Author: Robert I. Grundfest

I am a teacher, writer, voice-over artist and rationally opinionated observer of American and international society. While my job is to entertain and engage, my purpose is always to start a conversation.

Categories
Donald Trump

Shutdown Follies: Business As Usual

Wait a minute. I thought the point of the conservative movement was to shrink the federal government down to the size where it would “drown in the bathtub.” Why are the Republicans so worried about keeping the government open and fear the public’s backlash?

Perhaps because, despite their disdain for government services and their blatant disregard for how many Americans interact with their government, they know deep down that blame for this shutdown cannot be placed on a Senator from New York whose name means nothing to most people.

In short, the Republicans and Donald Trump own this shutdown and they know it. Well, I can’t really be sure what the president actually knows, but I imagine that in the quiet of a commercial break while watching FOX News, someone has told the president that this doesn’t look good for him and that his reputation as a deal maker is drowning in the bathtub.

Was this avoidable? Of course. All shutdowns are avoidable if both parties are willing to give something up. And it certainly looked like the discussions between the president and Senator Chuck Schumer were gathering some momentum yesterday afternoon with Schumer willing to say yes to some funding for the wall that I thought Mexico was supposed to pay for. In return, the president was willing to agree to a deal for the Dreamers.

What I imagined happened was that the immigration hard liners then spoke to the president and convinced him of the apparent folly of treating children – who were brought here by there parents – as nothing less than scoundrels and criminals. Especially the ones who went to college, have respectable lives and love this country every bit as much as an ignorant nativist like Steve King. Whom most people have never heard of. See what I mean?

Most people want a deal that allows the Dreamers to stay and most people do not want to spend $18 billion dollars on a wall that will do nothing to stop people from coming to this country illegally. Most people want responsible border security. Most people want the government to fully fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Most people want a strong military.

In a Congress where a $1.5 trillion dollar hole in the budget is not a problem, haggling over these programs amounts to a Mt. Washington of hypocrisy, full of violent winds, plunging temperatures and dangerous precipices. Add to that a blizzard of Republican accusations that shutting down the government amounts to a repudiation of the mandate of the people as demonstrated in the 2016 election, you know, the one where over 3 million more people voted for Hillary Clinton, and you have a situation where the GOP looks a bit hypocritical.

I have no doubt that there will be a deal soon, but it won’t solve any long term problems. That’s the problem with swamps. The mosquitoes will always find more blood and stagnant water.

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Categories
Donald Trump Racism

The Race to the Bottom on Race

At this point, Dr. Martin Luther King’s spinning in his grave could be used as wind power to light up the western hemisphere.

President Trump’s comments at a meeting with Congressional leaders about immigration on Friday smashed through the moral floor that this administration has set ten stories below the White House and established yet another embarrassing standard in ugliness for an administration that struggles to betray any semblance of normality.

Those defending the president like to point out that he’s just saying things that people say around their dinner table, or that he’s giving a truthful version of events or that he’s not a racist because he contributed to African-American causes or has socialized with African-Americans.

This is hogwash. People are complicated and can present different faces to different crowds. I know anti-Semitic people, some of whom are relatives, who hug me when we meet and can share a meal with me without saying anything offensive. But when it comes to their true views, they are not shy about believing that what they say about the most vile stereotypes is absolutely true. They’re still ant-Semites, and it informs their worldview.

In addition, I attended Franklin High School, which was, and still is, one of the most integrated schools in New Jersey. I saw genuine tolerance, friendship and love in the hallways, classrooms and homes.  But I also saw racist stereotyping and denigration at events where one group, either whites or African-Americans, dominated. I saw racial violence that was caused by the same social problems we have today. I experienced Antisemitism.

Many people who harbor racist ideas and attitudes can hide them, but when they get angry or frustrated, as the president does every hour, then the emotional turmoil that lies beneath the skin bubbles up and you find out what a person truly believes. Plus, if people are speaking this way around their dinner tables–denigrating other countries and labeling their people–then we need to do a better job educating our citizens about respecting other cultures and people.

