Month: November 2017

The Foreigners Threatening America

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25700577124_b9b3d89b92_kRepublicans are good at hateful, manufactured stereotypes.  “Welfare queens” worked pretty well for a while.   Now we have snobbish, nose-in-the-air elitist liberals.  They’re all like that right?  Just like shiftless blacks and Mexican rapists.  Who needs reality when you can tell who to hate based on skin-color, clothing or even the music they listen to.

Let’s get some reality.  Maureen Dodd did us a service last week with her annual piece presenting her brother’s comments from the other side of the political fence.   There was surprisingly little of substance—just breezy support for Trump’s “delivering on his promises to shake things up” and dissatisfaction with the Republican Congress for not getting the job done.  Nothing on actual policy beyond a hint of racism with the kudos to Bannon for “holding Republicans’ feet to the fire”.  All told this was another confirmation that the Trump core will follow wherever he leads.  It wasn’t different from the content of the Trump rallies or from any of the many recorded interviews with Trump supporters.   Just a reminder that after a year of Trump sell-outs nothing has changed.

It’s time to get over the white racism of the left—that the core Trump supporters are ultimately our people who need to be brought back into the fold.  They may be perfectly okay in normal life, but so were the Nazis who saw the Jews being rounded up in their neighborhoods and thought it was okay.   Fascism will do that to people.  Financial reverses plus a skilled demagogue, and reasonable, intelligent people can succumb to it.  And it’s not going to change any time soon.

It’s also clear what Trump and his supporters are doing to this country.  In their assertion of ultimate white privilege, they are undermining what has made this country great—the opportunity for everyone to succeed.  The fascist denial of objective reality is undermining US economic success, denying educational opportunity, and crippling the worldwide response to climate change.  Like Britain, we are on the way to becoming a second-rate power.  However the dangers here are worse—from another economic crash, from a war, or from our uncritical buddy-buddy relations with the Russians.

Two books in particular have shaped ideas about Trump core supporters:   Hillbilly Elegy and Strangers in Their Own Land.   Both tried to be sympathetic, describing the people, their views, and their reasons.  But the second is particularly relevant because it described Louisiana—a state where they’d won.   It was a disaster of epic proportions:   an environmental catastrophe and an educational system gutted to provide tax breaks for oil companies.  The whole business kept running by tax revenues transferred from the north.

The Trump campaign liked to say the last election was the last chance to protect the country from a Latin American takeover.  We now know he may have been right—we are well underway to becoming a banana republic where the ultra-rich control everything (through Citizens United and the Koch Organization) including how little they are taxed.   Public services, including education, are not priorities.  Hannah Arendt (quoted by Michelle Goldberg) talked succinctly about the collusion between the Nazi economic elite and the fascist-inspired masses they controlled, “The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability.”

That is what is foreign to America.   That is what must be pushed back before it is too late.

 

Big Brother

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The big story today is the Koch-financed purchase of Time Inc.  While this did make the NY Times—in a rather innocuous, long-winded article—you have to go to the Guardian to get a notion of what is going on.  There are three points:

– Most obviously this gives the Koch organization a direct mouthpiece in print media. To be clear—the Koch organization does not represent just Koch money.   It channels money from the richest people in the US and distributes untraceable billions of dollars through a political organization of 1600 staffers.   It quite literally owns the Republican party (Pence is their creation) and is the source (and explanation) for the current tax bill.

– Also this month, the FCC with its new Trump-appointed head, “eliminated protections against monopolies in local broadcast news, a move widely seen as clearing the way for the expansion of a Trump-friendly local broadcasting network”.  This is the Sinclair Media Group, which forces all local subsidiaries to broadcast centrally-prepared Trump agenda propaganda.

– Finally we have the much-discussed FCC ruling last week rolling back net neutrality.  This action has not gone unnoticed, but its impact has been discussed primarily in terms of network providers’ ability to block competitors for their own services.   In the current context however, it is equally important to recognize this amounts to oligarchic control of internet content.

So there you have it.  Print media, television, and internet all at risk of coming under control.  It can happen here.

Why Isn’t the Tax Cut Bipartisan?

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In previous posts we’ve talked about possibilities for bipartisan cooperation on the federal budget and the tax plan.   There were obvious possibilities for that to happen.   The biggest cuts after all are to the corporate income tax, and Obama already discussed his interest in that in the 2015 State of the Union.  Other Democrats talked to Trump about bipartisan options prior to the announcement of the tax plan.

Why didn’t that happen?  Let’s look at the primary provisions.

  1. The Corporate Tax Cut

First of all, as many have mentioned, the average effective corporate rate in the US is not 35% but more like 24%, which is not so far from the international average.   Real tax reform would bring the effective and nominal rates in closer line with each other–with the advantage of removing artificial lobbyist-created inequities in the tax plan.   That, with adjustments to assure parity with other countries, would not break the bank.  It would help the country and could have bipartisan support.

We have instead chosen to close few loopholes, insist on a nominal 20% corporate tax rate, and incur a massive revenue shortfall.  That choice gives us the deficit as well as the middle-class tax increases.  The connection to jobs is weak at best, so most of this additional corporate saving going to investors.   Since it isn’t a matter of competitive parity—why are we doing it?

  1. The Pass-Through tax cut

The stated target of this tax cut was small business, but in fact few small businesses would be helped.   Further, as was recognized early, this tax cut opens opportunities for wealthy people to avoid personal tax rates.   The current form of the tax cut has rules that attempt to limit that.  However many loopholes remain, and the rules are strangely targeted.   Manufacturing and real estate can benefit, but not services.

Since most of this money is going to people who can exploit the loopholes—not to the stated targets—why are we doing it?

  1. The Estate Tax cut

This is of course the most problematical of all.   Only rich people with estates over $10 million are involved, and the benefit increases with wealth.  It is worth emphasizing that we don’t just raise the tax-free limit, we completely abolish it and with no unpaid capital gains taxes on the heirs!

As to why we’re doing it, the explanation is the most transparent of self-serving nonsense—“making rich people richer is good for everyone”.

 

These tax cuts are not bipartisan, because their logic has nothing to do with the welfare of the country.   Donors are complaining they haven’t gotten what they paid for, so it’s time to get the job done.  Bipartisanship is not on the agenda.   These tax cuts are delivered as ordered.

It is important to recognize that there is nothing mysterious about the small, ultra-rich donor community (with the Koch organization as primary mover channeling money from others) and also nothing ambiguous about their demands—both money and power.  You might even argue—though it’s a stretch—that perhaps the stock market is rising not on business prospects, but on all that extra money the ultra-rich donors will have to invest somewhere!

And there’s another twist to this too.   Trump and the Koch brothers have much the same motives, but Trump is the President after all.  How can he get away with a tax program that has been precisely engineered for his own benefit?

Trump was born for this job.   He actually believes that whatever is good for him personally is by definition the best possible thing for the country.

So we are left with a philosophical quandary.   Is a crook who uses his office to pocket more than a billion dollars from the country excused if he is too self-intoxicated to realize what he’s doing?