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

By Marc Jampole

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

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

Absolutely nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Marc Jampole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Marc Jampole 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The commercialization of Halloween has helped further the infantilization of American culture

By Marc Jampole

The day after seeing the first TV commercial for the December holiday gift potlatch seems like an appropriate time to consider the point at which the celebration of Halloween transformed from a secular celebration of a religious holiday to a major factor in the infantilization of American culture.

Infantilization occurs when adults continue to act like children in their adult years, e.g., living at home after college (although many must), vacationing at Disney facilities, collecting My Little Ponies or Legos, indulging in superhero culture, participating in adult sleepovers at museums, engaging in cosplay or spending a good deal of time playing video games. The list of movies glorifying adults who remain children grows so quickly that I have tired of trying to keep up, and so supply a slightly old set of examples: The “Bad Mothers” series, “Tammy,” “Harold & Kumar” movies, “Old School,” “Big,” “Grandma’s Boy,” the “Ted” flicks, “The Wedding Crashers,” “Billy Madison,” ”Step Brothers,” “You, Me and Dupree,” “Dodgeball,” “The 40-year-old Virgin,” “Knocked Up,” all three “Hangovers,” the “Jackass” movies, “Bridesmaids,” “Hall Pass” and “Identity Thief.”

My central assertion over what has become ten pieces on the infantilization of American culture has been that retailers and advertisers embrace and encourage adults to keep their childish habits and ways of thinking because it’s easier to convince children to buy something, easier to manipulate their emotions and dissemble their still forming critical faculties.

Celebrating Halloween is different from attending a “My Little Pony” convention because it has a long history dating to the ancient Celts. Christianity rolled pagan customs into a three-day celebration of saints. When I lived in Germany in 1976, no one celebrated Halloween, but churches were opened and stores closed for the next day, All Saints Day. In England, by contrast, children have been trick-or-treating since the 16th century. Moreover in much of the civilized world, rich folk have dressed up for costume balls and parties since at least the Romans, if not before. Like all holidays that predate the establishment of the world’s major religions, Halloween is at essence a way of marking time, which means both counting years and separating the parts of the year—and the day—into parts and defining appropriate human behavior for marking those parts.

As it has done to all modern celebration, commercialization has slowly corrupted the holiday of Halloween. In every decade since World War II, fewer costumes are home-made and more are store-bought than in the prior decade. Virtually all treats are now prepackaged candy: a handful of highly-publicized cases of adulterating food aided by urban-legend type rumors of others in the 1980’s pretty much put the kibosh on distributing home-made cookies or brownies. Giving even a small amount of something healthy like raisins or nuts is way too expensive for most families. Decorations have gotten completely out of hand. Once people put a pumpkin or two in their window or on their porch. As children in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, my brother and I used to add a few cut-outs of ghosts, sometimes bought and sometimes created from construction paper. We would add twists of orange and black crepe to the living room when we threw a party. Decorations have become more and more elaborate with each passing decade and today symbolize an apotheosis of conspicuous consumption: elaborate and very expensive displays of three-dimensional witches, ghosts, goblins, gremlins, goons and monsters. Thorsten Veblen, author of The Theory of the Leisure Class, would marvel at how Halloween now turns the exterior of the house into yet another opportunity for the bourgeoisie to demonstrate that they have enough money to waste large sums of it on trifling showiness. People now also routinely send Halloween cards. With the increase in the intensity of Halloween celebration has come, of course, a growing tsunami of TV and Internet ads and entertainment programming starting around October 1st each year. In total, Americans spent $8.4 billion to celebrate Halloween last year, or $82.93 for each individual making a Halloween purchase.

But while we can regret this commercialization of Halloween, there is no infantilization in these developments, just the same good old-fashion American commercialization that has corrupted Christmas, Hanukkah and Easter, while creating new opportunities to commemorate by spending such as Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.

Many adults, however, are celebrating Halloween as if they were still children, all involving costumes. When you get dressed up in a costume to stay at home and distribute treats, you have been infantilized. When you insist on donning a costume to accompany your children on their trick-or-treating journey, you have been infantilized. When you wear a costume to the office during office hours, even if it is to attend a Halloween party that takes place at the lunch hour, yes, you’ve been infantilized. In all these situations, you are extending the habits and thought processes of childhood into adulthood. These practices are of course new reasons to buy stuff for the holiday, and so have been encouraged by commercials and entertainment, e.g., situation comedies and family dramas.

