Why the Democrats Keep Losing

June 22, 2017June 23, 2017 npslagleari berman, chomsky, citizens united, democrats, diana kasdan, georgia, gerrymandering, greg palast, james thompson, ossoff, special elections, trump, voter purgeLeave a comment

Donald Trump is arguably the most disliked president in the history of modern polling, according to Five-Thirty-Eight. Haphazard, mean-spirited (even by Trump’s own admission) healthcare proposals, blatantly racist travel bans, and the growing Russia scandal leave Trump in a very weak bargaining position with respect to Congress. Or perhaps the intention is to distract with whatever vulgar offering Trump and Bannon provide on Twitter away from the Paul Ryan/Mitch McConnell plot to eviscerate social programs and keep the rich rolling in the fat, as suggested by Noam Chomsky in an interview with Truthout. Whatever the Republican strategy (or lack thereof), Trump’s extreme unpopularity has heralded close calls for Democrats in a few of the four special elections held this year which would otherwise be very strongly Republican. Yet their strategy is broken.

Jon Ossoff very slightly lost a heavily Republican district very close to where I lived some years ago, and his defeat has predictably emboldened the hopelessly flat Trump to proclaim a landside 100%+ mandate for himself and his stupefying agenda. More appropriately, the closeness of the race in Kansas, to which we’ll return shortly, demonstrates profound dissatisfaction with Trump, something no doubt imperceptible to the mad king in his choking fog of self-congratulatory reverie. Georgia’s is the fourth special election in the months since Trump has become president, and this is the only one the Democratic National Committee cared to notice. Vox noted rather cleverly that Ossoff’s loss occurred because of a lack of substantive policies, permitting sleazy, establishment career politician Karen Handel to smear him on where he lives, who’s funding him (mostly small-time donors through Act Blue), and the like, despite his being raised in the district and her not and her receiving heavy donations from the corporate Republican machine. The issue becomes, rather strikingly, the simple fact that Ossoff, like Obama in 2008, ran only on the “I’m not Trump/Bush and never will be,” rather than actually offering strong policy. One can visit Obama’s 2008 campaign website to find rather scant policy content, mostly platitudes about changing politics and rhetoric. Obama, unlike Ossoff, won because of the previous increasingly frustrating years with warmongering liar Bush in charge, and that McCain, a fresh(ish) departure from Bush, was probably unelectable with Sarah Palin on the ticket. Of course, if Obama had run for the House against McCain and Palin, or McCain and a gorilla for that matter, in Georgia’s sixth district in 2008, he would have walked away with a striking defeat.

The other, and perhaps most significant issue in many urban/suburban districts is a systematic, widespread campaign of voter suppression, long documented by investigative journalist Greg Palast of Democracy Now and of course in outstanding work by Ari Berman in Give Us the Ballot. These two analysts unearth mountains of evidence of persistent voter suppression in the United States against minorities, quite remarkable in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections in that they very likely cost the Democratic candidates Al Gore and John Kerry, respectively, the electoral college. Forms the suppression take are

extreme gerrymandering to weaken or dilute minority districts, such as a drawing ruled unconstitutional in North Carolina in May and likely unconstitutional in Wisconsin soon (interestingly the defense before the court was “partisan advantage”, a euphemism for racial discrimination, much like the role the term “states’ rights” has served with respect to various forms of local tyranny),
purging voter rolls because of fuzzy matching of voter names with those of convicted felons,
deceptive polling location announcements,
dilapidated voting machinery,
insufficient staffing, paper ballots, or machines,
early polling place closures,
legal yet highly unethical barriers to voter registration (see Kasdan below),
persecution of volunteer registrars, a widespread form of suppression documented by Diana Kasdan of the Brennan Center for Justice (an instructive read, as it turns out many state and local governments prefer for voting drives not to happen),

and so on. Earlier, more hostile tactics included barring entry of African Americans to polling places at gun point, unbelievably difficult literacy tests, violence, murder, intimidation, and the list goes on and on.

Returning to strategy, the fundamental issue is that the DNC seems to think the pretty people with Hollywood money and empty platitudes will persuade heartlanders and southerners to pull the lever for a tepid return to establishment politics. Despite Trump’s shriveling popularity, it seems unlikely that they’ll abandon him for an outsider with a shallow platform. And though the Citizens United decision makes the Republican attack ads about outside money all the more absurd and hypocritical (after all they happily gobble up contributions from outside corporations and tycoons, as Think Progress has pointed out), public relations experts in the Republican camp certainly know how to twist that knife by portraying Ossoff as a “San Francisco candidate.” The DNC’s push to moderate Ossoff’s position essentially tied his hands with respect to combating the unremitting propaganda machine, as he’s left largely silent on policy while being forced to defend its outlandish accusations.

The DNC had an excellent opportunity in filling the seat left by CIA director Mike Pompeo in Kansas : James Thompson lost to Ron Estes by four points in a district Trump carried by 27 points, despite virtually no underwriting from the DNC but a strong, populist anti-establishment message. If there was an opportunity to be had, this was it. Kansas folk likely felt at home with Thompson, a local civil rights attorney with deep community ties. Ossoff’s defeat, by contrast, was by a larger percentage margin than Hillary Clinton’s in that same district.

The DNC continues to favor centrist, establishment figures, neither of which Trump’s working class base wants. Bernie’s ascendancy and Trump’s slight electoral victory last year indicated a strong preference among younger and working class people from both parties for an attempt from outside the Beltway.

Though Trump is extremely unpopular, bland establishment shills won’t tempt moderate Republicans, even if they dislike Trump. Though Trump may compulsively pat himself on the back for the victories, they’re actually quite revealing of his unpopularity, as Republicans have atypically only slightly held their seats with a new Republican president in office; Democratic leadership has yet to discover how to leverage it. True upstarts who challenge politics as usual with authentic advocacy for constituency is much more likely to convince people to abandon party and energize activists; as usual, they begin locally.

We’ll return to Cuba next time.

The Spanish Pearl Part One: Trump’s Gambit

June 18, 2017June 18, 2017 npslagleaxis of evil, bush, clinton, coburn, cuba, north korea, pyongyang, qatar, saudi arabia, tillerson, trump, yemen, zinnLeave a comment

Donald Trump, with modest pomp and circumstance from American media, honored a campaign promise this week in reversing the Obama administration’s 2014 decision to begin normalization of relations with Cuba, surrounded by a militant cadre of Republicans hankering to hurtle us back to the good old days of the Cuban missile crisis. From a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted last year, we have that a majority of Americans support lifting the decades-long embargo imposed on Cuba, yet Secretary of State Rex Tillerson offered the tough guy stance on continued human rights abuses within the island nation. Aside from the official response from Cuba reported by CNN detailing the myriad human rights abuses within the U.S. going on right now, one need not look far for the craven double standard present not just in Trump’s bungled, clumsily heavy-handed foreign policy, but in American foreign policy generally traversing the (narrow) political spectrum of post-war administrations. For example, despite myriad internal abuses documented over the years by Human Rights Watch, perpetration of massacres in Yemen, generation of radicalized ISIS militants as documented by Patrick Coburn of the Independent, the murderous tyranny Saudi Arabia’s monarchy enjoys broad American dispensation; Trump gleefully boasts, disingenuously according to the Brookings Institute, of multi-hundred billion dollar Saudi arms deals after a visit featuring a sword dance and a strange glowing orb. Cuba, by stark contrast, somehow continues to draw the ire of extremists both inside and out of the American political aristocracy. Though we may face temptation to hypothesize that

Trump’s open embrace of the repressive, morally repugnant regime in Saudi Arabia tightly follows Trump’s successful business dealings with said regime,
Trump’s haphazard hostility to Qatar, home to the largest U.S. air base in the region perhaps follows his difficulty in securing business deals in said Qatar and thus
an unsuccessful endeavor to circumvent illegally the Cuban embargo in the 1990s, together with disastrously unpopular domestic and foreign policy missteps leaves him with a need for a convenient bogeyman in the dictatorship to the south,

none of Trump’s foreign policy, though perhaps unusually egocentric and idiotic, is particularly shocking when placed in proper historical context. When George W. Bush delivered his first state of the union address in 2002, he thumbed his nose at Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, declaring them to be an “axis of evil,” reversing the meager efforts by his predecessor Bill Clinton in thawing relations with Pyongyang in the so-called Agreed Framework. Bush, like Trump to follow and Reagan to precede, seemed to have only a very slight understanding of geopolitics or the incredibly dangerous, malevolent game of poking-the-bear that is harsh sanctions and embargoes. Indeed, this unique combination of ignorance and possible malevolence is worth examining, notable resource being Neil Buchanan’s recent discussion in Newsweek. But returning to Cuba, fully appreciating the gravity of Trump’s intention to frustrate normalization requires investigating the deeply intertwined history with the rest of Latin America, the United States, the Soviet Union, and indeed the European imperialists who conquered it 500 years past. Over the next handful of articles, I’ll detail the post-colonial history of what was once called the “Pearl” of the Spanish Empire in the hopes that of sharing the moral and ethical legacy demanded of us as citizens responsible for our government’s deeds.

