During a Q&A with Oprah Winfrey, Van Jones, and Ava DuVernay, director of the new Netflix documentary 13th which documents the links between the clear flaws in the abolition of slavery and the ongoing criminalization of African-American men, Jones spoke in very stark terms about America’s future under Trump.
Asked by Winfrey what he expected of the new administration, Jones said, “I think mostly bad things. Both parties have a challenge. I think the president will prove to be authoritarian … You will see a horrendous abuse of power by this government. I think it’s good to hope for the best but we need to expect and prepare for the very worst.”
He added: “I think Trump is much worse than people understand … I think we’re on the verge of a kleptocracy.”
Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be a flaw in that logic. Jones is absolutely correct. And then some.
Not to be a Debbie Downer, but there really isn’t any other reasonable way to look at it. This administration will be a total cluster-frack, and Trump’s own supercilious hyperconfidence in his own infallibility is even more disconcerting now than it was before the election. His remaining and ongoing ethical entanglements, growing concern over his links to and influence by Russian intelligence, and his openly attacking an African-American hero and icon like John Lewis are not heartening.
We’re told that we should trust Trump and “just give him a chance” because he’s such a “great businessman” who will clearly bring jobs “back to America”—yet his greatest pre-inauguration feat, the salvaging of less than 1,000 jobs at Carrier air conditioning from going to Mexico, is being massively panned by the other 1,600 workers who are still getting fired.
[Trump] announced before a packed house of employees and news media that more than 1,100 jobs would stay in the Carrier plant.
But the numbers Trump announced don’t add up. When James and other union leaders met with the company right before Trump went on stage, they were told 730 union jobs would be saved at the Indianapolis plant―nearly 400 less than Trump announced. Trump was apparently including 350 engineering and administrative employees, but they were never leaving. That meant 550 workers would lose their jobs in Indianapolis as well as 738 workers at Huntington, which would shut down entirely.
That made James angry. He was one of the workers selected to appear before Trump as the news media broadcast the event live, but was in no mood to meet with the president-elect or shake his hand.
It was left to James and USW Local 1999 President Chuck Jones to dash the hopes of many workers. “We had to explain to workers that number was wrong. The workers were shocked that the number of jobs saved were lower than they thought. A lot said, ‘That’s fucked up.’”
Jones was more pointed, telling the media the president-elect “lied his ass off” about the jobs saved. That earned him Trump’s wrath, leading to threats pouring in such as, “You better keep your eye on your kids” and “We’re coming for you.” Jones says, “It really pissed me off he misled people their jobs might be saved. He didn’t want to get up and tell people part of the plant is going to stay and part of the plant is going to Mexico.”
So even if and when Trump accomplishes some tangible good, it’s still only going to be half-a-loaf at best. Trump and his various surrogates continue to make numerous contradictory claims about Obamacare, saying that they’ll replace it “easily” and also somehow allow the 30 million who would be left vulnerable by its repeal to still retain coverage.
What they haven’t come close to explaining yet is: How?
What we have heard from House Speaker Paul Ryan is that those who had been previously blocked from acquiring insurance due to “pre-existing conditions” will be split off and separated from the younger, more healthy public by placing them in what should be best called “high-risk” death pools.
As our own Charles “Brainwrap” Gabba describes, only about 8 percent of the public already have chronic medical conditions—and this group comprises about 50 percent of all medical costs. So yes, it’s true that isolating those with chronic conditions would save money and bring down premiums for the other 92 percent of the public, perhaps by as much as half, but it would increase premiums from those in the death pool by as much as six times. As Gabba states, Ryan’s proposal of $2.5 billion per year of premium support for this group is perhaps less than one-tenth of what’s needed to fully fund care, which means the remainder would have to come out of pocket or else coverage would have to be significantly cut to close the gap.
More than 92 percent of the public might be very happy to have a significant cut in their premiums, one which might grow even greater if options such as low-cost, high-deductible “Junk” insurance which is next to worthless when actual care is needed, but is that a good trade-off for those left trapped in the death pools with skyrocketing costs and shrinking coverage? And that’s on top of Ryan’s plan to voucherize Medicare and block grant Medicaid, which would significant cut the coverage and increase premiums for those programs, according to the CBO.