So it is with President Trump. He says racist things. Over and over. That leads me to believe that he is a racist in that he sees whiteness as a virtue, as superior, and the standard by which all other races should be measured. He has equated the tactics and motivations of white supremacists and those groups these white supremacists would like to obliterate. He has questioned the fairness of a Federal Judge based on the fact that the judge was a Mexican-American. He questioned whether the sitting president of the United States was, in fact, a citizen.

These are disgraceful, racist views and none of them is defensible if taken separately. Taken in the aggregate, they are an indictment of the president’s character and his ability to lead this country on this issue.

But as with most eruptions associated with this president, there is even more ignorance below the surface. His characterization of Haiti and African countries betrays the uninformed, but largely prevalent idea, that immigrants bring their former country’s culture and attitudes with them when they come to the United States. He’s saying that they must like the poverty and political dysfunction or economic stagnation or effects of past imperialism that infects their countries. That they cannot possibly become good Americans. That they take American jobs, marry American women, suckle at the American taxpayer’s teat.

This is a conversation we’ve had before. It was discriminatory then and it’s discriminatory now.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the offending countries were Italy, Russia, Greece and other European nations who were sending us Anarchists, Socialists, Jews and revolutionaries who were supposedly unsuited for life in a democracy. Before that, in the 1840s, Ireland sent us their starving people, who were referred to, incongruously, yet reflecting true native ignorance, as White Niggers. Miraculously, those tired, poor un-Americans were able to contribute mightily to the nation and enable it to become a beacon of hope and freedom.

The president’s ignorance betrays an unfortunately all-American, and increasingly all-Western world attitude that reinforces stereotypes and leads to more hatred. He long ago gave up any promise that he would be a leader who would unify the country and present a positive, forward message that we could rally behind. Instead, we are going backwards.

This Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, please make sure that you remind the world that we are a great people being led by a small man.

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Categories
Democracy Donald Trump

Secretariat Was a Stable Genius Too

donald trump spouting nonsense METRO GRAB taken from: http://video.metro.co.uk/video/met/2018/01/06/8980338924088870056/640x360_MP4_8980338924088870056.mp4

Can someone please tell me what the fuss is all about? Didn’t we know that a minority of people didn’t elect a statesman or someone with a deep and abiding knowledge of public affairs? Wasn’t it clear that Donald Trump was just a real estate guy with a TV show that glorified…himself and…his accomplishments based on…his ego? Is it not apparent that a minority of voters decided that they wanted a regular person who knew as much about the constitution as every other regular person and wanted someone who is as angry as they are about the what’s-so-complicated policies regarding immigration, taxes, health care, foreign affairs and the separation of powers?

Didn’t one of your parents ever say to you that big people talk about big ideas, while small people talk about…themselves?

The events of the past three days surprise me not. They are disturbing. They are frightening. And they were eminently avoidable. But Democrats have to be very careful about what accusations they make and what stories they gather themselves behind. Enough with the mental health updates or the talk of impeachment. These just make the left seem unhinged, screechy, petty and uninformed. And can someone please tell the New York Times that they don’t have to include a recap of every wrong thing the president has said over the past year in every story. I can’t even read the paper anymore.

The only objective is to win enough seats to take over the House and/or the Senate and to stop the GOP’s reactionary agenda before it can do any more damage to the country. That’s why the 2018 midterm elections are key. The Democrats need to mobilize their voters and those Trump voters who didn’t like Hillary, but would vote for a sensible Democrat who would protect their health care, truly lower their taxes, safeguard the environment, respect and improve international agreements and support reproductive rights.

It’s clear that the Republicans are not going to challenge the president on his behavior as long as he supports their program. But even that is beginning to fray. The order opening up the entire US coastline to drilling is such an outrageously terrible idea that even Governor Rick Scott, no friend to moderation, is against it, as is Chris Christie, who would be able to see the derricks from his beach chair.

There is also resistance to Jeff Sessions’ announcing that the Justice Department would begin acting against states that voted to legalize marijuana. Not that I’m a big fan of balancing state budgets on alcohol, tobacco, gambling and pot, but returning us to GiulianiTime.  The absolute last thing we need is for our criminal justice system to begin arresting low level drug users in states that have legalized weed. That would be a travesty. And here I thought the GOP was the party of states rights.