Moreover, Halloween was a holiday for children for many years. Now it is a holiday for children and adults. Commercialization and infantilization have worked together to transform Halloween from a special occasion for the community to give its children sweets from the harvest bounty to another excuse for Americans to spend to show they’re human and to pretend, for one evening, to be children again.

When I wrote at the beginning of this piece that I saw my first holiday gift TV commercial yesterday, it was a mild distortion. The commercial alluded only obliquely to Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, but instead pushed the idea of getting Black Friday prices before Black Friday, which has all but official recognition as a major American holiday, one dedicated to the greatest of all American past times—shopping for goods and services that express emotion and define relationships. The only benefit from this overlapping of the Halloween and the Christmas season is that it provides further protection from commercialization to Thanksgiving.

I want to close this piece with a base commercial announcement of my own: My latest book of poetry, a flipbook titled Cubist States of Mind/Not the Cruelest Month is available from the publisher, Poet’s Haven Press or Amazon. Cubist States of Minduses language equivalents of Cubist painting techniques to depict mental states, such as anger, desire, jealousy, boredom, hunger and wonder. Not the Cruelest Month is a cycle of vignettes of New York City the April after Superstorm Sandy hit that explores the relationship between reality, perception and language. That’s a lot of thought-provoking poetry, and at $6 it’ll make a great stocking stuffer or small gift.

Now that I have ended my shameless shill, I leave it to my readers to determine whether I have subverted commercial culture or been co-opted by it.

Editorial: White House of Lies

We never had much hope for Donald Trump, who ran for president as a fake populist on trade and economic issues who promised to protect American workers and “drain the swamps” in Washington. But for years Trump has shown a reckless disregard for the truth in his public statements, acted as a grifter with authoritarian leanings and has a history of stiffing contractors, fighting unions and looking out for No. 1.

Since he has been presidenting, Trump has been caught lying at a dizzying pace. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, as of Oct. 10, had counted 1,318 false or misleading claims in the 263 days since he was inaugurated. PolitiFact, which has been checking Trump’s claims since 2011, has examined 462 Trump statements and found fewer than 5% of Trump’s statements checked out as entirely true while 48% were entirely false. At the same time, Trump has reneged on campaign promises, packing his administration with half a dozen former executives of Goldman Sachs as well as pro-corporate administrators at federal agencies to prevent health and human services, environmental protection, public schools, federal lands and fair labor and housing standards.

Now it appears the Grifter in Chief’s mendacity has infected Chief of Staff John Kelly, who joined in Trump’s efforts to slander a Florida congresswoman who criticized Trump’s awkward attempt at a condolence call to the widow of US soldier killed in West Africa.

Kelly, a retired Marine general, was widely seen as the grown-up who was grounded in the real world, and who could instill order in the White House when he was moved July 28 from Homeland Security to become the gatekeeper to the Oval Office.

Kelly was sucked into the Trump vortex on Oct. 19 when US Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) criticized Trump after the president told Myeshia Johnson on the phone that her husband, Sgt. La David Johnson, who was killed in action with three other US soldiers in Niger, “must have known what he signed up for, but I guess it hurts anyway.”

Trump denied Wilson’s account, stating that he had proof it was “totally fabricated,” without producing evidence. But Wilson’s account was corroborated by Johnson’s aunt, who was with the widow and Wilson when Trump spoke to Mrs. Johnson on a speaker phone.

Kelly, in a press conference, said he was “stunned” that a member of Congress listened in on that conversation. “It stuns me. I thought at least that was sacred,” said Kelly, who was also listening in on the conversation with Trump. Kelly actually confirmed much of Wilson’s account, though he clarified that the president meant that Johnson knew the risks but he enlisted anyway.

Kelly went on to criticize Wilson as an “empty barrel” who, at the dedication of an FBI building in Florida in 2015, disgusted Kelly by hogging the credit for securing funding of the building.

