Reparations: A Wrong Answer and Sure Road to Democrat Party Defeat

In addition to Bernie Sanders' - in my view, insane - talk about socialism, one other issue being pressed by far left Democrats could help re-elect Donald Trump and, of course, in the process achieve the exact opposite of what these ultra-liberals want.  That issue is reparations for slavery which will (i) push many working class whites firmly into Trump's waiting arms, and (ii) ignores the fact that far more whites than blacks are living in poverty.  In a perfect world, it would be nice to have a magic wand and be able to erase slavery and Jim Crow from America's history, yet the push for reparations will likely only exacerbate racial division, especially among poorer whites who would rightly or wrongly likely view reparations as "those people" getting special rights at their own expense.  Indeed, Trump's 2016 calls to stir up racial division would likely be greatly intensified in 2020.  A piece in The Atlantic by a black authors argues that reparations is not the way to remedy the situation and that the battle against poverty needs to be a collective fight.  Here are article highlights:

Juneteenth—the annual celebration of when enslaved people in Texas learned of their freedom—brought two hearings this year on Capitol Hill. The first was widely covered. The House Judiciary Committee looked at H.R. 40, a proposal to create a commission to study reparations for slavery and subsequent discrimination. Witnesses debated the utility and justice of pursuing financial reparations to right some of the wrongs that, past and present, have kept black people economically disadvantaged in the United States.

At the same time, the House Budget Committee held a hearing on poverty in America, which drew a fraction of the media coverage. In that hearing, the economic disadvantages facing African Americans were only part of the story—because less than one-quarter of Americans living in poverty are black.

Slavery, and the systemic racism that has disadvantaged blacks in its aftermath, cannot be forgiven or forgotten. But reparations are not the answer. We cannot fix these injustices by emulating the my-race-first policies that birthed it. While the suffering of blacks hits close to home for me, it also pains me to see someone of another race or ethnicity degraded by the way our country forces poor people to live.

When blacks demand that our poverty be alleviated, it’s simply a matter of one race prioritizing its path to living well, when we should be fighting for everyone to live well. Prioritizing the economic needs of those who share my ethnicity, while so many others are suffering along with us, is morally wrong. The struggle against poverty needs to be a collective fight.

“We are tired of the racialization of poverty, the partisanism of poverty,” William Barber II, a Protestant minister who is a co-leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, told the members of the Budget Committee. More whites live in poverty than people of any other ethnic or racial group; a higher percentage of Native Americans live in poverty than members of any other ethnicity. Poverty isn’t a black problem, but an American problem, Barber told the committee, just as he had told the nine Democratic presidential candidates who spoke to the Moral Action Congress convened by the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C., earlier that week.

[T]he prevailing system in the United States isn’t white supremacy, but rather, economic oligarchy. And too much of the discussion of racism adopts the language of oligarchy, offering economic ascension as an antidote.

While racial inequality is sometimes quantified in other ways—by the composition of the prison population, levels of education, or health—it is most often quantified by dollars, and how many one has. In 2018, the Equality of Opportunity Project released the results of a multiyear study of economic mobility. Most of its findings were about economic opportunity. People homed in on its statistics about black boys, who had much less of a chance of rising to a different economic tier than the one into which they were born, or of staying rich, than white boys. Less was said about Native Americans, who, the study’s statistics showed, were about as poor as blacks, or about Asian Americans, who had a better chance to rise economically than whites.

Reparations are often presented in terms that are meaningful within an oligarchic system: A long history of racist practices has created economic inequality between blacks and whites. Of this, there is no doubt. But this is not the racial wealth gap; it is merely a racial wealth gap. One goal of reparations is to close this gap. But that adopts the logic of oligarchy, instead of challenging it. More black people reaching higher wealth tiers, and then living in the cocoon those tiers provide? That’s not something I am willing to fight for.

Barber and Liz Theoharis, the other co-leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, presented a “moral budget” to the committee. It aimed to show that the alleviation of poverty and its degradations is not only a moral demand, but that these goals make good economic sense. . . . The principle behind the movement remains the same as it was in 1968. People of all races who oppose this system of inequality and suffering, and the demonization of the poor, must act as a single force.

[Martin Luther] King was focused on the oligarchic class—or “Bourbon class,” as he called it—and its promotion of a strategic form of divide and conquer, pitting poor blacks against poor whites. Howard University’s E. Franklin Frazier had written about this strategy in his popular book, Black Bourgeoisie, a decade earlier, in 1957. Other scholars before and since have pointed to the post-slavery origins of voter suppression in service of what the wealthy, white, land-owning class publicly called white supremacy. But they had a dual aim, ensuring that poor whites were not part of the supreme.

This is not to argue for an equivalence of historical suffering between whites and blacks, but to emphasize that white supremacy in the U.S. is a strategy, not a system. The system is an economic oligarchy, and racism is an extremely effective tactic for perpetuating it. And the debate over reparations confuses the system with just one of the tactics that sustains it.

Reparations would address the financial ramifications of the racism that stymies blacks from “winning,” and knocks those blacks who have won back down. But they would not right the wrong of a supremacist society that is designed to create a class of winners and a mass of losers, and to do so, in part, by isolating aspirants from those they leave behind.