In 1492, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, on behalf of the Spanish monarchy, landed in Hispaniola and Cuba searching for a shorter trade route with the East Indies; upon arrival, he immediately set to the task of conquering and later exterminating the Taíno, the native peoples, installing a colonial government to oversee crop cultivation, resource extraction and, a very, very distant priority, Christianization of the fast-dying peoples. An aside, one can find an instructive first-hand account of Columbus and his initial expedition in Howard Zinn’s Voices of a People’s History of the United States, with thematically familiar vignettes of generous, open-minded natives offering succor and sustenance to their strange European visitors, only to be repaid with savagery, rape, pestilence, and butchery.

For over two centuries, Spanish dominance remained in play despite frequent attempts at usurpation by other European powers, but for a brief interlude in the eighteenth century during the Seven Years’ War in which the British claimed Havana, introducing tens of thousands of African slaves to the island. Demographically, non-white Cubans constituted roughly forty percent of the population in 1775, cresting at fifty-eight percent in the first half of the nineteenth century. Liberation movements stirred, partly due to the French revolution and independence of the thirteen British colonies to the north; contributing perhaps more resonantly was a slave uprising in Haiti in 1791, together with independence efforts by both whites, blacks, and so-called mulattos, or mixtures. Under pressure to close the slave trade (Britain had outlawed slavery in its colonies in 1807), Spain weakly complied, spurring uprisings throughout the middle decades of the 1800s. Of particular note, documented by Jose Canton Navarro in his History of Cuba, was the Conspiración de La Escalera, a vicious campaign to quell slave revolts with torture, murder, and exile owing its name to torture involving a ladder and a whip.

Instructive is the influence beginning in the nineteenth century of the independent thirteen colonies to the north on Cuba, to which we’ll return in subsequent articles.

Cap Contritely in Hand for the Environment

June 6, 2017June 11, 2017 npslaglechomsky, clean air act, climate change, cuyahoga river, department of energy, dodge v. ford, environmental protection agency, exxon, glacial retreat, global warming, gore, greenpeace, noorgard, peat bogs, rachel carson, silent spring, trumpLeave a comment

A few days ago, Donald Trump predictably announced his unilateral decision to toss aside the Paris accord, an agreement which in of itself probably fails to adequately address the existential threat of ecological catastrophe. It’s worth remembering that the agreement is non-binding, essentially expecting each signatory to commit to, well, whatever to which that signatory commits. It may sound like a tautology, and that’s precisely what it is. After all, imagine if the strategic arms limitations talks (SALT) had simply been voluntary on the part of the old Soviet Union and the United States. That is to say, perhaps both countries would come to the table to agree that each would reduce the number of nuclear-carrying ballistic missiles by x% and y%, respectively, and each could assign that number at their leisure. It’s almost a prisoner’s dilemma, each side deciding later how to assign their number. Trump’s simian, chest-thumping “I get to play at the big people’s table” nonsense is all bluster: he just as easily could have played nice, then cut the commitment to zero. The Breitbart-Bannon crowd welcome Trump’s slash-and-burn America-first policy-making approach, no doubt euphoric at their bitter flavor of ignorance finally reaching institutional gravitas. Trump, clearly unaware of consequences, revels in his promise-keeping capacities. Too bad they don’t extend to truly defending the security of Americans by ignoring the Pentagon’s recognition that climate change is a threat, to say nothing of “draining the swamp”, as Trump and his cabinet have so many conflicts-of-interest that the rigor mortis of normalization is firmly in place.

More disconcerting is the relentless propaganda of the past thirty years with respect to the environment. I can remember sitting in computer science courses listening to a naive professor expel the gassy strawman that environmentalists simply don’t want anyone to have a job, as though completely eradicating chances of decent survival of the human race can’t compete with the tacit assumption that full employment is an essential feature of a successful society, as we’ve discussed previously. I’m reminded of Al Gore discussing imagery of a balancing scale with Earth on one plate and gold on the other, a slide from a presentation at a corporate consortium discussion on global warming.

When I was in elementary school, I recall the final chapter in my fifth grade science textbook explaining air and water pollution, acid rain, the ozone layer, and anthropogenic climate adjustments through introduction of wildlife to untouched ecosystems, industrialization, habitat destruction, and the like. I specifically remember my fifth grade teacher, Carolyn Hassell, remarking that she felt the textbook ends splendidly in suggesting that we, the youth of today but adults of tomorrow, have the power to save the environment and our future. That was spring of 1991, twenty-six years ago, in a rural, quite conservative town in Texas. Certainly no one could accuse any of my elementary school teachers of being particularly liberal, yet none could imagine any other conclusion than human beings influence the environment in quite potent ways, and that wisdom and judiciousness are requisite in deciding policy. A striking irony is that the Republican party, an organization dedicated to opposing environmentalism in virtually all of its policy manifestations, bears the moniker “conservative,” a label originating with Theodore Roosevelt and his passion for conservationism, noteworthy in his creation of the National Conservation Commission.

Recognition of industrial pollutants has certainly been in public consciousness more recently. Since the dawn of the industrial era, mass production and increasingly large factories have released more and more toxins into the air, water, and soil. Corporations, concerning purely with profit, are institutionally compelled to transfer the costs of waste to the environment, and ultimately, to the ecosystem; this phenomenon is something called an externality, in the parlance of economics. That is, market systems consider mostly the first order effect of a transaction, ignoring higher order effects. The example often discussed by analyst Noam Chomsky is perhaps you sell me a car for some fixed sum, and maybe we each get a good deal; an externality, among many, is that the additional car may result in more traffic, pollution, and the like, yet the original transaction fails to reflect any of these additional factors. In the more extreme case, industrialists need not consider dumping waste into local rivers, as they may not face any direct financial consequence for doing so. Quite infamous is the burning Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, symbolic of the effects of runaway industrialization on nature; the Stokes brothers, one the mayor of Cleveland, the other a federal congressman, jointly lobbied for passage of the Clean Air Act signed into law by Richard Nixon in 1972. The United Kingdom beat the United States by sixteen years: in 1952, rare weather conditions permitted a heavy concentration of sulfuric acid, emitted from coal-fired power plants, to coalesce in the atmosphere over London. For four days in December, the smog refused to lift, killing at least 12,000 people and poisoning 100,000 more. Four years later, Parliament enacted the first serious legislation aimed at curtailing emissions. Recent work by Texas A&M uncovered more detail in the specific mechanisms, but certainly the causes remain fairly obvious.

Raising public awareness in 1962 was marine biologist Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring in which she discusses the deleterious effects of pesticides on bird populations; it’s possible her volume influenced the founders of the Environmental Defense Fund, an organization which immediately took up the task of curtailing pesticide use after its founding in 1967. The EDF’s influence in policy certainly reverberates throughout the early days of the popular environmental movement, including underwriting a study linking cancer in New Orleans to water contaminants which presaged the passage of the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 and lobbying to ban lead in gasoline beginning in 1985, a measure which predictably better protected children from the ghastly effects of exposure. Interestingly enough, the risks to pregnant women and children were understood as early as 1966 when Lyndon Johnson’s surgeon general William Stewart testified to Congress:

Existing evidence suggests that certain
groups in the population may be particularly
susceptible to lead injury. Children and
pregnant women constitute two of the most
important of such groups. Some studies have
suggested an association between lead
exposure and the occurrence of mental
retardation among children.

Two decades and much public pressure finally wrested regulatory control from corporations, including Associated Octel, responsible for poisoning the population. Much data was available earlier from studies in New Zealand on the toxicity of lead, yet American lobbyists stubbornly allowed gold to weigh more than earth, borrowing from the earlier imagery.

Tracing the history of the runaway greenhouse effect as we understand it today, we have that Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first proposed in 1896 that by-products of fossil fuel combustion could gradually warm the planet. After some back and forth in the mid-twentieth century, scientists settled in 1988 on the proposition that atmospheric temperatures were higher than anytime since 1880, a warming trend due primarily to industrialization. The mechanics of industrial release of carbon dioxide and oceanic resorption were by then largely understood, and the recognition that industrial activity was releasing more carbon dioxide than could be absorbed was beyond question. A coalition of international scientists formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization representing perhaps the largest peer-reviewed scientific cooperation in history. More recent scientific studies, including reports in 2014 and 2016 by the Coastal Resources Commission in North Carolina Coastal dispense with the propagandized claptrap of fossil-fuel underwritten think tanks such as Koch Industries, arguing the scope and damage of rising sea levels is perhaps inevitable now at the current rate of warming. North Carolina is perhaps most striking in its proactive stance toward climate change: in 2012, they simply outlawed it by denying local governments from enacting ordinances or legislation with respect to an earlier report. So much for permitting local governments to make their own choices, a frequent conservative refrain with a host of betrayals, such as the instructing all state and local governments how to define how people can associate in the Defense of Marriage Act, denying local governments the right to protect vulnerable immigrants through Gestapo-like tactics by the Immigration Customs Enforcement, and the like. One can’t help but ponder the tired argument that the Civil War was about states’ rights rather than slavery, despite the slave states happily supporting the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a preposterous piece of freedom-trampling legislation compelling citizens in free states to form militias to return runaway slaves.