Video of the event showed Wilson actually was responsible for naming the building for two slain FBI agents, and she fulsomely praised the dead agents, along with other law enforcement personnel at the dedication, as well as bipartisan members of Congress who helped rush the naming of the building in time for the dedication.

Kelly did not apologize for his slander and White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders later said Kelly was justified in accusing the lawmaker of grandstanding. “As we say in the South: all hat, no cattle,” Sanders said of Wilson, an African American who is known for wearing brightly colored cowboy hats.

Showing contempt for the First Amendment, Sanders also warned reporters not to criticize Kelly, because he was a four-star general: “If you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that that’s something highly inappropriate,” she drawled.

After Sgt. Johnson’s funeral, Mrs. Johnson on Oct. 23 confirmed that Wilson’s version of events was “100 percent correct” and said her conversation with the president left her “very upset and hurt; it made me cry even worse,” particularly when she heard the president stumble trying to remember her husband’s name.

Not long after the interview aired, Trump disputed Johnson’s account with a tweet: “I had a very respectful conversation with the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, and spoke his name from beginning, without hesitation!”

That prompted Rep. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), ranking member of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, to respond, “If you find yourself defending President Trump after he is attacking the widow of a fallen warrior, you might rethink that.”

Trump ignores repeated attempts at correction and refuses to admit he was wrong, instead usually claiming that the media is engaging in “fake news” when it points out his statements are at odds with the facts. For example, several fact-checking organizations have noted that his repeated claims that the US is the highest-taxed nation in the world are false.

The US has the highest statutory tax rate for corporations among developed nations, at 35%, but thanks to the thousands of deductions and exemptions in state and federal tax codes, according to a 2016 Government Accountability Office report, the effective average corporate tax rate is 22%. That puts the country in the middle of the pack among our economic peers, PolitiFact noted.

As a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), the US tax burden — covering all levels of government — was 26.4% in 2015, which ranked 28th out of 32 developed nations ranked by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). When PolitiFact ran the numbers based on federal revenues alone, the rankings stayed about the same.

On a per-person basis, America’s tax burden ranked 13th out of 31 developed nations, according to OECD figures.

So when Trump said that the US is “the highest developed nation taxed in the world,” and said his view is “exactly correct,” some might believe him, but in fact, PolitiFact found, he is incorrect.

Trump’s record as a liar has done a great deal of damage to the reputation of the United States, as world leaders wonder what they can believe, but at least his untrustworthiness has undermined the Republican Congress as its leaders begin an effort to rewrite the tax code to give major breaks to billionaires and corporations, and congressional leaders find they can’t trust the president either.

The Washington Post reported Trump called Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who was leading a bipartisan effort to fix the Affordable Care Act. Trump left Alexander feeling he had the president’s support. Ten days later, the president abruptly changed his mind.

In September, Trump hosted Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi at the White House and left them thinking they had his support on a deal to protect “Dreamers” who had been brought to the US as children. A month later, Trump added a list of conditions that Democrats could not accept, topped off with funding for a wall along the US-Mexico border.

In May, Trump celebrated House Republicans’ Obamacare repeal passage in the Rose Garden. Later, he called the House version “mean,” though it’s basically the same plan Trump later tried to get the Senate to pass. When the Senate failed to repeal Obamacare with bills that would cause millions to lose health coverage, Trump blamed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and John McCain.

Trump’s political strategy is “divide and conquer,” and deflect blame. Let’s hope the Democratic Party sticks together in the Senate and Trump rattles at least three senators from the Grand Oligarch Party. On Oct. 19, all the Republican senators except Rand Paul stuck together to approve the 2018 budget with $1.5 trillion in cuts from Medicare and Medicaid. The GOP needs the money to give their billionaire donors the hefty tax cuts they demand as a return on their investment. And don’t give Paul too much credit — he voted no because the budget cuts don’t go far enough. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2017

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Selections from the November 15, 2017 issue

COVER/Lauren Weber & Andy Miller
A hospital crisis is killing rural communities. Trump’s Rx won’t help.

