I am finding this diary very hard to write, in the face of several conflicting pressures. For Black History month, I want to spotlight Black issues; but I have neither the experience nor the knowledge to do them justice. I admire most of what Bernie Sanders says and does; but if I focus on Bernie, the comments will turn into another episode of DKos’ most popular pie-fight. I ought to end this TRT with action items, I found it proactive and heartening when earlier TRTs did that; but in fact, I myself don’t do enough work for progressive causes in real life, and I’d feel hypocritical advising others to work harder than I already do.
Yet, these are healthy pressures, they’re salutary. These pressures push me to learn and do more, beyond my comfort zone, to get closer to the progressive that I see myself as. We are living in times of turbulence, we’re all feeling hurt, rage, and confusion. Trump’s America is so wrong, so heartless and hateful, so backwards and upside-down. We face our natural pressures, of life’s normal challenges; and the extra pressures of an America getting ripped apart by greed, selfishness, lies and gleeful hate. Our great challenge is, how to persevere through both kinds of pressures, learning from the natural ones that help us grow into stronger selves, while avoiding going crazy, from the rabid lemming stampede driving America over a cliff. That rabies is not natural, it is a sickness that does not belong in our democracy. But it has some roots in our humanity, and in America, that we must find and fix.
We need to keep hope, to keep determined, and to keep hold of each other. All of us together against the Rethugs, we have enough strength and sanity to prevail. But “all of us together” will require Democrats to reach out to more Lefties and Independents, and to get everyone on our side registered and to the polls in 2018 and beyond.
Of all the countries in the world throughout history, America is a pretty good one, relatively. I refer to the United States as “America” (of which we’re but one fraction) because I’m not entirely aiming at factual accuracy here, but also at shared meanings, the hopes and dreams that inspire and unite us.
When I was born, in the ‘60s, we were worse in some respects, but better in a crucial way, at the very heart of our being. Roughly, America in the ‘60s was less fair and friendly towards women, Black and Brown people, LGBTs, the disabled, the mentally ill, and anyone who appeared Other, outside our norms. Except that we had more compassion for the homeless and poor people; there was a deliberate othering of them starting under Reagan, so that the public would grow less sympathetic, and it would be easier for Rethugs to cut their benefits.
The social advances of American culture, since the ‘60s, have mostly been an extending of our humanity, so that now we see most of the groups that straight, white squares once considered inferior Others, as fully human and equal, belonging in America and deserving of equal rights and respect. Again, roughly—because we still have massive amounts of enlightenment yet to achieve. But we have improved and, if you live like me in a coastal liberal city, you might almost think America is civilized. Until you turn on your T.V.
So how were we better in the ‘60s than we are now? We shared a middle-class dream. My mother moved, with her three youngest children in tow, to Europe in 1973. We left behind a country that took middle-class values for granted (without acknowledging how we were short-changing all the aforementioned less straight, white square segments of society). The ‘60s American Dream was: everyone deserves an equal chance on a level playing field, at least in the necessities of life. Government was responsible for making all public schools decent, so that any budding Einstein (even from the poorest neighborhood) would have good enough teachers and books and supplies to get into M.I.T.; govt. built the best highway system the world had seen, and kept our bridges from falling down; govt. gave everyone clean enough tap water to drink, so that we wouldn’t have any horrors like Flint.
Government mostly followed through on these basic responsibilities, which is why America had more social mobility then and far less people falling through the cracks at the bottom. There were certainly failures and mistakes. But Americans shared a belief in good government, we didn’t have Rethugs trying to shrink govt. till they could drown it in a bathtub, both openly and in worse ways behind closed doors.
I returned to America in 1983, and this country was being refashioned into a country of rich and poor, which splitting has continued and accelerated ever since. We are now a country of the 1% and the 99%, many of who are fixated on their pipe-dreams of joining the 1%, although they never will. The pipe-dreamers have traded their birthright for a mess of pottage. If they get it served up by Fox News, their pottage is laced with a lot of rabid lemming poison, too.
My story is not entirely accurate, as I said it’s more about “shared meanings, the hopes and dreams that inspire and unite us.” Because the America living in our hearts is more about that, than precise facts. What we believe in, what inspires us, makes all the difference. I was born in an America where, in spite of the flaws, we believed we would build a bigger, braver America than our parents had, and we felt we each had a chance to work hard and rise up honestly.
