When Dr. Vivek Murthy's photo suddenly disappeared from the US surgeon general's Twitter account, social media was abuzz with people speculating on which proverbial hill his career as surgeon general had ended. Doctors like me wondered which devoted guardian of the public's health could next face the same fate. The day after being fired, Murthy confirmed…
During the 2010 protests against Obamacare, tea party members alleged that the legislation would cause death panels, but now it seems Trumpcare might actually make them a reality.
Republicans accused Democrats of setting up an ethics panel that would determine if those over 75 would be given major medical procedures. The conspiracy caught on fast and the myth of "death panels" was born. But as Steve Rosenfeld notes, allowing states to opt-out of the pre-existing conditions mandate and turn it into a "high-risk pool" could turn into actual death panels.
“I don’t think people really understand how serious this is,” children’s book author Cannon Slayton told the New York Times. The 50-year-old is suffering from brain cancer. Under Trumpcare, she would lose her coverage and with it, possibly her life.
High-risk pools were part of a plan in several states prior to Obamacare. There were so many applicants from people that they had to start a waiting list to get treatment. Florida had to kill their program altogether.
"Such pools have no real purpose unless insurance companies are once again given the right to deny people coverage based on their health histories," Florida Today wrote in an editorial. "And doing that would once again turn sick people into second-class citizens."
It would ultimately put people in a desperate situation where if they are denied care they have to wait for the high-risk pool to save them.
"As of Wednesday, House Republicans are blinking when it comes to amassing enough votes to pass their latest Obamacare repeal bill because what they are hearing loud and clear is turning crazy Sarah’s macabre vision into reality. Americans struggling with cancer and other life-threatening illnesses are expressing their concrete fears that the House’s latest handiwork will accelerate their demise because it repeals Obamacare’s ban on insurers rejecting coverage for people with pre-existing conditions and allows insurers to segregate these people into pricier high-risk pools. Both are disasters," Rosenfeld wrote.
Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) rejected the GOP's proposal when the leadership needs a few more to ensure passage of Trumpcare. To score his vote, Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) promised he would keep $8 billion in subsidies back into the bill.
Rosenfeld cites Republican media consultant Rick Wilson, who explained in a Twitter storm that the pre-existing conditions rule is the most popular part of Obamacare and Republicans would be essentially committing political suicide by voting for it in the House.
Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said Wednesday that the GOP doesn't have teh votes in the Senate to pass the bill.
"Set aside policy. Set aside the economics. Think about the politics of it. They're awful. They're idiotic," Wilson explained. "It's a vote that makes House… Members vote for a bill that the Senate will NEVER pass. A Senate source tells me they now have MAYBE 25 Rs (and shrinking) [sic]."
He said that the bill is too heartless for moderates and not mean enough for the tea party, who just wants to see healthcare gone. Passing the bill would send waves of shock and fear through any family with a member struggling with cancer, diabetes, heart disease or even survivors of sexual assault.
Rosenfeld referred to a famous rant from Sarah Palin, in which the former vice presidential candidate said that seniors and the disabled "will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care.”
Palin seems to have prophesied her own party's repeal and replacement.
Gene Tunney, the champion prizefighter of the 1920s, wanted to promote an image of himself as a great intellectual. Trying to prove it, he always carried in his pocket a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Many members of the press weren’t buying it. When Tunney published a volume titled A Man Must Fight, one sportswriter began his story about it with this immortal line: “Gene Tunney, who has written one book and read several others…”
It’s a line that would work for Donald Trump, too, but only if flipped: “Donald Trump, who has written several books and read one other…”
Of course, his various books have been written with the considerable help of long suffering ghosts. And yes, I know that on several occasions Trump has bragged to reporters about the many books he claims to have read. In 2011, for example, he told the official Chinese news agency Xinhua, “I’ve read hundreds of books about China over the decades.”
If you believe that, I’ve got a Great Wall to sell you. A real one. In China, not Mexico.
As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, one of Trump’s least appealing of many unappealing traits is his incuriosity, his total lack of interest in history or pretty much anything that somehow doesn’t pump up his ego or profits. It’s deeply dangerous for all of us.
On Monday, here he was again, the man who just claimed an unprecedented first 100 days (must have been a helluva shock to FDR), who may have thought Frederick Douglass was still alive (“somebody who’s done an amazing job”) and who seemed eager to spread the news that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican (“Does anyone know? A lot of people don’t know that!”). Now he was sharing his thoughts on the Civil War:
“People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War — if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”
When my eyes uncross and my head stops coming to a point, I’d like to read aloud to him from the Emancipation Proclamation.
Trump’s remarks came as he discussed in a radio interview his oft-stated admiration for Andrew Jackson. But as Aaron Blake at The Washington Post notes, Trump pulled yet another groaner when, “Just last week, in an interview with Reuters, Trump suggested there was really no reason for the Israelis and the Palestinians to have been fighting for all these decades.
“‘I want to see peace with Israel and the Palestinians,’ Trump said. ‘There is no reason there’s not peace between Israel and the Palestinians — none whatsoever. So we’re looking at that, and we’re also looking at the potential of going to Saudi Arabia.'”“No reason whatsoever! You know, besides the whole claim-to-the-very-same-holy-land thing. Minor details.”
It boggles the mind. My former colleague, historian David McCullough, is no stranger to American presidents, having written Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies of Harry Truman and John Adams. He has been making the rounds promoting his new book, a collection of his speeches called The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For.
When he appeared on Leonard Lopate’s talk show on New York public radio a couple of weeks ago, McCullough noted that in Donald Trump we had
“put someone in the pilot seat who has never ever flown a plane before; who doesn’t understand how our government works, who has no interest in the history of the country and has said so on more than one occasion, who has never read a book about the presidency or a biography of a president and claims… that he doesn’t need to read books because he knows so much intuitively.”
And yet when Trump declares that health care reform or pretty much anything else — in fact the entire job of being president — is much more complicated than he imagined it would be, it’s precisely because he has no knowledge of history, the kind of knowledge that might at least from time to time buffer for him the shock of reality by offering the golden gift of precedence.
History, McCullough writes, is “an aid to navigation in such troubled uncertain times.
“… All problems have histories and the wisest route to a successful solution to nearly any problem begins with understanding its history. Indeed, almost any attempt to solve a problem without an understanding of its history is to court failure — an example our tragic plunge into Vietnam with hardly a notion of its past.”
Or our plunge into Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or Iran. Or North Korea — especially when the sum total of Trump’s knowledge of that country’s fraught history seems to have been a 10-minute tutorial from the president of China.
History is that proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in Mexico and causing a tsunami in Malaysia. Which makes it all the more perilous when you have a president who uses “America First” as a campaign slogan, revealing little knowledge of the isolationist movement before World War II; whose press secretary makes ill-considered statements comparing Nazi Germany, Syria and the use of poison gas to massacre civilians; and who calls Sen. Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas,” demonstrating a willful, repugnant ignorance of Native American history that goes all the way back to a time some 24 years ago when he claimed owners of tribal casinos “are not Indians” because they didn’t conform to his stereotype of what Native Americans should look like.
