Playing Games with America’s Health Care
President Trump reneged on promises about health insurance for all to win a
House vote on a bill to repeal Obamacare and cut taxes on the rich, but now
Republicans have to live with the consequences, writes Michael Winship.
By Michael Winship
This just in: Health care is not a game. It’s a matter life or death for
millions and millions of Americans. But you sure wouldn’t know it from watching
Donald Trump and House Republicans celebrate their narrow victory on Thursday.
The House managed to pass a bill, the American Health Care Act (AHCA), aimed at
altering or eradicating provisions of Obamacare, a somewhat muted version of the
“repeal and replace” battle cry screamed throughout the election campaign but
one that nevertheless will still devastate all but the richest of society with
exorbitant medical costs that many cannot afford. Medicaid would be slashed by
hundreds of millions. Twenty-four million fewer would be left without health
insurance.
But the Republicans celebrated this impending tragedy with cheers on Capitol
Hill and then got on buses to the White House for some further revelry in the
Rose Garden.
“Trump basked in adulation as lawmakers heaped praise on him,” Ashley Parker
reported in The Washington Post: “… Including Trump and [vice president Mike]
Pence, a dozen lawmakers and officials spoke, a snaking queue — nearly all white
men — who took turns stepping to the lectern to claim their reward: cable news
coverage, orchestrated by a president who values it above almost all else.”
Trump shouted, “How am I doing? I’m president. Hey, I’m president. Can you
believe it?” Not if I don’t want to. It all felt like a chintzy version of the
victory party after a high school football championship, except no one dared
douse Coach Trump or assistant coaches Pence and Paul Ryan with Gatorade. Which
was unfortunate.
Democrats got into the act, too, singing, “Hey hey hey, goodbye!” at the
Republicans in the House chamber, reminding the GOP that they had just cast a
vote that may cost many of them their seats in the 2018 midterms. The whole
thing was very classy, as if the Founders high-fived, fist-bumped and burst into
“We Are the Champions” after signing the Declaration of Independence.
The fact is, few Republicans have even read the bill. They did not wait for a
cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office before ramming it through. No
hearings were held; no group was given the opportunity to raise its objections
in such a public forum: no American Cancer Society, AARP, the March of Dimes,
the American Hospital Association — all of which, along with many other
professional and advocacy organizations, have made their opposition known.
No American Medical Association, which announced, “millions of Americans will
lose their health insurance as a direct result of this proposal…”
“Not only would the AHCA eliminate health insurance coverage for millions of
Americans, the legislation would, in many cases, eliminate the ban against
charging those with underlying medical conditions vastly more for their
coverage.”
Tax Cut for the Rich
But if you’re looking for the real reasons Republicans were throwing themselves
a frat party on Thursday, heed first the words of Sister Carol Keehan, president
of the Catholic Health Association of the United States: “It is critically
important to look at this bill for what it is. It is not in any way a health
care bill. Rather, it is legislation whose aim is to take significant funding
allocated by Congress for health care for very low-income people and use that
money for tax cuts for some of our wealthiest citizens. This is contrary to the
spirit of who we are as a nation, a giant step backward that should be
resisted.”
Then remember, as Paul Kane noted in The Post, that the GOP “viewed the measure
as a necessary step to demonstrate some sense of momentum and some ability to
govern in GOP-controlled Washington … inside the White House, President Trump’s
advisers became increasingly concerned about how little they had to show in
terms of early victories.”
And so they were willing to vote for a lousy, misbegotten piece of legislation
just so they could get the first round of tax cuts for the rich and to make it
look as if they had accomplished something. Not exactly the Age of Pericles.
I remembered that old poem, After Blenheim, in which Robert Southey recounts the
1704 battle in which Britain’s Duke of Marlborough (ancestor of Winston
Churchill) defeated the forces of France’s Louis XIV. The poem concludes:
“And everybody praised the Duke
Who this great fight did win.
‘But what good came of it at last?’
Quoth little Peterkin.
‘Why that I cannot tell,’ said he,
‘But ’twas a famous victory.'”
Never confuse motion for action, Republicans. And your “famous” victory may be
Pyrrhic. Fortunately, this horrible health care legislation has a long way to go
through the Senate before Donald Trump gets the chance to affix his EKG-like
signature. As South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham tweeted on Friday, “A bill —
finalized yesterday, has not been scored, amendments not allowed, and 3 hours
final debate — should be viewed with caution.”
Perhaps the most relevant — if unintentional — comment came from Trump himself
Thursday night when he told Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, “You
have better health care than we do.” The Land Down Under has universal health
care with a private insurance option. They call it Medicare.
If the Democrats don’t immediately start playing Trump’s statement on a constant
video loop between now and November 2018, they’ve lost the will to live. The
White House said Trump didn’t mean anything by it (although he then doubled down
on his words with a tweet) but if you’re in the mood to have a celebration of
your own, lift a glass to what he told the Australian PM and make a toast to
blowing up this bogus health care reform bill and giving us what Americans truly
need — Medicare for all.
Michael Winship is the Emmy Award-winning senior writer of Moyers & Company and
BillMoyers.com. Follow him on Twitter: @MichaelWinship.
http://billmoyers.com/story/americas-health-hands-gop-frat-boys/
Trump’s Fragile Grasp of History
President Trump may have been a reality-TV star but his grasp of reality has
always been tenuous, underscored by his weak understanding of U.S. and world
history, as Michael Winship explains.
By Michael Winship
Gene Tunney, the champion prizefighter of the 1920s, wanted to promote an image
of himself as a great intellectual. Trying to prove it, he always carried in his
pocket a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Many members of the press weren’t buying
it. When Tunney published a volume titled A Man Must Fight, one sportswriter
began his story about it with this immortal line: “Gene Tunney, who has written
one book and read several others…”
It’s a line that would work for Donald Trump, too, but only if flipped: “Donald
Trump, who has written several books and read one other…”
Of course, his various books have been written with the considerable help of
long suffering ghosts. And yes, I know that on several occasions Trump has
bragged to reporters about the many books he claims to have read. In 2011, for
example, he told the official Chinese news agency Xinhua, “I’ve read hundreds of
books about China over the decades.” If you believe that, I’ve got a Great Wall
to sell you. A real one. In China, not Mexico.
As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, one of Trump’s least appealing of many
unappealing traits is his incuriosity, his total lack of interest in history or
pretty much anything that somehow doesn’t pump up his ego or profits. It’s
deeply dangerous for all of us.
On Monday, here he was again, the man who just claimed an unprecedented first
100 days (must have been a helluva shock to FDR), who may have thought Frederick
Douglass was still alive (“somebody who’s done an amazing job”) and who seemed
eager to spread the news that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican (“Does anyone
know? A lot of people don’t know that!”).
Now he was sharing his thoughts on the Civil War: “People don’t realize, you
know, the Civil War — if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that
question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been
worked out?”
When my eyes uncross and my head stops coming to a point, I’d like to read aloud
to him from the Emancipation Proclamation. Trump’s remarks came as he discussed
in a radio interview his oft-stated admiration for Andrew Jackson. But as Aaron
Blake at The Washington Post notes, Trump pulled yet another groaner when, “Just
last week, in an interview with Reuters, Trump suggested there was really no
reason for the Israelis and the Palestinians to have been fighting for all these
decades.
“‘I want to see peace with Israel and the Palestinians,’ Trump said. ‘There is
no reason there’s not peace between Israel and the Palestinians — none
whatsoever. So we’re looking at that, and we’re also looking at the potential of
going to Saudi Arabia.'”
“No reason whatsoever! You know, besides the whole claim-to-the-very-same-holyland thing. Minor details.”
