Donald Trump’s War on the First Amendment

His commitment to free speech extends only to himself.

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: alternet

Author: Bill Blum/TruthDig

Emphasis Mine

If you were to ask Donald Trump’s supporters what they most admire about the GOP front-runner, chances are they would cite his so-called authenticity, his willingness to “tell it like it is” and, perhaps more than anything else, his rejection of that great bugaboo of the Obama Age: political correctness.

Such qualities ought to mean that whatever else Trump may be—a blowhard, a demagogue, a bigot, a reality TV huckster, a malignant narcissist, an unparalleled deal maker—he’s an ardent believer in press protections, free speech and the First Amendment. Indeed, in a Feb. 27 appearance on the Fox News channel, Trump seemed—at first—to be saying so, declaring, “I love free press. I think it’s great.”

But like much of what is taken as a given in the crazy-town vortex that is the Trump presidential campaign, the image of the candidate as a champion of free speech is a mirage. The bullying billionaire can sling mud and demean his real and imagined enemies with the best of them. The problem, however, is that he can’t take it when others fire back.

The very next sentence that Trump uttered during the Fox interview revealed a diametrically opposite view of the First Amendment. “We ought to open up the libel laws,” he said, thus making it easier to sue journalists who write critical things about him.

Trump’s on-air comments came a day after he had addressed the same subject at a rally in Fort Worth, Texas. Unhappy with certain news reports, he told a throng of cheering followers, “I think the media is among the most dishonest groups of people I’ve ever met. They’re terrible. If I become president, oh, do they have problems. They’re going to have such problems.”

He added:

One of the things I’m going to do if I win, and I hope we do, and we’re certainly leading, is I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money. We’re going to open up those libel laws so that when The New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace, or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.

What Trump probably means by “opening up” our libel laws is that, as president, he would work to overturn a line of landmark Supreme Court decisions dating back to the court’s unanimous 1964 decision in The New York Times v. Sullivan.

Prior to Sullivan, defamation lawsuits were governed exclusively by state law, and they were often slanted in favor of plaintiffs, especially rich ones who could afford the steep costs involved. To prevail, plaintiffs only had to establish that they had been defamed by a preponderance of the evidence—the lowest standard of proof in our legal system. As a practical matter, this meant that anyone wishing to criticize the wealthy and the powerful did so at considerable personal risk.

The Sullivan case changed all that by constitutionalizing defamation law throughout the United States. The justices wrote that in order to protect our “profound national commitment” to uninhibited, robust and wide-open debate that “may well include vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks,” the First and Fourteenth amendments would heretofore serve as protection for defamation defendants. Public officials, they further instructed, must be precluded from recovering damages for allegedly defamatory statements related to official conduct unless they establish by “clear and convincing evidence” (a far higher standard of proof) that such statements are made with “actual malice”—that is, that they are made with the knowledge that they are false or with reckless disregard for the truth.

In a series of subsequent decisions in the late ’60s and early ’70s, the court extended Sullivan and the “actual malice” rule

to defamation lawsuits brought by “public figures,” such as Trump and many of the corporations that he controls and operates.

This is what has the Republican hopeful so hopping mad. In the years following Sullivan and its legal progeny, less than 10 percent of defamation cases brought by public figures have resulted in plaintiff victories.

Trump is nothing if not litigious. As the political journalist Olivia Nuzzi of The Daily Beast wrote last year—in an article titled “Donald Trump Sued Everyone but His Hairdresser”—Trump has filed cases against “people, businesses, and entire cities and countries. He’s sued a newspaper, his ex-wife, a quaint business card store in Georgia and a Native American tribe. He’s cried breach of contract, government favoritism, fraud, and libel.”

And when it comes to libel, contrary to his daily pontifications about being a “winner,” you can count Trump and his business interests among the biggest courtroom losers.

Perhaps the best-known legal setback to date occurred in the litigation surrounding Trump University, a venture Trump helped to found in 2004 to “train, educate and mentor entrepreneurs on achieving financial independence through real estate investing.”

There are currently three major lawsuits pending against Trump and his now-defunct real estate program—two federal class actions initiated by former students in San Diego and one brought in New York by the state’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman.

