Pandemic and Economic Collapse Slam Trump Across Rust Belt

Some Donald Trump supporters are so invested in their racism and hatred of "liberals" that they will likely never open their eyes to the reality that Trump's tariff wars and tax cuts for the very wealthy and regulation cuts to big business are the real source of their worsening personal financial situations.  Then there are evangelicals so obsessed with Trump's promises of special rights that place them above the law and grant them a license to discriminate that they seem unable to grasp the financial ruin Trump has ushered in for them.  Now, however, the covid-19 pandemic and the related economic collapse may wake some of them up, especially in hard hit rust belt states that collectively gave Trump a 70,000 vote margin and an Electoral College victory.  A piece in Politico looks at Trump's adverse current situation in these same rust belt states and how November will be a referendum on Trump's policies and failures to handle the pandemic crisis.  Here are highlights:

The Industrial Midwest was always going to be a battleground in November.

The region is now becoming a new frontline for Americans’ lives and livelihoods as coronavirus hotspots proliferate and jobless rates spiral. The confluence of a ferocious pandemic, deepening economic turmoil and rising political tensions is more pronounced here than anywhere else in the country. And it sets the stage for a combustible campaign season that is testing President Donald Trump’s efforts to move on and insulate himself from the crisis—and Joe Biden’s ability to blame him for the fallout.

On Thursday, Trump ventured to a swing county in Pennsylvania, stopping off at a Lehigh Valley medical equipment distributor where he used an official speech to mock “Sleepy Joe,” chastise governors for moving too slowly to reopen and assail the news media as a “disaster” while touting American workers.

“I say it’s the ‘transition to greatness.’ The transition is the third quarter," Trump said. "The fourth quarter is going to do very well. And next year is going to be through the roof.”

The numbers and interviews, however, paint a much grimmer picture. The virus has moved from urban centers like Detroit and Chicago into suburbs and more sparsely populated counties, a trend seen from western Pennsylvania to Minnesota and Iowa. In Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania—Democrats’ so-called “Blue Wall”—19 counties report coronavirus cases doubling in less than 14 days. Trump won all but one of those counties, by an average of 65 percent.

Democrats are working to ensure that doesn’t happen again by casting his stewardship over the virus and economy as a betrayal.

“There are so many things Trump has done to attack the labor movement to undermine and betray workers,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) told POLITICO. “And since the coronavirus, he’s done nothing to help the essential workers.”

The region has been devastated by job losses amid pandemic-induced economic shutdowns, in some cases far outpacing the national average in terms of the proportion of their workforces that have applied for unemployment benefits since mid-March.

In Michigan, more than 3 in 10 workers have sought aid in the past two months, according to a POLITICO analysis of Labor Department data. Layoffs and furloughs are also piling up in Pennsylvania, where more than one-fourth of the workforce — or 29.6 percent — has filed an unemployment claim.

The double shock of the virus and financial meltdown has further sharpened partisan divides in the states. Wisconsin and Michigan were home to the highest percentage of people saying their state governments were overreacting to the crisis, according to a survey conducted by researchers at Harvard, Northeastern and Rutgers Universities last month.

Overall, however, the public has remained solidly behind governors who are urging caution, giving them high marks for their performances while their assessments of Trump’s handling of the outbreak sag.

And private surveys conducted by both parties and described to POLITICO show concerns about the virus and health care running ahead of worries over the economy.

Personal protective equipment also remains a problem in many jurisdictions, health officials say, and there are fears of how rural areas with rising caseloads and fewer hospitals will manage future outbreaks, particularly in Michigan, where health officials are starting to see spikes in rural counties.

The economic fallout is expected to be even more long-lasting, casting a shadow over the presidential election. Biden has maintained polling leads over Trump in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, while public polling of Ohio has been scarce.

The emerging economic downturn has also further undermined [Trump's] the president’s promises of reviving American manufacturing, particularly the steel industry.

In some industries — construction and building trades, for example — workers are used to long breaks between jobs, and many have filed for unemployment in the past. But the abrupt nature of the country’s shutdown threw many out of work with little warning, leaving them without time to prepare.

Democrats maintain that the region’s long standing financial difficulties were already being exacerbated by the Trump administration in the three years before the coronavirus struck. They point to tariffs and renewable fuel-standard waivers that impacted corn farmers. Manufacturing, too, has taken big hits. Last year, Pennsylvania saw a drop of 5,700 factory positions, while Michigan was down 5,300 and Wisconsin lost 4,100 jobs.

In her conversations with constituents, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) says they now recognize Trump’s role in a string of earlier economic setbacks, which have been compounded by the virus.  “They are very clear about what those missteps are and, frankly, they are angry," Baldwin said.

Trump aides and allies are primarily focused on changing the subject from the pandemic and ensuing economic devastation — highlighting Biden’s vulnerabilities in the region rather than defending the administration’s response.

Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf last month vetoed a GOP-backed bill to reopen more businesses. He's issued stern warnings in recent days that county leaders who defy current state orders will lose out on funding.

“Even though we are seeing a positive trend in our Covid-19 cases, we know that we’re far from done with this,” said Benjamin Weston, director of medical services for the Milwaukee County Office of Emergency Management, who added that the county will continue dealing with the coronavirus and continued outbreaks and surges until a vaccine is, hopefully, available sometime next year.

Democrats need to relentlessly hammer Trump for his trade wars, war against unions and the working class and utter malfeasance in the federal government covid-19 response.

Why Democrats Are Opposing the Senate GOP Stimulus Bills

Throughout the day I have seen numerous "conservatives," political liars and blowhards like Mitch McConnell, and right wing media outlets railing against Senate Democrats for "obstructing" the bail out needed to protect America's economy.  Some have forwarded outright lies as to why Democrats will not rubber stamp a huge bailouts to corporations which would then be free to fire employees while maintain obscene levels of CEO pay. One example of such blatant lies - that the usual suspects on Facebook jumped on without any fact checking - was that Nancy Pelosi was trying to tie abortion issues to the bill. It simply was a bald face lie that the right wing media echo chamber repeated.  A piece in New York Magazine lays out the real point of disagreement and also shows how virulent today's GOP has become and how its agenda is against public opinion when the public is given the true details of the GOP plan.  Read the full piece!  Here are highlights:

Last week, the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party unveiled a plan to keep British workers paid and employed for the duration of the coronavirus crisis. The Tory proposal would effectively cover 80 percent of sidelined workers’ salaries, while forbidding employers who accept the government’s help from laying off staff. The policy closely resembles one implemented by Denmark’s Social Democrats, except that Boris Johnson’s wage-replacement rate is slightly more generous than the Danish left’s. Although the Conservatives have a well-earned reputation for sacrificing Britain’s vulnerable on the altar of deficit reduction, even they recognize that social welfare must take precedence over budgetary concerns in the context of a historically sudden and deep economic crisis. On Friday, Tory chancellor Rishi Sunak announced that there would be no limit on the funding available for covering workers’ wages.

America’s conservatives see things differently.

U.S. workers are every bit as exposed to the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic side effects as their peers across the pond. Unlike their British counterparts, however, American laborers aren’t guaranteed affordable health care if they lose their jobs, nor any amount of paid sick leave should they take ill. And yet, despite our workers’ unique vulnerability to the harms of illness and unemployment, congressional Republicans are not only unwilling to support universal paid leave or make an open-ended commitment to covering 80 percent of workers’ salaries but are also fighting to protect the right of bailed-out corporations to fire as many workers as they see fit.

The mainstream press has attributed the Senate’s inaction to “Washington infighting,” or else to Democratic intransigence. But Chuck Schumer’s caucus didn’t vote down the Republican bill over some minor detail, or because it insisted on dictating the left’s preference on an issue that genuinely divides blue and red America. Rather, the key sticking point is that the GOP bill would empower the Trump administration to dole out $500 billion in bailout money to corporations of its own choosing — without forbidding bailed-out firms from laying off their workers. This arrangement would not only allow the hotelier-in-chief to plow public money into his companies and those of his cronies but also enable those firms to spend our government’s dollars on maintaining outsize executive compensation instead of retaining employees.

[T]he GOP’s insistence on subsidizing corporations that fire workers in the middle of a pandemic appears to be the Democrats’ paramount concern.

Critically, the Republican Party’s opposition to requiring bailed-out firms to retain at least 90 percent of their workers does not reflect the uniquely pro-management bent of public opinion in the U.S. . . . . when asked whether companies that accept government aid should be required to maintain their payrolls, 74 percent of respondents said yes. The requirement was nearly as popular with GOP voters as it was among Democratic ones, with 70 percent of self-identified Republicans approving.

Therefore, the gulf between the GOP’s response to the crisis and that of Britain’s Tories is not a product of public opinion or crass electoral concerns. Rather, it reflects the fact that the Republicans are not a normal conservative party, but a uniquely reactionary political formation. No other major party in the Western world rejects the concept of universal health care or disputes the reality of man-made climate change. The GOP is more adamantly opposed to the downward redistribution of resources, or any measure that tips the balance of power between workers and bosses in the former’s direction, than any center-right party in the developed world.

Republicans’ uniquely virulent strain of conservatism is undermining not only their response to COVID-19’s economic consequences but also to the public-health crisis itself. Even as U.S. hospitals and health-care workers are suffering from a shortage of masks and ventilators, President Trump has refused to invoke his authority under the Defense Production Act to force the mass production of those critical materials. Instead of conscripting domestic manufacturers into the figurative war on the coronavirus, the White House has attempted to arrange a voluntary consortium of firms interested in aiding with mask and ventilator production. According to the New York Times, this decision came at the behest of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Trump defended his approach Sunday on the grounds that “we’re a country not based on nationalizing our business.” Of course, invoking the DPA to temporarily commandeer a firm’s productive capacity is not tantamount to the nationalization of industry. Meanwhile, the voluntarist approach mandated by the GOP’s devotion to corporate prerogatives is not delivering the goods. . . .