Don’t Know Much…
It boggles the mind. My former colleague, historian David McCullough, is no
stranger to American presidents, having written Pulitzer Prize-winning
biographies of Harry Truman and John Adams. He has been making the rounds
promoting his new book, a collection of his speeches called The American Spirit:
Who We Are and What We Stand For.
When he appeared on Leonard Lopate’s talk show on New York public radio a couple
of weeks ago, McCullough noted that in Donald Trump we had “put someone in the
pilot seat who has never ever flown a plane before; who doesn’t understand how
our government works, who has no interest in the history of the country and has
said so on more than one occasion, who has never read a book about the
presidency or a biography of a president and claims… that he doesn’t need to
read books because he knows so much intuitively.”
And yet when Trump declares that health care reform or pretty much anything else
— in fact the entire job of being president — is much more complicated than he
imagined it would be, it’s precisely because he has no knowledge of history, the
kind of knowledge that might at least from time to time buffer for him the shock
of reality by offering the golden gift of precedence.
History, McCullough writes, is “an aid to navigation in such troubled uncertain
times. … All problems have histories and the wisest route to a successful
solution to nearly any problem begins with understanding its history. Indeed,
almost any attempt to solve a problem without an understanding of its history is
to court failure — an example our tragic plunge into Vietnam with hardly a
notion of its past.”
Or our plunge into Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or Iran. Or North Korea — especially
when the sum total of Trump’s knowledge of that country’s fraught history seems
to have been a 10-minute tutorial from the president of China.
History is that proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in Mexico and causing a
tsunami in Malaysia. Which makes it all the more perilous when you have a
president who uses “America First” as a campaign slogan, revealing little
knowledge of the isolationist movement before World War II; whose press
secretary makes ill-considered statements comparing Nazi Germany, Syria and the
use of poison gas to massacre civilians; and who calls Sen. Elizabeth Warren
“Pocahontas,” demonstrating a willful, repugnant ignorance of Native American
history that goes all the way back to a time some 24 years ago when he claimed
owners of tribal casinos “are not Indians” because they didn’t conform to his
stereotype of what Native Americans should look like.
‘A Bad Thing’
But even worse than any of these is a lack of knowledge of history and
government that puts our very existence as a free and democratic government in
peril. Embracing other countries’ dictators is one slippery slope. And then on
Sunday there was Trump’s chief of staff Reince Priebus suggesting to Jonathan
Karl of ABC News that his boss is contemplating amending or even eliminating the
First Amendment to curb negative coverage of the president. And finally, there
was Trump himself, complaining to Fox News about the difficulty of getting his
program through Congress: “It’s a very rough system. It’s an archaic system…
It’s really a bad thing for the country.”
In other words, history, the system of checks and balances and the Constitution
itself are just getting in Trump’s way, despite his prior claims to regard as
inviolate the original language of the founders.
David McCullough has said that our past is an invaluable asset, but “if you’ve
inherited some great work of art that is worth a fortune and you don’t know that
it’s worth a fortune, you don’t even know that it’s a great work of art and
you’re not interested in it — you’re going to lose it.”
Trump and his minions seem determined to send the admittedly flawed masterwork
that is our legacy to the trash. One of David’s favorite quotes comes from
Thomas Jefferson: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of
civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
Sadly, those words are probably unfamiliar to Trump precisely because of what
Jefferson suggested. Past presidents have embraced our past as prologue, read
books, invited eminent historians to the White House for advice and
consultation. But Trump takes his history, as little as it is, from the dark
spoutings of pseudointellectuals like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, or in
tweets and soundbites from Fox & Friends. When he tries to parrot the words back
as public statements, they come out even more mangled and malevolent.
While he is so ignorant we cannot be free.
Michael Winship is the Emmy Award-winning senior writer of Moyers & Company and
BillMoyers.com. Follow him on Twitter at @MichaelWinship.
[http://billmoyers.com/story/dont-know-much-about-history/]
Comparing Tweeting Trump and Silent Cal
President Trump’s tax-cut plan charts a bonanza for himself, his friends and his
family, getting rid of taxes that bite the rich and leaving debts behind for
future American generations to pay, say Bill Moyers and Michael Winship.
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
Republican Calvin Coolidge, who in 1923 ascended to the presidency following the
death of the corrupt and dunderheaded Warren Harding, was a man of few words.
But some of the most famous of the few were, “The chief business of the American
people is business.”
Donald Trump, on the other hand, is often a man of many words, but rarely do
they fit together to make a coherent sentence or complete thought. And we know
for sure that he, too, believes the chief business of America is business,
especially when it’s his business. Oh, and Jared and Ivanka’s, whose junkets on
Dad’s behalf appear to be merchandising missions for The Trump Empire. And his
two safari-loving sons still holding forth from the family palace in New York,
putatively running Pop’s business while protected by a moat of barriers and
security guards — take that, you huddled masses.
Coolidge was known as “Silent Cal.” When a dinner party hostess told him, “You
must talk to me, Mr. Coolidge. I made a bet today that I could get more than two
words out of you,” Coolidge replied, “You lose.” The last thing our current
president would be described as is silent. Trump can’t stop tweeting and
gibbering. And he doesn’t like losers.
The taciturn Coolidge has been described as the most conservative president in
American history. No one is quite certain what Trump is, as his opinions and
moods shift depending on the last person to whom he has spoken or something he’s
just seen on Fox & Friends or heard from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. They
point rightward for sure, but as with so many conservative spokesmen these days,
tinged with lunacy and utterly devoid of reason.
And yet there on the august pages of The New York Times, Charles R. Kesler, a
senior fellow of the right-wing Claremont Institute, gushes:
“Mr. Trump remains the kind of conservative president whom one expects to say,
proudly and often, ‘the chief business of the American people is business.’
Although Calvin Coolidge said it first, Mr. Trump shows increasing signs of
thinking along broadly Coolidgean lines, and of redirecting Republican policies
toward the pre-New Deal, pre-Cold War party of William McKinley and Coolidge,
with its roots in the party of Abraham Lincoln.”
Not Making Sense
Oh brother. Professor Kesler is projecting onto Trump a consistency of thought
and belief that thus far seems unproven. Comparing him to McKinley is a stretch,
and to Lincoln — well, absurd. Really now, does this remotely sound like Donald
Trump?
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may
have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of
memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living
heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the
Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our
nature.”
On the one hand, Kesler’s adoration of Trump makes sense, given that last
September it was the Claremont Institute that published a pseudonymous and nownotorious essay titled “The Fight 93 Election,” basically telling conservative
Republicans that if they did not support Trump’s presidential candidacy, their
world was doomed.
Why? Because Republican opposition to Trump, the author warned, “is the mark of
a party, a society, a country, a people, a civilization that wants to die.
Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at
least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I
want my country to live. I want my people to live.”
Clunky pearls of wisdom from what passes today for conservatism. Where have you
gone, George Will, now that they need you? Next thing we know, Ann Coulter will
be running the Library of Congress.
Calvin Coolidge would never have gone for such histrionics. Yet it’s worth
taking a moment to consider what did occur during his administration. His years
in office were the height of “The Roaring ’20s” — a time of economic whoopee
marked by wild financial speculation, extravagant bank loans and debt that
contributed to the 1929 market crash and the Great Depression.
Coolidge himself was the epitome of frugality and respectability but like Donald
Trump (who fancies himself “the king of debt,” by the way — a real conservative,
no?) he favored enormous tax cuts, slashing spending, high tariffs on imports
and cramming regulatory agencies with pro-business types.
Unlike Trump, he favored a low profile and as far as policy goes preferred
inertia to action. Here’s what the noted columnist Walter Lippmann said at the
time: “This active inactivity suits the mood and certain of the needs of the
country admirably. It suits all the business interests which want to be let
alone…. And it suits all those who have become convinced that government in this
country has become dangerously complicated and top-heavy….”
