Time To Wake Up

Here's my next newspaper column:

Time Magazine offered me “Person of the Year” before Trump, but they wanted me to say they invented “Foxolimjonesian” and “Foxification.” I declined.  

When Trump makes a similar claim, and Time responds that nothing he said is remotely true, that’s serious. Unlike my fib, his lies are legion, and affect us all. Since the election, his untruths number more than 1,600. You can look it up. It’s beyond pathological. In a “leader,” it’s alarming. The only thing more so is people who deny it.  

Retaining ownership of the above-noted appellations, I present my latest: Prevariocracy. Because they can’t win honestly with their donor-demanded, economically irresponsible, environmentally destructive, stockholder-enriching, poverty-punishing, no-growth fiscal agenda, Republican leaders created the prevariocracy to push their no-hearings, no-jobs corporate tax breaks. Among other untruths. Trump, his cabinet, and his rapacious Congress aren’t draining the swamp. They ARE the swamp. 

Faced with choosing between protecting the institutions on which America was founded – preserving democracy, in other words – and an agenda constructed expressly to foster and maintain oligarchy, they’ve chosen the latter. It’s a Mephistophelian bargain, at the expense of 95% of us, supporters included. 

Erasing the boundaries between truth and falsehood is but the starting point for today’s Republican leaders. It underpins Trump’s nonstop attacks on non-Foxolimjonesian media, promoting the myth of “fake news” to defame reporters brave enough to expose their fictions. (The Washington Post just parried a Koch-funded O’Keefian scam aimed at discrediting reporting on Roy “Unqualified-even-without-predation” Moore. Trump has contributed ten grand to O’Keefe.) Creating distrust of non-propagandist media, Trump feels free to lie about Russian connections and election interference. And pretty much everything else. 

Deliberate as an IED, Republicans are turning the electoral process into a weapon for retaining power, rather than the means by which we are empowered to influence our government. They’ve chosen to win by gerrymandering, and by promulgating the Orwellian falsehood of massive voter fraud to justify laws impeding access to polling places by Democratic-leaning citizens. In states Trump won by a whisper, it worked to the tune of hundreds of thousands of legal voters turned away. 

Worse: recognizing that people capable of thinking, having access to free-flowing information, are a threat to their deceptions, Republicans have been attacking public education for decades, creating a warehouse of pliable voters, ignorant of science, suspicious of expertise. From rewriting history textbooks to teaching mythology over science, cynically manipulating the faithful, whom they regard as fertile soil in which to plant their dishonesty (when will they see it?), their war on truth and the desire and ability to obtain it has been unrelenting. 

And now they’re targeting access to the internet, where facts counter to their deceits are in abundance, for people immune to the plague of disinformation they’re spreading, aided by Russia. The FCC was inundated with as many as a million fake letters and emails demanding an end to net neutrality. Predictably, suspiciously, the Trump-appointed head of the FCC is refusing to cooperate with investigations. If they succeed in undermining fair access, it’ll hit poor people the hardest. Anyone surprised? 

Simultaneously, almost unnoticed, right-wing media conglomerates like Sinclair metastasize across the land (they’re here), substituting Fox-like propaganda for news. Democracy depends on informed voters; these attacks on accurate information are multi-varied and disturbingly effective.  

And they know maintaining this subversion requires larding federal courts with incompetent ideologues who’ll look the other way from attacks on voting, minority rights, women’s health, environmental protection, separation, consumer protection (a Trump appointee just did), and more. 

Since the American Bar Association has been evaluating judicial nominees, initiated by President Eisenhower in 1953, less than one percent of all nominees had been deemed not qualified. Until Trump’s. Of them, it’s eight percent. (Trump told the ABA he’ll ignore their recommendations. He already has a swampful of choices.) The Republican Senate consented. To them, judicial qualification means willingness to legislate from the bench. Their way.  

Realizing that legislating wealth accretion for themselves and their financers requires destroying the indispensable components of a free society, Trump and Republicans are doing so, enthusiastically. It can’t be overstated how dangerous this is. People who ignore it are facilitators; those who see and excuse it fatally misunderstand, or reject, the true source of American greatness. Trump retweets Nazi anti-Muslim videos. Fox spews state-sponsored agitprop. Congressional deconstruction is relentless. “It can’t happen here?"

It is. Right now.
  

[Image source: Facebook, somewhere]

Bullet Points For Trumpists

Tomorrow's newspaper column:

Bullet points for Trumpists:

·   Trump said he’d protect Medicare and Medicaid. His budget cuts them by $1.5 trillion. Depending on the study, it also adds two to ten+ trillions to our national debt, while cynically dodging CBO scoring. After outrage at Obama’s deficits, lowered by two-thirds from when he took office, your silence is clamorous.

·  You’re alone in a room. Jeff Bezos enters. The net worth in the room now averages $45 billion. Sarah “Huckayou” Sanders says the average tax break for families is four thousand bucks. Get it?