But even worse than any of these is a lack of knowledge of history and government that puts our very existence as a free and democratic government in peril. Embracing other countries’ dictators is one slippery slope. And then on Sunday there was Trump’s chief of staff Reince Priebus suggesting to Jonathan Karl of ABC News that his boss is contemplating amending or even eliminating the First Amendment to curb negative coverage of the president. And finally, there was Trump himself, complaining to Fox News about the difficulty of getting his program through Congress: “It’s a very rough system. It’s an archaic system… It’s really a bad thing for the country.”
In other words, history, the system of checks and balances and the Constitution itself are just getting in Trump’s way, despite his prior claims to regard as inviolate the original language of the founders.
David McCullough has said that our past is an invaluable asset, but “if you’ve inherited some great work of art that is worth a fortune and you don’t know that it’s worth a fortune, you don’t even know that it’s a great work of art and you’re not interested in it — you’re going to lose it.”
Trump and his minions seem determined to send the admittedly flawed masterwork that is our legacy to the trash. One of David’s favorite quotes comes from Thomas Jefferson: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
Sadly, those words are probably unfamiliar to Trump precisely because of what Jefferson suggested. Past presidents have embraced our past as prologue, read books, invited eminent historians to the White House for advice and consultation. But Trump takes his history, as little as it is, from the dark spoutings of pseudointellectuals like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, or in tweets and soundbites from Fox & Friends. When he tries to parrot the words back as public statements, they come out even more mangled and malevolent.
While he is so ignorant we cannot be free.
This article was originally published at BillMoyers.com
For getting a sense of what Americans think, decent polls, for all their deficiencies, are better than wild guesses. So consider the findings of a major poll that last month looked into the question of whom to believe, Trump or the major media. It ain’t pretty.
First of all, how many Americans think that media are responsible for “fake news”? According to this poll, commissioned from Langer Research Associates by ABC News/The Washington Post, 52 percent of Americans think that news organizations “regularly” produce false stories. Regularly.
True, that’s not as big a number as the 59 percent of the same sample who think the Trump administration “regularly” makes false claims. Even factoring in the poll’s sampling error, the news organizations would seem to be slightly — but only slightly — more credible than the White House falsehood machine. How much of a victory is that?
Curiously, 40 percent of the same sample think that it’s a bigger problem that mainstream news organizations produce false stories than that the Trump administration makes false claims. Forty-three percent think it’s the other way round. Eleven percent think they’re equally at fault. Allowing for the sampling error, it’s a wash. Small comfort for media, I’d say.
Another poll (which asks about “national political media,” not “news organizations,” but such are the vagaries of the disorderly polling business), gives a result even less flattering to the news media as a whole:
Trump’s critiques of the media, which he commonly derides as “fake news” also seems to have struck a chord with Americans. A plurality (42 percent) said they see fake news in national newspapers or network news broadcasts more than once or about once a day. About 3 in 10 (31 percent) said they saw fake news from those sources once every few days, once a week or slightly less often than that.
Unsurprisingly, this poll was touted by Breitbart News.
Another poll, this one by The Economist/Yougov in February, asked the question more pointedly, and found a more dramatic tilt toward media over Trump. Their question was:
“When the media challenges Donald Trump about whether things he and his Administration say are correct, or not correct, do you feel… (A) Trump and the Administration usually turn out to be right on the facts; (B) The media usually turns out to be right on the facts; (C) Not sure.”
Thirty-one percent trusted Trump more, 39 percent trusted the media more.
Neither poll specified which news organizations the pollsters were asking about. That’s a serious deficiency. Presumably, respondents were welcome to include, among “news organizations,” Fox, Breitbart, Infowars and other right-wing vehicles that I have been calling the Vortex — VOices of RT-Wing EXtremism. So what are we entitled to conclude about the state of national disbelief? To judge historical tendencies, we have to resort some educated guesswork. So here goes.
It was in 1972 that Gallup started asking Americans how much “trust” (sometimes “confidence”) they had in news media generally, which the pollster sometimes labeled a bit more specifically as “newspapers, TV and radio.” For 35 years, between 1972 and 2007, the total of “great deal” and “fair amount” always stood at 50 percent or higher. Other pollsters asked comparable questions, posing the alternatives a bit differently: high, medium and low confidence. Between 1977 and 1983, the total of “high” and “medium” confidence soared as high as 89 percent.
It’s not hard to guess why news media looked so reliable. Those were the post-Watergate years, when journalism basked in the afterglow of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. The presidency of Ronald Reagan — at least his first term — made no discernible dent in the media’s prestige. But then Reagan did not crusade against the media. He sweet-talked them, and successfully, as Mark Hertsgaard amply documented in 1988.
Since 1997, Gallup has asked the question this way: “How much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly?” Perhaps they changed the wording in 1997 because that was the year after Fox News was launched and they meant to include CNN but not Fox. In any event, in 1997, the total of “great deal” and “fair amount” stood at 53 percent, where it remained, give or take a point or two, through 2003, when, within a single year, that total plunged to 44 percent. Likely, George W. Bush propaganda about weapons of mass destruction, and media hype about the nonexistent weapons, took their toll. But even then, in 2005 the total who trusted media “a great deal” or “a fair amount” recovered to 50 percent.
But since 2005, “trust and confidence” have been drifting slowly downward. (What Gallup means by “trust and confidence,” as opposed to “trust,” I don’t know, but for brevity’s sake, I’ll collapse the two into “trust.”) By 2008, the total of “a great deal” and “fair amount” of trust had slipped to 43 percent. In 2014, it was down to 40 percent. In 2016, it was down to 32 percent — a new low, reflecting a decline, within six years, of almost one-third.
Also according to Gallup, most of the decline has come among Republicans. Faced with a choice between Trump and “the enemy of the American people,” Republicans made their choice, and they’re sticking to it: Trump.
Here are the relative figures at four-year intervals, except for the last row:
In other words, between 1997 and 2016, Democrats’ trust eroded by 20 percent; Independents’ by 43 percent; and Republicans’ by a breathtaking 66 percent. The Republicans have gone to the dark side.
Possibly these numbers tell us something about how far-gone they are. In 2010 pollsters began to ask about confidence in specific news organizations. Here are the numbers I can find:
Now, let’s take confidence in Fox News as a proxy for hard-right views of the media. There are two problems here. One is that some folks may have lost confidence in Fox News because they think it’s too moderate, and prefer Breitbart, Infowars, etc. We can’t get a fix on how much popular judgment has been clouded by affection for the Vortex. Secondly, we don’t have any numbers for confidence in Fox News during the year 2016, so there are no grounds for surmising how much of the collapse in confidence in non-Fox news can be attributed to Trump’s blithe assault on media as “the enemy of the American people.” What we can say is this:
In November, Trump won 46 percent of American voters. At last look, Gallup gives him a 41 percent job approval (with a +/- 3 percent margin of error , although note Gallup polls all Americans not just voters). From the last available data, 29 percent of the public were “confident” in Fox News. In other words, roughly two-thirds of Trump’s supporters are pretty hard-line right-wingers, and if we add back in a chunk who’ve lost faith in Fox because they find it too tame, we can say that something like three-quarters of Trump supporters are accounted for by the hard right.
