Your Pre Convention Dose of Trump

An Evangelical TV preacher likes Trump better than Jesus...

From RAWSTORY

Donald Trump’s lies are so fast and numerous that fact checking can’t stop them quickly enough. Trump is like a massive infection we can’t fight off.

From VOX

Trump is so dishonest and so corrupt and so self-centered and so contradictory and so inexperienced and immature…. that a number of noted historians have broken their longstanding rule and decided to speak out about a political figure before he is dead.

From the New York Times

There are Republicans who think Trump cannot win. But most of them are hedging their bets by sleeping with Trump occasionally when he phones them and promises to be gentle.

From Vanity Fair

The GOP platform calls for selling off National Forest and National Parks. Come on Big Oil and Big Timber!

From Think Progress

The platform is also saying coal isn’t dirty at all.

From SLATE

Is it possible that Trump is involved in more massive criminal activity than any candidate in history? A huge tax fraud case has just emerged, and his family is involved.

From David Cay Johnston in The Daily Beast

Trump’s and Pence’s tax policies would make every state as backward and decaying as Kansas and all the other low tax states.

From the Tax Policy Center

Some of Mike Pence’s choicest and stupidest newspaper bloviation. (Pence says CO2 from burning fuels can’t be the cause of increased global temperatures because it “is a naturally occurring phenomenon in nature…” And this one: “Time for a quick reality check. Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill.”)

From BUZZFEED

A thoughtful piece from the New Yorker. As if thoughtful writing will save us from this juggernaut.

From Adam Gopnick

This kind of TV ad might work. It shows kids watching Trump’s various outrageous and obscene moments on camera. Of course the Trump voter doesn’t give a damn about his kids.

From the Hillary campaign, via DailyKos

The ACLU is calling Trump a clear and present danger. (Sounds of cheering from the conservatives who despise the Bill of Rights.)

In the Washington Post

Donald Trump has ended the deplorable dog-whistle racism of Reagan and Bush's Republican Party. He has replaced it with outright racism shouted into a microphone.

From the Guardian

Earlier this week Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke out about Trump and was criticized for violating the sanctity of our non-political Supreme Court. You know the one where Sandra Day O’Connor said a Gore presidency would be a disaster and then overturned his election.

From Dahlia Lithwick at SLATE

(I’m sure there were judges in Weimar Germany who spoke up about Hitler and were criticized for it too.)

Of course Supreme Court Justices have gotten political before. A few cases here:

From NBCNews

Samantha Bee explains what Trump/Pence’s new logo means

Via SALON

How Our Kiss Up/Kick Down Tax Policy Could Be Fairer

Obama takes steps against too-big-to-fail banks. From VOX.

The Wall Street Journal thinks this is a bad idea, so it must be good for most people. Why not create a safer harbor for retirement savings than the predator filled waters of the financial sector, where the safest waters are reserved for the wealthy.

The new fiduciary rule means financial advisors would once again be obligated to you rather than obligated to the financial giants who’d like to use the masses of lower income retirees like a cash machine. From SLATE.

Pulitzer Prize financial reporter David Cay Johnston discusses a few of the sneakier dodges available to the 1%.

Did you realize that the helpful folks who devise the simple, easy to use tax software are not really helpful at all but predatory?

Which is why they oppose any new policy that would make tax filing easier for everyone.

VOX reports on Elizabeth Warren's good idea.

Propublica reports how the Turbotax people lobbied Congress to keep our tax code more complicated. Complicated tax laws make them very very rich.

Maybe the worst policy in recent years is the one that makes college loan debt unforgivable. I mean, even the worst felons are paroled eventually, but college loans persist after the death of the college student who incurred them. College debt interest ought to be tax deductible like mortgage interest. You incurred the debt to open up a better career, why isn’t it a business expense? Why in god’s name is it now suggested we make it a tax deduction for corporations to pay off your debt for you, when your paying it off wasn’t deductible? Reported at SLATE.

From the PARIS REVIEW, some history on the crime of indebtedness.

The unfairness of our Kiss Up Kick Down economy is finally sinking in. People are angry and understand what they are angry about. Before we’ll see a fundamental shift we need a critical mass of understanding, a consensus that the system is screwed up and isn’t working. It’s not just unfair, it is dysfunctional. From NEW YORK MAGAZINE.

The 1% are hoarders. While we work long hours they rake in millions they haven’t earned without lifting a finger, and they hide it where it can’t be taxed for schools and bridges and water systems. Reported by EVONOMICS.

Even Goldman Sachs may be realizing the current system is not working. Reported by BLOOMBERG.

One thing has to change: we need to quit putting the rich above the law. I’ve seen this expressed in another nicely cynical way: “I’ll believe corporations are people when they hang one in Texas." Reported by PROMARKET.