For this reason, the wealthiest nation in human history appears to be on the cusp of allowing mass business failures and layoffs — and then attempting to redress those preventable economic harms by prematurely suspending social-distancing measures, thereby condemning many of its people to death by suffocation in hospital hallways.

And so long as that’s the case, mainstream news outlets must not attribute the relief package’s delay to small-minded partisanship or Democratic intransigence, but rather to the Republican Party’s singular commitment to the prerogatives of plutocrats.

 Once again, I find myself ashamed to have ever been a Republican.  Similarly, I do not understand how supposedly decent, moral people can continue to support today's GOP. 

Trump/Pence's Ultimate Betrayal of Its Base

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman hits a home run in a column in the New York Times that looks at the ways the Trump/Pence regime - and the Republican Party as a whole - has betrayed and continues to betray its white working class base.  A base that seems willing to believe any lie so long as its racial animosities are pandered to. The latest betrayal is the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court.  While Kavanaugh may provide an anti-gay, pro-Christofascist vote on the Court to the delight of evangelical Christians, he will likely do nothing but harm them economically and help lock in the wage stagnation that has harmed so many working Americans even as corporate profits have soared and the wealthy have claimed a growing percentage of all wealth in America.  Here is Krugman's column:

By now, it’s almost a commonplace to say that Trump has systematically betrayed the white working class voters who put him over the top. He ran as a populist; he’s governed as an orthodox Republican, with the only difference being the way he replaced racial dog-whistles with raw, upfront racism.

Many people have made this point with respect to the Trump tax cut, which is so useless to ordinary workers that Republican candidates are trying to avoid talking about it. The same can be said about health care, where Democrats are making Trump’s assault on the Affordable Care Act a major issue while Republicans try to change the subject.

But I think we should be seeing more attention devoted to the way Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court fits into this picture. The Times had a good editorial on Kavanaugh’s anti-worker agenda, but by and large the news analyses I’ve seen focus on his apparently expansive views of presidential authority and privilege.

I agree that these are important in the face of a lawless president with authoritarian instincts. But the business and labor issues shouldn’t be neglected. Kavanaugh is, to put it bluntly, an anti-worker radical, opposed to every effort to protect working families from fraud and mistreatment.

The most spectacular example is his opinion that Sea World owed no liability for a killer whale attack that killed one of its workers, because she should have known the risks. He has declared the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which helps control the financial fraud against working families that played a major role in the 2008 crisis, unconstitutional. He’s taken an extremely expansive view of the rights of business to suppress union organizing.

This is all, by the way, the opposite of populism. The public strongly supports worker protections. The ongoing campaign to take them away is an act of conservative elites, people who have made their careers by carrying water for business interests, and is being implemented in effect by stealth under the noses of voters who thought Trump was on their side.

And this betrayal matters much more for workers than, say, Trump’s trade bluster. There’s growing evidence that wage stagnation in America – the very stagnation that angers Trump voters — isn’t being driven by impersonal forces like technological change; to an important extent it’s the result of political changes that have weakened workers’ bargaining power. If Trump manages to install Kavanaugh, he’ll help institutionalize these anti-worker policies for decades to come.

2018: Will Voters Continue to Act Against Their Own Economic Interest

Historically when wealth disparities have become too great, the lower classes have risen up and the top tier of the population hoarding most of the wealth has fared badly.  The French Revolution and the Russian Revolution are but two examples of catastrophic consequences for the top classes.  Britain in contrast - and partly as a result of the terror the French example provided - managed to avoid the French example by making changes that improved the lot of the lower classes.  Those lessons seem lost on today's Republican Party which, combined with pro-rich and pro-corporation policies are overseeing the stagnation of wages for the majority as the top 0.01% ranks in increasing wealth.  Bizarrely, many Americans continue to vote Republican and against their own economic interests.  As a column in the New York Times explores, the carrot(s) that induce such short sighted behavior are views on race, religion, abortion, LGBT rights and immigration.   As the 2018 midterm elections near, the question becomes whether such short sighted voting will continue. Here are column excerpts: 

Even as corporate America has unleashed insatiable consumer demand for innovative low-cost goods and technology, it has driven economic trends that continue to increase inequality, stall wage growth and strengthen the power of business. 

Nearly half the country’s voters support a president who embraces upwardly redistributive policies that many of them do not benefit from.

Why? Because on race, religion, abortion, LGBTQ rights and immigration, President Trump — unlike previous Republican presidents — has given his voters exactly what they want.

This is patently true in the case of immigration. As The Washington Post reported in June, “The Trump administration has ramped up arrests of illegal immigrants, slashed refugee programs, criminalized unauthorized border crossings” and secured a ban on travelers from six majority-Muslim nations.