Returning to the environment, denialism actually dates back to explorations by Exxon Mobile in 1979 into the implications of climate shifts due to fossil-fuel combustion, an understandable venture given policy could affect their bread-and-butter; in the following years, they vehemently funded a campaign of disinformation to postpone any meaningful action. No strangers to controversy, their almost suicidal foot-dragging and propaganda campaigns permitted horrendous accidents such as the Exxon Valdes spill, a near impossibility with a more decentralized sustainable energy system. Early governmental agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol, would have required signatories to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases such as the aforementioned carbon dioxide, chloroflourocarbons (CFCs), aerosol chemicals known to damage the paper-thin shield of ozone gas absorbing some of the sun’s more harmful ultraviolet radiation, and a handful of other pollutants and toxins. Not unexpectedly, George W. Bush pulled out of the agreement, citing economic needs of American business were more important than the environment; his advisers came to regret the unilateral cowboy decision, as it, like Trump’s blustering parallel move this past week, further galvanized the rest of the world in their perception that America is the selfish, bully child demanding more than its fair share.

Though one could read myriad books on the subject of human contributions to environmental destruction, I’m more interested here in discussing the persistent issue: mountains of evidence, virtual unanimity among scientists regarding these issues, together with palpable, very visible effects seem insufficient to overcome the static friction of apathy. Though we can point to indoctrination and diminished sources of information in the past, online media has somewhat mitigated this problem in recent years, provided one knows where to look for peer-reviewed summaries. A 2015 study by Yale University reports distributions of awareness and concern throughout the world about climate change, noting that 40% of people in the world have never heard about it, obviously mostly in third world nations, and that 48% of Americans aren’t worried despite having heard a good deal of evidence. Certainly that pattern persists across the developed world : awareness perhaps weakly correlates with concern. So one might ask, logically, how it is possible that seemingly rational people can deny the overwhelming scientific evidence? Is it simply because they deny science? Is it because they follow the lead of their favorite pundits and politicians? I would tend to believe the problem is both institutional and sociological, the former being the more obvious antecedent, the latter based on fairly recent research, to which we’ll return.

Corporate disinformation is a major institutional factor : science discovers some mechanism through which environmental manipulation harms ecosystems, imperiling the food supplies and the quality of water and air, next industrial corporations mostly responsible for the devastation dispatch their public relations people to the airwaves and their lobbyists to Washington to “control the narrative,” or rather supplant or obfuscate truth. One can literally go case after case to find the same pattern: if there’s an agency or cache of talking points aimed at undermining environmental concerns, typically the underwriting comes from none other than the corporations poised to lose the most if policy reflects said concerns, as we mentioned earlier. One can note that as of June 6, 2017, Exxon itself buys ad space on Google if one searches for “Exxon climate change denial;” the page is an exercise in public relations spin mostly lambasting environmental groups dedicated to reducing consumption of fossil fuels in energy production, suggesting they and the media are somehow part of an outlandish conspiracy theory discussed by Paul Krugman in a recent op-ed in the New York Times. Krugman’s arguments extend to more than just climate change, which we’ll discuss momentarily. Greenpeace provides a fascinating timeline of Exxon’s early research in the 1960s and 1970s, initially with Elmer Robinson and R.C. Robbins presenting a report to the American Petroleum Institute about the dangers of excess carbon dioxide raising sea levels and re-architecting marine ecosystems, James Black of the research division circulating reports internally about the greenhouse effect, writing in 1978 that

[p]resent thinking holds that man has a time window of
five to ten years before the need for hard decisions
regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical,

and so on into the early 1980s. In particular, meeting minutes released from a task force on climate change organized by Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Shell, and others suggested agreement with the realities of greenhouse gas emission and climate change, along with concession of the responsibilities they would bear going forward. Roger Cohen, a scientist at Exxon, wrote in an internal memo in 1983, later leaked,

[t]he consensus is that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from
its pre-industrial revolution value would result in an average
global temperature rise of (3.0 ± 1.5)°C [equal to 5.4 ± 1.7°F]…
There is unanimous agreement in the scientific community that
a temperature increase of this magnitude would bring about
significant changes in the earth’s climate, including rainfall
distribution and alterations in the biosphere.

Cohen decided to reverse his position later, joining a denial think tank created by Exxon. Disinformation campaigns have emerged over time from various industrial leaders, the Koch leaders being a particular example. In the academic field of climate science, near unanimity of the scope and risk of ecological catastrophe is easy to find, documented heavily by various non-partisan organizations such as Skeptical Science. The majority of scientists in other fields and government scientific agencies also agree with the consensus, documented by NASA. Astonishingly, as the consensus has solidified and global temperatures have risen steadily by easily understood anthropomorphic mechanisms, the Republican party’s official position has shifted increasingly in the direction of mind-numbingly stupid denialism. Vox offered an intriguing look at the evolution of the Republican position on environmentalism in an April 22 article, tracing the perspectives as beginning with more sound acceptance of scientific research, gradually eased out by right-wing think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation in the 1970s and both the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy in the 1980s, along with a tidal wave of anti-establishment politics in Reagan’s 1980 electoral victory. Ann Gorsuch, mother of Trump’s recent far-right appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court, headed the Environmental Protection Agency with a penchant for dismantling the regulatory and administrative state shared by the nationalist Bannon contingency in today’s executive branch. She later resigned amidst threats from the Democratic-led Congress to investigate allegations into corruption; a SCOTUS decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council 1984 broadened agency interpretation of legislation, reversing somewhat Reagan’s efforts at deregulation. Nonetheless, institutional denial has increased as the science has become more certain; analyst Noam Chomsky points to institutional bias of corporations as a partial culprit, pointing out that a CEO of a multinational corporation, even if aware of the overwhelming dangers, cannot risk profits, even at great moral cost. Anglo-American legal precedent offers evidence in Dodge v. Ford in 1919, codifying the position that corporations granted charters in America must pursue profits above all other considerations, meaning the rest, as I would imagine most people know, is public relations. We’ll return to the contradiction of rising denialism corresponding to increasing uniformity in the scientific consensus momentarily, but to circle back to Krugman’s editorial, the official Republican party position has become increasingly fact-free, or perhaps more appropriately fact-abhorrent. As he points out, whether it be environmentalism, the budget, healthcare, and the like, Trump’s programs, and by a marginal difference, the Paul Ryan fiscal wing, are almost completely without any constructive intent. Trump’s own leaked internal analysis of his first stab at healthcare reform had even more dire projections than the Congressional Budget Office’s assessment, despite all the bluster to the contrary. As Chomsky has pointed out previously, the Republican party no longer follows parliamentary procedure, nor does it care about the opinions of experts, scientists, or anyone offering anything challenging their fragile, fantastical world-view, echoing conservative analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein in declaring the “unparty” to be a “radical insurgency”. This madness extends to the stubborn, Republican position that curtailing fossil fuel consumption would destroy jobs, no longer supported by any facts since renewable energy job projections far exceed any job loss associated with older energy programs, reported by Fortune; even today, the number of jobs in renewable energy exceeds that of non-renewables, according to a Department of Energy study. In older arguments I’ve heard throughout my life, conservatives have pointed to the high cost of investment in renewable energy, again ignorant of the pervasive state capitalism model we’ve discussed previously : heavy government investment in the technology sector during the more expensive phase of research and development, followed by private interests cashing in once the technology becomes marketable. So in summary, every argument offered by Republicans contravening meaningful action against ecological catastrophe folds like a cheap card table under the enormity of scientific consensus and thorough economic analysis.

