If instead of waging wars, we spent money on education, alternative fuels & infrastructure, we would create millions more jobs

By Marc Jampole

The first week after the announcement of the arrests of dozens of selfish and unethical rich folk who committed fraud to get their kids into college, the New York Times must have had 25 articles analyzing various aspects of this disgraceful scandal. All of these articles repeated a limited number of basic facts, with each article providing a different frame—the kids, the parents, the corrupt coaches, the investigation. After a while, it was just so much blah, blah, blah…

I wonder whether that’s why there has been no room in the Times to cover “War Spending and Lost Opportunities,” a truly startling piece of research by Heidi Garrett-Peltier, a research fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts. Dr. Garrett-Peltier studies the impact of war-related spending compared to other ways the federal government could spend the money. The paper demonstrates that if instead of going to war in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, the federal government had spent the money on other government programs, the economy would have created approximately 1.4 million more jobs since 2001.   

In 2017, her first paper on the subject, published by the Watson Institute of International Affairs at Brown University, Dr. Garrett-Peltier took a look at how many jobs various government activities produce, including waging war, investing in education, support of wind and solar energy, maintaining our infrastructure of mass transit, sewers systems, highways and bridges and healthcare. Her analysis consisted of three parts:

1. Distinguishing between wartime spending and the base Pentagon budget.
2. Comparing the number of jobs created by waging war to the numbers created by other federal spending.
3. Creating a reasonable mix of other ways to spend and comparing the number of potential jobs created with the number of jobs actually created by our war economy.

As it turns out, virtually every other kind of federal expenditure creates more jobs than bombing and invasion. Check out some of these numbers: Healthcare sending creates 107.2% more jobs, which means that if war money created 100 jobs, the same amount spent on healthcare would have created more than 207 jobs. Elementary and secondary school education spending creates 178.3% more jobs, infrastructure spending creates 42% more jobs, retrofitting existing manufacturing and energy systems creates 53.6% more jobs.

While other researchers could disagree about how much alternative spending should go to education versus renewable resources, whatever mix you pick will create significantly more jobs than spending it on war.

Her initial study was ignored by the mainstream media at the time, and the same fate has met her 2019 update so far. Her latest numbers estimate warfare spending from FY 2001 through FY2019 (FY = fiscal year) and fine tune some details of her analysis.

Perhaps the most shocking number Dr. Garrett-Peltier provides is the average annual amount we have spent on war-related activities over the past 19 years. The number is in addition to the base Pentagon budget, which already puts us way ahead of what any two other nations combined spend on the military. Get ready for this number. Sit down. Relax. Maybe ready a glass or pipe of your favorite anti-anxiety home remedy. Or an Ativan or two.

Here goes…

On average, every year since 2001, the United States has spent $290 billion fighting wars. Again that’s not the total, but the annual average. Using Dr. Garrett-Peletier’s model, it works out 1.8 million defense-related jobs, instead of 3.7 million jobs that spending that money on a realistic mix of education, infrastructure, retrofitting, healthcare and renewable energy would have created.

And what did we get? Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and our bloody little adventures throughout Africa.  

Dr. Garrett-Peltier doesn’t measure the toll our wars have taken on American soldiers, their families and the soldiers and civilians of our adversaries. She hasn’t measured the monetary value of the wrecked cities, roads and bridges. She hasn’t taken into account the millions of refugees created by our wars. On a more Kissingerian “Realpolitik” note, Dr. Garrett-Peltier’s research doesn’t measure the loss of status we have suffered throughout Western Europe and the Muslim world for our stupid, goalless bullying wars. She doesn’t compute the value of the loss in global leadership to China and other countries in the areas of alternative fuels and infrastructure development. Or the value of the loss of status as a leader in the future by spending trillions of dollars on bombing and shooting instead of investing in meeting the Paris Accords on climate change.

None of these wars made the United States any safer. None of them advanced our expressed interests. None of these wars created greater democracy, freedom of speech, equality for women or economic growth. All they did was to kill people, destroy economies and enlarge the bank accounts of military contractors and weapons manufacturers.

It’s time to bring home all our troops, reign in development of new weapons of mass and pinpoint destruction, and start investing our tax dollars in life, not death.

Feel-good story of homeless 8-year-old chess champ should make us feel ashamed that other homeless children won’t get the opportunities now open to him

By Marc Jampole

A homeless eight-year-old refugee from Nigeria wins the New York State Chess Championship in the K-3 division. Within weeks, the publicity that Tanitoluwa Adewumi receives, primarily through the New York Time’s Nicholas Kristof, leads to the boy getting a home, a six-figure bank account, scholarship offers from three private schools and an invitation to meet with former President Bill Clinton.

What a wonderful story of deserving talent being rewarded! How heart-warming to see this very smart young man get some breaks in what has been until now a perilous life! Only in America, land of opportunity. All you need is hard work and perseverance.

At least that’s all you need if you’re Tani, as he is mostly called. But for most other homeless children, eight years of age is not when things start getting easier. Tani left behind thousands of school-aged children without homes, many of whom have one or both parents who work but don’t make enough money to afford permanent lodging.

Right-wingers can point to Tani and say that those with extraordinary talent have the best chance to do something with it in the United States. These knee-jerk flag-saluters and liars ignore statistics showing there is less economic and social mobility in the United States today than in virtually every other western country, and far less than we had 40, 50, 60 and 70 years ago. More to the point, virtually every society in all ages has found ways to identify and reward the very talented. From ancient China’s system of examinations to the rise of meritocracy-based civil service bureaucracies in European nation states to academic scholarships in the 20th and 21st centuries, ruling elites have never had a problem locating the geniuses and the great athletes, and then helping them get to a point that they can contribute to society.