By Greg Sargent’s calculation in The Washington Post, this number more or less matches the proportion of Trump voters (78 percent) who think the news media regularly publish false stories.
Which means that something between 22 and 25 percent of them may not be. So about 10 percent of Americans — roughly 22 percent of Trump’s 43 percent) are up for grabs.
That 10 percent are the stakes of American politics for the foreseeable future. They are not automatically right-wing loyalists. They are not true believers. They have not taken leave of their senses forever. They are conditional Trump supporters. They pay some attention to his results. Will he deliver jobs? Boost middle-class income?
How much attention? Who knows?
Serious thinking about how to recover public reason must begin, then, with a tough question that needs to be put to all the professionals—all the politicians, all the strategists, all the political consultants who occupy the ample territory on the sunny side of berserk: How will you win over that one-tenth? It’s not impossible. But Americans who find Trump “a disaster,” to use one of his favorite words, are owed a plan.
This article was originally published at BillMoyers.com
After more than 100 days into his presidency, it seems fair to ask: What is Donald Trump’s governing philosophy?
He isn’t really a Republican (he didn’t join the GOP until 2012). He’s hardly a free-market conservative (he’s eager to block trade and immigration). No one would mistake him for a libertarian (he’s okay with preventing abortions and gay marriage).
So what is he? An authoritarian.
Political scientists use this term to describe a way of governing that values order and control over personal freedom, and seeks to concentrate power in the hands of a single “strongman.”
Viewed through the lens of authoritarianism, Trump’s approach to governing is logical and coherent.
For example, an authoritarian wouldn’t follow the normal process in a constitutional democracy for disputing a judicial decision he dislikes – which is to appeal it to a higher court.
An authoritarian would instead assail judges who rule against him, as Trump has done repeatedly. He’d also threaten to hobble the offending courts, as Trump did last week in urging that the 9th Circuit (where many of these decisions have originated) be broken up.
Likewise, an authoritarian has no patience for normal legislative rules – designed, as they are in a democracy, to create opportunities for deliberation.
Which is why Trump told Mitch McConnell to use the “nuclear option” against the time-honored Senate filibuster, in order to confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
Last week, Trump called House and Senate rules “archaic,” and urged they be abandoned. “We don’t have a lot of closers in politics, and I understand why: It’s a very rough system. It’s an archaic system,” he said.
Through the eyes of an authoritarian, rules that block what the authoritarian wants to do are always “bad for the country,” as Trump said of them.
Trump would like to get rid of the filibuster altogether. “The filibuster concept is not a good concept to start off with.”
An authoritarian also seeks to intimidate the press, in order to avoid criticism and consolidate his power.
Trump still doesn’t miss an opportunity to assail the media for publishing “fake news.” His chief of staff has revived Trump’s campaign proposal to widen libel laws so that he can sue the press for stories he doesn’t like.
Authoritarians do not tolerate other levels of government with their own powers and responsibilities. Which is why Trump wants to force states and cities to report on unauthorized immigrants, even though this violates the principle of federalism enshrined in the 10th Amendment.
Finally, authoritarians promote other authoritarians, in an effort to normalize authoritarian rule.
Last Saturday, Trump invited President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines to visit the White House.
Duterte, you should know, is an authoritarian leader accused of ordering extrajudicial killings of thousands of people suspected of using or selling narcotics as well as others who may have had no involvement with drugs. He has referred to former President Barack Obama as a “son of a whore.” And he has declared open season on suspected terrorists, saying that if he were presented with a suspected terrorist, “give me salt and vinegar and I’ll eat his liver.”
Two weeks ago, Trump phoned to congratulate President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey for his victory in a referendum filled with voting irregularities that expanded Erdogan’s powers and has put Turkey on the road to dictatorship.
Trump also opined that the recent terrorist attack in Paris will help the right-wing extremist Marine Le Pen.
Trump has praised President Xi Jinping of China, the most authoritarian leader China has had since Mao Zedong.
Trump also hosted at the White House Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who had not been granted an invitation to the White House since seizing power in a military coup almost four years ago.
And don’t forget Trump’s vow during the presidential campaign to pursue a warmer relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. (The effort has faltered in light of possible links between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.)
Donald Trump’s authoritarianism is a consistent and coherent philosophy of governing. But it’s not America’s.
In fact, the Framers of the U.S. Constitution created separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism precisely to avoid concentrated power. Their goal was to stop authoritarians like Donald Trump.
Not long ago Trump adviser Stephen Miller declared “the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.” Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, and Hamilton would have been appalled.
This article was originally published at RobertReich.org
Anyone familiar with Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement of 1964 knows what a real free speech movement looks like. And the current Ann Coulter/College Republican free speech charade at Berkeley bears no resemblance to such a movement.
In the free speech controversy of 1964 the UC Berkeley administration closed down the traditional free speech area just outside the campus’s south entrance. This suppression generated mass protest by a wide spectrum of student groups from the Young Socialist alliance to Goldwater Republicans. It took months of negotiations, sit-ins, a semester full of non-violent demonstrations, the largest mass arrests in California history, and the most intensive organizing by thousands of students to win over the faculty to the Free Speech Movement’s central demand – affirmed in a landslide vote by the Berkeley Academic Senate – in its December 8, 1964 resolutions “that the content of speech or advocacy should not be restricted by the University.” In other words, the Berkeley administration, headed by Chancellor Edward W. Strong, had to be forced by a broad student movement and a majority of its voting faculty to open the campus to free speech and political advocacy.
The contrast between the Strong administration of 1964 and today’s UC Berkeley administration, headed by Chancellor Nicholas B. Dirks, could not be starker. When a small group of students back in 2014 demanded that UC disinvite comedian Bill Maher from speaking at its graduation ceremony on the grounds that Maher’s humor was Islamophobic, Dirks invoked Berkeley’s free speech tradition and insisted that Maher be allowed to speak – which he was. When earlier this semester student activists and an open letter from some 100 faculty urged him to ban the bigoted alt right speaker Milo Yiannopoulos, Dirks refused to do so, again standing up for free speech. It was only after an ugly riot and arson by non-student anarchists on the night of the Yiannopoulos talk (leaving more than $100,000 in property damage on the Berkeley campus) that the chancellor reluctantly canceled the talk in the interests of public safety.
Fearing a recurrence of the Yiannopoulos violence, the Berkeley administration sought to postpone Coulter’s speech, and in the end asked that in the interest of security it be delayed a week. The administration cited threats it had received against Coulter, which is not surprising given that she is an intemperate nativist. Coulter and her College Republican and Young American Foundation sponsors responded with claims that the administration was trying to stifle conservative speech and that it had caved in to Berkeley’s “rabid off-campus mob” in doing so.