At that last part, you can just see all Trump’s plutocratic Cabinet members and
advisors nodding their heads in vigorous agreement.
When he died, Calvin Coolidge’s net worth was less than a million in 2016
dollars and he left it all to his wife Grace. Trump, who says his net worth may
be as much as $10 billion (how can we hope to know if he won’t release his tax
returns?), and his family are using the White House to make the family fortune
multiply, as if the presidency were a perpetual goose laying golden eggs. Each
news cycle brings more stories of conflicts of interest, and the tax cut plan
announced on Wednesday is a sweeping bow to the rich.
“It is striking,” Neil Irwin at The New York Times noted, how much the proposal
favors Trump and his kin: “He is a high-income earner. He receives income from
564 business entities, according to his financial disclosure form, and could
take advantage of the low rate on ‘pass-through’ companies. According to his
leaked 2005 tax return, he paid an extra $31 million because of the alternative
minimum tax that he seeks to eliminate. And his heirs could eventually enjoy his
enormous assets tax-free.”
So conservatism under Trump and his cronies now running government has brought
back a revised version of the gold standard: How much gold you can mine from
privatizing the mother lode of government is the mark of your success.
No wonder Trump admires Vladimir Putin so much: They are the Midas and Ali Baba
of autocracy. But conservatives they are not, unless to conservatives greed has
become the coin of the realm.
One more thing: President Trump doesn’t sleep much at night, reportedly getting
about five hours of shut-eye (obviously, the cause is not a guilty conscience).
President Coolidge loved to sleep, as much as twelve hours at a time. When he
awoke from a White House nap he often would ask his butler, “Is the country
still there?”
He meant it as a joke. Today, the question isn’t funny.
Bill Moyers is the managing editor of Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com.
Michael Winship is the Emmy Award-winning senior writer of Moyers & Company and
BillMoyers.com. Follow him on Twitter at @MichaelWinship. [This story originally
appeared at
http://billmoyers.com/story/forget-andrew-jackson-the-right-thinks-trump-is-calv
in-coolidge/]
The Riches on the Right
A surprise from the financial disclosure forms of the Trump White House was how
many of the players got rich from working in the right-wing world of antigovernment activism, says Michael Winship.
By Michael Winship
Some of the latest hooey uttered by White House press secretary Sean Spicer —
the man from whom a seemingly bottomless wellspring of hooey flows — was his
pronouncement the other day that having so many fabulously wealthy men and women
working in the White House is a good and wondrous thing.
“The President has brought a lot of people into this administration, and this
White House in particular, who have been very blessed and very successful by
this country, and have given up a lot to come into government by setting aside a
lot of assets,” Spicer said.
“People are often told they have to sell an asset or get rid of something to
come serve in the government. And there’s a lot of people that have done a lot
to come into this administration to give back, that have been inspired by the
President’s victory and the President’s agenda to move the country forward.”
You bet, Sean. In a world of haughty ideals and self-professed high purpose,
some would call this notion noblesse oblige — that with wealth and power comes
social responsibility; to whom much is given, much is expected, etc. And so it
should be.
But in Donald Trump’s world, snagging a White House job doubtless will be a
solid gold vehicle for using wealth and power to generate more wealth and power
for yourself and others, taking optimal advantage of an opportunity handed you
by the rich guy who, thanks to the deficiencies of the Electoral College, has
landed in the most lucrative pot of jam ever.
And while the new hires may have to hew closer to the conflict-of-interest rules
than the boss — did you see the latest about how Trump can keep siphoning
profits from his businesses even though he’s supposed to be hands off? — there
will be plenty of opportunities to take advantage.
In other words, high-ranking White House employee, those assets that you may or
may not have set aside for the duration are likely to be worth a lot more when
you and this president are done, even though you will have left behind quite a
trail of broken dreams and shattered lives among the less favored of us.
The financial disclosure forms from about 180 staffers that begrudgingly were
released by the White House late last week — a Friday night news dump designed
to be as cumbersome for the press as possible — revealed, as The Washington
Post reported, that Trump, “who campaigned as a champion of the working class,
has surrounded himself with a circle of wealthy advisers.
“The disclosures showed that Trump’s top aides have generated millions of
dollars from Wall Street, Hollywood, real estate and the media, holding a slew
of investments that intensify the administration’s challenge in navigating
potential intersections between officials’ personal finances and their
policymaking roles.”
Amassed Fortunes
Just 27 of these folks have a combined worth of $2.3 billion, and that is a
sum, according to a different Washington Post article, greater than what all the
households in each of 80 percent of America’s counties make in a year — 86
percent when it comes to the counties that voted for Trump. Per the Post, in a
classic bit of understatement, “This reinforces the disconnect between the Trump
team and the voters Trump likes to highlight.”
That would include such team players as chief economic adviser and Goldman Sachs
alum Gary Cohn, worth between $253 million and $611 million; Reed Cordish, the
Maryland real estate guy now in charge of technology initiatives, worth at least
$197 million; and of course, Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, the
person known around these parts as The Son-in-Law Also Rises.
Ivanka and Jared, a man whose burgeoning portfolio of responsibilities now
covers everything from the opioid epidemic and peace in the Middle East to
possibly, I pray, throwing himself between his father-in-law and the nuclear
football, are worth as much as $740 million.
Eric Lipton and Jesse Drucker at The New York Times write: “Mr. Kushner did
resign from more than 200 positions in the partnerships and limited liability
companies that make up the family-run multibillion-dollar real estate business.
But the financial disclosure report shows that Mr. Kushner will remain a
beneficiary of most of those same entities.”
And that’s a big problem, “perilous legal and ethical ground,” according to
experts interviewed by the Times. As real estate investors, the Kushner family
attracts money from China, Russia, the Middle East and other places where
American foreign policy has an interest.
What’s more, the banks with which the Kushners deal are regulated by governments
here and abroad and stand to gain from Trump pledges to roll back the Dodd-Frank
reforms, among others. Some, such as Israel’s Bank Hapoalim, are under federal
investigation. The tax code reform that Trump claims to be a high priority will
impact the Kushners and their financial interests, too.
One other thing. Looking at the disclosure forms, what’s also striking is how
many of the fortunate now staking their claims at the executive mansion made
much of their money not via inheritance or banks or industry but in the world of
political consulting, a field that has exploded with the infusion of millions
now made possible by Citizens United and other court decisions. Those rulings
have helped open a fire hose of dark money, much of it from the Right —
especially the Koch brothers and the Mercers, father and daughter — and it
floods the electoral landscape with a deluge of cant and propaganda.
Presidential adviser and mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway, a pollster and consultant,
has assets valued at between $11 million and more than $44 million. Last year
she made $842,614 from a reported 75 sources of income, including Tea Party
Patriots and the Judicial Crisis Network, which has been bankrolling a big media
campaign in support of Supreme Court pick Neil Gorsuch.
And while Steve Bannon made his initial fortune in international investment
banking (including Goldman Sachs), an irony given his current anti-globalist
nationalism and economic populism, in recent years he has made a lot of his cash
from ventures in right-wing publishing (Breitbart), filmmaking, analysis and
consulting. His assets are now listed as between $13 million and $56 million.
At AlterNet, Steven Rosenfeld writes: “While most press reports have focused on
the potential for financial conflicts of interest posed by the multibillions in
holdings by numerous White House officials, the personal financial statements
show how key political advisers became rich via their extreme anti-government
activism.”
The profit opportunities are rife, deeply tempting and not just for Trump’s
nearest and dearest. This wealthiest administration in American history is going
to make for its selected few a bundle of a size unimaginable to the rest of us —
yet we’re the ones who will be paying the bill.
