This Week in #NoDAPL
Here's a map that vividly shows the original proposed route of the Dakota Access Pipeline--changed when the Army Corps of Engineers acknowledged the concerns of the mostly white residents of Bismarck, ND about the potential impact to their drinking water--and the current route, crossing lands promised by an 1851 treaty to the First Americans living there and intersecting dangerously with the Missouri River, threatening the drinking water of millions. The pipeline just skirts the existing Standing Rock Sioux reservation by half a mile, and it cuts multiple times across their sources of drinking water.
People who think the controversy began with the standoff at the pipeline construction site are missing a big chunk of the story. Mother Jones reported back in September on the history of the controversy, going back to February 2015, when the Corps--required by law to seek tribal input, allegedly ignored multiple communications from the tribe requesting a full archaeological investigation. Months of litigation followed. The on-the-ground protests became even more intense after September 3, 2016, when, as Mother Jones describes: "Dakota Access bulldozers plow a two-mile-long, 150-foot-wide path through what the Standing Rock Sioux say is a sacred tribal burial ground. The Sioux had contested the permits for that land in its lawsuit. 'We're days away from getting a resolution on the legal issues, and they came in on a holiday weekend and destroyed the site,' said Jan Hasselman, attorney for the Standing Rock Sioux. According to EcoWatch, the ancient site was discovered 'only days before its destruction was awaiting review by the state historic preservation office.'"
One protestor, shot in the face with a tear gas canister, is in danger of permanently losing her sight in one eye. Another, shot with a rubber bullet, needed 17 staples to close the wound. They and others are suing law enforcement agencies for using excessive force.
This weekend, a couple thousand military veterans will be showing up at the protest site, to act as a "human shield" to defend the protestors. We applaud their effort.
The broader issue is that the pipeline's purpose is to make it easier to pull oil from the ground and get it to market. What we need, though, is to keep finding new ways to keep fossil fuels in the ground, to replace our dependence on them with energy that doesn't cook the only planet we have. Those standing in the way of the pipeline are not only trying to defend their ancestral homelands and their only sources of potable water, they're defending the Earth we all share. Their efforts should be honored.
This Week in Foreign Policy
It's not making headlines, except in foreign policy and national defense circles--then again, foreign policy and national defense circles are some of the most important circles we have--but lots of the people serving in the government, in those roles, are questioning whether they should stay on board during a Trump administration. The issues they face are real--will the new administration order Americans to torture prisoners? Will it renege on longstanding security agreements with our allies? Will it cozy up to dictators and strongmen?
A couple of those experts have written an important piece this week. They frame the issue thusly: "Unlike our counterparts who work on domestic policy, national security practitioners have long enjoyed a largely bipartisan consensus about the core principles of what makes America strong and secure: an open, liberal international order guaranteed by American leadership and power. Democrats and Republicans have fought long and hard about specific policies for decades, but those arguments have, for the most part, been about ways, not ends — how to best realize broadly shared principles, not whether they were the right principles in the first place."
Trump, however, threatens to upend those "broadly shared principles." So the question becomes, can those currently working in those jobs stay in them, in order to try to guide administration policy in directions that will protect our national security and our interests around the world? Or is it a hopeless cause? Will they be instructed to break longstanding norms, to justify actions they know will harm our country? At what point is one's moral compass too badly threatened to continue serving?
Side Note: Trump has promised to tear up the Iran nuclear agreement. Outgoing CIA Director John Brennan seems to think that would be the wrong way to go. According to the BBC:
He [Brennan] also warned Donald Trump's incoming team over their position taken during the campaign to abandon the nuclear deal with Iran.
"I think it would be disastrous," Mr Brennan told the BBC. "First of all, for one administration to tear up an agreement that a previous administration made would be unprecedented."
He said such a move would risk strengthening hardliners in Iran and risk other states pursuing nuclear programmes in response to a renewed Iranian effort. "I think it would be the height of folly if the next administration were to tear up that agreement," he said.