There are very few students on the Berkeley campus who see this week’s delay of the Coulter speech on public safety grounds as a free speech violation. That’s why the lawsuit the College Republicans filed this week against the UC administration had no Berkeley student sponsors other than the College Republicans. Think of the contrast with 1964, when there was a genuine free speech violation and a mass free speech movement; it mobilized virtually every Berkeley student group from left to right and even created a new organization of students, the independents, so that those who had been unaffiliated with any political group could be a part of the Free Speech Movement. In 1964 thousands of Berkeley students marched and hundreds engaged in civil disobedience when free speech was genuinely under threat. Not so today.
No, this is not a real free speech movement at Berkeley today, and that is because there has been no free speech violation by the UC administration. What the Coulter affair really amounts to is a “time, place, and manner” quibble. The settlement of the 1964 Free Speech Movement, as embodied in the December 8 resolutions, included a provision authorizing the university to impose reasonable regulations on the “time, place, and manner of political activity” on campus so that such activity does not interfere with “the normal functions of the university.” The administration has used this “time place and manner” authority in the face of the threats it received, acting on the belief that the time and place for the Coulter talk that would not end in violence and disrupt the normal functions of the university was in early May at a more secure location.
Whether out of a desire for free publicity, concern about her $20,00 speakers fee, or a desire to bash UC’s liberal administration and the Berkeley left, Coulter presented herself as a free speech martyr, and in this she has been joined by her College Republican sponsors. But there has never been a mass “time, place, and manner” movement at Berkeley. And judging by the collective yawn with which the campus has reacted to Coulter’s posturing and the College Republicans' lawsuit, there is not about to be one.
Robert Cohen is a Professor of Social Studies, Steinhardt, and Affiliated Professor, History Department, New York University.
This article was originally published at History News Network
Tired of the 100-day review of Donald Trump’s Presidency? You should be, with one exception. The drama, ambition and accomplishment in the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s presidency lie not in his record, but in the resistance to this President.
Ever since Franklin Roosevelt pushed through major legislation in his first 100 days in office, newly elected Presidents have had their early record measured against the same 100-day standard. Donald Trump has called this threshold “ridiculous” and “artificial,” which would probably be an accurate statement except for the fact that he used the same 100-day timetable during his campaign to lay out an action plan portraying his ability to achieve a plan as bold and far-reaching as FDR accomplished.
The country was in a very different place in 1933, well into its third year of economic crisis, following the stock market crash in October 1929. Unemployment levels moved from 4 million people in 1930 to 15 million by the time Roosevelt took office. Thousands of banks had failed and industrial production had fallen by half. The crisis demanded action, and demanded it on a fast timetable.
Roosevelt delivered in a way that re-shaped the nature of how Americans view government, addressing through emergency legislation and executive action all aspects of relief, recovery and reform needed to reverse the direction of the economy. It was the nature of the crisis that dictated the unprecedented nature of FDR’s first 100 days.
That’s why this 100-day standard makes little sense. Trump, despite his rhetoric indicating he inherited a mess, actually took over the reins of an economy in recovery, certainly better than the one his predecessor inherited in 2009.
What has been more akin to FDR’s dramatic first 100 days in 2017 has been the unprecedented nature of the opposition to Trump.
First, there are the protests. They started before Trump took the oath of office and then swelled in the first 24 hours of his Presidency. There were other demonstrations greeting newly inaugurated Presidents, from the 5000 women who marched before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration demanding the right to vote, to the anti-war protesters at both Nixon inaugurals and the thousands who marched to express their opposition to the election of George W. Bush in 2001.
What was different this time was the size of the demonstrations, not only in Washington DC, but around the nation and in cities in other countries. Everyone but Trump and his inner circle acknowledge that the women’s march on the day after the inauguration surpassed the crowd attending his inauguration. Another difference is that the protests continue, against Trump’s efforts to ban Muslims from entry into the U.S., to build a wall on the southern border, to repeal health care, to refuse to release his taxes, to disregard the science of climate change.
Second, despite the control of both the executive and legislative branch by Trump’s party, the opposition has been surprisingly successful in derailing the pledges that the Republicans ran on, most notably the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Funding for the border wall is a non-starter, tax reform has been reduced to a public relations one-page set of principles, and there’s no sign of a massive infrastructure program. Republican Party unity did help ensure that all of Trump’s nominees for his cabinet, except for the two who withdrew, were able to pass through the Senate, which also confirmed his nominee for the Supreme Court position, left vacant for over a year when the Republicans refused to grant a hearing for President Obama’s selection.
A third unprecedented focus of the opposition has been the speed with which courts have responded to requests to halt President Trump’s executive orders. Both of Trump’s executive orders to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. have been thrown out, as has his administration’s threat to withhold federal funding from cities refusing to deputize their local police forces as deportation officers. One organization – Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, CREW – has filed a lawsuit alleging Trump’s conflicts of interests violate the Constitution and another, the American Civil Liberties Union, is preparing a second such suit.
Fourth, the reaction to Trump from beyond the borders has been an unprecedented rejection of what he is trying to impose here and abroad. Not only do people outside the U.S. in the numbers of millions continue to join the protests, but voters in the Netherlands rejected the candidate who looked like Trump, and French voters will likely follow suit, worried about what they are seeing on this side of the Atlantic. Far from acting as a global superpower, the U.S. is on the receiving end of lectures from world leaders like Theresa May and Angela Merkel on Russia, Justin Trudeau on trade and Xi Jinping on North Korea, all viewing perhaps Trump’s self-proclaimed penchant for unpredictability and flexibility as euphemisms for incompetence and lack of strategy.
Fifth, despite obstacles from the White House and certain Republicans, investigations within the Department of Justice and Congress were launched to look into the role played by the Russian government in helping Donald Trump get elected. The implications for American democracy of any connection between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russian government in that effort necessitates a patient and thorough investigation and compilation of the facts.
Finally, a new, invigorated civic and political activism has sprung up to unprecedented levels. Across the country, citizens are mobilizing to make their voices heard through town hall meetings where members of Congress are seeing attendance rise tenfold since January 20. The volume of phone calls to Congress are setting records, reaching 1.5 million calls to the Senate alone. Ad hoc groups have formed to partner voting districts across the red-blue political divide, to address redistricting that favors Republican candidates, to refuse to shop at businesses owned by or supporting the President and his family, to join voter registration drives.
When FDR set the standard for 100 days of accomplishment by an incoming President, he did so in the face of an acute crisis. The crisis facing the country now is not any external mess, but is all that the new President stands for. Addressing that crisis through a sustained opposition has been the real story of the first 100 days.
John Dickson is a former diplomat and author of the blog historyallaround.org.
Though he spent his early days as an up-and-coming real estate developer masquerading as his own PR rep “John Barron,” Donald Trump’s relationship with the press has largely deteriorated in recent years.