This kind of corruption has happened before. Bill Moyers revisits the corruption of a few decades ago.

Kiss Up, Kick Down––April 2016 Edition

This week John Oliver takes his always funny approach to an investigation of credit agencies, those large slipshod corporations that tell potential employers and landlords that you are actually a different person with a criminal record. Why do they do this? Because employers and landlords––groups of people who are always richer and more secure than you are–– are worried that someone lower down on the food chain is going to rip them off when the proper order if things reserves the right to rip people off to folks like them. Besides, if they make mistakes about your credit history (and 25% of the time they do) it’s only happening to people poorer than they are, so who gives a damn? (A: apparently no one.)

What if poverty is actually profitable to rich people. It is, and this happens. Predatory capitalism prefers to prey on people too poor or too weak to put up a fight.

If you dare to fight back, if you dare to criticize the powerful, this sort of thing might happen. Some courageous citizen annoyed Florida Governor Rick Scott and he did this. By the way, has Experian or any of the other credit rating agencies ascertained that Governor Scott is not actually Bat Boy?

Why do rich people have such contempt for the poor? Maybe they have a warped view of reality. Maybe they think money grows on trees and some people are just too dumb and lazy to pick the fruit. Because for rich people money does grow on trees. For the rest of us that is just an expression. Evonomics takes a look at the perpetual money machine rich people live off of.

Why Do Republicans Believe Spending Dedicated To Helping People Is Wrong?

According to new information (reported by VOX) anti-poverty spending does far more good than we’ve been told. Why do Republicans hate helping the poor? Maybe it’s their way of looking at things. If you measure everything in dollar terms, obligation is bad, therefore irresponsibility is good; spending is bad, therefore not spending is good.

Republicans, believing what corporate lobbyists tell them, assess problems in dollar terms too. If you spend a lot of money on a problem it’s a big problem. If you spend no money on a problem it’s not a problem at all. They choose the second approach. Problems which no money is spent on don’t exist. Poor and sick people die more quickly, quietly and (above all) more cheaply if you limit their access to healthcare. If you can use their health problems to extract maximum profits out of them that’s not a problem either, that’s a good thing. But obligation to heal people is expensive and therefore a problem.

Food benefits to poor people are a relatively small part of government spending but if you don’t know any poor people it seems like an easy item to cut when you’re trying to maximize tax benefits to your wealthy contributors and the people you golf with. From where the average Republican lives you hardly notice children going hungry. If it causes them to do poorly in school you can tell yourself it’s their moral failure. If they have to work three minimum wage jobs to feed their kids you can say that is a measure of high morality. By refusing to give them a food subsidy you are doing them a favor by making them better people. They're setting a better example for the children they are never home to see or interact with.

The effectiveness of anti-poverty spending isn’t measured in the same way on the Republican side. It’s not effective if it helps poor people because the good done by spending is not measured by the Republican accountant unless that money is spent in an upward direction. Money spent on people down the income scale is measured as a negative, the way accountants measure employee pay and benefits. The good we do in life almost always subtracts from profits.


Meanwhile, in Kansas, the capitalist utopia, where corporate tax cuts bloom like sunflowers and there are no public needs because there is no money to spend on public needs… a governor is hurting. Poor pitiful him. (The whole sad story is in the Kansas City Star.)

Brownback isn't the only example of Republican nuttiness. There's Dan Burton, former Republican senator from Indiana, now a lobbyist for bogus science and cult worship. (Reported in Forbes.)


The Republican Right seems to be certifiably insane. It believes the best way to fiscal responsibility is to cut taxes. The best way to make a fair society is to make sure all tax liability falls on people who work 9-5 jobs. And the best way to handle healthcare is to make sure it’s unaffordable for sick people and poor people so they die more quickly, cheaply and quietly.

And the best medicine apparently isn’t the kind pioneered by Pasteur and Salk and the other lifesaving scientists who delivered us from mass epidemics. Republicans used to be a practical and sensible lot. A bit stodgy and stingy but sound. Now they are represented by fruitcakes and sociopaths and hypocrites. A sad end to the once progressive party of Lincoln and T.R.

Kiss Up, Kick Down

We have an economy that distorts our sympathies and our solutions to problems. It’s all part of The Rule Of Accumulated Advantage, which says the more you have the more you get, the less you have the more we take away. The more you have the more we care about you, the less you have the less we give a damn.

Let's call this Kiss Up, Kick Down.

Examples from today’s news:

Wealth Therapy. Nobody cares about them because they’re rich. So now there are therapists who can soothe their pain. Adding another client class to the retinue, rather than distributing some of that obscene wealth down to the people who actually do the work around here, whose worries are real, whose illnesses can bankrupt them..

