A View From The Left-WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME-Join The Resistance

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WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

How the GOP vote to undo Obamacare could affect the places that went for Trump

Republicans in the House successfully moved a bill forward Thursday that could make insurance more costly — especially for those living in places around the country where President Trump is most popular. The bill would undo and rewrite some of the most consequential elements of the Affordable Care Act, also called Obamacare. The GOP legislation would limit the financial help Obamacare makes available to middle-class households for buying insurance. Additionally, the legislation could weaken protections for patients with certain conditions, allowing insurers to charge them more because they require more expensive treatment…   An analysis by The Washington Post found that of the 35 counties where residents stand to lose the most in financial assistance under the GOP plan, Trump carried 33 — in many cases, by overwhelming margins.  More

Opposing Trump's "Moral Chaos," People's Budget Offers Roadmap for Resistance

The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) on Tuesday unveiled its "People's Budget," offering a vision of economic equality and fairness that comes in sharp contrast to the Trump administration's "slash-and-burn approach to governing based on ideological extremism."

The People's Budget: A Roadmap for the Resistance (pdf) includes a $2 trillion infrastructure investment; closes corporate tax loopholes; ensures families don't pay more than 10 percent of their income for childcare; and supports progressive measures such as a minimum wage increase, clean energy expansion, and debt-free college. Bottom line, the caucus said Tuesday, the document "puts political and economic power back in the hands of the people."  …"It's one thing to oppose President Trump and expose his broken promises to workers, but it's also important to lay out a positivepath forward," said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.). "The Congressional Progressive Caucus's budget is a plan to actually help working Americans who have felt left behind by an economy rigged against them. Our budget is a roadmap for the resistance, investing in the progressive priorities and economic, kitchen-table issues that matter to real people: infrastructure to create jobs; education to help our kids reach their full potential; and access to affordable healthcare."   More

‘The People’s Budget’: Analysis of the Congressional Progressive Caucus budget for 2018

The People’s Budget is focused on both short- and long-term economic objectives. In the short run, The People’s Budget targets a rapid and durable return to genuine full employment through the use of expansionary fiscal policy. In the long run, The People’s Budget pushes back on decelerating productivity growth by making necessary and sustained public investments.  The budget was developed from the evidence-based conclusion that the present economic challenge of joblessness results from a continuing shortfall of aggregate demand—the result of the Great Recession and its aftermath—and that the depressed state of economic activity is largely responsible for elevated budget deficits and the recent rise in public debt. Further, much recent research indicates that aggregate demand is likely to remain depressed in coming years without a fiscal boost (this hypothesis about chronic ongoing demand shortages is often referred to as “secular stagnation”). Labor market slack resulting from this continuing demand shortfall is in turn exacerbating the decade-long trend of falling working-age household income and the almost four-decades-long trend of markedly increasing income inequality.   More

Prospects for black America about to get worse under Trump, report says

Black and Hispanic Americans continue to lag far behind whites economically -- and their prospects look much worse under President Trump, according to a reportto be released Tuesday by the National Urban League.  Despite promises of a “new deal for black America,” any recent progress made towards racial equality is increasingly under threat, said Marc Morial, the league’s president and chief executive. The president's incendiary rhetoric on the campaign trail has translated into discriminatory public policy, he said. “The social cancer of hate continues to metastasize, thriving in a climate conducive to hostility towards religious and racial minorities, permeating even at the highest levels of national discourse and threatening to further crack our fractured nation,” Morial wrote in the report. In an interview with The Post, he pointed to Trump's intent to roll back key Obama-era policies from expanding health care coverage to greater police oversight as evidence that the future for black America is precarious. The annual report found the standard of living for African Americans is 72 percent that of the average white person.  More

ALL IN THE FAMILY TRUMP

It turns out that the voters who cast their ballots for Donald Trump, the patriarch, got a package deal for his whole clan.  That would include, of course, first daughter Ivanka who, along with her husband, Jared Kushner, is now a key political adviser to the president of the United States.  Both now have offices in the White House close to him.  They have multiple security clearances, access to high-level leaders whenever they visit the Oval Office or Mar-a-Lago, and the perfect formula for the sort of brand-enhancement that now seems to come with such eminence. President Trump may have an exceedingly “flexible” attitude toward policymaking generally, but in one area count on him to be stalwart and immobile: his urge to run the White House like a business, a family business. The ways that Jared, “senior adviser to the president,” and Ivanka, “assistant to the president,” have already benefited from their links to “Dad” in the first 100 days of his presidency stagger the imagination. Ivanka’s company, for instance, won three new trademarks for its products from China on the very day she dined with President Xi Jinping at her father’s Palm Beach club.  More

GREENWALD: Trump’s Support and Praise of Despots Is Central to the U.S. Tradition

Since at least the end of World War II, supporting the world’s worst despots has been a central plank of U.S. foreign policy, arguably its defining attribute. The list of U.S.-supported tyrants is too long to count, but the strategic rationale has been consistent: In a world where anti-American sentiment is prevalent, democracy often produces leaders who impede rather than serve U.S. interests.  Imposing or propping up dictators subservient to the U.S. has long been, and continues to be, the preferred means for U.S. policymakers to ensure that those inconvenient popular beliefs are suppressed. None of this is remotely controversial or even debatable. U.S. support for tyrants has largely been conducted out in the open, and has been expressly defended and affirmed for decades by the most mainstream and influential U.S. policy experts and media outlets…  All of this history is now being erased and whitewashed, replaced with jingoistic fairy tales by the U.S. media and leading political officials. Despite these decades of flagrant pro-dictatorship policies, the U.S. media and leading political officials have spent months manufacturing and disseminating a propagandistic fairy tale that casts Donald Trump’s embrace of dictators as some sort of new, aberrational departure from the noble American tradition.   More