This Week in Negotiating with Terrorists
As everyone who watches cop shows on TV knows, the logic against negotiating with terrorists and paying ransom to kidnappers is the same--although to the family and friends of the victim, the only important goal is getting their loved one back in one piece, to society at large, the goal is the opposite. Pay off the bad guys, the logic dictates, and they'll just do it again. They (or others like them) will keep kidnapping or taking hostages or terrorizing communities, because it worked--they got paid for it.
This week, Donald Trump claimed "victory" because a Carrier Corp. plant in Indiana announced that it would not, as it had planned, move a thousand jobs to Mexico. The story is more complicated than it appears at first--1300 jobs are still going to Mexico, but 800 will stay in Indiana--and the state of Indiana (the governor of which just happens to be Trump's VP-elect) is giving Carrier (or its parent company, United Technologies) $7 million in taxpayer-funded tax breaks.
Trump, obviously, is not yet president, so couldn't have legally agreed to any particular terms on the federal side, although some reporting suggests that he might have promised that Carrier would be able to keep federal contracts that are worth about $6 billion, a huge part of the company's bottom line--which is not, we hasten to add, how the federal contracting process is supposed to work. We imagine that if/when those contracts are formally extended, there will be multiple challenges and plenty of lawyers will get rich off the litigation that follows).
The federal contracting process is a complex thing, but basically, companies are supposed to bid for projects. Agency professionals (not the president) evaluate the bids on a number of criteria, ultimately selecting the one that provides the best value for the taxpayers while providing the best possible result (the product or service being acquired). The president doesn't get to individually pick and choose.
Of course, there's also the issue that Trump campaigned saying the opposite--he would use sticks, not carrots, to keep jobs in the US. In this particular case, he said if Carrier moved the jobs, they would pay a 35% tariff on every air conditioner they tried to sell in the US. And the related issue, that Republicans constantly say there's no place for government interference in the free market. Unless, it appears, one is trying to make a PR splash about a result that in the end is a tiny drop in a huge bucket.
We're glad that Indianans will keep (some of) their jobs. But having sweetened the pot for Carrier, Trump and the state may have opened the floodgates. What's going to stop other companies from making "plans" to move jobs out of the country, knowing that the president and state officials will throw taxpayer money at them to keep them in place?
Apparently Trump and Pence have been too busy watching Fox "News" to watch those cop shows. We may all pay the price for that.
Below the fold: racism, recounts, health care and Medicare, and more. Also bears.
This Week in Republican Racism
Thanks to the candidacy and victory of Donald Trump, white racism is making a vocal, very public comeback in America. It would be a mistake to think that it ever went away, but for a few decades, it was at least considered objectionable among polite society. We've written here, though, that among Republicans, it hasn't been shelved, it's just been relegated to "dog whistle" status--Republican politicians have traded in racism since Richard Nixon adopted the "Southern Strategy," after Lyndon Johnson's embrace of civil rights legislation turned white southern Democrats against the Democratic Party.
In his 1980 victory against Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan relied heavily on the votes of these southern whites, and blue-collar whites across the country, just like Trump did this year. They came to be called "Reagan Democrats," but the truth is, they were Democrats only through tradition and history, not through ideology. They abandoned the party, or the party abandoned them, when it decided that civil rights for all were an important cause.
Reagan's appeal to these white southerners was truly despicable, and as Republicans try to paint him as St. Ronnie, it should be remembered. The story starts on June 21, when three civil rights workers--James Earl Chaney of Meridian, MS, and Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner of New York City--who were in Mississippi for the Freedom Summer campaign, were murdered in Neshoba County, MS, and buried in an earthen dam. They were found 44 days later, and the investigation eventually implicated the KKK, the Neshoba County Sheriff's office, and the Philadelphia, MS Police Department. No individual was held legally responsible until Earl Ray Killen was charged and convicted 41 years later, in 2005.
Fast forward to Reagan's 1980 campaign. On August 3, 1980--looking for the votes of white racists--Reagan went to the Neshoba County Fair, held about 7 miles from Philadelphia, where the three young men had been so viciously murdered (Goodman is believed to have been buried alive, beside his two already dead companions).