And when this gang leaves their government jobs, they’ll be making even more,
spinning through the revolving door back into the private sector, their worth
enhanced by the time they’ve spent working for this mudslide of a president.
Welcome to the plutocracy.
Michael Winship is the Emmy Award-winning senior writer of Moyers & Company and
BillMoyers.com. Follow him on Twitter at @MichaelWinship. [This story first
appeared at http://billmoyers.com/story/rich-line-white-house-atm/]
Embattled Trump Reneges on Health Vow
President Trump promised health insurance for all, but – now dependent on the
political protection of House Speaker Paul Ryan – he is supporting a plan that
will push millions outside the system, writes Michael Winship.
By Michael Winship
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Donald Trump still insists he’s going to Make America
Great Again! Mind you, it won’t be a healthy or vigorous America — in fact, it
will be coughing and wheezing to the grave, but boy, will it be great!
If you ever needed further evidence that Trump doesn’t give a single good
goddamn about the people who elected him, just look at his treacherous turnabout
on health care. This Republican “repeal and replace” bill stinks on so many
levels I’m tempted to say it should be taken far out to sea and dumped into the
deepest depths of the Mariana Trench but I have too much regard for marine life,
even the kind with the big googly eyes and the really scary teeth.
Remember that Trump was the carnival barker who declared during the campaign, “I
am going to take care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not.
Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of
now.” And right before his inauguration he told The Washington Post, “We’re
going to have insurance for everybody. There was a philosophy in some circles
that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with
us.”
Then along comes the proposed Republican bill, which over a decade, according to
the now-famous report from the Congressional Budget Office, would see 24 million
fewer Americans with coverage, doubling the number of uninsured. Trump’s own
supporters would take it on the chin for what he tweeted is “our wonderful new
health care bill.”
According to John McCormick at Bloomberg News: “Counties that backed him would
get less than a third of the relief that would go to counties where Hillary
Clinton won. The two individual tax cuts contained in the Republican plan to
replace Obamacare apply only to high-earning workers and investors, roughly
those with incomes of at least $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for married
couples.”
And remember all that nonsense about Obamacare’s “death panels,” a falsehood so
rotten to the core it was declared PolitiFact’s 2009 Lie of the Year? Well, this
Republican bill actually would kill people. Those older would pay more than the
young, it would strip Planned Parenthood of funding and Medicaid programs would
be slashed. It would eliminate money for the Prevention and Public Health Fund,
which provides epidemiology, immunization and health-screening programs. And
there would be no mandate that employers with 50 employees or more provide
coverage.
Julia Belluz at Vox reports on:“[V]ery high-quality studies on the impacts of
health insurance on mortality, which come to some pretty clear estimates. This
research suggests that we would see more than 24,000 extra deaths per year in
the US if 20 million people lost their coverage. Again, 20 million is less than
the 24 million the CBO thinks will lose insurance by 2026. So the death toll
from an Obamacare repeal and replacement could be even higher.”
Ignoring the Needy
Notice that Trump has barely lifted a finger to assist those who need genuine
reform that would bring quality care to all, the kind of help he promised as a
candidate. Instead, he has directed his energies at helping Speaker Paul Ryan
win over right-wing House members by promising to make the bill even crueler to
those who need health care the most.
Take a look at this statement issued by tea partier and Alabama Republican Rep.
Robert Aderholt after meeting with Trump on Friday, a statement so mind-boggling
it’s worth quoting in full:
“President Trump called me to the Oval Office this morning to discuss the
American Healthcare Act, because of his understanding that I could not support
the current language of the bill. I expressed to the president my concern around
the treatment of older, poorer Americans in states like Alabama. I reminded him
that he received overwhelming support from Alabama’s voters.
“The president listened to the fact that a 64-year-old person living near the
poverty line was going to see their insurance premiums go up from $1,700 to
$14,600 per year. The president looked me in the eye and said, ‘These are my
people and I will not let them down. We will fix this for them.’
“I also asked the president point blank if this House bill was the one that he
supported. He told me he supports it ‘1,000 percent.’ After receiving the
president’s word that these concerns will be addressed, I changed my vote to
yes.”
Can you believe it? Trump’s behind the bill 1,000 percent, the President claims,
but don’t worry, we’ll fix it. It’s hard to decide which of the two men is
behaving more hypocritically: Trump saying he won’t let the people down or
Aderholt claiming to believe the President actually will keep his word. Each is
endorsing a cutthroat scheme that will bring nothing but grief to the people but
hundreds of billions in tax breaks to the wealthy and vast profits to the
insurance industry.
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: “The top 400 highestincome taxpayers — whose annual incomes average more than $300 million apiece —
each would receive an average annual tax cut of about $7 million, we estimate
from Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data.”
Andy Slavitt, who was President Obama’s acting administrator of the Centers for
Medicare and Medicaid Services told The Washington Post, “This is a massive tax
cut for unpopular industries and wealthy individuals. It is about cutting care
for lower-income people, seniors, people with disabilities and kids to pay for
the tax cut.”
This is, in the words of Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Connecticut, “a dumpster fire of a
bill that was written on the back of a napkin behind closed doors because
Republicans know this is a disaster.” But thanks to ineptitude and an inchoate,
ill-planned rush to pass the legislation, it looks as if the current Republican
bill may be on its way to failure, if not in the House then in the Senate.
Lucky us — for now. But if the GOP and Trump White House do manage to force on
us anything short of what’s really needed – single-payer, universal health care
— we’re doomed to live in a nation the motto of which may no longer be “In God
We Trust” but instead, “Die young and leave a good-looking corpse.”
Michael Winship is the Emmy Award-winning senior writer of Moyers & Company and
BillMoyers.com. Follow him on Twitter at @MichaelWinship. [This article first
appeared at
http://billmoyers.com/story/trump-gop-prescription-america-dont-get-sick/]
Testing the Principle of Free Speech
A surge in hateful speech toward minorities in the Age of Trump has been met by
a pushback from angry activists, sometimes trampling the vital principle of
free and open debate, writes Michael Winship.
By Michael Winship
At the risk of sounding like a geezer complaining about “these kids today,” back
in my college days, when it came to points of view we were unhesitatingly
exposed to literature, teachers and on-campus speakers covering the ideological
waterfront.
In one instance, the student body was addressed by civil rights activist and
comedian Dick Gregory, radical Irish activist Bernadette Devlin and the
conservative writer and critic Russell Kirk — all in the course of a week or so.
Such variety was a common occurrence, and freewheeling, open discussion was
encouraged. We didn’t always like or agree with a lot of what we heard or read —
from time to time there were vehement protests — but all of it was invaluable.
None of us were harmed in the making of our education.
So I was appalled other day when I read about the attempt by Republican Arkansas
legislator Kim Hendren to ban from that state’s public schools all books written
by the great radical historian Howard Zinn, including his seminal A People’s
History of the United States, a truthful, lacerating look at the heroes and
villains of America — especially the oligarchs and kleptocrats who once again
have their heels on the necks of the poor and middle class.
But I also was deeply troubled by the incident at Vermont’s Middlebury College
on March 2, when controversial social scientist Charles Murray was invited by a
conservative student group and attempted to speak on campus. Here’s what
happened, according to the Associated Press:
“Hundreds of students chanted as Murray began to speak Thursday, forcing the
college to move the lecture to an undisclosed location. Murray’s talk was livestreamed to the original venue, but protesters drowned it out. The topic, he
said, was the divergence of the country’s culture into a new upper class
separated from mainstream America.
“Afterward, a group of protesters surrounded Murray, professor Allison Stanger
and college administrator Bill Burger as they were leaving, he said. The
protesters became violent, with one pulling Stanger’s hair, twisting her neck,
the college said.