The Ryan budget would cut Medicare spending by $129 billion over the 2015-2024 period, relative to the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) current-law baseline, by raising Medicare’s income-tested premiums, increasing cost sharing, limiting medical malpractice awards, and apparently repealing the benefit improvements in health reform (including closure of the prescription drug “donut hole,” described below). Ryan’s budget also includes about $140 billion in scheduled cuts from Medicare’s sustainable growth rate formula for physicians and about $110 billion in future Medicare cuts from sequestration.
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The proposal’s impact on individual beneficiaries would differ depending on whether traditional Medicare or private plans cost less in their region, but it would disadvantage beneficiaries in at least two ways. First, in many regions, traditional Medicare would cost more than the premium-support voucher, so beneficiaries who chose to enroll in traditional Medicare would have to pay higher premiums than under current law. Second, beneficiaries who enrolled in a private plan would not receive the federally subsidized supplemental benefits that enrollees in private Medicare Advantage plans receive under current law.
Yet again, half a loaf at best.
And Ryan’s proposal to defund Planned Parenthood and replace its services with community health centers may be a disaster for women’s health.
I have worked with community health centers for nearly 40 years, and no one believes more strongly than I do in their ability to transform the primary health care landscape in medically underserved low-income communities. But a claim that community health centers readily can absorb the loss of Planned Parenthood clinics amounts to a gross misrepresentation of what even the best community health centers in the country would be able to do were Planned Parenthood to lose over 40 percent of its operating revenues overnight as the result of a ban on federal funding.
For the millions of poor women who depend on Planned Parenthood clinics, this scenario would mean the loss of affordable and accessible contraceptive services and counseling, as well as breast and cervical cancer screenings and testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections (STIs). The assertion that community health centers could step into a breach of this magnitude is simply wrong and displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how the health care system works.
As with many things, the past is prologue. Here’s a report by Rachel Maddow on Trump’s attempts to trick taxpayers into paying for the toxic cleanup on a failed business which had been run by his eldest son Donald Jr., showing yet again that Trump’s style of doing business is to pay as little as possible out of his own pocket and take as much as possible from the federal and state coffers.
More on Titan Atlas from the New York Times:
At issue is a six-acre factory site in North Charleston, S.C., that was once owned by Titan Atlas Manufacturing, an industrial venture that Donald Trump Jr. helped to start and that ceased operating in 2012.
In 2014, his father, now the president-elect, formed a new Trump Organization affiliate called D B Pace, which took over a $3.65 million bank loan made to Titan Atlas with the property as security.
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This year, D B Pace applied under a state program to undertake a voluntary cleanup of the property. If approved, the company would also gain protection against liabilities related to any pollution there, such as chemical contamination of local groundwater, caused by Titan Atlas and other past owners.
There is, however, a catch: To qualify for the protections, the buyer of a contaminated property must not be affiliated with a former owner, or have had involvement with the site.
So in order to get the state of South Carolina to pay for the toxic mess caused by his son’s company, Trump has to mystically, magically convince them he’s not affiliated with his own son, who has his own name and is going to be running his companies while he’s president.
That’s pretty blatant. It’s right in your face that this guy just doesn’t give a frack and he never has, going to back to when he bought his first properties largely using tax abatements.
In his disdain of big government, however, Trump glances over an expensive irony: He built his empire in part through government largesse and connections.
From his first high-profile project in New York City in the 1970s to his recent campaigns to reduce taxes on property he owns around the country, Trump has displayed a consistent pattern. He courted public officials, sought their backing for government tax breaks under extraordinarily beneficial terms and fought any resistance to deals he negotiated.
He has boasted of manipulating government agencies, misleading officials in one case into believing he had an exclusive agreement to develop a property and then retroactively changing the development's accounting practices to shrink his tax bill. In New York, Trump was the first developer to receive a public subsidy for commercial projects under programs initially reserved for improving slum neighborhoods. Such incentives have now become the norm in the powerful New York real estate community.
Trump quite literally took tax breaks intended to help the poor and kept the money for his own rich self—reverse Robin Hood supreme. And then of course as most of us know, he would then regularly stiff his subcontractors on the final bill.