Democrats need to capitalize on these issues and get out their voters and those Democrats who sat out the 2016 election. And they’d better come up with an economic argument too because that will also be the key issue in November, as it usually is. That most people see the GOP tax cut as a sop to the wealthy will help, but seeing more money in your paycheck is a powerful argument to stay the course. Then again, cuts to social programs, as the Republicans promise, will certainly wake people up to the danger.

So cut the garbage about psychiatric evaluations and see this election through the correct lens: It’s politics, and all politics is local.

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Featured

Are You Better Off Now Than You Were Forty Years Ago?

I keep coming back to something that Rutgers University Professor W. Carey McWilliams said once at a meeting I attended at the Eagleton Institute of Politics in the 1980s. He quoted Ronald Reagan’s famous campaign line from 1980 and 1984: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Of course, in 1980, after Jimmy Cater’s term, the answer was supposed to be no, and in 1984, after four years of Reagan’s supply-side trickle down policies, the answer was supposed to be yes. But McWilliams had a different interpretation of what Reagan was doing, and he was not happy about it.

Said McWilliams, “Reagan has boiled down more than two hundred years of constitutional government to a question that appeals only to the citizen’s craven self-interest. It is as far from democracy as one can get.”

Exactly.

Forty years later, we are living the ultimate manifestation of Reagan’s transactional politics and for most people, we are decidedly not better off than we were in 1980. Despite repeated tax cuts, the wealthy are doing just fine while the middle and lower classes have fallen farther behind with every passing decade. Buying power has declined, and it’s now absolutely necessary for everyone in a family to work in order to pay for monthly living expenses and to save for big ticket items such as cars, appliances and college educations. Many Americans love the myth that women should stay home and take care of the children, but the reality is very different. Economically, despite the explosion of wealth tied to technology and the rising stock market, it’s difficult to make the case that the people, however we define that, are better off than they were when the conservatives took power.

In addition, the social policies of the party that supposedly supports family values have not led to stronger families, in large part because the religious conservative’s definition of the family is rooted in a gone-forever past. Regressive policies regarding women’s health, family planning and welfare programs have resulted in more families living on the margins, and the prospects are that 2018 could see major cuts in social programs in order to pay for the trillion dollar tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. The fight to reverse gay marriage and abortion rights is one-conservative-to-replace-Anthony-Kennedy-away from reality. The right of religious people to use their beliefs to discriminate could be ratified by the Supreme Court this June.

The same is true regarding foreign policy. The West’s victory in the Cold War was supposed to usher in a period of peace and prosperity led by liberal democratic values and the respect for human rights. We’ve seen glimpses of this, but since the September 11 attacks, we’ve been involved in unnecessary and unwinnable wars against foes who don’t play by World War II rules. We’ve spent trillions trying to fight or buy off countries that will never be true allies, such as Pakistan and Afghanistan, and we’ve seen a resurgence of Chinese and Russian nationalism and power rise to the point that we are now in a second Cold War being fought over economic issues rather than ideological ones. North Korea reminds us that we always one step away from disaster.

Both parties can take blame for these developments. The difference now is that we have a regime in the White House that doesn’t understand that American power is tied to its moral commitments, not just to whether a country has paid its bills. Republicans since Reagan have tried to question and undermine the role the United Nations should play in the world, and I have no doubt they would pull us out if the right scenario presented itself. The Trump Administration is fine with right-wing strong men (and it always seems to be men), and has said nothing about dictatorial actions in the Philippines and Myanmar, where a Rohingya genocide is unfolding right before the world’s Ray-Ban’d eyes.

Of course, there have been victories, and anyone who was over the age of 12 in 1970 can tell you that, this past year notwithstanding, the country does feel better about itself. Crime is down. Most of our major metropolitan areas have thriving cultural lives. Music, television and movies are far better than that of the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Inflation tamed, for now. Disco is dead.

I am of the humble opinion that we are at the end of the conservative movement and soon will be entering a period where the political pendulum will begin swinging back to the left. Perhaps the congressional elections will be the beginning of this trend. Will conservatives still win elections and continue to influence policies? Of course. And president Trump will continue to remind the majority that opposes him that his view of how this country ought to operate is an outlier, the same way that many moderates saw the counterculture of the 1960s as an outlier.

But the excesses of the conservative movement will begin to receded. The unending focus on money and competition and winning will give way to a more tempered view of what’s important in life and  our place in the world. Taxes on the wealthy will go up. We will be less divided.