But recent scholarly research shows how the interests of those on top of the economic pyramid are gaining strength.

“Industries are increasingly characterized by a ‘winner take most’ feature where a small number of firms gain a very large share of the market,” David Autor, an economist at M.I.T., and four co-authors, write in “The Fall of the Labor Share and the Rise of Superstar Firms.”

They go on: Markets have changed such that firms with superior quality, lower costs, or greater innovation reap disproportionate rewards relative to prior eras. Since these superstar firms have higher profit levels, they also tend to have a lower share of labor in sales and value-added. As superstar firms gain market share across a wide range of sectors, the aggregate share of labor falls.

According to Autor and his colleagues, the decline in the size of the pie going to labor — known among economists as “labor share” — coincides with the rise of superstar firms and increasingly with the use of outsourcing to “temporary help agencies and independent contractors and freelancers for a wider range of activities previously done in-house, including janitorial work, food services, logistics and clerical work.” . . . Together, these workplace trends account “for a significant portion of the increase in U.S. wage inequality since 1980.”

Policymaking, judicial decisions and structural changes in the economy have functioned in concert to weaken the clout of voters, consumers, workers and minorities — with considerable support and little or no objection from a key part of the electorate.

The Supreme Court has played a well-documented role in this process, especially in decisions on campaign finance and business law that have empowered corporations and the super rich.

“The Court has given the green light to restrictive voter identification laws, without requiring states to prove that such laws prevent any appreciable amount of voter fraud or promote public confidence in the fairness of the electoral process,” Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California-Irvine, wrote in an email in response to my inquiry . . . .

The downstream consequences of concentration for employees are substantial, Shambaugh et al write: “Concentration in product markets can be mirrored by its labor market equivalent — monopsony — that exists when employers face limited competition for workers.” Firms dominating concentrated labor markets “face relatively inelastic labor supply” (i.e., job choices are limited) which, in turn, allows employers to “reduce wages without losing all (or even a large fraction) of their workforces.”

Among economists, one of the most discussed developments is the precipitous decline in the percentage of total economic output flowing to labor, . . . . In other words, shareholders and business owners amassed profits amounting to $1.35 trillion or $17,000 per employee as a result of the increase in profit share.

This bleak tale does not end here, as new pieces of evidence accumulate. Dominique Guellec and Caroline Paunov, senior economists at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, argued in a 2017 paper, “Digital Innovation and the Distribution of Income,” that without government intervention, increased inequality is virtually inevitable:

The growing importance of digital innovation — new products and processes based on software code and data — has increased market rents, which benefit disproportionately the top income groups. In line with Schumpeter’s vision, digital innovation gives rise to ‘winner-take-all’ market structures, characterized by higher market power and risk than was the case in the previous economy of tangible products.

Increased profits, in turn, “accrue mainly to investors and top managers and less to the average workers, hence increasing income inequality.”

In the United States, the top 0.01 percent holds 9.9 percent of the nation’s total wealth excluding deposits in tax havens. When wealth in tax havens is included, the share held by the top 0.01 percent rises to 11.2 percent.

While an increase from 9.9 to 11.2 percent amounts to a 1.3 percentage point increase, in real dollars that translates to $1.06 trillion, or roughly $40 million for every adult in the top 0.01 percent.

A continued failure of wages to advance, despite job growth, while corporate profits shoot up to record levels would give Democrats a significant counterargument to legitimate Republican claims of overall economic improvement.

[T]he question for 2018 will be which demographic and generational groups will see their turnout climb or drop the most.

Since 2016, Trump has successfully angered millions of voters, especially women, who have been mobilizing in support of Democratic House and Senate candidacies. Vilified and insulted members of racial and ethnic minorities are seething. At the same time, millions of others — a majority of them men — have been infuriated by economic and cultural developments they feel have devastated neighborhoods, local environments and workplaces so that they can no longer recognize them.

How many Americans will yield to apathy and how many will believe with conviction that each vote matters?

The Exceptionally Bad State of American Workers

Yesterday was the 4th of July and among the supposedly patriotic talk was much bloviating about American exceptionalism - something that I personally view as a factually unsupported myth.  America is currently under the rule of a Republican Party that has maintained power through gerrymandered districts, a constitutional frame work that that disproportionately gives small, backward states too much power in the U.S. Senate, and pathetic levels of voter turnout - Trump won the vote of less than 30% of registered voters. Not what one can call an exceptional system. For American workers things are even worse and will worsen further if the GOP minority has its way and further dismantles unions and worker protections as if pushes to create a new Gilded Age. Indeed, compared to the rest of the developed world, America is exceptional in a negative sense in how poorly its workers are treated even as wealth inequality soars. An article in the Washington Post looks at this undesirable exceptionalism of America that con only be viewed positively by vulture capitalists and their political prostitutes.  Here are article highlights:

The U.S. labor market is hot. Unemployment is at 3.8 percent, a level it’s hit only once since the 1960s, and many industries report deep labor shortages. Old theories of what’s wrong with the labor market — such as a lack of people with necessary skills — are dying fast. Earnings are beginning to pick up, and the Federal Reserve envisions a steady regimen of rate hikes.