Although the cases are separate and distinct from a technical standpoint, they share a common nucleus of allegations, which have been summarized in an online posting by the San Diego lawyers representing the former students. According to the attorneys, “Trump University and Trump violated federal law across the delivering access to Trump’s real estate techniques taught by ‘hand-picked’ professors at an elite ‘university,’ when in fact Trump was not substantively involved in the Live Events curriculum or selecting the instructors and the New York State Education Department had warned Trump it was unlawful to call it a ‘university.’ ”

The oldest of the San Diego cases was filed in 2010 by Tarla Makaeff, a yoga instructor who at first named only Trump University as a defendant. Trump himself was added to the case as a personal defendant two years later.

Makaeff enrolled in Trump University classes in 2008, spending $1,495 for an introductory session and later forking over $34,995 to enroll in the school’s “Gold Elite” program, which entitled her to four three-day “advanced” training workshops, a three-day mentoring session and other benefits.

Although Makaeff filled out evaluation forms praising the courses, she had changed her mind by the fall of 2009. She then requested a refund of her tuition but was denied. Thereafter, she wrote letters to the Better Business Bureau, her bank and government agencies, and she posted comments online, complaining that she had been pressured to give the school good evaluations and that the university had failed to deliver on its promises and had engaged in fraudulent and unfair business practices.

Trump University responded to Makaeff’s lawsuit with a defamation counterclaim. Makaeff’s lawyers, in turn, moved to strike the counterclaim, citing the Sullivan case and characterizing the counterclaim as a “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” or SLAPP.

As the Digital Media Law Project explains on its website, SLAPPs are lawsuits “filed in retaliation for speaking out on a public issue or controversy.” They usually, but not always, come in the guise of a defamation complaint. The goal of a SLAPP plaintiff isn’t necessarily to win a case on the merits but to intimidate and silence critics.

To combat the chilling effect that SLAPPs have on First Amendment rights, 28 states (including California) and the District of Columbia have enacted anti-SLAPP statutes that provide procedures for pretrial motions to dismiss or strike them.

Even though Makaeff’s case was filed in federal court, the California anti-SLAPP law applied to her fraud and unfair business-practice claims because those were based on California law. It took three years of heated litigation, but in 2013 the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Makaeff’s motion to strike, finding that she had spoken out on a matter of public concern and that Trump University was a public figure insofar as the dispute over its real estate offerings was concerned. As such, the court also held that Trump University could not meet the “actual malice” standard articulated by the Sullivan case.

In a stinging rebuke of its claim that Makaeff’s previous endorsement of the school showed that she had acted with malice when she later complained, the court wrote: “As the recent Ponzi-scheme scandals involving onetime financial luminaries like Bernard Madoff and Allen Stanford demonstrate, victims of con artists often sing the praises of their victimizers until the moment they realize they have been fleeced. Makaeff’s initial enthusiasm for Trump University’s program is not probative of whether she acted with actual malice.”

The school was subsequently ordered to pay Makaeff’s lawyers nearly $800,000 in attorneys’ fees.

Last week, Makaeff asked the trial judge assigned to her case to permit her to withdraw as a class representative and named plaintiff because of health issues. If her request is granted, the case will be carried forward by three other named plaintiffs. A pretrial conference to set a trial date has been calendared for May 6.

Trump’s loss to Makaeff is by no means his most embarrassing SLAPP setback. That honor goes to a case Trump filed a decade ago in New Jersey.

In 2006, Trump sued Time Warner Books and writer Timothy O’Brien, then a reporter with The New York Times and now the editor of Bloomberg View, alleging that he had been libeled in a biography O’Brien had written, “TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald.”

Instead of bringing the lawsuit in New York, which has an anti-SLAPP statute, Trump opted for a venue in New Jersey, which doesn’t have one. The alleged defamation that Trump cited was O’Brien’s claim in the book that, considering all of the real estate mogul’s assets and liabilities, Trump’s net worth was actually in the neighborhood of $150 million to $250 million rather than the $5 billion to $6 billion that he had claimed.

Even without an anti-SLAPP law to lean on, O’Brien won a state appellate court ruling in 2011, granting summary judgment in his favor and finding that Trump could not, as a matter of law, meet the Sullivan test of actual malice. For all the mischief he had caused, Trump was ordered to fork over a cool $1 million in legal fees.

Interviewed about his ordeal with Trump for an article published last week in The Washington Post, O’Brien told reporter Paul Farhi: “We blew him up on the whole notion that I set out with reckless disregard and malice. My lawyers drew and quartered him.”

Unbowed and seemingly gearing up for more battles, Trump is quoted in the same article as saying that he knew he couldn’t win the case against O’Brien. “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more,” he admitted. “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.”