But what about everyone else?

While Tani is to be praised and honored, we should also examine how lucky he has been. Lucky to be born with great mathematical talent and an inborn competitive edge, as both are needed to win at chess at any level.

Lucky to go to a school that had a chess program in a city and state that care about the game.  

Lucky not to be born in the first half of the 19th century, when he would arrive in the United States not as a homeless refuge required to attend school, but as a slave.

Lucky to excel at an endeavor in which an eight-year-old can have the success of an adult. In a few years, he’ll have competition from a lot of kids whose families can afford chess lessons with grand masters, chess camps and other kinds of enrichments like foreign travel that help children learn to think. By the age of 12, there may be 25 children across the country with the same kind of talent Tani has who come from wealthy families and practice three hours a day or more. With more kids playing and more kids serious in the future, Tani might have already had his best chance to win a major tournament. Or maybe he’ll become a chess professional. Hikaru Nakamura, one of the 10 highest rated chess players in the world had about the same rating as Tani at about the same age. Of course, Hikaru was studying chess three hours a day by the time he was ten.

But even if Tani never wins another chess tournament, his early achievement has identified him as a very special talent, and American society will now help him.

But kids like Tani are really few and far between. True talent, of the Tani or LeBron level, while distributed evenly among large populations (be they defined nationally, racially, by sex or by economic class), is nevertheless rare.  It’s not the Tani’s of the world who get screwed when wealthy parents put their kids through test prep after test prep, hire consultants and use their money to cheat or bully their children into highly rated colleges. It’s the average kids, and especially the above average but not brilliant kids of limited means who get screwed. And the screwing starts early, as wealthier parents are able to give their children the type of enrichment that most other parents can’t afford, unless they live in a large city with lots of free cultural opportunities. You know, the kind of stuff for which Republicans have spent the last 40 years slashing budgets, like libraries, music and drama programs, free lessons after school

Let’s face it. We love our little darlings and think they are all little geniuses. But most people are pretty average in ability and potential. Luckily, our economy produces a wide range of jobs that require every possible talent at every level. What we don’t do is value everyone or value every job. Our current society produces CEOs who make hundreds of millions of dollars no matter how the company performs, while millions of people have to live on a minimum wage that has remained stagnant for so many years that it’s buying power has been eroded to the point that in not one state in the country can someone afford a home on minimum wages. Meanwhile, many million more have seen no raise or even a shrinking of income when you adjust for inflation.

Imagine a world in which the range of salaries and wealth was much less than today, a world in which the cost of tuition at state universities was in the hundreds of dollars, a world in which a relatively high level of unionization insured that both union and non-union jobs paid middle class wages, a world in which high rates of marginal income tax (marginal meaning you only pay the rate for income above a certain amount, not your entire income) financed the building of roads and bridges, cheap public education, robust research and development and other government programs that create a level playing field and equalize the rewards of the winners and losers.

That world existed for the most part from 1940-1975 or so. It was not a perfect world, as minorities, women and the disabled did not have the opportunities that white males had in the workplace. Some would call it ironic that the era in which American society created a more level playing field for minorities and women was the very period in which the playing field became tilted in favor of the rich and the rewards became to be distributed in a less fair manner. Of course, many, including myself, wouldn’t call the simultaneous emergence of these two trends a coincidence.  Those interested in returning society to the Gilded Age of extremes in rich and poor in which selfishness reigned used the real plague of racism and the phony threat of job and status loss to the “other” to convince large numbers of both poorly and well educated voters to support candidates who created the conditions for today’s growing inequality by lowering taxes on the wealthy and cutting government programs.

The story of Tanitoluwa Adewumi makes us feel good, but it should make us feel ashamed and guilty, because it reminds us by virtue of being human everyone deserves the basics of an affordable home, a quality education, lifelong healthcare and a secure retirement. We shouldn’t judge a society on how well its talented do, but on how well the average and under-average do. We’re all people, whether we can figure out checkmates or have trouble adding two-digit numbers.

Editorial: Show Mueller’s Work

William Barr did what he was hired to do. The new attorney general shut down Robert Mueller’s investigation into the relationship of Donald Trump and the Russians, and Barr declared that the president cannot be indicted for conspiracy or his efforts to obstruct justice.

Trump claimed Barr’s letter summarizing Mueller’s findings amounted to “total exoneration,” when it did no such thing. Barr specifically quoted Mueller saying that one of his principal findings was that the report “does not exonerate him.”

Mueller apparently did not find enough evidence of conspiracy to warrant an indictment (Barr didn’t use the word “collusion” in his four-page letter summing up Mueller’s 22-month investigation) but Mueller found some of the obvious signs that Trump tried to obstruct the investigation. Indeed, Mueller reportedly created a substantial record of the president’s troubling interactions with law enforcement. Barr’s letter only contains the top-line findings. It does not include any of the evidence or legal analysis that underlies those findings, which the full Mueller report would contain.

It is widely believed that Barr got the job of attorney general because he had ruled out charging a president with obstruction. In a June 2018 memo, shared with Trump’s lawyer before his nomination, Barr argued that the theory of obstruction he believed Special Counsel Robert Mueller to be adopting was “fatally misconceived.”

Barr has a history of undermining investigations of Republican presidents. In 1992, when he was then-President George H.W. Bush’s attorney general, Barr advised Bush to pardon all those who had been involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, which threatened to implicate Bush and former President Ronald Reagan in arranging secret sales of arms to Iran in exchange for American hostages in the early 1980s. After the Christmas Eve 1992 pardons, Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh, who headed the investigation of Reagan Administration officials’ criminal conduct in the Iran-Conra scandal from 1986 to 1992, stated that “the Iran-Contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed.” Walsh noted that in issuing the pardons Bush appeared to have preempted being implicated by evidence that was to come to light during the pending trial of former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger.