Am I an optimist? You bet. Am I confident about the future of our country? Yes indeed. Will the short-term be a trying, difficult, maddening, stressful period? Afraid so.

Another year dawns. See the best. Be the best. Do your best.

Happy New Year.

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Categories
Donald Trump Donald Trump Featured Racism

Trump’s Immigration Policy Based on Ignorance and Hate

WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 23: (AFP OUT) U.S. President Donald Trump reads the first of three Executive Orders he will sign in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC on Monday, January 23, 2017. This one concerned the withdrawal of the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The others will be a US Government hiring freeze for all departments but the military, and "Mexico City" which bans federal funding of abortions overseas. (Photo by Ron Sachs - Pool/Getty Images)
I was actually looking for an uplifting article to post close to the holiday that might provide some confidence and hope. Then I came upon this posting that discussed the president’s thinking on immigration policy and how he reacted to court rulings that postponed the travel restrictions and immigration bans he tried to implement this year.
Appalling doesn’t really do justice to my reaction. According to six officials who were in the room with him, the president read a document that listed how many immigrants had received visas in 2017. Some of his responses:

More than 2,500 were from Afghanistan, a terrorist haven, the president complained.

Haiti had sent 15,000 people. They “all have AIDS,” he grumbled, according to one person who attended the meeting and another person who was briefed about it by a different person who was there.

Forty thousand had come from Nigeria, Mr. Trump added. Once they had seen the United States, they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa, recalled the two officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive conversation in the Oval Office.

Terrorists. AIDS victims. Hut dwellers.

This is the President of the United States deciding policy.

His thought process? Bigoted. Uninformed. Under-educated. Judgmental. Ignorant.

What’s worse is that he is dragging down the reputation of the United States with him.

It’s clear that the president is not just protecting the United States from predatory foreign companies or workers who come here and take jobs that American citizens want. He believes, according to the article, that immigration is bad for the country and that foreign ideas are inferior to American ones. His nationalism is small because it rests on the incorrect assumption that our culture is superior to all others.

It’s president Archie Bunker at your service.

I suppose the good news is that much of the rest of the world ignores this nativist babble for the racism that it is, and that an interconnected, sharing world is a safer one both economically and militarily. Even allowing Internet service providers the ability to block, throttle or slow down sites will not stop people from blurring borders and searching for the best price, the highest wage, and people they can work with. A minority of voters in the United sates voted for fear, suspicion and moral relativity. I am optimistic that the majority sees through his blather and negativity.

And with that, I wish you a happy holiday, a Happy New Year and all of the other happiness that all humans so richly deserve.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

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Featured

Define Your Own Reality: The New Seven Dirty Words

What began earlier this year as an assault on climate science continues this week with a directive by the Trump Administration to ban seven words, which clearly rankle conservatives even more than George Carlin’s famously dirty seven words. From the Centers for Disease Control website as reported in this article in the Washington Post,

Policy analysts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were told of the list of forbidden words at a meeting Thursday with senior CDC officials who oversee the budget, according to an analyst who took part in the 90-minute briefing. The forbidden words are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”

The charitable explanation for this change would be that Betsy DeVos called the president and said that these words were too big for her to understand and could the president please change them to more monosyllabic terms.

The reality, though, is far scarier. This is not a change on the order of Ronald Reagan saying that ketchup and mustard should be classified as vegetables for school lunch programs. This is censorship and doublespeak. As for what should replace these terms?

In some instances, the analysts were given alternative phrases. Instead of “science-based” or ­“evidence-based,” the suggested phrase is “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes,” the person said. In other cases, no replacement words were immediately offered.

Which means that every community in America can define its own reality. Your community doesn’t like climate change? Then it doesn’t exist. You oppose diversity? Why, feel free to discriminate. Or marginalize transgender citizens. Want to write a curriculum for your school district? No need to make it either evidence or science-based.

Can you say America Last in education and First in dirty air?

For all of their talk about allowing the invisible hand of the market a free reign, the Republicans certainly are afraid that Americans might make decisions based on science or any other information available to them. Fortunately, most Americans do not approve of the president or his policies, including this massive tax cut for the wealthy. And most Alabamans saw through the ridiculous argument that the state needed a fanatical pedophile to represent it rather than a former prosecutor who has worked tirelessly for all state residents.