So why does a large subset of workers continue to feel left behind? We can find some clues in a new 296-page report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a club of advanced and advancing nations that has long been a top source for international economic data and research. Most of the figures are from 2016 or before, but they reflect underlying features of the economies analyzed that continue today. In particular, the report shows the United States’s unemployed and at-risk workers are getting very little support from the government, and their employed peers are set back by a particularly weak collective-bargaining system.

Those factors have contributed to the United States having a higher level of income inequality and a larger share of low-income residents than almost any other advanced nation. Only Spain and Greece, whose economies have been ravaged by the euro-zone crisis, have more households earning less than half the nation’s median income — an indicator that unusually large numbers of people either are poor or close to being poor.

Joblessness may be low in the United States and employers may be hungry for new hires, but it’s also strikingly easy to lose a job here. An average of 1 in 5 employees lose or leave their jobs each year, and 23.3 percent of workers ages 15 to 64 had been in their job for a year or less in 2016 — higher than all but a handful of countries in the study. . . . . OECD research found that an unusually large amount of job turnover in the United States is due to firing and layoffs, and Labor Department figures show the rate of layoffs and firings hasn’t changed significantly since the research was conducted.

The U.S. ranks at the bottom for employee protection even when mass layoffs are taken into consideration as well, despite the 1988 Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act's requirement that employers give notice 60 days before major plant closings or layoffs.

And when you lose your job in the United States, it’s harder to find another. Fewer than half of displaced workers find a job within a year, the researchers found — that puts the United States near the bottom of the five countries for which the researchers provided recent data.

Even when Americans do find another job, their earnings don’t recover. After four years, displaced workers are still about 6 percent behind their peers in terms of annual earnings. 

These gaps at the lower end of the labor market can be traced back to weak government programs and hamstrung union bargaining, the report says.  . . . The unemployed, in particular, receive relatively little assistance. U.S. unemployment benefits provide less support in the first year of unemployment than those in any other country in the study, and the maximum length of benefits in a typical U.S. state, 26 weeks, is shorter than in all but a handful of countries. In some states, the maximum benefit length is less than half of that.

Only 12 percent of U.S. workers were covered by collective bargaining in 2016 — among all the nations the OECD tracks, only Turkey, Lithuania and South Korea have been lower at any point this millennium.  . . . These collective bargaining and government support systems might have something to do with another report finding as well: Workers’ share of national income dropped about eight percentage points between 1995 and 2013, faster than anywhere but Poland and South Korea over that time.

This aspect of America's false "exceptionalism" is an embarrassment - just like the occupant of the White House.  The first step in changing it is to vote Republicans at all levels out of office.   In Virginia, it also means ending the state's "right to work laws" that allow employees to be fired without notice and for no reason. 

Trump’s War On Pre-Existing Condition Protections

As noted in the prior post concerning suicide, Trump and the GOP, but Trump in particular, is waging a war to kill the pre-existing condition provisions of the Affordable Health Care Act.  If successful, this will mean many Americans will lose coverage completely or face skyrocketing premiums.  Oh, and did I mention that almost anything can be deemed a pre-existing condition by insurance carriers who only want to accept premium payments but never have to pay out to their insureds?  With fewer and fewer Americans receiving health insurance through their jobs, this is a big deal and will cause significant harm to many already beleaguered individuals and families - especially among the GOP base.  Belatedly, some in the GOP are waking up to the danger of their handiwork in the lead up to November 218.  A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at the issue.  Here are excerpts:

Republicans were already worried that the nation’s health care woes could sink them in 2018. Now they feel like the Trump administration just tossed them an anvil.

The Department of Justice’s announcement Thursday night that it will take aim at Obamacare’s most popular provisions — a ban on insurance companies discriminating against people based on pre-existing conditions, and limits on how much insurers can hike premiums for older Americans — will be ammunition Democrats can use this November.

The long-shot lawsuit from 20 conservative states, now endorsed by the DOJ, argues that because Republicans repealed the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate penalty as part of their tax overhaul, the mandate itself can no longer be considered a tax — the basis on which the Supreme Court upheld it in 2012. And, the DOJ added, since the ACA’s rules on pre-existing conditions are “closely intertwined” with the mandate, they too must be struck down.

Republicans had begun growing hopeful that good economic news and some improving poll numbers might save them in the midterms. But they now fear that Trump has handed voters proof positive that his party doesn’t care about those with preexisting conditions.

“This is definitely the most popular aspect of the Obamacare legislation, and it clearly creates an opening for Democrats going into the final months of the election year,” GOP strategist Ken Spain, a former communications director at the National Republican Congressional Committee, told TPM.