At rallies and events throughout the 2016 campaign—even as he received $2 billion dollars worth of free media—Trump repeatedly excoriated the press, often singling out individual reporters and news organizations as the targets of his disdain. He even vowed to “open up our libel laws” to make it easier for people and companies to sue the press.
Since Trump took office, his administration has ramped up the volatile rhetoric against media organizations. A week after the president’s inauguration, chief White House strategist Steve Bannon declared the media “the opposition party,” arguing it should “keep it’s mouth shut" (a statement later parroted by the president).
And in a freewheeling press conference in February—at the height of furor (so far) over potential collusion been Trump officials and Russia operatives—the president gave a passionate and lengthy rebuke of the very institution that played a pivotal role in elevating him to the White House.
"I have never seen more dishonest media, frankly than the political media," Trumps said during that conference. “The news is fake because so much of the news is fake.”
Trump's media attacks make for good sound bytes, but as it turns out, his constant rebuke of the press has serious implications. Chief among them, the fact that his supporters, inundated by accusations of "fake news" and "biased media" have now taken to view criticism against the president as a badge of honor.
As Salon’s Matthew Rozsa point out, a University of Virginia Center for Politics Project survey on the president’s first 100 days reveals that a full 88 percent of Trump supporters believe he is on the “right track” when the media criticizes him. Only 12 percent find it concerning when the apparatus of researchers, reporters, experts and analysts find an element or elements of Trump’s behavior disconcerting.
Which means despite his plethora of policy failures—from the disastrous GOP healthcare vote to his DOA immigration ban—and open disdain for ethical and historical White House traditions, mention of this to his supporters only serves to reinforce how good he’s doing.
"Tomorrow, they will say: 'Donald Trump rants and raves at the press,'" Trump predicted during that historic press conference in February. "I'm not ranting and raving. I'm just telling you. You know, you're dishonest people. But, but I'm not ranting and raving. I love this. I'm having a good time doing it.”
And, at least for now, his supporters are too.
One way dictators take over democracies is by threatening the independence of a nation’s courts. Donald Trump is doing just this.
Connect the following dots:
1. In January, Trump blasted a federal judge for staying his travel ban. “The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!” he tweeted.
2. In February, after the judge made the stay permanent, Trump issued a veiled threat: “Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!”
3. Last week, after another federal judge issued a nationwide injunction blocking Trump’s travel ban, Trump’s Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, said “I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power.”
4. On Tuesday, after another federal judge blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a threat to take away funds from sanctuary cities, the White House issued a statement condemning the judge as “unelected.” The statement charged “this San Francisco judge’s erroneous ruling is a gift to the criminal gang and cartel element in our country, empowering the worst kind of human trafficking and sex trafficking, and putting thousands of innocent lives at risk. This case is yet one more example of egregious overreach by a single, unelected district judge.”
5. On Wednesday, Trump said he was considering breaking up the court of appeals for the 9th Circuit, in which these three federal judges hear and decide cases. "There are many people who want to break up the 9th Circuit,” he said. “It’s outrageous.” The 9th Circuit Court covers Arizona, California, Alaska, Nevada, Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Washington and Hawaii, as well as Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. Eighteen of the court’s 25 judges were appointed by Democratic presidents.
It is the job of the Justice Department to provide a reasoned case for overruling a federal judge’s decision. In condemning individual judges and threatening to break up the court of appeals instead, Trump is attacking the foundations of the separation of powers in the Constitution.
This assault on the federal judiciary is an abuse of Trump’s constitutional authority – yet another ground for impeachment.
This article was originally published at RobertReich.org
Since neurosurgeon and former Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson was sworn in as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development on March 2, we’ve barely heard a peep from him. Is it because he’s adjusting to his new position, for which he has no relevant experience? Probably. Is it because, as his surrogate said, that he’s not qualified to run a federal agency? Could be that, too.
Apparently there’s been “an atmosphere of paranoia and guardedness that has enveloped HUD since Trump’s inauguration,” according to a former HUD official under Barack Obama, as reported by Next City.
In his first public remarks as head of HUD in early March, Carson tragically stumbled by referring to slaves as “immigrants.” On March 15, Carson began a “listening tour,” dipping his toes into public scrutiny by traveling to cities in Florida, Michigan and Texas to visit buildings and programs that HUD played a hand in creating. In several awkward cases, Carson has praised an initiative only to find out that Donald Trump’s budget blueprint would eliminate the programs that funded those very projects.
According to a trustee for Dallas County Schools, Carson “and his staff have avoided widely advertising the trip.” His trip to Texas wasn’t announced until hours before his first event, according to CityLab. Carson’s secrecy “may have something to do with the fact that Secretary Carson would rather not have to answer to the public and defend the outrageous budget cuts he and Donald Trump are trying to ram through Congress,” the trustee wrote.
Trump’s proposal cuts $6.2 billion from HUD, or 13.2 percent of its annual budget, by slashing public housing support and development grants. The budget gets rid of the 42-year-old, $3 billion Community Development Block Grant program, the HOME Investment Partnerships Program, the Choice Neighborhoods program and the Self-Help Homeownership Opportunity Program.
"We've spent a lot of money on Housing and Urban Development over the last decade without a lot to show for it,” said Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney. “Certainly, there are some successes but there are a lot of programs that simply cannot justify their existence and that's where we zeroed in." Meanwhile, according to CNBC, the Community Development Block Grant program provided housing assistance to nearly 74,000 households, gave public services to nine million Americans and created over 17,000 jobs in 2016 alone. But somehow Mulvaney can’t, or won’t, acknowledge these successes as he touts his budget blueprint that will hit the poor in almost every way possible.
Carson has attempted to defend the cuts to the public, and his past statements show he’s likely on board with them. The new HUD secretary has frequently claimed that with government subsidies, people are not incentivized to get off the federal dole. Carson has made some pretty outrageous statements including that poverty is “really more of a choice than anything else.”
Nothing like getting thrown out on the street with two kids and a $7.25-per-hour job to give you the tools to achieve the American dream.
The proposed Trump budget also eliminates a $1.4 billion-per-year disaster relief program within HUD while adding $700 million to the Department of Homeland Security’s disaster funding. The means that the Trump administration wants to cut disaster relief by $800 million, or 9.4 percent. The cuts are part of an effort to take billions from non-defense agencies and send them directly to the Pentagon.
In typical conservative lingo, the budget claims, “State and local governments are better positioned to serve their communities based on local needs and priorities.” How they’ll do that, when they’re already strapped for cash, is unclear. Seeing as 19 states refused to give millions of uninsured residents health care by expanding Medicaid—initially 100 percent subsidized by the federal government—it’s hard to imagine how they’ll bend over backward to help the poor with funding taken away from them.
Carson began his listening tour at Ben Carson High School of Science and Medicine, a Detroit public school named after him that is a “Michigan Future School,” meaning it receives support from the nonprofit Michigan Future, a project of the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce, which supports charter schools. While Ben Carson High is not a charter, Michigan Future has made numerous six-figure donations to several charters in Detroit.