And that’s precisely the problem with Trump’s war on the First Amendment. He loves the combat. He thrives on it. And no matter how many lives he imperils in the process, and no matter how many times he comes up short in court, he has no intention of relenting.

As president, of course, Trump would have no power to repeal or negate the Sullivan decision. It would take a constitutional amendment to accomplish that, or a highly unlikely reversal by the Supreme Court.

Nonetheless, if elected, Trump could do real damage, vetoing pending legislation to enact a federal anti-SLAPP law and using his bully pulpit to dissuade the 22 states without such statutes from enacting them.

And then there’s all the legal baggage he would drag with him to the White House. The civil suits that he has initiated and been the target of won’t be stayed just because he’s traded Trump Towers for the Oval Office. As the Supreme Court held in Paula Jones’ lawsuit against Bill Clinton, sitting presidents are not immune

from civil litigation arising out of events that transpired before they took office.

Derailing Trump’s war on the First Amendment or at least confining it to isolated courtroom skirmishes should be easy, but only if we keep one principle foremost in mind: that he must never, ever—and here words almost fail me—become president of the United States.

 

Bill Blum is a former judge and death penalty defense attorney. He is the author of three legal thrillers published by Penguin/Putnam (“Prejudicial Error,” “The Last Appeal” and “The Face of Justice”) and is a contributing writer for California Lawyer magazine.

See:http://www.alternet.org/donald-trumps-war-first-amendment?akid=14064.123424.0zQ2EW&rd=1&src=newsletter1052620&t=6

Why the Rise of Trump, Cruz and Sanders Is the Logical Result of the 1% Not Paying Taxes, and Shutting off Opportunity to the Poor

the U.S. protects “everything that deals with capital and property but we cannot deal with protecting basic human rights.”

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source:AlterNet

Author: Vijay Prashad

Emphasis Mine

You reap what you sow. The Republican Party – pushed along by large segments of the “Third Way” Democrats – crafted policies that allowed the American rich to go on tax strike, that allowed them to deindustrialize the United States and that allowed their banks to control the destiny of people from the redwood forest to the gulf stream waters.

This land is their land. Democracy is the mask of the 1 percent.

The detritus of those policies created under-employment and endemic social crises. Between the prison industrial complex and the opioid crisis lies the fault line of race: otherwise these are identical. Wages plummeted, but debt-fueled consumption allowed the American Dream to remain alive. The Great Recession of 2007 awoke sections of the country from its credit card somnolence. For the first time in decades, the American Dream seemed unrealistic. The lives of American children would most certainly be economically more fragile than those of their parents.

Race stayed the hand of unity. The Tea Party movement covered itself in the old rags of racism to blame migrants and minorities for the degradation of their country. Egged on by the Republican elites, this movement took the hatred of government and of outsiders to the limit. Out of it came Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, with fire against Washington as their ammunition. It is fitting that the old Gadsden flag was taken up by the Tea Party – with its rattlesnake above the sign, “Don’t Tread on Me.”

To associate oneself with the rattlesnake is a curious gesture. This is venom incarnate.

The Great Recession hit black and Latino families hardest, but there was no room for them in the Tea Party consensus. It was Obama’s presidential campaign that became their ark. That Obama did little to constrain the banks and force the rich to pay tax was disappointing, but not sufficient for disillusionment. What choice has there been? It was organizations such as Stand Up United, Black Lives Matter, Dream Defenders, Defend the Dream, Stand Up/Don’t Shoot and Black Youth Project that drew in the more critical segments – spurred on by Ferguson.

They are the antithesis of the Tea Party, although survivors of a similar dynamic set in motion by the American rich’s tax strike.

Many of these young people have now taken refuge in the Sanders’ campaign. Hillary Clinton was part of the “Third Way” Democrats that allowed Wall Street its excesses. She does not have the compass to bring in this segment. It is fitting that the wife of Eric Garner (killed by the New York police department) supports Clinton, while their daughter – Erica Garner – who is an activist in these movements supports Sanders.

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are the end-points of Republican policy. They are what emerge when the rich don’t pay their fair share of taxes and the working poor cannot any longer dream of a better life. But they are particularly the salvation of the white working poor. Theirs is a populism narrowed by racism and misogyny.

Stop Trump, goes the slogan. But replace him with what? Ted Cruz, who is not only as bellicose as Trump (bomb the desert to “make it glow”), but is also a zealot? These men are mirror reflections of each other. They are Crump.

