borders” in 2020. Democrats shouldn’t let Trump set the terms of the debate, but should run on progressive populist solutions to improve economic opportunities for working Americans.
“We renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country,” Trump said in his State of the Union speech Feb. 5.
Republicans already are claiming that Democrats, given half a chance, would turn the US into another Venezuela. At the same time the increasingly authoritarian Grand Oligarch Party pushes to build an Iron Curtain along our southern border.
Of course, Republicans have been calling Democrats socialists ever since Franklin D Roosevelt and his advisers drafted the New Deal to revive the economy from the Great Depression in the 1930s — and the accusation that Roosevelt was a socialist was a source of amusement and/or resentment for real socialists ever since. But, socialist or not, voters re-elected FDR three times as the New Deal revived the economy from the Great Depression and saved many a family’s farm and livelihood.
FDR’s government did not take over the means of production, which is the actual definition of socialism, but the New Deal provided support for farmers, created public works programs that put millions of Americans back to work, set up Social Security, which included unemployment insurance, welfare programs and income for disabled people and retirees, and it gave workers the right to organize into unions and bargain collectively. Above all, FDR’s New Deal saved capitalism by regulating it, and the plutocrats never forgave him.
The New Deal coalition dominated Congress through the 1960s, although Southern Democrats and Republicans formed coalitions to roll back the rights of labor organizations with the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 and resisted other liberal initiatives. The New Deal’s last hurrah was Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program, which included the Civil Rights Act and the War on Poverty in 1964, the Voting Rights Act and Medicare in 1965, Medicaid in 1966, as well as consumer and environmental protections, as he got Congress to create the Department of Transportation as a cabinet-level agency and provided federal funding for education, affordable housing, rural development and the arts and public broadcasting.
Opposition to the War in Vietnam and backlash against passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in the South and among conservative Democrats in the North gave Republicans an opportunity to exploit divisions in the New Deal coalition. That helped Richard Nixon win the presidency in 1968, but Democrats continued to control Congress until 1981, when Republicans gained a majority in the Senate to work with Ronald Reagan during the first six years of his presidency. But Republicans lost the Senate in 1987 and it was not until 1995, in the third year of Bill Clinton’s first term, that Republicans managed to get control of the House and Senate.
In 1999, the Republican Congress, with Clinton’s signature, repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which had separated commercial and investment banks, preventing commercial banks from getting involved in speculative stock deals and investment banks from accepting federally insured deposits. The financial services industry made it through eight years of free-market capitalism under George W. Bush before excessive risk-taking by banks, dealing in subprime mortgage debt securities, caused the financial crisis of 2007-08, which spread to a global economic downturn.
It fell to Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress to clean up the mess the free-market Republicans left them, and they proceeded to pass an $800 billion economic stimulus package in February 2009. Obama also approved loans for General Motors and Chrysler to continue operations while they reorganized in March 2009. The stock market bottomed out in March 2009 before beginning the climb back up; the unemployment rate peaked at 10% in October 2009 before the economic recovery kicked in. By November 2012 unemployment had dropped to 7.7% and it continued to drop in Obama’s second term, down to 4.7% when he left office in January 2017.
Republicans accused Obama of being a socialist, of course, so the term has lost much of its sting — so much that young Americans who have grown up since the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics are more likely to associate socialism with prosperous democratic socialist states, such as Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
Axios reported Feb. 2 that centrist potential Democratic candidates for president are rethinking their plans because the “rising Democratic enthusiasm for big government liberalism” might limit their appeal.
“Michael Bloomberg and former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, each of whom were virtual locks to run, are having serious second thoughts after watching Democrats embrace ‘Medicare for All,’ big tax increases and the Green New Deal,” Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei reported for Axios. “Joe Biden, who still wants to run, is being advised to delay any plans to see how this lurch to the left plays out. If Biden runs, look for Bloomberg and McAuliffe to bow out, the sources tell us.”