From Reagan on, that American dream was melting like Antarctica for twenty years, then Bush’s fake war and tax cuts took an icepick to it. Now Donald Trump and his Rethug minions have put the pieces in a blender, and added our tears to make their margaritas. We 99% need to work together, inventing and building a 21st Century American Dream. We on the left have trouble uniting and working effectively in the best of times, and now we have to do so in the face of apocalyptic madness and destruction. Which we can, if we connect the strength in all our hearts, to multiply our shared sanity and certainty in humankind.
The first step towards jamming the oligarchy America has become, and returning us to the democracy we need to be in order to progress and improve, is loosening the stranglehold that corporations and billionaires have on our representatives. We sure could use five Supreme Court Justices who aren’t asinine enough to buy Citizens United. In the meanwhile, this from Business Insider is an encouraging turn:
Gillibrand became the fourth sitting Democratic senator to ban corporate PAC cash, putting her in the same camp as Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, both of whom Gillibrand may square off against in the 2020 presidential primary. The move indicates the party's solidifying rejection of corporate influence in politics, the rejection of which may become the next litmus test for Democrats who want to rise in the party.
"I believe the flood of special interest and secret money into campaigns is corrosive and leading to corruption both hard and soft in Congress," Gillibrand, who's running for Senate reelection in 2018, said Tuesday. "We won't be able to bring down Medicare drug prices, stop companies from outsourcing our jobs or start to rebuild the middle class until we can stem the unlimited influence special interest money applies over politicians."…
Democratic strategists agree the decision is smart, and almost obvious — it will win Gillibrand points with the party's base, burnish her economic populist credentials, and distance her from Clinton, whose close ties to Wall Street and other corporate interests hurt her during the 2016 Democratic presidential primary….
And the PAC-money prohibition likely won't hurt Gillibrand's bottom line very much. About 15% of the total funds she's raised throughout her time in the House and Senate have come from PACs, 65% of which came from business PACs, Roll Call reported Tuesday. An aide said the senator will continue to accept money from labor PACs.
It looks to me like Democrats have lost the battle to safeguard our DACA brothers and sisters. But it’s a tangled mess, and it’s not over yet. Trump, McConnell, Ryan, and the somehow even uglier Stephen Miller were rotten lying shits. Perhaps Nancy Pelosi making her principled stand, but not whipping her caucus into a government shutdown, was the most she could accomplish, under all the pressures she balances to keep all her constituents, from voters to powers that be working sort of together. Given the Rethugs track record on this issue, I think she knew this wouldn’t be enough.
In the big picture, if we progressives are inventing and building a 21st Century American Dream, then standing strong, to the utmost, with the Dreamers Trump keeps bullying lies at the heart of that Dream.
The ugliest face of America today, which Trump embodies, is all this arrogant, selfish, hateful scorn. Trump and his frothy base deem so many kinds of people "enemies of America", then dehumanize and attack these enemies, as if they were dangerous beasts: felons and potential criminals; people with mental health issues; homeless and poor people; Muslims; Latinos, lest they be immigrants; Blacks who are minding their own business; LGBTs; women who complain about harassment or injustice. Trump, Kelly, Sessions, Kobach, Miller, indeed the entire Rethug powers that be, they are the poisonous and vindictive shadow in America's heart.
Well, that's what we're fighting against, that is what all sound Progressives decry. So what are we fighting for, then, always and forever? We're fighting for the largest view of Humanity, dignity and equal rights for every individual and all kinds of individual. In this case, we all know in our hearts that Dreamers are not The Other, they are true and worthy Americans, they belong here and are worthier citizens than Donald Trump's base are.
When Democrats fail to fight tooth and nail to keep Dreamers safe and achieve complete legal status for them as US citizens, Democrats are also relinquishing another piece of the party's own humanity, of just what makes us better than the Rethugs we're battling — and of the first principle attracting voters to the polls for us: the certain knowledge that Democrats are standing and fighting, representing every element of the 99% that Trump is screwing every day.
Here’s an editorial from Friday’s Guardian. I don’t fully agree with it, but it offers hope and new facts. Our immigration debate is so stuck in circular arguments, that I’m ready to open my mind to new angles on it, even when I don’t see how they’ll get a toehold in our jammed political machinery.
It is logical to support immigration restrictions if you believe that the United States is fundamentally an Anglo-European culture with western civilizational roots. This logic drove the United States’ earliest immigration laws from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Immigration Act of 1924 that established quotas to protect a racially defined notion of who could enter the United States. Subsequent immigration laws removed the explicitly racist elements, but have continued to limit the number of immigrants, the vast majority of whom are not white.