Both Trump and Sanders attract the white workers who had been battered by the trade agreements of the 1 percent. Trump’s rhetoric is familiar to the American right, which heard it from Pat Buchanan in an earlier era. Sanders comes from a long line of Democratic barnstormers who opposed these recent trade deals – whether Tom Harkin or Sherrod Brown and most recently the Sanders’ supporter Keith Ellison. These are Mid-western politicians who know how the trade deals eviscerated the working class of their heartland.

In this skepticism of the 1 percent’s trade deals there is the potential of great unity, but again race is the obstacle. Buchanan’s fulminations on the “end of White America” are far from Harkin’s 1992 objections to NAFTA on the grounds that the U.S. protects “everything that deals with capital and property but we cannot deal with protecting basic human rights.”

Exit from this current nightmare is not evident. Until the American Rich give up their tax strike, there is little hope for necessary social investments. Unity is impossible as long as the toxicity of racism diminishes social life. Trump and Cruz offer bluster, empty slogans that reduce the potential of people. Clinton and Rubio have little to offer beyond the prattle of the Beltway, which is continued adherence to Wall Street’s failed dogmas and belief in the Security establishment’s failed imagination for the world.

The Republican elite wants to sow fear of Trump in order to sneak in Cruz. Under both shells sit rotten peas.

It is better to pick neither.

Vijay Prashad is professor of international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of 18 books, including Arab Spring, Libyan Winter (AK Press, 2012), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013) and the forthcoming The Death of a Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016). His columns appear at AlterNet every Wednesday.

See: http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/why-rise-trump-cruz-and-sanders-logical-result-americas-wealthiest-not-paying-their?akid=14080.123424.MZYW4e&rd=1&src=newsletter1052897&t=12

 

Why Bernie’s Revolution Has Just Begun

With each primary victory—and each close call—Sanders has shown us our own strength.

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: AlterNet

Author: D.D. Guttenplan/The Nation

Emphasis Mine

Well, we’ll always have Michigan….

A week after Bernie Sanders stunned pollsters with a victory that nobody predicted, lifting his campaign—and his supporters’ expectations—those hopes came crashing down to earth yesterday with defeats in Florida, Ohio, Illinois, and North Carolina. Hillary Clinton’s late-breaking win in Missouri gives her a clean sweep on a night that was meant to mark the turn in the tide for Sanders, who poured time and money into Ohio, where Clinton took every big city on her way to a convincing 14-point victory, and Illinois, where Sanders hoped to profit from dissatisfaction with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a longtime Clinton ally. Though voters did punish Cook County prosecutor Anita Alvarez for her handling of the police shooting of Laquan McDonald, favoring challenger Kim Foxx by a margin of 2 to 1, Clinton carried Cook County by a comfortable 8 points.

Yes, it’s true that the rest of the primary calendar is more favorable to Sanders—who has won more states, garnered many more votes, and has a larger share of the delegates than any of the Republicans challenging Donald Trump. Whose presumptive grasp on his party’s nomination is denied almost daily by the same media who have been burying Sanders—when they could be bothered to write about him—from Iowa onward. We never said this was going to be easy—or a fair fight.

Hillary Clinton has always been the favored candidate of the party establishment. And unlike 2008, when the powerful Cook County portion of that establishment broke for Obama, a favorite son, this time the establishment remains unified in the face of the Sanders insurgency. Which would be reason enough for Sanders to carry on his fight all the way to Philadelphia, even if it really were mathematically impossible for him to win the nomination—a point we are still unlikely to reach before California votes on June 7. The strength of Sanders’s challenge, and the enthusiasm of his supporters, have already pulled Hillary Clinton off dead center on police violence, trade policy, access to education, and making the wealthy pay their share of taxes. 

As long as he stays in the race, and stays true to his beliefs, Sanders will keep winning those arguments, even if Clinton’s willingness to steal her opponent’s best ideas—and even some of his best lines—help her to win voters who will be crucial in defeating Trump in November. Turnout remains the Democrats’ Achilles’ heel: In Ohio, where Trump came second, he still got more votes than either Democrat. Clinton herself seems to get this, and yesterday declined to endorse calls for Sanders to drop out. Any other course would leave Trump in sole possession of the media for the next four months.

Speaking of the Donald, it also seems odd that while his impact on the Republican party is endlessly analyzed, almost nothing has been said about the way Trump’s likely nomination has influenced Democratic primary voters. My own guess is that fear of Trump probably carried Clinton over the line in Illinois and Missouri.