With the new Barr letter apparently putting Trump in the clear, at least temporaarily, Trump was intent on vengeance, and said “the other side” might be made to pay. “Hopefully, somebody is going to look at the other side. This was an illegal takedown that failed. And hopefully, somebody is going to be looking at the other side.”

It’s hard to see how Mueller avoided finding conspiracy and/or obstruction in a probe that already has taken down Trump’s former campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, personal attorney, national-security adviser, and longtime political adviser. We know Russians offered to help the Trump campaign, and Don Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort met in the Trump Tower in June 2016 with Russian government associates offering “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. We know Trump invited Russians to find Hillary’s missing emails. We know Paul Manafort shared Trump campaign polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian linked to Moscow’s intelligence agencies. We know Jared Kushner sought to use secure Russian diplomatic lines to communicate with the Kremlin. And Trump has a long history of lying, filing false reports and business dealings with Russian mobsters and oligarchs. Also, Trump resisted answering questions from Mueller, and Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, suggested Trump might use the Fifth Amendment to avoid incriminating himself. Of course, that is his right. But we have the right to know if the president did plead the Fifth, which Trump has said in other cases would be an admission of guilt.

Meanwhile, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York continue their investigation of campaign finance violations, including hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal to keep the women quiet about their sexual affairs with Trump. His former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, already pleaded guilty last year to campaign finance violations related to the $130,000 payoff to Daniels and Cohen told investigators and Congress that he made the payment on Trump’s orders. The Trump Organization’s former chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, has also been cooperating with the SDNY since last August, leading to speculation that he could implicate Trump in future indictments.

Federal investigators also are probing Trump’s inauguration committee for potentially committing illegal acts such as fraud, conspiracy, money laundering and a host other crimes. The inauguration raised an unprecedented $107 million dollars with little to show for it and spent exorbitant amounts on expenses such as makeup and rooms in the Trump International Hotel. Prosecutors subpoenaed the inaugural committee in February for documents on how it spent the money, seeking a wide range of materials, including records of payments to the Trump International Hotel or Trump Organization.

The subpoena indicates investigators are looking for a wide range of possible crimes. It’s likely that the SDNY, which issued the subpoena, will take the lead in the probe. Much like the other inquiries into Trump’s operations and inner circle, there’s no immediate end in sight for the investigation.

The House Judiciary Committee should continue its wide-ranging corruption probe into Trump’s involvement in any campaign finance violations, obstructions of justice or abuses of power such as misuse of pardons. It should also demand that the Justice Department account for evidence of criminal conspiracy between Trump and Russia, as well as efforts to cover up any potential conspiracy.

Leading the investigation is House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, an attorney and congressman from New York. The White House and many Trump allies appear to be stonewalling Nadler’s document requests, however, and only eight of 81 requests for documents were returned by the deadline. Nadler expects that more individuals will eventually comply, but the White House has already rejected requests for certain materials, such as those related to Trump’s meetings and phone calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and they can expect the White House to try to stonewall any more scrutiny, crying that it is a partisan inquiry.

New York’s state attorney general is looking into Trump’s dealings with Deutsche Bank, including whether he inflated the value of his property during his failed 2014 attempt to buy the Buffalo Bills football team. The attorney general’s office reportedly has subpoenaed Deutsche Bank and Investors Bank for records related to the Bills deal, as well as other Trump Organization plans. Deutsche Bank loaned Trump at least $2 billion over recent decades despite other banks cutting him off because of his financial instability.

At the very least, Barr must release the full Mueller report, including underlying documents, and agree to testify before the House Judiciary Committee to explain his decision not to prosecute.

Mueller’s punt on the Russia probe removes the pressure on House Democrats to pursue impeachment, since the prospects of getting 20 Senate Republicans to join Democrats in removing the Great Misleader are remote to the point of invisibility.

While we might be stuck with Trump for another two years, that should enhance Democrats’ chances for an electoral sweep in 2020. Make Republicans defend Trump’s pursuit of Moscow Gold as well as the GOP’s tax breaks for the billionaires, their plans to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, budget cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and placing fossil fuel industrialists in charge of the nation’s environment and national parks. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2019

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Selections from the April 15, 2019 issue

COVER/Laura Paddison
US has a dire shortage of affordable homes, and Trump wants to make it worse

EDITORIAL
Show Mueller’s work

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
Trump’s symbiotic relationship with big media

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Strain on small colleges is another blow for rural America

DISPATCHES
Trump seeks revenge as Russia probe threat wanes;
Trump campaign warns networks against booking some Democrats;
Trump really can’t stand Puerto Rico;
Clean energy cheaper than coal;
Coal companies veto Trump nominee who opposed coal bailout;
Midwest flooding will cost billions in damages;
Trump policies are destroying the American farm and no one knows how to stop it;
DACA flight attendant released after 6 weeks in ICE custody ... 