I switched away from the H.R. 40 hearings to focus on the debate over the more encompassing wrong. The focus should be on transforming the oligarchy, not on lifting up any one segment of society.

Reparations are a sideshow. We are living in the now, in which millions of people of all races and ethnicities are forced into degradation, ill health, and despair in this rich nation. Overturning that system is a goal that is not out of reach for a people who had the intellectual, political, and social will to survive slavery and beat back Jim Crow.

The author is correct.  Reparations are a side show, but one that, if pushed, will only serve to defeat politicians seeking to right the wrongs of today's economic system.  Worse yet, it will maintain in office those who most promote hate and racial division.  Let's hope Democrats aren't foolish enough take the reparations bait.  

The Need to Make Hard Decisions on Immigration Reform

In a very lengthy piece in The Atlantic former Republican David Frum makes a reasoned case for the need for comprehensive immigration reform and the need for liberals to get on-board as a means of preventing the fascist approach of racists and bigots (he doesn't name Trump and many in the GOP, but the inference is obvious.)  Of course, the GOP base doesn't want reform and Trump is exacerbating problems driving Central American refugees northward by announcing the end of all aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, stupidly believing that "punishing" the countries will stop the flow north.  Instead, expect the exact opposite to occur since the real solution would be to end the conditions driving refugees to flee in the first place.  Here are some highlights from the piece that looks at the issue from both a historic perspective and looking for a pragmatic way forward (read the entire piece):  

Through much of the 20th century, the United States received comparatively few immigrants. In the 60 years from 1915 until 1975, nearly a human lifetime, the United States admitted fewer immigrants than arrived, legally and illegally, in the single decade of the 1990s.

If you grew up in the 1950s, the 1960s, or even the 1970s, heavy immigration seemed mostly a chapter from the American past, narrated to the nostalgic strains of The Godfather or Fiddler on the Roof. The Ellis Island immigrant-inspection station—through which flowed the ancestors of so many of today’s Americans—closed in 1954. It reopened as a museum in 1990.

Yet rather than fading into history, immigration has only been accelerating. From 1990 to 2015, 44 million people left the global South to find new homes in the global North. They came from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. They came to the United States above all, but to the nations of Europe too. The United Kingdom has received nearly as many immigrants, relative to its population, as the United States has. Germany and Sweden have received more. Some 45 million foreign-born people now make their home in the United States. About 11 million to 12 million live here illegally.

As with climate change, separating annual fluctuations from long-term trends is important. Illegal immigration into the United States by Mexicans is now declining. Border crossings by Central Americans are steeply rising. Year by year, immigration numbers may shift up or down. But decade by decade, immigration is remaking nations on a world-altering scale.

By 2027, the foreign-born proportion of the U.S. population is projected to equal its previous all-time peak, in 1890: 14.8 percent. Under present policy, that percentage will keep rising to new records thereafter.

This massive new wave of immigration has brought many benefits to the United States. Of the 122 Americans who won a Nobel Prize from 2000 to 2018, 34 were immigrants. Four of the five Americans who won Nobels in 2016 were born outside the country. Of the 41 Fortune 500 companies created since 1985, eight had an immigrant founder. In many ways, the United States is a stronger, richer, and more dynamic country because of international migration. But large-scale immigration also comes with considerable social and political costs, and those must be accounted for. In November 2018, Hillary Clinton delivered a warning to Europeans that mass immigration was weakening democracy. “I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration, because that is what lit the flame,” Clinton said, referring to the upsurge of far-right populism destabilizing countries such as France and Hungary. “I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken, particularly by leaders like Angela Merkel, but I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message—‘We are not going to be able to continue to provide refuge and support’—because if we don’t deal with the migration issue, it will continue to roil the body politic.” Clinton’s assessment of the European political situation is accurate. According to recent poll numbers, 63 percent of French people believe too many immigrants are living in their country. One-third of the British people who voted in 2016 to leave the European Union cited immigration as their primary reason. In Germany, 38 percent rate immigration as the most important issue facing their country. Thanks in great part to their anti-immigration messages, populist parties now govern Italy, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.

And of course, anti-immigration sentiment was crucial to the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.

Immigration on a very large scale is politically stressful. Yet acknowledging that fact can be hazardous to mainstream politicians. . . . . It wasn’t always this way, even on the left. As recently as 2015, the senator and presidential aspirant Bernie Sanders defended at least some immigration restrictions in language drawn from the immigration-skeptical tradition of organized labor.

But the political rise of Donald Trump has radicalized many of his opponents on immigration. Some mainstream liberal commentators, such as Farhad Manjoo of The New York Times, have called for completely open borders. While not many Democrats have gone that far publicly, some—including most prominently the 2020 presidential hopefuls—have expressed ever greater unease about removing people who cross borders unauthorized. . . . While it would be destabilizing and impractical to remove all the people who have been living peaceably in this country for many years, it does not follow that any non-felon who sets foot in the U.S. has a right to stay here.

Trump demagogically seized on the caravan as a voting issue before the November midterm elections—and goaded many of his critics to equally inflammatory responses. “This whole caravan in the last week of the election is a giant lie. This is Trump’s Reichstag fire. It is a lie,” said a guest on MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes. But however manipulatively oversold, the caravan existed . . . .