Poll after poll has found that protecting people with pre-existing conditions is the most emotionally potent health care argument for voters. A survey conducted by the Democratic firm Hart Research Associates for Protect Our Care this past January and shared with TPM on Friday found that the issue was one of the most effective in the healthcare debate: 63 percent of voters had “very major concerns” and another 20 percent had “somewhat major concerns” with the GOP’s efforts to repeal pre-existing condition protections. Among independents, that number rose to 73 percent with “very major concerns.”

Now, thanks to the Trump administration, the issue is poised to come back into the headlines at the worst possible time for Republicans. Most insurers inform their customers about their new insurance rates in October, just weeks before voters go to the polls. Insurance rates were already set to rise next year, in large part because of Republicans’ repeal of the individual mandate, and insurers say Trump’s latest move could push premiums higher still.

“Removing those provisions will result in renewed uncertainty in the individual market, create a patchwork of requirements in the states, cause rates to go even higher for older Americans and sicker patients, and make it challenging to introduce products and rates for 2019,”America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), health insurers’ major lobbying group, warned in a Friday statement.

Now, a year later, after receiving significant political blowback for these repeal attempts, GOP lawmakers are once again in the hot seat as the Trump administration tries to use the courts to get rid of the ACA protections they were unable to abolish through Congress.

“If I were a House Republican I would have woken up to my morning newspaper and thrown it against the wall. He just made clear the thing they’ve done their best to hide from,” said Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson.

As Republicans squirm, Democrats are pouncing on the administration’s attempt to have the ACA’s most popular protections ruled unconstitutional. By Friday morning, candidates in competitive House and Senate races were blasting out statements on the legal filing and attacking their GOP opponents for siding with President Trump on health care policy.

With their eyes on retaking at least one, if not both chambers of Congress this fall, national Democratic groups are confident that the issue will be a major political liability for the GOP.  

“No issue is more personal than health care, and this is a perfect storm of two of the most personal aspects of health care coming together: skyrocketing premiums and the loss of protections for people with pre-existing conditions,” Tyler Law, the national press secretary for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), told TPM.

“Whoever tends to be disruptive on healthcare tends to get punished,” former Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA), a former NRCC chairman, told TPM. “When Republicans come in and try to undo Obamacare, they’re being disruptive.”

When Will American Workers Wake Up to Trump’s Con?

I have made the case many times that the Republican Party has used pandering to religious extremists - those I call the Christofascists - and racist/white supremacists to dupe far too white voters into voting against own financial interests.  Sadly, Donald Trump has done the same thing and has so far delivered on championing promises made to Christofascists' to further their hatred of LGBT individuals and to racists and white supremacists by arguing a false equivalency between KKK members and Neo-Nazis versus anti-fascists and those who support diversity and inclusion. Meanwhile, Trump is pushing the GOP's reverse Robin Hood agenda and attacking workers' right and workplace protections.  One can only wonder when Trump's white supporters will realize that they are being conned and played for fools.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the issue. Here are highlights:

On a holiday weekend set aside to honor the American working class, it is hard to escape the sense that American workers find themselves exploited by our politics — and particularly by our president.

If wage earners could turn all the warm words they have heard into dollars, they would be rich. But they never receive the rights or benefits that are supposed to come their way.

Decade after decade, we engage in more or less the same arguments about economic justice, yet over the past 15 years or so, the condition of laboring men and women has, by many measures, gotten worse.

In his campaign, President Trump promised the world to American workers, including a better and more generous health-care system. Having broken his health-care pledges, he now claims that he will live up to his vows on jobs and wages by — cutting corporate taxes.

Remember all those stories in 2016 about Trump being a different sort of Republican? It turns out he’s the same old trickle-down conservative, only meaner: He also preys upon racial feelings and anti-immigrant sentiment, which is often cast as part of his “populism.”

There is absolutely nothing new about Trump’s insistence that what’s good for corporations will be good for American workers.

Here’s what he said last week in a speech in Missouri: “We must reduce the tax rate on American businesses so they keep jobs in America, create jobs in America and compete for workers right here in America — the America we love.”

Now if Trump hadn’t pretended to be some kind of populist hero in 2016, his recitation of old Republican boilerplate would not be particularly interesting or troublesome. But it is maddening to see this man described as some great innovator when it comes to the interests of the left-out and forgotten.

If you want to know how old Trump’s talking points are, consider a debate broadcast by CBS Radio on April 11, 1948, between Sen. Robert A. Taft, lovingly known as “Mr. Republican” among conservatives of his day, and Walter Reuther, the legendary leader of the United Automobile Workers union.

“Prosperity here depends upon a large percentage of the proceeds of our wealth being invested in new tools, new investments,” Taft insisted. 