EDITORIAL
White House of lies

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
When rehab programs stink

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Buy nothing at Walmart on Black Friday

DISPATCHES
Senate OKs big cuts to Medicare, Medicaid to pay for tax cuts;
Rigged: how voter suppression threw Wisconsin to Trump;
Uninsured rate rising as Trump sabotages Obamacare;
Trump’s numbers are really, really bad;
Obama kicks off campaign to stop GOP gerrymandering;
Tillerson tells Shia fightes in Iraq to 'go home';
Abortion rates are down, so GOP is coming after birth control.

ART CULLEN
The wrong choice for Iowa State

JILL RICHARDSON
Me too. And you. And you.

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Abuses of power: Notes on Harvey Weinstein

JOHN YOUNG
Bed sheet flapping from the Oval Office

BOB BURNETT
Marching with Trump ‘Through the Valley of the Shadow’

SETH SANDRONSKY
Amazon, taxpayer subsidies and worker safety

RICHARD ESKOW
How to profit from the coming Trump apocalypse

JOSH HOXIE
So many tax lies, so little time

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Contraception and false science

SAM URETSKY
Irrational voters have their man

GENE NICHOL
Dusting off the guarantee clause for North Carolina

WAYNE O’LEARY
Ken Burns’ Vietnam War

JOHN BUELL
Defanging debt, denigrating austerity

THOM HARTMANN
The America I knew has almost disappeared 

ROB PATTERSON
Tom Petty left his stamp

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Trump 3.0: The AIs have it

MOVIES/Ed Rampell
Profile in pacifist courage: The railroading of the other Brian Wilson

MARK ANDERSON
Equifax ‘shared’ your data, but Congress is on the case

and more ...

Cutting taxes on rich will be as destructive as closing down trolley lines in cities to favor of cars was in 20th century

By Marc Jampole

Slashing taxes on the wealthy and cutting services to children, the poor and the aged.

Cutting back on immigration and deporting the 800,000 dreamers.

Shaping government policy to promote fossil fuels, while ignoring the role government can play in addressing global warming

Ending our commitments to treaties forged from a policy of cooperation with other nations throughout the world.

Let’s forget about the human tragedies that these Trump-GOP policies will produce. If carried through, any of these four actions will be enough to sink the American economy.

But don’t think that it’s the first time that the leaders of our country have instituted policies that were doomed.

We’ve done it before.

And usually, the reason for the disaster has been that the government policy was concocted to help one industry or small group of people and founded on the faulty ideas and reasoning that industry/group developed to justify their greed.

20th century American history records at least three instances of our government working hand-in-glove with well-heeled special interest groups against the best interests of the American people:

1. Truman’s decision to develop nuclear energy instead of solar energy.

As if dropping atom bombs on two large cities wasn’t enough, Harry Truman also got the federal government behind development of nuclear energy as a means to generate electricity and squelched the solar option. In the early fifties, experts placed two white papers on his desk—one to develop nuclear, the other to develop solar. Truman went with nuclear, because it did what the large utility companies and major manufacturers wanted: centralized power facilities transmitting electricity along a grid and then metered and sold. Solar by contrast, would have developed decentralized industries and enabled many consumers to lower their use of all other metered energy, such as heating oil and natural gas. Non-metered electricity and heat? Better for the long-term economy, public safety and the economy, but a no-no to the big guys.

2. Destruction of inner city mass transit and the development of auto-dependent suburbs

Lots of things contributed to the development of our car-dependent existence and its discontents, e.g., pollution, traffic jams, social isolation and segregation. Government housing and transportation policies, the rapid decline in cost of both cars and homes, the creation of suburban plans that tended to isolate people, media exaggeration of urban problems, the machinations of local real estate industries everywhere and racism all played a role. But there can be no doubt that the long prevailing mass transit policies—the destruction of dedicated trolley lines in cities in favor of the automobile and busses and the related development of suburbs with no mass transit to urban and job centers—were negative policies that played major roles in creating all the dystopic aspects of suburban life. As Kenneth T. Jackson so ably detailed 30 years ago in Crabgrass Frontier,before World War I we had more trolley lines in inner cities than all of Europe combined. Governments saw trolley lines as private businesses which they taxed and regulated to keep fares below costs. The same governments invested huge sums in highways. Moreover, the federal government sat still for 30 years and let General Motors buy up hundreds of trolley lines all over the country and either shut them down or convert them to buses, freeing the roads for cars and more cars. Meanwhile, unlike the first wave of suburban growth, new suburbs were developed that did not have ready access to rail mass transit helped by governmental policies. As a nation, we turned our back on dedicated mass transit for the benefit of the automobile industry and certain developers.