BOB BURNETT
Trump and the economy

JOHN YOUNG
The payoffs almost no one talks about

JILL RICHARDSON
Politicians are finally catching up on marijuana

ELIZABETH HENDERSON
Organic farms are under attack from agribusiness, weakened standards

ART CULLEN
Rural America is ready for some sort of a new deal, preferably green

JOHN SARBANES and MICHAEL BRUNE
To clean up the planet, clean up Washington

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Transform the court

JOEL D. JOSEPH
The Trumps and Jared Kushner cheated their way into elite colleges

LEO GERARD
The big cheat

GENE NICHOL
Legacy preferences

BOOK REVIEW/Seth Sandronsky
Making a better world

BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Flag overboard

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Yes we can fleece the customer

SAM URETSKY
Why is it urban liberals vs. rural conservatives

NORMAN SOLOMON
‘Speaking truth to power’ is no substitute for taking power

WAYNE O’LEARY
The left’s achilles heel

JOHN BUELL
Clear Jared Kushner — and the rest of us

KENT PATERSON
Mexican border workers rattle the NAFTA economy

ROB PATTERSON
Time for the left to start rallying too

ROB PATTERSON
Browse a bookstore while you can

FILM REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Citizen Pulitzer: Patron Saint of the oppressed

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
How many days would it take?

CHUCK COLLINS
Bring back Eisenhower socialism

Trump supporters and the GOP are building a house of cards on Attorney General William Barr’s four-page interpretation of the Mueller report

By Marc Jampole

We don’t have the Mueller report yet, but we do have the quick-and-dirty analysis of it
by an attorney general who got the job because of his previous strong public statement
against the idea of a special counsel and a long-held disposition to declare all
presidential actions as legal.

Trump supporters and other Republicans seem delighted in Barr’s version of the
conclusions, but they have built themselves a house of cards which tumbles as soon as
we look at the recent history of special counsel investigations.

First to the house of cards: Barr declares that there is insufficient evidence that the
Trump campaign explicitly asked Russian to swing the election to Trump. It’s true that
the events that have been made public such as the infamous Trump Tower meeting and
Trump’s public request that the Russians help find Hilary’s so-called missing emails
suggest that there’s a lot of smoke. But the standard for finding fire when it comes to
Republicans colluding with foreign entities to swing presidential elections is extremely
high. We know that South Vietnam’s reluctance to come to the negotiating table in 1968
helped Nixon win. We know that Iran not freeing the hostages in 1980 helped Reagan
win. And we know that Russian interference in the 2016 election helped Trump win. In
all cases, there is strong documentation that the representatives of the Republican
campaign in each case met with foreign entities. But in all cases, Congress and the
American people found that the idea of a major party colluding with a foreign power was
so horrific that the proof had to be absolutely incontrovertible—some would say a
standard too high ever to be met in the real world.

Trump actually gets off easier than Nixon or Reagan when it comes to considering a
possible collusion, because the idea that Trump was an unwitting stooge or a useful
idiot is just as believable as that he knowingly colluded. Russia may have conducted
their nefarious assault on U.S. elections because Putin and his advisors felt strongly
that a Trump presidency would weaken the United States. His history overflows with
examples of not only his stupidity and his willingness to break laws, but also of a vanity
that makes him brag about things that didn’t really happen. Then there’s his obvious
ignorance of law dictating how governments and political parties operate that may
excuse him. It’s thus believable that Trump did not collude/conspire.

However one wishes to interpret the smoke of collusion and conspiracy, Mueller found
no smoking gun. But reducing a 22-month investigation to that one sentence is a weak
foundation for what Trump supporters and other Republicans, including Barr, are saying
now. Their argument goes like this:
1. Mueller found no proof of collusion or conspiracy.
2. Collusion/conspiracy was the underlying crime.
3. Since there was no underlying crime, it was impossible for Trump to have obstructed
justice, even if there are strong indications that he obstructed the investigation.

Over the past few days, I have heard some version of this argument delivered by both
avid Trump supporters and other Republicans. The logical conclusion to this line of
thought, of course, is that all the emerging investigations of Trump should stop, or at
least those investigations related to collusion/conspiracy and obstruction.

But if we look back at the history of impeachment we have to conclude two important if
usually unspoken principles of American justice as applied to presidents:
1. Obstruction of an investigation equals obstruction of justice.
2. Obstruction of an investigation is not only an impeachable offense, it may be the
only offense for which a president can end up being impeached in the real world.

Let’s look at history: The articles of impeachment against Andrew Johnson had nothing
to do with obstruction of an investigation and Johnson was not impeached. The articles
of impeachment against Nixon focused exclusively on the Watergate cover-up (i.e.,
obstruction). Does anyone doubt that Nixon resigned because he knew he was certain
to be impeached by the Senate, and then convicted by the House of Representatives?
Not for green-lighting a third-rate burglary, but for leading the cover-up, i.e., for
obstruction. The articles of impeachment against Bill Clinton only mention obstruction of justice, for a simple reason. Kenneth Starr and his crew had spent years going through
Clinton’s past looking for both high crimes and misdemeanors and found nothing. Zilch.
A clean record. All Clinton did was lie about having a consensual affair with an adult
woman. Messing around on your wife is not illegal, meaning that Clinton was
impeached for obstruction of justice and not for any underlying crime.

The history of impeachment proceedings and politics therefore suggest that Trump
supporters and other Republicans are dead wrong to suggest that Trump can’t be
charged with a cover-up because there was no underlying crime proven, or that the
cover-up isn’t impeachable because there was no crime. They have built a house of
cards that tumbles as soon as we remove the false foundation that a cover-up exists
only when we have proof of an underlying crime. The cover-up is in and of itself
impeachable, and as history has shown, perhaps the only crime that a president can
commit that will lead to impeachment.

Thus it comes down to how we interpret Mueller’s evidence, which Mueller himself
refused to do. So far, only William Barr and his staff have attempted to cull through the
hundreds of pages of Mueller’s analysis. Barr admits that there are signs of a cover-up,
but he has decided to give Trump the benefit of the doubt. Would Kenneth Starr have
made the same decision regarding Bill Clinton with the same basis of facts? What about
Leon Jaworski about Nixon? Or Jeff Sessions about Trump?