Keeping Clinton from reverting to a neoliberal default isn’t the only reason for Sanders to stay in the race—or the most important. As Sanders has always said, his aim is “a political revolution.” Winning the nomination would be nice, but is neither necessary nor sufficient to bring that about. Building a nationwide, durable network of mobilized, active supporters prepared to keep working for universal healthcare, a living wage, ending Wall Street welfare and America’s endless wars—including the drug wars—in numbers great enough to Occupy the Democratic Party and take it back from its corporate funders is absolutely crucial. So, too, is the difficult work of stitching together movements like #BlackLivesMatter, Fight for 15, immigrant rights, climate justice, and voting rights into a coalition prepared to march together, vote together, and transform our politics—and our country. Yet that is the task we face.

Are the odds against us? Of course. That’s what it means to live inside a rigged system. But remember where we were only a few months ago. With each primary victory—and each close call—Sanders shows us our own strength. With each packed rally we see the claim that socialism is un-American exposed as a lie, that a world where no one starves, healthcare is not rationed by wealth, and energy companies aren’t allowed to rape the earth for profit and leave the rest of us to take the consequences is not only possible but popular.

Why cut off that momentum? Especially when, as Daniel Cantor of the Working Families Party points out, Sanders actually keeps getting stronger: “Bernie’s North Carolina performance was 15 points better than his South Carolina performance last month, and 5 points better than his Virginia performance two weeks ago. Meanwhile, the margin in Cook County, Illinois, is half of that in Wayne County, Michigan.”

So we fight on—to July, November, and beyond. For the nomination, so long as that remains a possibility. For our country—which may in November face as stark a choice as any in our lifetimes. And for our future, which is far too precious a prize to abandon for the sake of a few thousand votes.

 See:http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/why-bernies-revolution-has-just-begun?akid=14080.123424.MZYW4e&rd=1&src=newsletter1052897&t=4

GOP Voters, Unaffiliateds More Influenced by Debates Than Democrats Are

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: Rasumussen

Emphasis Mine

Republicans and unaffiliated voters are more likely than Democrats to have changed candidates as a result of the 10 GOP and six Democratic presidential campaign debates. But most voters who have followed the debates are pretty much where they were before it all began. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on February 25 and 28, 2016 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.

See:http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/elections/election_2016/gop_voters_unaffiliateds_more_influenced_by_debates_than_democrats_are

Blowing the Biggest Political Story of the Last Fifty Years

The shocking story isn’t the rise of Donald Trump but how the GOP slowly morphed into a party of hate and obstruction.

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source:Alternet

Author: Bill Gabler / Moyers and company

Emphasis Mine

Ah, the crescendo of complaint! The Republican establishment and the mainstream media, working hand in hand in their unprecedented, non-stop assault on the “short-fingered vulgarian” named Donald Trump, would have you believe that Trump augurs the destruction of the Republican Party. Former Reagan speechwriter and now Wall Street Journal/CBS pundit Peggy Noonan expressed the general sentiment of both camps when she said on Super Tuesday that “we’re seeing a great political party shatter before our eyes.”

But here is what no one in the GOP establishment wants you to know, and no one in the media wants to admit: Donald Trump isn’t the destruction of the Republican Party; he is the fulfillment of everything the party has been saying and doing for decades. He is just saying it louder and more plainly than his predecessors and intra-party rivals.

The media have been acting as if the Trump debacle were the biggest political story to come down the pike in some time. But the real story – one the popularity of Trump’s candidacy has revealed and inarguably the biggest political story of the last 50 years — is the decades-long transformation of Republicanism from a business-centered, small town, white Protestant set of beliefs into quite possibly America’s primary institutional force of bigotry, intellectual dishonesty, ignorance, warmongering, intractability and cruelty against the vulnerable and powerless.

It is a story you didn’t read, hear or see in the mainstream media, only in lefty journals like The Nation and Rolling Stone, on websites like People for the American Way, and in columns like Paul Krugman’s. And it wasn’t exactly because the MSM in its myopia missed the story. It was because they chose not to tell it – to pretend it wasn’t happening. They are still pretending.

It is hardly a surprise that the GOP establishment and their enablers in the media are acting as if Trump, the Republican frontrunner, is a break from the party’s supposedly genteel past. Like Captain Renault in Casablanca, who was “shocked, shocked,” to find gambling in Rick’s establishment, the GOP solons profess to be “shocked, shocked” by Trump’s demagogic racism and nativism. Their protestations remind me of an old gambit of comedian Milton Berle. When the audience was applauding him, he would shush them demonstratively with one hand while encouraging them gently with the other.