The next day, Carson had lunch at a restaurant made possible by the Motor City Match program, which helps Detroit businesses establish themselves and grow via grants, loans and counseling funded in part by HUD’s Community Development Block Grants. Carson praised the program on Twitter while his agency is set to eliminate it.
On March 30, Carson attended a youth baseball game hosted by the Dallas Housing Authority, and the next day he popped into a Dallas Habitat for Humanity facility for a mere 15 minutes. In 2015, Carson publicly opposed an anti-housing segregation provision of the Fair Housing Act, strengthened by a Supreme Court ruling involving Dallas, calling it a “mandated social engineering scheme.”
Then he moved on to Florida. In Jacksonville on April 11, he stopped at a poorly maintained low-income apartment building that’s part of HUD’s project-based Section 8 program, which provides residents with rental assistance. Carson praised housing vouchers, but Trump’s budget proposal would cut $600 million from Section 8 programs, which include vouchers and project-based initiatives.
Next, Carson hit Miami and visited an apartment complex that includes dozens of units for the homeless and low-income residents. A supportive housing group built the complex mostly with federal funding, including $1.5 million from the HOME program that the Trump administration wants to cut. The building wouldn’t exist without HOME, said the president of the supportive housing organization. And Miami sees $4 million a year in development block grants, which the city will say goodbye to if the Trump budget passes.
On the tour, the housing secretary has heaped praise on public-private partnerships, which already make up a good portion of affordable housing projects. “I just really appreciate the fact that we are starting to learn as a nation that it’s the private-public partnerships that work because there’s almost unlimited money in the private sector,” said Carson.
Carson hasn’t offered specifics on his plans for the agency, and what he did say isn’t reassuring to people who depend on affordable housing. “I would forget the numbers and think about the concept,” said Carson in Detroit. “The concept is we're going to take care of our people.”
“The parts of these programs that are functioning well—and that are maintaining people—are going to be preserved,” Carson said vaguely in Miami, without giving details on how the programs will survive the massive cuts in the budget blueprint.
Carson, like Trump, has yet to fill many key positions in his department. According to the HUD website, all eight assistant secretary positions are vacant, as well as the “president,” chief information officer and chief operations officer. All ten regional administrators are missing as well as many deputy assistant secretaries. Unlike some heads of other agencies, Carson has actually kept on a number of staffers from the Obama administration, although his Deputy Chief of Staff is Deana Bass, a GOP operative who was press secretary for his campaign.
As Carson attempts to begin making changes to HUD policy, at least one group is following his moves closely. CarsonWatch is “a grassroots campaign” launched by nonprofit lawyers’ group Public Advocates and funded by three housing and justice organizations including the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, according to CityLab. The site offers news updates and opportunities to “take action.”
The website reads, “CarsonWatch is committed to stopping President Trump, HUD Secretary Ben Carson and their congressional allies from any attempts to roll back fair housing protections and undermine the housing security of millions of Americans.”
Democrats are still reeling from Hillary Clinton's unexpected loss last November. Democratic leaders such as Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer are leading the opposition to President Trump's proposals to overturn reforms such as the Affordable Healthcare Act. But history suggests that opposition to the president and vows of action to reconnect with alienated voters will not suffice. The Democrats will need new ideas, better alignment with the spirit of the times, and fresh new candidates to make a comeback and recapture the presidency.
They can learn from the experience of their party in the 1950's. Their presidential candidate, Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, campaigned in 1952 mostly on a platform of continuing and expanding the programs of his Democratic predecessors, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. He lost to Dwight Eisenhower, a World War II hero who vaguely promised to uproot corruption in Washington and end the Korean War, ongoing since 1950. Republicans won majorities in both houses of Congress.
The Democrats came back, but it took eight years. They mainly followed five strategies.
1. Analyze reasons for the loss
Democrats need to examine frankly why they lost in 2016.
In 1952, Stevenson lost for two reasons. One, Eisenhower, a popular military hero because of his World War II leadership, ran convincingly against corruption in Washington and the threat of communist aggression and promised to end the war in Korea, which had begun two years earlier. It would have been very difficult for any Democrat to defeat him in 1952.
Two, more relevant for Democrats to recall today, Stevenson, governor of Illinois, came across as detached, waffling and indecisive. He was a reluctant candidate, not entering the race until just before the convention. He was eloquent and witty but bland, uninspiring, and inconsistent, something of a lukewarm liberal. He endorsed and promised to continue FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal policies. But he also expressed disdain for federal programs on public housing, aid to education, and farm subsidies. He favored self-restraint, government frugality, and state action on economic issues. We should not "do in Washington what can be done in Indianapolis" or "ask Uncle Sam to bridge Catbird Creek," he insisted. He was a proponent of civil rights but skeptical of federal intervention and asserted the issue was a state responsibility. He said there was "no easy answer" to the Korean War. Stevenson's loss was due in part to not having clear, distinct, credible positions on key issues.
2. Develop new ideas
Democrats need a fresh set of ideas and policy proposals.
Early in 1953, John Kenneth Galbraith, an economics professor who had served as an advisor and speechwriter on Stevenson's 1952 campaign, wrote him with a suggestion. "How can we do the most to keep the Democratic Party intellectually alert and positive during these years in the wilderness?" Galbraith asked. "We have all told ourselves that mere opposition is not enough. Yet it would be hard at this moment to say what the Democratic Party is for. On domestic matters we are for good and against evil and for tidying up the unfinished business of the New Deal. We want an expanding economy but there are few who could be pressed into any great detail as to what this means or takes.... [W]e are still trading on the imagination and intellectual vigor of the Roosevelt era and that capital is running thin."
The answer, said Galbraith was "some organization in or adjacent to the Democratic Party" where political leaders and intellectuals could discuss issues and develop fresh new proposals.
Galbraith, with Stevenson's encouragement, assembled an informal group of thoughtful economists, political leaders, academics, and foreign policy experts. The group met every month or two for the next three years. It became known informally as the Finletter Group because it assembled frequently at the Washington home of Thomas K. Finletter, former Secretary of the Air Force. Stevenson attended occasionally. The group's discussions were lively and imaginative as they explored ways to draw on traditional New Deal/ Fair Deal policies but come up with fresh ideas that would take the Democratic Party to a new level and help it project a new, winning progressive image. They debated strategy, developed new ideas, and wrote substantive papers on national security, disarmament, taxation, social security, income distribution, agriculture, education, international trade, disarmament, and the U.S. role in Southeast Asia.
The whole effort brought forth new perspectives and fresh ideas for more proactive, interventionist federal policies. Several Finletter Group veterans worked for Stevenson's campaign in 1956 and later served as policy architects in the Kennedy Administration.
3. Use new ideas as a basis for the next campaign
Democrats need to bring their new ideas into the next presidential campaign; if possible, they need to try some of them out next year, in House and Senate elections.