With all due respect to Barr, there is plenty of public evidence of obstruction. His conclusions represent the efforts of one man, one with a known predilection to having an extremely high bar of proof when it comes to presidential actions. Before we let Trump off the hook, we need others—many others—to look at the Mueller report and perhaps the raw data behind it, too. At this point, that’s the job of the House of Representatives. We can assume, thankfully, that its investigators take longer than 48 hours to do their analysis, and that they will take into account the history of impeachment proceedings in deciding whether to drop the obstruction issue.

Editorial: Dems Fight for the Vote

Alarms have been raised by “concern trolls” that Democrats are at risk of alienating voters by overreaching with their aggressive agenda as the new House majority.

While the corporate media like to push the story that Democrats are in disarray, House committees have stepped up investigations of the Trump campaign’s ties with Russia as well as the Trump administration’s attempts to obstruct the special prosecutor’s investigation. Meanwhile Democrats are proceeding with plans to promote expansion of Medicare to cover all Americans, set Congress on course to address climate change as well as create new economic opportunities with a Green New Deal, and passed a major bill to increase voting rights and reform campaign procedures to reduce candidates’ dependence on lobbyists to finance their campaigns.

The electoral reform bill, known as HR 1, the “For the People Act,” passed by a party-line vote of 234-193 on March 8. It includes provisions for publicly financing federal elections and requiring candidates for president to release their tax returns.

The bill has been a top priority for Democrats since the party won back the majority in the House in November, in an election marked by challenges to voting rights, including voter suppression efforts by the Georgia Secretary of State’s office under Brian Kemp, which may have provided the margin of victory for Republican Kemp in the race for governor over Democrat Stacey Abrams.

The bill would create a national voter registration system, including expansion of online voter registration, and end aggressive voter purges and election day voter registration. It would provide funding for states to adopt paper ballots, restore voting rights for ex-felons and declare Election Day as a federal holiday. It also would institute new donor disclosure requirements for political organizations and a 6-to-1 matching system to multiply small-dollar donations to federal campaigns.

The bill also prohibits gerrymandering by requiring independent commissions instead of state legislatures to draw congressional maps and would allow federal workers to take up to six days of paid leave to work at polls.

While the public likes most of the provisions in the bill, it is unlikely to advance in the Senate. Every Republican in the House voted against the bill, because conservatives know they are increasingly unlikely to win in fair elections, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he will not bring the election reform bill, which he characterized as a “radical, half-baked socialist proposal,” up for a vote in the Senate.

At least it was another victory for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who held the Democratic caucus together for the electoral reform bill, which some moderate House Democrats said went too far. Ten days earlier, all but two Democrats voted for another potentially controversial bill — requiring federal background checks for nearly all firearms sales and transfers, which the House passed 240-190. That bill is popular, but it also is expected to die in the Republican Senate, which is beholden to the National Rifle Association.

Democrats seem to take little risk in passing bills that are popular but face a roadblock in the Senate. It gives voters a reason to want to see Democrats take back the Senate and the White House.

There also is little reason to be pessimistic about Democrats’ chances of beating Trump, who has never had an approval rating of 50% or more since he’s been president. When he took office in January 2017 he had a national approval rating of 45.5%, according to an weighted average of polls reviewed by FiveThirtyEight.com. But even that anemic level of approval quickly began to founder and bottomed out at 36.5% in December 2017 (which finally settles the question of how many people one can fool all of the time).

Trump’s ratings have fluctuated since then, with approval in the high 30s to low 40s, while disapproval has remained in the low 50s. As of March 12, FiveThirtyEight.com showed him with 41.7% approved and 53.5% disapproved, which is not a good look for a president seeking re-election. In January, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found 56% of Americans said the will “definitely not” vote for Trump’s re-election. And this was before many Trump supporters discovered Trump’s billionaire tax cuts didn’t reach them.

Perhaps more important, Trump has seen his approval ratings plunge in states he carried in November 2016. When he took office, he had a net positive rating in 38 states, according to Morning Consult’s tracking poll, but in January 2019, Trump’s positive states were down to 17, while 31 states had a net negative and two states — Nebraska and Texas — were tossups at 48% approval and 48% disapproval. Two years ago, Trump had a 23-point net positive in Nebraska while Texas was a 20-point net positive for him.

Alaska, Kansas and Montana, all 24-point net positives for Trump in January 2017, were only one point positives for him this past January. Among the states still positive toward Trump, but within single digits, are Indiana and North Dakota, both within four points.

Among states Trump won in 2016 that are now net negative on him are Georgia, down 20 points since 2017, to one point net negative (47-48); Missouri, down 21 points since 2017, to two points negative (47-49); Florida, down 26 points, to four points negative (46-50); North Carolina, down 22 points, to four points net negative (46-50); Ohio, down 20 points, to six points negative (45-51); Utah, down 33 points, to six points negative (45-51); Arizona, down 28 points, to eight points negative (44-52); Pennsylvania, down 20 points, to 10 points net negative (43-53); Iowa, down 23 points, to 14 points net negative (41-55); Michigan, down 23 points, to 15 points net negative (40-55); and Wisconsin, down 22 points, to 16 points net negative (40-56).

Those numbers should not give Republicans confidence going into the 2020 elections. When they expect to have to fight for Utah, Texas and Nebraska, that not only is good news for the eventual Democratic presidential nominee. It also presents opportunities for Democrats in House and Senate races against Trump enablers, when Republicans will be defending 22 Senate seats while 12 Democratic seats will be up for election.