3. The imperialist post-World War American foreign policy

After World War II, the United States acted as if a country that wasn’t completely anti-communist was a threat that gave us the right us to interfere in its politics. We were quite willing to do business with dictators, but not with democratically elected governments that leaned left. People of good will can dispute the merits and necessity of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, but how did we improve our national security by helping totalitarians overthrow the democratically elected governments of Iran and Chile? How did we improve national security by taking sides with anti-democracy forces in Nicaragua, Guatemala and Angola? How could Democrats and Republicans so ubiquitously share the mass delusion called the domino theory and therefore subscribe to the Viet Nam war, a war that Lyndon Johnson knew was unwinnable even as he kept escalating it? The Iraq War merely extends the lunacy of post-war U.S. foreign policy. One consistent element in all of the individual bellicosities the American Imperium has committed has been the massive economic benefit it provides to large defense contractors and to other large industries, often involved in natural resource extraction.

Yes, our leaders have had a curious habit of hurting the country to favor a few wealthy industries or families. It goes back to the beginnings of the nation—subverting democracy to favor slave-holding agricultural interests through the institution of the Senate, the Electoral College and the counting of slaves as three-fifths of a person for census purposes.

These collective inanities of the 20th century have turned us into a society divided by money, race and geography with a crumbling infrastructure, poor health and severe environmental and climate challenges. But behind each mass delusion are good intentions: securing our supply of energy in a post-oil world, making it easier for people to move around the world, defending our national security. In theory it’s not a bad thing if industries and individuals benefit by fulfilling national policy. In a market-based economy, even one with lots of regulations, a wide social safety net, and government involvement and even ownership of industry, individual companies, industries and families will always benefit from government policies. There’s nothing wrong with that outcome, as long as the benefit to the industries and individuals maximizes the benefit to society and everyone else. All too often in the United States, however, industries and individuals highjack policy and shape it so they will benefit, even if it means hurting others.

Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains fills in blanks in Jane Mayer’s Dark Money narrative

By Marc Jampole

According to the standard leftwing narrative about the current dominance of Republicans on both the state and national levels is that the economic rightwing has contrived a deal with racists and social conservatives (among which groups there is some but not complete overlap) by which the ultra-wealthy have manipulated poor and middle class whites to vote against their own economic interests while seeking to disenfranchise large groups of left-looking voters. It’s a storyline which I think pretty accurately describes American politics over the past three decades.

Duke University history professor Nancy MacLean, however, makes a strong case in Democracy in Chains, that the techniques for gaining absolute power and the ultimate objective of the Koch, Mercer, Anschutz, Bradley, DeVos, Prince and other ultra-rich, ultra-right families derive from the original racist reaction to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which outlawed segregation of the races in public schools.

According to MacLean, the key figure in transforming the reactions of segregationists to the working game plan of the 21st Republican Party was James McGill Buchanan, who stands out among Nobel Prize winners for Economics for his focus on theory and disuse of empirical evidence. His great contribution was to bring economic ideas into the realm of politics, primarily through what is called the “public choice theory,” primarily the idea that individuals always behave in politics in their own best interests. While at the University of Virginia, Buchanan put together the plan in Virginia to resist segregation by ending public schools and giving parents vouchers for private schools. Later he founded the Center for the Study of Public Choice, into which the Koch brothers poured millions of dollars. Once Buchanan transferred the program to George Mason University, the focus shifted from educating thinkers to dispute the constitutional thought that led to Brown v. Board to training operatives for the far-flung network of think tanks and lobbying groups funded by the Kochs and their pals. This network, which includes the Cato Institute, the Mt. Pelerin Society, the Heritage Foundation, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth and Reason Foundation, among others, spews out deceptive information and ideas on a variety of matters such as healthcare policy, gun rights, climate change, school policy and public sector employment. You see their bogus work all the time as opinion or expert pieces in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Atlantic and elsewhere.