There, Reagan gave a speech in which he said, in part: "I believe in state's rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we've distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I'm looking for, I'm going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there."
That sounds relatively mundane--unless you know, as Reagan did, about the bloody history of Neshoba County, and the longer history of the phrase "state's rights" in that part of the world. "State's rights" had been used since 1830 to mean "white people's right of supremacy." "State's rights" was the phrased used by people who wanted to deny that the South withdrew from the Union because they didn't want to free their slaves. Well known racists like Strom Thurmond and George Wallace kept it alive well into the 1960s and 70s. To imagine that Reagan was ignorant of the phrase's meaning is laughable at best. He knew what he was saying and he knew where he was saying it.
Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act. During his campaigns, he used "welfare queens" as a thinly veiled code word for black Americans. As Bob Herbert wrote:
He was opposed to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the same year that Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were slaughtered. As president, he actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. And in 1988, he vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation.
Congress overrode the veto.
Reagan also vetoed the imposition of sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa. Congress overrode that veto, too.
Throughout his career, Reagan was wrong, insensitive and mean-spirited on civil rights and other issues important to black people.
Reagan might not have had personal animosity toward blacks. But he had political animosity galore--maybe not out of personal feelings but out of a desire to win elections by playing to white racism. That might be worse. Personal animosity only goes so far, but a president trying to appeal to the worst elements in our society strengthens those elements throughout society. That's what Reagan did. Trump will, too--and by being even more open about his politically motivated embrace of racism, he's likely to strengthen them even more.
Not all white Republicans are racists, we feel compelled to remind readers. But only Republicans rely on the white racist vote to win national office. Because they rely on that vote, they can't bring themselves to seriously, genuinely oppose racism in America. That's a terrible, hateful legacy for a political party. We'd like to see the party undo that legacy, and hoped that a Trump loss might push that process along. Sadly, because Trump won, it won't happen any time soon.
What it tells us is what many of us who've watched the political scene for decades have been saying for decades. As a campaign tactic and as a governing principle, Republicans tell voters that people with white skins are better than those with brown skins, black skins, red skins, or yellow skins. They say that straight people are better than not-straight people, and that Christians are better than not-Christians. They've done it through dog whistles, but now, thanks to Trump, what's been happening under cover is out in the open. Any vote for a Republican cast over the past several decades, and any vote for a Republican cast from today until the party finally--if ever--reforms itself racewise, as the Democrats did, is a vote to reward racism. It rewards the party that practices such abhorrent political methods, and that continually puts the needs of racial minorities behind the needs of the white plutocrats whose whims it exists to serve. Whether a given candidate is or is not racist doesn't matter--unless that candidate is running as a Republican who's explicitly trying to overturn the party's abominable history of white supremacy, that Republican vote is a vote that encourages and continues America's original sin.
Side Note 1: Speaking of racism, here's a story (complete with video) about a psycho white woman screaming inside a Michael's store, claiming she was discriminated against by two black employees (calling one of them an "animal" and a "lying piece of shit," among other things, and announcing at the top of her lungs (as if there was any question at this point) that she voted for Trump. If she's "emboldened" by Trump's victory, it's done her no good--she comes across as a rude, pathetic lunatic, who freaked out for 45 minutes because she didn't want to pay $1 for the shopping bag that would hold the things she was buying.
The good part of the story is that a shopper named Jessie Grady, who shot the video, was so disturbed by this woman's treatment of one of the employees that she started a GoFundMe campaign to try to raise $400 to help make the employee's holidays a little nicer. As of Wednesday afternoon, the campaign had raised $30,000. That's a lot of Americans taking a stand against racism, and it's heartening to see.