“After Murray and the two Middlebury staff members got into a car to leave,
protesters banged on the windows, climbed onto the hood and rocked the vehicle,
the college and Murray said.”
Professor Stanger, by the way, went to the ER and was subsequently diagnosed
with concussion. She’s a respected political scientist at Middlebury and a
fellow at the progressive New America, and was there the other night because the
conservative student group had asked her to provide a counterpoint to Murray’s
speech, to interview him from the stage after his prepared remarks. She had
prepared some tough, challenging questions.
Odious Opinions
Many of Charles Murray’s opinions are indeed odious and his research highly
questionable, He was co-author of The Bell Curve, a notorious book that seemed
to link race and IQ. He describes himself as a libertarian, but the Southern
Poverty Law Center (SPLC) calls him a white nationalist and reports:
“According to Murray, the relative differences between the white and black
populations of the United States, as well as those between men and women, have
nothing to do with discrimination or historical and structural disadvantages,
but rather stem from genetic differences between the groups… Murray’s attempts
to link social inequality to genes are based on the work of explicitly racist
scientists.”
At the beginning of Murray’s attempt to speak at Middlebury, students turned
their backs to him and chanted in protest. I probably would have done the same.
But to not let him speak and to allow the protests to lead to violence is
inexcusable.
I realize that this raises all sorts of questions about freedom of speech and
academic liberty, the nature of dissent and when and if political violence is
ever justified, but looking at what happened coolly — and admittedly, from a
distance — it seems clear that this went far beyond the boundaries of civil
discourse that especially today must be defended against the barbarians who
already have run roughshod, pushing through the gates and seizing the reins of
power and governance.
Professor Stanger said it best herself. She wrote:
“To people who wish to spin this story as one about what’s wrong with elite
colleges and universities, you are mistaken. Please instead consider this as a
metaphor for what is wrong with our country, and on that, Charles Murray and I
would agree. This was the saddest day of my life. We have got to do better by
those who feel and are marginalized. Our 230-year constitutional democracy
depends on it, especially when our current President is blind to the evils he
has unleashed. We must all realize the precious inheritance we have as fellow
Americans and defend the Constitution against all its enemies, both foreign and
domestic. That is why I do not regret my involvement in the event with Dr.
Murray.”
And then she quoted James Baldwin: “Not everything that is faced can be changed,
but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
I can be as guilty as the next person about tuning out and trying to ignore the
voice of someone with whom I vehemently disagree. I know, too, that this indeed
is a time to speak out against the ignorance and despotism sweeping our nation.
Further, I realize that the religious, racial and homophobic hate crimes that
have been on the upswing since Donald Trump’s candidacy and election — and
increased in 2016 for the second year in a row according to the Southern Poverty
Law Center — far exceed in numbers and intensity any violence or brutishness
that has occurred on college campuses. No question that they’re more frightening
and dangerous.
But, in the words of Andrew Sullivan, “Universities are the sanctuary cities of
reason. If reason must be subordinate to ideology even there, our experiment in
self-government is over.”
Two sides of the same coin: whether the Trump White House or those who would
physically attack a college professor. Their unthinking, unyielding enslavement
to a single viewpoint is fatal.
Ignorance begets ignorance and hate begets hate. And like a virus, each can
infect without regard to race, gender, creed or political perspective. At a time
when those in charge are fueling a pandemic of intolerance we must make sure not
to succumb ourselves.
Michael Winship is the Emmy Award-winning senior writer of Moyers & Company and
BillMoyers.com. Follow him on Twitter at @MichaelWinship. [This article
originally appeared at
http://billmoyers.com/story/free-speech-ends-ignorance-begins/]
Trump’s Troubling First Days
Donald Trump’s presidency is off to a chaotic and troubling start with
provocateur Steve Bannon pushing controversial policies and Trump closing ranks
with the Right, say Bill Moyers and Michael Winship.
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
The smell of a coup hung over the White House this past weekend, like the odor
of gunpowder after fireworks on the Fourth of July.
In these first few days of the Trump administration we have witnessed a series
of executive orders and other pronouncements that fly in the face of the
Republic’s most fundamental values. But Friday’s misbegotten announcement of a
ban on refugees from Syria and a 120-day ban on refugees from seven Muslim
nations defies reason, pandering to a segment of the population festering with
paranoia and rage.
Let’s just look at some of the misrepresentations that litter Trump’s
declaration like garbage strewn across a sidewalk. Despite claims that the order
is not about religion (!), it gives Christian refugees priority because, Trump
wrongly said, “If you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a
Christian it was almost impossible.” The New York Times reports that, “In fact,
the United States accepts tens of thousands of Christian refugees. According to
the Pew Research Center, almost as many Christian refugees (37,521) were
admitted as Muslim refugees (38,901) in the 2016 fiscal year.”
Trump went on to say that in Mideast war zones, “Everybody was persecuted, in
all fairness — but they were chopping off the heads of everybody, but more so
the Christians.” Again the facts: The Washington Post notes that “Since the
beginning of the Syrian civil war and the rise of the Islamic State, many more
Muslims than Christians have been killed or displaced because of the violence.”
What’s more, The New York Times editorial board observed, “The order lacks any
logic. It invokes the attacks of Sept. 11 as a rationale, while exempting the
countries of origin of all the hijackers who carried out that plot and also,
perhaps not coincidentally, several countries where the Trump family does
business.”
Add to all this the haste and hurry, the sloppiness of preparation and apparent
lack of prior review by qualified attorneys and affected government agencies,
the chaos and pain created by its sudden, thoughtless implementation and the
fuel this will doubtless add to the propaganda of the very same radical Islamic
terrorists the executive order is supposed to keep out of the country. What
Trump did makes little or no sense, and the way he did it was an insult to due
process.
Immigration Decree
The President’s decree on immigration is the act of a self-assumed Caesar — a
Peronista strongman, wielding power like a blunt instrument with no regard for
the short- or long-term consequences on fellow human beings or other nations.
The courts have countered him for the moment on some provisions, but the stay is
temporary. And Trump will soon be replacing more than 100 federal judges, all in
his image, no doubt, like mannequins in a store window.
Oddly enough, while it seems clearer than ever that Donald Trump has never
really read the U.S. Constitution, he may have inadvertently picked up a wrong
idea or two from the Declaration of Independence. Among the Founders’ grievances
against King George III was that the monarch was “obstructing the Laws for
Naturalization of Foreigners” and “refusing to pass others to encourage their
migrations hither.”
Does it come as any surprise that with his refugee ban Trump favors a ban that
sounds more like it came from tyrannical old King George than leaders of the
American Revolution? No wonder he leaped at the invitation extended by the
U.K.’s Prime Minister Theresa May last week to dine with Queen Elizabeth. Next
thing you know the gilded letters T-R-U-M-P will grace Downton Abbey. You can
imagine dreams of reviving old royal traditions like primogeniture jitterbugging
in his head — otherwise, what’s the use of having three sons if not so at least
one of them can inherit the gilded throne? (Sorry, Ivanka and Tiffany.)
But we digress. Let’s also not forget Trump’s ludicrous feud with Mexican
President Enrique Peña Nieto, Trump’s childish obsessions with voter fraud and
crowd size at his inauguration, his failure to mention 6 million Jews when
saluting International Holocaust Remembrance Day and still, the never-ending
tweets.
Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus got it right: “You don’t have to disagree
with Trump’s policies to be rattled to the core by his unhinged behavior. Many
congressional Republicans privately express concerns that range from
apprehension to outright dread.” Which raises another question: Why do GOP
lawmakers remain so publicly cowed? Is it because they cherish their party’s
power more than they do America’s principles?
