COVER/Hal Crowther
Voiding the social contract: Trump’s war of the weird
EDITORIAL
Snap out of it, Dems!
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Food servers: Their times and troubles
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Don’t throw the personal campaigning out with the caucuses
DISPATCHES
Reneging on pledges (again), Trump would cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security to pay for tax cuts for rich;
Trump Medicaid rules would undermine rural health care;
Iowa caucuses slowly serve their purpose;
Plenty of Republican Senate targets;
Trump still ‘underwater’ in swing states;
Barr confirms he'll process Giuliani's anti-Biden claims;
Trump job creation still lags Obama’s last three years;
Trump makes taxpayers pay nearly $500,000 for Secret Service stays at president's properties;
Trump threatens to pardon Roger Stonne before dirty trickster is sentenced;
New data shows Texas' working class supports progessive economic policies;
'End Citizens United' and 'Let America Vote' join foces for combined voting rights group
ART CULLEN
Iowa results seem to fall where everyone expected they would: Undecided
JAMES EGGERT
When Democrats vote ...
JILL RICHARDSON
A cruel attack on the disabled
JOHN YOUNG
Donald Trump: Loser
NANCY J. ALTMAN
Trump is a brazen liar about Social Security
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Election-year pessimism
TOM CONWAY
Trump gets an F from workers
TOM JOHNSTON
Clarifying prospects for US health care
MICHAEL WINSHIP
Donald Trump’s state of the mighty me
ROBERTO DR. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ
The end of truth: The triumph of lying
BOB BURNETT
This is the way it ends, not with a bang but a whimper
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
The Fabulist-in-Chief takes on cancer
SAM URETSKY
Who can you trust in a liar’s world
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
What will it take?
WAYNE O’LEARY
Democrats, post-feud
JOHN BUELL
California fires and the search for home
MARK ANDERSON
Can Britain and EU disentangle
DAVID SCHMIDT
Crossing the border between reality and fantasy: The wild inaccuracies of ‘American Dirt’
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
The toil and trouble of our time
ROB PATTERSON
Scorsese brings us along on his journeys
SETH SANDRONSKY
Mourning in America: Kobe and me
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
#OscarsSoWhite meets #OscarsSoConservative
FRANK LINGO
Butterfly protectors join toll of murdered environmentalists
and more ...
Saturday, February 15, 2020
Thursday, February 13, 2020
Saturday, January 25, 2020
Editorial: No Time for Dem Schism
With the Iowa caucuses on the horizon, it’s the time the serious slashing starts, as the candidates desperately seek an advantage in a tight race. Folks will gather in schools, churches, living rooms and other meeting places across Iowa the evening of Feb. 3 to stand up for their candidates.
More than two dozen candidates exercised their presidential ambitions in the past year and many of them already have withdrawn from the fray. Iowans will start the process of cutting down those ranks to three or four solid candidates who will go on to New Hampshire for the Feb. 11 primary, followed by Nevada caucuses Feb. 22 and South Carolina’s Feb. 29 primary.
After that comes “Super Tuesday” on March 3, when primaries in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Democrats Abroad, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia, plus caucuses in American Samoa, could well determine the nominee.
With that front-loading of delegate selection, it’s no wonder Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren started attacking each other, with the Sanders campaign putting out the word that Warren was the candidate of the elites and wouldn’t expand the base while Warren complained that Sanders told her a woman couldn’t get elected president.
Democrats shouldn’t get distracted by this controversy, which was stoked by CNN during the Jan. 14 debate in Des Moines. Warren said Sanders made the statement and Sanders denies it. It’s possible both candidates are telling the truth, according to their memories of what was said. In the absence of tapes, we’ll never know for sure, and it doesn’t make a great deal of difference. We do know Hillary Clinton got three million more votes than Donald Trump in 2016, and she lost only because voter suppression efforts in Detroit and Flint, Mich., and Milwaukee, Wis., along with Clinton’s failure to campaign in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the closing days of the 2016 campaign let Trump creep through to victory by a margin of less than 80,000 votes in those three states, which gave him the win in the Electoral College.
It’s an old rule that the only way to run in an election is scared, and that applies to Democrats picking a candidate to oust Trump, but there is no need to panic when you remember that Trump won’t sneak up on us this time. In 2016, Trump drew to an inside straight and won, with the help of his Russian enablers who skillfully manipulated FaceBook, WikiLeaks and other social media. But we won’t get fooled again. Trump played an economic populist in 2016 and he made all sorts of promises about protecting American jobs, particularly in steel mills and coal mines, but all he’s really done is produce tax cuts for corporate bosses and shareholders while he cut regulations for polluters and made it more difficult for citizens to hold corporate scofflaws accountable.
Trump has been disapproved by more than half of potential voters in FiveThirtyEight’s average of polls since mid-March 2017, with 53.4% disapproval and 42.2% approval as of Jan. 21. And there’s little good news for Trump in the battleground states. As of Dec. 31, even with a relatively good economy, Trump was “underwater,” with greater disapproval than approval, in Morning Consult tracking polls in at least nine states he carried in 2016: He is underwater in Alaska by two points, Arizona by three points, Florida by one point, Georgia by two points, Iowa by nine points, Michigan by 15 points, Ohio by four points, Pennsylvania by five points and Wisconsin by nine points. And he was tied, 48-48, in Texas and North Carolina. If Trump has to campaign in Texas, it’s good news for Democrats in other swing states. That means Republicans must keep Democrats from voting.
Pundits have warned, without much evidence, that Sanders and Warren are too far left for the electorate. But their proposals to expand Medicare to cover everybody — which was the original plan when Medicare was created in 1965 — is still pretty popular, particularly while Trump and the Republicans have been aggressively trying to abolish the Affordable Care Act and gut the guaranteed coverage of pre-existing medical conditions.
Polls show Sanders and Warren are competitive with Trump in battleground states. A Marquette Law School poll of registered voters in Wisconsin, released Jan. 15, found Joe Biden leading Trump 49-45, Sanders leading 47-45 and Warren trailing Trump 48-45. Warren’s gap was within the 4.1% margin of error, but she also led Trump 44-42 in the Jan. 8 Fox News poll in Wisconsin (which also was within the margin of error).
An EPIC/MRA poll in Michigan released Jan. 15 showed Biden, Sanders and Warren leading Trump by 6, 5 and 3 points, respectively. A Florida Atlantic University poll in Florida released Jan. 15 showed Biden, Sanders and Warren leading Trump by 2, 6 and 2 points, respectively.
Progressive Democrats must make a hard choice between Sanders, who has been a progressive stalwart for decades, and Warren, a former Republican from Oklahoma who began to vote Democratic in 1995 because she believed the Republican Party was tilting the playing field in favor of large financial institutions and against middle-class American families.
While Trump and the Republicans will engage in character assassination against whoever ends up with the nomination, they’re undoubtedly eager to target Sanders, who got comparatively gentle treatment in 2016 from the media and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Geoffrey Kabaservice, a center-right activist, wrote in The Guardian Jan. 16 that he got a glimpse of the Republican opposition research book on Sanders, “which was so massive it had to be transported on a cart.” Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald, who got to see some of its contents, declared in 2016 that “it was brutal. The Republicans would have torn [Sanders] apart.”
According to Eichenwald, the book includes damning material such as the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to Texas where it would be dumped in a poor Hispanic community, that he honeymooned in the Soviet Union, and that he appeared at a 1985 rally in Nicaragua at which Sandinista supporters chanted “Here, there, everywhere / the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.” Then there’s Sanders’ fictional 1972 essay he wrote for an alternative newspaper in Vermont in which he described a woman fantasizing being raped by three men.
Unfair? Distorted? Taken out of context? You can count on it. And Trump will have plenty of money and Fox “News” to smear Sanders 24/7. Instead, let Bernie be our Moses.
All Trump has on Warren is that she has Native American ancestry, enough that her grandparents had to elope because her grandfather’s family objected, but there’s not enough Indian blood for her to qualify for tribal casino profits. And she wants to expand Medicare to cover everybody, paid by billionaires and corporations.
We believe that, once Democrats unify, Warren can beat Trump in the swing states, and she will pursue progressive populist policies as president. If she doesn’t win the nomination, we are confident Warren will support Sanders, or Biden, or whoever wins the Democratic nomination, and so will we, because none of us can risk giving Trump four more years to abuse presidential power. Nobody can afford to sit out the election this year. — JMC
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Copyright © 2020 The Progressive Populist
More than two dozen candidates exercised their presidential ambitions in the past year and many of them already have withdrawn from the fray. Iowans will start the process of cutting down those ranks to three or four solid candidates who will go on to New Hampshire for the Feb. 11 primary, followed by Nevada caucuses Feb. 22 and South Carolina’s Feb. 29 primary.
After that comes “Super Tuesday” on March 3, when primaries in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Democrats Abroad, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia, plus caucuses in American Samoa, could well determine the nominee.
With that front-loading of delegate selection, it’s no wonder Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren started attacking each other, with the Sanders campaign putting out the word that Warren was the candidate of the elites and wouldn’t expand the base while Warren complained that Sanders told her a woman couldn’t get elected president.
Democrats shouldn’t get distracted by this controversy, which was stoked by CNN during the Jan. 14 debate in Des Moines. Warren said Sanders made the statement and Sanders denies it. It’s possible both candidates are telling the truth, according to their memories of what was said. In the absence of tapes, we’ll never know for sure, and it doesn’t make a great deal of difference. We do know Hillary Clinton got three million more votes than Donald Trump in 2016, and she lost only because voter suppression efforts in Detroit and Flint, Mich., and Milwaukee, Wis., along with Clinton’s failure to campaign in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the closing days of the 2016 campaign let Trump creep through to victory by a margin of less than 80,000 votes in those three states, which gave him the win in the Electoral College.
It’s an old rule that the only way to run in an election is scared, and that applies to Democrats picking a candidate to oust Trump, but there is no need to panic when you remember that Trump won’t sneak up on us this time. In 2016, Trump drew to an inside straight and won, with the help of his Russian enablers who skillfully manipulated FaceBook, WikiLeaks and other social media. But we won’t get fooled again. Trump played an economic populist in 2016 and he made all sorts of promises about protecting American jobs, particularly in steel mills and coal mines, but all he’s really done is produce tax cuts for corporate bosses and shareholders while he cut regulations for polluters and made it more difficult for citizens to hold corporate scofflaws accountable.
Trump has been disapproved by more than half of potential voters in FiveThirtyEight’s average of polls since mid-March 2017, with 53.4% disapproval and 42.2% approval as of Jan. 21. And there’s little good news for Trump in the battleground states. As of Dec. 31, even with a relatively good economy, Trump was “underwater,” with greater disapproval than approval, in Morning Consult tracking polls in at least nine states he carried in 2016: He is underwater in Alaska by two points, Arizona by three points, Florida by one point, Georgia by two points, Iowa by nine points, Michigan by 15 points, Ohio by four points, Pennsylvania by five points and Wisconsin by nine points. And he was tied, 48-48, in Texas and North Carolina. If Trump has to campaign in Texas, it’s good news for Democrats in other swing states. That means Republicans must keep Democrats from voting.
Pundits have warned, without much evidence, that Sanders and Warren are too far left for the electorate. But their proposals to expand Medicare to cover everybody — which was the original plan when Medicare was created in 1965 — is still pretty popular, particularly while Trump and the Republicans have been aggressively trying to abolish the Affordable Care Act and gut the guaranteed coverage of pre-existing medical conditions.
Polls show Sanders and Warren are competitive with Trump in battleground states. A Marquette Law School poll of registered voters in Wisconsin, released Jan. 15, found Joe Biden leading Trump 49-45, Sanders leading 47-45 and Warren trailing Trump 48-45. Warren’s gap was within the 4.1% margin of error, but she also led Trump 44-42 in the Jan. 8 Fox News poll in Wisconsin (which also was within the margin of error).
An EPIC/MRA poll in Michigan released Jan. 15 showed Biden, Sanders and Warren leading Trump by 6, 5 and 3 points, respectively. A Florida Atlantic University poll in Florida released Jan. 15 showed Biden, Sanders and Warren leading Trump by 2, 6 and 2 points, respectively.
Progressive Democrats must make a hard choice between Sanders, who has been a progressive stalwart for decades, and Warren, a former Republican from Oklahoma who began to vote Democratic in 1995 because she believed the Republican Party was tilting the playing field in favor of large financial institutions and against middle-class American families.
While Trump and the Republicans will engage in character assassination against whoever ends up with the nomination, they’re undoubtedly eager to target Sanders, who got comparatively gentle treatment in 2016 from the media and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Geoffrey Kabaservice, a center-right activist, wrote in The Guardian Jan. 16 that he got a glimpse of the Republican opposition research book on Sanders, “which was so massive it had to be transported on a cart.” Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald, who got to see some of its contents, declared in 2016 that “it was brutal. The Republicans would have torn [Sanders] apart.”
According to Eichenwald, the book includes damning material such as the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to Texas where it would be dumped in a poor Hispanic community, that he honeymooned in the Soviet Union, and that he appeared at a 1985 rally in Nicaragua at which Sandinista supporters chanted “Here, there, everywhere / the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.” Then there’s Sanders’ fictional 1972 essay he wrote for an alternative newspaper in Vermont in which he described a woman fantasizing being raped by three men.
Unfair? Distorted? Taken out of context? You can count on it. And Trump will have plenty of money and Fox “News” to smear Sanders 24/7. Instead, let Bernie be our Moses.
All Trump has on Warren is that she has Native American ancestry, enough that her grandparents had to elope because her grandfather’s family objected, but there’s not enough Indian blood for her to qualify for tribal casino profits. And she wants to expand Medicare to cover everybody, paid by billionaires and corporations.