Neither is it a surprise that the conservative media have been doing the same thing — decrying Trump while giving us Trump Lite. Indeed, even less blatant partisans who ought to know better, like every “thinking man’s” favorite conservative David Brooks, deliver the same hypocrisy.

No, Brooks isn’t too keen on Trump (or Cruz for that matter), but he is very keen on some mythological Republican Party that exudes decency. On the PBS NewsHour last week he said with great earnestness, “For almost a century-and-a-half, the Republican Party has stood for a certain free market version of America – an America that’s about openness, that’s about markets and opportunity, and a definition of what this country is.”

Free markets? That’s what he thinks defines America? Let me rephrase what I said earlier: Trump hasn’t just fulfilled the Republican Party’s purpose; he has exposed it. And he also has exposed the media’s indifference to what the party has become.

Obviously, I am not saying that the transmogrification of the Republican Party happened surreptitiously. It happened in plain sight, and it was extensively chronicled — but not by the MSM. The sainted Reagan blew his party’s cover when to kick off his general election campaign in 1980 he spoke at the Neshoba County Fair, just outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been brutally murdered in 1964. He wasn’t there to demonstrate his sympathy to the civil rights movement, but to demonstrate his sympathy to those who opposed it. This was an ugly moment, and it didn’t go entirely unnoticed in the media. In fact, David Brooks would later be moved to defend the speech, which invoked the not-so-subtle buzz words “states’ rights,” and to act as if Reagan had been slandered by those who called him out on it.

But if some in the media did call out Reagan on his disgusting curtsy to George Wallace voters, the press seemed to lose its nerve once Reagan became president and the Republican Party lurched not just rightward, but extremist-ward. Do you remember these headlines: “Republicans Oppose Civil Rights”; “Republicans Work to Defeat Expansion of Health Insurance”; “Republicans Torpedo Extension of Unemployment Benefits”; “Republicans Demonize Homosexuals and Deny Them Rights”; “Republicans Call Climate Change a Hoax and Refuse to Stop Greenhouse Gases”? No, you don’t remember, because no MSM paper printed them and no MSM network broadcast them. Instead, the media behaved as if extremism were business as usual.

I don’t think the media would deny their indifference. They would say they don’t take sides. They’re neutral. They just report. Partisanship is for Fox News and MSNBC.

Of course, this is utter nonsense. Accurate reporting means taking sides when one side is spouting falsehoods. I am still waiting for the media to correct the GOP pronouncements that Obamacare has cost us jobs and sent health care costs skyrocketing – both of which are screamingly false. I am not holding my breath.

But even if it were true that the media are not referees, not taking sides against extremism is just another way of taking sides by legitimizing extremism and making it the new normal, which it now is – so long, apparently, as you don’t shout it. In any case, objectivity is a rationalization. We know the media are afraid of a right-wing backlash. We know that they protect themselves by insisting that our two major parties are equidistant from the political center – more nonsense. And we know that every story is framed by its political consequences, not its human ones. We see that every day.

But if you really want to know why the media skipped the story about Republican extremism all these years, you have to look to the force of extremism itself and the way it reconfigures the political spectrum, basically disorienting us. In Europe, fringe parties on the right and left get savaged by the press all the time. If we had them here, no doubt the same thing would happen, press objectivity notwithstanding. The difference between Europe and America is that our right-wing extremists happen to control one of our two major parties and theirs don’t. To take on extremism would reveal not only the Republicans’ deficiencies, both of its elected officials and its rank and file, but the deficiencies of the entire American political system. That takes a courage very, very few people (OK, nobody) in the MSM have.

And yet we now know that the media can be assertive if they want to be, that they can take sides, and even correct the record if they choose. We know because that is precisely what they are doing against Trump, but only because they see Trump as an outlier from the GOP establishment – a disruptive, fringe force. Trump has a right to feel blindsided by the double standard to which he is being subjected. Cruz may be even more of an outlier from the American mainstream than Trump, and yet the media don’t seem anywhere near as lathered about him.

But back to the big story: Something happened in American politics over the last 25 or 30 years to release our demons and remove our shame. The media didn’t want to look. Now Trump has come along to reap what the conservatives had sown, and stir up those demons, and the media are suddenly in high dudgeon. Where were they when America needed them?