The first casualty in any war, be it with weapons or policy, is language. The GOP is trying to redefine the basic elements of democracy and knowledge with a president who speaks on a fifth grade level.

Let’s define a new reality for them next November.

 For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest
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Democracy Featured

Do Not Let Us Fall Into Temptation

Usually I skip over stories that have to do with the Pope, but I’ve been reading more of them since Francis took the rather large yarmulke a few years ago because he seems to get the part about treating people like humans. He still has work to do with women and the Rohingya, but his proposed new change to the Lord’s Prayer (which I have as a 45 rock version from 1973) comes at a most perfect time.

Temptation seems to be all the rage these days and I have to agree with Francis that the problem is not with a deity leading us there, but with us as functioning people resisting the lure. And we do have problems with that.

From national and state politicians, media moguls, entertainers, business executives and, yes, the President of the United States, men have been tempted to use their power and influence to harass, rape, threaten, bully and terrorize both women and men for…what? Sex? Influence? Power? Babies? There’s a pathology here because rolling the dice and hoping you don’t get caught must be part of the demonic thrill involved in the chase. And sometimes, even an apology does not substitute for tears.

But there are other temptations that are weakening us too. The Republican Party, tempted by power, is shutting out any reasonable attempt at bipartisanship on health care and taxes, and I imagine that they’ll extend their terrible ideas to infrastructure, government spending and immigration.

The Democratic Party is similarly tempted by the thought of overreaching in their opposition to the president by becoming, at times, irrational baying wolves, calling for impeachment or overturning the election results. Neither of these will lead to the path to power, nor do I believe that they will become a force that compromises or ends the partisan war being fought throughout this country.

For all of this, I am not a religious person, but occasionally religious leaders do tap into the zeitgeist, intentionally or not. We could all use a little humility, and if it won’t come from the president or his inner circle of sycophants, then it must come from us because only the American people can put an end to a tolerance of lies, misdeeds and obstinate behavior.

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college

The Education Money Trap

And you thought I might have something scathing, sarcastic and scary to say about the terrible tax bill that the party of the deficit (which they now own) passed Friday evening. But since the horrible House tax bill will need to be reconciled with the even more horribler Senate bill, I figured I would wait a bit.
Then I saw this article about education and money and how our focus on college has become even more skewed than our focus on money and how money influences our decisions. How money has become the overwhelming money focus of our money lives to the money extent that a college education is all about…money.

The crux of the article is that it’s currently illegal for colleges to collect and publish information on how much money each of their graduates is earning, what kinds of jobs they have and other information related to…money. Which bothers me a great deal because I am truly concerned about our present preoccupation with money and how students typically see a college as a four year job training program… with beer.

And that got me thinking. About me.

Because if you included information about me and my work experience, it might not lead to the type of information that might be helpful or that accurately reflects what some consider to be a typical college experience.

For example, I graduated from Syracuse University with a BA degree in two majors. One was in Television/Radio Management from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and the other was in History from the Maxwell School in the College of Arts and Sciences. Both of these colleges are at or near the top of the rankings in their respective fields and I am duly proud of my accomplishments. Many of the graduates from these programs are thriving and are making valuable contributions to their fields.

Consider, though, that almost half of all college graduates are not directly using their major in their employment, including me. I’m a public school teacher and, yes, I do use my history degree every day, but I didn’t attend a school of education and I’m probably bringing down the income average of those classmates who are making more money in communications and media. Any prospective student would then look at my information and come away with financial information that doesn’t match my academic experience.

This is the problem with…money.

And this is also the problem when we, and I mean teachers, parents, guidance counselors, test preparation companies and society in general – focus on the financial aspects of a college education at the expense of its real purpose.

What we really need colleges and universities to publish is a happiness index or a satisfaction index or the ways in which a degree has made us more educated, more reflective, more compassionate, more inquisitive and more consequential, because those are the characteristics that we want people to come away with after spending four years at an institution of higher learning.

And we can use more people like that these days.

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Featured

Making a Losing Wager on Wages

I think the first paragraph of this story pretty much says it all about the Republican tax plan.

