Eric Levitz at New York magazine’s “Daily Intelligencer” writes—Trump Tries to Make Tax Cuts for Rich People Sound Populist:
Virtually no one in the United States believes that taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals should be cut. In one recent Gallup survey, just 9 percent of respondents said corporations paid too much in taxes, while 67 percent said they paid too little; for “upper income people,” those figures were 10 and 63, respectively.
But even these numbers fail to convey the dearth of public demand for the Republican Party’s tax “reform” effort. Voters don’t merely lack enthusiasm for cutting taxes on the rich and powerful — most don’t even see a need for their taxes to be cut. In April, Gallup found 61 percent of Americans saying that their current income-tax burden is “fair” — the highest that figure has been at any point since 2009. Meanwhile, even those who believe that they deserve a tax cut don’t (generally) see such a measure as worth prioritizing: Last month, a Bloomberg poll found that less than 5 percent of Americans believe tax policy is the “most important issue facing the country” — less than half the percentage that picked climate change.
And this common wisdom has much to recommend it. America’s wealthiest have already hoarded three decades’ worth of economic growth; America’s effective corporate tax rate is already competitive with those of other nations. Meanwhile, we’ve got to finance the growing costs of the baby boomers’ mass retirement; restore the nation’s decaying infrastructure; and, now, rebuild our fourth-largest city. The notion that Congress should make “dramatically reducing federal revenue so as to increase the post-tax income of the one percent” it’s top priority is so indefensible, even tea party Republicans won’t argue forthrightly for their agenda. Donald Trump didn’t win the White House on a promise to cut taxes for the rich, but on a vow to raise wages for middle-income workers, while cracking down on “special interests” (and, ya know, do all that racist stuff).
But the GOP donor class expects a return on its investment. And so, on Wednesday, the president tried to make a plan for doing their bidding sound like one for doing the American people’s.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—A hurricane of conservative hypocrisy:
One of the barriers to sensible politics is the opportunism that so often infects our debates about what government is there for, where we want it to be energetic and how we can keep it from violating the basic rights of citizens.
The muddled nature of our discussions of these matters has been brought home by two unfortunate events: the mass suffering unleashed by Hurricane Harvey and President Trump’s pardon of former sheriff Joe Arpaio.
In the case of the vicious storm, we are reminded that some politicians think government is great when it helps their own constituents and wasteful if it helps anyone else. [...]
We also regularly assert that government is better when it prevents problems than when it focuses primarily on cleaning up after the fact. But when environmentalists suggest that development can be carried out in more sustainable ways or that climate change is worth dealing with, they are mocked as “anti-business” or “crisis-mongers.” Then a crisis comes, and we wonder why the politicians were so shortsighted.
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times, who has been relentlessly pounding on Trump since before it became the pundit thing to do, writes—Trump Raises an Army:
The final assessment on how this administration handles the storm can’t be made while it still rages, but what Trump says and does now is open to analysis. In that vein, a line from Trump’s joint press conference with the president of Finland stood out. When asked about pardoning former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio as Harvey was making landfall, Trump responded:
“Actually, in the middle of a hurricane, even though it was a Friday evening, I assumed the ratings would be far higher than they would be normally.”
Consider what this man is saying: He used the horror and anxious anticipation of a monster storm menacing millions of Americans — particularly in Houston whose population is 44 percent Hispanic — in a political calculation to get more ratings and more eyeballs on the fact that he was using the power of the presidency to forgive, and thereby condone, Arpaio’s racism.
Why does Trump continue to do things that are so divisive and alienating to the majority of Americans? Why does he keep fueling the white-hot fire of his base to the exclusion of the other segments of the country?
I have a theory: Trump and the people who either shield or support him are locked in a relationship of reciprocation, like a ball of snakes. Everyone is using everyone else.
Graham Vyse at The New Republic writes—Is Montana a Model for Fighting Trump’s Re-Militarization of the Police?