We believe that, once Democrats unify, Warren can beat Trump in the swing states, and she will pursue progressive populist policies as president. If she doesn’t win the nomination, we are confident Warren will support Sanders, or Biden, or whoever wins the Democratic nomination, and so will we, because none of us can risk giving Trump four more years to abuse presidential power. Nobody can afford to sit out the election this year. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2020
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us
Copyright © 2020 The Progressive Populist
Selections from the February 15, 2020 issue
COVER/Maanyi Singh
Water crisis in cities worsens already terrible inequality
EDITORIAL
No time for Democratic schism
FRANK LINGO
Interview with Lucifer
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
State republicans and their comfort zones
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Genetically modified impossible burgers are trouble
DISPATCHES
The last thing Republicans want is a fair trial on impeachment;
Expert: Ga. election server showed signs of tampering;
Moscow Mitch blows off latest Russian hacking news, says we’ve done enough to protect the election;
Medicare for All is not a pipe dream;
Inflation adjusted wages rose 0% in 2019, 51% got no raises;
Vast majority of Americans say US economic system unfiarly benefits the powerful;
Sciff says NSA, CIA withhold documents from Congress, including those relevant to impeachment;
Trump legal team: what happens 'when you don't pay your legal bills':
Food & Water Action says US=Mexico-Canada Agreement is bad for climate and food safety;
Lev Parnas worked his way into Trump's world — and is now rattling it ...
ART CULLEN
Iowa says we’ll let you know when we decide
BEN LILLISTON
Cory Booker’s halt on factory farms would help the climate
JILL RICHARDSON
Why do we have school lunch debt at all?
JOHN YOUNG
Standing around oblivious to flames
MARK ANDERSON
As the wells run dry, so does democracy
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Assassination nation
JOEL D. JOSEPH
President Trump’s appointment of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner violates federal law
BOB BURNETT
2000-2019: What hath the internet wrought?
ROGER BYBEE
Centrist dems, pundits use insurers’ key words against Medicare for All
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Think locally: The health mantra for 2020
SAM URETSKY
Issues will drive the democratic vote
SAM PIZZIGATI
Are America’s rich getting tired of winning?
WAYNE O’LEARY
Here’s to your health (or not)
JOHN BUELL
Financing post secondary education — for all
SETH SANDRONSKY
Job quality index says economy has a way to go
JOSEPH B. ATKINS
US interference in foreign affairs is business as usual
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Let the bodies hit the floor
ROB PATTERSON Well-told detective tales
GENE NICHOL
A broken university
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Estranged bedfellows: What the FOX is going on?
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
So long, dear dotard
and more ...
Water crisis in cities worsens already terrible inequality
EDITORIAL
No time for Democratic schism
FRANK LINGO
Interview with Lucifer
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
State republicans and their comfort zones
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Genetically modified impossible burgers are trouble
DISPATCHES
The last thing Republicans want is a fair trial on impeachment;
Expert: Ga. election server showed signs of tampering;
Moscow Mitch blows off latest Russian hacking news, says we’ve done enough to protect the election;
Medicare for All is not a pipe dream;
Inflation adjusted wages rose 0% in 2019, 51% got no raises;
Vast majority of Americans say US economic system unfiarly benefits the powerful;
Sciff says NSA, CIA withhold documents from Congress, including those relevant to impeachment;
Trump legal team: what happens 'when you don't pay your legal bills':
Food & Water Action says US=Mexico-Canada Agreement is bad for climate and food safety;
Lev Parnas worked his way into Trump's world — and is now rattling it ...
ART CULLEN
Iowa says we’ll let you know when we decide
BEN LILLISTON
Cory Booker’s halt on factory farms would help the climate
JILL RICHARDSON
Why do we have school lunch debt at all?
JOHN YOUNG
Standing around oblivious to flames
MARK ANDERSON
As the wells run dry, so does democracy
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Assassination nation
JOEL D. JOSEPH
President Trump’s appointment of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner violates federal law
BOB BURNETT
2000-2019: What hath the internet wrought?
ROGER BYBEE
Centrist dems, pundits use insurers’ key words against Medicare for All
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Think locally: The health mantra for 2020
SAM URETSKY
Issues will drive the democratic vote
SAM PIZZIGATI
Are America’s rich getting tired of winning?
WAYNE O’LEARY
Here’s to your health (or not)
JOHN BUELL
Financing post secondary education — for all
SETH SANDRONSKY
Job quality index says economy has a way to go
JOSEPH B. ATKINS
US interference in foreign affairs is business as usual
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Let the bodies hit the floor
ROB PATTERSON Well-told detective tales
GENE NICHOL
A broken university
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Estranged bedfellows: What the FOX is going on?
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
So long, dear dotard
and more ...
Thursday, January 16, 2020
Saturday, January 11, 2020
Editorial: Making a Martyr in Iran
Donald Trump’s decision to assassinate Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani in a drone strike at Baghdad International Airport managed to undermine the popular unrest in Iran and in Iraq to Iran-leaning Iraqi leaders.
Trump claimed Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds Force, was killed because he was planning large-scale attacks against American diplomatic and military personnel. But Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi told the parliament that Trump asked Abdul-Mahdi to mediate the dispute between the US and Iran and Soleimani arrived in Baghdad on a commercial flight Jan. 2 and went through passport control with his diplomatic passport to meet with Abdul-Mahdi to discuss peace prospects. Luckily, Abdul-Mahdi didn’t meet Soleimani at the airport, but Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis went out to welcome the general, so he and eight other passengers also died in the fiery blast.
Juan Cole noted that the lack of security at the US embassy, which allowed the grounds to be invaded by thousands of Iraqi protesters Dec. 31, undermined claims that there were substantial threats against American targets. “If they thought there was a dire such threat in the offing, wouldn’t they have sent in some Marines? Only after they received a stronger than expected reaction to their assassination campaign did they finally take the security of the embassy seriously.”
Trump has been expected to pick a fight with Iran ever since he got in the Oval Office. He is known to project his ambitions on his rivals, and in 2011 and 2012, he repeatedly claimed that Barack Obama would start a war with Iran in order to get re-elected. Of course, Obama managed to win re-election without mixing it up with Iran. But with Trump’s job approval stuck in the low 40s while disapproval has hovered in the 52 to 54 percent range the past year — and a narrow pluality of voters favoring his removal from office — the ImPOTUS is hoping the rally-round-the-flag move will turn his misfortunes around.
Defenders of the drone strike say Soleimani is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of US military and contractors in Iraq, so we are well rid of him. But Trump took a charismatic special forces commander and made him a martyr. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians and Iraqis came out into the streets Jan. 3 to mourn the martyr and reprise the chant, “Death to America.”
Cole noted that young protesters in downtown Baghdad and other cities initially broke into happy dances when they heard Soleimani had been murdered, since he was plotting to repress them. But a day later they were chanting against both Iranian and US presence in Iraq. Shiites who had come to resent Iranian influence in Iraq made an abrupt about-face. In Karbala, where the Iranian consulate was recently torched, an enormous crowd mourned Soleimani as a martyr. There are also large numbers of Shiites in Iraq, Pakistan and India. And it might take a generation or more before Iranians will take a peace overture from America seriously.
How did Soleimani get his murderous reputation? The Department of Defense says Iran-backed Shiite militias, which Soleimani helped train and supply, were responsible for deaths of 603 US troops in Iraq from 2003 to 2011. But most of those deaths occurred during the surge in Iraq, when President George W. Bush pushed thousands of US troops into the country to deal with the sectarian civil war between Shiite and Sunni groups after Saddam Hussein was ousted. The last big burst was in June 2011, as US forces were withdrawing from Iraq, Iranian-backed militants launched rocket attacks on American bases that killed more than a dozen US soldiers, Colin Kahl, a former national security adviser for Vice President Joe Biden, wrote for Foreign Policy. The Obama administration had two options for retaliating: a strike inside Iran that would kill Iranian operatives or unilateral special operations forces raids in Iraq against the militia rocket teams. To head off an escalation to a wider war with Iran, the administration chose the latter.
But the Obama administration also pursued a multinational deal with Iran to stop its development of a nuclear weapon, in exchange for easing sanctions that were strangling Iran’s economy.
The deal, which was reached in 2015 and was approved by the United Nations Security Council, was successful in stopping Iran’s nuclear arms race, according to UN nuclear arms inspectors.
But Trump could not abide Obama’s diplomatic achievement, so one of the first things the Great Misleader did when he took office was to unilaterally renege on the deal. He put economic sanctions back in place against Iran and threatened sanctions against other nations, including NATO allies, who were signatories to the deal if they continued to honor it.
Since good behavior was not rewarded, what was Iran’s recourse? They brought out the rockets and improvised explosive devices and handed them to their affiliates in Iraq, which led to the Dec. 27 rocket attacks on American bases in Iraq.
Iran also has announced it will no longer abide by the limits imposed by the 2015 nuclear deal, Iraq’s Shiite majority parties in parliament have urged their leaders to expel US troops from Iraq and the US-led coalition announced it was suspending its operations against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. And if Soleimani left behind any big plans to attack American targets, his successors still have the plans and plenty of motivation. Heck of a week for Trump.
After Iowa, the New Hampshire primary is Feb. 11, Nevada caucuses are Feb. 22, South Carolinda’s primary is Feb. 29 and the race could be practically decided on Super Tuesday, March 3, when primaries will be held in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Democrats Abroad, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia are held, and American Samoa will caucus.
Our preferences come down to the two progressive populist candidates: Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. They have managed to raise funds while taking aim at corporate greed and promoting legislation that would improve the lives of working families.
Some pundits say Sanders and Warren are too far left to win the election, but they share an ambition to expand Medicare to cover everybody, which is popular among the electorate at large and will only become more popular if Republicans succeed in getting the Supreme Court to overturn the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare.
Don’t let Trump supporters’ bravado scare you. Trump is a phenomenally unpopular president whose ratings have been a net negative since a month after he took office. Polls show Biden, Sanders and Warren can beat Trump. If that is the case, you might as well vote for the candidate whose platform appeals most to your progressive values. Just don’t say anything about the other candidates that you can’t walk back later if your candidate doesn’t win the nomination. Resolve to vote blue, no matter who. — JMC
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Copyright © 2020 The Progressive Populist
Trump claimed Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds Force, was killed because he was planning large-scale attacks against American diplomatic and military personnel. But Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi told the parliament that Trump asked Abdul-Mahdi to mediate the dispute between the US and Iran and Soleimani arrived in Baghdad on a commercial flight Jan. 2 and went through passport control with his diplomatic passport to meet with Abdul-Mahdi to discuss peace prospects. Luckily, Abdul-Mahdi didn’t meet Soleimani at the airport, but Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis went out to welcome the general, so he and eight other passengers also died in the fiery blast.
Juan Cole noted that the lack of security at the US embassy, which allowed the grounds to be invaded by thousands of Iraqi protesters Dec. 31, undermined claims that there were substantial threats against American targets. “If they thought there was a dire such threat in the offing, wouldn’t they have sent in some Marines? Only after they received a stronger than expected reaction to their assassination campaign did they finally take the security of the embassy seriously.”
Trump has been expected to pick a fight with Iran ever since he got in the Oval Office. He is known to project his ambitions on his rivals, and in 2011 and 2012, he repeatedly claimed that Barack Obama would start a war with Iran in order to get re-elected. Of course, Obama managed to win re-election without mixing it up with Iran. But with Trump’s job approval stuck in the low 40s while disapproval has hovered in the 52 to 54 percent range the past year — and a narrow pluality of voters favoring his removal from office — the ImPOTUS is hoping the rally-round-the-flag move will turn his misfortunes around.
Defenders of the drone strike say Soleimani is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of US military and contractors in Iraq, so we are well rid of him. But Trump took a charismatic special forces commander and made him a martyr. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians and Iraqis came out into the streets Jan. 3 to mourn the martyr and reprise the chant, “Death to America.”
Cole noted that young protesters in downtown Baghdad and other cities initially broke into happy dances when they heard Soleimani had been murdered, since he was plotting to repress them. But a day later they were chanting against both Iranian and US presence in Iraq. Shiites who had come to resent Iranian influence in Iraq made an abrupt about-face. In Karbala, where the Iranian consulate was recently torched, an enormous crowd mourned Soleimani as a martyr. There are also large numbers of Shiites in Iraq, Pakistan and India. And it might take a generation or more before Iranians will take a peace overture from America seriously.
How did Soleimani get his murderous reputation? The Department of Defense says Iran-backed Shiite militias, which Soleimani helped train and supply, were responsible for deaths of 603 US troops in Iraq from 2003 to 2011. But most of those deaths occurred during the surge in Iraq, when President George W. Bush pushed thousands of US troops into the country to deal with the sectarian civil war between Shiite and Sunni groups after Saddam Hussein was ousted. The last big burst was in June 2011, as US forces were withdrawing from Iraq, Iranian-backed militants launched rocket attacks on American bases that killed more than a dozen US soldiers, Colin Kahl, a former national security adviser for Vice President Joe Biden, wrote for Foreign Policy. The Obama administration had two options for retaliating: a strike inside Iran that would kill Iranian operatives or unilateral special operations forces raids in Iraq against the militia rocket teams. To head off an escalation to a wider war with Iran, the administration chose the latter.
But the Obama administration also pursued a multinational deal with Iran to stop its development of a nuclear weapon, in exchange for easing sanctions that were strangling Iran’s economy.
The deal, which was reached in 2015 and was approved by the United Nations Security Council, was successful in stopping Iran’s nuclear arms race, according to UN nuclear arms inspectors.
But Trump could not abide Obama’s diplomatic achievement, so one of the first things the Great Misleader did when he took office was to unilaterally renege on the deal. He put economic sanctions back in place against Iran and threatened sanctions against other nations, including NATO allies, who were signatories to the deal if they continued to honor it.
Since good behavior was not rewarded, what was Iran’s recourse? They brought out the rockets and improvised explosive devices and handed them to their affiliates in Iraq, which led to the Dec. 27 rocket attacks on American bases in Iraq.