If Democrats win the White House, they’ll need to gain at least three seats to gain control of the Senate. Sen. Doug Jones is the Democrat facing the toughest re-election fight, in Alabama, but endangered Republican incumbents include Cory Gardner in Colorado, Susan Collins in Maine and Martha McSally in Arizona. If Trump pulls down the ticket, other endangered Republicans could include Joni Ernst in Iowa, David Perdue in Georgia, an open seat in Kansas as Pat Roberts is retiring, Steve Daines in Montana, Thom Tillis in North Carolina, an open seat in Tennessee, where Lamar Alexander is retiring, and it makes it worthwhile for Dems to find a candidate to challenge John Cornyn in Texas. And Mitch McConnell was the third least popular senator, with 47% disapproval and only 38% approval in Kentucky, as of January, according to Morning Consult, so Democrats should find a good candidate to put up against him.

With those states up for grabs, Republicans figure they can’t afford to risk fair elections. So, with HR1, the “For the People Act,” buried deep in the bowels of the Senate, you can expect Republicans to devise new ways to keep likely Democrats from casting ballots in 2020. So far, 14 candidates have announced they’re running for the Democratic nomination for president and at least 10 more are considering a run. Any of them would be better than Trump and his gangster associates. Please, this time, don’t make reckless charges about rival Democrats that you can’t take back after the nomination is decided. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2019

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Selections from the April 1, 2019 issue

COVER/Austin Frerick
Fixing our food system — and reviving rural America — means breaking up big ag

EDITORIAL
Dems fight for the vote

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
Methodism revisited: No turning back

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Don’t Bern the Dems’ hopes

DISPATCHES
Trump budget reneges on promises to protect Social Security and Medicare;
Republicans reserve the right to bash Muslims, minorities;
Trump tells blackface joke at RNC fundraiser;
Trump tops 9,000 lies;
Rate of illegal crossings from Canada rising nearly as rapidly as US border with Mexico;
Sunday morning talk shows ignore Trump massage parlor scandal;
Trump asks UK to drop food and environmental standards for post-Brexit trade deal;
Household net worth falls by lagest amount since Great Recession ...

JIM VAN DER POL
Sustainable farms depend on soil health

JILL RICHARDSON
Starving kids won’t help them study

ART CULLEN
Julián Castro is resetting the Latino image in Iowa

NANETTE SENTERS
GM is closing my plant. What are politicians going to do about it?

JOHN YOUNG
What percent of Cohen’s testimony don’t you believe?

SARAH GERTLER
Criticizing Israel isn’t anti-semitic. Here’s what is. 

SAM PIZZIGATI
Have the rich always laughed at stiff taxes?

BOB BURNETT
Costing the Green New Deal

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
How to slay the Medicare beast: A handy guide

SAM URETSKY
Millennials are changing the world, whether you like it or not

BARB KALBACH
Rural America needs Medicare for All now

WAYNE O’LEARY
The ‘S’ word

JOHN BUELL
Reclaiming the peace dividend

N. GUNASEKARAN
Nuclear tensions increase after failed Trump-Kim summit

SETH SANDRONSKY
Public pensions finance immigrant detention

ROB PATTERSON
Elvis Costello’s worn out genius

BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Who listens to the negro?

ED RAMPELL
Hollywood’s ‘other’ awards ceremony

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Trump fall down go boom

KARLA MOLINAR-ARVIZO
Worse than the wall

Editorial: Curb the Deadbeat Dictator

After President Donald Trump declared a national emergency on the southern border, the real crisis involves whether the Republican Party will enable the Great Misleader to assume dictatorial powers.

Trump claimed extraordinary power under the National Emergencies Act (NEA) of 1976 to redirect money Congress had appropriated for other uses to build a wall along the border with Mexico. Trump is using the law, whose constitutionality is uncertain, to fulfill a campaign promise that he would build the wall (despite his promise that Mexico would pay for the wall) — and also to distract from the progress of Robert Mueller’s probe of his business and political ties with Russian oligarchs. The White House plans to divert $3.6 billion from military construction projects to the wall, as well as $2.5 billion from counternarcotics programs and $600 million from a Treasury Department asset forfeiture fund.

Combined with $1.375 billion authorized for fencing in the spending package Congress passed, Trump would have about $8 billion for barriers, significantly more than the $5.7 billion he had demanded from Congress.

When Trump announced the national emergency, he may have undercut his argument that the border situation was urgent. “I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster,” he said. “I just want to get it done faster, that’s all.”

A bipartisan group of 58 former senior national security officials issued a statement Feb. 25 saying that “there is no factual basis” for Trump’s proclamation of a national emergency to build a wall on the US-Mexico border.

If anything, border crossings have decreased dramatically over the past 20 years, with 467,000 apprensions in 2018, compared with one million as recently as 2006. Border cities in the US boast relatively low crime rates. Nothing going on there requires the use of armed forces — and the use of the US Army to enforce domestic immigration laws may be a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of military as a domestic police force.

The NEA provides that Congress can terminate a “national emergency” by passing a joint resolution. The Democratic House has started that process, and they might get the four Republican senators they need to pass the resolution in the Senate, but they probably would need to override the president’s veto with two-thirds majorities, which would require a substantial number of Republicans to stand up to the would-be dictator.

In case Republicans won’t stand up for the constitutional separation of powers, 16 states, led by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, have sued in federal court to block Trump from stealing federal funds appropriated for their states for other uses.

Trump has cited concerns that the US was being flooded with murderers, drug runners, kidnappers and other offenders from Central America. During his Rose Garden announcement of the emergency declaration, he claimed there was an ongoing “invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people,” including gang members he called “monsters” and migrants who have killed US citizens.