The Axios writers also noted polling in Iowa “by a prominent 2020 hopeful found that the Democratic electorate has moved sharply left. For instance, the polling found that ‘socialism’ had a net positive rating, while ‘capitalism’ had a net negative rating.”
If so, good feelings toward socialism might reflect national trends. A Gallup Poll found for the first time in August 2018 that Democrats have a more positive view of socialism than capitalism. In 2016, 56% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents had a positive view of capitalism and 58% had a positive view of socialism. By 2018, only 45% had a positive view of capitalism while 57% were positive about socialism.
Among Americans aged 18-29 in the Gallup Poll, 45% were positive about capitalism while 51% were positive about socialism, but older Americans favored capitalism over socialism, with people aged 30-49 favoring capitalism (57%) over socialism (41%), people aged 50-64 favoring capitalism over socialism 60% to 30% and people aged 65 and over favoring capitalism 60% to 28%.
A supermajority of Americans also support taxes that hit the rich. A Fox News poll in January found 70% of voters support raising taxes on those with incomes of over $10 million and 65% support higher taxes on those with incomes over $1 million.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, who actually calls himself a democratic socialist, got over 12 million votes and narrowly lost the Democratic nomination in 2016 to centrist Hillary Clinton. With high-profile victories of democratic socialists last year, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York’s 14th Congressional District, the Democratic Socialists of America’s membership has grown from 7,000 members to over 50,000 since 2016.
Support for socialism may have grown in the past few years, but Democrats don’t need to spend time and resources trying make the case for socialism among voters over 30. Democrats should embrace the time-tested brand of progressive populism, which has promoted greater equity among people, rights for labor and farmers, regulation of capitalism, improved social services and universal health care in the United States for the past century.
Above all, Democrats should tell voters what they’ll do if they get back in power. And a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, expansion of Social Security benefits to raise all retirees above the poverty level, and federal grants that make university education affordable for everybody who can make the grade — all paid by higher taxes on the superrich — is a good start. But we’ll let the capitalists keep their corporations, as long as they’ll behave. — JMC
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Copyright © 2019 The Progressive PopulistPO Box 819, Manchaca TX 78652
“We renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country,” Trump said in his State of the Union speech Feb. 5.
Republicans already are claiming that Democrats, given half a chance, would turn the US into another Venezuela. At the same time the increasingly authoritarian Grand Oligarch Party pushes to build an Iron Curtain along our southern border.
Of course, Republicans have been calling Democrats socialists ever since Franklin D Roosevelt and his advisers drafted the New Deal to revive the economy from the Great Depression in the 1930s — and the accusation that Roosevelt was a socialist was a source of amusement and/or resentment for real socialists ever since. But, socialist or not, voters re-elected FDR three times as the New Deal revived the economy from the Great Depression and saved many a family’s farm and livelihood.
FDR’s government did not take over the means of production, which is the actual definition of socialism, but the New Deal provided support for farmers, created public works programs that put millions of Americans back to work, set up Social Security, which included unemployment insurance, welfare programs and income for disabled people and retirees, and it gave workers the right to organize into unions and bargain collectively. Above all, FDR’s New Deal saved capitalism by regulating it, and the plutocrats never forgave him.
The New Deal coalition dominated Congress through the 1960s, although Southern Democrats and Republicans formed coalitions to roll back the rights of labor organizations with the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 and resisted other liberal initiatives. The New Deal’s last hurrah was Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program, which included the Civil Rights Act and the War on Poverty in 1964, the Voting Rights Act and Medicare in 1965, Medicaid in 1966, as well as consumer and environmental protections, as he got Congress to create the Department of Transportation as a cabinet-level agency and provided federal funding for education, affordable housing, rural development and the arts and public broadcasting.