Iran also has announced it will no longer abide by the limits imposed by the 2015 nuclear deal, Iraq’s Shiite majority parties in parliament have urged their leaders to expel US troops from Iraq and the US-led coalition announced it was suspending its operations against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. And if Soleimani left behind any big plans to attack American targets, his successors still have the plans and plenty of motivation. Heck of a week for Trump.
Candidates, On Your Marks
As the Iowa caucuses approach on Feb. 3, it’s time to get real about picking the Democratic nominee for president. There field is halved from the 28 who expressed presidential aspirations, but several great candidates remain in the hunt, any of whom would be preferable to Donald J. Trump.After Iowa, the New Hampshire primary is Feb. 11, Nevada caucuses are Feb. 22, South Carolinda’s primary is Feb. 29 and the race could be practically decided on Super Tuesday, March 3, when primaries will be held in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Democrats Abroad, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia are held, and American Samoa will caucus.
Our preferences come down to the two progressive populist candidates: Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. They have managed to raise funds while taking aim at corporate greed and promoting legislation that would improve the lives of working families.
Some pundits say Sanders and Warren are too far left to win the election, but they share an ambition to expand Medicare to cover everybody, which is popular among the electorate at large and will only become more popular if Republicans succeed in getting the Supreme Court to overturn the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare.
Don’t let Trump supporters’ bravado scare you. Trump is a phenomenally unpopular president whose ratings have been a net negative since a month after he took office. Polls show Biden, Sanders and Warren can beat Trump. If that is the case, you might as well vote for the candidate whose platform appeals most to your progressive values. Just don’t say anything about the other candidates that you can’t walk back later if your candidate doesn’t win the nomination. Resolve to vote blue, no matter who. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2020
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us
Copyright © 2020 The Progressive Populist
Selections from the February 1, 2020 issue
COVER/John Vidal
The lost decade: How we awoke to climate change only to squander every chance to act
EDITORIAL
Making a martyr; Candidates, on your marks
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Sallie McFague remembered
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Grade presidential candidates on farm and food issues
DISPATCHES
Explosive report indicates Trump loans from Deutsche Bank were backed by Russia;
Trump tipped off Mar-a-Lago pals to expect ‘big’ Iran action;
Trump claims tweets are sufficient notice to Congess that US may strike Iran;
Trump threats against Iranian sites raise potential of war crimes;
Iranian general killed by Trump may have been working on peace deal;
Trump stil ‘underwater’ in key battleground states;
Pence claims Iran ties to 9/11 attacks;
Dem trying to flip Graham’s Senate seat reports record haul;
Iranian Americans, returning home from Canada, detained, interrogated by Border agents ...
ART CULLEN
The last bus stops in Iowa on Feb. 3
NORMAN SOLOMON
Progressives need a united front for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren
JILL RICHARDSON
The Education Department is ripping off defrauded students
JOHN YOUNG
Happy New Year from the conserva-myth party
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Greider told the people
TOM JOHNSTON
Democrats can win the Medicare for All debate and the 2020 elections
N. GUNASEKARAN
Trade war was deadly to Asia’s poor
MICHAEL WINSHIP
In Trump world, fiction is just as strange as truth
KARL GROSSMAN
Trump gets Space Force to assert domination
BOB BURNETT
2019: Ten reasons to be thankful
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Scrooge lives: A new chapter if the history of food stamps
SAM URETSKY
Trump followers living in another world
SETH SANDRONSKY
Business and the rising minimum wage
WAYNE O’LEARY
The trouble with Obamacare
JOHN BUELL
Australia: The fire this time
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
“Dreaming of a White Christmas,” as sung by Kim Jong Un
KENT PATERSON
Who really rules El Paso?
ROB PATTERSON
OK, so Quentin Tarantino has some talent ...
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
When the narrative gets kidnapped
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life is an anti-war triumph
GENE NICHOL
Trump’s economic cruelty
and more ...
The lost decade: How we awoke to climate change only to squander every chance to act
EDITORIAL
Making a martyr; Candidates, on your marks
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Sallie McFague remembered
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Grade presidential candidates on farm and food issues
DISPATCHES
Explosive report indicates Trump loans from Deutsche Bank were backed by Russia;
Trump tipped off Mar-a-Lago pals to expect ‘big’ Iran action;
Trump claims tweets are sufficient notice to Congess that US may strike Iran;
Trump threats against Iranian sites raise potential of war crimes;
Iranian general killed by Trump may have been working on peace deal;
Trump stil ‘underwater’ in key battleground states;
Pence claims Iran ties to 9/11 attacks;
Dem trying to flip Graham’s Senate seat reports record haul;
Iranian Americans, returning home from Canada, detained, interrogated by Border agents ...
ART CULLEN
The last bus stops in Iowa on Feb. 3
NORMAN SOLOMON
Progressives need a united front for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren
JILL RICHARDSON
The Education Department is ripping off defrauded students
JOHN YOUNG
Happy New Year from the conserva-myth party
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Greider told the people
TOM JOHNSTON
Democrats can win the Medicare for All debate and the 2020 elections
N. GUNASEKARAN
Trade war was deadly to Asia’s poor
MICHAEL WINSHIP
In Trump world, fiction is just as strange as truth
KARL GROSSMAN
Trump gets Space Force to assert domination
BOB BURNETT
2019: Ten reasons to be thankful
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Scrooge lives: A new chapter if the history of food stamps
SAM URETSKY
Trump followers living in another world
SETH SANDRONSKY
Business and the rising minimum wage
WAYNE O’LEARY
The trouble with Obamacare
JOHN BUELL
Australia: The fire this time
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
“Dreaming of a White Christmas,” as sung by Kim Jong Un
KENT PATERSON
Who really rules El Paso?
ROB PATTERSON
OK, so Quentin Tarantino has some talent ...
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
When the narrative gets kidnapped
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life is an anti-war triumph
GENE NICHOL
Trump’s economic cruelty
and more ...
Saturday, December 14, 2019
Trump Isn’t a Populist
The editor of The Progressive Populist gets provoked every time he hears Donald Trump described as a populist. Trump is a con man who inherited a real estate empire from his father and he has kept it going through a series of bankruptcies that showed, among other things, he couldn’t make a profit running casinos. He also wouldn’t pay his contractors without forcing them to go to court. Trump appears to have remained afloat with the backing of Eastern European oligarchs, which is probably why he is so desperate to avoid the release of his income tax returns. His former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, before heading to federal prison for offenses that include conspiring with Trump to violate federal election laws and lying to Congress about efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, testified to Congress that Trump altered his tax and loan records to suit his business needs.
Corporate media calls Trump a populist because corporate executives won’t let reporters call him what he is — a fascist who has embraced hyper-nationalism, admires authoritarian leaders, cuts regulations for corporations and puts former executives and lobbyists in charge of the agencies that are supposed to regulate corporations, and he suggests violence may be used in politics if he doesn’t get his way. He also has had mob ties throughout his career as a real estate developer.
There are clear differences between populism and fascism. Populism is a movement that rose in the late 1800s as a reaction to the rapid industrialization of the US during the Gilded Age. It called for the government to protect working people, farmers and small businesses against monied interests, particularly railroads and what were then called “trusts,” which we now know as corporations. The little guys needed protection against the plutocrats and oligarchs who own and control the corporations (and the government).
The Populists started in the 1880s, and appealed to farmers and merchants in the South, Midwest and Western states to unite in an attempt to regulate the railroads and trusts.
The People’s Party put up candidates for state and national offices in more than 20 states in the 1890s but after the election of 1896 moved into the Democratic and Republican parties and had an influence on their progressive wings of those national parties. The Populists had called for collective bargaining, federal regulation of railroads, an expansionary monetary policy and a Sub-Treasury Plan, which called for federally controlled warehouses to aid farmers, as well as a graduated income tax, direct election of senators, a shorter workweek and establishment of a postal savings system.
You can see those elements in the accomplishments of the Progressive Era of the early 1900s and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs in the 1930s, through the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. The Populists also supported public schools and universities and sought diffusion of scientific and technological knowledge so farmers could make use of it. The Populists also tried to form coalitions between white and black farmers in the South, which resulted in a backlash by white supremacists that brought about the Jim Crow laws in the 1890s.
Trump has demonstrated the Grand Oligarch Party’s tilt toward fascism, but the GOP has been moving in that direction since American plutocrats, who had been looking for an opportunity to overturn the New Deal since the end of World War II, put up Ronald Reagan to run for president in 1980.
The Republican Party under Reagan expressed contempt for “liberal” media and, once elected, his National Labor Relations Board undermined organized labor and his Federal Communications Commission in 1987 did away with the Fairness Doctrine, which had been established in 1949 to require broadcasters to present controversial issues of public importance in a manner that was honest, equitable and balanced. The doctrine was designed to encourage diversity of opinions and prevent the control of broadcasters that allowed fascist governments to consolidate their hold on power in Europe in the 1930s.
Since radio and TV stations no longer are required to provide balanced coverage, talk radio has come to be dominated by right-wing voices, particularly in rural areas, where one can drive most of the day without hearing a good word about liberals or Democrats on the car radio. That may be one reason rural areas increasingly vote Republican. Air America Radio was established in 2004 to provide a liberal alternative to right wingers such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. At its height, Air America’s most popular show, The Al Franken show, was carried by 92 affiliates and had 1.4 million weekly listeners before he was elected to the Senate in 2008. The Rush Limbaugh Show was carried by more than 600 affiliates and had between 14 million and 20 million weekly listeners.
With the decline of local newspapers, that leaves struggling periodicals like us and the Internet as refuges for progressive views.
As House Democrats move toward impeachment of Trump, Republican members of the Intelligence and Judiciary committees have offered little substantial defenses, mainly complaining about the process, making procedural objections and dilatory motions and demanding record votes on routine actions to obstruct the flow of the hearings.
Republicans won’t support the impeachment in the House and few, if any, Republicans will vote for Trump’s removal in the Senate trial. But Democrats must do their duty, and they should go ahead and throw in the obstruction of justice charges Robert Mueller’s report proposed. Trump is corrupt to the core and Republicans carry guilt by their continued association.
Ultimately, voters will decide if Trump is fit to be president, and if his Republican enablers are fit to remain in Congress. Trump remains unpopular, which is why Republicans want to limit who makes it to the polls. Make sure you and your friends are registered.
When it comes to actual populists running for president, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren effectively carry progressive populist positions and progressive Democrats should support one or the other of them in the upcoming Democratic primaries, particularly with the Iowa caucuses coming up Feb. 3. We’ve heard many Democrats express misgivings about voting for Sanders or Warren, fearing if they don’t nominate a centrist it might give Trump an advantage next November. Don’t believe it. Voters want government to help them, and Medicare for All, which both Sanders and Warren are proposing, would be a great deal for most businesses as well as workers and their families who will pay less than they now pay for insurance that require deductibles and co-pays. Both Sanders and Warren propose to expand Medicare so it pays nearly all health costs for every American without deductibles, with wealthy tax dodgers would pay the balance.
Medicare for All was overwhelmingly popular among Democrats and independent voters, and even among Republicans, before the health industrial complex started spending millions of dollars to spread disinformation about what Medicare for All would do. Polls have shown a drop in support for Medicare for All, but progressives need to get the truth out — the current US system costs twice as much per capita as Canadian health care, and that’s with the US sytem leaving 87 million Americans uninsured or underinsured. — JMC
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us
Copyright © 2019 The Progressive Populist
Corporate media calls Trump a populist because corporate executives won’t let reporters call him what he is — a fascist who has embraced hyper-nationalism, admires authoritarian leaders, cuts regulations for corporations and puts former executives and lobbyists in charge of the agencies that are supposed to regulate corporations, and he suggests violence may be used in politics if he doesn’t get his way. He also has had mob ties throughout his career as a real estate developer.
There are clear differences between populism and fascism. Populism is a movement that rose in the late 1800s as a reaction to the rapid industrialization of the US during the Gilded Age. It called for the government to protect working people, farmers and small businesses against monied interests, particularly railroads and what were then called “trusts,” which we now know as corporations. The little guys needed protection against the plutocrats and oligarchs who own and control the corporations (and the government).
The Populists started in the 1880s, and appealed to farmers and merchants in the South, Midwest and Western states to unite in an attempt to regulate the railroads and trusts.
The People’s Party put up candidates for state and national offices in more than 20 states in the 1890s but after the election of 1896 moved into the Democratic and Republican parties and had an influence on their progressive wings of those national parties. The Populists had called for collective bargaining, federal regulation of railroads, an expansionary monetary policy and a Sub-Treasury Plan, which called for federally controlled warehouses to aid farmers, as well as a graduated income tax, direct election of senators, a shorter workweek and establishment of a postal savings system.
You can see those elements in the accomplishments of the Progressive Era of the early 1900s and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs in the 1930s, through the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. The Populists also supported public schools and universities and sought diffusion of scientific and technological knowledge so farmers could make use of it. The Populists also tried to form coalitions between white and black farmers in the South, which resulted in a backlash by white supremacists that brought about the Jim Crow laws in the 1890s.
Trump has demonstrated the Grand Oligarch Party’s tilt toward fascism, but the GOP has been moving in that direction since American plutocrats, who had been looking for an opportunity to overturn the New Deal since the end of World War II, put up Ronald Reagan to run for president in 1980.
The Republican Party under Reagan expressed contempt for “liberal” media and, once elected, his National Labor Relations Board undermined organized labor and his Federal Communications Commission in 1987 did away with the Fairness Doctrine, which had been established in 1949 to require broadcasters to present controversial issues of public importance in a manner that was honest, equitable and balanced. The doctrine was designed to encourage diversity of opinions and prevent the control of broadcasters that allowed fascist governments to consolidate their hold on power in Europe in the 1930s.