The core of the Democratic position on immigration is harder to discern. Democrats are in favor of some border security, but definitely not a wall. Democrats favor some immigrants such as Dreamers, but accept the status quo that restricts immigration from most of the planet. Since the Republicans have come clean on their desire to reduce legal immigration, Democrats should formulate a forceful pro-immigration argument in favor of open borders….
Open borders could have an enormous positive impact on GDP worldwide. Even critics of immigration, such as George Borjas, acknowledge this: “The removal of immigration restrictions would indeed lead to a huge increase in GDP: global wealth would increase by $40tn – almost a 60% rise. Moreover, the gain would accrue each year after the restrictions were removed.” Given the clear economic benefit, the conservative Wall Street Journal ran an editorial in 1984 arguing for a five word amendment to the US constitution: “There shall be open borders.”
The concern that some citizens might lose jobs to immigrants is not supported by research. One study found migrant and native workers are employed in different sectors of the economy, another showed that migrants create 1.2 additional jobs beyond the job they do because they rent an apartment, buy a car, and frequent local businesses.
I like Gary Younge for always telling the blistering truth. I usually find him in The Guardian, but this is from The Nation:
So when President Donald Trump asked, in reference to immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and the nations of Africa, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?,” his sentiments should be understood as firmly in the tradition of official US immigration and foreign policy, not as an aberration. As such, liberal indignation has to engage with two important and challenging issues when it comes to Trump’s bigotry, be it leaked, tweeted, or officially proclaimed. First, it is not unique to him but has been a structural feature of the polity for some time, even when individual leaders may not have embraced it. Second, this would not be possible without broad consent from a considerable section of American society. Liberals and progressives need to come to terms with the fact that not only was it possible for such an openly racist candidate to get elected, but that this could never have happened if the country weren’t more racist than they had previously believed…. America, like most of the West, has not only referred to but treated much of Africa, the Caribbean, and the other nonwhite portions of the planet as shitholes.
What is new about Trump is that, in the post-colonial, post-civil-rights era, Western leaders were increasingly compelled to think like this and act on it without ever saying it. At home, they would hide behind law and order, welfare reform, the War on Drugs, or school vouchers without ever mentioning race. Abroad, as we saw with the last invasion of Iraq, they claimed that the subjugation and humiliation of poorer, darker nations was motivated by the pursuit of a greater good: making the world safe for democracy and spreading Enlightenment values. As President Richard Nixon’s chief of staff H.R. Haldeman wrote in his journal, Nixon “emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”
The fact that Trump has done away with appearances matters. His brazen outbursts embolden that section of white America that has not yet come to terms with either the relatively new reality of a nonracial democracy (it has barely been 50 years) or the relatively immediate prospect of no longer being a racial majority (it will happen in the next 30) to deny the past, contort the present, and resist the future. This is a shift in etiquette with serious consequences. This is where Charlottesville came from. It explains the sharp increase in the number of hate crimes since 2016, particularly around race and Islamophobia. When the president tells police it’s OK to rough up suspects in a country where black people are already being shot in the streets, bad things will happen.
But a shift in tone should not be mistaken for a shift in policy or practice, lest one start to give Trump far more credit than he is due. He didn’t introduce racism, xenophobia, and imperial disdain into the state any more than Barack Obama, by his presence alone, could get rid of them. What is new about this moment is its appalling clarity. The patina of plausible deniability that shrouded a culture of systemic exclusion has been stripped away with great fanfare. Nobody is pretending anymore.
We are living in shocking times. The shocks disturb us, we lose our balance; for a month after Trump got elected I was losing sleep and my appetite too. It is horrific living through such wrongness, in an America that never should have been like this. That’s how I feel, and I’m fortunate: I’m a white man, who can pay his bills, in an apartment in LA but, unlike some of my neighbors, secure in knowing that ICE will never bang on my door and drag me out of here, then out of the only homeland I know. But the suffering around us, the roiling hate and destruction of norms and safety nets we believe in, it infects us all.
What shocks me most is, how can anyone look at Trump and see a President, or see what he says and does and imagine that he is good, that he cares for anything outside himself and his petty ego? I’ve been watching this car crash too closely, except for the raw horror Trump is an interesting case. So I see how the Rethugs have gamed so many systems, and then how Trump has gamed the Rethugs. I see how broken down and venal our MSM was, especially throughout the primaries and campaign; and how social media, and Russians, and others fed into that whole spin cycle of lies.
When you look for the heart of Trump, what he believes in and shouts about most often, what he shifts off his lazy ass and actually fights for, he appears to have swallowed the whole goblin mirror from Andersen’s fairy tale. Trump dreams such twisted nightmares, his hopes are so grabby, furious and cruel.