The Rise of Bannon
Now the new president has placed his spooky senior counselor Steve Bannon on the
National Security Council. This is a man so far to the right he called William
Buckley’s National Review and William Kristol’s The Weekly Standard “both leftwing magazines.” During his reign as chief of Breitbart News, he tolerated
racist and sexist attitudes, and announced to a real journalist, “I am a
Leninist.” He went on to explain: “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s
my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of
today’s establishment.”
At least until the President gets fed up with the attention Bannon’s receiving
and fires him, the gruesome twosome appear to have settled on their mode of
governance: Trump does the theatrics, Bannon does the policy. Bannon writes the
executive orders, Trump signs them.
With all this instability, it’s not surprising that not only progressives but
also thoughtful conservatives already have had it with the President. Here’s
neo-con Eliot Cohen in The Atlantic: “Trump, in one spectacular week, has
already shown himself one of the worst of our presidents, who has no regard for
the truth (indeed a contempt for it), whose patriotism is a belligerent
nationalism, whose prior public service lay in avoiding both the draft and
taxes, who does not know the Constitution, does not read and therefore does not
understand our history, and who, at his moment of greatest success, obsesses
about approval ratings, how many people listened to him on the Mall and enemies.
He will do much more damage before he departs the scene, to become a subject of
horrified wonder in our grandchildren’s history books.”
At Washington Monthly, Martin Longman agreed. “Cohen and I couldn’t be more
different in our personal politics or our foreign policy priorities,” he wrote,
“and yet we’re singing from the exact same hymnal on Trump. … I honestly do not
think this country can endure a four-year term of Trump as our president, and
the prospects for worldwide calamity are so great that I can’t avoid saying very
radical sounding things about where we stand and what must be done.”
Those “things” could be impeachment or implementing Section 4 of the 25th
Amendment to the Constitution, the one that says that if it’s determined that
the President “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the
Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as
Acting President.”
Ladies and gentlemen, we are already in the midst of a national emergency. The
radical right — both religious and political — have been crusading for 40 years
to take over the government and in Trump they have found their rabble-rouser and
enabler. They intend to hallow the free market as infallible, outlaw abortion,
Christianize public institutions by further leveling the “wall” between church
and state, channel public funds to religious schools, build walls to keep out
brown people and put “America first” on the road to what Trump’s nominee to be
Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, has called “God’s Kingdom.”
You can see in the chaos a pattern: the political, religious and financial right
collaborating to move America further from the norms of democracy with the
triumph of one-party, one-man rule. There’s never been anything like it in our
history. But many in the media are catching on, which explains the strategy
Trump and his pack have adopted to discredit journalists, as Bannon tried last
week when he proclaimed that the media “should keep its mouth shut.”
That’s not going to happen. Nor does it look as if the hundreds of thousands of
protesters who marched the day after the inauguration and this past weekend at
the nation’s airports to protest the refugee ban are about to stop either. A
sturdy line of resistance is forming as the press, the people and patriotic
lawyers join in fighting for our rights in the nation’s courts of justice and in
the court of public opinion. Perhaps some brave Republican legislators,
uncharacteristically demonstrating a profile in courage, will take a stand, too,
against the despotic urges now roiling the Republic.
Bill Moyers is the managing editor of Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com.
Michael Winship is the Emmy Award-winning senior writer of Moyers & Company and
BillMoyers.com. Follow him on Twitter at @MichaelWinship.
http://billmoyers.com/story/donald-trumps-mission-creep-just-took-giant-leap-for
ward/
Ignoring the Voice of the People
The massive protests that followed the inauguration should have reminded Donald
Trump that he is a minority president with a slim-to-none popular mandate, as
Michael Winship describes.
By Michael Winship
“Peaceful protests are a hallmark of our democracy. Even if I don’t always
agree, I recognize the rights of people to express their views.” On Sunday
morning, that came flying out from the Twitter account of @realDonaldTrump,
raising the question, “What have you done with the real, @realDonaldTrump?”
It sure didn’t sound like the troll we’ve come to know. A couple of days in,
maybe the awesomeness of becoming the leader of the free world had penetrated
his roiling psyche and settled him down. Nah. Clearly, he hadn’t written it.
Because just two hours before, in a tone far more like the narcissistic whine
we’re used to, the Trump account tweeted, “Watched protests yesterday but was
under the impression that we just had an election! Why didn’t these people vote?
Celebs hurt cause badly.”
Not voting? Celebs? That sound you heard was my cognitive dissonance alarm
hitting DEFCON 1. In both instances, the bad and not-quite-as-bad Trump personas
were writing about Saturday’s worldwide protests, women’s marches in more than
500 cities in the United States — at least 3.7 million Americans — and more than
another hundred demonstrations internationally, from London and Paris to that
handful of hearty souls who displayed their protest signs in Antarctica.
There were half a million people in Washington, DC, just the day after the less-
than-superb turnout for Donald Trump’s inauguration and some 400,000 here in New
York City, if not more. According to Sarah Frostenson at Vox, “Political
scientists say they think we may have witnessed the largest day of
demonstrations in American history.”
I have been at many, many protest marches in my life, going back to the big
anti-Vietnam demonstrations of the late ’60s and ’70s, and I have never
experienced anything like what happened this weekend. We arrived at our
designated stepping off point on Saturday at 11:30 a.m., right on time, but the
block was so packed it already had been penned off.
A marshal suggested we move up to the next street above and work our way back
down to where we were supposed to be but it was impossible and in the process I
managed to get separated from my girlfriend Pat and another friend — too much of
a crowd between us to get back to one another; a situation complicated by a
dying cellphone.
And so there I stood, alone in the crowd, waiting for something to happen,
soaking in the excitement and anticipation everyone shared at being there,
enjoying the collegiality, reading the hundreds of signs, from the woman
carrying a 5×7 card with the words, “A tiny sign for a tiny man” to the guy not
far from me whose placard read, “A woman made this sign for me.”
Apparently, our numbers were so unexpected it took a while for the organizers
and police to figure out what to do with us all, so it was 2:30 p.m. or so
before we finally began to move, slowly swinging south onto Second Avenue on the
east side of Manhattan. This wasn’t so much a march as a slow group shuffle;
there were so many people crowded onto the street we could only move a little
bit at a time, like an escaped chain gang bound at the ankles.
We worked our way down to 42nd Street and then west. I was tempted to peel off at
Grand Central Station and head home — the hour already was late — but I was
determined to make it all the way to the end, to reach Fifth Avenue and 56th
Street and summit at Trump Tower.
By the time we made our way onto Fifth Avenue the sun was going down but we kept
moving, singing, chanting, cheering. A 6-year-old girl, perched on a grown-up’s
shoulders, urged us on: “We are the popular vote! This is what democracy looks
like!” she shouted and we echoed everything she said. This was her personal
favorite: “Donald Duck for president!”
We got to a block from Trump’s gilded pleasure dome and then were turned away by
parade marshals and police. We could get no closer; barriers blockaded the way.
Amicably, the protesters broke up, walking east and west on the cross streets,
many filling the bars and restaurants, others crowding into the subway stations,
headed home.
Shrugging Off Protests
White House press secretary Sean Spicer tried to shrug off the significance of
what happened on our streets Saturday. Referring to the Washington march, he
said, “There were people who came to the Mall, as they do all the time,
sometimes in smaller numbers.” Ho-hum, he seemed to say.
“A lot of these people were there to protest an issue of concern to them and not
against anything,” Spicer said, personifying the self-deception that believes
the lie. Sorry, Sean — Saturday was a stunning affirmation of defiance, a rebuke
and warning that resistance has just begun, yet only if we have the patience and
grit to keep it moving forward.
I’ve told this story here before, but the lesson remains: In the wake of the
murder of protesting students at Kent State and Jackson State in 1970, the big
antiwar demonstrations that followed and the nationwide student strike that shut
down hundreds of colleges and universities, the idea was not just to demonstrate
but to mobilize and continue to work toward an end to the Vietnam War.