To hear civil libertarians tell it, Montana’s recent push to de-militarize the police has its roots in the Bozeman BearCat incident of 2014. The city’s police department bought a 17,000-pound armored vehicle—a Ballistic Engineered Armored Response Counter Attack Truck, or “BearCat”—with money from the federal Homeland Security Grant Program. But it did so without the knowledge of the City Commission, and public outcry ensued. “Some commenters went to the police department’s Facebook page, usually known for its campy morning posts, and chastised the department for getting such a vehicle,” The Bozeman Daily Chronicle reported. Soon, the hashtag #senditback began to circulate. Critics in this city of 45,000 worried that souped-up gear would start to make their local police department look more like a military force.
And it wasn’t just one shiny new BearCat—or one federal grant—they had to worry about. Since 1990, the Defense Department has transferred over $5.4 billion in surplus military equipment to state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies across the country through its “1033 Program.” As the Washington Post explained last week, the equipment has included “armored vehicles, riot gear, rifles, ammunition and computers that had been scrapped by the Defense Department,” and it all comes remarkably cheap. The only fee the local forces have to pay is shipping.
After much debate, the Bozeman City Commission ended up voting to keep the BearCat, but the controversy led to action at the state level in 2015, with Democratic Governor Steve Bullock signing a Republican-sponsored bill passed with bipartisan support. The Montana law blocks state and local police departments from receiving certain equipment from the 1033 Program, namely weaponized drones, aircraft configured for combat, grenade launchers, silencers, and militarized armored vehicles. Police are free to request other kinds of military surplus equipment from the federal government, but they must notify the public within 14 days of doing so.
Peter Cole at In These Times writes—These Dockworkers Just Showed the Labor Movement How to Shut Down Fascists:
What role should the labor movement play in beating back the resurgence of fascism? Resistance, while a powerful concept, is far too vague. Local 10, the San Francisco Bay Area branch of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU)—and perhaps the most radical union in the United States—demonstrates what can be done.
This past week, the San Francisco Bay Area—long a center of unionism, social justice movements and radicalism—took center stage. Patriot Prayer is a right-wing organization with a demonstrated history of inciting racist violence, most obviously in Portland, Ore., while ironically asserting peaceful intentions. The far-right group declared it would rally in San Francisco on Saturday.
Local 10 took a lead role in organizing counter-protests that contributed to the San Francisco event being canceled the day ahead of its scheduled event. The union’s role in this wave of popular mobilizations demands consideration.
At its August 17 meeting, Local 10 passed a “Motion to Stop the Fascists in San Francisco,” which laid out members’ opposition to the rally and intention to organize. This resolution enumerated the union’s justifications, starting with Donald Trump’s “whitewashing this violent, deadly fascist and racist attack [in Charlottesville] saying ‘both sides are to blame,’ and his attacking anti-racists for opposing Confederate statues that honor slavery adds fuel to the fire of racist violence.”
The dockworkers called out Patriot Prayer for inciting violence.
Linda Greenhouse at The New York Times writes—Eclipsing Dreams of Better Lives:
Immigration will be a highlight of the Supreme Court term that begins on Oct. 2; President Trump’s appeal of two separate rulings against his Muslim travel ban will be argued on Oct. 10. But there is another immigration case that has passed nearly completely under the radar in the more than a year that it has been on the court’s docket, a case with important implications for the constitutional rights of noncitizens who get caught up in any kind of immigration enforcement proceeding.
I don’t want to romanticize President Barack Obama’s immigration legacy. His administration’s immigration enforcement was aggressive. True, it maintained that it was limiting its enforcement to immigrants with criminal records. But the kind of crime with which immigration officials might be concerned is a judgment call, and during both the Obama and the George W. Bush administrations, the definition was capacious and unforgiving. A minor drug offense for which no jail time was imposed? A teenage “joy ride” in someone else’s car? Those two offenses combined were what earned Alejandro Rodriguez, a lawful permanent resident who was brought to the United States as an infant, more than three years in immigration detention awaiting deportation before he finally won an administrative appeal in 2008. [...]