Demagogues don’t rise by talking about irrelevant issues. Demagogues rise by talking about issues that matter to people, and that more conventional leaders appear unwilling or unable to address: unemployment in the 1930s, crime in the 1960s, mass immigration now. Voters get to decide what the country’s problems are. Political elites have to devise solutions to those problems. If difficult issues go unaddressed by responsible leaders, they will be exploited by irresponsible ones.

Across the developed world, very high levels of immigration have coincided with widening class divisions, the discrediting of political and economic elites, and the rise of extremist politics. And immigration pressures will only intensify in the decades ahead, for reasons obscured by media coverage of immigrants as poor and desperate. That coverage isn’t entirely wrong.

Since 1990, the number of human beings living in extreme poverty—defined as less than $2 a day—has declined by nearly two-thirds. . . . That comparative affluence allows the strivers to buy things once impossibly out of reach: air conditioners, smartphones, motorized vehicles. But the thing those strivers want more than anything else—the great golden ticket into a whole new life—is exit from the less successful countries of the global South into the more successful countries of the global North.

We are talking here about astonishingly large numbers of potential immigrants—large and fast-growing. Egypt will add 50 million people to its population over the next three decades. Bangladesh will reach 200 million people; Pakistan, 300 million. The populations of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, countries that have already sent so many people northward, will rise by 50 percent by 2050, to more than 47 million. Twenty-six African countries will double their population by the time today’s college seniors celebrate their 50th birthday. Altogether, the population of Africa in 2050 will almost equal the entire population of the world in 1950: 2.5 billion people.

Hundreds of millions of people will want to become Americans. Only a relatively small number realistically can. Who should choose which ones do? According to what rules? How will those rules be enforced? The Trump-era debate about a wall misses the point. The planet of tomorrow will be better educated, more mobile, more networked. Huddling behind a concrete barrier will not hold the world at bay when more and more of that world can afford a plane ticket. If Americans want to shape their own national destiny, rather than have it shaped by others, they have decisions to make now.

But at present, the most important immigration decisions are made through an ungainly and ill-considered patchwork of policies. Almost 70 percent of those who settle lawfully in the United States gained entry because they were close relatives of previously admitted immigrants. Many of those previously admitted immigrants were in their turn relatives of someone who had arrived even earlier.

In almost every legal immigration category, the United States executes its policy less by conscious decision than by excruciating delay. The backlog of people whose immigration petitions have been approved for entry but who have not yet been admitted is now nearing 4 million. (Only spouses and children are exempted from annual numerical caps.)

The question before the United States and other advanced countries is not: Immigration, yes or no? In a mobile world, there will inevitably be quite a lot of movement of people. Immigration is not all or nothing. The questions to ask are: How much? What kind?

Too little immigration, and you freeze your country out of the modern world. Too much, or the wrong kind, and you overstress your social-insurance system—and possibly upend your democracy. Choose well, and you build a stronger, richer country for both newcomers and the long-settled. Choose badly, and you aggravate inequality and inflame intergroup hostility. How we choose will shape the future that will in its turn shape us.

[A]ccording to a 2016 survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic, nearly half of white working-class Americans agree with this statement: “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.”

A classic 2005 study by the social scientist Karen Stenner predicted the consequences of such feelings. In any given population, according to Stenner, roughly one-third of people will have authoritarian tendencies. This habit of mind is just part of the way human beings are, in much the same way that a certain percentage will be born with depressive tendencies.

Happily, the authoritarian tendency does not necessarily lead to authoritarian politics. In secure and stable circumstances, it goes dormant.

The extremism and authoritarianism that have surged within the developed world since 2005 draw strength from many social and economic causes. Immigration is only one of them—but it is typically the spark that ignites the larger conflagration. Immigration has done particular damage to political parties of the moderate left. From the 1970s until the 2010s, social-democratic parties dominated the politics of the European Union member states. As of last spring, among the 28 governments of the EU, only Malta, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, and Sweden were led by social democrats.

The Myth of Bernie Sanders’s White Working-Class Support

As the 2020 Democrat primary begins, one issue that will be critical, in my view, for Democrats to keep sight to the reality that politics is all about having your team – flawed or not – in control of the executive branch of government, especially if you do not hold complete control of the legislature.  One cannot wait for the perfect candidate.  The bottom line is to win elections and field the candidate best positioned to win.  Who that candidate will be is as yet unknown,  That said, I see two as un-electable: one is Elizabeth Warren who despite some good ideas, has far too much baggage.  The other is Bernie Sanders, who in my view, should not even be allowed into the Democrat race given his jettisoning of the party immediately after 2016. Sadly, this reality is lost on Bernie Sanders supporters who, in my view, delude themselves into thinking that Sanders has broader support than he has in fact, especially among working class whites, and without factoring in some of Sanders' extreme positions of the past.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the myth of Sanders' working class support.  Here are highlights:

The Sanders campaign has circulated a strategy memo proclaiming their candidate would compete with Trump not only in Michigan and Ohio but even in states like West Virginia, Kansas, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Montana. Sanders “is popular with traditional, working-class, industrial workers in those places,” asserts his adviser, Jeff Weaver. “Bernie Sanders,” raves Bhaskar Sunkara, “is the only one capable of reaching millions of working Americans with the message that politics can indeed improve their lives.”