Opposition to the War in Vietnam and backlash against passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in the South and among conservative Democrats in the North gave Republicans an opportunity to exploit divisions in the New Deal coalition. That helped Richard Nixon win the presidency in 1968, but Democrats continued to control Congress until 1981, when Republicans gained a majority in the Senate to work with Ronald Reagan during the first six years of his presidency. But Republicans lost the Senate in 1987 and it was not until 1995, in the third year of Bill Clinton’s first term, that Republicans managed to get control of the House and Senate.
In 1999, the Republican Congress, with Clinton’s signature, repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which had separated commercial and investment banks, preventing commercial banks from getting involved in speculative stock deals and investment banks from accepting federally insured deposits. The financial services industry made it through eight years of free-market capitalism under George W. Bush before excessive risk-taking by banks, dealing in subprime mortgage debt securities, caused the financial crisis of 2007-08, which spread to a global economic downturn.
It fell to Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress to clean up the mess the free-market Republicans left them, and they proceeded to pass an $800 billion economic stimulus package in February 2009. Obama also approved loans for General Motors and Chrysler to continue operations while they reorganized in March 2009. The stock market bottomed out in March 2009 before beginning the climb back up; the unemployment rate peaked at 10% in October 2009 before the economic recovery kicked in. By November 2012 unemployment had dropped to 7.7% and it continued to drop in Obama’s second term, down to 4.7% when he left office in January 2017.
Republicans accused Obama of being a socialist, of course, so the term has lost much of its sting — so much that young Americans who have grown up since the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics are more likely to associate socialism with prosperous democratic socialist states, such as Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
Axios reported Feb. 2 that centrist potential Democratic candidates for president are rethinking their plans because the “rising Democratic enthusiasm for big government liberalism” might limit their appeal.
“Michael Bloomberg and former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, each of whom were virtual locks to run, are having serious second thoughts after watching Democrats embrace ‘Medicare for All,’ big tax increases and the Green New Deal,” Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei reported for Axios. “Joe Biden, who still wants to run, is being advised to delay any plans to see how this lurch to the left plays out. If Biden runs, look for Bloomberg and McAuliffe to bow out, the sources tell us.”
The Axios writers also noted polling in Iowa “by a prominent 2020 hopeful found that the Democratic electorate has moved sharply left. For instance, the polling found that ‘socialism’ had a net positive rating, while ‘capitalism’ had a net negative rating.”
If so, good feelings toward socialism might reflect national trends. A Gallup Poll found for the first time in August 2018 that Democrats have a more positive view of socialism than capitalism. In 2016, 56% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents had a positive view of capitalism and 58% had a positive view of socialism. By 2018, only 45% had a positive view of capitalism while 57% were positive about socialism.
Among Americans aged 18-29 in the Gallup Poll, 45% were positive about capitalism while 51% were positive about socialism, but older Americans favored capitalism over socialism, with people aged 30-49 favoring capitalism (57%) over socialism (41%), people aged 50-64 favoring capitalism over socialism 60% to 30% and people aged 65 and over favoring capitalism 60% to 28%.
A supermajority of Americans also support taxes that hit the rich. A Fox News poll in January found 70% of voters support raising taxes on those with incomes of over $10 million and 65% support higher taxes on those with incomes over $1 million.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, who actually calls himself a democratic socialist, got over 12 million votes and narrowly lost the Democratic nomination in 2016 to centrist Hillary Clinton. With high-profile victories of democratic socialists last year, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York’s 14th Congressional District, the Democratic Socialists of America’s membership has grown from 7,000 members to over 50,000 since 2016.
Support for socialism may have grown in the past few years, but Democrats don’t need to spend time and resources trying make the case for socialism among voters over 30. Democrats should embrace the time-tested brand of progressive populism, which has promoted greater equity among people, rights for labor and farmers, regulation of capitalism, improved social services and universal health care in the United States for the past century.