The Democrats did a mediocre job of this in 1956. Their policies were more progressive than in 1952, but their candidate, once again Adlai Stevenson, did not capture the public's imagination.
Stevenson attacked the Eisenhower Administration for promoting complacency. He emphasized what would be required of the American people in the years ahead. His acceptance speech focused on the catchy theme "New America." Stevenson could be eloquent but too often came across as vague and idealistic, as he had in 1952. He believed that "the illumination of problems, needs, dangers and opportunities" should be at the center of any campaign and eschewed the sorts of forceful, energetic speeches that would have helped him grab the public's imagination.
But overall Stevenson's 1956 "New America" platform was a notable advance over 1952, with several forward-looking proposals, including:
● Federal aid to education, including college scholarships, fellowships and loans and expansion of vocational and adult education
● Aid to economically depressed areas
● Expanding Social Security
● Federal support for old-age health insurance (a forerunner of Medicare)
● Funding for housing for the elderly
● New approaches to foreign policy, including a ban on testing hydrogen bombs
Eisenhower, still very popular, easily won reelection. But the Democratic Party had staked out new territory for itself and entered a new era, foreshadowing its comeback in 1960.
4. Focus on issues that matter to voters and show you can get things done
Democrats need to show that they are really in touch with people's concerns and will advance practical policies to address them.
Particularly in the Senate, Democrats in the 1950's focused on bread-and-butter issues that mattered to people, such as jobs, the minimum wage, labor rights, and trade. They often compromised with the popular president. Overall, they came across as concerned, constructive and statesmanlike.
Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, Minority Leader in the Senate from 1953 to 1955 and Majority Leader, 1955-1961, was the Democrats' most prominent leader and strategist in Congress. He used his exceptional political skills to stay on good terms with the president, appeal to both northern liberal Democrats and southern conservative Democrats, and work with Republicans where he could. Democrats should support "a program geared NOT just to opposing the majority but to serving America" he insisted when he took over as Minority Leader. When he became Majority Leader in 1955, he projected an image of action, getting things done, doing what was best for the nation rather than for his section of the country or his party. He favored compromise and worked out deals in his office, in the hallways, or in the Senate cloakroom. He abhorred long, divisive Senate debates. "It is the politician's task to pass legislation, not to sit around saying principled things," he said.
His biographer Robert Caro concluded that "Lyndon Johnson's Washington was a world in which deals could always be made, bargains could always be arranged, in which men were reasonable on compromising their principles."
Johnson, the consummate deal maker, brokered passage of a compromise civil rights bill put forward by Eisenhower in 1957. To northern liberal Democrats, he asserted he was a champion of civil rights. To southern conservatives, he argued that a compromise bill would ward off more stringent civil rights measures. To the country at large, Johnson came across as a statesman, master of the practical, someone who got important things done without ruffling feathers. That image rubbed off on his party.
5. Burnish the party's image
Democrats face an issue similar to what they faced after Stevenson's second defeat in 1956: they need a jolt of rejuvenation.
Democratic national chairman Paul Butler in 1957 organized the Democratic Advisory Council (DAC) to sharpen Democratic Party positions in opposition to the Eisenhower administration and to stake out issues that would enable them to regain the presidency in 1960. Former president Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, and senators John F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and Stuart Symington – all but Truman contenders for the 1960 presidential election – joined.
The DAC drew on the work of the Finletter Group but went well beyond it. Its public position papers, which were issued under the sponsorship of the Democratic National Committee, got media attention. They advocated federal aid to education, a national health insurance program, a housing program for the elderly, urban renewal, a higher minimum wage, and a firm stand on civil rights. In the foreign policy area, DAC advocated tempering implacable opposition to communist aggression with attention to economic issues that were fostering totalitarism in developing nations.
Lyndon Johnson and his counterpart in the House, Speaker Sam Rayburn, sometimes clashed with the DAC; at one point, a meeting between Johnson and Butler turned into a shouting match. But Johnson gradually accommodated the Council's progressive views and ceded more power to Senate Democratic liberals identified with the DAC. Their issues, such as aid to education, urban renewal, and national health insurance, rose in prominence and were translated into official Democratic Party positions. The party's profile moved to the left. Many of the DAC's positions found their way into the 1960 Democratic Party platform.
6. Find a dynamic presidential candidate to give new ideas a popular appeal
The Democrats need to groom a fresh, new candidate to run for president.
Senator John F. Kennedy narrowly won the presidency in 1960, ushering in eight years of Democratic predominance and accomplishments, including civil rights and medical care programs. Unlike the other Democratic contenders for the presidency that year, Kennedy had youth, charisma and he was vigorous and dashing. He drew on his party's momentum – the ideas of the Finletter Group, Stevenson's elevation of a sense of national purpose, the track record of Johnson and others in showing the party cared about popular issues, and a sense of freshness and progressivism. But his campaign themes – we need to do more, we need to get the country moving – took the party to a new level and gave it new energy. The themes resonated with the changing public mood, which was becoming more attentive to the need for dedication and sacrifice and for new ways of using American power in the world.
His opponent, Republican Vice President Richard Nixon, seemed to embody what voters were then tiring of – the stale complacency and status quo of the 1950's. By 1960, people wanted something more.
Arthur Schlesinger, in his book A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, explained that: "The Democratic party had undergone a transformation in its eight years in the wilderness. In the last days of Truman the party motto had been 'You never had it so good.' The essence of the party appeal was not to demand exertions but to promise benefits." By 1960, the public mood had shifted, and "the candidates for the Democratic nomination, and Kennedy most of all, were ... stressing peril, uncertainty, sacrifice, and purpose."
Kennedy appealed to the new public mood. "Recent history had washed away the easy consolations and the old formulas," Schlesinger wrote. "He voiced the new generation's longings – for fulfillment in experience, for the subordination of selfish impulses to higher ideals, for a link between the past and the future, for adventure and valor and honor."
Of course, few people would compare Donald Trump to Dwight Eisenhower, and the issues and tenor of the times are different today. But Democrats can return to national power again. To accomplish that, they need to learn from their own history, particularly the long comeback in the 1950's.
Dr. Bruce W. Dearstyne is a historian in Albany, New York. His most recent book is The Spirit of New York: Defining Events in the Empire State's History.
This article was originally published at History News Network
You’ve probably heard the news that the celebrated post-WW II beating heart of America known as the middle class has gone from “burdened,” to “squeezed” to “dying.” But you might have heard less about what exactly is emerging in its place.
In a new book, "The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy," Peter Temin, professor emeritus of economics at MIT, draws a portrait of the new reality in a way that is frighteningly, indelibly clear: America is not one country anymore. It is becoming two, each with vastly different resources, expectations and fates.