Their evidence is the persistent support Sanders amassed during his struggle against Clinton. But there is something eerily familiar about the pattern of Sanders’s support in 2016. Nate Silver, diving into the numbers, finds that about a quarter of Sanders voters were what he calls “Never Hillary” voters. They leaned conservative, and many of them voted for Donald Trump in the general election.
 How big a factor was the Never Hillary vote for Sanders?  Pretty big. They made the difference in eight of the states he won, finds Silver. Without that protest vote, the entire narrative of Sanders as the rising voice of the party’s authentic base would never have taken hold. And that basic misreading of the data created the foundation for a flourishing socialist dream that the American white working class is poised to turn against neoliberalism if only presented with a pure and sharp enough critique.
 Ironically, Sanders supporters have made the same analytic error the Clinton fans made after 2008. They looked at their growing strength among the white working class and saw a future base they could pry away from the GOP, never realizing that the only reason those voters had ever supported them was that they had already lost.

It is absolutely critical that Trump, should he run, or Mike Pence, be defeated in 2020.  Sanders simply is not the one to do that.

Seeing Through Republican Deceptions

One of the most disturbing aspects of politics over most of the last two decades is the manner in which working class whites have voted against their own economic interest and supported the Republican Party which offers them noting other than pandering to their prejudices and bigotry.  In short, these voters are played for fools as the GOP pushes policies and tax cuts that favor the wealthy and allow big corporations to cut corners on safety regulations.  With the 2018 midterms upon us, we are seeing past GOP deceptions taken to a whole new level of dishonesty and open racism.  The days of dog whistle messaging are gone and open white supremacists and Christian extremists (the two tend to overlap significantly, in my view) are embraced.  A column in the New York Times by a Nobel Prize winning economist looks at this latest round of GOP lies and deceit.  Here are column excerpts:

Until recently, it looked as if the midterm elections might be defined largely by an argument about health care. Over the past few days, however, the headlines have been dominated instead by hatred — hysteria over a caravan of migrants a thousand miles from the U.S. border, and now the attempted assassination of multiple prominent Democrats.

But whoever sent the bombs and why, the caravan hysteria is no accident: creating a climate of hatred is how Republicans avoid talking about health care. What we’re seeing in this election is a kind of culmination of the strategy the right has been using for decades: distract working-class voters from policies that hurt them by promoting culture war and, above all, racial antagonism.

When it comes to substance, the modern conservative policy agenda, which centers on cutting taxes and tearing up the social safety net, is consistently unpopular. By large margins, voters want to raise, not lower, taxes on corporations and the wealthy. They overwhelmingly oppose cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

So how do Republicans manage to win elections? Partly the answer is that gerrymandering, the Electoral College and other factors have rigged the system in their favor; Republicans have held the White House after three of the past six presidential elections, despite winning the popular vote only once. And they will probably hold the House unless Democrats win by at least 6 percent.One way they have traditionally gotten there is with red-baiting, portraying any and all progressive policies as the next thing to Communism. More than half a century ago, Ronald Reagan warned that Medicare would destroy American freedom. (It didn’t.) A few days ago, the Trump White House issued a report equating Medicare for All with Maoism.

Another key tactic involves lying about both their own positions and those of their opponents. During the administration of George W. Bush, the lies were relatively subtle by current standards, involving things like pretending that tax cuts favoring the rich were actually aimed at the middle class. These days, the lies are utterly shameless.

But lies about policy, while they may confuse some voters, aren’t enough. Hate has always been part of the package.  Let’s not romanticize the past. When Reagan talked about welfare queens driving Cadillacs, or a “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy steaks, he knew exactly what he was doing.

Under Trump, however, the strategy of hatred has gone to a whole new level.  For one thing, after decades of cloaking its strategy in euphemisms, the G.O.P. is back to letting racists be racists.

At the same time, the mainstream G.O.P. has gone all in on the kind of conspiracy theorizing — tinged with anti-Semitism — that used to be restricted to the fringe.  And it’s hard to see calling the news media “enemies of the people” as anything other than an incitement to violence.

So will this ramped-up strategy of hate work? It might, in part because those same news media still dance to the haters’ tune. Take the story of the migrant caravan. The right’s hysteria is obviously insincere; it’s clear that it is hyping the story to take attention away from health care and other substantive issues: Never mind pre-existing conditions! Look at those scary brown people!

[I]f this strategy of hate works in the midterms, the right will pursue it even more avidly. Don’t expect anyone involved to experience any pangs of conscience. Indeed, after CNN and several prominent critics received bombs in the mail, Trump blamed … the media.

I have seen the future, and it’s full of menace.

Why Are So Many White Americans Dying?