Corporate executives love the plan because they will make gazillions. But they don’t expect wages to rise. Which I think is a funny way of expressing that idea since it’s the corporate executives who are the ones in charge of making wages rise. So if they’re saying that wages will not rise, then not rise they will.

And wage earners in the middle and working classes can take that to the bank, where the bankers will likely laugh at them for trying to deposit empty promises. The silver lining is that interest rates are about to go up again, so the return on those empty promises is about to get larger.

Sucker.

Yes, there will be those who will see some more money in their paychecks next year, but the cost will be extraordinary. A black hole in the budget where trillions will be sucked into another dimension. Accounting gimmicks that will need to rely on millions of people giving up their health benefits so the rest of us insured folks can pay higher premiums when the uninsured get sick. And, now, the admission that wages are not likely to go up.

And through it all, the president remains broadly unpopular because Americans are far smarter than he is and they can see right through the hokum he and the Republicans are peddling. It starts with the contradictory argument whereby the president says that the stock market is at record highs, unemployment is at a 17-year low (thank you Barack Obama), and corporate profits are healthy and growing.

Why, then, do we need to mortgage our future and borrow on the backs of people without health insurance? Things seem to be going well without killing the economy. But since the GOP needs a win, even if it’s really a loss for the people, they will move ahead and hope that we won’t notice.

Too late.

Polls show that a majority of Americans don’t believe that tax cuts, especially to corporations and the wealthy, should be a priority. In fact, two-thirds of American voters say that cutting the deficit is more important than cutting taxes. But the GOP needs a win because their attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act failed miserably for the understandable reason that taking health insurance away from 20 million people was a terrible idea. A tax cut bill that balloons the deficit and makes middle class taxpayers pay more is an equally terrible idea.

We also need to remember that aside from tax cuts, conservative orthodoxy says that the federal government is too large and that social programs, you know, the ones that are keeping many people alive in distressed areas, need to be eliminated or have their funding cut back. What are the odds that the GOP discovers the huge hole in the deficit next year and says that Social Security must be privatized and that Medicare and Medicaid need serious revision? I’m thinking the odds are pretty good.

The Republicans have been waiting for this moment, when they control all three branches of the government to undo the New Deal and Great Society programs, cut taxes and services, favor corporations and business interests over consumers, and turn the clock back to a more intolerant era.

Democrats have a year to remind voters what a great country looks like, how it acts on the world stage, and the costs of furthering income and legal inequality.

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Featured

The Immoral Minority

Why couldn’t we have this as our president?

Yes, I know her views on Israel would not be popular, but at this moment in time, don’t we need someone who has some, say, morals?

As far as I’m concerned, all the men who’ve been caught, have admitted, or have been credibly accused of inappropriate and/or criminal sexual activity should not be eligible for elective office. That’s Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, agree or disagree, religious or secular. It’s only when we have a zero-tolerance policy backed up by real and convincing action will people take this seriously.

The problem now is that we have a president who has no moral authority on this issue. Of course, that hasn’t stopped him from saying nothing about Roy Moore, but a lot about Al Franken. I stopped taking the president seriously about most issues last winter, but this one resonates because his supporters have created unique pinholes by which they are trying to weave their moral needles through with arguments that use very slippery thread. What it all comes down to with them is that Trump didn’t act on what he said about women.

To which I say, read what he said. It was not theoretical.

The same is true for Roy Moore, but since he’s the darling of the religious right, they need to twist a moral ideology so his behavior is OK. Like hanging around 14-year-olds. When he was 32.

The right likes to bring up Bill Clinton, and they should, because his behavior was reprehensible and probably cost two people–Al Gore and Hillary–their chances to be president. The big difference between Clinton and some of the others is that he was punished. He was impeached, although not convicted by the Senate, and he was disbarred. Meanwhile, many of these other predators are walking around unscathed and still either elected or eligible for office.

But harassment of women is not the only moral issue floating around these days. The tax cut bill, because it’s not really reform, is another example of retrograde Gilded Age thinking being gussied up as something new.

This bill is a moral disaster on a number of levels, but the key is that some middle class and even lower income people will actually pay more in taxes under the bill, either now or by 2026, in order to pay for the massive tax cuts that corporations and the already wealthy will see. There is absolutely no excuse for anyone who makes under $150,000 to see anything but a robust, healthy, consequential tax cut and a promise that the tax cut will last into the future.