Side Note 2: The problem isn't just racism, of course. The Trump campaign was built on hate and division: racism, misogyny, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBT beliefs, and more. This week, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported on 867 reported incidents of "harassment and intimidation" that occurred in the ten days after the election--a remarkable spike in such reports, and many of them carried out in Trump's name (23 of the 867 were anti-Trump incidents). (Full disclosure: TWiA World Headquarters has been a monthly donor to the SPLC for many years.)
This Week in Recounts
President-elect Donald Trump has been attacking the Hillary Clinton campaign for agreeing to participate in a recount of votes cast in Wisconsin, where Clinton lost narrowly to Trump. He--and others, including some in the media--have said that this is the same thing he was accused of, when he said he might not accept the results of the election. In fact, it's very different.
The recount was initiated by Green Party candidate Jill Stein, not by the Clinton campaign (and seems to have been done largely as a fundraiser for Green Party organizing efforts in those states). The Clinton folks were informed of some oddities in the count--not necessarily fraudulent, but curious--but those oddities did not seem like they were sufficient to change the numbers. Clinton had already conceded, and the world knew that Trump had been declared the victor. Changing that result would be an enormous upset, and if the election results were overturned now, Clinton's presidency would be under a very dark, low-hanging cloud of suspicion. With the Republican Congress still in place, she would have a struggle on her hands to do even the most basic governing. We would much rather have seen a Clinton win, but winning through recount, this late in the game, would handicap her presidency to an unprecedented degree.
That said, once the recount process was underway, as Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Erik Elias explains here, the Clinton folks had to join in. The recount is a legal process, and since their campaign is involved, to not have their legal team at the table would amount to legal malpractice. It doesn't mean Clinton expects the initial results to change; it just means that the campaign needs to be represented if people are going to start messing around with the votes.
It's not at all the same as announcing before the election that the vote is going to be "rigged," that the results will only be accepted if they're perceived by the loser to be "fair" according to his mutable definition thereof. And it's not the same as him announcing this week that he would have won the popular vote if not for the millions of "illegal" votes cast--a claim for which he has no evidence, and which is demonstrably false.
Clinton's popular vote lead of 2.5 million votes and counting, at this writing, is almost historic in its size. If he genuinely believed that he would have won the popular vote, he would be out front in demanding a recount. Instead, he's dismissing it, because he knows he might wind up behind by even more votes than he is now. (At the New Republic, Brian Beutler argues that the recount is a good thing--not that it's likely to change the results, but that anything that helps people come to grips with the fact that Trump really won--to accept a difficult reality, in other words--is good for democracy in the long run.)
On Friday, Trump supporters suddenly sued to stop the recounts from proceeding in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which may indicate that although he's the one who first said the election was rigged, now he doesn't want us to know in which direction, or just how rigged.
But what's really going on here is much more complicated than it appears. First, the New York Times took a deep dive into the many countries in which Trump has business interests, and the conflicts of interest that could arise from those. Also at the NYT, economist Paul Krugman explains why that matters--the problem, he writes, isn't that Trump will use his position to make himself richer, but that he and others are creating an administration that will make policy decisions that are bad for American interests in the pursuit of their own personal wealth. It's not the conflict of interest, it's the policy result of that conflict.
The potential for corruption, and Trump's casual avoidance of the usual standards for US presidents1, should be on the front pages of every newspaper and should lead every newscast until Trump agrees to accept some sensible safeguards. But by tweeting ridiculous, hyperbolic craziness about millions of illegal votes, he drives the real story off the front pages. People on social media are discussing nonexistent vote fraud instead of the real issues. Fake news2 helped elect Trump, and he's going to rely on it to distract us from what he's really up to in the Oval Office.
Second--and this ties into the top story this week--claims of voter fraud have been used by Republicans for years in their ongoing efforts to limit the number of Democratic-leaning voters who can participate in our democracy. Those efforts are often racially motivated, because African American, Asian American, Hispanic, and Native American voters tend to vote Democratic.