Underlying the convoluted gobbledygook of public choice theory is the basic belief that the majority should never constrain the minority. Public choice theory “elevates property rights as to paralyze the use of government for democratically determined goals,” as MacLean puts it. At the same time, public choice theory insists on the primacy of individual players, believing that collections of individuals, such as unions and other special interest groups, too often get their priorities approved by government, a terrible situation for Buchanan, Koch and others if it leads to any constraint on property. Buchanan and his ilk (disciples all of Hayek and Milton Friedman) want the government to operate like an absolute free market—each entity representing only itself, even if a small number of ultra-wealthy entities can therefore control everything.

Constraint of the majority was the original Southerners’ idea during the debate on the Constitution to prevent the growing, non-slave-owning North from gaining too much power through the federal government, leading to the Electoral College, Senate and the counting of slaves as three-fifths of a person for census purposes. Later it became the basis for all segregationist arguments, and still later the rationale for the opposition to environmental regulations, higher taxes on the wealthy, LGBTQ rights and a variety of other policies approved by a majority of Americans. In its extreme, as presented by Buchanan (and co-author Gordon Tullock) in The Calculus of Consent, it means that only those who agree to being taxed for public schools or building a road should pay and only programs with unanimous consent of all governed can be implemented by the government.

MacLean reports that after losing the battle against integration, Buchanan and some associates used what she calls Leninist ideas to put together a stealth plan to inject public choice theory into the mainstream of American political thinking and to turn the United States into the type of oligarchy that existed in Virginia and other southern states in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The plan seems to follow the lead of corporate mobilization called for in Lewis Powell’s famous 1971 memo in which the future Supreme Court Justice calls for corporate American take a more aggressive role in shaping America’s social and political ideas. It’s not mentioned by MacLean, but the process that Buchanan outlined and the Kochs and their pals funded seems right out of socialist G. William Domhoff’s public policy model. In simplified terms: rich folk put together foundations and think tanks, which propose ideas that rich folk find politicians to endorse; once elected, the politicians form commissions and committees on which sit the rich folks’ experts to promulgate the policies and laws that the rich folk wanted in the first place. http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/Sounds like the plot of Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, required reading for anyone interested in learning why our democracy has been commandeered for the benefit of a few ultra-wealthy and very selfish families.

Right-wingers have panned MacLean’s book, asserting that she made a selective use of Buchanan’s work, citing what damned him as an anti-democratic racist and ignoring other evidence that suggests otherwise. But as with the more than 150-year-old defense of the racist and strategically mediocre Robert E. Lee, the defense is based on snippets in an ocean of information. Democracy in Chains joins Dark Money, Domhoff’s Who Rules America Now and The Myth of Liberal Ascendancy and C. Wright Mill’s The Power Elite as essential reading to understand how rich folk manage to always get their way in the United States, even if their way hurts just about everyone else.

Let’s use the Weinstein moment to fight for laws that end wage gap & support health of women & families

By Marc Jampole

If a woman would gladly watch a high-powered Hollywood executive play with himself, give him a massage or do whatever else Harvey Weinstein fantasized about, that would be between them—two consulting adults.

But Harvey Weinstein was not interested in consensual sex, and I doubt he was interested in sex at all. For him, it was all about power over women. He must be one sick pup—just as sick as Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Bill Cosby and Donald Trump. Very insecure men who seem to feel threatened by all women and take every opportunity to use sex as a weapon to assert a superiority in power.

That these men are still allowed to play key management roles in large organizations in the 21st century seems as impossibly fantastic as the idea that enough Americans would vote for an inexperienced, ignorant and unbalanced failed businessman to enable him to win the Electoral College vote. The outing of these famous super-predators, the defeat of an eminently qualified woman in the Electoral College by one of them, and the widespread reports of badly-behaving men and rampant male chauvinism at many young technology companies all remind us that a virulent strain of misogyny still exists in the United States.

But also existing are the laws, and in most places, the corporate policies and procedures to shut down sexual harassment of women. What doesn’t exist all too often is the will. It doesn’t help that, like child molesters, the super-predator has a sixth sense about which potential victims are more vulnerable—the new, the naïve, the ignorant, those with emotional problems. The fact that there are often ready-made victims for sexual harassers makes it even more incumbent on organizations to clearly communicate that harassment of all types is illegal and will not be tolerated, no matter how rich, famous or connected the harasser is.