Reuther was unpersuaded. “Unfortunately,” he asserted, “most everything that Congress has done in the past six or eight months has moved in the direction of giving more to the people who already have too much and taking away from the people who need more.”

Taft, to his credit, did not pretend to be someone he wasn’t. He believed in the ideas he was pushing. But anyone who expected Trump to take the American worker to a new place should be profoundly disappointed. As for Reuther’s description of conservative economics, it seems as relevant now as it was 69 years ago.

Trump moves us backward in other ways . . . . the president is using his executive power to undercut regulations on workers’ pay, financial security and job safety, and also their right to form unions. Here again, Trump’s actions belie his words.

Trump seems to think that if he goes after immigrants, picks fights about his border wall, regularly recites the words “law and order” and assails “political correctness,” workers won’t notice any of this.

Will it work? I’d insist that it’s always safe to wager that, over time, American workers judge politicians by looking at their paychecks, their working conditions and the economic prospects of their families. Trump will discover the limits of his flimflam.

Indeed, Trump is merely a meaner, more brutish, self-centered version of the GOP agenda that goes back to Ronald Reagan and before. When will people stop falling f

or the racist appeals and religious claptrap to realize that it is the GOP, not immigrants and non-Christians who are actually the real threat to their financial well being?

Are People Waking Up to Fact GOP's "Small Government" Agenda Is Killing GOP Voters?

For years now - perhaps decades - the Republican Party has been wooing working class white voters to vote against their own economic best interests through appeals to racism, religious extremism, and other forms of hatred towards others.  It worked yet again in the 2016 presidential election.  Now, these manipulated voters who have been played for fools time and time again may be belated waking up to the fact that GOP policies are literally killing them.  The uprising of Trump voters and working class whites against the GOP plan to kill Obamacare is a case in point - especially after many receiving health care benefits woke up and discovered that the new found benefits they enjoying (and depending on to survive) derived from Obamacare.  Yes many will continue to fall for the GOP's toxic brew of racism/religious extremism/xenophobia, but perhaps the tide is finally turning, although not in time to have avoided the Trump/Pence nightmare.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at this possible awakening.  Here are excerpts:

In his inaugural address, President Trump vowed that “the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.” He then suggested that the government has a responsibility to provide its “righteous people” with “great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves.”

The hedge-fund billionaire who bankrolled Trump’s campaign takes a different view. Robert Mercer reportedly believes that “human beings have no inherent value other than how much money they make,” and that “society is upside down” because “government helps the weak people get strong, and makes the strong people weak by taking their money away, through taxes.”

Thus far, Trump’s governing style has been more in keeping with his donor’s private views  . . . . The president has backed a health-care plan that finances a tax cut for millionaires by throwing millions of “forgotten” Americans off of Medicaid — while proposing a budget that would slash spending on public housing, food assistance, after-school programs, and development funds for poor rural and urban areas.

The fact that the new Republican president is serving as a loyal general in the one percent’s class war would be wholly unremarkable, had Trump not campaigned as a populist outsider. But then, if Trump hadn’t run as a populist outsider, it’s quite possible that there wouldn’t be a new Republican president.

Typically, Republicans attribute the despair of impoverished communities to the moral failings of individual poor people. But Trump never lamented the “culture of poverty.” Instead, he blamed the misery of the “forgotten” on rapacious elites who had failed to protect the “righteous” people’s economic interests. . . . This message — when liberally (or, perhaps illiberally) salted with appeals to white racial resentment — proved to be a winning one.

Trump gave the GOP the rebrand it desperately needed. But, thus far, he’s made few alterations to the actual product. And, judging by their failed attempt to pass a supply-side tax cut dressed as a health-care bill, Republicans believe that the only thing their agenda ever lacked was a racist reality star as its salesman.

But they are wrong about that: Movement conservatism is failing politically because its policies have never had less to offer the voters it relies on.

New research on the surging death rate among white, non-college-educated Americans offers a harrowing testament to this fact. In 2015, Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton discovered that an epidemic of suicides and substance abuse was driving up the mortality rate of middle-aged, working-class, white Americans — even as medical advances were pushing down that rate for college-educated whites and every other racial and ethnic group. . . . .  the great recession, black and white non-college-educated workers have seen their mortality rates rise, across every age group. And working-class African-Americans still suffer higher death rates than white ones do.

However, only the non-college-educated white population has seen a nearly continuous rise in its mortality rate over the last two decades. And that jump has been driven by a uniquely high spike in “deaths of despair.”

[N]on-college-educated white workers have seen their economic prospects drop from a higher peak — and no countervailing narrative of cultural progress has arrested their sense of decline. This foreboding can pervade whole communities, and lead their most vulnerable members to seek relief in drinking, drugs, or death. . . .  economists suggest that these breakdowns are “rooted in the labor market.” 