The Ninth Circuit stopped short of ruling that a failure to provide hearings was unconstitutional. Rather, it interpreted federal immigration law itself to require the hearings, under a doctrine known as “constitutional avoidance” that courts invoke to interpret statutes in a way that avoids the need for a constitutional ruling. If the statutory structure didn’t require hearings, the court suggested, the Constitution’s guarantee of due process might well do so.
The Obama administration’s appeal to the Supreme Court, Jennings v. Rodriguez, reached the justices in April of last year. Its tone was fevered.
Thomas Frank at The Guardian writes—Finally, Democrats are looking in the mirror. That's reason for optimism:
Working people have been deserting the Democratic party for decades, making possible numerous Republican triumphs. Furthermore, it shouldn’t be hard to figure out how to appeal to them in the fourth decade of the great race to the bottom.
Adopting some of Bernie Sanders’s proposals would be eminently suitable for such an endeavor: universal healthcare, free college, going after the big banks, to name a few.
Making it easier to form unions is another idea that would pay off hugely for Democrats down the line, as workers discover the power of solidarity and begin to identify once again with the other constituencies of the left. Truth be told, there are dozens if not hundreds of Reagan/Clinton/Bush policies that Democrats could promise to reverse that would open the door to working people.
Faced with this cornucopia of good choices, however, our modern Democrats managed to pluck out a lump of coal. Schumer prefaced the rollout of A Better Deal by saying: “In the past, we were too cautious; we were too namby-pamby. This is sharp and bold.”
Alexandra Petri at The Washington Post writes—My letter of not quite resignation from the Trump White House:
Dear Mr. President,
I can say it in no uncertain terms: Everything this administration does makes me sick.
I am absolutely disgusted with everything going on the White House right now. Several times daily, I must run out of a meeting of the National Economic Council to vomit into a wastepaper basket. (Sometimes, weeks later, I am chagrined to discover one of these papers being presented as a policy proposal.) This cannot go on any longer.
Everyone has told me that I should resign. Random members of the media. My wife. People whom I did not even realize knew my name.
I am under tremendous pressure. I have done everything I can. I have privately described myself off the record as sickened and appalled. What more do you want from me? An actual letter of resignation? Well, I have certainly drafted one. I can draft another. Really I can do anything with a letter of resignation other than send one. [...]
There is a reason I have let every media outlet know — secondhand — that I am “disgusted” and “frantically unhappy” and, at this moment, drafting a stern and strongly worded letter of resignation. Because I intend to do nothing. Also, I love drafting letters and never sending them. It is very cathartic. You get to feel as though you’ve made a beautifully worded statement of moral principle, but then in actual reality you haven’t.
Syreeta McFadden at The Guardian writes—Can black celebrities shake America out of its racial justice slumber?
Once again, this is turning out to be a summer marked by prominent police killings of innocent black men. Black popular artists in American culture are complicating things for those fans who would prefer to remain silent or choose not to engage in the most significant civil rights issue of our time. These artists are shaking moderates out of complacency and extending our awareness to this crisis – just as their forebears did during the civil rights struggle in the 1960s. [...]
It isn’t new that black artists are using every tool within their large platform to demand that we ensure the equal protection of black life in America. The strange and tragic thing we have to ask ourselves in 2016 is: why is it even necessary for them to do so? [...]
Seeing leading artists or global superstars like Rihanna and Beyoncé; comedians like Kevin Hart and Chris Rock and actors Rosario Dawson and Taraji P Heson, evoke fatal interactions between black children, women and men and police is haunting. Perhaps the most haunting thing of all is how little has changed.
Jean-Michel Basquiat channeled his outrage at the 1983 police-related death of 25-year-old street artist Michael Stewart in one of his most famous paintings, Defacement. Basquiat, who was haunted by this death, recognized: “It could have been me.”