Two roads diverged
In one of these countries live members of what Temin calls the “FTE sector” (named for finance, technology and electronics, the industries that largely support its growth). These are the 20 percent of Americans who enjoy college educations, have good jobs and sleep soundly knowing that they have not only enough money to meet life’s challenges, but also social networks to bolster their success. They grow up with parents who read books to them, tutors to help with homework and plenty of stimulating things to do and places to go. They travel in planes and drive new cars. The citizens of this country see economic growth all around them and exciting possibilities for the future. They make plans, influence policies and count themselves lucky to be Americans.
The FTE citizens rarely visit the country where the other 80 percent of Americans live: the low-wage sector. Here, the world of possibility is shrinking, often dramatically. People are burdened with debt and anxious about their insecure jobs if they have a job at all. Many of them are getting sicker and dying younger than they used to. They get around by crumbling public transport and cars they have trouble paying for. Family life is uncertain here; people often don’t partner for the long-term even when they have children. If they go to college, they finance it by going heavily into debt. They are not thinking about the future; they are focused on surviving the present. The world in which they reside is very different from the one they were taught to believe in. While members of the first country act, these people are acted upon.
The two sectors, notes Temin, have entirely distinct financial systems, residential situations and educational opportunities. Quite different things happen when they get sick or when they interact with the law. They move independently of each other. Only one path exists by which the citizens of the low-wage country can enter the affluent one, and that path is fraught with obstacles. Most have no way out.
The richest large economy in the world, says Temin, is coming to have an economic and political structure more like a developing nation. We have entered a phase of regression and one of the easiest ways to see it is in our infrastructure: our roads and bridges look more like those in Thailand or Venezuela than the Netherlands or Japan. But it goes far deeper than that, which is why Temin uses a famous economic model created to understand developing nations to describe how far inequality has progressed in the United States. The model is the work of West Indian economist W. Arthur Lewis, the only person of African descent to win a Nobel Prize in economics. For the first time, this model is applied with systematic precision to the U.S.
The result is profoundly disturbing.
In the Lewis model of a dual economy, much of the low-wage sector has little influence over public policy. Check. The high-income sector will keep wages down in the other sector to provide cheap labor for its businesses. Check. Social control is used to keep the low-wage sector from challenging the policies favored by the high-income sector. Mass incarceration: check. The primary goal of the richest members of the high-income sector is to lower taxes. Check. Social and economic mobility is low. Check.
In the developing countries Lewis studied, people try to move from the low-wage sector to the affluent sector by transplanting from rural areas to the city to get a job. Occasionally it works; often it doesn’t. Temin says that today in the U.S., the ticket out is education, which is difficult for two reasons: you have to spend money over a long period of time, and the FTE sector is making those expenditures more and more costly by defunding public schools and making policies that increase student debt burdens.
Getting a good education, Temin observes, isn’t just about a college degree. It has to begin in early childhood, and you need parents who can afford to spend time and resources all along the long journey. If you aspire to college and your family can’t make transfers of money to you on the way, well, good luck to you. Even with a diploma, you will likely find that high-paying jobs come from networks of peers and relatives. Social capital, as well as economic capital, is critical, but because of America’s long history of racism and the obstacles it has created for accumulating both kinds of capital, black graduates often can only find jobs in education, social work, and government instead of higher-paying professional jobs like technology or finance— something most white people are not really aware of. Women are also held back by a long history of sexism and the burdens — made increasingly heavy — of making greater contributions to the unpaid care economy and lack of access to crucial healthcare.
How did we get this way?
What happened to America’s middle class, which rose triumphantly in the post-World War II years, buoyed by the GI bill, the victories of labor unions and programs that gave the great mass of workers and their families health and pension benefits that provided security?
The dual economy didn’t happen overnight, says Temin. The story started just a couple of years after the ’67 Summer of Love. Around 1970, the productivity of workers began to get divided from their wages. Corporate attorney and later Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell galvanized the business community to lobby vigorously for its interests. Johnson’s war on poverty was replaced by Nixon’s war on drugs, which sectioned off many members of the low-wage sector, disproportionately black, into prisons. Politicians increasingly influenced by the FTE sector turned from public-spirited universalism to free-market individualism. As money-driven politics accelerated (a phenomenon explained by the Investment Theory of Politics), leaders of the FTE sector became increasingly emboldened to ignore the needs of members of the low-wage sector, or even to actively work against them.
America’s underlying racism has a continuing distorting impact. A majority of the low-wage sector is white, with blacks and Latinos making up the other part, but politicians learned to talk as if the low-wage sector is mostly black because it allowed them to appeal to racial prejudice, which is useful in maintaining support for the structure of the dual economy — and hurting everyone in the low-wage sector. Temin notes that “the desire to preserve the inferior status of blacks has motivated policies against all members of the low-wage sector.”
Temin points out that the presidential race of 2016 both revealed and amplified the anger of the low-wage sector at this increasing imbalance. Low-wage whites who had been largely invisible in public policy until recently came out of their quiet despair to be heard. Unfortunately, present trends are not only continuing, but also accelerating their problems, freezing the dual economy into place.
What can we do?
We’ve been digging ourselves into a hole for over 40 years, but Temin says we know how to stop digging. If we spent more on domestic rather than military activities, then the middle class would not vanish as quickly. The effects of technological change and globalization could be altered by political actions. We could restore and expand education, shifting resources from policies like mass incarceration to improving the human and social capital of all Americans. We could upgrade infrastructure, forgive mortgage and educational debt in the low-wage sector, reject the notion that private entities should replace democratic government in directing society, and focus on embracing an integrated American population. We could tax not only the income of the rich, but also their capital.
The cost of not doing these things, Temin warns, is incalculably high, and even the rich will end up paying for it.
“Look at the movie Hidden Figures," he says. "It recounts a very dramatic story about three African-American women condemned to have a life of not being paid very well teaching in black colleges, and yet their fates changed when they were tapped by NASA to contribute to space exploration. Today we are losing the ability to find people like that. We have a structure that predetermines winners and losers. We are not getting the benefits of all the people who could contribute to the growth of the economy, to advances in medicine or science which could improve the quality of life for everyone — including some of the rich people.”
Along with Thomas Piketty, whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century examines historical and modern inequality, Temin’s book has provided a giant red flag, illustrating a trajectory that will continue to accelerate as long as the 20 percent in the FTE sector are permitted to operate a country within America’s borders solely for themselves at the expense of the majority. Without a robust middle class, America is not only reverting to developing-country status, it is increasingly ripe for serious social turmoil that has not been seen in generations.
A dual economy has separated America from the idea of what most of us thought the country was meant to be.
Lynn Parramore is contributing editor at AlterNet. She is cofounder of Recessionwire, founding editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of "Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture." She received her Ph.D. in English and cultural theory from NYU, and she serves on the editorial board of Lapham's Quarterly. Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore.
This post originally appeared on the blog of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
Everywhere you look American conservatism is shedding its stars like a failing Broadway show in its final days. Bill O'Reilly, the so-called King of Cable, is, as one wag put it, no longer a "factor." Nice touch, there! But O'Reilly is not alone among the right-wing casualties, merely the latest. His erstwhile boss, Roger Ailes, led…
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