Since radio and TV stations no longer are required to provide balanced coverage, talk radio has come to be dominated by right-wing voices, particularly in rural areas, where one can drive most of the day without hearing a good word about liberals or Democrats on the car radio. That may be one reason rural areas increasingly vote Republican. Air America Radio was established in 2004 to provide a liberal alternative to right wingers such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. At its height, Air America’s most popular show, The Al Franken show, was carried by 92 affiliates and had 1.4 million weekly listeners before he was elected to the Senate in 2008. The Rush Limbaugh Show was carried by more than 600 affiliates and had between 14 million and 20 million weekly listeners.
With the decline of local newspapers, that leaves struggling periodicals like us and the Internet as refuges for progressive views.
As House Democrats move toward impeachment of Trump, Republican members of the Intelligence and Judiciary committees have offered little substantial defenses, mainly complaining about the process, making procedural objections and dilatory motions and demanding record votes on routine actions to obstruct the flow of the hearings.
Republicans won’t support the impeachment in the House and few, if any, Republicans will vote for Trump’s removal in the Senate trial. But Democrats must do their duty, and they should go ahead and throw in the obstruction of justice charges Robert Mueller’s report proposed. Trump is corrupt to the core and Republicans carry guilt by their continued association.
Ultimately, voters will decide if Trump is fit to be president, and if his Republican enablers are fit to remain in Congress. Trump remains unpopular, which is why Republicans want to limit who makes it to the polls. Make sure you and your friends are registered.
When it comes to actual populists running for president, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren effectively carry progressive populist positions and progressive Democrats should support one or the other of them in the upcoming Democratic primaries, particularly with the Iowa caucuses coming up Feb. 3. We’ve heard many Democrats express misgivings about voting for Sanders or Warren, fearing if they don’t nominate a centrist it might give Trump an advantage next November. Don’t believe it. Voters want government to help them, and Medicare for All, which both Sanders and Warren are proposing, would be a great deal for most businesses as well as workers and their families who will pay less than they now pay for insurance that require deductibles and co-pays. Both Sanders and Warren propose to expand Medicare so it pays nearly all health costs for every American without deductibles, with wealthy tax dodgers would pay the balance.
Medicare for All was overwhelmingly popular among Democrats and independent voters, and even among Republicans, before the health industrial complex started spending millions of dollars to spread disinformation about what Medicare for All would do. Polls have shown a drop in support for Medicare for All, but progressives need to get the truth out — the current US system costs twice as much per capita as Canadian health care, and that’s with the US sytem leaving 87 million Americans uninsured or underinsured. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2020
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us
Copyright © 2019 The Progressive Populist
Selections from the January 1-15, 2020 issue
COVER/Hal Crowther
Christmas at the madhouse: The straitjacket blues
EDITORIAL
Trump isn’t a populist
FRANK LINGO
Progressive propaganda: Private parts
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
A tale of two narratives
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Threats to farms and food — roundup the usual suspects
DISPATCHES
Deal reached on bill to replace NAFTA;
One-third of Americans delayed medical care over cost last year;
House sends bill to restore Voting Rights Act to roadblocked Senate;
N.R. Rep. George Holding to retire after district redrawn;
Dems say Trump ‘illegally withholding’ funding for Puerto Rico hurricane aid;
Trump brings war crimes pardonees to Fla. fundraiser;
Refugee advocates remember anniversary of child's death in US custody;
Moscow Mitch's boycott of legislating is angering one of his own: Chuck Grassley;
Lawsuit alleging private prison company used ICE detainees as 'captive labor force' goes forward;
Trump touts 'special relationship' with North Korea, which calls him 'heedless and erratic old man' ...
ART CULLEN
Biden appeals to rural voters over climate change
TRACEY L. ROGERS
Can plantations be redeemed?
JILL RICHARDSON
Is marijuana a gateway drug?
JOHN YOUNG
Gleam in Rick Perry’s eyes: King Trump
MAX B. SAWICKY
Everything you need to know about the next recession
TOM CONWAY
Corporations sell out workers’ safety for profit — with Trump as their ally
THOM HARTMANN
Why have no republicans turned on Trump?
JOEL D. JOSEPH
Ford Motor Company has lost its way
BOB BURNETT
The new normal
JOHN L. MICEK
Trump continues to manufacture lies
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
A shopper’s guide to costs, the health version
SAM URETSKY
When do pols pass their peak?
ALEX LAWSON
Why Bernie Sanders is backing Cory Booker’s plan to tackle Big Pharma’s soaring prices
WAYNE O’LEARY
Annals of inequality: The market factor
JOHN BUELL
The politics of the non-political fed
JASON SIBERT
Get a grip on nukes
N. GUNASEKARAN
‘Asia’s oldest democracy,’ Sri Lanka, faces dilemma
HEATHER SEGGEL
The trash is piling up
ROB PATTERSON
‘Mrs. Maisel’ is indeed marvelous
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
What goes around
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Dead woman walking: A capital film on capital punishment
SETH SANDRONSKY
A king’s ransom
JAMES G. KAHN
It’s time to end Medicare-for-All denial
Christmas at the madhouse: The straitjacket blues
EDITORIAL
Trump isn’t a populist
FRANK LINGO
Progressive propaganda: Private parts
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
A tale of two narratives
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Threats to farms and food — roundup the usual suspects
DISPATCHES
Deal reached on bill to replace NAFTA;
One-third of Americans delayed medical care over cost last year;
House sends bill to restore Voting Rights Act to roadblocked Senate;
N.R. Rep. George Holding to retire after district redrawn;
Dems say Trump ‘illegally withholding’ funding for Puerto Rico hurricane aid;
Trump brings war crimes pardonees to Fla. fundraiser;
Refugee advocates remember anniversary of child's death in US custody;
Moscow Mitch's boycott of legislating is angering one of his own: Chuck Grassley;
Lawsuit alleging private prison company used ICE detainees as 'captive labor force' goes forward;
Trump touts 'special relationship' with North Korea, which calls him 'heedless and erratic old man' ...
ART CULLEN
Biden appeals to rural voters over climate change
TRACEY L. ROGERS
Can plantations be redeemed?
JILL RICHARDSON
Is marijuana a gateway drug?
JOHN YOUNG
Gleam in Rick Perry’s eyes: King Trump
MAX B. SAWICKY
Everything you need to know about the next recession
TOM CONWAY
Corporations sell out workers’ safety for profit — with Trump as their ally
THOM HARTMANN
Why have no republicans turned on Trump?
JOEL D. JOSEPH
Ford Motor Company has lost its way
BOB BURNETT
The new normal
JOHN L. MICEK
Trump continues to manufacture lies
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
A shopper’s guide to costs, the health version
SAM URETSKY
When do pols pass their peak?
ALEX LAWSON
Why Bernie Sanders is backing Cory Booker’s plan to tackle Big Pharma’s soaring prices
WAYNE O’LEARY
Annals of inequality: The market factor
JOHN BUELL
The politics of the non-political fed
JASON SIBERT
Get a grip on nukes
N. GUNASEKARAN
‘Asia’s oldest democracy,’ Sri Lanka, faces dilemma
HEATHER SEGGEL
The trash is piling up
ROB PATTERSON
‘Mrs. Maisel’ is indeed marvelous
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
What goes around
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Dead woman walking: A capital film on capital punishment
SETH SANDRONSKY
A king’s ransom
JAMES G. KAHN
It’s time to end Medicare-for-All denial
Friday, November 29, 2019
Editorial: Rule of Law Overrules Lies
You’ve heard the saying, “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.” Clearly that doesn’t work with Donald Trump or Republican members of Congress, who volunteer lies in defense of the president’s power grabs.
Two weeks of hearings by the Democrat-led House Intelligence Committee produced a lot of bluster by Republican Congress members as well as Trump’s tweets and statements trying to distract from the truth laid out by witnesses from the State Department and the National Security Council. They confirmed that Trump not only pressed Ukraine’s president to order an investigation of Joe Biden but also pursued a debunked claim that it was the Ukraine, not Russia, that conspired with Democrats to throw the 2016 election..
Trump and his allies falsely claim that Biden, as vice president, stopped a potential prosecution of his son, Hunter Biden, who was on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, by threatening to withhold a US government loan to Ukraine. Trump wanted to smear Joe Biden as corrupt. But Biden pushed for the ouster of an ineffective prosecutor, which was a policy of the US government and was coordinated with US allies, such as the European Union and International Monetary Fund. And the Ukrainian gas company was not under investigation at the time of Biden’s actions.
After Trump in mid-July ordered a pause in the distribution of $391 million in security assistance that Congress had appropriated, US officials in Kiev and D.C. scrambled to understand why the decision was made and sought to get it reversed before the authorization expired on Sept. 30.
Trump, in a July 25 phone call, stepped over the line when he asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “do us a favor” and investigate Biden, a potential rival in the 2020 election. Trump and his defenders have asserted this kind of “quid pro quo” is the normal give and take that takes place between governments.
Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, not only got Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to remove US Ambassador Marie Yovanovich because she wasn’t seen as a team player; Giuliani kept a back channel with Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Ukraine special envoy Kurt Volker, who pressed the Ukrainian president to issue a statement that he was opening investigations into Biden and the 2016 election. The US aid and/or a White House meeting with Trump was the bait.
President Zelensky had finally caved to the pressure and scheduled an interview with CNN on Sept. 13, at which he was expected to make the announcement of the investigation. But a few days before the interview, the funds were released after pressure from Congress, and the interview was canceled.
Trump insists that the CrowdStrike, a company that investigated hacking of the Democratic National Committeer (DNC), took the server to Ukraine, where he said CrowdStrike’s primary owner is located. The theory is that Ukrainians hacked into the DNC network in 2016 and framed Russia for it.
In fact, CrowdStrike is based in California and is a publicly traded American company co-founded by US-born George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch, who was born in Russia, is a US citizen with no connection to Ukraine, the company says. The DNC server data was copied and submitted to the FBI, the Washington Post reported.
The FBI and DNC disagree on whether the FBI requested access to the DNC’s servers. Former FBI director James B. Comey testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that the bureau made “multiple requests at different levels” to access the servers, but the DNC said the FBI never requested access. The DNC had CrowdStrike analyze its network and share findings with the FBI, which Comey called an acceptable substitute.
Cybersecurity expert Thomas Rid told the Post that “handing over the server” as Trump described could have destroyed evidence.
Thomas P. Bossert, Trump’s first homeland security adviser, said Sept. 29 that the president has been told the story is “completely debunked.” “The DNC server and that conspiracy theory has got to go,” Bossert said on ABC’s “This Week.” “If he continues to focus on that white whale, it’s going to bring him down.”
But Trump won’t let it go. It is one of those lies that demonstrate his reckless disregard for the truth, which has led him to make more than 13,435 false or misleading statements, many of them repeated on multiple occasions, as of Oct. 9, according to the Post’s Fact Checkers.. That’s an average of almost 22 false claims daily this past fall.
Some Republicans are resorting to the fallback position that what Trump did may be wrong, but it does not call for his impeachment and removal from office. However, extortion is a form of bribery, which is specifically mentioned in the Constitution as an impeachable crime.
And there are plenty of other impeachable acts the House can list in the Articles of Impeachment. Among them are various efforts to obstruct justice, detailed in Robert Mueller’s report, as well as his obstruction of the oversight role of Congress.
Lawyers for the House of Representatives accused Trump of trying to “obstruct his own impeachment” by claiming the authority to block his advisers from cooperating with congressional investigations. The House Judiciary Committee is trying to secure testimony from former White House Counsel Don McGahn, as he testified in special counsel Mueller’s investigation, which laid out 10 instances of apparent obstruction of justice.
The House’s lawyers cited the current top White House counsel’s declaration that the Trump administration would refuse all cooperation with the House’s impeachment inquiry, calling it “illegitimate” and “invalid.” Trump directed McGahn not to comply, claiming his former senior advisers have “absolute immunity” from testifying before Congress.
On Nov. 25, a US District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson disagreed and ordered McGahn to comply with the subpoena, ruling that “no one is above the law,” but the decision was expected to be appealed by the Department of Justice.
Trump also has refused to allow his income tax returns to be released to the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, as the law requires. (He also had promised before his election he would make the tax returns public.)
After the first week of hearings, an ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted Nov. 16-17 found 70% of Americans think Trump’s request to a foreign leader to investigate his political rival was wrong, but only a slim majority, 51%, believe he should be impeached and removed from office. Most other polls appear to show Americans split over impeachment. On Nov. 26, after the second week of hearings, the average of polls reviewed by FiveThirtyEight showed 48.6% support impeachment and 44.1% don’t support it.
Impeachment probably will not result in the removal of Trump from office, unless voters put pressure on Republican senators who are the bulwark against the Democratic prosecution. Democrats need at least 20 Republican senators to vote to remove Trump.
If Republican senators choose to defend their president’s power grab against republican principals, Democrats should not only run on “normal” policy initiatives to improve health care, economic opportunities for the working class and building green infrastructure to address climate change, but Dems should also focus on taking back the Senate and the White House, and restoring the rule of law. — JMC
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Copyright © 2019 The Progressive Populist
Two weeks of hearings by the Democrat-led House Intelligence Committee produced a lot of bluster by Republican Congress members as well as Trump’s tweets and statements trying to distract from the truth laid out by witnesses from the State Department and the National Security Council. They confirmed that Trump not only pressed Ukraine’s president to order an investigation of Joe Biden but also pursued a debunked claim that it was the Ukraine, not Russia, that conspired with Democrats to throw the 2016 election..
Trump and his allies falsely claim that Biden, as vice president, stopped a potential prosecution of his son, Hunter Biden, who was on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, by threatening to withhold a US government loan to Ukraine. Trump wanted to smear Joe Biden as corrupt. But Biden pushed for the ouster of an ineffective prosecutor, which was a policy of the US government and was coordinated with US allies, such as the European Union and International Monetary Fund. And the Ukrainian gas company was not under investigation at the time of Biden’s actions.