Once the dramatic marches had come to an end, all too many simply took advantage
of an early end to the semester and headed for the beach. Little was
accomplished and the war continued for another five years. Those of us who
wanted to keep the peace work going — the stated intention of the strike — were
met with diffidence at best and at worst, outright apathy and resentment.
“Thank you for understanding that sometimes we must put our bodies where our
beliefs are,” Gloria Steinem said at Saturday’s rally in Washington. “Pressing
‘send’ is not enough.” She’s right, but marching won’t be enough either as we go
up against a committed band of zealots determined to end all remaining vestiges
of the New Deal and the Great Society and to further enrich the wealth of the 1
percent — especially, of course, themselves.
“This is the upside of the downside,” Steinem said on Saturday. “This is an
outpouring of energy, and true democracy like I have never seen in my very long
life. It is wide in age, it is deep in diversity, and remember, the Constitution
does not begin with ‘I the president,’ it begins with ‘we the people.’”
The work must take place at every level, from local on up: organizing, keeping
yourself informed, sending letters and emails, making phone calls, attending
town meetings, running for office or working for the candidates who best
represent your interests.
And this, perhaps above all: confront your member of Congress. Don’t let him or
her off the hook. Make sure your representative doesn’t sell you out to the Big
Interests, or deceive you with empty rhetoric. If they do – throw the rascals
out.
There is no time to lose. With each day, a cornice of our republic crumbles and
the body of democracy struggles to keep itself from stumbling and falling into
the abyss. No joke.
Michael Winship is the Emmy Award-winning senior writer of Moyers & Company and
BillMoyers.com. Follow him on Twitter at @MichaelWinship. [This story originally
appeared at http://billmoyers.com/story/great-joyful-march-not-enough/]
Trump’s Bait and Switch
Donald Trump has portrayed himself as a billionaire for the common people but
his early presidency has the look of a flock of plutocrats feathering their own
nests, write Michael Winship and Bill Moyers.
By Michael Winship and Bill Moyers
Throughout the campaign and the transition period leading up to the
Inauguration, whenever Donald Trump was caught lying or tweeting something
outrageous we were told by his acolytes that we should ignore his words and
instead pay attention to his deeds.
Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s Queen of Bull, who has moved from campaign manager to
White House counselor, actually has argued that what he says should not be taken
literally, even telling CNN’s Chris Cuomo, “You always want to go with what’s
come out of his mouth rather than look at what’s in his heart.”
Well, we’re journalists, not cardiologists but okay, by that standard, President
Trump’s inaugural address was of a piece, much of it appealing to his core
constituency — white workers and the middle class angry that they’ve been left
out of the good times, as indeed they have been. But the speech was hollow
rhetoric when compared to all the things Trump and his fledgling administration
actually have done in just the last few weeks and hours.
“Today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another
or from one party to another,” Trump declared. “But we are transferring power
from Washington, DC, and giving it back to you, the people… The establishment
protected itself but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not
been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs.”
Fine, we’ll do as Kellyanne Conway recommends. Rather than heed the rhetoric
we’ll look at his deeds and try to plumb the depths of his tiny heart. Truth is,
Donald Trump has surrounded himself with many of the very elitists responsible
for the plight of those everyday people he promised never to forget. The
establishment he decried in his speech is front and center; six Goldman Sachs
alumni alone already are in his administration, including Treasury Secretarydesignate Steve Mnuchin, the man who parked a hundred million dollars in an
offshore account and forgot to tell the Senate about it (we’re not making this
up).
High IQ or Net Worth?
Trump bragged Thursday night about the collective high IQ of his Cabinet but the
real number that’s troubling, as the website Quartz noted last month, is that
the first 17 people he named to the Cabinet or Cabinet-ranking posts “have well
over $9.5 billion in combined wealth. … This collection of wealth is greater
than that of the 43 million least wealthy American households combined.”
Let that sink in. Those first 17 people plucked by Trump to help him govern have
more wealth “than over one-third of the 126 million households total in the US.
Affluence of this magnitude in a US presidential Cabinet is unprecedented.”
How about billionaire Wilbur Ross firing an undocumented household staff member
to avoid being embarrassed when Trump picked Ross as Secretary of Commerce?
Could it be he suddenly developed an interest in immigration policy?
Or Labor Secretary-designate Andrew Puzder, CEO of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s
restaurants, his profits built on cutting corners and paying workers the lowest
wages possible. Unless he has suddenly developed the common touch, it’s not
likely he’ll be a robust advocate for blue- and white-collar workers.
Or Education Secretary-designate Betsy DeVos, whose confirmation hearings this
past week revealed she knows almost nothing about public education — which, by
the way, she doesn’t believe in — but whose lack of credentials pale in
importance beside the more than $20 million she and her family have given to
Republican candidates at the federal level, including many of the senators who
will vote for her confirmation.
And how about Trump himself — stopping his inaugural parade to get out of his
limousine in front of his DC hotel, of course — but so far failing to keep his
promise last week that by Jan. 20 he would transfer complete control of his
businesses? According to Pro Publica’s Derek Kravitz and Al Shaw, none of the
required documents have been filed.
No time for that, apparently, but plenty of time during his first hours in
office to eliminate a climate change page on the White House website and replace
it with attacks on the “burdensome” regulation of the energy industry — exactly
what the global warming giants of fossil fuel sought to achieve with their
campaign contributions. The new president already has forgotten those ordinary
people out there experiencing the erratic weather brought on by climate change,
many of them watching the waters rise around their homes and small businesses.
Perhaps Trump plans to build them an ark.
Hitting Homeowners
Speaking of everyday people: If you’re one of the homeowners struggling to make
ends meet, some of the people Trump pledged in his inaugural address to defend,
consider this as well: One of his first executive orders Friday suspended his
predecessor’s plan to decrease insurance premiums on Federal Housing
Administration mortgages, a move Obama intended to help stabilize the housing
market. Congratulations — if you’re one of those mortgage holders, you’ve been
Trumped!
“A punch in the gut to middle-class buyers” — that’s how it was described by
Sarah Edelman, director of housing policy at the Center for American Progress.
“With mortgage interest rates already on the rise, reversing the FHA’s move to
cut insurance premiums in fact puts the dream of homeownership farther out of
reach for millions of hardworking Americans.”
Contrast that cheapskate move with the money being spent on Trump’s big
inaugural weekend. Nicholas Fandos at The New York Times reported last week
that, “All told, the group planning the inaugural festivities says it has raised
more than $100 million, which would be nearly double the record for an
inauguration, with much of it coming in six- and seven-figure checks from
America’s corporate suites.” That includes a million bucks from Boeing and half
a million from Chevron. A small price to pay for the kind of influence and
thinly veiled bribery that are sure to characterize the Trump years.
“We will make America wealthy again,” Trump bellowed in his speech — he just
didn’t say that the wealth won’t be shared. Fact is, “the forgotten men and
women of our country” whom Trump addressed in the speech don’t have a chance
against the army of influence peddlers with whom the new president already has
surrounded himself.
For example, it was announced on Thursday that 13 — yes, 13 — lawyers from the
high-powered law firm of Jones Day will be moving to top positions in the
administration, seven of them at the White House alone. It’s s “a ton of top
jobs” for one Washington firm, as David Lat of the website Above the Law put it:
“This is very good news for Jones Day and the lawyers remaining at the firm.
It’s great for the firm’s prestige, and it also means that JD lawyers will be
eagerly sought after by clients with issues pending before their former
colleagues.” (italics added).
This must be what they mean by “draining the swamp” — they just divert it over
to the White House.