See:http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/blowing-biggest-political-story-last-fifty-years?akid=14057.123424.w4j9ci&rd=1&src=newsletter1052440&t=6

 

Why the Religious Right’s Love for the Donald Makes Total Sense

The religious right was formed to protect segregation, so it’s no surprise they’re drawn to Donald Trump.

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source:AlterNet

Author: Amanda Marcotte/Salon

Emphasis Mine

Donald Trump’s triumphant performance in the Nevada caucus, “a testament to his broad appeal among Republican primary voters” as Salon’s Sean Illing writes,  is causing another round of media handwringing about how the giant orange circus clown can possibly be doing so well. Of special interest is why Trump, who has been married three times and likes to brag about how many sex partners he’s had, is doing so well with evangelical voters, who vote for him at about the same rate as other Republicans.

One theory is that they are generically “angry,”  like all other Republicans, and that makes them willing to overlook his many flaws.

Or perhaps it’s because they are forgiving, as Ralph Reed told Lauren Fox of Talking Points Memo. “Evangelicals have a long history of accepting converts to the pro-life and pro family cause at their word,” Reed argued.

But really, this evangelical fervor for Trump isn’t all that surprising when you consider the history of the religious right in this country, a history which suggests these voters are less motivated by faith than they are motivated by conservative ideology. “Jesus” is just the word they apply to their beliefs to make otherwise repulsive reactionary politics seem moral and righteous. Evangelical voting behavior makes way more sense if you assume the politic views come first and the Bible is just the rationalization for them.

Trump’s campaign motto is “Make America Great Again!”, which ties into his campaign theme of a country that’s lost its way and needs to be returned to some halcyon days of yore. What that means is pleasantly vague enough for pundits to project all sorts of narratives onto it, but I would venture that the simplest interpretation is probably the one resonating with the voters: This used to be the sort of country that would never elect a black man (or a woman) to the White House, and Trump is going to get us back to those days again.

His pitch is convincing because he’s successfully painted the rest of the GOP as people are too cowed by the forces of “political correctness” to say what really needs to be said, which is evident to voters in the other candidates’ relative unwillingness (with an eye towards the general election) to race-bait as blatantly as Trump does.

That this racially provocative narrative appeals to evangelicals shouldn’t be surprising, because this particular narrative has always been the motivating, indeed formative narrative of the religious right. It’s forgotten all too often, but the religious right as we know it formed in the South as a direct reaction to the civil rights movement, and its purpose was to use “Jesus” as a cover story to resist desegregation. In 2014, historian Randall Balmer published a Politico article on this quickly fading but critically important history, where he laid out how much of the infrastructure of the religious right was established by racists who were trying to preserve segregation.

As Balmer explains, after Brown v Board of Education, huge swaths of the South reinstated segregation by creating an elaborate private school system, which were deemed “segregation academies.” Jerry Falwell got his start as a religious right leader founding and defending such schools.

But in 1971, the federal government ruled that private non-profit schools could not maintain a tax-exempt status if they banned black students, and the organized efforts to resist this, by using religion as a justification to resist race-mixing, turned into what we now understand as the modern religious right.

To be clear, the religious right was swift in turning away from overt racism to overt sexism as its defining feature, first by fighting the Equal Rights Amendment that would ban sex discrimination and then waging the war on legal abortion, sex ed, and contraception access. But the disappearance of overt claims that Jesus disapproves of race-mixing shouldn’t be mistaken for a total abandonment of white resentment as an organizing force for the Christian right.

Ronald Reagan gets a lot of credit, for understandable reasons, for helping shape the religious right into a definable and powerful Republican voting bloc. He did this in part by feeding them the anti-feminist rhetoric they wanted to hear, but he also did it by pumping out an endless stream of race-baiting that fed directly into the political style of the religious right, which leans heavily on urban legends and rejects empirical evidence.

Reagan loved to thrill his racist audiences by telling tales of a “welfare queen” who bought a Cadillac off welfare or the “strapping young buck” buying T-bones with food stamps. He argued that the Voting Rights Act was “humiliating to the South” and opposed the Civil Rights Act. He kicked off his 1980 campaign in a town where civil rights workers had famously been murdered, and his speech focused on his support for those resisting desegregation. And he won the religious right’s vote, despite being a former movie star and the first (and so far only) divorced President.

Sounds an awful lot like the current front-runner of the Republican race, a man who enjoys tickling his audience with racially loaded urban legends and bigoted insinuations, and whose past as a decadent tabloid fixture and TV star doesn’t seem to ruffle religious right feathers, so long as he keeps the bigoted rhetoric coming.