After Trump in mid-July ordered a pause in the distribution of $391 million in security assistance that Congress had appropriated, US officials in Kiev and D.C. scrambled to understand why the decision was made and sought to get it reversed before the authorization expired on Sept. 30.
Trump, in a July 25 phone call, stepped over the line when he asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “do us a favor” and investigate Biden, a potential rival in the 2020 election. Trump and his defenders have asserted this kind of “quid pro quo” is the normal give and take that takes place between governments.
Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, not only got Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to remove US Ambassador Marie Yovanovich because she wasn’t seen as a team player; Giuliani kept a back channel with Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Ukraine special envoy Kurt Volker, who pressed the Ukrainian president to issue a statement that he was opening investigations into Biden and the 2016 election. The US aid and/or a White House meeting with Trump was the bait.
President Zelensky had finally caved to the pressure and scheduled an interview with CNN on Sept. 13, at which he was expected to make the announcement of the investigation. But a few days before the interview, the funds were released after pressure from Congress, and the interview was canceled.
Trump insists that the CrowdStrike, a company that investigated hacking of the Democratic National Committeer (DNC), took the server to Ukraine, where he said CrowdStrike’s primary owner is located. The theory is that Ukrainians hacked into the DNC network in 2016 and framed Russia for it.
In fact, CrowdStrike is based in California and is a publicly traded American company co-founded by US-born George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch, who was born in Russia, is a US citizen with no connection to Ukraine, the company says. The DNC server data was copied and submitted to the FBI, the Washington Post reported.
The FBI and DNC disagree on whether the FBI requested access to the DNC’s servers. Former FBI director James B. Comey testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that the bureau made “multiple requests at different levels” to access the servers, but the DNC said the FBI never requested access. The DNC had CrowdStrike analyze its network and share findings with the FBI, which Comey called an acceptable substitute.
Cybersecurity expert Thomas Rid told the Post that “handing over the server” as Trump described could have destroyed evidence.
Thomas P. Bossert, Trump’s first homeland security adviser, said Sept. 29 that the president has been told the story is “completely debunked.” “The DNC server and that conspiracy theory has got to go,” Bossert said on ABC’s “This Week.” “If he continues to focus on that white whale, it’s going to bring him down.”
But Trump won’t let it go. It is one of those lies that demonstrate his reckless disregard for the truth, which has led him to make more than 13,435 false or misleading statements, many of them repeated on multiple occasions, as of Oct. 9, according to the Post’s Fact Checkers.. That’s an average of almost 22 false claims daily this past fall.
Some Republicans are resorting to the fallback position that what Trump did may be wrong, but it does not call for his impeachment and removal from office. However, extortion is a form of bribery, which is specifically mentioned in the Constitution as an impeachable crime.
And there are plenty of other impeachable acts the House can list in the Articles of Impeachment. Among them are various efforts to obstruct justice, detailed in Robert Mueller’s report, as well as his obstruction of the oversight role of Congress.
Lawyers for the House of Representatives accused Trump of trying to “obstruct his own impeachment” by claiming the authority to block his advisers from cooperating with congressional investigations. The House Judiciary Committee is trying to secure testimony from former White House Counsel Don McGahn, as he testified in special counsel Mueller’s investigation, which laid out 10 instances of apparent obstruction of justice.
The House’s lawyers cited the current top White House counsel’s declaration that the Trump administration would refuse all cooperation with the House’s impeachment inquiry, calling it “illegitimate” and “invalid.” Trump directed McGahn not to comply, claiming his former senior advisers have “absolute immunity” from testifying before Congress.
On Nov. 25, a US District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson disagreed and ordered McGahn to comply with the subpoena, ruling that “no one is above the law,” but the decision was expected to be appealed by the Department of Justice.
Trump also has refused to allow his income tax returns to be released to the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, as the law requires. (He also had promised before his election he would make the tax returns public.)
After the first week of hearings, an ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted Nov. 16-17 found 70% of Americans think Trump’s request to a foreign leader to investigate his political rival was wrong, but only a slim majority, 51%, believe he should be impeached and removed from office. Most other polls appear to show Americans split over impeachment. On Nov. 26, after the second week of hearings, the average of polls reviewed by FiveThirtyEight showed 48.6% support impeachment and 44.1% don’t support it.
Impeachment probably will not result in the removal of Trump from office, unless voters put pressure on Republican senators who are the bulwark against the Democratic prosecution. Democrats need at least 20 Republican senators to vote to remove Trump.
If Republican senators choose to defend their president’s power grab against republican principals, Democrats should not only run on “normal” policy initiatives to improve health care, economic opportunities for the working class and building green infrastructure to address climate change, but Dems should also focus on taking back the Senate and the White House, and restoring the rule of law. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2019
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us
Copyright © 2019 The Progressive Populist
Selections from the December 15, 2019 issue
COVER/Jeff Bryant
Striking teachers are fighting for much more than paychecks
EDITORIAL
Rule of law overrules lies
FRANK LINGO
Progressive propaganda, please
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Vaping: When kids become lab experiments
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Try new things in the new year
DISPATCHES
Middle-class Americans getting crushed by health insurance costs;
Southern governors say Dems can win if they stick to kitchen-table issues;
Kentucky GOP moves to strip new Dem governor’s authority;
Polls show close races in key states;
Trump starts sending refugees to Guatemala;
Company behind Keystone pipeline lowballs leak;
‘Pro-life’ group embraces death penalty;
AOC calls on solar company to rehire workers fired after unionizing;
Arizona jury acquits migrant rescuer;
Latino voters hope to flex numbers in California primary;
Justice Department empowers monopolists in media & entertainment ...
ART CULLEN
Yovanovitch reminds us of decency
JILL RICHARDSON
Explaining Trump’s racism
JOHN YOUNG
If another president did (even one of) these things
LINDSAY KOSHGARIAN
It’s our choice: Medicare for All, or endless war?
ANDREA FLYNN
What breast cancer taught me about health care
TOM CONWAY
Corporate spies keep an eye on organized labor
BOB BURNETT
Ranking the Democratic candidates
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Not all politics is national
NEGIN OWLIAEI
Time for a billionaire ban
JIM VAN DER POL
Two farm crises
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Cassandra on the status quo
SAM URETSKY
Antibiotic resistance: The superbugs are fighting back
PAUL ARMENTANO
Americans love CBD, but it’s a wild west
WAYNE O’LEARY
The Bernie blackout
JOHN BUELL
How’s that individual responsibility working for you?
HEATHER SEGGEL
PSPS, I don’t love you
KENT PATERSON
Two clashing visions for El Paso’s future
DAVID SCHMIDT
The Left got “Joker” dead wrong: A progressive defense of the film
ROB PATTERSON
Escaping into the Hollywood view of Washington
BOOK REVIEW/Seth Sandronsky
Abolish this
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Pacino, Paquin and the Gangs of New York are all here: Mean seats
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Ahead of his time
and more ...
Striking teachers are fighting for much more than paychecks
EDITORIAL
Rule of law overrules lies
FRANK LINGO
Progressive propaganda, please
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Vaping: When kids become lab experiments
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Try new things in the new year
DISPATCHES
Middle-class Americans getting crushed by health insurance costs;
Southern governors say Dems can win if they stick to kitchen-table issues;
Kentucky GOP moves to strip new Dem governor’s authority;
Polls show close races in key states;
Trump starts sending refugees to Guatemala;
Company behind Keystone pipeline lowballs leak;
‘Pro-life’ group embraces death penalty;
AOC calls on solar company to rehire workers fired after unionizing;
Arizona jury acquits migrant rescuer;
Latino voters hope to flex numbers in California primary;
Justice Department empowers monopolists in media & entertainment ...
ART CULLEN
Yovanovitch reminds us of decency
JILL RICHARDSON
Explaining Trump’s racism
JOHN YOUNG
If another president did (even one of) these things
LINDSAY KOSHGARIAN
It’s our choice: Medicare for All, or endless war?
ANDREA FLYNN
What breast cancer taught me about health care
TOM CONWAY
Corporate spies keep an eye on organized labor
BOB BURNETT
Ranking the Democratic candidates
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Not all politics is national
NEGIN OWLIAEI
Time for a billionaire ban
JIM VAN DER POL
Two farm crises
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Cassandra on the status quo
SAM URETSKY
Antibiotic resistance: The superbugs are fighting back
PAUL ARMENTANO
Americans love CBD, but it’s a wild west
WAYNE O’LEARY
The Bernie blackout
JOHN BUELL
How’s that individual responsibility working for you?
HEATHER SEGGEL
PSPS, I don’t love you
KENT PATERSON
Two clashing visions for El Paso’s future
DAVID SCHMIDT
The Left got “Joker” dead wrong: A progressive defense of the film
ROB PATTERSON
Escaping into the Hollywood view of Washington
BOOK REVIEW/Seth Sandronsky
Abolish this
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Pacino, Paquin and the Gangs of New York are all here: Mean seats
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Ahead of his time
and more ...
Friday, November 15, 2019
Editorial: The Right Enemies
Say this about Elizabeth Warren: She scares the right people.
Billionaires are up in arms about her plans to tax their wealth, which is one of the elements of her plan to pay for Medicare for All. One of the aggrieved billionaires, hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman, wept on CNBC’s “Halftime Report” Nov. 4 at the thought that Warren might become president and make him pay higher taxes. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, chided Warren for using “some pretty harsh words, you know, some would say vilifies successful people.” Then billionaire Michael Bloomberg announced he was weighing the possibility of jumping into the Democratic primary field, apparently because he was not impressed with the selection.
There is no apparent groundswell of support for Bloomberg, who served two terms as a mayor of New York City from 2001 to 2009 as a Republican before switching to independent to run for a third term in 2009. But he decided he’s the only one who can beat Trump on the Democratic ticket.
Health industry executives are really scared at the threat Warren and Bernie Sanders represent to their billions of dollars in profits, so they’re lining up funds to brainwash the electorate into believing that it is impractical to expand Medicare to cover everybody.
As former insurance executive Wendell Potter notes in our cover story, big insurance, drug and hospital companies have hired a PR firm to create and run a front group called the “Partnership for America’s Health Care Future,” which, with allies such as the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, will work to convince voters that expanding Medicare to cover everybody can’t be done without a significant tax hike on middle-income earners. And the propaganda seems to work.
In January 2019, a national poll released by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation found that two-thirds of Americans support a national health insurance program that would eliminate premiums and reduce out-of-pocket expenses and they supported “Medicare for All” 56% to 42%.
But when they were told that a government-run system could lead to delays in getting care or higher taxes, support plunged to 26% and 37%, respectively. Support fell to 32% if it would threaten the current Medicare program.
That represents the power of lying — and misrepresenting what Medicare for All would do is the last refuge of the health industry scoundrels. In fact, the proposals by Sens. Sanders and Warren would improve the current Medicare program for seniors, as well as younger Americans, by making it comprehensive, covering everybody and doing away with co-pays and deductibles — and they could accomplish it by simply re-routing through Medicare money that now is spent on insurance premiums.
Warren produced a plan on Nov. 1 that would pay for Medicare for All with higher taxes on businesses, financial firms, wealthy Americans and corporations that would essentially replace the premiums American businesses and individuals now spend on private insurance. Bernie Sanders would pay for the Medicare expansion with a 7.5% payroll tax on businesses and 4% tax on workers’ income.
Warren noted that families are getting crushed by health costs. For years she studied bankruptcies and found that the number one reason families were going broke was because of medical bills they could not pay — and three quarters of those who declared bankruptcy after an illness were people who already had health insurance. No other industrialized nation has this problem.
An average family of four with employer coverage spends $12,378 per year on health care, Warren noted. This includes employee premium contributions and out of pocket costs in 2018. And the figure has increased every year. The family would pay $844 under Sanders’ plan and nothing under Warren’s plan.
Employers who now provide coverage for their workers would also see savings. They now pay, on average, $5,500 toward each employee’s annual premium and $750 in Medicare payroll tax for an employee earning $50,000 annually. Under Sanders’ plan the employer’s cost would decline to $3,750 for an employee who earned $50,000. And skinflint employers who don’t provide insurance for their workers would finally have to ante up. Warren expects businesses to pay slightly less than what they currently pay for health care, but she would exempt firms with less than 50 employees. Sanders would exempt the first $2 million of payroll.
Of course, ultimately the tax structure to support Medicare for All would be up to Congress, starting with the House Ways and Means Committee.
Critics use 10-year totals to scare voters, claiming that expanding Medicare to cover everybody could cost $35 trillion over the next decade, but we’re already at that spending level, as the US spent $3.65 trillion, or $11,121 per person, in 2018, according to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Warren’s plan counts on cost savings, which gets a skeptical reaction from critics, but there appears to be plenty of room for savings as the US already spends twice as much, per person, as Canada and most other countries that have national health care — and that’s while leaving 87 million Americans uninsured or underinsured. (The next-biggest spender is Germany, whose $5,986 average expenditure is 53.8% of the US average, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.)
Nearly 60% of our health care costs already are paid from public money that finance Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration, coverage for public employees, elected officials, military personnel and so forth.
One-third of the nation’s health care spending go to private health insurance premiums paid by businesses and individuals. Another 10% of health care spending came directly from the pockets of Americans on copays and deductibles.
And administrative costs, much of which are spent on billing and paperwork, take up approximately a quarter of health-care revenues in the US, Drs. Stephanie Woolandler and David Himmelstein reported in 2017. They estimate that single-payer reform could save approximately $503 billion annually in administrative costs.
Spending on hospitals, doctors and other clinic services was $2.16 trillion, holding steady at 59% of total health care spending.