In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, we have heard much about the supposed economic angst of white working class Americans.  In addition, a study last year found that mortality rates for working class whites was falling.  America is the only advanced industrial country to see this phenomenon.  It's not happening in "Old Europe" and other modern nations.  I have my own thoughts on the matter and causation: (i) America still has the worse (and most expensive) health care system of any industrialized nation where even with health care coverage, high deductibles force many to not seek medical treatment, (ii) America has the worse social safety net of any advanced nation, (iii) Europeans have far greater job security, and (iv) despite talk of vocational training for the non-college bound, our high school fail in far too many instances to provide real, marketable vocational skills.  The results in a globalized economy are deadly.  To address these problems takes money - something Republicans refuse to spend on American citizens and, indeed, the current crop of congressional Republicans seek to cut funding for all of the above cited needs, making the prospects going forward even worse.  To them, average Americans are disposable trash.  A piece in Politico looks at the problem.  Here are highlights:

It’s a mystery with profound implications for American politics, not to mention public health: Why are so many white people dying?

When economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton released their first bombshell study in 2015, showing that mortality rates were rising for middle-aged white Americans after years of decline, the finding stunned the research world. This wasn’t a global trend—it was a distinctly American phenomenon, Case and Deaton had discovered. Among other races and age groups in Europe, mortality rates had continued to fall. But in the U.S. white people aged 45 to 54 without a college degree were dying sooner, and not from the usual suspects like heart disease and diabetes.

[W]hen Donald Trump won an upset victory in the presidential victory with a message that resonated with those same voters, many turned to Case and Deaton’s research as one possible explanation for his ascendance.

Now Deaton, who won the Nobel Prize in 2015, and Case, his wife and coauthor, are back with a new paper that aims to refine their original findings, digging into the group that’s seeing the largest increases in mortality rates: white people without college degrees, accelerated by what they call deaths of despair, or suicide, alcohol- and drug-related deaths. “Ultimately,” they write, “we see our story as about the collapse of the white, high school educated, working class after its heyday in the early 1970s, and the pathologies that accompany that decline.”

[J]ournalists and scholars have voiced concern about the spotlight on white people’s economic problems, which are still, relatively speaking, far smaller than those of, say, African-Americans.

[N]obody is disputing that the United States has a real problem as it struggles to understand the despair in communities left behind by globalization and automation. And, Case argues, the reversal of decades of progress on health among the least educated should be setting a fire under political leaders and policy wonks in both parties as they try to craft real solutions:

[W]hite non-Hispanics stopped making progress on heart disease, which is a big killer in middle age. First progress slowed, then it flatlined, and now it looks like it’s turned in the opposite direction.

[A] [high school] degree seems to be a marker for a lot of dysfunction that we’re seeing. But this new paper shows that the body count is only the tip of the iceberg. People with less than a college degree are reporting a lot more pain, much poorer health, poorer mental health. They’re less likely to be married, they’re less likely to be attached to the labor market, their wages don’t increase with age as quickly as they had in previous generations. So part two is being able to document that these things are happening in sync with each other.

And the third part is the fact that things appear to be getting worse and worse with every successive birth cohort, so that the cohort born in 1980 is having a much harder time on all those dimensions than the cohort born in 1970, who is in turn having a much harder time than the cohort born in 1960.

It used to be the case that with a high school degree, you could get a good job, with potential for on-the-job training and you could expect to have a middle-class life. You could get married, you could have a family. And the kinds of jobs a person can get now with a high school degree are not jobs where there is any up to move to.

[I]n Europe, mortality rates are falling, but they’re falling even more for people on the low end of their education distribution. Their mortality is falling faster than people on the high end of their education distribution. So what are they doing right that we’re not? That’s sort of the question right now. And again, education might just be a marker of something else, but I think it would be wise to look at how the Europeans have actually shouldered the kind of changes in the labor market. You know, they’ve lost a lot of manufacturing jobs to the far East, they’ve weathered the recession, but they haven’t seen the same kind of dysfunction and mortality increases that we’ve seen in the U.S.—so why?

Education is not necessarily what’s driving this, but it is highly correlated with all these bad outcomes that are happening to people. And I think part of that is that your high school degree gets you less far than what it used to, and when that happens, a lot of other bad things follow on.

[W]e see the prescription opioid epidemic as being an accelerant, as making this worse, but we don’t think it’s a root cause. It was happening before the heavy-duty prescription opioids hit the market. It starts at least as far back as 1990—that death rates from deaths of despair start rising—and then you throw prescription opioids into the mix, and it makes things a heck of a lot worse. But it was happening already.

There seem to be two Americas now: one for people who went to college and one for people who didn’t, and that’s going to be truer and truer, regardless of the color of your skin. Whether or not there’s enough political force to bring us back together, I’m really not sure about that.

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.  

The Real Reason Behind the GOP's Rush to Repeal Obamacare

There was in truth only one real motivation behind the GOP's thankfully failed Obamacare "repeal and replace" effort:huge tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest Americans.   Yes, some of the most right wing Republicans are anti-government and want the government out of the healthcare arena completely, but the net effect of a total repeal with no replacement would be the same, namely huge tax cuts for corporations and the truly wealthy.  What I found so utterly dishonest was the GOP claim that tax credits would have allowed individuals the "freedom to choose the coverage best for them."  The reality is that the tax cuts were so inadequate that there'd be only one "choice" available - to have no coverage.  Even if working class individuals were relieved of all income tax obligations, in most instances, it would still not provide the funding needed for healthcare coverage.  The "replacement" offered also ignored the reality that many employees with coverage offered through their jobs fail to secure coverage for one reason: they cannot afford to add coverage for their spouse and/or children due to the expense.   

