Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—Ode to Obama:
The dark clouds of the coming administration rolled in this week with a fury, producing a flood of strange and worrisome news. [...]
But there was a calm in the midst of the storm, a rock of familiarity and stability and strength: On Tuesday night, President Obama delivered his farewell address in his adopted hometown, Chicago, as a forlorn crowd looked on, realizing the magnitude of the moment, realizing the profundity of its loss.
As the old saying goes: You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. [...]
But none of those differences in opinions about strategy injured in any way my profound respect for the characteristics of the man we came to take for granted: bracingly smart, exceptionally well educated, literate in the grand tradition of the great men of letters. He was scholarly, erudite, well read and an adroit writer.
And he was an orator for the ages.
Jill Abramson at The Guardian writes—Obama's right: in an age of unreality, democracy is in peril:
George Orwell, no doubt, would have approved of President Obama’s farewell speech. Underneath the hopeful rhetoric of “Yes We (Still) Can” and list of the accomplishments over the past eight years lay a bracing, overarching message: when lies can become truth, democracy is in peril.
Orwell penned his dystopian political novel, 1984, from the same fear. “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world,” he wrote. “Lies will pass into history.” In 1984, the Ministry of Truth spews propaganda and the language of Newspeak obfuscates lies. On Tuesday night in Chicago, Obama reinforced that this could happen now unless we can agree that there is accepted truth and that “reason and science matter.”
“Without some common baseline of facts, without a willingness to admit new information and concede that your opponent might be making a fair point,” President Obama warned, democracy can’t function.
Dana Milbank at The Washington Post writes—Opinions Tillerson’s foreign policy: Russia first:
As Trump was giving his first post-election news conference in Trump Tower, his nominee to be secretary of state was testifying in Washington — and Rex Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil chief, showed why he earned Putin’s Order of Friendship award.
[...]
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) followed that with a blunt question: “Is Vladimir Putin a war criminal?”
“I would not use that term,” the Russian Order of Friendship laureate replied.
Rubio offered to “help” Tillerson reach that conclusion, describing his targeting of schools and markets in Syria that have killed thousands of civilians, and his earlier attacks on Chechnya, where he killed 300,000 civilians using cluster munitions and bombs that kill by asphyxiation. “You are still not prepared to say that Vladimir Putin and his military . . . have conducted war crimes?”
“I would want to have much more information before reaching a conclusion,” the nominee replied.
Bill McKibben at The Guardian writes—Rex Tillerson is big oil personified. The damage he can do is immense:
In one of the futile demonstrations that marked the run-up to the Iraq war, I saw a woman with a sign that read “How Did Our Oil End Up Under Their Sand?” In nine words she managed to sum up a great deal of American foreign policy, back at least as far as the 1953 coup that overthrew Mossadegh in Iran and helped toss the Middle East into its still-boiling cauldron.
If the Senate approves Rex Tillerson after his testimony on Wednesday, they’ll be continuing in that inglorious tradition – in fact, they’ll be taking it to a new height, and cutting out the diplomats who have traditionally played the middleman role. [...]
If we listened to climate scientists and ramped up our commitment to change, the oil business would suffer deeper damage yet. That was the hope of the Paris accords, which called for ratcheting up the modest plans agreed to in 2015, in accordance with emerging science.
But now the guy responsible for our participation in the Paris process will be able to make sure that doesn’t happen. He can’t save Exxon and its kin long-term – the rapidly falling price of renewables will see to that – but he can keep it from being pinched harder over the next few years, even at the cost of pushing the planet’s carbon load past every benchmark the scientists have warned us against.
John Nichols at The Nation writes—Rex Tillerson Would Put the Dollar Sign on the American Flag:
“I feel,” Nebraska Senator George Norris warned a century ago, “that we are about to put the dollar sign on the American flag.” Decrying the advocacy by munitions merchants, speculators, and stockbrokers for legislation that would further involve the United States in the European conflict that would come to be known as World War I, Norris thundered:
We are taking a step today that is fraught with untold danger. We are going into war upon the command of gold. We are going to run the risk of sacrificing millions of our countrymen’s lives in order that other countrymen may coin their lifeblood into money. And even if we do not cross the Atlantic and go into the trenches, we are going to pile up a debt that the toiling masses that shall come many generations after us will have to pay. Unborn millions will bend their backs in toil in order to pay for the terrible step we are now about to take.