Fabulous Wealth
A pall of contradiction hung over the whole ceremony Friday — between the
rhetoric aimed at those millions of working people and middle-class Americans to
whom Trump said he was talking and the fabulous wealth concentrated
in his personal and official circles. Not once did he mention the words
democracy, or equality, or even the Constitution.
And while the clergy who offered prayers frequently invoked the names of God and
Jesus, no one disturbed the official piety by reminding the privileged and
powerful gathered around the new president that Jesus told his followers, “I was
hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a
stranger and you welcomed me.”
Or had said to a certain rich young man: “You lack one thing. Sell what you own
and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come,
follow me.”
Or had admonished his followers: “When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the
crippled, the lame and the blind.”
It wasn’t that kind of affair, of course. Instead, a few hours after the
swearing-in, President Trump, in another of his first official acts, signed an
executive order moving forward the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, which
could ultimately remove 18 to 32 million people from health insurance. Many of
them presumably voted for Trump. Not a few may now need a miracle to survive.
By the way, according to Darren Samuelsohn at Politico, the end of the ACA would
personally save our billionaire president “at least $6.7 million” in Medicare
taxes.
Let us pray. After we march.
Michael Winship is the Emmy Award-winning senior writer of Moyers & Company and
BillMoyers.com. Follow him on Twitter at @MichaelWinship. Bill Moyers is the
managing editor of Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com. [This article first
appeared at
http://billmoyers.com/story/trump-inauguration-hollow-rhetoric-collidesreality/]
Resisting the Congressional Watchdog
Not that political corruption doesn’t happen with divided government, but with
Republicans controlling all three branches, the prospects for more Abramoff-type
scandals rise, warn Bill Moyers and Michael Winship.
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
Mark Twain noted that man is the only animal that blushes — or needs to. He also
believed that “public office is private graft.” Those two observations from our
greatest and most sagacious humorist intersected with a bang on Capitol Hill
Monday night, when the bright lights of the Republican House Conference met in
secret behind closed doors at the end of the New Year’s holiday.
They tried to vote themselves an especially tasty treat: eviscerating the
independent Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE). That’s the office created in
2008 in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal and the placement of three
congressmen behind bars. The conference voted to absorb it into the House Ethics
Committee. In other words, they wanted to weaken OCE and put it under the
control of some of the very folks the office is charged with investigating for
possible influence peddling and other assorted mischief.
If the conference had its way, OCE would wind up having all the clout of the
token student representative on your local board of education, giving
unscrupulous legislators freedom to rob the public blind without fear of
exposure.
But a funny thing happened on the way to congressional visions of new secret
bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. The public can become like sheep when the
shepherd is a demagogue, but when the public is outraged over outright
unfairness and chicanery, it can roar like a lion. Once word of the vote leaked
out, phone calls, emails and social media recriminations from all points of the
political spectrum began flooding the sacred halls of the House of
Representatives, which was once called The People’s House before it became the
predator’s lair.
Talk about embarrassment. Imagine this new Congress, pledged to “drain the
swamp,” taking as its first action a rule that in effect would have helped make
the swamp part of the National Park Service.
The nonpartisan Project in Government Oversight (POGO), declared that OCE needed
“to be strengthened and expanded — not taken out back and shot in the middle of
the night.” So the GOP conference fled into another closed-door session and
changed its mind. We were only kidding, they said. The Office of Congressional
Ethics is alive and well — until the next time we try to kill it.
Just before the meeting, our august President-elect bestowed the Congress with
two of his imperial tweets. “With all that Congress has to work on, do they
really have to make the weakening of the Independent Ethics Watchdog, as unfair
as it,” read the first, followed by, “… may be, their number one act and
priority. Focus on tax reform, healthcare and so many other things of far
greater importance! ?#DTS.”
DTS stands for Drain the Swamp, of course, although we’re sure many of our
progressive brethren would prefer bawdier acronyms involving the President-elect
himself. Nonetheless, many are claiming it was these very dispatches from
fearless leader that turned the vote around. But read his words carefully: He’s
more concerned about bad timing; he has no great love for the OCE.
In fact, shortly before the tweets, his amanuensis Kellyanne Conway was telling
George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America that “gutting it doesn’t mean
there won’t be a mechanism” – just that there had been “overzealousness in some
of the processes over the years.”
Most members of the House agree it was the public outcry that swiveled those
usually obdurate minds on Capitol Hill; Trump merely once again displayed his
ability to jump on the prevailing public sentiment or someone else’s success and
ride it to vainglory, like the story of the French revolutionary John F. Kennedy
liked to tell: There go my people, the revolutionary said. I must find out their
destination so I can lead them.
Beware the Congress
In the end, what this New Year’s imbroglio tells us is three things. First, it’s
a reminder once again of the mediocre caliber of too many of the men and women
running for the House and Senate these days.
All too often, people of public spirit who would make ideal candidates are
discouraged from running by the horrors of perpetual fundraising — the vise of
money in politics — not to mention the spotlight shone on every small detail of
their personal and professional lives. Many of the people who wind up taking the
bit and running are soulless empty suits, in it for the power and the payoffs
during and after tenure. Or they’re already rich in the first place.
Which leads us to the second thing: venality, so often hand-in-hand with
mediocrity. All indications are that our incoming president regards the White
House as a pirate galleon built to increase his family’s trove of plunder many
fold, and the notion seems to be rubbing off on Congress. New York Times
columnist Frank Bruni asked, “Is it any wonder that House Republicans felt OK
about trying to slip free of some of their own ethical shackles, no matter how
ugly the optics? …
“It’s the tone that Trump has set and the culture that he’s creating. He
operates with an in-your-face defiance, so these House Republicans did, too. He
puts his own desires and comfort first, so they reserved the right to do the
same. With more than a few of his Cabinet picks, he demonstrated little sense of
fidelity to what he promised voters and even less concern about appearances.
House Republicans decided to treat themselves to a taste of that freedom.”
Third, we have to keep ever vigilant. Other anti-democratic measures inserted in
the same rules package slipped past the public. The first imposes a fine on
House members taking photos or video in the chamber — a petty, vindictive,
retroactive slap to those lawmakers who last June sat-in to protest Congress’
refusal to take action on gun control. You’ll recall that after Republicans
quickly adjourned and cut off the C-SPAN cameras, the protesting members, led by
Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights legend, used their cell phones to send out
video and keep the story alive.
Even worse, the new rules allow not just members of Congress to subpoena and
question officials and citizens; it extends that fearsome power to staff
members, opening the door to witch hunts and persecutions that could make
Benghazi and Clinton’s emails seem like a stroll in the park. Rep. Louise
Slaughter, D-New York, ranking member of the House Rules Committee, said,
“Freely handing out the power to compel any American to appear, sit in a room,
and answer staff’s invasive questions on the record — without members even being
required to be present — is truly unprecedented, unwarranted and offensive.”
Every battle won’t be won. Nonetheless, the public DID manage to keep the House
GOP from surreptitiously murdering the Office of Congressional Ethics, and
that’s proof we can make a difference if we keep the pressure on and hammer home
our resistance and opposition when democracy and liberty are threatened.
The problem, neatly summarized as usual by Mark Twain, is that, “To lodge all
power in one party and keep it there is to insure bad government and the sure
and gradual deterioration of the public morals.” This week, we got a vigorous,
healthy and inspiring reminder that protest matters. Keep that in mind as the
perfidies unfold this year under the one-party monopoly that will soon control
our federal government.
Michael Winship is the Emmy Award-winning senior writer of Moyers & Company and
BillMoyers.com, and a former senior writing fellow at the policy and advocacy
group Demos. Follow him on Twitter at @MichaelWinship. Bill Moyers is the
managing editor of Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com. [This article originally
appeared at http://billmoyers.com/story/protest-stopped-predators-will-back/]