So certainly we can point to institutional corruption and the shift rightward of both major political parties, placing one center right and the other in outer space, in explaining part of the propaganda campaign against environmentalism, but how do we explain some of the more curious phenomena with respect to attitudes and beliefs? Sociologist Kari Marie Noorgard of the University of Oregon has an interesting set of answers in her 2011 book Living in Denial. She compares a few competing theories on denialism: the first theory, for instance discussed in Harriet Bulkeley’s paper in 2000 on Australian attitudes, suggests that denialism is rooted in disinformation campaigns of corrupt institutions and ignorance of the population, neatly a problem of information. The more astonishing theory, echoing work in Norway by Hellevik and Barstad in 2004, asserts that willingness to solve climate change diminishes as public awareness grows. Similar work in the United States by Kellsted, Zahran, and Vedlitz finds a similar, stunning trend : the more people know about the problem, the less responsible they feel for it. Aside from the 26% of Americans who stubbornly refuse to accept the overwhelming scientific consensus, coincident with Trump’s more galvanized nativist base, many of us simply refuse to take responsibility for it, and thus fail to pressure the political elite to ignore intensive lobbying from fossil-fuel firms. In fact, I found in reading the theory that I, too am part of the contingency; though I drive an electric car to reduce emissions, aim for aluminum can consumption rather than plastic bottle since aluminum is cheaper and easier to recycle, lobby officials on behalf of environmental causes, and eat virtually no meat, I nonetheless have a much larger carbon footprint than do most people, mainly in very frequent air travel to see family scattered across the continent. It occurred to me in thinking about the problem that I, too, feel a sense of resignation in the defeat of either more environmentally-friendly or more malleable candidates, such as Clinton in 2016 (more the latter than the former, as the Democratic party barely addresses the climate concerns), and thus somehow feel less responsible for the damage done either in the manufacture of products that I buy or not more vehemently pressing local, state, and federal representatives to pursue more sustainable policies. Calmer, more educated conservatives point to this contradiction as part of the problem of framing, as in the American Conservative. They complain that liberals, if that term even makes sense anymore, appeal to social justice, uplifting indigenous populations vulnerable to sea rises, and the like, notions argued to be viscerally repulsive to their less educated Christian conservative brethren. It’s rather stunning to me that one could profess to be Christ-like yet be unconcerned with social justice, but then again most flavors of religion offer a mixture of dogmatism, progressivism, oppression, liberation, and so on, depending on where you look. Certainly Christian conservative politicians fall off the spectrum, with such notables as Jim Inhofe saying,

God is still up there... arrogance of
people to think that we, human beings,
would be able to change what He is doing
in the climate is to me outrageous.

In other words, if God chooses to let us burn, we shouldn’t buck His divine plans. Fervently religious, the Republican candidates in the 2016 presidential election all denied climate science, with the exception of John Kasich and tentatively Jeb Bush, despite admonitions from the Good Book about protecting mother nature. Neither of the “adults in the room” thought we should do anything about it, incidentally. And it’s debatable whether Trump has ever read any book, let alone one on science of any kind beyond Little Golden Books.

In any case, Noorgard’s research suggests to me that most of us, whether we’re knowledgeable or not, bear responsibility for what happens with regard to this existential threat. Admittedly, convincing the unscientifically-minded and the institutionally-indoctrinated of the gravity presents challenges, but we’re fast running out of options. Facing believers and non-believers alike are

retreating glaciers, something visually perceivable thanks to photography and more recently satellite imagery,
extreme weather, destroying coastal cities and killing thousands of people,
extinction rates at least 1000 times the background rate, catapulting us into a sixth extinction event,
crop destruction affecting food supplies of thousands in third-world nations,
coastal flooding in low-lying regions such as Bangladesh, a worsening of which would generate refugee crises never before seen in civilization,
diminishing water supplies as Himalayan ice caps melt, potentially depriving southeast Asian populations of all drinkable water and increasing tensions between the nuclear states India and Pakistan,
melting of Siberian tundra, releasing from peat bogs vast reserves of the significantly more potent greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere,

and the terrifying list grows. And unlike in the mortgage crisis of 2008, the stock market crash of 1929, the savings and loans disaster of the 1980s, the automotive crisis of 2008 to 2010, and other “free market” disasters, corporations primarily responsible for ecological destruction will find no nanny state riding to the rescue when the elites finally ask for help, cap contritely in hand, to borrow an expression from Chomsky.

Austerity : A Propagandist’s Weapon

May 30, 2017June 9, 2017 npslagleAusterity, Blyth, Budget, Entitlements, Food stamps, Gilded age, Globalism, Income inequality, Krugman, Medicaid, Medicare, neoliberalism, New Deal, Poverty, Social security, Spirit of the age, trump, Trump budgetLeave a comment

Investigating the federal budget blueprint promoted by the Trump administration of late certainly wouldn’t suggest candidate Trump had even the slightest populist inclinations, to say nothing of promising universal healthcare and a more relaxed student loan schedule. Serious policy analysis from various agencies and organizations declare his budget to be a sharp, deep kick to the solar plexus of the poor rural whites, a constituency which, according to Bloomberg, largely carried its bitter class enemy to electoral victory. Budget chief Mick Mulvaney assures us that all of this is in the interest of prioritizing the “taxpayer” rather than compassion for the recipients of soon-to-be decimated social programs; that is, as analyst Noam Chomsky cleverly puts it,

Tough love is just the right phrase: 
love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.

Notably, education, housing, human services (above and beyond the ACA repeal underway), and labor agencies will face erosion; among the biggest losers are

the poor with cuts to food stamps, temporary assistance for needy families (TANF), and housing subsidies,
children with cuts to the children’s health insurance program (CHIP),
the disabled with cuts to social security disability insurance, contravening Trump’s promise to protect social security and medicare,
women with cuts to healthcare and family planning services if they even mention abortion,
college students with cuts to student loans,

and so on. Social security disability insurance is of particular note, as candidate Trump and traditional conservative dogma suggests rampant fraud. In reality, SSDI fraud occurs in no more than one percent of cases, despite a media campaign to marginalize the disabled and eligibility requirements more stringent than anywhere else in the developed world, tying with Japan, Canada, and South Korea. Though we could spend some time unearthing every ghastly, despicable policy choice and respective consequences to the population in what appears to be one of the most malevolent, destructive budgets offered by any administration in recent memory, I’d rather discuss the broader economic dogma of austerity, both in fact and in form, to which we’ll return.

A former teacher and dear friend of mine remarked recently that the costs of her health insurance, provided through the Texas Teacher Retirement System, are skyrocketing, “thanks to the Texas legislature [and those] who only vote on issues like abortion or bathroom use.” In fact, I need not look far among my own friends and family to find victims of an increasingly austere social policy, including retirees, disabled family members, and the like. It turns out that even those who supported Trump very much so will not escape unscathed, as suggested in earlier posts. Particularly of note to me are rare agency reports praising Trump’s budget : the conservative Heritage foundation dispatched their usual lockstep ideologues to praise slashing aid for the poor in the interest of meeting economic projections, bolstering the already grossly over-funded military in overestimating non-nuclear threats to our safety, and building of exceedingly costly walls along borders to protect us from the imagined terrorism of Mexicans. An analyst named Adam Michel, in admittedly what is a shock even to me, repeats the tired, heavily disproved supply-side argument that tax cuts increase revenue; some years ago, Neera Tanden pondered rather lucidly this seemingly immortal economic theory, if one can dignify it with a legitimate scientific label. Trump’s melodrama around corporate tax rates is particularly Quixotic, considering that the share of the federal budget funded by corporate taxes has fallen to ten percent over the last sixty years, according to Americans for Tax Fairness, and so many of the largest corporations pay no taxes at all. Speaking of Quixotic hysteria, Heritage complains that the military budget isn’t receiving a sufficiently large bump to combat our imagined enemies; we’ve discussed previously how military spending is mostly state capitalism, or transfer of public monies to corporations largely unconstrained by Lippman’s “meddlesome outsiders,” so we’ll leave it at that.

More troubling than the expected bias from Heritage is an op-ed I found on CNN by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former chief of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). He concedes early that Trump’s budget is a mixed bag yet omits any specific criticism, rather defending the heavy-handed assumption that entitlements are out-of-control, and thus must be curtailed to support programs envisioned by the “Founders… as the actual responsibilities of government,” including security, research, and the like. That is to say, retiree pensions and programs supporting the vulnerable members population must be subjected to stark economic constraints to offer incommensurate support for Holtz-Eakin’s interpretation of what the government should be doing : pouring money into private firms for defense research, weapons manufacture, and so on. Though this catastrophizing around entitlements may seem isolated amidst a sea of negative analyses of Trump’s disastrous budget, it is in fact a persistent and essential feature of the austerity dogma, one tinging even more balanced critiques of his budget.