Along with a handful of allies that included Wisconsin Senator Robert M. La Follette, Norris argued that the United States need not entangle itself in a distant war between the armies of kings and kaisers. [...]
Norris, La Follette and the courageous foes of US involvement in World War I—most of them Midwestern progressive populists—recognized the profound danger that arose when US foreign policy became intertwined with the pecuniary demands of plutocrats and profiteers.
It is not just in matters of war and peace that those dangers arise, of course. When CEOs are calling the shots, everything from trade policy to energy policy and responses to climate change are warped by unenlightened self-interest. The potential for the corruption of America’s foreign policy expands dramatically when businessmen with international interests assume positions of power.
Demi Lee at The New Republic writes—Rex Tillerson isn’t sweating climate change:
At Wednesday’s Senate confirmation hearing for the secretary of state nominee,Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon asked whether he considers climate change a national security issue. Tillerson, until recently the CEO of Exxon Mobil, replied, “I don’t see it as the eminent national security threat that perhaps others do.”
Who are these “others”? President Barack Obama, for one, but also the U.S. military, George W. Bush administration, and CIA Director John Brennan.
Merkley noted that the Syrian civil war was hastened by climate change through drought and displacement. When he brought up the increased likelihood of severe storms, Tillerson said, “There’s some literature out there that suggest that. There’s other literature out there that says it’s inconclusive.”
This is only accurate if you consider the Daily Mail to be literature.
Richard Wolffe at The Guardian writes—Trump's trainwreck press conference ushers in a clueless presidency:
If the potentially explosive story embroiling him weren’t so salacious, you might say this is a case of the emperor’s new clothes. Instead, it’s safe to say the Trump presidency is already in shambles. And it has yet to reach its official start.
For a showman who promised to restore the Reagan era – and even ripped off Reagan’s slogan – this is just one of the most surprising revelations of the past few days.
Reagan and his advisers knew how to project a sunny image that kept the presidency separate from whatever the pesky media wanted to focus on, such as high unemployment or secret gun-running to enemy states.
Judging from Wednesday’s trainwreck press conference – the first since July – Trump and his handlers have no self-discipline and no strategy to deal with the Russian crisis that has been simmering for the best part of the past year.
David Dayen at The Nation writes—Trump Just Stumbled Into a Canyon on Obamacare:
mid the gnashing of teeth about the press corps’ performance and the general circus-like atmosphere at Donald Trump’s press conference, we shouldn’t overlook what a bind he just put his party into on the biggest legislative fight of his presidency.
Asked about Obamacare, Trump largely reiterated comments made to The New York Times, that any overhaul of the system must both repeal the bulk of the Affordable Care Act and replace it “essentially simultaneously.” In addition, Trump said that he would introduce his own plan as soon as Representative Tom Price, the nominee for secretary of Health And Human Services, is confirmed.
This delivers a Viking funeral to the absurd “repeal and delay” concept, which would have built a two-to-four-year cliff for Obamacare in an attempt to force Democrats to collaborate in its elimination. That idea had already been teetering, with multiple senators balking at voting to end the current system without a plan for the future.
Joan Walsh at The Nation writes—When Trump Pits Journalists Against Each Other, He’s Won:
The ostensible purpose of the press conference was to finally unveil Trump’s plans for his businesses—how he would avoid conflicts of interest and even possible constitutional violations. After reminding viewers, at length, that as president he couldn’t be found to have a conflict of interest, Trump told the press that he would turn over management of his businesses to his sons. “What I’m going to be doing is my two sons, who are right here, Don and Eric, are going to be running the company,” he told the crowd. “They are going to be running it in a very professional manner. They’re not going to discuss it with me. Again, I don’t have to do this.”
Then he turned the podium over to attorney Sheri Dillon, who made a long, confusing presentation, heavy on legalese, about how Trump would avoid conflicts—at least partly by arguing he couldn’t have a conflict because he’s the president. He would not be selling his business, Dillon said, because “President-elect Trump should not be expected to destroy the company he built.”
Shortly after Dillon wrapped, Common Cause released a statement saying Trump’s proposal “falls far short of what’s necessary to avoid conflicts of interest and Emoluments Clause violations.” Obama ethics watchdog Norm Eisen told The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent: “The Trump plan falls short in every respect. Trump did not make a clean break with his business ownership interests as his predecessors for four decades have done. Trump’s ill-advised course will precipitate scandal and corruption.”