This year, 14 states had new voting restrictions in place for the first time (combined with 20 states that imposed them in 2010). 868 polling places were close in counties that had been covered by the Voting Rights Act--until the Supreme Court gutted the pre-clearance provision--counties with demonstrated histories of racist voting restrictions, which is why they were covered in the first place. Were those new laws enough to win Trump the presidency? It's impossible to know for sure--and obviously they weren't enough to deny Clinton a massive popular vote win--but we do know that they prevented millions of Americans from casting what should have been legal votes.
There's no evidence of the widespread voter fraud Trump alleges in this year's presidential election, as is clarified here by the New York Times and the Washington Post. A couple of instances surfaced, the most prominent of which was a Trump voter trying to cast extra votes for him (who was caught in a state that doesn't even have voter ID laws, showing how hard it is to pull off that kind of fraud). A substantive investigation by the Washington Post turned up exactly 4 documented cases of attempted voter fraud in the 2016 election, none of which were successful. That continues what we know to be true about past elections: voter fraud, in particular the in-person fraud that is the only kind addressed by voter ID laws, is incredibly rare.
Voter fraud is a bogus charge, but it's one the Republicans keep leaning on because they want fewer Americans involved in the process. For partisan purposes, Republicans want fewer Americans to be allowed to vote, so don't expect Trump's Justice Department to continue the Obama administration's efforts to protect voting rights. To see what a rollback of voting rights looks like, check out North Carolina's recent history.
Trump's claims of massive illegal voting will, according to Ari Berman (whose 2015 book, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, is all about the issue of voting) play into the hands of those seeking restrictions on voting. Berman writes:
His [Trump's] pick for attorney general, Jeff Sessions, wrongly prosecuted black civil-rights activists for voter fraud in Alabama in the 1980s, called the Voting Rights Act “a piece of intrusive legislation,” and praised the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, saying that “if you go to Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, people aren’t being denied the vote because of the color of their skin.”
Trump’s Justice Department could limit voting rights in a number of critical ways, as I wrote in The New York Times last week: "It could choose not to vigorously enforce the Voting Rights Act, instead pressing states to take more aggressive action to combat alleged voter fraud. This could include purging voter rolls and starting investigations into voter-registration organizations."
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a front-runner to head Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, has called for precisely this. During a meeting with Trump last week, Kobach brought a “strategic plan” for DHS that advocated purging voter rolls and drafting amendments to the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, presumably to require proof of citizenship, like a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote, which prevented tens of thousands of eligible voters from being able to register in Kansas. It’s chilling that a top Trump adviser like Kobach views voting rights as a threat to homeland security.
Trump’s chief adviser, Steve Bannon, has even more radical views. According to The New York Times, he “once suggested to a colleague that perhaps only property owners should be allowed to vote.” A co-writer of his on a Reagan documentary told the paper:
So Trump uses outrageous Tweets as a smokescreen, to keep real news stories off the public radar. But he also uses them to lay the groundwork for possible presidential action--in this case, the most undemocratic action a president could take, making it harder for Americans to cast their ballots.
1Trump tweeted this week: "I will be holding a major news conference in New York City with my children on December 15 to discuss the fact that I will be leaving my great business in total in order to fully focus on running the country in order to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!" We won't know more details, it appears, until December 15. We don't have high expectations.
2Fake news is a problem when it helps elect a clearly unqualified candidate to the most powerful office in the world, and it's a problem when that person uses it to disguise what he's really up to. But it's also a problem when he believes it, even to the exclusion of real news. Much of what Trump believes, including his claims of millions of illegal voters, appears to have its origins in the twisted, America-hating fever dreams of conspiracy nut Alex Jones. It should go without saying that Jones is a fabulist, not a journalist, and his "scoops" have zero credibility. But Trump isn't smart enough to tell fact from fiction, and thanks to the electoral college, we'll all have to suffer from his fascination with Jones's brand of insanity.
This Week in Health Care
The Affordable Care Act has brought health insurance to 20 million Americans who didn't have it before, lowering the uninsured rate to 10%--a historic 6 percentage-point drop since the ACA took effect. More, it's removed caps on coverage and bent down the overall cost to the country of health care.