But in the hubbub about Weinstein’s disgusting behavior and the entertainment industry that enabled it for decades, let’s not forget that women face not just sexual harassment, but economic discrimination in the workplace. Women still make less than men for doing the same job, plus workplace rules often create a “Jim Crow” kind of situation, without the lynching and jailing—a set of laws that tend to favor men over women. For example, employers still are not required to make reasonable accommodations for pregnant women who want or have to continue working and there are no national scheduling standards that balance employers’ desire for scheduling flexibility with the need of women (and some men) to be able to plan family necessities.

The issue of employment equality and workplace sexual harassment are related. We won’t solve one until we solve the other. Lower salaries and de facto discriminatory policies and procedures tell men that organizations don’t consider women to be their equal, a subtle but clear signal that women can be treated as objects, insulted or pressed for sexual favors. The lesser, more vulnerable human is always fair game.

My wife alerted me to a great organization, the National Partnership for Women and Families, which lobbies for new laws that expand opportunities for women and improve the well-being and economic security of families. In a March 2017 fact sheet, the National Partnership detailed five proposed laws that would help women achieve equality in the workplace (and I quote): http://www.nationalpartnership.org/research-library/work-family/not-enough-family-friendly-policies.pdf

• The Paycheck Fairness Act would strengthen the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and help eliminate the discriminatory pay practices that plague employed women.
• The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would prevent employers from forcing pregnant women out of the workplace and help ensure that employers provide reasonable accommodations to pregnant women who want to continue working.
• The Family and Medical Insurance Leave (FAMILY) Act would create a national paid leave insurance program to support workers and businesses when a new child arrives or a serious personal or family medical need arises.
• The Healthy Families Act would allow workers to earn seven paid sick days to use to recover from illness, access preventive care or care for a sick family member.
• The Schedules That Work Act would establish national fair scheduling standards that would help provide economic security for working families and enable workers to meet their responsibilities at home and on the job.

I urge readers to contact their Senators and Congressional Representatives and urge them to support these bills. Also get on the National Partnership website and educate yourself about all the issues affecting women in the workplace. You might even want to contribute.

Editorial: Lose with King Moron / Save the Iran Deal

Donald Trump markets himself as the master of the deal, but there are two kinds of people who have dealt with Trump: those who have lost money investing in him and those who haven’t lost money yet.

Republicans are just starting to question their investment in the real estate huckster who has taken his businesses through bankruptcies six times — and at least five of those bankruptcies involved casinos, so Trump was the rare business genius who could lose money running casinos. But he looked good on TV and now he’s in the White House.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil CEO who has repeatedly been undercut by Trump in his attempts to engage in diplomacy, reportedly called his boss a “f***ing moron,” which we have sanitized to “king moron.”

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is the most prominent Republican to quit the Trump fan club. After Corker announced he was not going to seek re-election, the Tweeter in Chief on Sunday morning, Oct. 8, claimed Corker “begged” for his endorsement. “I said ‘NO’ and he dropped out (said he could not win without my endorsement). He also wanted to be Secretary of State, I said ‘NO THANKS.’ He is also largely responsible for the horrendous Iran Deal! Hence, I would fully expect Corker to be a negative voice and stand in the way of our great agenda. Didn’t have the guts to run!”

Corker, who had been a prominent Trump supporter in 2016 and for most of this year, replied with his own tweet: “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.” Ouch!

In an interview with the New York Times, Corker said Trump had asked him at least four times this year to run for re-election and promised an endorsement. Corker also charged that Trump was treating his office like “a reality show” with reckless threats toward other countries that could set the nation “on the path to World War III.”

Corker started distancing himself from Trump in August, criticizing the president’s handling of the deadly rally of white supremacists, including Ku Klux Klansmen and neo-Nazis, in Charlottesville, Va. At that time, Corker said, “The president has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful.”

On Oct. 8, Corker said he was alarmed about a president who acts “like he’s doing ‘The Apprentice’ or something.”

“He concerns me,” Corker added. “He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation.”

Other Republican members of Congress might feel the same way, but they are willing to put up with Trump as long as he is willing to sign a tax cut bill that their wealthy donors are demanding.