In 2016, black Americans fear not only that “I could be next”, but worse, “it could be my loved one.” And that is a fear that black Americans – both celebrities and everyday people – know all too well.
David Dayen at The Nation writes—Corporate Tax Cuts Don’t Create Jobs, They Enrich CEOs:
President Trump, after a summer of neglecting his top legislative priority, will make a full-throated pitch for tax reform [Tuesday] in Missouri. The still-fuzzy plan will have a lot of moving parts: lower top marginal rates, simplification of deductions, and elimination of the estate tax, which “only morons pay,” according to Trump’s economic adviser, Gary Cohn. But one centerpiece will be a significant reduction in the corporate tax rate, from the current 35 percent rate to as low as 20 percent.
This is necessary for three reasons, according to Republicans: “Jobs, jobs, jobs,” to quote House Speaker Paul Ryan this June. Though congressional Republicans and the White House rarely see eye-to-eye these days, they are united on the idea that cutting corporate taxes will spur an hiring boom that will reach down to the ordinary worker.
A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies shows this isn’t true. US companies are already paying minimal amounts in corporate taxes, and the ones most likely under Republican theory to pour tax savings into job creation have instead been more likely to cut their workforce over the past nine years. The data shows that low corporate tax rates more often lead to increases in CEO pay and boosts for shareholders.
Before breaking down the report, it’s important to recognize that the 35 percent US corporate tax rate doesn’t reflect what corporations actually pay. The average effective corporate tax rate in the United States, once deductions are factored in, is around 27 percent, putting it below the global average. If you limit the review to profitable corporations, the number drops to 19.4 percent. Corporate taxes as a share of GDP have fallen threefold since 1952, from 6 percent to 2 percent. Far from being overtaxed, corporations have carried an increasingly lighter burden.
Jim Sleeper at The Washington Monthly writes—The End of Stanley McChrystal’s War on Poverty. In the 2000s, neocons tried nation-building abroad while dismantling the nation at home. Trump is ending the former, but continuing the latter.:
Instead of continuing the policies of the militarist right and the social-welfare left, McChrystal proposed [in 2009] to expand the war in ways that would “embrace the people,” be “a positive force in the community,” and “use local economic initiatives” to displace the insurgency. With massive new resources, this new doctrine would integrate “military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency.” [...]
McChrystal also requested massive new resources to “fight corruption and improve the delivery of basic services such as clean water, paved roads, electricity, education, and a functioning legal system.” He wanted to raise Afghan government salaries because “the notoriously low wages…are a major inducement for corruption.”
War on Poverty strategists wanted all this, too. So did American local and state governments in 2009, as McChrystal was taking action and as their own communities were reeling from the Great Recession. McChrystal estimated that Afghanistan’s thirty million people would need 600,000 counterinsurgents. There were “only 270,000 (170,000 Afghans, 64,000 Americans, 35,000 from other nations),” but such things, [conservative Max] Boot explained, were “too intricate to be reduced to such back-of-the-envelope calculations. Unique local characteristics have to be taken into account.”
H. Patricia Hynes at TruthDig writes—Female Equality Is Key to a Sustainable Future:
I am looking at the faces of 10-year-old girls from across the world—faces brimming with expectancy. The U.N. report, “The State of World Population 2016,” opens with their photos, and these words are part of the introduction to Chapter 4, “The Face of the Future”:
With support from family, community and nation, and the full realization of her rights, a 10-year-old girl can thrive and help bring about the future we all want.
What the world will look like in 15 years will depend on our doing everything in our power to ignite the potential of the 10-year-old girl today.
What the world will look like in 15 years depends also on our commitment to reduce substantially greenhouse gas emissions and achieve 50 percent of energy from renewable sources by 2030, so that her world remains habitable.