Above all, Democrats should tell voters what they’ll do if they get back in power. And a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, expansion of Social Security benefits to raise all retirees above the poverty level, and federal grants that make university education affordable for everybody who can make the grade — all paid by higher taxes on the superrich — is a good start. But we’ll let the capitalists keep their corporations, as long as they’ll behave. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2019
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us
Copyright © 2019 The Progressive PopulistPO Box 819, Manchaca TX 78652
Selections from the March 1, 2019 issue
COVER/Elizabeth Henderson
Why sustainable agriculture should support a Green New Deal
EDITORIAL
Don’t play Trump’s game
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
New journalism and the truth behind the facts
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Plant milkweed and trees for life
DISPATCHES
Trump tax ‘cuts’ may become political disaster.
Trump tells at least 28 lies in State of the Union speech.
NAFTA rewrite would lock in high med prices.
Black Virginians support Gov. Northam in blackface scandal.
Green New Deal reflects 2016 Democratic platform, but stronger.
Senate Leader McConnell linked to Russian oligarchs as sanctions lifted.
Loss of newspapers leads to political polarization.
ICE confirms asylum seekers on hunger strike ae being force-fed.
Trump trade war pushes farmers into record number of bankruptcies.
JIM VAN DER POL
Nursing the soil back to life
JOHN YOUNG
Third-party math is Trump’s fondest calculation
JILL RICHARDSON
People who seek mental health treatment should be applauded
ART CULLEN
Can candidates define the national conversation for 2020 amid the chaos?
ART CULLEN
What is a ‘Green’ New Deal?
BOB BURNETT
State of the Union 2019: Two visions
JOEL D. JOSEPH
States should squeeze college coaches to lower tuition and house students
PETER CERTO
People who care about democracy don’t plot coups abroad
GENE NICHOL
A minimal wage
JOSH HOXIE
How the age of billionaires ends
JAMES EGGERT
The real crisis
FR. DONNELL KIRCHNER
What is right and what is wrong?
SAM URETSKY
How little pharma grew up
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Canaries and the politics of immiseration
SETH SANDRONSKY
Activists, banks and for-profit immigrant prisons
WAYNE O’LEARY
Corruption incorporated
JOHN BUELL
The return of the strike?
KENT PATERSON
The hot honeymoon of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador
BARRY FRIEDMAN
Can we all just lighten up about Howard Schultz?
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Tidying up with Trump
ROB PATTERSON
Blacklist and blue
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Fear ... and loathing, but mostly fear
THEATRE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
‘Birds of Passage’ depicts the devastation of drug trafficking for South America’s indigenous people
Why sustainable agriculture should support a Green New Deal
EDITORIAL
Don’t play Trump’s game
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
New journalism and the truth behind the facts
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Plant milkweed and trees for life
DISPATCHES
Trump tax ‘cuts’ may become political disaster.
Trump tells at least 28 lies in State of the Union speech.
NAFTA rewrite would lock in high med prices.
Black Virginians support Gov. Northam in blackface scandal.
Green New Deal reflects 2016 Democratic platform, but stronger.
Senate Leader McConnell linked to Russian oligarchs as sanctions lifted.
Loss of newspapers leads to political polarization.
ICE confirms asylum seekers on hunger strike ae being force-fed.
Trump trade war pushes farmers into record number of bankruptcies.
JIM VAN DER POL
Nursing the soil back to life
JOHN YOUNG
Third-party math is Trump’s fondest calculation
JILL RICHARDSON
People who seek mental health treatment should be applauded
ART CULLEN
Can candidates define the national conversation for 2020 amid the chaos?
ART CULLEN
What is a ‘Green’ New Deal?
BOB BURNETT
State of the Union 2019: Two visions
JOEL D. JOSEPH
States should squeeze college coaches to lower tuition and house students
PETER CERTO
People who care about democracy don’t plot coups abroad
GENE NICHOL
A minimal wage
JOSH HOXIE
How the age of billionaires ends
JAMES EGGERT
The real crisis
FR. DONNELL KIRCHNER
What is right and what is wrong?
SAM URETSKY
How little pharma grew up
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Canaries and the politics of immiseration
SETH SANDRONSKY
Activists, banks and for-profit immigrant prisons
WAYNE O’LEARY
Corruption incorporated
JOHN BUELL
The return of the strike?