·   Likely no one reading this benefits from eliminating the estate tax. Everyone in Trump’s politburo does; some, including Trump, by over a billion.

·   Trump takes credit for not (yet) bending downward the trajectory of the Obama economic recovery; brags about employment growth, also set in motion by Obama. Neither he nor Congress have done anything significant to stimulate this boom, but they’re insisting we need tax breaks for corporations and their wealthy donors to stimulate a boom, about the current splendor of which they’re bragging. Make sense?

·   They expect you to agree cuts should be paid for by those hits to Medicare and Medicaid, and by taking money from people whose spending actually does stimulate growth. (Tax cuts, economic boom: Kansas, Wisconsin. California before and after Democrats took over. Minnesota. Look it up. It’ll be a learning experience.)

·   That no bid-contract, which granted a pal of Trump’s swampy Interior Secretary $300 million to find people to repair Puerto Rico’s electric grid, also precluded government audits or penalties. It specified hourly wages of over $300, daily lodging of even more, meal allowance of $80 a day. The governor, previously lauded by Trump, wised to the scam. Trump passed the buck faster than a Russell Wilson toss with twenty seconds to go.

·   While Trump ignores those US citizens’ growing health crisis, the Clinton Foundation just airlifted 76 tons of medicine and medical supplies there.

·   Because Democrats paid for investigations into Trump’s relations with Russia, he wants you to believe it’s collusion. You do. Research that was begun by “Never Trump” Republicans. Research whose findings, if true, are hugely important. Think of it this way: Suspecting your spouse is cheating, you hire a P.I. who finds lovers. You don’t use the evidence. Your spouse claims you colluded … with the lovers! Seriously, that’s what they’re saying, because they think you’re stupid. (Also: Opposition research is older than all of us.)

·   To distract you from his malfeasance, counting on your gullibility, Trump and his enablers are lying about Hillary and uranium, too. He prefers lies, but you needn’t. Here’s the truth: No uranium left our country. The sale was approved, as required, by all nine members of CFIUS (Google it), independent of Hillary. Years before his donation, the guy who gifted gazillion dollars to the Clinton Foundation sold his stake in the involved Canadian uranium company. (Okay, for something this important, we need links again: This, and this. Assuming you found your brush with reality refreshing, check this out.)

·   Trump refuses to enforce Russia sanctions imposed by Congress and signed by him. Why don’t you wonder why?

·   Benefitting only Dow Chemical, which donated a million to his inauguration, Trump overturned a ban on a nerve-gas/pesticide known to cause severe brain damage in children. Your children. While, presumably from inside his impenetrable shipping container (not-kidding), away from his 18-person security squad, environment-killer Scott Pruitt fires expert scientists in favor of corporate shills. This doesn’t bother you?

·   Trump’s long-delayed response to the opioid crisis includes, so far, $56,000 in funding. And various words.

·   Law requires the science adviser to the USDA be “a distinguished scientist…” Trump nominated Sam Clovis. Look him up. Assistant secretary of energy: a Meineke muffler salesman. “The best people.”

·   After 9/11, George Bush spoke of American unity. After this week’s attack in NYC, Trump tweeted division. And called our justice system (i.e., the Constitution) “a laughing stock.” Patriotically, though.

·   Oh, there were indictments, too? Nothing to do with Trump, says Sarah “Daddy likes my lies” Sanders. Manafort? Never heard of him.

Donald Trump assumes he can manipulate you into overlooking his corporatist, self-enriching tax plan, his disregard for people like you, and let him lie his way out of the Mueller investigation. If you don’t, he might just wag the deadliest dog in inhuman history. Your call. Admittedly, a tough one.

[Image source]

Redefining "Balance"

Deficits, it turns out, matter only when Democrats are in charge. Screaming about increasing debt, as was heard under Obama (despite, as has always been the case with Ds vs Rs, the deficit dropping after rising under Bush), will be a thing of the recent past. From the Tax Policy Center:

This paper analyzes presidential candidate Donald Trump’s revised tax proposal, which would significantly reduce marginal tax rates, increase standard deduction amounts, repeal personal exemptions, cap itemized deductions, and allow businesses to elect to expense new investment and not deduct interest expense. His proposal would cut taxes at all income levels, although the largest benefits, in dollar and percentage terms, would go to the highest-income households. Federal revenues would fall by $6.2 trillion over the first decade before accounting for added interest costs. Including interest costs, the federal debt would rise by $7.2 trillion over the first decade and by $20.9 trillion by 2036.

But... but... Donald and Paul promised us budgetary balance. It's almost as if they were knowingly lying. It's almost as if they assume their base LIKES being lied to.

Which, it's obvious, they do.

The entire analysis is found at the above link. In fairness, it does predict short-term growth in GDP, which falls after the first few years.