Our Progressive Dreams are so much nobler, they are the cathedral vault of America’s heart, aiming for clean blue heavens. We have our differences, and we will be quibbling over them forever, like the Left always has. But there are some fundamental truths, the very core of what we stand for, that we all agree on. We need to start on that solid ground, because we’re already fighting to get better and more Democrats elected this fall, and then another blue wave in 2020. America is at a crossroads, and we good guys and gals must win and win again. Before more Americans fall into the Rethug goblin mirror, distorting all we once knew to be true and precious.
Here from Common Dreams is Trump’s nightmare of America, writ in the only language he cares for, dollar signs:
On Monday, President Donald Trump released his proposed budget for 2019. On the heels of his only legislative accomplishment to date, the massive tax cut that favors the wealthiest individuals and corporations, Trump’s budget would slash or completely eliminate core anti-poverty programs that form the heart of the U.S. social safety net, from childhood nutrition to care for the elderly and job training. It blatantly violates one of his key campaign promises, to leave untouched Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The Trump budget is a document of towering immorality, a wish list of extreme right-wing cuts to federal spending that would destroy a century of progressive legislative achievements. Congress will be in recess for the next week, and elected representatives who support Trump’s cruel agenda should expect a wave of opposition as people organize resistance from coast to coast.
“This budget is the budget of the Koch brothers. It is the budget of the billionaire class. And the American people understand it,” Vermont’s independent senator, Bernie Sanders, said, railing against Charles and David Koch, the two billionaire industrialist brothers who have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into U.S. elections in order to promote their far-right agenda.
Sanders continued: “This is a budget which will make it harder for our children to get a decent education, harder for working families to get the health care they desperately need, harder to protect the air that we breathe and the water we drink, and harder for the elderly to live out their retirement years with dignity and respect. This is not a budget, as candidate Donald Trump talked about, that takes on the political establishment. This is a budget of the political establishment. This is the Robin Hood principle in reverse: It is a budget that takes from the poor and gives to the very wealthy.”…
Many Beltway observers concede that the Trump budget has almost no chance of being passed. Of course, these are the same people who said Trump had no chance of being elected. But the budget relays a vision for the country held by the president and the Republican Party. This budget signals a dark, heartless and cruel future, exacerbating poverty, inequality and suffering. It is a budget that the people of the United States cannot afford.
Amy Goodman, who wrote that article, is a national treasure. If you watch YouTube at all, then check out Democracy Now! on YouTube. They’re well worth bookmarking or subscribing to. Their weekday morning roundup, Top U.S. & World Headlines, is a ten or fifteen minute overview of the news, which covers many stories that the MSM is ignoring or glossing over. Here is Amy Goodman interviewing Rep. Pramila Jayapal on how Trump’s Immoral Budget Punishes the Poor, Sick & Elderly:
AMY GOODMAN: We turn to President Trump’s $4.4 trillion budget plan, unveiled this week. The plan proposes deep cuts to education, healthcare, social safety net programs—while massively increasing the Pentagon’s budget. Trump’s plan would slash the Department of Education’s budget by more than 10 percent. It would sharply reduce income-based student loan repayment plans, while ending the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program. Trump’s budget would cut more than $17 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, barring food stamp recipients from buying fresh fruit and vegetables, and instead providing only a boxed food delivery program. The budget would also phase out federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports public and community radio and TV stations. This comes as McClatchy reports the Trump administration is considering a plan that would not only impose work requirements for Medicaid enrollees, but which would also put a lifetime limit on adults’ access to Medicaid. Meanwhile, Trump’s budget would see a 13 percent rise in spending on weapons and war, bringing the Pentagon’s budget to $686 billion. The administration says its plan would add $7.1 trillion to U.S. budget deficits over the next decade, though many economists say that number relies on rosy projections. The budget comes less than two months after Trump signed into law one of the largest tax cuts in U.S. history, one that overwhelmingly favors the wealthiest Americans….
REP. PRAMILA JAYAPAL: Well, this is—I call it the “three strikes you’re out” budget for working people and the poor and the elderly and the sick and the disabled, because strike one was, you know, to actually transfer $1.3 trillion in wealth from working people and the poor to the wealthiest through the GOP tax scam. And to their credit, they are finally saying, in this budget, that actually those GOP tax cuts don’t pay for themselves, because they’re projecting these enormous deficits as a result of the tax cuts. Strike two is that they’re essentially going to balloon the deficit, and—as you said, $7 trillion over 10 years, a trillion dollars next year alone. And strike three is cutting every program that allows people to live with any shred of dignity, any shred of hope, any shred of opportunity….