Like so much else in the GOP agenda, what Paul Ryan and Der Trumpenführer were peddling was one huge lie.  Voters well for it during the 2016 elections, but with every passing day, the abortion known as the American Health Care Act was increasingly recognized as a con job that would harm millions of Americans.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at why the GOP was in such a hurry.  It also suggests what any "tax reform" package offered up by the GOP will have as its underlying motive.  Here are highlights:

Why were Republicans rushing to vote on a health-care plan that they'd barely finished drafting, that budget scorekeepers hadn't had a chance to fully evaluate, and that, insofar as people did know about it, was widely despised?

In part, it's because their plan was so unpopular and because it got more unpopular the more people learned about it. But it's also because only by rushing to reshape a full sixth of the American economy without knowing exactly how they would be reshaping it would Republicans be able to use health care to pave the way for the rest of their agenda, including tax reform. In other words, the GOP didn't want to let a detail like tens of millions of people losing their health insurance get in the way of two tax cuts for the rich.

Here's what we knew about the Republican plan. The latest version that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office had a chance to analyze would have, over the course of 10 years, cut taxes by $1 trillion, disproportionately benefiting the rich; cut Medicaid spending by $839 billion, exclusively harming the poor and sick; and cut the Affordable Care Act's health insurance subsidies by about $300 billion, mostly hurting older people of modest means. Add it all up, and the CBO estimated that 24 million people would have lost their health insurance as a result. Not only that, but premiums would have increased 15 percent to 20 percent more than they otherwise would have in the next four years. . . 

This wasn't just a matter of higher premiums and higher deductibles, though. Trumpcare also would have repealed the “essential health benefits” that plans are required to cover now. States would have been allowed to write their own rules, so, depending on where you lived, insurance companies might have been able to sell you “insurance” that didn't cover hospitalizations, prescription drugs, maternity care, mental health care and preventive care, and also imposed annual and lifetime limits on your benefits. 

The surprising thing, then, isn't that as few as 17 percent of people approved of the American Health Care Act. It's that as many as 17 percent did.

But there's a reason the GOP was pushing a bill that would have taken everything people don't like about the health-care system and made it worse. That's the fact that it would have allowed them to pass two permanent tax cuts for the rich. Anyone, you see, can pass a tax cut that expires after 10 years. But if you want to make it last — and you don't have 60 votes in the Senate — then you need to find a way to pay for it (or at least look like you did). Taking health insurance away from poor and sick people would have done just that for the Obamacare taxes, which primarily hit people in the top 1 or 2 percent. 

[T]he combination of tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the poor that was the GOP health-care plan would have been a reverse Robin Hood that redistributed income from people making $50,000 or less to mostly those making $200,000 or more.

If Republicans had repealed the Affordable Care Act's $1 trillion worth of taxes before they revised taxes, that's $1 trillion less they'd have to come up with to make it look like money wasn't being lost. Now, without those phantom savings, tax restructuring, Speaker of the House Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) admitted, will be “more difficult.” Not that it was ever going to be easy. After all, the $1 trillion they were trying to save with a “border adjustment tax” seems to be on political life support, since every major retailer, including big GOP donors such as Walmart, is opposed to it.

Republicans will either have to scale back their ambitions for how deeply they will cut taxes or how long they will. Whatever they choose, though, the top tax rate isn't going to stay under 30 percent.  And for the GOP, that's the real tragedy of 24 million people keeping their health insurance.

So why do working class whites who would have been screwed royally by the GOP "replacement" plan vote Republican?  For many of the rich, it is obvious: greed and self-enrichment via tax cuts.  But why the rest?  The answer is the same one that Republicans have used for many years now.  Appeal to racism and white nationalism, generate hatred due to loss of white privilege, use abortion as a snare for right wing Christians, and demonize those deemed "other."  It's the same method used over and over again by the GOP to get individuals to vote against their own best interests.  What's amazing is that so many are so gullible - or perhaps stupid is the better word - that they keep falling for the same ploy. When are these people going to wake the hell up? 

No Sympathy for Working Class Trump Voters

Some Democrats and liberals are whining and contemplating their navels as they seek ways to "understand" poor and working class whites who voted for Donald Trump so as to win them back over to supporting Democrat/liberal policies.  I am decidedly not a member of that group.  Perhaps it's because in many ways I remain a conservative and support the concepts of personal responsibility and that actions - or in this case votes - have consequences.  In my view, poor whites and working class whites fell prey to their racism, religious extremism and desire to blame others for their failed state in life while never facing the reality that their own bad choices, embrace of ignorance and bigotry were in fact the root cause of many of their current ills. To these folks, sexual orientation is a "choice" but somehow abusing drugs and alcohol and dropping out of school are not a choice. In short, I find it difficult to have zero sympathy for such folks (although I do worry about their children) and hope they suffer greatly for the consequences of their misguided votes.  A piece in New York Magazine makes the case that rather than trying to be "understanding" Democrats and liberals need to see these people for what they are: deplorables who cannot be reached. .  Here are  excerpts:

On the morning after, traumatized liberals set out hunting for answers as if Election Day were 9/11 all over again. The ubiquitous question of 15 years earlier — “Why do they hate us?” — was repurposed for Donald Trump’s demolition of the political order. Why did white working-class voters reject Hillary Clinton and the Democrats? Why did they fall for a billionaire con man? Why do they hate us?