Austerity is an economic policy which mitigates national debt and capital shortages through either increases in taxation or slashing of government spending, usually social spending or entitlements. John Maynard Keynes, perhaps the most influential economist of the depression years and co-architect of the financial regulatory apparatus codified in the Bretton Woods agreement, famously quipped,

the boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity,

as discussed by political scientist Mark Blyth in his book Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. As Blyth illustrates, nations have nonetheless attempted to implement austerity measures often at the wrong time, such as during recessions, depressions, and the like, often to cataclysmic consequence. On the more moderate side of error, Franklin Roosevelt implemented austerity in 1937, much too early in the Great Depression to salvage the meager restoration of money flow. On more extreme examples, we have starvation of third world nations through both transfer of debt from corrupt, undemocratic leaders to the unwitting population and neoliberal antilabor policies driving wages down and forcing migrant workers and farmers off the farms and into crowded factories with diminished protections and standards, as we’ve seen in Pinochet’s Chile after the CIA-backed overthrow of Salvador Allende, various Latin American countries through violent overthrows, Argentina, China under trade policy with Europe, Japan, and the US, Mexico under NAFTA, north Africa, and the like; Riad Azar discusses the uncomfortable relationship between neoliberalism and authoritarianism in many of these cases. Elites in these nations generally tell their populations that times are tough, thus we must all give up a little luxury here and there to cover debts. In the past forty years, we’ve experienced the same here in the United States; president after president has asked us to surrender more and more of the entitlement programs enacted under the New Deal, citing imminent fiscal meltdown and an absurd promise that somehow cutting taxes on the rich will more than meet the shortfall. Paul Krugman, economist at the New York Times, lambasted the theoretical support for austerity in an article for the New York Review of Books a few years ago, demonstrating flaws in the arguments of austerians and exhibiting data from the international monetary fund (IMF) demonstrating both the disastrous results of austerity measures in Greece, Portugal, and other European countries, and the low cost of deficits for nations capable of expanding their own currency, the USA being a principal example. So if so much evidence abounds weighing against austerity, why does it persist?

Krugman cites Andrew Mellon’s suggestion to President Herbert Hoover at the beginning of the Great Depression to

liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers,
liquidate real estate... 
it will purge the rottenness out of the system.
High costs of living and high living will come down.
People will work harder, live a more moral life.
Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will
pick up from less competent people,

indicating a belief that the depression was a natural consequence of the largesse of the 1920s. Naturally his position among the banking elite of the day obscured from his sight that income inequality was stark in that roaring decade, rivaling today’s lopsided wealth distribution; the Americans hit hardest by the Great Depression were those farmers victimized by the Dust Bowl, poor city dwellers, and, of course, marginalized minorities, most of whom weren’t participants in the immoral ways torturing Mellon’s lily-white soul. Krugman cites this example, along with The Great Deformation, David Stockman’s multiple-page content-free rant against economic excesses, and others as the innate need for elites and others to interpret the goings-on of economics as a “morality play,” despite Keynes’ claims to the contrary. Austerians, Krugman contends, grasp at any opportunity to fortify their central thesis, expecting that punishment is in order to correct the moral balance of society. With even a cursory glance, one can find striking evidence of a desire to excise reliance on government services among Trump supporters, elitists, and the like: for nearly thirty years, I’ve listened to the Trump supporters in my family bemoan abuses to the system by black recipients of welfare, despite years worth of nonpartisan General Accounting Office (GAO) studies suggesting that most recipients of welfare are on the rolls less than two years, and those remaining are mostly elderly and children. Most seriously, entitlements intended to buttress the poor make up an almost trivial amount in the budget: food stamps alone account for maybe three percent, depending on how one counts it. Any analyst serious about cutting expenditures should tackle the most obvious offender, the military.

Krugman and Blyth offer an excellent critique of austerity within an economic framework, but my thinking is that the problem is actually far more elementary. As suggested earlier, military spending is an undemocratic transfer of wealth to corporations, somehow magically shielded from the harsh, requisite market principles applied to retirees, the disabled, and so on. A confluence of interests largely explain the pervasiveness of the dogma, including

subservient academics in Blyth’s “Bocconi boys,” responsible for lending austerity a theoretical legitimacy,
Ayn Rand’s morally repugnant objectivism promoted even by so-called Christian politicians such as Bob Barr, Ron Paul, and Paul Ryan, and
a vast propaganda machine fueled by elites and crafted by the public relations industry, including
- an unusually violent labor history,
- unremitting elite hostility toward unions despite their indispensable democratic functions,
- red scares in the 1910s and 1950s, and, of course,
- the persistent argument that entitlements are failing.

Circling back to Holtz-Eakin’s claim, even argued in the Washington Post op-ed included above, that entitlements will run out of gas in a few decades, I’m astounded by the almost cultish adherence to market ideology, which taken to its natural conclusion, leads to a key, immoral tenet of austerity : liquidity over livelihood. Human life apparently isn’t worth a balanced budget. In any case, I would argue that even without Krugman’s rather elegant take-down, the theoretical underpinnings collapse by virtue of sheer hypocrisy: somehow defense, very much overblown and over budget well beyond necessity, as repeatedly discussed by peace activist David Swanson, enjoys exemption from the natural law of markets, it would seem. Even more absurd is that avaricious financial institutions somehow earn special dispensation, such as a sizable bailout in 2008 following a crisis of their own making, to say nothing of the economic protectionism of the Gilded Era, the post-war years, and the Reagan years, discussed previously, and that the super wealthy should receive enormous tax cuts at the expense of social programs on the merits of the debunked supply-side thesis as they did in 1982 and 2002; somehow, we’re told, these unusual events perfectly harmonize with the inscrutable free market ideology. The alarmist perspective of extremists, the Republicans, (and some centrists, the Democrats) in our government holds that despite experiencing enormous growth in wealth over the past four decades, the top tier must receive more than those below, and furthermore democracy cannot overcome the natural order of market ideology. That is, once entitlements run aground as currently financed, there simply is no way to transfer monies downward, as this would violate the sacred natural order. No amount of votes or popular pressure should overcome this dastardly outcome, so naturally, elderly and disabled people, along with children unfortunate enough to be born into poverty, should simply suffer.

Frankly, only an imbecile would assent to these ludicrous notions. First of all, there is no natural law of markets, well-argued by Kerry Anne Mendoza. Second of all, there is no shortage of capital. To create the obvious analogy to hopefully emphasize this point, suppose one hundred people are marooned on an island without outside help and no way to escape, yet the island offers enough food and water to support these hundred people. Further, consider that by some fluke exactly one person on that island manages to control 90% of the precious food and water, yet since he’s unwilling to share even a crumb with his fellow inhabitants, a shortfall in the next year is a guarantee for the remaining 99. What law of markets or private property justifies the greed of one person at the expense of the others? To sketch the analogy further, suppose the other 99 inhabitants perform most of the work to accumulate the food and water over time, yet they cannot partake without his magnanimous permission. As outrageous and unrealistic as this may sound when the problem appears so concretely, it is precisely what we’re facing with the entitlements crisis. Compounding the lunacy of the hysteria is that money isn’t a precious, limited resource like drinkable water, breathable air, and consumable food stuffs; it’s a construct, or an abstraction designed to provide an intermediary exchange for goods and services, something which the US can expand and contract freely as it has since the founding of the Federal Reserve. And even without artificially inflating capital, there is plenty to go around. I’ll repeat, as this is crucial : there is no real shortage of capital. Unfortunately, there isn’t a surplus of morality and principle where most of this capital lives; in its place is a malignant, metastatic greed leeching resources and wealth away from the workforce and vulnerable recipients of these entitlements; I’m reminded of a quote by Martin Wolf, economic correspondent for the Financial Times, repeated by Chomsky,

an out-of-control financial sector
is eating out the modern market economy
from inside, just as the larva of the spider
wasp eats out the host in which it has been laid.

The irony here is the far-right hysterics’ fanaticism with apocalypse doesn’t seem to extend to the real threats : terminal nuclear war and ecological disaster; instead, I feel their motives are clear. Like those textile mill workers of 120 years ago, we can lament in this second gilded age

the new spirit of the age...
gain wealth... forget all but self.

We need not surrender now.

Trump : Symptom or Cause?

May 24, 2017May 24, 2017 npslaglebernstein, checks and balances, clapper, coburn, comey, gilding, goldwater rule, haig, impeachment, kissinger, leaks, russia, snowden, syria, trump, yatesLeave a comment

The major news in recent weeks has featured prominently the ongoing investigation into Russia’s manipulation of last year’s presidential election, the possible complicity of Trump’s campaign in said manipulation, and Trump’s repeated snafus, contradictions, and rather astonishingly public twitter meltdowns. With so much ground to cover, it can be a bit difficult to decide where to begin.

If ever there were an argument against the fitness of a particular holder of the office, we have a collection of problems whose astonishing proliferation parallels the severity:

appointing Michael Flynn to head the NSA while knowing he was under FBI investigation for aiding the government of Turkey, granting him access to untold government secrets,
failing to fire Flynn for nearly three weeks despite having been warned of his self-denied meetings with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak,
leaking intelligence to Russian dignitaries, including Kislyak,
suggesting to James Comey, director of the FBI, that he jail reporters who repeat classified leaks (despite lavish praise for Wikileaks and leakers during the Obama administration),
then firing Comey, first for incompetence, then, admittedly to frustrate the investigation mentioned above,
intimidating Sally Yates, James Clapper, and Comey via twitter in anticipation of their respective testimonies before Congress,
allegedly coercing the director of national intelligence, the head of the national security agency, obviously the FBI director, and the Justice Department to end the Russian probe,

and the list continues. We have a dangerously unstable man occupying the White House with the power to intimidate, imperil, and harass with minimal Congressional oversight. In fact, the Republican response to each new abuse of power, though glacially warming from their lackluster tepid beginnings, contrasts immensely with mass hysteria among Congressional Republicans during Clinton’s sex scandal or Obama’s healthcare proposals, nicely captured by the analysts at the morally bankrupt Fox news. Certainly it evokes the astonishingly forgiving attitude of arch-conservative faith leaders such as Pat Robertson toward Trump when damning Access Hollywood tapes surfaced, recording his sexual objectification of women as things to abuse at his pleasure. Robertson, like his high-minded counterparts of the past complicit in the Nazi ascent, offers spiritual cover for Trump even amidst major scandals.