National health care is by no means a radical program. It has been a Democratic priority since President Franklin D. Roosevelt included “The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health” in the Second Bill of Rights he proposed in his State of the Union address on Jan. 11, 1944. Harry Truman called for universal health care as part of his Fair Deal proposal in 1949, but conservatives blocked it in Congress. When Lyndon Johnson finally got Congress to approve Medicare in 1965 as part of his Great Society program, the plan was to start offering health coverage to seniors aged 65 and older. Then, in succeeding years, the eligibility age was supposed to move down to eventually cover everybody.
With Donald Trump at historic levels of unpopularity, and several vulnerable Republicans up for re-election in the Senate, Democrats have an historic opportunity to move ahead on finally closing the gap on Medicare. If it takes vilifying a few billionaires who don’t want to do their part, so be it. — JMC
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Copyright © 2019 The Progressive Populist
Billionaires are up in arms about her plans to tax their wealth, which is one of the elements of her plan to pay for Medicare for All. One of the aggrieved billionaires, hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman, wept on CNBC’s “Halftime Report” Nov. 4 at the thought that Warren might become president and make him pay higher taxes. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, chided Warren for using “some pretty harsh words, you know, some would say vilifies successful people.” Then billionaire Michael Bloomberg announced he was weighing the possibility of jumping into the Democratic primary field, apparently because he was not impressed with the selection.
There is no apparent groundswell of support for Bloomberg, who served two terms as a mayor of New York City from 2001 to 2009 as a Republican before switching to independent to run for a third term in 2009. But he decided he’s the only one who can beat Trump on the Democratic ticket.
Health industry executives are really scared at the threat Warren and Bernie Sanders represent to their billions of dollars in profits, so they’re lining up funds to brainwash the electorate into believing that it is impractical to expand Medicare to cover everybody.
As former insurance executive Wendell Potter notes in our cover story, big insurance, drug and hospital companies have hired a PR firm to create and run a front group called the “Partnership for America’s Health Care Future,” which, with allies such as the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, will work to convince voters that expanding Medicare to cover everybody can’t be done without a significant tax hike on middle-income earners. And the propaganda seems to work.
In January 2019, a national poll released by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation found that two-thirds of Americans support a national health insurance program that would eliminate premiums and reduce out-of-pocket expenses and they supported “Medicare for All” 56% to 42%.
But when they were told that a government-run system could lead to delays in getting care or higher taxes, support plunged to 26% and 37%, respectively. Support fell to 32% if it would threaten the current Medicare program.
That represents the power of lying — and misrepresenting what Medicare for All would do is the last refuge of the health industry scoundrels. In fact, the proposals by Sens. Sanders and Warren would improve the current Medicare program for seniors, as well as younger Americans, by making it comprehensive, covering everybody and doing away with co-pays and deductibles — and they could accomplish it by simply re-routing through Medicare money that now is spent on insurance premiums.
Warren produced a plan on Nov. 1 that would pay for Medicare for All with higher taxes on businesses, financial firms, wealthy Americans and corporations that would essentially replace the premiums American businesses and individuals now spend on private insurance. Bernie Sanders would pay for the Medicare expansion with a 7.5% payroll tax on businesses and 4% tax on workers’ income.
Warren noted that families are getting crushed by health costs. For years she studied bankruptcies and found that the number one reason families were going broke was because of medical bills they could not pay — and three quarters of those who declared bankruptcy after an illness were people who already had health insurance. No other industrialized nation has this problem.
An average family of four with employer coverage spends $12,378 per year on health care, Warren noted. This includes employee premium contributions and out of pocket costs in 2018. And the figure has increased every year. The family would pay $844 under Sanders’ plan and nothing under Warren’s plan.
Employers who now provide coverage for their workers would also see savings. They now pay, on average, $5,500 toward each employee’s annual premium and $750 in Medicare payroll tax for an employee earning $50,000 annually. Under Sanders’ plan the employer’s cost would decline to $3,750 for an employee who earned $50,000. And skinflint employers who don’t provide insurance for their workers would finally have to ante up. Warren expects businesses to pay slightly less than what they currently pay for health care, but she would exempt firms with less than 50 employees. Sanders would exempt the first $2 million of payroll.
Of course, ultimately the tax structure to support Medicare for All would be up to Congress, starting with the House Ways and Means Committee.
Critics use 10-year totals to scare voters, claiming that expanding Medicare to cover everybody could cost $35 trillion over the next decade, but we’re already at that spending level, as the US spent $3.65 trillion, or $11,121 per person, in 2018, according to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Warren’s plan counts on cost savings, which gets a skeptical reaction from critics, but there appears to be plenty of room for savings as the US already spends twice as much, per person, as Canada and most other countries that have national health care — and that’s while leaving 87 million Americans uninsured or underinsured. (The next-biggest spender is Germany, whose $5,986 average expenditure is 53.8% of the US average, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.)
Nearly 60% of our health care costs already are paid from public money that finance Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration, coverage for public employees, elected officials, military personnel and so forth.
One-third of the nation’s health care spending go to private health insurance premiums paid by businesses and individuals. Another 10% of health care spending came directly from the pockets of Americans on copays and deductibles.
And administrative costs, much of which are spent on billing and paperwork, take up approximately a quarter of health-care revenues in the US, Drs. Stephanie Woolandler and David Himmelstein reported in 2017. They estimate that single-payer reform could save approximately $503 billion annually in administrative costs.
Spending on hospitals, doctors and other clinic services was $2.16 trillion, holding steady at 59% of total health care spending.
National health care is by no means a radical program. It has been a Democratic priority since President Franklin D. Roosevelt included “The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health” in the Second Bill of Rights he proposed in his State of the Union address on Jan. 11, 1944. Harry Truman called for universal health care as part of his Fair Deal proposal in 1949, but conservatives blocked it in Congress. When Lyndon Johnson finally got Congress to approve Medicare in 1965 as part of his Great Society program, the plan was to start offering health coverage to seniors aged 65 and older. Then, in succeeding years, the eligibility age was supposed to move down to eventually cover everybody.
With Donald Trump at historic levels of unpopularity, and several vulnerable Republicans up for re-election in the Senate, Democrats have an historic opportunity to move ahead on finally closing the gap on Medicare. If it takes vilifying a few billionaires who don’t want to do their part, so be it. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2019
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us
Copyright © 2019 The Progressive Populist
Selections from the December 1, 2019 issue
COVER/Wendell Potter
How health insurance industry allies will lie about Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare for All Plan
EDITORIAL
The right enemies
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Secular urge, religious language
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Thanks for caring
DISPATCHES
Trump must pay $2 million to charities over misuse of his foundation;
Civiqs poll of battleground states shows tight prez race, no matter who Dems nominate;
Many undecided voters in ‘Blue Wall’ states;
Estimated 15,600 deaths result from GOP blocking Medicaid expansion;
Trump ends Filipino WW2 vets program
Ukraine expert says Mulvaney held up missile sles to Ukraine to avoid upsetting Russia;
At Rick Perry's suggestion, 2 political backers get Ukraine gas deal;
Senate Republicans ready to rubber stamp worst Trump judge appointee yet;
Trump hotels rake in millions from Republicans eager to suck up;
New Chinese trade deal might make chicken a booby trap ...
ART CULLEN
Impeachment is not the issue in Iowa
BEN LILLISTON
NAFTA’s empty promises
JILL RICHARDSON
We need publicly owned utilities
JOHN YOUNG
Un-American to boo Trump? Well, lock us up
JOHN L. MICEK
Trump and Republicans are weak, even on friendly turf
ROBERT P. ALVAREZ
Republicans, not Russians, threaten our elections
SAM PIZZIGATI
How much ‘inequality tax’ are you paying?
KEITH COMBS
One way to honor vets? Protect the Postal Service
THOM HARTMANN
A Democracy-killing duo: How the Supreme Court and the morbidity rich are ruining Democracy in America
TOM CONWAY
NAFTA is an accomplice to murder
JOEL D. JOSEPH
Japan-US trade agreement is weak and unconstitutional
SETH SANDRONSKY
California burning
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
A note on the limits of Uncle Sam
SAM URETSKY
Can dogs help sell a presidential candidate?
GENE NICHOL
Obama and Cummings
WAYNE O’LEARY
Annals of inequality: the Trump interlude
JOHN BUELL
Chile and 9/11 (1973)
FRANK LINGO
EPA ignores toxic PCBs in schools
JASON SIBERT
International cooperation takes a break during the Trump era
ERIC BOEHLERT
Trump’s reelection campaign spreads lies online — and the press touts it as savvy
ROB PATTERSON
Listening to music while driving
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
The lies in true crime
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
All-aboard the freedom train: ‘Harriet’ is real life African American action hero
RON NICHOLS
‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ and the GOP’s crisis of sonscience
and more ...
How health insurance industry allies will lie about Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare for All Plan
EDITORIAL
The right enemies
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Secular urge, religious language
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Thanks for caring
DISPATCHES
Trump must pay $2 million to charities over misuse of his foundation;
Civiqs poll of battleground states shows tight prez race, no matter who Dems nominate;
Many undecided voters in ‘Blue Wall’ states;
Estimated 15,600 deaths result from GOP blocking Medicaid expansion;
Trump ends Filipino WW2 vets program
Ukraine expert says Mulvaney held up missile sles to Ukraine to avoid upsetting Russia;
At Rick Perry's suggestion, 2 political backers get Ukraine gas deal;
Senate Republicans ready to rubber stamp worst Trump judge appointee yet;
Trump hotels rake in millions from Republicans eager to suck up;
New Chinese trade deal might make chicken a booby trap ...
ART CULLEN
Impeachment is not the issue in Iowa
BEN LILLISTON
NAFTA’s empty promises
JILL RICHARDSON
We need publicly owned utilities
JOHN YOUNG
Un-American to boo Trump? Well, lock us up
JOHN L. MICEK
Trump and Republicans are weak, even on friendly turf
ROBERT P. ALVAREZ
Republicans, not Russians, threaten our elections
SAM PIZZIGATI
How much ‘inequality tax’ are you paying?
KEITH COMBS
One way to honor vets? Protect the Postal Service
THOM HARTMANN
A Democracy-killing duo: How the Supreme Court and the morbidity rich are ruining Democracy in America
TOM CONWAY
NAFTA is an accomplice to murder
JOEL D. JOSEPH
Japan-US trade agreement is weak and unconstitutional
SETH SANDRONSKY
California burning
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
A note on the limits of Uncle Sam
SAM URETSKY
Can dogs help sell a presidential candidate?
GENE NICHOL
Obama and Cummings
WAYNE O’LEARY
Annals of inequality: the Trump interlude
JOHN BUELL
Chile and 9/11 (1973)
FRANK LINGO
EPA ignores toxic PCBs in schools
JASON SIBERT
International cooperation takes a break during the Trump era
ERIC BOEHLERT
Trump’s reelection campaign spreads lies online — and the press touts it as savvy
ROB PATTERSON
Listening to music while driving
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
The lies in true crime
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
All-aboard the freedom train: ‘Harriet’ is real life African American action hero
RON NICHOLS
‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ and the GOP’s crisis of sonscience
and more ...
Saturday, October 26, 2019
Editorial: Ways to Pay for Med4A
As Sen. Elizabeth Warren has gained a narrow lead in the Democratic presidential field, pundits and many of her Democratic rivals have demanded that she specify where she would get the money to pay for expanding Medicare to cover everybody. She has wisely avoided the trap.
Reporters want a sound bite that Medicare for All will increase taxes on the middle class. Sen. Warren explained at the Oct. 15 debate in Ohio that no middle-class family would see an increase in overall health care costs. “Costs will go up for the wealthy,” Warren said. “They will go up for big corporations. And for middle-class families, they will go down. I will not sign a bill into law that does not lower costs for middle-class families.”
There are many ways to come up with the estimated $3.5 trillion to pay for expansion of Medicare to cover practically all medical expenses for everybody. The health insurance industry, which stands to be the big loser, wants desperately to muddy the debate.
The Affordable Care Act was a good first step in providing access to health coverage for millions of people who don’t get health insurance with their job, and the ACA provides minimum standards for that coverage. But coverage that cost hundreds of dollars per month for adults, and more than $1,000 for a family, with copays and annual deductibles of $6,000 or more made it less affordable. Republicans’ answer was to allow insurance companies to offer “skinny” insurance plans that offer lower monthly premums, but also provide skimpier coverage.
Some moderates have proposed simply expanding Medicare to people in their 50s, so more people qualify for Medicare, and eventualy covering everybody. But that won’t do away with copayments, deductibles and the need for supplemental “Medigap” insurance.
In 2018, the last year with complete data, nearly 60 million Americans received Medicare benefits. Most were elderly residents, as well as nine million disabled people. Total spending was over $700 billion, or an average of $11,800 per recipient, Gerald Friedman, a professor of economics at University of Massachusetts Amherst noted. Of course, that group includes the oldest and most medically needy people.
Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP) notes that 60% of our health care system already is financed by public money, including federal and state taxes, property taxes and tax subsidies that pay for Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration, coverage for public employees, elected officials, military personnel, etc. There are also hefty tax subsidies to employers to help pay for their employees’ health insurance.
Public funds already funneled to Medicare and Medicaid would be retained. PNHP figures the gap between current public funding and what we would need for a universal health care system would be financed by a payroll tax on employers (about 7%) and an income tax on individuals (about 2%). The payroll tax would replace all other employer expenses for employees’ health care, which would be eliminated. The income tax would take the place of all current insurance premiums, co-pays, deductibles, and other out-of-pocket payments. For the vast majority of people, a 2% income tax is less than what they now pay for insurance premiums and out-of-pocket payments such as co-pays and deductibles, particularly if a family member has a serious illness.
Under the current system, the typical non-elderly family in the US spends $8,200 per year, or 11% of their income, on health care – not including employer contributions – but this can vary substantially by income, type of insurance, and health status, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports.
For example, a family of four with employer coverage with $50,000 income spends, on average, $7,450, or roughly 15% of income, on health care. This includes $2,100 in out-of-pocket costs, a $3,950 premium contribution, and $1,40 in state and federal taxes to fund health programs. Under the PNHP plan, the family would pay $1,000 more in tax instead of $3,950 in premiums.