There were, of course, many other culprits in the election’s outcome. Comey, the Kremlin, the cable-news networks that beamed Trump 24/7, Jill Stein, a Clinton campaign that (among other blunders) ignored frantic on-the-ground pleas for help in Wisconsin and Michigan, and the candidate herself have all come in for deserved public flogging. But the attitude among some liberals toward the actual voters who pulled the trigger on Election Day has been more indulgent, equivocal, and forgiving. Perhaps those white voters without a college degree who preferred Trump by 39 percentage points — the most lopsided margin in the sector pollsters define as “white working class” since the 1980 Ronald Reagan landslide — are not “deplorables” who “cling to guns and religion” after all.

While many, if not most, of those in #TheResistance of the Democratic base remain furious at these voters, the party’s political class and the liberal media Establishment are making a concerted effort to convert that rage into empathy. 

But for those of us who want to bring down the curtain on the Trump era as quickly as possible, this pandering to his voters raises a more immediate and practical concern: Is it a worthwhile political tactic that will actually help reverse Republican rule? Or is it another counterproductive detour into liberal guilt, self-flagellation, and political correctness of the sort that helped blind Democrats to the gravity of the Trump threat in the first place? 

After the debacle of 2016, might the time have at last come for Democrats to weaponize their anger instead of swallowing it? Instead of studying how to talk to “real people,” might they start talking like real people? No more reading from wimpy scripts concocted by consultants and focus groups. . . . . Say in public what you say in private, even at the risk of pissing people off, including those in your own party. Better late than never to learn the lessons of Trump’s triumphant primary campaign that the Clinton campaign foolishly ignored.

This is a separate matter from the substantive question of whether the party is overdue in addressing the needs of the 21st-century middle class, or what remains of it. The answer to that is yes, as a matter of morality, policy, and politics.  . . . . But it’s one thing for the Democratic Party to drain its own swamp of special interests and another for it to waste time and energy chasing unreachable voters in the base of Trump’s electorate. For all her failings, Clinton received 3 million more votes than Trump and lost the Electoral College by the mere 77,744 votes that cost her the previously blue states of Michigan (which she lost by .2 of a percentage point), Wisconsin (.8 point), and Pennsylvania (.7 point).

[T]he Trump vote is overwhelmingly synonymous with the Republican Party as a whole. . . . That makes it all the more a fool’s errand for Democrats to fudge or abandon their own values to cater to the white-identity politics of the hard-core, often self-sabotaging Trump voters who helped drive the country into a ditch on Election Day. They will stick with him even though the numbers say that they will take a bigger financial hit than Clinton voters under the Republican health-care plan. 

While you can’t blame our new president for loving “the poorly educated” who gave him that blank check, the rest of us are entitled to abstain. If we are free to loathe Trump, we are free to loathe his most loyal voters, who have put the rest of us at risk.

 The toughest critics of white blue-collar Trump voters are conservatives. Witness Kevin D. Williamson, who skewered “the white working class’s descent into dysfunction” in National Review as Trump was piling up his victories in the GOP primaries last March. Raised in working-class West Texas, Williamson had no interest in emulating the efforts of coastal liberals to scale empathy walls. Instead, he condemns Trump voters for being “in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles.” He chastises them for embracing victimhood by blaming their plight on “outside forces” like globalization, the Establishment, China, Washington, immigrants — and “the Man” who “closed the factories down.” He concludes: “Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.”

The conservative contempt for Trump voters — omnipresent among the party’s Establishment until the Election Day results persuaded all but the most adamant NeverTrumpers to fall into line — would seem to give the Democrats a big opening to win them over.

 There’s zero evidence that they will. The dug-in Trump base shows no signs of varying its exclusive diet of right-wing media telling it that anyone who contradicts Trump, Rush, or Breitbart is peddling “fake news.” 

There’s no way liberals can counter these voters’ blind faith in a huckster who’s sold them this snake oil. The notion that they can be won over by some sort of new New Deal — “domestic programs that would benefit everyone (like national health insurance),” as Mark Lilla puts it — is wishful thinking. These voters are so adamantly opposed to government programs that in some cases they refuse to accept the fact that aid they already receive comes from Washington — witness the “Keep Government Out of My Medicare!” placards at the early tea-party protests.

Perhaps it’s a smarter idea to just let the GOP own these intractable voters. Liberals looking for a way to empathize with conservatives should endorse the core conservative belief in the importance of personal responsibility. Let Trump’s white working-class base take responsibility for its own votes — or in some cases failure to vote — and live with the election’s consequences.

So hold the empathy and hold on to the anger. 