The mainstream media, though largely responsible for placing Trump in the center seat with high-volume, free news coverage throughout 2015 and 2016, somehow found its voice once Trump slithered into the White House with a slight advantage in the obsolete electoral college, no doubt because of his incessant attacks on the press. Nonetheless, what bothers me most about the current state-of-affairs is not the alleged collusion, which I’d easily wager truly did happen (think : Trump entreated Russia to steal Hillary’s emails, not to mention the snowballing investigation mentioned above), nor is it the insanity of Trump himself, a condition so blatantly obvious that mental health professionals around the world, including three university professors who implored Obama to institute a mental fitness test for incoming presidents, and country have drifted from the Goldwater rule, an APA convention designed to depoliticize psychology.

Trump’s shenanigans and abuses of power, together with the ineffective, simpering cronies in Congress, uncover some of the more fearsome deficiencies in the American government. A continuing dialog by CBS with a group of voters tracks the evolution of public viewpoints since the election, revealing a remarkable characteristic among Trump’s most ardent loyalists : they believe law enforcement and government agents should swear an oath not only to uphold the U.S. Constitution, but offer unconditional support to the U.S. President. Though this received very little press coverage, it struck me with great alarm, as I recall learning even as an elementary school student in social studies that the principles of freedom articulated in the Constitution greatly exceeded any one leader in authority; though the transition into adulthood taught me how unfairly protectionist elite sectors happen to be, quite striking for example in the application of austere, lofty market principles to the poor and vulnerable while greedily hiding behind the nanny state to guarantee a good, yet non-market outcome, hearing even lower middle class and perhaps poor people hope for some sort of totalitarian pledge to an office of increasingly diminished constraint frankly frightened. In fact, the cavalier attitude of Trump’s strongest supporters, both in Congress and the population, toward his many abuses of power, incompetence, violations of the emoluments clause, leveraging his position to enrich companies owned by him, his daughter, and his son-in-law, nauseating affection for vicious, murderous dictators such as Putin, Duterte, and Erdogan, and highly suspect entanglements with foreign agencies indicate either deeply entrenched partisanship or discouraging ignorance. An obvious example was in questions lobbed by Senators James Kennedy, John Cornyn, and Ted Cruz at Sally Yates about Trump’s ill-fated, first amendment-violating Muslim ban, in defiance of the purpose of her testimony, a discussion of Russian interference into the election, to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Kennedy mocked her by asking, “Who appointed you to the supreme court?”, blathering rather idiotically that no agent sworn to uphold the Constitution can argue with or overrule a despotic president ordering violations of that same document. It certainly gives one pause to consider that the racist underpinnings of Trump’s bans fly in the face of a multi-hundred billion dollar arms deal with Saudi Arabia, the key source of “Wahabized” Sunnis fueling ISIS, according to regional expert Patrick Coburn. Obama had previously blocked such a sale because of the atrocious Saudi record of human rights violations, something a toady such as Kennedy might not know. Of course, though the ignorance of a petty sycophant in the Senate may be an acute example of the brokenness of the system, it hardly tells the whole story.

The House of Representatives harriedly passed a bastardization of healthcare reform in a desperately rushed, craven attempt to hand Trump some meager legislative victory before the Congress Budget Office could offer a sobering analysis delivered for the first variant of Trumpcare. I watched in utter astonishment as Representative Mark Sanford admitted not reading the entire bill; others confessed they simply wished to punt healthcare to the Senate. Honestly, I’ve often wondered how it was possible that public approval of the branches of the federal government negatively correlates to the democratic quality of the branch; that is, the House is the most hated, followed by the Senate, then the Supreme Court, then the White House. Yet listening to men whose only job is to propose, amend, read, understand, and approve/disapprove legislation affecting the entire country concede that their constitutional oaths to office, purported devotion to constituency, and their juicy six-figure salaries are meaningless in the face of a tantrum-throwing imbecile so set on any victory that slicing the throats of his own supporters with cuts to Medicaid, student loan subsidies, small business subsidies, and elimination of ACA protections seems perfectly reasonable. The worshiped, fabled checks-and-balances of our government, as usual, are only as powerful as the people enforcing them. So far, no success, despite the carefully laid out responsibilities of each branch listed in the Constitution, let alone the more serious constitutional pressure valve of impeachment.

Speaking recently to an educated family member whose devotion to Trump defies imagination, I attempted to outline the case for such an impeachment, suggesting that a narcissistic conman with near unconstrained war-making power and a profound ignorance of climate science can harm not just the vulnerable and the poor, largely unimportant to my relative, but also his own children’s chances of decent survival. His two retorts, utterly stunning, included a dismissal of corruption and abuses of power of both Trump and, appropriately parallel, Nixon as “not really a big deal,” and that all existential threats to humanity are resolvable through “population control.” That is, if there were fewer people on planet earth, nuclear weapons would magically no longer pose a threat. Though the effects on climate from exponential gains in population are noteworthy, it seems almost as ludicrous as simply asking the sun to turn down the heat, as it’s impossible to solve a population problem in the near term without anything short of genocide. I reminded him that the distribution of consumption and massive pollution of militaries and multinationals are more appropriate targets in mitigating ecological disaster. He even proffered population control as a means of ensuring enough employment for everyone, expressing loyalty to an outdated and outmoded economic paradigm derided by former Greenpeace CEO Paul Gilding as unsustainable. Even more astonishing is that my family member receives most of his salary through government safety net programs, seemingly oblivious to the self-inflicted wound supporting Trump’s heartless, destructive budget proposals happens to be, as mentioned above.

Much public discussion of impeachment has appeared in light of more recent revelations, including a courageous act by black Representative Al Green to call for and draw up articles; he has since received threats of murder and lynching, steeped in racial epithets. Yet despite Trump’s turbulent relationship with media, it isn’t hard to pinpoint the two key weaknesses in the fourth estate’s watchdog role : Trump’s not-so-state-of-the-union address and his unilateral dropping of MOAB in Afghanistan and the bombing of a Syrian airfield. In each of these cases, the media tried, I think genuinely, to support him moments before the eruption of a new scandal. In the case of the former, they seemed excited he was behaving “presidential” by sounding less insane in his speech, demonstrating their societal function of continued subservience to power; in the case of the latter, violent military action tends unfortunately to generate a rally-around-the-flag effect, despite being an obviously impeachable offense. Intriguingly, Obama refused to act unilaterally in Syria because of threats by Congress to impeach him, yet the Republican leadership and mainstream media welcome with euphoria a completely ineffective airstrike which imperils relations with Russia and other players in the region. Also, MOAB, the most powerful non-nuclear bomb ever created, devastates anything within a mile of its target, a vicious and malevolent display of aggression against an almost totally destroyed country. Of course, I’d agree if Obama had acted as such, he should have been impeached. In fact, every president since the second world war should have faced impeachment for some military action or another (think the invasion of Iraq, the drone assassination campaign, and so on), raising perhaps one of the most disconcerting developments in the past eighty years.

In the post-war era, Congress and the Supreme Court have increasingly broadened war-making powers of the President under the guise of national defense, offering

"[t]he President shall be Commander in Chief of
the Army and Navy of the United States, and of
the Militia of the several States, when called
into the actual Service of the United States"

as crucial constitutional support. Yet something happened at the conclusion of the second world war unforeseen by the framers: with the beginning of the nuclear age and the Anthropocene epoch, mankind for the first time was uniquely positioned to extinguish itself. The President of the United States, the single most powerful person in the most powerful institution to ever exist, can precipitate terminal nuclear war with the tenuous argument that it is necessary to provide the common defense. Dangers have abounded in the past, including orders by Nixon’s chief of staff Alexander Haig that no last minute nuclear strikes should occur without approval from himself and Henry Kissinger as the Nixon presidency collapsed under Watergate. We’ve discussed near-misses such as the Cuban missile crisis and Operation : Able Archer before, but the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is certainly worth remembering.