The story about Wealth Therapy, in the Guardian.

Down at the other end of the scale, where advantages disappear and disadvantages accrue and reinforce each other, we have a different dynamic at work. We find ways to compound disadvantages. We bill the relatives of the people who die in prison for the cost of imprisoning them. Why charge the families who have already suffered a punishment alongside their kin? Because costs of public necessities are increasingly sorted downward to be paid by people who work for a living, and since people who work for a living have seen their incomes decline there is a persistent deficit. But we must never ever ask the advantaged to pay that deficit. Because that deficit was created by putting a larger and larger portion of our economy into their pockets, and that greater portion deserves its immunity.

The story about charging the imprisoned for their imprisonment, from Vox.

A similar punishing burden falls upon young people who want to go to college. Young people with rich parents have money set aside tax free, but there is very little to be set aside in working families, so they take out loans, which have punitive interest rates, and that money flows daily, monthly and yearly into the pockets of the rich people who own the financial industry. Of course it would be wrong to tax the people who benefit vastly and unequally from our economy to take the load off the people who are trying to better themselves. This is why college debt follows graduates for the rest of their lives, especially those whose education does not lead them into hugely lucrative jobs in the financial industry.

An article about how college loans are our most unforgivable sin, in the Fiscal Times.

The bankruptcy laws allow billionaires like Donald Trump to declare bankruptcy multiple times and walk away from their speculative losses. But the debt incurred by going to college? No that is not something you can walk away from if your life doesn’t fall into place or if misfortune strikes you. Imagine if you graduate from college and unplanned injury or disease prevents you from rising immediately to a lucrative career. You’re outa luck, pal.

The tale of Trump's multiple bankruptcies in the Washington Post.

And in Vanity Fair.

In a way, felons are luckier than college graduates. Felons can be paroled or pardoned. Crimes can be forgiven or plead down. But college debt is never forgivable. The rich can bargain themselves out of their debts to society, but regular people? Never.

Greece Explained

An excellent video from VOX. No more oversimplified than the final demand letters Greece is getting from Angela Merkel.

I keep going back to the meme I invented a couple of years ago: Kiss Up, Kick Down. Is this crisis just an international version of junior high bullying? The powerful preying on the powerless? Noam Chomsky writes about this.

Vox has discovered that NSA wiretaps reveal Angela Merkel's cynical calculations prior to the Greek bailout. Why did Merkel and Germany send Greece so much money knowing the debt would be unsustainable? Maybe the potential profit caused them to ignore the risks. No intention of fixing a problem, just a strong impulse to milk that problem for profit. The payday loan model again.

Europe isn’t a family. Families don’t starve the child that does poorly in school. Families don’t think how they can profit from a family member’s failure.

I realize it gets complicated in families too. But nations and organizations of nations need to lean toward the helpful model rather than the exploitive one. Think St. Francis not some mob kingpin. Keynes not Friedman. The Marshall Plan, not the Versailles Treaty.

How We Think About The Dead

The New York Times described Michael Brown as “no angel.” An unfortunate choice of words on the day of his funeral. Especially if you consider (as Vox does here) the carefully worded descriptions they had published about some well-known mass killers. Timothy McVeigh, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, the Columbine shooter, and others were described as "just like you and me." Was Michael Brown unlike you and me?

There is a very subtle mechanism we all insert into our judgments, to rationalize what has happened, to explain why it happened, to excuse it, to justify it. In the case of the white murderers it was a “who could have known?” rationalization. In the case of the young black man wrongly killed a week away from freshman year in college it is a reassurance that “Hell, he wasn’t really innocent at all.” A mechanism to help us not feel so bad about it, or at least not guilty ourselves.

Vox's Matthew Yglesias turns this on its head and asks the necessary question: what might happen to any of us in our own youthful brushes with the law if we were the color of Michael Brown?

We have a long and persistent habit of racism in this country. As William Faulkner said “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In his poem Let America Be America Again, Langston Hughes describes how different our inheritance of liberty and freedom and opportunity is depending on our skin color. It resonates especially loudly this month in Ferguson, Missouri.

LET AMERICA BE AMERICA AGAIN

Langston Hughes, 1902 - 1967


Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

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.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

American newspaper archives are full of photographs from the last century and before of happy laughing crowds of white people gathered around the tortured, burned, disfigured, hung corpses of black men. The atmosphere is that of a town picnic. Who are those people? They are our ancestors. How should they be described in the New York Times? We know how the men they murdered were described.

A bit of history. A lynching in Omaha in 1919. Our ancestors were there and took part. We can't rationalize that away.