Trump and Republican congressional leaders in September released a summary of their new tax “reform” that would cut taxes by an estimated $2.4 trillion over the next decade, with 80% of the breaks going to the top 1% of superrich by 2027 while tax rates for the lowest-income level actually would increase from 10% to 12%. Americans for Tax Fairness figured that 30% of middle-class families making between $50,000 and $150,000 a year will pay $2,000 more in taxes, on average, under the Republican proposal.

To set up the tax cuts for billionaires and multinational corporations, the House on Oct. 5 passed a 2018 budget resolution on a 219-206 vote, with 18 Republicans joining 188 Dems in voting against the bill. Among other things, it repeals the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), resulting in a $1.5 trillion cut in health care spending, and it cuts Medicare by $473 billion, regardless of Trump’s campaign promises to protect those programs, Americans for Tax Fairness reported.

Trump also has vowed to protect Social Security, but we’ll see how that stands up to House Speaker Paul Ryan’s determination to privatize and/or raise the retirement age for Social Security benefits. Trump’s own budget proposes cuts to Social Security Disability Insurance. The Senate budget proposal not only cuts Medicare and Medicaid; it also cuts $37 billion from affordable housing programs, $100 billion from Pell Grants for university students; $3 billion from Head Start and essentially guts the WIC program that provides food assistance to 1.25 million for women, infants and children, said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Republicans plan to pass the budget through special rules that allow them to get it through the Senate on a simple majority vote. But the choke point is still the Senate, where the loss of three Republicans can stop the bill. If your senators claim to be conservative deficit hawks when Democrats are in power, get them to explain how the US can afford to give $2.4 trillion to billionaires, claiming it will spur economic growth, when the experience of the last 20 years proves that “supply-side” economics is a right-wing fantasy.

About a third of Americans continue to support Trump, polls show, despite his transformation from populist reformer during the campaign to a friend of oligarchs as president. He claimed he would “drain the swamp,” but he named executives and alumni from the Wall Street investment firm Goldman Sachs to key White House positions, as well as pro-corporate administrators to various agencies to prevent health and human services, environmental protection, public schools, federal lands and fair labor and housing standards.

Workers who invest their hopes in Trump are bound to lose.

Save the Iran Deal

Trump is trying to intimidate North Korea into giving up its nuclear weapons at the same time he is threatening to renege on a deal with Iran, which agreed to give up its program to develop nuclear weapons.

Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign repeatedly ridiculed the Iran deal, which the Obama administration negotiated with the Islamic republic to give up its program to develop nuclear weapons in exchange for lifting economic sanctions. Russian, China, France, Britain and Germany also were in on the deal, but Trump vowed to rip it up. He declared at the United Nations Sept. 19 that the agreement was “embarrassing to the United States.”

The only problem is that Iran is living up to its side of the bargain. The International Atomic Energy Agency has said that Iran is in compliance; when it has found minor violations, they were quickly fixed.

Trump must decide by Oct. 15 whether to certify that Iran is keeping up with its end of the deal. He wants to renegotiate the deal, but Iran has warned it would refuse to renegotiate the deal, unless the US was also ready to make concessions, which Trump won’t accept.

Trump’s top Pentagon advisers told Congress Oct. 3 Iran appears to be sticking to the 2015 agreement to halt its nuclear weapons program and expressed support for keeping the pact.

“At this point in time, absent indications to the contrary, it is something the president should consider staying in,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Joe Dunford, told the panel Iran “is not in material breach” of the agreement, contending that the pact has “delayed the development of a nuclear capability by Iran.”

”By declining to certify Iran’s compliance, Trump would essentially kick it to Congress to decide whether to reimpose punitive economic sanctions. But even among Republicans, there appears to be little appetite to do that, at least for now,” Mark Landler and David E. Sanger reported in the New York Times Oct. 5.

Still, Trump’s expected move would allow him to tell supporters that he had disavowed the accord, while bowing to the reality that the US would isolate itself from its allies if it sabotaged a deal with which Iran is viewed as complying. But Trump’s bad-mouthing of the Iran deal is another cynical ploy to distract from the damage he is doing at home. And it tells our allies he can’t be trusted. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2017

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