Watching as scandal after scandal shreds public institutions further, it again reminds me to ask why we need these institutions in the first place. Obama prosecuted more leakers under the Espionage Act of 1917 than all previous administrations combined, and Democrats and non-Trump Republicans cheered, such as denouncing Edward Snowden to be a traitor after he revealed a mass surveillance operation leveraged by the NSA against the American population. Now, whistle-blowers from within the so-called “deep state” reveal information almost daily that acquaint us with the desperately precarious position in which we find ourselves, and the media and many Democrats cheer. The fact remains that though one can argue “state secrecy” as justification for concealing any information in the name of security, it again illustrates a fundamental distrust of the population that government representatives and elite media generally share. Leaks have always been an essential feature of elite power systems desperate to self-sustain even at odds with institutional charters, as Carl Bernstein pointed out in a recent op-ed. Certainly the decades-old “state secret” argument dovetails nicely with John Yoo’s doctrine on near constraint-free torture even against children and with white supremacist Stephen Miller’s claim that Trump’s authority “cannot be questioned”

Trump therefore happens to be especially acute in the danger he represents, but the problem persists as systemic; after all, if he’s guilty of abuse of power and obstruction of justice, aren’t all or most of his cabinet, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Devin Nunes, and the like? They too either refuse or offer tepid support to investigate what should be substantive news; admittedly, the U.S. has interfered through violence, subversion, subterfuge, and a host of other mechanisms in elections across the globe throughout are history. It certainly isn’t as fun when someone else does it to us. Analysts argue back and forth as to whether his obstructions carry the requisite criminal intent, an almost laughable debate considering that quashing an investigation into your own possible criminality is by definition criminal intent. It’s worth noting that even highly respectable analysts such as Glenn Greenwald suggest the possibility of no smoking gun in the case since Trump would be rather stupid to draw attention to himself in firing Comey; of course, he tacitly ascribes a rationality to Trump obviously missing when one applies even layperson psychology. So we have a crazy, destructive narcissist running the White House, laying bare frailties of the crumbling public institutions before our very eyes. How do we fix it?

An apparent strategy, and perhaps not beyond what is achievable in light of the many abuses of the White House, is to substantially curtail the power of the executive, increase the size of both the Supreme Court and Congress, and (with greater difficulty) adjust the Constitution to match the needs of a modern society. Watching as the media and Congress wait with breathless abandon for the president to set the agenda is laughable; why does the White House set the legislative agenda? How can corrupt gerrymanderers in North Carolina who think arguing that partisan advantage justifies racial discrimination garner a single vote from the Supreme Court, let alone those of Alito, Roberts, and Kennedy? How is it that the U.S. Senate can sit idly by while Trump, a serial liar, continues to violate the Constitution and obstruct investigations into his own corruption? If we survive the time Trump is in office (and I’m increasingly convinced that time will be very brief), we should try to solve the serious inadequacies of our system, and that right soon.

Book Review : The Submerged State

April 7, 2017June 10, 2017 npslaglederegulation, mettler, obamacare, state capitalism, submerged state, trump, trumpcare2 Comments

Donald Trump’s spectacular healthcare debacle in the past month generated a remarkably improbable coalition of opponents, heralding the haphazardness, the callousness, and the sheer incompetence of both the conman and his cowardly rank-and-file. The laughable so-called freedom caucus objected because the replacement for the Affordable Care Act would still offer help to anyone at all; moderate Republicans feared increasing backlash as their constituents, Trump supporters included, have gradually come to discover just how essential elements of the bemoaned “Obamacare” are in meeting their medical needs; Democrats, appropriately, oppose the demise of what serious analysts continue to depict as Obama’s “signature domestic achievement;” liberals of course oppose funneling money away from healthcare for the poor upward to comfort the wealthy. One need only ponder the proposed replacement superficially to begin to understand clearly the rationale behind such astonishing obstruction.

Among the proposals are

Medicaid expansion freezes in 2018 or 2020, conspicuously following midterms,
elimination of mandate fees largely underwriting the program, indicative of a fundamental lack of understanding of how insurance, private or otherwise, is designed to work,
reduction or dissolution of other taxes paid by income earners over the $500K/yr threshold,
increases to tax rates on middle and working class people,
replacement of out-of-pocket assistance with a questionable age-based assistance framework, likely quite harmful to poor older Americans just below 65 years of age and younger Americans with chronic health conditions,

and the list goes on and on.

Rates of uninsured and overall cost of coverage are uncontroversially projected to increase under the Trump plan, though Secretary Tom Price of the Health and Human Services Department insists rather disingenuously otherwise. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan actually bested both Trump and Price by claiming, rather ludicrously, that loss of coverage and higher costs are qualitatively better, as they represent more “freedom” for Americans.

Though we’ll defer a thorough treatment of the hodge-podge mess that is the American for-profit medical insurance system for now, suffice it to say that our faltering system is a scandal among industrialized nations. Virtually every western democracy offers its citizens a better healthcare deal than does the United States of America; these deals are hardly utopian, but the margin for improvement in America is something of a chasm. Physicians for a National Health Program articulate a sound strategy for moving the United States’ system closer to that of the civilized world. More absurd and fantastic is the propaganda machine claiming hysterically that free market principles require special protection in a domain which would never have existed without immense government intervention, beginning in the 1930s with tax exemptions for Blue Cross and other institutions evolved from the American Hospital Association, continuing with tax policy intended to form an employment-based health insurance and pension systems, and crescendoing with Eisenhower extending tax exemptions to virtually all health insurance companies by signing the Revenue Act of 1954.

Medical research is topical of late, as Trump promises to vanquish the evil largesse of the National Institutes of Health. Astonishingly, an acquaintance and physician who receives NIH grants has applauded Trump’s proposed demolition of public health and medical research, disparaging the agency as liberal advocacy for (paraphrased) sickle cell anemics in the ghetto, fat diabetic thugs in the barrio, and alcoholic obese Indians rotting on the reservation, rather than those who “might contribute to society.” Setting aside the strawman that is the rather grotesque racist commentary and elitist assessment of what is and what isn’t good for society, his further remarks extolling privately-funded research dovetails with Speaker Ryan’s bizarre pronouncement that dying without medical care in bankruptcy is tantamount to dying with the dignity only the truly free can know. First, it’s important to note that much of private medical research is possible because of public subsidies, either in the form of tax policy, drug revenue through artificial constraints on Medicare’s ability to regulate drug prices, direct payouts, and transfer of the results of purely public, long-term, high-risk research into private hands once effectiveness is assured, all of which contradict directly the freedom argument. Further, as a public agency, answerable to the executive, Congress, and the American people, the NIH presents a distribution of grant topics each year, most of which aren’t a boon to what my friend may consider enemies of the American way of life. And though the balance of research and development between private and public organizations has shifted in recent years, the distinctions listed above stand, as well as a lack of public accountability and conceivably a greater susceptibility to bias in experimentation in private agencies beholden to quarterly shareholder reports.

This is but one of many examples worth examining as part of what Suzanne Mettler of Cornell calls the submerged state. Her eponymous text of said state discusses the often hidden roles the federal, state, and local governments play in everyday life, be it healthcare, infrastructure, business, education, or homesteading. Certainly the astonishingly large subsidies by the federal government in the high tech sector over the past several decades and throughout American history are among the best kept secrets from the population; for everything from telephony to airplanes to computers to highways to the internet, one can trace roots to very large public subsidies either into the university system, both government and private research labs, transfer of intellectual property and massive tax subsidies to large multinational corporations, among others. The balance of public investment has shifted over the past several decades as part of the larger propaganda around market systems. For instance, Eisenhower, a Republican president from 1953 to 1961, wrote to his brother Edgar in November 1954,

"Should any political party attempt to
abolish social security, unemployment insurance,
and eliminate labor laws and farm
programs, you would not hear of that party
again in our political history. There is a
tiny splinter group, of course, that believes
you can do these things. . . . [But] their
number is negligible and they are stupid."

Richard Nixon, perhaps the last liberal president yet also a Republican, directed the formulation of the EPA and the NOAA, targets of team Trump’s deregulation and anti-environmental fanaticism. Ronald Reagan stumbled to victory touting free market virtue, yet his administration was more protectionist than all post-war presidencies combined, as boasted in an understatement by James Baker; during his terms, transfer of public funds into real estate, insurance, and financial institutions freshly deregulated under Nixon skyrocketed, guaranteeing enormous gains for top income earners (Trump included). As usual, austerities associated with market principles apply only to the poor and those incapable of winning the game while nanny state protectionism, aptly named by economist Dean Baker, belongs within reach of the elite sectors. So why do so many in the population hold public institutions in such low regard, as frequently measured by polling agencies?

Mettler’s research is quite revealing of the shift in public attitudes on the role of government. In particular, citizens tend to be more aware of programs which affect them directly according to studies conducted by Mettler and Matt Guardino discussed at length in her book. Anecdotes aside (think of the citizen famously ordering Representative Robert Inglis of South Carolina to keep his “government hands off my Medicare“), poorer working class folks tend to understand the earned income tax credit (EITC), whereas they’re largely ignorant of the regressiveness of the home mortgage interest deduction (HMID) and retirement savings accounts deductions. Mettler concludes that presenting citizens with more information, irrespective of income level, tends to shift attitudes in favor of more egalitarian tax policy.