So, this budget, you know, to me, is—a budget is supposed to be a statement of moral principles. This is a statement of a immoral principles, because it literally is saying to people that if you’re poor, you’re worthless; if you’re elderly, you’re worthless; if you can’t afford housing because minimum wage has not actually kept up with inflation over the years, and so you may be working two or three jobs, minimum-wage jobs, but you still can’t put food on the table or a roof over your head, then somehow you don’t get to have the assistance of the government to climb out of it. So, it’s a cruel budget.
And while it’s true that this budget is not going to pass this year, because it already contradicts so dramatically the agreement that was made last week in the Senate and the House, the reality is the Trump administration is trying to put forward a proposal that, oh, deficits are ballooned so much that now we have to cut Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security. These are programs that three-quarters of Americans rely on. And so, ultimately, this is saying to the wealthiest 1 percent and the biggest corporations—it’s a love letter, on Valentine’s Day, to those millionaires, billionaires and wealthiest corporations. Those are the only people that are going to benefit from this budget.
I’ll give the last word—until your comments, dear readers—to Masha Gessen. She is a Russian immigrant who has been a journalist here and there, written a book about Putin, and many articles on autocrats, being queer, and many other matters. She’s astute, she has idiosyncratic ideas, and she always gets me thinking in new directions. This is from a mostly personal piece she wrote in the New York Review of Books, about choosing her identity as a Russian or an American, as a woman or a man or queer, but also imagining the ghosts of herself that had chosen the other way. It’s a long piece, this is just a taste of it:
Choice is a great burden. The call to invent one’s life, and to do it continuously, can sound unendurable. Totalitarian regimes aim to stamp out the possibility of choice, but what aspiring autocrats do is promise to relieve one of the need to choose. This is the promise of “Make America Great Again”—it conjures the allure of an imaginary past in which one was free not to choose.
I’ve been surprised, in the last year, that the resurgence of interest in some of the classic books on totalitarianism has not brought back Erich Fromm’s wonderful Escape from Freedom… In the book, Fromm proposes that there are two kinds of freedom: “freedom from,” which we all want—we all want our parents to stop telling us what to do—and “freedom to,” which can be difficult or even unbearable. This is the freedom to invent one’s future, the freedom to choose. Fromm suggests that at certain times in human history the burden of “freedom to” becomes too painful for a critical mass of people to bear, and they take the opportunity to cede their agency—whether it’s to Martin Luther, Adolf Hitler, or Donald Trump.
No wonder Trump appears to be obsessed with people who embody choice. Immigrants are his most frightening imaginary enemy, the ones who need to be “extremely vetted,” blocked out with a wall, whose crimes need to be reported to a special hotline and whose families need to be kept out of this country. It puts me in mind of the “aggressive monitoring” for the cancer that’s sure to come. Transgender people have been another target of Trump’s apparently spontaneous lashing out—witness the transgender ban in the military, the rescinding of protections for transgender students, and now the ban on the very word “transgender.”...
Immigrants make a choice. The valor is not in remaining at risk for catching a bullet but in making the choice to avoid it. In the Soviet Union, most dissidents believed that if one were faced with the impossible choice between leaving the country and going to prison, one ought to choose exile. Less dramatically, the valor is in being able to experience your move less as an escape and more as an adventure. It is in serving as living reminders of the choicefulness of life—something that immigrants and most trans people do, whether their personal narratives are ones of choice or not.
I wish I could finish on a hopeful note, by saying something like: If only we insist on making choices, we will succeed in keeping darkness at bay. I’m not convinced that that’s the case. But I do think that making choices and, more important, imagining other, better choices, will give us the best chance possible of coming out of the darkness better than we were when we went in. It’s a bit like emigrating that way: the choice to leave rarely feels free, but choices we make about inhabiting new landscapes (or changed bodies) demand an imagination.
We must choose a better 21st Century American Dream, because Trump’s nightmare is hideous, shrinking American humanity and dividing our hearts. We are the 99%, we are the better American truth, we can be the solution. When every Democrat stands on our clear, basic principles, and fights to the utmost even when Trump rigs the DACA fight into a three-card Monte trick, then even those who have lost faith in politics will come to the polls and vote for more blue waves. As Meteor Blades aptly put it, we believe in:
A revolution of intersectionality that doesn’t demand this or that group should “wait for its turn.” A revolution which recognizes that matters of race, gender, economics, and environment must be resolved together—without downplaying, denigrating, or ignoring one or another of them—else none of them will be resolved.