However, we cannot get to a sustainable world without the full realization of girls’ and women’s rights, for women are responsible for providing food, fuel and water for billions of people in much of Africa and Asia, where natural resources are growing scarce or rapidly degrading. Yet many of these women lack the right to own land or to access credit and technical training to assure the sustainability of their countries’ natural resources.
We will not get there in 15 years without women’s equality in decision-making because women in governance positions sign on to international treaties that take action against climate change more than their male counterparts. Further, there is abundant evidence that women care more about the environment than men and handle risk—economic, environmental and personal—more wisely than men.
Sarah van Gelder at Yes! magazine writes—It’s Not Just the South: Here’s How Everyone Can Resist White Supremacy:
According to The New York Times, more than 30 Confederate monuments have been or will soon be removed.
Every region of our country has its history of racial exclusion and white supremacy.
Rooting out white supremacy is not a task that belongs only to those communities with Confederate monuments, though. Every region of our country has its history of racial exclusion and white supremacy, enforced to this day by domestic terrorism, laws, regulations, and police discrimination. Every region has seen people of color, especially African Americans, forced off of land that they farmed; out of businesses, schools, voting booths; and often into poverty through menial underpaid work, overpriced slums, and policing practices that disproportionately target people of color.
On my road trip, I gathered stories of communities taking action to root out white supremacy.
Zoé Samudzi at Medium writes—On Berkeley: Community Resistances Show Other Worlds Are Possible:
Shortly after a coalition of counter-protestors, the one including the black bloc, arrived at the park, the Berkeley Police Department promptly hid themselves behind their riot gear and poised to shoot rounds of tear gas into the crowd. The black bloc put their hands into the air in a now rallying gesture and continuously and necessarily confrontationally yelled "put the gun down!" at the officers. Had the officers shot the tear gas at the crowd, multiple people would likely now be dead or injured: not only would the police have probably killed the frontline anarchists that their canister-loaded weapons were trained upon, but people would have also been killed or injured in the panic of a tightly packed crowd of hundreds of people trying to escape the eye and throat-burning gas. The police lowered their arms and absconded their posts in the park shortly thereafter: both masked and unmasked protestors jumped over police barricades and assembled throughout the park, a people's park.
Media commentary has forced me to understand our collective [mis]definition of violence as we constantly grapple with "well-reasoned" responses to far-right politics and urgently reinscribe the state's monopoly on legitimate forms of force to undermine the legitimacy of self-defense. Community members were implored to stay away from the spaces where fascistic forces assemble, while the media actively normalizes their politics by positioning functionally genocidal politics as "controversial" albeit legitimate opinions within a robust marketplace of ideas. Violence is the state's white supremacist militarization, like Urban Shield, in the name of "community safety"; it is my constant articulation that, as a black anarchist and member of the left more broadly, my defense of self and community (and other communities) in the face of existential threats, is not "violence." Antifa (anti-fascism), a coalescence of left politics in resistance to fascist creepings, is not violence because this kind of community self-defense cannot be violent.
Jill Abramson at The Guardian writes—Will 2017 be Rupert Murdoch's summer of despair?
If 2016 was Rupert Murdoch’s summer of discontent, this could be the summer of his despair. It was a little more than a year ago that the Roger Ailes sexual harassment scandal erupted. Then came a cascade of related sexual misconduct lawsuits against various Fox on-air personalities and executives. Ailes died earlier this year.
The future of Murdoch’s media empire and his company, 21st Century Fox, could depend on the pending approval of his $12bn takeover of Sky News. But the deal must clear Ofcom, the British regulatory authority over broadcasting. The endemic allegations of sexual misconduct inside of Fox may, justifiably, have caused Ofcom to think twice about approving the deal and giving the Murdochs greater global reach over the news.
The Murdochs had hoped approval would come in June, but Ofcom decided to extend its review into whether the deal makes the Murdochs too powerful. The regulators have also scrutinized whether they are fit and proper owners, a question that has lingered since this newspaper broke the phone hacking story six years ago that forced the shuttering of the Murdochs’ largest British newspaper, the News of the World.