Instead, what we seem to have in Congress is a bill that takes some of the most immoral and questionable stances we’ve ever seen. For example, teachers can now take a $250 deduction for items they buy for their classroom. The GOP wants to get rid of that so it can pay for the cuts to the wealthy. Imagine that. We already know that teachers mean nothing to this administration other than as a mostly unionized special interest, and that their goal is to destroy the public schools and make teachers into an even lower paid work force. But taking a paltry deduction away is beyond insulting–it’s immoral because it hurts students and communities. It sends a message that even that small amount of money is too much for public workers.

Further, the Senate wants to drop the personal mandate that everyone have health insurance, meaning that many people who should have it, but won’t because of the cost, will drop insurance, leaving themselves vulnerable to a financial catastrophe, and would use that money to further cut taxes.

The egregious immorality of this move is that in order to save money, the GOP is actually hoping that people will drop their coverage. And who will end up picking up the tab? Why, taxpayers like you and me in the form of higher premiums. And if you think that a further tax cut will make up for an insurance rate increase, then you haven’t been paying attention, unless you believe that you’ll be getting more than a 10% increase on top of what the GOP is offering now, because that’s at least how much your insurance will be increasing.

And the president thinks that wages will go up because of this tax cut. Um, not if insurance rates go up, they won’t because your employer will have to pay more to cover you if sick people can’t or won’t buy health insurance.

Have I also mentioned that taxpayers in high property and income tax states, like NY, NJ, and CA, will also lose in this bill because they will no longer be able to deduct those expenses? Not a problem for the GOP, though: Those states don’t vote Republican.

The only hope I have is that the GOP Senators who seem to get the danger of Trump–Corker, Flake, McCain, Murkowski and Collins–will sink this bill and ask for time, negotiations, hearings and analysis.

You know, democracy.

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The Real Rankings: Trump, Putin, Xi. Then America.

It’s tough having a president who’s ready, at the drop of a hat, to throw the country under the bus. President Trump likes to say that he will put America first, but he has a strange way of showing it.

For decades, the United States lead the world economically, militarily and morally. Sometimes we did some extremely bad things and we’ve made our share of mistakes, but most of the world knew where we stood and we remained a place that other people wanted to come to, and they were generally welcomed.

Not any more.

By supposedly putting America first, the president has done great damage to our reputation and what we stand for. When the Russians clearly tried to influence the 2016 election, the president never spoke out about foreign interference, and instead worried obsessively about how it would make him, and only him, look bad.

Now we find that the president, perhaps the most gullible man in the political world, believes Vladimir Putin when he said that Russia did not interfere with the election. And he’s siding with the Russian leader over his own CIA and members of Congress from both parties.

You know, Americans.

How did Trump come to this conclusion? By asking Putin if his country interfered, of course. Isn’t that what international power politics is all about? Everyone tells the truth, right?

As Bugs would say, “What a maroon.”

The president’s trip to Asia was also a me-first excursion as the president essentially said that he, and only he, knew what America’s best interests were and that he was going to make sure that any future deals benefited this country.  He’s already shown the folly of that statement by withdrawing us from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris Climate Accords. Both of those agreements would have enabled the United States to have major influence over trade, intellectual property laws, and economic policies that would help guide the world toward a more environmentally responsible future.  We’ve now lost a good deal of that influence and China has immediately stepped into that power vacuum and is ready to fill it, as President Xi said in his remarks immediately after Trump finished speaking on Friday.

And what did our president say to that? He essentially threw every previous president under his smog-belching bus by saying that America’s past leaders were to blame for our terrible trade deals. We can certainly blame previous leaders for today’s problems, but the rule is that you defend your own in public while excoriating them in private. For Trump, though, there is only one person he will protect: himself.

But the president is not only hurting America abroad. His support of the health care repeal that would throw about 20 million people off their health insurance was reprehensible. And his support of a tax bill that would raise taxes on millions of people in the middle class while allowing hedge fund managers to continue to pay a lower rate on their incomes, and for other wealthy people and corporations to get a huge cut is immoral. The president would also benefit immensely from this tax bill, but since he won’t release his tax returns, we don’t know by how much.