But according to new US Immigration and Customs Enforcement figures obtained by the Washington Post, the nation’s immigration jails were not filled with such criminals. As of Feb. 9, days before the president’s declaration, nearly 63% of the detainees in ICE jails had not been convicted of any crime.

Of the 48,793 immigrants jailed on Feb. 9, ICE data shows, 18,124 had criminal records. An additional 5,715 people had pending criminal charges, officials said, but they did not provide details. ICE also did not break down the severity of the crimes committed by or attributed to detainees.
An average of 59% of detainees in custody during this fiscal year had no criminal history, according to ICE.

Of course, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security does not have a much better record on telling the truth than Trump’s White House. DHS officials still are unable to say how many children were abducted from their parents at the border since the Trump administration took over, or what happened to hundreds of them.

The Office of Inspector General of the US Department of Health and Human Services reported in January that HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement received at least 2,737 separated children before a June 2018 federal court order required ORR to identify and reunify separated children in its care as of that date, but thousands more children may have been separated during an influx that began in 2017, before the accounting required by the court. The Trump administration not only failed to track separated families in a single database, but the agencies say they lack the resources to find out what happened to all the separated children. Some of them may have been put up for adoption without their parents’ consent.

Salvadoran officials in August 2018 said three minors from El Salvador separated from their parents after crossing the US border were sexually abused in “shelters” in Arizona, the Associated Press reported. In late July, the news website ProPublica reported that police had received at least 125 reports since 2014 of sex offenses at shelters that mostly house migrant children.

One of the most damaging impacts of the Trump presidency is the normalizing of lying. Republicans have been inoculating their supporters against believing what they call the “liberal media” for more than 40 years, ever since they blamed the mainstream news media for supporting the movement to oust President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal. But the Republican disinformation campaign has been supercharged under Trump, who has taken the use of lying to a level undreamed of in generations past — at least in the United States.

The Washington Post has a team of three fact checkers assigned to examine political statements on a bipartisan basis, but the bulk of their effort has been trying to hold Trump to account for false or misleading claims, which as of Feb. 17 numbered 8,718 in the 25 months since he was inaugurated.

The Post did not have a similar team tracking President Barack Obama’s misstatements, but the New York Times reported in December 2017 that Obama made 18 demonstrably false claims during his eight years in office, while Trump told 103 separate lies or falsehoods in his first 10 months as president. (The Post counted 1,876 false or misleading claims in the same period, but it counted each time Trump repeated a lie as a separate occurrence.) A key difference is that when Obama became aware that what he was saying was untrue, he stopped saying it.

“Trump is different. When he is caught lying, he will often try to discredit people telling the truth, be they judges, scientists, FBI or CIA officials, journalists or members of Congress,” David Leonhardt, Ian Prasad Philbrick and Stuart A. Thompson wrote in the New York Times Dec. 14, 2017. “Trump is trying to make truth irrelevant. It is extremely damaging to democracy, and it’s not an accident. It’s core to his political strategy.”

Trump is not only doing damage to domestic politics. America’s historic allies have come to know they cannot trust him, as he has berated and lied about NATO allies, particularly Canada, while cozying up to dictators, particularly Vladimir Putin in Russia.

Republican congressional leaders don’t appear to have a problem with Trump’s strategy. Call your senators and your member of Congress via the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and urge them to uphold the constitutional separation of powers, with a veto override, if necessary. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2019

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Selections from the March 15, 2019 issue

COVER/Daniel Ross
Factory farms pollute the environment and poison drinking water

EDITORIAL
Curb the deadbeat dictator

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

DON ROLLINS
Kaepernick, Reid and the heritage

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen p. 5
What happens when a hog lot moves in near you?

DISPATCHES
Trump approval tops 50% in only 17 states;
Trump presidency continues to devalue his brand;
Green New Deal doesn’t mention farting cows;
CNN hires Republican operative to head 2020 election coverage;
Drug seizures show empty promise of Trump border wall;
Supreme Court limits civil asset forfeiture;
Coast Guard officer accused of plotting murder of prominent Dems and media personalities;
US hints at military intervention after Venezuelans block 'aid'
NC cout attacks fruits of illegal gerrymandering;
Trump's shameless fli-fop on high=speed rail;
Didn't see the death of clouds coming ...

JIM GOODMAN
The Green New Deal outlines the change society needs

ART CULLEN
Help wanted: Rural America needs immigrants

JILL RICHARDSON
Take it from me: Addiction doesn’t start at the border

JOHN YOUNG
A border crisis sized to TV screens

JIM VAN DER POL
We need more people, and fewer factories, in farming

LEO GERARD
Standing together on trade with China

JASON SIBERT
Make arms control great again

BOB BURNETT
Next steps

MARK ANDERSON
Spending bill saves sensitive areas from border wall

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
High class robbery

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Mexican pollution pours under border wall

WAYNE O’LEARY
They’re off and running

JOHN BUELL
Resetting the doomsday clock

FR. DONNELL KIRCHNER
Going over Trump’s wall might lead to better things

ROB PATTERSON
A soft focus on Quincy Jones

BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
We won’t go back

ED RAMPELL
A super supernatural socialist show

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Punxsutawney Phil sees Trump’s shadow and cries

PAUL ARMENTANO
Marijuana can help fight opioid abuse

Editorial: Don’t Play Trump’s Game

Donald Trump and the Republicans obviously want to run against socialism and “open borders” in 2020. Democrats shouldn’t let Trump set the terms of the debate, but should run on progressive populist solutions to improve economic opportunities for working Americans.

“We renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country,” Trump said in his State of the Union speech Feb. 5.