But Trump's pick to run the department of Health and Human Services--the federal agency overseeing the ACA--is Rep. Tom Price (R/GA), a notorious opponent of the ACA. This makes it more likely that the ACA will be repealed or otherwise ended. Whether it will be replaced, and with what, is anybody's guess. Whatever takes its place, if anything, will be less effective, offering worse insurance coverage if any, and eliminating protections like the removal of lifetime caps.
Who will be hurt the worst? Ironically, Trump voters--poorly educated, working class white people whose jobs don't provide them with health insurance. Among those people, the ACA has brought the uninsured rate down a full 10 percentage points.
He's not going to be bringing their jobs back. Coal didn't fall out of use because of Obama-era regulations, it's just that fracking made natural gas a cheaper, more profitable energy source (and Trump approves of fracking). Obama didn't kill the steel industry--anyone who listens to Bruce Springsteen or Billy Joel (or reads the newspapers) knows that steel was dying in the 1970s and 80s, the infrastructure for the industry is gone, and it's not coming back. Manufacturing jobs haven't gone out of the country, they've been lost to automation. He's not going to increase their minimum wage or expand other protections. He'll allow cuts to the social safety net they depend on, and he's going to make sure that if they suffer an accident or serious illness, they'll also face bankruptcy at the same time. Good deal, huh?
This Week in Medicare
Price also agrees with House Speaker Paul Ryan (R/WI) on the urgent need to destroy Medicare and Medicaid. Good thing he'll be in charge of the department that's supposed to protect those vital social programs.
At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall runs down what "phasing out" Medicare (which Ryan and Trump want to do in only six months) really means:
You think it's hard getting good insurance when you're 30 or 50? Try getting good private insurance when you're 70 or 80.
Providing health insurance coverage to seniors will unquestionably cost more if run through private insurance. No one who has looked at the comparative data on the cost efficiency of Medicare and private carriers can question this. There's no money savings. Quite the opposite. The only difference is that seniors will pay vastly more out of pocket because the vouchers won't come close to the costs of a policy. The upshot of the Ryan plan is significantly increasing the cost of what society pays for the medical care of seniors and then making seniors pay dramatically more out of pocket. All with none of the bedrock gaurantees Medicare provides.
That's what phasing out Medicare means. Ironically, what Trump and Ryan are proposing is something like Obamacare: you buy your insurance on an exchange and you get some premium support from the government. Obviously, not everyone loves Obamacare. But building an exchange and subsidy adjunct for non-seniors onto an existing and fairly robust private health insurance system is one thing. Creating one from scratch for people who are all pretty much by definition bad risks is close to laughable. Laughable if you're not bankrupted or dying because you couldn't get care.
Remember the other things Medicare significantly guard against. If parents have insupportable medical bills or have no way to pay for care, they go to children. In the absence of any other options, that's how it should be. But that money comes out of other things: buying homes, putting kids through college. The social insurance model of Medicare has positive effects well beyond direct beneficiaries.
Medicare, as Marshall writes, is a clear public good. The idea behind it is simple--most Americans who have health insurance get it through their employers. Most elderly people no longer have employers; therefore, the government steps in to be sure that those who've lived and contributed to society can retire with their health care needs met during the most vulnerable period of their lives, without worrying about bankruptcy, without having to choose between meals and medicine.
Charles Pierce at Esquire writes that every Democratic politician (for that matter, every citizen concerned about America's elderly, or who expects to grow old) needs to resist Ryan's effort to destroy it. "One of the great triumphs of progressive government in the 20th century was its virtual elimination of hopeless poverty among the elderly. Because of Medicare, and Social Security before that, old people were freed up to have the opportunity to consider their quality of life, rather than living from one can of catfood to another. And there was no more shame in them than there was in young Paul Ryan when he was living off Social Security survivor benefits after the death of his father. (You're welcome, by the way.) There can be no backsliding on this one, no attempts to 'work across the aisle,' no appeals to 'civility' or 'bipartisanship.'"