The real evidence, though, is that the president is not putting America first because he continues to deliberately divide this country. He’s made no real effort to include his opponents or those who voted against him. He’s content to throw twitter bombs and to blame everyone else (women, immigrants, Muslims, Democrats, NFL players) for our problems without recognizing that he is the president of all the people.

Effective presidents are ones who recognize that they might not bring their opponents over to their side, but that for the greater good of the country, they need to make an effort at unity and conciliation. I have little hope that President Trump will do this because his first priority is himself.  Not the country, and certainly not anyone who deigns to point out when he is wrong, or illustrates his disdain for, and lack of understanding of, our constitution.

We will always be second.

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Democracy

Tired of Russia and Taxes? Here’s The New Jersey Election Special!

For the moment, I’m going to put aside the frenzy over the Mueller investigation and how the Russian hacking and fake Facebook posts were all Hillary’s fault even though GOP campaign operatives lied through their collective teeth about their contacts with said Russians, and I’m going to postpone any comments on the new GOP Let’s Give a Sop to the Wealthy and Corporations Act of 2017, which, at first glance, will have me paying more in taxes, because I believe that the Senate will correct many, but not all, of the egregiously disgraceful ways in which the GOP wants the middle class to pay for the corporate tax cuts and blow up the deficit.

So no comment at all on those two issues.

What’s instead?

New Jersey is going to elect a new Governor on Tuesday!

Yes, I know you’re going to miss Chris Christie, who has sunk so low in the ratings lake that divers are rooting around the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald looking for Christie’s poll numbers. It’s gotten so bad that even a great public program to combat opioid addiction, which Christie proposed, couldn’t pry any money out of a president who supposedly is still considering Christie for a replacement part in his administration, on the off chance that someone will leave it soon. Which they will. And Christie will remain in Mendham where he belongs.

So who will win the election on Tuesday? Democrat Phil Murphy has a big lead in the polls, but of course we know about poll numbers. After all, it was only last year that Hillary was supposed to win the national vote by a couple of percentage points. Which she did. So all polls must be wrong, right? Not when you have a 14 point lead. Which Murphy has. If Democrats go out and actually vote, he’ll win.

But what of Republican Kim Guadagno? She served as Christie’s Lieutenant Governor for a glorious eight years, and that’s exactly why she will not win. She’s run a decent campaign, but she just can’t get out of Christie’s shadow on any issue, even the ones where she differs from him. He’s that unpopular.

Not that Murphy has been a dream candidate. He’s gotten tripped up over immigration and making New Jersey a sanctuary state. He’s also promised to fully fund public schools without being specific about how he’s going to pay for them, and he’s promised the teachers that he will fully fund their pension without, again, saying how hes going to pay for it. But he’s a Goldman Sachs guy and we know all about their fiscal acumen. Not really.

And I’m not really enthralled with his choice of Lieutenant Governor, former Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver. You remember her. She’s the Democrat who shepherded the Pension and Benefits bill through the Assembly in 2011. That’s the bill that reduced teacher take home pay for four years and stripped away our collective bargaining rights when it comes to health insurance.

Yes, THAT Sheila Oliver.

She only ran the Assembly. What of the State Senate? Glad you asked.

The New Jersey Education Association is currently committing political hari-kiri by supporting the opponent of Steve Sweeney, the Senate President who got enough Democratic votes to pass the pension bill in his chamber. The problem is that his opponent, Fran Grenier, is a Trump-and-Christie-supporting far right Republican who really dislikes almost everything the NJEA stands for.

But since Sweeney also committed the political sin of  not posting a constitutional amendment that would guarantee the state would fully fund the pension system, reading the public, correctly in my view, as being opposed to it, the NJEA wants him gone. Which won’t happen on Tuesday or any other day this week. Which means that the NJEA, which I support on most other issues, will now have an adversary instead of a friend just when Democratic control of the entire state government is probably going to be a reality.

In this case, gun control measures would have stopped the NJEA from shooting itself in the foot.

Nice job.

I expect that Sweeney and the NJEA will make nice up to a point, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he took something out on the organization sometime in the next four years.

But of course, the main thing to do this Tuesday, no matter where you live, is to vote.

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