Obamacare Repeal Costs: 3 Million Jobs; $1.5 Trillion in State Revenues

The hypocrisy of Congressional Republicans - and, of course, Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Fuhrer, is stunning when it comes to the plan to repeal Obamacare which is motivated by two things: (i) to allow large tax cuts to the wealthy, and (ii) to undo the legacy of America's first black president in order to pander to the racists and white supremacists who now dominate the Republican Party base. Not only will repeal without a concurrent replacement deprive 20+ million Americans of health care coverage, but it will also result in lost jobs and blows to state revenues.  The true GOP agenda likewise shows the hypocrisy of Republican whining over deficits.  Economist Paul Krugman sums this up well:

Not long ago prominent Republicans like Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, liked to warn in apocalyptic terms about the dangers of budget deficits, declaring that a Greek-style crisis was just around the corner. But now, suddenly, those very same politicians are perfectly happy with the prospect of deficits swollen by tax cuts; the budget resolution they’re considering would, according to their own estimates, add $9 trillion in debt over the next decade. Hey, no problem.

This sudden turnaround comes as a huge shock to absolutely nobody — at least nobody with any sense. All that posturing about the deficit was obvious flimflam, whose purpose was to hobble a Democratic president, and it was completely predictable that the pretense of being fiscally responsible would be dropped as soon as the G.O.P. regained the White House.

But back to the lost jobs and financial hit that repeal of Obamacare will unleash.  A piece at CNBC looks at the economic impact that will likely disproportionately hit the working class cretins whites who voted for Trump, especially in rural areas.  Here are article highlights:

Spending less by getting rid of Obamacare could end up costing a whole lot more.

Up to 3 million jobs in the health sector and other areas would be lost if certain key provisions of the Affordable Care Act are repealed by Congress, a new report said Thursday.

At the same time, ending those provisions could lead to a whopping $1.5 trillion reduction in gross state product from 2019 through 2023, according to the study.

"Repealing key parts of the ACA could trigger massive job losses and a slump in consumer and business spending that would affect all sectors of state economies," said Leighton Ku, director of the Center for Health Policy Research and professor at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University.

Ku is the lead author of the report, which was issued by the Milken Institute and the Commonwealth Fund.

The report comes as President-elect Donald Trump and the new Congress are moving toward repealing parts of the ACA through the budget reconciliation process.

"The immediate and most visible effect of ACA repeal would be the loss of coverage and access to care for millions of people who have gained insurance because of the law," said Sara Collins, vice president for health-care coverage and access at the Commonwealth Fund.

"This study points to even larger potential economic effects that would be detrimental to the health and well-being of millions more," Collins said.

The estimate of job and state product losses are based on a scenario in which Congress defunds federal subsidies that most Obamacare customers receive to help lower their monthly insurance premium costs, and also gets rid of funding to cover adults who became newly eligible for Medicaid under the ACA.

Repealing both provisions would save the federal government $140 billion in health-care spending, the report found. And as that funding spigot dried up, it would lead to job losses and a drop in gross state product, the report said.

The study notes that most of the federal funding for Obamacare flows to hospitals, health clinics, pharmacies and other medical providers, who in turn hire and pay staff and purchase goods and services.

A column in the Washington Post looks further at the disingenuousness of Trump and Congressional Republicans:

Let’s try to get this straight. Donald Trump campaigned as the champion of lower-paid working people who deserve better than they have. Republicans have spent the Obama presidency complaining about high deficits and promising to cut them.

And whenever liberals put forward major reforms, conservatives say: No, no, you can’t make radical changes on the basis of narrow partisan majorities. Let’s take it slow and be very careful. They love to cite Thomas Jefferson’s dictum, “Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.”

In moving with reckless speed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Republicans are violating every one of these supposed principles. That’s because the principle that really matters to them is the one they try to shroud behind happy talk about efficiency and compassion: They want to spend a whole lot less money helping Americans get health coverage.

This needs to be made very clear as their throw-people-over-the-side juggernaut rolls forward. Any vote to repeal Obamacare before there is a comprehensive alternative on the table that all can study, understand and debate is a vote to deprive many of their health insurance. It is a vote to make the lives of millions of Americans demonstrably worse.

And a bunch of politicians who regularly accuse their progressive opponents of being “out of touch” with the “real America” need to be exposed for what they are: a comfortable, affluent and privileged coterie that does not need to spend a single second worrying about whether their kids can see a doctor or whether they will get the care they need if a health disaster strikes.

That also means you, Sens. Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker. In Tennessee, 526,000 more people would be uninsured. (Corker, it should be said, acknowledged on Friday that “repeal and replacement should take place simultaneously.”) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is threatening to hike the uninsured figure in Kentucky by 200 percent, or 486,000 people.

In Arizona, Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake, the number without coverage would rise by 709,000. In West Virginia, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, the ranks of the uninsured would go up by 208 percent, more than twice the national average, from 88,000 if the ACA were left in place to 272,000.

Oh, yes, and as for the deficit, the very bill McConnell is putting forward would swell it to $1 trillion — that’s with a “tr” — by the end of the decade. This is quite an achievement. In one vote, the Republican Congress would deprive millions of lower-income Americans of their health care while saddling the next generation with a whole new debt load. 

[W]hat the nation needs most right now are Republicans willing to face up to how devious and manipulative this process is and how damaging their votes could be to some of their most faithful supporters. These GOP loyalists believed them when they promised to replace Obamacare.