KENT PATERSON
The hot honeymoon of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador
BARRY FRIEDMAN
Can we all just lighten up about Howard Schultz?
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Tidying up with Trump
ROB PATTERSON
Blacklist and blue
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Fear ... and loathing, but mostly fear
THEATRE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
‘Birds of Passage’ depicts the devastation of drug trafficking for South America’s indigenous people
Wednesday, February 6, 2019
Private insurers will make a lot of money off Medicare-for-all, but that’s okay: everyone will be covered and overall costs will go down
By Marc Jampole
There are a number of myths floating around the mainstream news media that portray Medicare-for-all as politically unviable, too expensive and impossible to implement.
The biggest misconception is that there would be no place for the politically powerful private insurance companies if everyone is on the government plan. This myth proposes that the eradication of private insurers makes passing a Medicare-for-all bill virtually impossible. If it did pass, consumer choice in plans would be severely limited, because private sector competition creates choice. Yet even a cursory look at the real world proves that only people with no actual experience of Medicare could seriously entertain the idea that Medicare-for-all would eliminate private insurers.
Private insurance has been an integral part of Medicare for decades, in three ways:
- Private insurance companies offer supplemental plans that pay for the 20% of medical costs that Medicare doesn’t cover.
- Private insurers also sell Medicare Advantage plans, which replace Medicare coverage with coverage through a private insurance company that Medicare pays for. Typically these plans offer a dental and eye benefit and wellness programs, but they also usually force participants to use a limited healthcare network of physicians and facilities. All of the Advantage plans saddle participants with co-pays.
- Private companies offer prescription drug policies (Medicare Part D).
I doubt an American single-payer system could exist without the support of private companies. What’s more, private companies should embrace the Medicare-for-all concept. Although they will be forced to offer less profitable policies, tens of millions more people will be covered, a bonanza opportunity for private healthcare insurers. Moreover, the more people who are covered, the lower the overall cost of healthcare coverage, which will cut costs at the level of the individual insurance provider.
The next myth is that Medicare-for-all will give people less choice. Nothing could be further from the truth. For one thing, people don’t get that much choice to begin with. Virtually every private healthcare insurer offers the same portfolios of benefits, with the same perks like wellness classes and on-line tools and apps, differing only in the size and composition of their provider networks and the combination of deductibles and co-pays they require. Everyone offers annual physicals. No one will pay for custom shoes unless the patient has diabetes. Cardiac stress tests, yes. Coronary calcium tests, no.
In fact, I would assert that Medicare offers more choice than private commercial insurance. For the past 15-20 years, it has been impossible to find a commercial plan that didn’t have co-pays or deductibles. I know, because I tried many times, having gotten use to buying healthcare plans without co-pays or deductibles for the employees of my company before the insurers did away with premium-only policies. (BTW, my company always paid the entire premium for employees and their families.)
By contrast, Medicare offers people the option of buying a supplemental plan—from a private insurance company—that pays all the costs that Medicare doesn’t cover without a deductible or a co-pay. That’s the kind of choice that appeals to this American!
Perhaps the most egregiously wrong-headed myth about Medicare-for-all is that it will be so expensive that it will bankrupt the country. That makes no sense, assuming that the money that companies and individuals now pay for commercial insurance goes towards taxes to pay for Medicare-for-all. It’s true that more people will be covered, but research and the results of Obamacare show that the more people who are covered, the lower the cost to insure each. The uninsured tend to wait until they are very sick to seek medical care, often using the very expensive emergency department. Society pays for those costs in one way or the other. It is much less expensive when people get regular check-ups, get their flu shots and other needed vaccinations, and are encouraged to go to the doctor as soon as they get sick. Most economic estimates predict that Medicare-for-all will eventually drive down the cost of medical care.