Michael Specter at The New Yorker writes—Trump’s Dangerous Support for Conspiracies about Autism and Vaccines:
In 2005, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., published an article in Rolling Stone, and online, at Salon, called “Deadly Immunity.” It was, he wrote, “the story of how government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal’’—a preservative once widely used in vaccines—and “a chilling case study of institutional arrogance, power and greed.”
Kennedy’s article was largely based on a famously discredited and retracted study, published in The Lancet, in 1998, that linked autism to the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. In 2010, the British Medical Council found the principal author, Andrew Wakefield, guilty of dishonesty and of “callous disregard” for the pain of the children in his study.
The Lancet article fuelled a powerful anti-vaccine movement in the United States and in England, led by people convinced that the vaccine causes autism. Many major studies have compared children who have been vaccinated with children who have not. Both groups develop autism at the same rate; nobody has ever discovered a causal relationship between the vaccine and the disorder. [...]
Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that Kennedy told reporters yesterday that Donald Trump—who has, over the years, issued a stream of inaccurate and conspiratorial tweets on the subject of vaccines and autism—has asked him to “chair a commission on vaccine safety and scientific integrity.’’
Dan Aymar-Blair at TruthDig writes—Standing Rock Is a Model of the Right of Peaceful Assembly:
2016 was chock-full of protests of every kind around the globe. But we need look no further than the fields of North Dakota for a living example of why freedom of peaceful assembly is regarded as an inalienable human right, and of the obstacles and threats faced by its practitioners, in this case, water protectors.
Standing Rock showed us the long odds faced by those who peaceably assemble. It began with ominous walls of armored police and military vehicles. Our social media feeds filled with photos of dogs sicced on peaceful protesters, and of traumatic injuries from rubber bullets, tear gas and the like. New and shocking abuses of power included turning firehoses on a crowd in subfreezing temperatures. And it wasn’t just the state; locals threatened water protectors with violence as well.
The Standing Rock Sioux and their allies held themselves to high standards of peaceful action and prayer and did not provoke law enforcement. They were attacked because they amplified their voices by taking space with a long-term encampment, an increasingly popular mode of assembly in the 21st century.
Violence is not the only indignity and human rights violation faced by protesters. Other, more guileful threats awaited them. Take the letter written by Col. John Henderson of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to tribal chairman David Archambault the day after Thanksgiving. In the letter, Henderson told the protesters they’d have to vacate the Oceti Sakowin camp for their own safety. In return, he offered them a “free speech zone.”
Joel Berg at The Washington Monthly writes—U.S. Poverty Policy Is Outdated and Inefficient. Here’s a Better Approach:
U.S. poverty policy is stuck in a rut. In 2015, 43 million people in America were living in poverty – more than the combined populations of Texas, Pennsylvania, and Nebraska and 11 million more than in 2000.
Slow growth and inequality are the main culprits. But the outdated way we deliver social services – through ponderous, top-down bureaucracies and siloed programs – also hinders efforts by low-income Americans to rise out of poverty. [...]
It’s time for policymakers to discard the notion that “hassle” is the right way to ensure that only those people truly in need are the ones who access benefits. There is a better approach to poverty policy – one that is efficient and reaches everyone in need while at the same time encouraging personal responsibility. This approach is to equip all low-income individuals in need with an Online HOPE (Health, Opportunity, and Personal Empowerment) account and action plan that can help individuals both receive the benefits they need and build a long-term plan to lift themselves out of poverty in the long term.
Dave Kamper at The Jacobin writes—Trump’s anti-worker agenda won’t be implemented overnight. Labor has a narrow window to build its power.
According to a recent report, the Service Employees International Union is implementing an immediate 10 percent cut in spending, rising to 30 percent by the beginning of 2018. Bloomberg’s Josh Eidelson writes that SEIU president Mary Kay Henry told staffers in a memo that the assaults on labor expected of a Trump presidency and an anti-worker Congress “require us to make tough decisions that allow us to resist these attacks and to fight forward despite dramatically reduced resources.”
This is an understandable decision — a Trump presidency will undoubtedly be disastrous for both workers’ lives and union budgets. But signaling such a retreat before Trump is even in office is also a significant strategic error and one that will do great harm to unions’ ability to fight for working people in the face of right-wing headwinds.
Now is not the time to tighten our belts. Labor must invest in member power now if we’re going to save ourselves later.