Lest anyone think that Ryan doesn't really intend to end Medicare, we remind you that his budget proposals--approved unanimously, or nearly so, by House Republicans year after year--have always included that feature. To believe he isn't targeting Medicare for destruction is to disbelieve not only what he says but what he has put before Congress many times. Virtually every Republican in that body, knowing what's in it, has voted to pass it. The only sleight-of-hand is in Ryan's phrasing. He wants to replace it with a "voucher support system," which is pretty much the same thing George W. Bush tried to do with Social Security--moving it from a universal public program into the private sector, where the profit motive and the greedy hands of Wall Street sharks come between the people and the public program upon which they depend.
It is, as Marshall suggests above, tantamount to taking a public, single-payer health insurance plan like Canada's and instead, changing it into an Obamacare-style plan. But Ryan says Obamacare is a disaster, so how would he be satisfied with stopping there? And the point of Medicare (and Social Security) is that they're universal--if you contribute to society, you get the benefits. If they're reduced to being welfare-type programs benefiting only the poor, they become easy to do away with altogether, because the poor don't have armies of high-priced lawyers and lobbyists stalking the halls of power and making enormous campaign contributions on their behalf.
We would rather see Obamacare repealed and replaced with a Medicare-for-all plan, a true single-payer universal plan that makes health care a privilege of American citizenship, as it is in so many other advanced democracies. Under Trump and Ryan, that's not going to happen; at best, we'll manage to hang onto something resembling the health care system we have now. At worst, we'll be jetting to Cuba for our medical care.
Medicare does not lead to "a culture of dependency," as Ayn Randian acolytes like Ryan often claim. Before it existed, our elderly faced terrible choices and unnecessary illness and death. Medicare saved them from that and offered a degree of dignity that only the wealthy had before. It must be preserved.
Side Note: Over in the Senate, Republican Senators are talking as if privatizing Medicare won't be at the top of their to-do list, at least not right off the bat. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D/OH) doesn't trust them, though. "Of course they are. They live to go after social insurance. First thing Gingrich did when they had a Republican House and Senate was go after Medicare. First thing George Bush did when he had a House and Senate after the 2004 elections was to try to privatize Social Security. Why would you hire Tom Price, who is specialized in privatization of Medicare and raising the eligibility age? So that will be one of the first things they do, and that will show working class America that their mission is always the billionaire's agenda."
This Week in Education
How extreme is Betsy DeVos, Trump's pick for secretary of education? Here's ThinkProgress.org:
Betsy DeVos, a Michigan-based philanthropist and President-elect Trump’s pick for education secretary, has a long record of supporting anti-LGBTQ causes. As head of the federal Department of Education, she would have the power to promote those causes in schools across the country by weakening anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ students.
DeVos and her husband, Richard DeVos, supported efforts to amend the Michigan constitution to ban same-sex marriage in 2004. They donated $200,000 to the campaign. Voters approved of the amendment.
The influence of the DeVos family reaches far beyond Michigan, however. The family has also contributed hundreds of thousands to Focus on the Family, a group that supports conversion therapy, Politico reported. The Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation donated $400,000 to the group. Conversion therapy is exactly what it sounds like: patients are taught that they can change their sexual attraction through “counseling,” and that LGBTQ people are simply bored and seeking excitement, or are trying to fulfill emotional needs through sexual validation.
And Mother Jones:
Michigan serves as one of the most prominent examples of what aggressive DeVos-style school choice policies look like on the ground, especially when it comes to the expansion of charter schools. About 80 percent of state charter schools are run by for-profit management companies, a much higher share than anywhere else in the country, and with very little oversight from the state. And this year, the DeVoses were the biggest financial backers of the effort to oppose any new state oversight of charters.