Employers who now provide coverage would also see savings. They pay, on average, $5,500 toward each employee’s annual premium and $750 in Medicare payroll tax. That would decline to $3,500 for an employee who earned $50,000. And skinflint employers who don’t provide insurance for their workers would finally have to ante up.
A single person earning $50,000 who now obtains insurance on the individual market instead of through his or her employer now can expect to spend 20% of income — $10,000 — on health care. Medicare for All could cut that to $1,000.
Many pundits assume that organized labor won’t support Medicare for All, because they already have insurance as a result of collective bargaining, but many union leaders say they would be glad to have Medicare for All take health insurance out of contract negotiations, so they could spent their time pushing for better wages and other priorities. Protection of health-care benefits was a major issue in contract negotiations between US Steel and the United Steelworkers last year, as well as the recent UAW strike of GM
The AFL-CIO endorsed Medicare for All in 2009, but support varies from one union to another.
“While we would like to see universal health care, we want to make sure that there is a role for employer-bargained plans in that plan,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told reporters in July after the second Democratic debate. Though the union voted in 2017 on a resolution to “move expeditiously toward a single-payer system, like Medicare for All,” Trumka has endorsed a much narrower coverage expansion plan: lowering Medicare’s eligibility age to 55.
Other union leaders would rather take care of health coverage once and for all.
“Wouldn’t it be great if we had a single, universal access point for health care and we could instead spend our time bargaining for lower class sizes and wrap around services and increases to people’s pay?” said Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers, which endorsed Medicare for All earlier this year. “Wouldn’t it be great it if it wasn’t always dominated by health care fights?”
Jonathan Cohn, who covers health care for HuffPost, noted Oct 17 that progressives in New York have been promoting a state-level New York Health Act that is structurally similar to Sanders’ Medicare for All proposal. The New York plan would be financed with taxes on payrolls and non-wage income (interest, dividends, etc.).
The Rand Corporation noted that the New York bill, which hs not advanced in the legislature, would cover all residents of New York state with comprehensive health benefits (except long-term care benefits, which could be added later). Patients would have no deductibles, copayments, or other out-of-pocket payments at the point of service for covered benefits.
Rand researchers determined the NYHA as designed would reduce overall spending on medical care in New York. And as long as taxes to pay for the program were sufficiently progressive, the benefits would flow primarily away from the rich and toward lower- and middle-income groups.
Specifically, the richest 10% of New Yorkers would be paying more for health care on average, while the other 90% would pay the same or less, Cohn noted.
“That sounds a lot like the kind of plan that Sanders and Warren promise — which is to say, it sounds a lot like a plan that would work out well for most Americans.”
Make that deal for Americans, Democrats. — JMC
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Reporters want a sound bite that Medicare for All will increase taxes on the middle class. Sen. Warren explained at the Oct. 15 debate in Ohio that no middle-class family would see an increase in overall health care costs. “Costs will go up for the wealthy,” Warren said. “They will go up for big corporations. And for middle-class families, they will go down. I will not sign a bill into law that does not lower costs for middle-class families.”
There are many ways to come up with the estimated $3.5 trillion to pay for expansion of Medicare to cover practically all medical expenses for everybody. The health insurance industry, which stands to be the big loser, wants desperately to muddy the debate.
The Affordable Care Act was a good first step in providing access to health coverage for millions of people who don’t get health insurance with their job, and the ACA provides minimum standards for that coverage. But coverage that cost hundreds of dollars per month for adults, and more than $1,000 for a family, with copays and annual deductibles of $6,000 or more made it less affordable. Republicans’ answer was to allow insurance companies to offer “skinny” insurance plans that offer lower monthly premums, but also provide skimpier coverage.
Some moderates have proposed simply expanding Medicare to people in their 50s, so more people qualify for Medicare, and eventualy covering everybody. But that won’t do away with copayments, deductibles and the need for supplemental “Medigap” insurance.
In 2018, the last year with complete data, nearly 60 million Americans received Medicare benefits. Most were elderly residents, as well as nine million disabled people. Total spending was over $700 billion, or an average of $11,800 per recipient, Gerald Friedman, a professor of economics at University of Massachusetts Amherst noted. Of course, that group includes the oldest and most medically needy people.
Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP) notes that 60% of our health care system already is financed by public money, including federal and state taxes, property taxes and tax subsidies that pay for Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration, coverage for public employees, elected officials, military personnel, etc. There are also hefty tax subsidies to employers to help pay for their employees’ health insurance.
Public funds already funneled to Medicare and Medicaid would be retained. PNHP figures the gap between current public funding and what we would need for a universal health care system would be financed by a payroll tax on employers (about 7%) and an income tax on individuals (about 2%). The payroll tax would replace all other employer expenses for employees’ health care, which would be eliminated. The income tax would take the place of all current insurance premiums, co-pays, deductibles, and other out-of-pocket payments. For the vast majority of people, a 2% income tax is less than what they now pay for insurance premiums and out-of-pocket payments such as co-pays and deductibles, particularly if a family member has a serious illness.
Under the current system, the typical non-elderly family in the US spends $8,200 per year, or 11% of their income, on health care – not including employer contributions – but this can vary substantially by income, type of insurance, and health status, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports.
For example, a family of four with employer coverage with $50,000 income spends, on average, $7,450, or roughly 15% of income, on health care. This includes $2,100 in out-of-pocket costs, a $3,950 premium contribution, and $1,40 in state and federal taxes to fund health programs. Under the PNHP plan, the family would pay $1,000 more in tax instead of $3,950 in premiums.
Employers who now provide coverage would also see savings. They pay, on average, $5,500 toward each employee’s annual premium and $750 in Medicare payroll tax. That would decline to $3,500 for an employee who earned $50,000. And skinflint employers who don’t provide insurance for their workers would finally have to ante up.
A single person earning $50,000 who now obtains insurance on the individual market instead of through his or her employer now can expect to spend 20% of income — $10,000 — on health care. Medicare for All could cut that to $1,000.
Many pundits assume that organized labor won’t support Medicare for All, because they already have insurance as a result of collective bargaining, but many union leaders say they would be glad to have Medicare for All take health insurance out of contract negotiations, so they could spent their time pushing for better wages and other priorities. Protection of health-care benefits was a major issue in contract negotiations between US Steel and the United Steelworkers last year, as well as the recent UAW strike of GM
The AFL-CIO endorsed Medicare for All in 2009, but support varies from one union to another.
“While we would like to see universal health care, we want to make sure that there is a role for employer-bargained plans in that plan,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told reporters in July after the second Democratic debate. Though the union voted in 2017 on a resolution to “move expeditiously toward a single-payer system, like Medicare for All,” Trumka has endorsed a much narrower coverage expansion plan: lowering Medicare’s eligibility age to 55.
Other union leaders would rather take care of health coverage once and for all.
“Wouldn’t it be great if we had a single, universal access point for health care and we could instead spend our time bargaining for lower class sizes and wrap around services and increases to people’s pay?” said Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers, which endorsed Medicare for All earlier this year. “Wouldn’t it be great it if it wasn’t always dominated by health care fights?”
Jonathan Cohn, who covers health care for HuffPost, noted Oct 17 that progressives in New York have been promoting a state-level New York Health Act that is structurally similar to Sanders’ Medicare for All proposal. The New York plan would be financed with taxes on payrolls and non-wage income (interest, dividends, etc.).
The Rand Corporation noted that the New York bill, which hs not advanced in the legislature, would cover all residents of New York state with comprehensive health benefits (except long-term care benefits, which could be added later). Patients would have no deductibles, copayments, or other out-of-pocket payments at the point of service for covered benefits.
Rand researchers determined the NYHA as designed would reduce overall spending on medical care in New York. And as long as taxes to pay for the program were sufficiently progressive, the benefits would flow primarily away from the rich and toward lower- and middle-income groups.
Specifically, the richest 10% of New Yorkers would be paying more for health care on average, while the other 90% would pay the same or less, Cohn noted.
“That sounds a lot like the kind of plan that Sanders and Warren promise — which is to say, it sounds a lot like a plan that would work out well for most Americans.”
Make that deal for Americans, Democrats. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2019
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us
Copyright © 2019 The Progressive Populist
Selections from the November 15, 2019 issue
COVER/Austyn Gaffney
A Wisconsin town desperately fights for its drinking water
EDITORIAL
Ways to pay for Med4A
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Public radio on the country music highway
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Climate change puts the lights out
DISPATCHES
Online lies aren’t helping Trump much;
Americans shift to supporting Trump impeachment;
Confusion continues in White House as Trump changes course on leaving troops in Syria;
Trump passes 13,435 lies in October;
Hillary’s emails were always a nothingburger, the State Department finally caught up;
What happens when Trump is gone?
Thanks to Republican policies, STDs at record highs;
Dem congessional candidates raise big sums, buoyed by small donors;
Bankrupt PG&E rejects San Francisco bid to buy back power grid;
Supreme Court will review Consumer Finance Protection Bureau;
Billions spent on stock buybacks should have been spent raising wages, creating jobs, Patriotic Millionaires say;
Texas has worst health in nation ...
ART CULLEN
Don’t just sit and take it
JIM VAN DER POL
Dems need more voices of working people
JILL RICHARDSON
What life on the margins feels like
JOHN YOUNG
Team Trump and ‘consciousness of guilt’
DIANE ARCHER
Watch out, seniors: Trump just launched a stealth attack on Medicare
TOM CONWAY
The dark side of billionaire philanthropy — and the threat to American democracy
GRASS ROOTS/Hank Kalet
A different world for the poor
MICHAEL WINSHIP
Our mad dog president — and his Bible-thumping pals
GENE NICHOL
Defeating a tyrant
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Making America cruel again, next chapter
SAM URETSKY
Pols depend on air superiority
WAYNE O’LEARY
Idea man
JOHN BUELL
Who are the real centrists
JOEL D. JOSEPH
US should support independent Kurdish nation
SETH SANDRONSKY
California’s Fair Pay to Play Act
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Poverty and perspective
ROB PATTERSON
A fresh voice, 14 albums later: Chuck Prophet
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Seoul on ice: ‘Parasite’
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Witches want their hunt back
FRANK LINGO
Republicans mistreat Native Americans
and more ...
A Wisconsin town desperately fights for its drinking water
EDITORIAL
Ways to pay for Med4A
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Public radio on the country music highway
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Climate change puts the lights out
DISPATCHES
Online lies aren’t helping Trump much;
Americans shift to supporting Trump impeachment;
Confusion continues in White House as Trump changes course on leaving troops in Syria;
Trump passes 13,435 lies in October;
Hillary’s emails were always a nothingburger, the State Department finally caught up;
What happens when Trump is gone?
Thanks to Republican policies, STDs at record highs;
Dem congessional candidates raise big sums, buoyed by small donors;
Bankrupt PG&E rejects San Francisco bid to buy back power grid;
Supreme Court will review Consumer Finance Protection Bureau;
Billions spent on stock buybacks should have been spent raising wages, creating jobs, Patriotic Millionaires say;
Texas has worst health in nation ...
ART CULLEN
Don’t just sit and take it
JIM VAN DER POL
Dems need more voices of working people
JILL RICHARDSON
What life on the margins feels like
JOHN YOUNG
Team Trump and ‘consciousness of guilt’
DIANE ARCHER
Watch out, seniors: Trump just launched a stealth attack on Medicare
TOM CONWAY
The dark side of billionaire philanthropy — and the threat to American democracy
GRASS ROOTS/Hank Kalet
A different world for the poor
MICHAEL WINSHIP
Our mad dog president — and his Bible-thumping pals
GENE NICHOL
Defeating a tyrant
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Making America cruel again, next chapter
SAM URETSKY
Pols depend on air superiority
WAYNE O’LEARY
Idea man
JOHN BUELL
Who are the real centrists
JOEL D. JOSEPH
US should support independent Kurdish nation
SETH SANDRONSKY
California’s Fair Pay to Play Act
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Poverty and perspective
ROB PATTERSON
A fresh voice, 14 albums later: Chuck Prophet
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Seoul on ice: ‘Parasite’
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Witches want their hunt back
FRANK LINGO
Republicans mistreat Native Americans
and more ...
Saturday, October 12, 2019
Editorial: Impeach Trump and Senate
Democrats should proceed with impeachment inquiries in House committees, whether or not the Trump administration continues to block the House’s access to White House documents and officials.
It appears the simplest route to impeachment relates to Trump’s effort to extort the president of Ukraine, to get him to gin up an investigation of Hunter Biden that might smear his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, who Trump apparently fears as a potential Democratic nominee. Ukraine needed the $400 million Congress appropriated to help the embattled nation fend off Russian-backed separatists. Trump was holding onto the military aid package until he could talk things over with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25. A heavily edited memo of the call, released Sept. 25, shows that, after some small talk about Trump’s support of Ukraine, when Zelensky said he hoped to buy American Javelin anti-tank missiles so it could better repel armored assaults by Russian-supported fighters, Trump replied, “I would like you to do us a favor, though.”
Trump pressed Zelensky to use the help of Attorney General William Barr in opening an investigation of a company involved in the beginnings of the FBI inquiry of Russia’s 2016 election interference. He also wanted a corruption investigation connected to the Bidens.
Trump and his Republican supporters insist that no “quid pro quo” was discussed in the call. Of course, Trump didn’t need to spell out what might happen if Zelensky didn’t play ball. A few days later the House Intelligence Committee released a series of text messages that show State Department officials made it quite clear to their counterparts in Ukraine that staying in Trump’s good graces — and getting the military aid — was contingent on Ukraine providing Trump the concocted evidence he could use to bolster his crackpot conspiracy theories about the Democrats.
