WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

THE BEST DEFENSE: Fighting for the Good Life in Trumplandia

Many of the folks I know are getting ready to play serious defense in 2017, and they’re not wrong. Before we take up our three-point stance on the national line of scrimmage, however, maybe we should ask ourselves not only what we’re fighting against, but what we’re fighting for… Nor should we forget that in addition to people’s rights, there are actual people to defend in the brave new world of Trumplandia, or at least to help defend themselves: immigrants, Muslims, African Americans -- especially young black men -- as well as people facing poverty and homelessness… What would it mean to take seriously the idea that people create governments so they can enjoy” life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?” What would the United States look like if that were its purpose?

But what if we were actually to take those words at face value? Not naively, but with the bitter nuance of the black poet Langston Hughes who, recognizing both the promise and the sham, wrote:

“ O, let America be America again --  
The land that never has been yet --
And yet must be -- the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine -- the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME --
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.”

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SUSPENDING THE RULES:

How Congress Plans to Undermine Public Safety

A handy rule of thumb in Washington is that the more pernicious the act, the more high-minded the title. Thus, last week, the House of Representatives approved the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act of 2017, also known as the REINS Act. The bill would strip the executive branch of the power to issue significant new rules on topics ranging from air quality to food safety. In normal times, such a power grab by Congress would surely face a veto threat from the President, but, of course, these are not normal times… The ostensible justification for the REINS Act is a fear of executive overreach. However, it’s easy to discern the real—and darker—motive. No agency imposes a regulation with “an annual effect on the economy of $100,000,000 or more” lightly. Such regulations take years to draft and finalize. They’re subject to multiple levels of review, not to mention months of public comment. These regulations also tend to be the sort that have an impact on big corporations, in areas such as energy production, workers’ safety, and lending practices, and, not surprisingly, big corporations often don’t like them.   More

THERE IS NO "TERRIFIC" REPLACEMENT FOR OBAMACARE (Other than Single-Payer!)

Republicans are caught between the criticisms of Obamacare that are popular to make and the plans they actually want to pass…  Donald Trump likes to say he’s going to repeal Obamacare and replace it with “something terrific.” Sadly for everyone, that’s probably not possible. What is possible is repealing Obamacare and replacing it with something that makes a different set of equally painful trade-offs…  The Kaiser Family Foundation polled Trump voters on the Affordable Care Act, and their priorities diverge sharply from those of congressional Republicans. The Medicaid expansion, Medicare taxes, and out-of-pocket limits are among the Obamacare provisions that elected Republicans like least. But all three are popular even among Trump supporters… President Barack Obama outlined the trade-offs he would like to make to improve Obamacare. He wants to raise taxes on the rich to increase subsidies to the poor, and to add a government-run public insurance option. Pumping more money into subsidies would certainly lead to more people being covered and lower premiums and deductibles, but I doubt McConnell would like it.   More

STEALING ELECTIONS IS ALL IN THE GAME

Ever since Donald Trump won the presidency last November, perhaps no issue has consumed America’s political class more than the question of whether Russia interfered in the U.S. election. The White House, the FBI, and the rest of the intelligence community says it did, although the government has still not provided the public with the concrete evidence on which that conclusion is based… Lost in the furor over what Moscow did or did not do, and what effects it did or did not have, is [the fact that] …this interference is a type of behavior that the United States helped establish; indeed, meddling in other countries’ politics has been an American specialty for a long time… Since 1945, America has intervened in the internal political affairs of other countries as a matter of course. Our basic attitude has been that free elections are great — as long as they don’t produce outcomes the U.S. government doesn’t like. Many of these episodes — Indochina, Congo, Chile, the Dominican Republic, and so on — are quite well-known. Other cases — like Guyana, where the Kennedy administration put heavy pressure on the British to prevent Cheddi Jagan from coming to power through the democratic process — are less familiar. The practice was more common during the Cold War than people realize.  Indeed, the United States felt free to intervene, sometimes massively, in the internal political affairs of our democratic allies. More

Democrats are playing with fire on Russia

Two months after the defeat of Hillary Clinton, the most cohesive message from congressional Democrats is: blame Russia. The party leaders have doubled down on an approach that got nowhere during the presidential campaign — trying to tie the Kremlin around Donald Trump’s neck.  Still more interested in playing to the press gallery than speaking directly to the economic distress of voters in the Rust Belt and elsewhere who handed the presidency to Trump, top Democrats would much rather scapegoat Vladimir Putin than scrutinize how they’ve lost touch with working-class voters. Meanwhile, the emerging incendiary rhetoric against Russia is extremely dangerous. It could lead to a military confrontation between two countries that each have thousands of nuclear weapons.   More

The 'Post-Truth' Mainstream Media

The astonishing reality is that the mainstream media often leaves the public more ignorant and confused than if they ignored them altogether. This is in fact what polling by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s Public Mind Poll has found: that people who said they didn’t follow the news at all were better informed about international events than either Fox News or MSNBC viewers, and about as knowledgeable as CNN viewers. People whose main news source was Comedy Central’s The Daily Show scored second highest of all, outscored by NPR listeners but better informed than Sunday talk show and “talk radio” junkies as well as cable news viewers… Like many institutions in our society, the U.S. media system has been degraded by the inherent corruption of the neoliberal order that has been consolidating its power over our lives and society for the past generation. Just as commercially driven corporate control has proven to be a destructive model for education, healthcare and other public services that leads only to corruption and declining quality, handing over the responsibility for informing the public about what is happening in the world to increasingly monopolistic for-profit corporations is eroding yet another vital pillar of American life.   More

US Government Tries and Fails to Play Media Critic on RT

The much-anticipated Office of the Director of Intelligence (DNI) Report—the combined assessment of the CIA, FBI, DHS and others—on alleged attempts by Russia to influence the 2016 election was released on Friday to a combination of uncritical boosting and underwhelmed perplexity… Indeed, the most bizarre part about the release was that it dedicated considerable effort—approximately 40 percent of the report’s content—to the Kremlin-financed Russia Today cable network… In the report’s worldview, any and all criticism of the social fabric of the United states is seen as sinister propaganda. Seemingly hard-to-deny problems like Wall Street greed and civil liberties abuse get the dismissive “alleged” treatment… The distinction between fact and fiction is unimportant to the US government, and, by extension, to those parroting the report; what matters is, “Does it make the United States look bad?” The implication is that if RT didn’t exist, issues such as “Wall Street greed” and fracking would be overlooked. If true, what does this say about the health of our press?  Would the average American not think our democracy corrupt if it weren’t for the pesky Russians?   More