Detroit, in particular, provides a cautionary tale of how the proliferation of charter schools without sufficient regulations hurts student achievement. Detroit's public school test scores in math and reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress have remained the worst among large cities since 2009. In June, the New York Times published a scathing investigation of the city's school district, which has the second-biggest share of students in charters in America. (New Orleans is No. 1.) Reporter Kate Zernike concluded that insufficiently regulated growth—including too many agencies that are allowed to open new charter schools—contributed to a system with "lots of choice, with no good choice":
Betsy DeVos is a billionaire, born into wealth, who married into yet more wealth. Her children never attended public schools, and although she hasn't yet declared an intention to eliminate public education altogether, she and her husband, Dick DeVos, are closely connected to the Mackinack Center for Public Policy, a far-right Michigan think-tank that has that as one of its long-range goals. As Mother Jones reports, "In a 2002 speech at the Heritage Foundation, Dick DeVos advocated a shift in how conservatives talk about America's schools. '"Public schools" is such a misnomer today that I really hate to use it,' he said. 'I've begun to use the word "government schools" or "government-run schools" to describe what we used to call public schools because it's a better descriptor of what they are.' At the time, you might have been hard pressed to find a prominent Republican politician willing to use such a loaded term. Fourteen years later, the president-elect is talking about our "failing government schools."'
This Week in Promises
During the campaign, Trump made at least 282 promises of things he would do as president. Here's the list.
This Week in Democracies
We used to think that once a country had achieved a real democracy, that was the end of the line--it would never go back to any other form of government. Not so, according to these academics. "The warning signs are flashing red" in America, in large part thanks to Millennials who don't think living in a democracy is a big deal.
This Week in Gun Safety
Some people--the president-elect among them--blame mass shootings on "gun-free zones," in effect blaming the victims for not being armed and ready to get into gunfights with people who are often armed with semiautomatic rifles and are looking to kill. The latest research, as reported by The Trace, shows the fallacy of that belief: of 111 "gun massacres (defined as 6 or more people murdered) studied, only 18 occurred in places where civilian guns were banned. The rest took place in areas where anyone could have been armed, had they chosen to be. Furthermore, the study reports, "Successful civilian uses of guns to stop a mass shooting were incredibly rare and about as common as armed civilians being shot while attempting to respond to mass shooting incidents."
As The Trace reports:
The findings are consistent with a 2013 FBI study of 160 active shootings between 2000 and 2013. The review unearthed a single attack that was stopped by an armed civilian — a U.S. Marine. But 13 percent of those shootings were interrupted by unarmed civilians, the FBI found.
A much broader examination of defensive gun use comes from the Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey. The survey finds that about 100,000 people report using a gun in self-defense each year, affecting just less than 1 percent of all violent crime victimizations. One analysis of the NCVS results found no advantage to defensive gun use over other methods of self-defense.
The NRA's interest in expanding the availability of guns isn't in public safety, it's in the profit margins of the gun and ammunition companies that provide most of the group's funding. They, and politicians parroting their lies, are putting ever more Americans at risk of gun violence when they pass laws allowing guns on campuses, for instance, or as in Georgia, guns just about anywhere people are.
The truth is simple: more guns equals more gun violence. Fewer guns equals less gun violence. When we let the laws be dictated by those who profit from gun violence, we're all in greater danger.
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The pro-gun death folks at the NRA were among the biggest donors to the Trump campaign. People join the NRA for all kinds of reasons, but one of them is that--like AAA, AARP, and many other organizations that are dedicated to less deadly causes--with NRA membership come discounts at a wide variety of businesses, not all of which are directly connected to killing people (although some, like Casket Royale, which offers NRA members a 10% discount on caskets, are directly involved in the death business). If you want to limit the power of the NRA and you do business with any of the companies on this list, stop doing business with them, and write or call them to explain why. Companies that support the death-dealers of the NRA are not companies we want to support with our dollars.
This Week in Bears
Lest anyone think bears are incapable of gratitude, this story should set them straight. This week, there was a horrific, human-caused wildfire in Tennessee, costing at least 7 people their lives. This rescued bear cub thanks its hero in the most adorable way possible.
Here's a series of photos of a grizzly mother at Alaska's Katmai National Park, catching salmon and sharing the catch with her three cute cubs.
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