I should mention that the submerged state isn’t simply happenstance; at the conclusion of the second world war, virtually all economists subscribed to the Keynesian approach of “priming the pump;” that is, eliminate risk of further depressions and recessions with wealth circulation through massive government spending. Businessweek and the Wall Street Journal editorialized that of the two choices, social spending versus military spending, military spending was superior in that it suffered no democratizing effects while comfortably funneling public subsidies upward, as articulated by analyst Noam Chomsky.

Of the many examples Mettler gives, she includes a discussion of Obama’s 2009 stimulus package. Unknown to many working class people is that they received a tax cut that same year to push the economy forward; even more unknown is that the secrecy was intentional, as the Obama camp needed the working class people to spend the cut rather than save it, so the dispersal was gradual and almost imperceptible through the year. Obama seemed to follow in Lippman’s elitist tradition of aiding the “bewildered herd” and “meddlesome outsiders” while limiting direct participation since they’re unfit to make policy decisions themselves, yet this isn’t a law of nature. One can envision a system in which the public can make such decisions for themselves.

Mettler demonstrates, as suggested above, that exposure to more detail on regressive social spending reduces ignorance and bolsters support for more progressive measures; she cites earlier work by Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter to further the claim that political literacy is by no means uniform, but rather correlates rather strongly with engagement; opinions shift freely in the presence of more detailed information, as confirmed by John Sides’ work on the estate tax. She also explains the remarkable reinstatement of direct government lending in student borrowing after the financial crisis, a progressive victory for American students. Indicative of the deeply embedded propaganda around markets and the role of government, Republican John Kline hysterically decried the measure as a “government takeover of our classrooms,” despite the near-constraint-free avarice of a runaway banking system pocketing enormous sums off of young working class people trying to better themselves with education. The reforms within Family Federal Education Loans (FFEL), according to Mettler, are substantial yet represent a missed opportunity for Obama to more publicly expose and diminish the submerged state; he spent more time persuading Americans, lobbyists, insurance companies, and the like to support the Affordable Care Act without drawing sufficient attention to other domestic achievements.

In summary, her book presents a thoughtful, well-documented analysis on both the deleterious effects of the submerged state (such as curtailed democracy, popular ignorance of policies, limited participation) and its antidote: increased political engagement. I’d certainly agree that’s a start.

A Perfect Storm : The Rise of Donald Trump Part One

November 26, 2016April 10, 2017 npslagleclinton, hillary, neoliberalism, sanders, trump, white working classLeave a comment

Donald Trump’s apparent electoral victory two weeks ago stunned both supporters and opponents, as the preponderance of pundits and analysts assumed that even the much maligned, absurdly incremental, uncharismatic, scandal-dogged Hillary Clinton couldn’t lose the election to an anti-science, narcissistic, vengeful, vulgar, greedy billionaire with a penchant for fomenting hate for immigrants, Muslims, and people of color, even if he offered a phony message of hopeful populism. I, by contrast, was somewhat more skeptical of the polling numbers, as errors in likely voter modeling or the influence of the social desirability phenomenon could easily push results over the margin of error. Nonetheless, I shared the shock and frankly the fear as swing state after state fell to a candidate I’d considered to be more of a carnival attraction than a serious statesperson. How could this happen, what does it mean, and what can we do? These are critical questions both his supporters and opponents need be asking; reasonable answers may not be the knee jerk ones. We begin with investigating the context in which a person such as Trump could be elected, deferring the second and third questions for subsequent articles. This post also defers deeper, more detailed discussions on a host of important issues so that we may cover more of the highlights.

Despite Clinton carrying the lead in the popular vote by perhaps two million, a little less than half of those who voted, a substantial fraction, seem to believe Trump can actually improve their lives. Peppered amongst scattershot claims he’s made on the campaign trail, he correctly depicted so-called free trade agreements such as NAFTA and the TPP as destructive; he correctly observed the plight of American workers through deindustrialization; he correctly derided the governing elite as nepotistic, disingenuous, petty, and heretofore incapable of meeting the needs of the working class in a populist appeal. The Democratic leadership faltered easily, ignoring highly suggestive evidence that Clinton simply didn’t cut it against the Republican contenders and more seriously marginalizing a populist candidate in Bernie Sanders who represented one of the largest grassroots movements in history; his favorability and electability, along with his fervent young supporters, were ridiculed early on by party insiders, yet many analysts and strategists concede an easy victory for him against Trump. Sanders offered genuine populism and helped energize a new generation of young voters with promises of universal healthcare and tuition-free college, proposals the American media condemn as fantasy and pie-in-the-sky, despite many proofs-of-concept in other western democracies.

Many of the grievances of the white working class, perhaps Trump’s biggest constituency, are legitimate yet have been long ignored by both political parties. Predating this election is a decades-long decline in income mobility and the standard of living; the postwar boom generated historically unprecedented wealth and security for working class people, precipitating a true middle class and birthing the so-called American dream. Anecdotally, my grandfather, descendant of poor farmers in Indiana, managed a decent job in a purchasing supply company in the late 1940s with no more than a high school diploma; he could buy a house, cars, and send his children to college. This simply isn’t the case now, and American workers know it. Fueled by scornful elitism from the ruling class and an utter lack of articulate response to their genuine cries for help, they’ve abandoned trust in fundamental public institutions such as schools, governments, and the media, not all of which is unjustified. Analysts in 1994 predicted that NAFTA would perpetuate the offshoring of manufacturing jobs largely begun in the 1970s with the financialization of the economy. The media’s concentration into just a few multinational companies corresponds with little airing of the problems plaguing middle America. Even Clinton herself snubbed Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” A vacuum generally won’t remain as such for long: Trump and many who preceded him have offered easy explanations for their woes; these answers are crazy, but coherent, fanning flames of hatred and further mobilizing a lightly-sleeping, subsurface deeply nativist ultra-nationalist sector of the population extant since the founding and forever awaiting a deliverer who can save white America. Part of my family fits the bill, I’m sorry to say; I’m all too familiar with the rhetoric and the mindset.

In short, he’s stated explicitly, or sometimes intimated, that illegal immigrants imperil our families and steal our jobs, that Obama is a non-citizen illegitimate president sympathetic to Islamic terrorists, that people of color are destroying their own communities and stealing elections, and that he can bring back the good old days when our economy was driven more by honest industry and production than corrupt financial institutions. Indeed, Trump’s ascent has emboldened this nativist sector, paralleling a cascade of hate-crime related incidents across the country according to the Southern Law Poverty Center. Hate and white supremacy groups brag that Trump is their guy, and though most people who support Trump for his promised populism probably aren’t among them, they’ve nonetheless tolerated his hate speech in the hopes that this populism is genuine. As a result, the baseless allegations of voter fraud against people of color which are deeply rooted in historical efforts at disenfranchisement incited violence at the polls and voter intimidation of poor minorities. The historical record should be clear on many of Trump’s wild claims; voting fraud is almost impossible to execute successfully, and Trump’s repeated utterances of having evidence simply must be intentional falsehoods, a handy trick any politician or sleazy salesman can brandish quickly. Obama’s citizenship is simply public record; his record on atrocities and crackdown on whistleblowers should easily demonstrate no support for Islamic terrorists or alleged sympathizers. Illegal immigration, largely a feature of deleterious effects of our disastrous free trade policy, interventionism, and climate change on Central and South America, is nothing more than a wedge issue cravenly designed to fan flames of hatred among workers whose share of mutual interests dwarf those with the masters.

Media coverage also appears to have played a role in Trump’s ascent, as the months leading into the primary season and campaign featured heavy, disproportionate coverage by major American news outlets of the spectacle that is Trump; one measure indicates that the empty podium awaiting Trump’s arrival received more airtime than did all of Sanders’ rallies during the summer and fall of 2015. Similar patterns emerge among other media giants. Les Moonves, CEO of CBS, bragged at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference in San Francisco early this year that though disproportionate coverage of Trump “may not be good for America, […] it’s damn good for CBS, that’s all I got to say.” Trump’s showmanship, bellicosity, and willingness to say on air the unthinkable seem to have generated heavy ratings, moving us perilously closer to virtually substance-free political debates and campaigning.

In short, a perfect storm of economic uncertainty, remarkably unfavorable opposition, a fundamental, immoral failure of the political class to meet the needs of the citizenry, and a sharp decline in the public trust has led to the rise of a fascist-lite kleptocrat celebrated by hate groups, anti-science zealots, and Christian supremacists for his selection of a myopic fundamentalist running mate, cabinet choices whose competencies for their respective jobs-to-be are inversely proportionate to their bottom lines, and profound disdain for immigrants and climate science. Our next article will focus on what these critical choices mean.

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