Yet people expect that he’s going to help America balance its books when he himself is more than $1 billion in debt to foreign governments.
And even one of the more universally popular of Trump’s proposals, his infrastructure plan, is yet another example of his classic bait and switch.
First, Trump’s plan is not really an infrastructure plan. It’s a tax-cut plan for utility-industry and construction-sector investors, and a massive corporate welfare plan for contractors. The Trump plan doesn’t directly fund new roads, bridges, water systems or airports, as did Hillary Clinton’s 2016 infrastructure proposal. Instead, Trump’s plan provides tax breaks to private-sector investors who back profitable construction projects. These projects (such as electrical grid modernization or energy pipeline expansion) might already be planned or even underway. There’s no requirement that the tax breaks be used for incremental or otherwise expanded construction efforts; they could all go just to fatten the pockets of investors in previously planned projects.
Moreover, as others have noted, desperately needed infrastructure projects that are not attractive to private investors — municipal water-system overhauls, repairs of existing roads, replacement of bridges that do not charge tolls — get no help from Trump’s plan. And contractors? Well, they get a “10 percent pretax profit margin,” according to the plan. Combined with Trump’s sweeping business tax break, this would represent a stunning $85 billion after-tax profit for contractors — underwritten by the taxpayers.
In addition to all this, at least 48 percent of current federal employees are concerned that their agencies will be weakened or dysfunctional under Trump.
The Government Executive reports that nearly 60 percent of federal employees disapproved of Trump’s transition, and just one-third think he might be “at least partly effective at managing government.” Most federal employees who participated in the survey believed the incoming administration would likely not be effective with the day-to-day aspects of government management.
Only 20 percent of the respondents thought Trump would positively impact their agency’s mission, while 48 percent responded the opposite.
And all of this is on top of his cabinet of neo-deplorables with their host of ethical conflicts and character issues, starting with alt-Nazi propagandist Steve Bannon; his attorney general pick who has a history of bigotry and no real support for civil rights or policing reform; secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson with his tight ties to Russia, tendency to enrage China, complete lack of a moral compass regarding the impact of his former company Exxon’s working hand-in-hand with regimes that engage in human rights abuses and his denial of the impact of climate change; a Health and Human Services nominee who has a history of trading stocks with companies that he’s writing legislation for; a CIA nominee who wants unrestricted power to collect data despite the Fourth Amendment; and a Labor nominee who opposes raising the minimum wage and believes more in the value of robots and automation than the work of humans.
Not to mention the latest Trump advisor who is being sued for hiring white thugs to beat up black people.
Most of the outlook here is pretty bleak, but on the other hand the one thing that Trump’s administration may have already done is reignite and focus a robust protest and opposition movement against him.
Not only did the first female presidential nominee of a major political party lose after her victory was taken for granted, but she lost to a man caught on tape boasting about groping women. Now the sadness, alarm and ensuing determination that many young American women felt after the door-slam of the 2016 election have become catalysts for a resurging women's movement.
"We all assumed that it was time for a woman to have this opportunity, and that it was obvious," added Alsop. "It's galvanized people."
The Women's March on Washington is bringing some women together around America, where they meet in state and local chapters to prepare for the march and to share experiences. In Key West, Fla., women are participating together in late-night yoga. In Orlando, they meet at a Fuddruckers restaurant. Women in Washington state are knitting special hats for the march. Women in Texas gather in living rooms to create signs.
The women’s march held on the Saturday after the inauguration may ultimately be one of the largest public protests in history. There are now an estimated 3,000 groups registered at IndivisibleGuide.com—which you can search and interact with here—all armed with a strategic plan of action to impact their local Congress members and help stem the tide of Trump’s malfeasance and kleptocracy.
Trump’s regime will have an impact on the nation which will be mostly, if not almost entirely negative. But we don’t have to accept that. We don’t have to fold up our hands and walk away. In fact, now is exactly the time to get engaged, to get involved, to take a stand, and make your voices heard.
We will survive Trump. We will battle and soon conquer his agenda. The fight begins now—and I have no intention of losing.