Republicans already are claiming that Democrats, given half a chance, would turn the US into another Venezuela. At the same time the increasingly authoritarian Grand Oligarch Party pushes to build an Iron Curtain along our southern border.

Of course, Republicans have been calling Democrats socialists ever since Franklin D Roosevelt and his advisers drafted the New Deal to revive the economy from the Great Depression in the 1930s — and the accusation that Roosevelt was a socialist was a source of amusement and/or resentment for real socialists ever since. But, socialist or not, voters re-elected FDR three times as the New Deal revived the economy from the Great Depression and saved many a family’s farm and livelihood.

FDR’s government did not take over the means of production, which is the actual definition of socialism, but the New Deal provided support for farmers, created public works programs that put millions of Americans back to work, set up Social Security, which included unemployment insurance, welfare programs and income for disabled people and retirees, and it gave workers the right to organize into unions and bargain collectively. Above all, FDR’s New Deal saved capitalism by regulating it, and the plutocrats never forgave him.

The New Deal coalition dominated Congress through the 1960s, although Southern Democrats and Republicans formed coalitions to roll back the rights of labor organizations with the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 and resisted other liberal initiatives. The New Deal’s last hurrah was Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program, which included the Civil Rights Act and the War on Poverty in 1964, the Voting Rights Act and Medicare in 1965, Medicaid in 1966, as well as consumer and environmental protections, as he got Congress to create the Department of Transportation as a cabinet-level agency and provided federal funding for education, affordable housing, rural development and the arts and public broadcasting.

Opposition to the War in Vietnam and backlash against passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in the South and among conservative Democrats in the North gave Republicans an opportunity to exploit divisions in the New Deal coalition. That helped Richard Nixon win the presidency in 1968, but Democrats continued to control Congress until 1981, when Republicans gained a majority in the Senate to work with Ronald Reagan during the first six years of his presidency. But Republicans lost the Senate in 1987 and it was not until 1995, in the third year of Bill Clinton’s first term, that Republicans managed to get control of the House and Senate.

In 1999, the Republican Congress, with Clinton’s signature, repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which had separated commercial and investment banks, preventing commercial banks from getting involved in speculative stock deals and investment banks from accepting federally insured deposits. The financial services industry made it through eight years of free-market capitalism under George W. Bush before excessive risk-taking by banks, dealing in subprime mortgage debt securities, caused the financial crisis of 2007-08, which spread to a global economic downturn.

It fell to Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress to clean up the mess the free-market Republicans left them, and they proceeded to pass an $800 billion economic stimulus package in February 2009. Obama also approved loans for General Motors and Chrysler to continue operations while they reorganized in March 2009. The stock market bottomed out in March 2009 before beginning the climb back up; the unemployment rate peaked at 10% in October 2009 before the economic recovery kicked in. By November 2012 unemployment had dropped to 7.7% and it continued to drop in Obama’s second term, down to 4.7% when he left office in January 2017.

Republicans accused Obama of being a socialist, of course, so the term has lost much of its sting — so much that young Americans who have grown up since the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics are more likely to associate socialism with prosperous democratic socialist states, such as Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

Axios reported Feb. 2 that centrist potential Democratic candidates for president are rethinking their plans because the “rising Democratic enthusiasm for big government liberalism” might limit their appeal.

“Michael Bloomberg and former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, each of whom were virtual locks to run, are having serious second thoughts after watching Democrats embrace ‘Medicare for All,’ big tax increases and the Green New Deal,” Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei reported for Axios. “Joe Biden, who still wants to run, is being advised to delay any plans to see how this lurch to the left plays out. If Biden runs, look for Bloomberg and McAuliffe to bow out, the sources tell us.”

The Axios writers also noted polling in Iowa “by a prominent 2020 hopeful found that the Democratic electorate has moved sharply left. For instance, the polling found that ‘socialism’ had a net positive rating, while ‘capitalism’ had a net negative rating.”

If so, good feelings toward socialism might reflect national trends. A Gallup Poll found for the first time in August 2018 that Democrats have a more positive view of socialism than capitalism. In 2016, 56% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents had a positive view of capitalism and 58% had a positive view of socialism. By 2018, only 45% had a positive view of capitalism while 57% were positive about socialism.

Among Americans aged 18-29 in the Gallup Poll, 45% were positive about capitalism while 51% were positive about socialism, but older Americans favored capitalism over socialism, with people aged 30-49 favoring capitalism (57%) over socialism (41%), people aged 50-64 favoring capitalism over socialism 60% to 30% and people aged 65 and over favoring capitalism 60% to 28%.

A supermajority of Americans also support taxes that hit the rich. A Fox News poll in January found 70% of voters support raising taxes on those with incomes of over $10 million and 65% support higher taxes on those with incomes over $1 million.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, who actually calls himself a democratic socialist, got over 12 million votes and narrowly lost the Democratic nomination in 2016 to centrist Hillary Clinton. With high-profile victories of democratic socialists last year, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York’s 14th Congressional District, the Democratic Socialists of America’s membership has grown from 7,000 members to over 50,000 since 2016.

Support for socialism may have grown in the past few years, but Democrats don’t need to spend time and resources trying make the case for socialism among voters over 30. Democrats should embrace the time-tested brand of progressive populism, which has promoted greater equity among people, rights for labor and farmers, regulation of capitalism, improved social services and universal health care in the United States for the past century.

Above all, Democrats should tell voters what they’ll do if they get back in power. And a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, expansion of Social Security benefits to raise all retirees above the poverty level, and federal grants that make university education affordable for everybody who can make the grade — all paid by higher taxes on the superrich — is a good start. But we’ll let the capitalists keep their corporations, as long as they’ll behave. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2019

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