Hunter Biden is a lawyer who joined the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, in 2014, when the company was trying to clean up its image after its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, was forced to flee to Russia with former Ukraine president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted after massive, sustained protests that focused on corruption in his administration.
Joe Biden, who was then vice president, apparently had nothing to do his son getting on the board, with a $50,000-a-month salary, even if having the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine for a dad didn’t hurt Hunter’s employment prospects. But there is no evidence Joe Biden did any favors for Burisma, and the reason he (and other European nations and international bodies) pushed for the ouster of Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in 2016 was because he was widely viewed as corrupt. Shokin’s successor, Yuriy Lutsenko, has said Hunter Biden didn’t violate any Ukrainian laws.
Hunter Biden left the board of Burisma earlier this year as his father was launching his presidential campaign.
Trump also has made unfounded allegations about the Bidens in China. On several occasions, Trump has intimated that the Bidens have received millions of dollars from China, implying they capitalized on the then vice president’s political power and connections.
Trump said Oct. 3, “China should start an investigation into the Bidens,” alleging that they received a “payoff” worth billions. Trump said that while he hasn’t yet asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to look into the Bidens, he will start “thinking about it.”
But CNN reported Oct. 3 that in a June call with Xi, Trump raised Biden’s political prospects as well as those of Sen. Elizabeth Warren. He also told Xi he would remain quiet on Hong Kong protests as trade talks progressed.
According to the New York Times, Hunter Biden has a 10% interest in BHR Partners, a private-equity fund that the Chinese government-owned Bank of China has invested in. As of May 2019, both the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that Hunter had not received any money from the fund or in connection with his role as an unpaid advisory board member.
In July 2019, more than two years after his father left office, Hunter purchased an equity stake in the BHR fund, valued around $430,000, according to the Washington Post.
Yes, the optics of Joe Biden’s son taking advantage of foreign business opportunities while his dad was vice president don’t look good, but bad optics are bipartisan. What do you think Donnie Jr. and Eric have been doing since their dad got into the White House? And at least they don’t have government jobs, like Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, who were supposed to stop doing business while they serve as special assistants to the president, but they took in as much as $135 million in revenue from real estate holdings, stocks and bonds and a book deal last year, according to their financial disclosures reported in June.
Still, it’s hard to believe Kushner’s position as Trump’s senior adviser did not play a role in Brookfield Asset Management taking a 99-year lease on 666 Fifth Avenue, the troubled Manhattan tower owned by the family of Trump’s son-in-law. Jared Kushner paid a record-setting $1.8 billion for the building in 2007, and it has been a drag on his family’s real estate company ever since.
The deal, in which Canada-based Brookfield paid $1.1 billion rent for the entire 99-year term upfront, helped the family resolve its biggest financial headache: a $1.4 billion mortgage on the office portion of the tower that was due in February 2019, the New York Times reported. Jared technically had divested himself from the property, but he “sold” the assets to his brother and a trust controlled by his mother. A lawyer described the transaction to the Times as a “shell game.”
The Kushners had spent more than two years on an international search for new partners or fresh financing that stretched from the Middle East to China.
Among Brookfield’s investors is the Qatar Investment Authority, one of the world’s largest sovereign funds, which raised questions about Jared’s involvement in the deal. Brookfield said that the Qataris had no knowledge of the deal before its public announcement.
The House can pass articles of impeachment any time now, and Senate Majority Leader “Moscow Mitch” McConnell (R-Ky.) appears to be confident that there is no way Democrats will get the 20 Republican senators needed for a two-thirds majority to remove the crooked incumbent president from office, but after the public gets a chance to focus on the shakedown of Zelensky, the admission that Trump raised the subject with Chinese President Xi, the acceptance of emoluments from foreign powers and domestic favor-seekers via payments to Trump-owned properties, such as the Trump International Hotel in D.C., which has become a favorite watering hole for lobbyists, and Trump’s obstruction of the congressional investigation of issues raised by the Mueller report might give Democrats the momentum not only to defeat Trump in November 2020, but also to flip at least three Senate seats now held by Republicans to regain control of the Senate (if they don’t regain the White House, they’ll need to flip four seats).
There are plenty of vulnerable Republican targets in the Senate, whose re-election prospects would diminish if they are saddled with an unpopular vote to keep crooked Trump in office. Democrats should force that vote upon them. — JMC
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us
Copyright © 2019 The Progressive Populist
It appears the simplest route to impeachment relates to Trump’s effort to extort the president of Ukraine, to get him to gin up an investigation of Hunter Biden that might smear his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, who Trump apparently fears as a potential Democratic nominee. Ukraine needed the $400 million Congress appropriated to help the embattled nation fend off Russian-backed separatists. Trump was holding onto the military aid package until he could talk things over with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25. A heavily edited memo of the call, released Sept. 25, shows that, after some small talk about Trump’s support of Ukraine, when Zelensky said he hoped to buy American Javelin anti-tank missiles so it could better repel armored assaults by Russian-supported fighters, Trump replied, “I would like you to do us a favor, though.”
Trump pressed Zelensky to use the help of Attorney General William Barr in opening an investigation of a company involved in the beginnings of the FBI inquiry of Russia’s 2016 election interference. He also wanted a corruption investigation connected to the Bidens.
Trump and his Republican supporters insist that no “quid pro quo” was discussed in the call. Of course, Trump didn’t need to spell out what might happen if Zelensky didn’t play ball. A few days later the House Intelligence Committee released a series of text messages that show State Department officials made it quite clear to their counterparts in Ukraine that staying in Trump’s good graces — and getting the military aid — was contingent on Ukraine providing Trump the concocted evidence he could use to bolster his crackpot conspiracy theories about the Democrats.
Hunter Biden is a lawyer who joined the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, in 2014, when the company was trying to clean up its image after its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, was forced to flee to Russia with former Ukraine president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted after massive, sustained protests that focused on corruption in his administration.
Joe Biden, who was then vice president, apparently had nothing to do his son getting on the board, with a $50,000-a-month salary, even if having the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine for a dad didn’t hurt Hunter’s employment prospects. But there is no evidence Joe Biden did any favors for Burisma, and the reason he (and other European nations and international bodies) pushed for the ouster of Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in 2016 was because he was widely viewed as corrupt. Shokin’s successor, Yuriy Lutsenko, has said Hunter Biden didn’t violate any Ukrainian laws.
Hunter Biden left the board of Burisma earlier this year as his father was launching his presidential campaign.
Trump also has made unfounded allegations about the Bidens in China. On several occasions, Trump has intimated that the Bidens have received millions of dollars from China, implying they capitalized on the then vice president’s political power and connections.
Trump said Oct. 3, “China should start an investigation into the Bidens,” alleging that they received a “payoff” worth billions. Trump said that while he hasn’t yet asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to look into the Bidens, he will start “thinking about it.”
But CNN reported Oct. 3 that in a June call with Xi, Trump raised Biden’s political prospects as well as those of Sen. Elizabeth Warren. He also told Xi he would remain quiet on Hong Kong protests as trade talks progressed.
According to the New York Times, Hunter Biden has a 10% interest in BHR Partners, a private-equity fund that the Chinese government-owned Bank of China has invested in. As of May 2019, both the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that Hunter had not received any money from the fund or in connection with his role as an unpaid advisory board member.
In July 2019, more than two years after his father left office, Hunter purchased an equity stake in the BHR fund, valued around $430,000, according to the Washington Post.
Yes, the optics of Joe Biden’s son taking advantage of foreign business opportunities while his dad was vice president don’t look good, but bad optics are bipartisan. What do you think Donnie Jr. and Eric have been doing since their dad got into the White House? And at least they don’t have government jobs, like Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, who were supposed to stop doing business while they serve as special assistants to the president, but they took in as much as $135 million in revenue from real estate holdings, stocks and bonds and a book deal last year, according to their financial disclosures reported in June.
Still, it’s hard to believe Kushner’s position as Trump’s senior adviser did not play a role in Brookfield Asset Management taking a 99-year lease on 666 Fifth Avenue, the troubled Manhattan tower owned by the family of Trump’s son-in-law. Jared Kushner paid a record-setting $1.8 billion for the building in 2007, and it has been a drag on his family’s real estate company ever since.
The deal, in which Canada-based Brookfield paid $1.1 billion rent for the entire 99-year term upfront, helped the family resolve its biggest financial headache: a $1.4 billion mortgage on the office portion of the tower that was due in February 2019, the New York Times reported. Jared technically had divested himself from the property, but he “sold” the assets to his brother and a trust controlled by his mother. A lawyer described the transaction to the Times as a “shell game.”
The Kushners had spent more than two years on an international search for new partners or fresh financing that stretched from the Middle East to China.
Among Brookfield’s investors is the Qatar Investment Authority, one of the world’s largest sovereign funds, which raised questions about Jared’s involvement in the deal. Brookfield said that the Qataris had no knowledge of the deal before its public announcement.
The House can pass articles of impeachment any time now, and Senate Majority Leader “Moscow Mitch” McConnell (R-Ky.) appears to be confident that there is no way Democrats will get the 20 Republican senators needed for a two-thirds majority to remove the crooked incumbent president from office, but after the public gets a chance to focus on the shakedown of Zelensky, the admission that Trump raised the subject with Chinese President Xi, the acceptance of emoluments from foreign powers and domestic favor-seekers via payments to Trump-owned properties, such as the Trump International Hotel in D.C., which has become a favorite watering hole for lobbyists, and Trump’s obstruction of the congressional investigation of issues raised by the Mueller report might give Democrats the momentum not only to defeat Trump in November 2020, but also to flip at least three Senate seats now held by Republicans to regain control of the Senate (if they don’t regain the White House, they’ll need to flip four seats).
There are plenty of vulnerable Republican targets in the Senate, whose re-election prospects would diminish if they are saddled with an unpopular vote to keep crooked Trump in office. Democrats should force that vote upon them. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2019
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us
Copyright © 2019 The Progressive Populist
Selections from the November 1, 2019 issue
COVER/Adam Weymouth
Big banks are accused of funding the climate crisis
EDITORIAL
Impeach Trump and the Senate
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Tommie Smith and John Carlos: Heroes at last
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Sometimes a little disruption is necessary
DISPATCHES
Team Trump wants Supreme Court to hold off destroying ACA until after election;
Trump’s Medicare ‘improvement’ sets up its demise;
Trump lets Turkey attack Kurdish allies of US;
Which senators appear vulnerable heading into 2020?
Trump sees Florida changes shrink;
Workers pay as GE freezes pensions;
72% of rural hospital closures are in states that rejected Medicaid expansion ...
ART CULLEN
Trump impeachment might shake up Senate
BEN LILLISTON
Trump’s Japan deal another win for global meat
JILL RICHARDSON
Why does Trump keep doing this?
JOHN YOUNG
Look who’s ‘trying to destroy the Republican Party’
JOSUE DE LUNA NAVARRO
How fossil fuels pollute STEM education
MICHAEL WALLIS
My patients deserve Medicare for All
NANCY J. ALTMAN and SEAN MCELWEE
How far are Americans willing to go to overthrow the power of big pharma?
WENDELL POTTER Why the private health insurance industry faces an existential crisis
TOM CONWAY
US government lets employers target union organizers with impunity
THOM HARTMANN
If we want democracy back, we must undo the attack on middle class launched by Reagan
OLIVIA SNOW SMITH
Wall Street is killing local newspapers
BOB BURNETT
Ready or not, here comes impeachment
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Vaping: Now that we know, or derailing addiction from the start
SAM URETSKY
‘Moscow’ Mitch McConnell — a hard man to like
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Ladies first
WAYNE O’LEARY
Random thoughts on democratic dissonance
JOHN BUELL
O Canada: Race and class north of the border
ELWOOD WATSON
Yes! Many millenials are plagued with racism!
ROB PATTERSON
Opinions are like smartphones; everybody’s got one
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Going, going, gone but not forgotten
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Roy Cohn and the art of mean
SETH SANDRONSKY
Privileging white skin
and more ...
Big banks are accused of funding the climate crisis
EDITORIAL
Impeach Trump and the Senate
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Tommie Smith and John Carlos: Heroes at last
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Sometimes a little disruption is necessary
DISPATCHES
Team Trump wants Supreme Court to hold off destroying ACA until after election;
Trump’s Medicare ‘improvement’ sets up its demise;
Trump lets Turkey attack Kurdish allies of US;
Which senators appear vulnerable heading into 2020?
Trump sees Florida changes shrink;
Workers pay as GE freezes pensions;
72% of rural hospital closures are in states that rejected Medicaid expansion ...
ART CULLEN
Trump impeachment might shake up Senate
BEN LILLISTON
Trump’s Japan deal another win for global meat
JILL RICHARDSON
Why does Trump keep doing this?
JOHN YOUNG
Look who’s ‘trying to destroy the Republican Party’
JOSUE DE LUNA NAVARRO
How fossil fuels pollute STEM education
MICHAEL WALLIS
My patients deserve Medicare for All
NANCY J. ALTMAN and SEAN MCELWEE
How far are Americans willing to go to overthrow the power of big pharma?
WENDELL POTTER Why the private health insurance industry faces an existential crisis
TOM CONWAY
US government lets employers target union organizers with impunity
THOM HARTMANN
If we want democracy back, we must undo the attack on middle class launched by Reagan
OLIVIA SNOW SMITH
Wall Street is killing local newspapers
BOB BURNETT
Ready or not, here comes impeachment
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Vaping: Now that we know, or derailing addiction from the start
SAM URETSKY
‘Moscow’ Mitch McConnell — a hard man to like
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Ladies first
WAYNE O’LEARY
Random thoughts on democratic dissonance
JOHN BUELL
O Canada: Race and class north of the border
ELWOOD WATSON
Yes! Many millenials are plagued with racism!
ROB PATTERSON
Opinions are like smartphones; everybody’s got one
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Going, going, gone but not forgotten
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Roy Cohn and the art of mean
SETH SANDRONSKY
Privileging white skin
and more ...
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