Movement conservatism’s other anti-poverty prescription — instilling self-reliance in the poor by kicking them out of their welfare hammocks — also withers under the paper’s scrutiny. The United States has the thinnest safety net of any major, western nation. And it is also the only such country in which non-college-educated white workers are dying much younger than they used to. . . . . the rationale behind House Republicans’ push to add work requirements to Medicaid — that providing a minimum standard of health care to the indigent unemployed breeds an unhealthy dependency — is hard to reconcile with the superior health outcomes of workers in European nanny states.

[T]he GOP has grown more radically right wing; income has grown more concentrated at the top; and Republicans have grown ever more dependent on the nonaffluent for votes.
Now, even the GOP base supports more government spending on health care and opposes tax cuts for the rich.

Republicans can continue putting the superstitions of misanthropic billionaires above the needs of their downscale voters. But in doing so, they will send more “forgotten men and women” to early graves. And, eventually, the righteous people may take the GOP down with them.

One can only hope that this growing realization accelerates and that some will learn to change the channel from Fox News.  

Trump Attacks Women's March Participants

Still smarting from the low attendance turnout for his coronation inauguration, Der Fuhrer attacked those who participated in yesterday's Women's March.  The New York Daily News noted as follows:  

Trump, on his second full day in office, criticized the efforts of participants in Saturday’s Women’s March held in Washington, D.C.

“Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an election!” Trump wrote on Twitter Sunday. “Why didn't these people vote? Celebs hurt cause badly.”

The White House – after remaining silent on the topic Saturday – released a statement earlier Sunday addressing the march, bemoaning the lack of attention surrounding the anti-abortion March for Life scheduled for Friday, Jan. 27.

A column in the Washington Post looks at the march and more importantly why the momentum must continue to fight and oppose every effort of Der Fuhrer and Congressional Republicans to roll back time and eliminate civil rights.  Here are excerpts:

Some descended on Washington’s Mall very early, and some joined later. Some stood in long lines outside Metro stations to get downtown. Others walked a long way.

The signs were almost all homemade. Many were clever, channeling humor and whimsy (“There will be hell toupee,” “Things are so bad even introverts have to protest”), as well as anger, determination and commitment.

And the crowd got so big that it broke into tributaries, marching in different directions. The tributaries eventually joined up to form a mighty stream of protest. No matter how much President Trump and his administration try to lie and spin, every objective indication is that far more people showed up to register dissent over his rise to power than to celebrate it.

It was a diverse crowd in many ways, more white than African American and Latino but with a fair representation across racial lines. It tilted young but included many among the middle-aged and the senior set. 

For many, it was a multi-generational day, a family affair: grandparents, parents and children, some in strollers. Women predominated, but a large minority was male, and a fair number of men carried signs suggesting, in various formulations, that real men, good men, supported the rights of their sisters and wives and mothers.

[I]t was at least as much a message to Trump and to the country: Less than 24 hours after the new president took the oath of office, hundreds of thousands of Americans came together to say that they would not stand by in silence if the new administration threatened basic freedoms or the advances of the past eight years, and the last 50.

The message of the Washington March was echoed by large crowds that gathered in cities and towns across the country. In their different ways, the marchers were saying that they would not be cowed into silence or demobilized into a sullen difference.

The anger and dismay over Trump was a dominant emotion, and judging by the signs, its sources were multiple: his attitude and behavior toward women especially, given the theme of the day, but also Russia’s role in the election and Trump’s bromance with Vladimir Putin.

There were loud calls for the defense of free speech and freedom generally. If Trump didn’t talk about freedom in his inaugural address, this crowd picked up the slack.

There was an acceptance of the reality that Trump is president but a stout rejection of who he is and what he stands for. That included expressions of a desire to drive him from office, with the inevitable breakout of “Hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go” chants.

The politics of the next few months and years will depend a great deal on whether the energy displayed on Saturday is sustained through the hard work of political activism. I can imagine skeptics reading this and saying one day of protests will be very easy for Trump and the Republican Party to absorb (even if one can imagine Trump’s fury at not getting even a day’s peace).

But there is reason to believe this was not a one-off. First, there was not a single march in Washington but demonstrations all over the country. As the tea party showed, change comes from local actions coordinated nationally. There is clearly a large national base of opposition, community by community.

Second, the reaction to Trump is unprecedented. No other president faced such a wave of rallies immediately after he took office. No other president so quickly mobilized so many people against him. Trump really is special.

Third, the march here (and such evidence I have seen suggests this was true elsewhere) was strikingly nonsectarian. There were not people pushing very narrow ideological agendas or political subgroups insisting that they and only they had, in old left parlance, “the right line” on the future. Different parts of the anti-Trump coalition were generally happy to reinforce one another’s messages.

Finally, Trump’s election jarred many progressives and moderates from quiescence. If these marches were for women and against Trump, they were also marches against complacency. That may have been their most important message.

What I have found encouraging is that so many people I know who have not been political activists in the past turned out in March, including one of my sisters and both of my daughters.   The momentum must continue and Trump must be driven from office.