But who will pay? That’s the big question and the big fear. The answer, however, should be obvious: raise the Medicare tax on both employers and employees so that the additional tax collected is somewhat close to the current total cost for non-Medicare related commercial policies. We could exempt employees earning under a certain amount, but not their employers. We would, of course, have to make certain the tax applied to sole proprietors, freelancers and the companies who hire gig economy employees. At the end of the day, though, rich folk will tend to subsidize a Medicare-for-all system, while poor people will pay less than what they use. The same will be said for healthy people and young adults who will use the system less and the elderly and infirm, who will use it more.
This solution will leave some companies and individuals paying less for healthcare than they currently do and some paying more. But let’s remember that when governments decided to standardize weights and measures, merchants with scales that were “light” made less money as they adjusted what a pound meant up and merchants with “heavy” pound scales made more as they started selling “pounds” that weighed less. Likewise, when governments decided to prevent bakers from putting sawdust in bread—some bakers made more money and others made less. When American governments in the first half of the 20th century decided to tax mass transit systems while subsidizing the construction of highways, some companies and individuals made more money and some made less. When a government decides to go to war, change a safety standard, ask for a new piece of paperwork, or do just about anything, someone is going to make more money and someone is going to make less. That’s the nature of all economies. Don’t mistake these comments as an argument against regulation, though: the decisions of companies and consumers also always economically benefit certain parties and hurt others. Just ask towns when factories move away or the employees of small downtown stores when Wal-Mart builds a super store at a nearby mall. Or the people who manufacture Cleveland Cavalier paraphernalia.
Political questions always come down to who benefits and who pays. In the case of Medicare-for-all, a system can be created in which everyone, including the private insurance industry, benefits, except those rich folk who don’t like to subsidize the health care of others, those racists who don’t like society to help minorities, and those fanatics deathly afraid that people will like Medicare-for-all so much that they’ll start doubting the ideology of the free market which to many conservatives is their most cherished religious belief. In other words, only those who believe in or benefit from the politics of selfishness should fear Medicare-for-all.
Monday, February 4, 2019
In defiance of Nov’s blue wave & will of the people, NRA pursues challenging NYC’s strict gun law & Trump acts to make it easier to sell AK-15’s abroad
By Marc Jampole
The blue wave that swept Democrats into office on the local, state and federal levels has given progressives and centrists hope that legislatures will soon start passing tougher gun control laws.
Meanwhile back at the ranch—or in Trump’s case, the garish, overpriced resort—those who want to expand the sale of guns and the rights of gun owners to create unsafe environments for everyone else are winning two major victories, both of which will lead to an increase in gun-related crimes, deaths and acts of terrorism in the United States and around the world.
When I write “in the United States,” I specifically mean my home town of New York City. As Amy Davidson Sorkin describes so well in her “Talk of the Town” article in the February 4 New Yorker, the New York state affiliate of the National Rifle Association and two Bronx gun owners are trying to get the Big Apple’s gun law declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law is so tough that gun owners can take their guns out of their home only if they are unloaded and in a locked case. It will be the first time the Court will be considering gun rights since its awful 5-4 decision in D.C. v. Heller that proposed that the Second Amendment gave people an absolute right to bear arms that had nothing to do with serving in a government militia. With Brett Kavanaugh on the court, it’s likely that the New York City gun law will be overturned.
I take this lawsuit personally. In fact, it pisses me off bigly. One of the reasons I moved back to New York seven years ago after being gone for decades was because of the extremely tough gun control laws. It’s a no-brainer to figure out why New York has among the very lowest rates of crime, violent crime and murders anywhere in the United States. It is effectively illegal to carry a gun in the street and there is a relatively low level of gun ownership. Every legitimate study on the issue shows that the lower the number of guns in a locality, region or country, the fewer deaths and injuries from guns; the higher the number of guns, the higher the deaths and injuries from guns. No wonder New York is so safe. I can’t be the only New Yorker offended to the quick that these Bronx bozos and the NRA want to force their minority views on the overwhelming number of New Yorkers who like to be able to walk the streets and ride the subway safely. Keep in mind that large majorities of Americans, including gun owners, want stronger gun control laws, including the banning of assault weapons like AK-15’s and wait periods for all gun purchases.
Gun sales are down in the United States, primarily because gun owners loaded up on weapons during the Obama years, when they feared administrative action to regulate firearms ownership. But while enjoying success in corrupting and intimidating legislators on all levels of government, the NRA has not been able to grow its market, as the number of gun owners has declined steadily over the past 50 years. Of course, each of these gun owners own more guns than they used to. There are, however, still only so many guns the shrinking number of gun owners can afford to buy.
Luckily for U.S. firearms manufacturers and unfortunately for everyone else, the Trump administration intends to rescue them from a shrinking market by making it easier to sell AR-15s and other weapons to individuals in other countries by loosening export regulations and oversight. Many American gun and ammunition manufacturers that sell primarily to consumers will no longer have to register with the State Department, which currently licenses international arms sales, or to pay the department an annual fee. Instead, those sales would be licensed by the Commerce Department, which has a simpler process and does not charge a fee. According to the New York Times, the State and Commerce Departments privately told Congress that they intend to finalize the new rule soon. Once the administration gives Congress formal notice of the rule change, lawmakers will have 30 days to decide whether to intervene. It’s unlikely that Congress could permanently prevent the rule from going into effect unless the Democrats controlled both houses.
So it looks as if the federal government is going to facilitate the spread of the epidemic of mass shootings from the United States to the rest of the world.
As is usual with gun laws and gun violence, the hands of both major parties are dripping in blood. The Times reports that the Obama administration originally wanted to make a similar change. They were about to complete the rule when the Sandy Hook massacre occurred. Even though the rule change affects sales outside the United States, the Obama administration thought it was politic to drop the idea.
Trump uses threats to public safety that don’t really exist to justify building a wall along our southern border with Mexico that we don’t really need. Yet he and the Republican Party ignore the pressing need to strengthen gun control laws. Instead, they create more of a danger to the public by supporting laws, regulations and lawsuits that make it easier to buy guns or give gun owners more rights in the public square.
Let’s face it. The GOP has become the party of death and the culture of death. While both parties are dominated by militaristic thinking, the Republicans spend far more on the armed forces than the Democrats and start more wars, which after all, help their crony defense contractors and suppliers. Republicans are just as enthusiastic about helping commercial gun sales, as shown by their eager embrace of every proposed law and regulations of the gun lobby.
But the conservative predilection for death goes well beyond support for gun manufacturers and policies that kill people. We can start with their approach to healthcare, which denies coverage to people who can’t afford it to save wealthy taxpayers a few bucks. The GOP’s environmental and energy policies support the coming death of other species and millions of people in areas suffering extreme weather events. The GOP’s support for gutting social welfare programs shows a mean-spirited disregard for human life. The immigration policy if taken to its extreme will lead to the death of the American economy, since native-born Americans are reproducing at very low rates which, if unaugmented by immigration, will result in a rapidly shrinking population within a few years.
Even the GOP’s support of laws that prevent abortions is pro-death. Here’s my reasoning: You can’t die unless you are born. By forcing unwanted births and then shredding the social net that helps children in impoverished circumstances, anti-abortion laws almost by definition add to the toll of human suffering, including some number of unnecessary premature deaths.
The Democrats aren’t much better when it comes to killing people outside the country, but their domestic policies for the most support the health and well-being of the population.
I would like to write that never has a political party been so dedicated to death and so fascinated by destruction as the current edition of the GOP. But then I remember our genocide against the Indians, our dropping of two atomic bombs on Japanese cities, slavery’s destruction if human life. That’s just in U.S. history, and doesn’t consider the Soviet Union, England, France, China or Rwanda. The collective thinking of individuals that occurs in political parties too often falls prey to the dark nightmares of its most blood thirsty members.
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