And yes, while Trump’s history on reproductive rights suggests he’s not as opposed to them as the other candidates, it’s also true that his misogyny is unquestionable. The sad fact of the matter is that he doesn’t have to be against reproductive rights to prove his disdain for female independence, because contempt for women drips off him.

There’s been a lot of attention paid to the fact that Trump won the Latino vote at the Nevada caucus, but don’t believe the hype. Only 8% of the voters who turned out to the Republican caucus were Hispanic, compared to 19% in the Democratic caucus. Eighty-five percent of Republican voters in Nevada were white, compared to 59% of Democratic voters. If you want to understand Republican voters and why they thrill at Trump’s wink-and-nod race-baiting over the stylings of men named Marco Rubio and Rafael “Ted” Cruz, that might be the simplest answer. Yes, even for the ones who like to talk about how much they love Jesus, who they, after all, invariably portray as a white man.

Amanda Marcotte is a politics writer for Salon. She’s on Twitter @AmandaMarcotte. 

 

See:http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-religious-rights-love-donald-makes-total-sense?utm_source=Amanda+Marcotte%27s+Subscribers&utm_campaign=395339125c-RSS_AUTHOR_EMAIL&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f2b9a8ae81-395339125c-79824733

 

 

How the U.S. Went Fascist: Mass Media Makes Excuses for Trump Voters

Networks and newspapers are trying to explain away racism from a prominent GOP candidate. That he won the evangelical vote again in Nevada is helpful for us in seeing that American evangelicalism itself is in some part a form of white male chauvinist nationalism and only secondarily about religion.

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: AlterNet

Author: Jaun Cole/Informed Comment

Emphasis Mine

The rise of Donald Trump to the presumptive Republican standard bearer for president in 2016 is an indictment of, and a profound danger to the American republic.

The Founding Fathers were afraid of the excitability of the voters and their vulnerability to the appeal of demagogues. That is the reason for a senate (which was originally appointed), intended to check those notorious hotheads in Congress, who are elected from districts every two years.

But it isn’t only the checks and balances in government that are necessary to keep the republic. It is the Fourth Estate, i.e. the press, it is the country’s leaders, and the general public who stand between the republic and the rise of a Mussolini. The notables have been shown to be useless. Donald Trump should have been kicked out of the Republican Party the moment he began talking about violating the Constitution. The first time he hinted about assaulting the journalists covering his rallies, he should have been shown the door. When he openly advocated torture (‘worse than waterboarding’), he should have been ushered away. When he began speaking of closing houses of worship, he should have been expelled. He has solemnly pledged to violate the 1st, 4th and 8th Amendments of the Constitution, at the least. If someone’s platform is unconstitutional, it boggles the mind that a major American party would put him or her up for president. How can he take the oath of office with a straight face? The party leaders were afraid he’d mount a third-party campaign. But who knows how that would have turned out? Someone with power needs to say that Trump is unacceptable and to define him out of respectable politics, the same way David Duke is treated (Trump routinely retweets Duke fellow-travellers).

Then there is the mass media. As Amy Goodman has pointed out, corporate television has routinely pumped Trump into our living rooms. They have virtually blacked out Bernie Sanders. Trump seems to have connived to have 10 or 15 minutes at 7:20 every evening on the magazine shows, such as Chris Matthews’ Hardball, who obligingly cut away to Il Duce II’s rants and gave away his show to him on a nightly basis.

Not long ago, extremely powerful television personalities and sportscasters were abruptly fired for saying things less offensive than Trump’s bromides. Don Imus was history for abusive language toward women basketball players. But Trump’s strident attack on Megyn Kelly as a menstruating harridan was just allowed to pass. Jimmy ‘the Greek’ Snyder was fired by CBS for saying African-Americans were ‘bred’ to be better athletes. But Trump issued a blanket characterization of undocumented Mexican labor migrants as rapists, thieves and drug dealers. Of course this allegation is untrue.

I watched the Nevada caucus coverage on MSNBC and was appalled at the discourse. One reporter tried to assure us that Trump voters were not actually voting for racism and bullying politics, they were just upset. But polling in South Carolina demonstrated that Trump voters were significantly to the right of most Republicans on some issues. In SC, 38% of Trump voters wished the South had won the Civil War, presumably suggesting that they regretted the end of slavery.

Another MSNBC reporter helpfully explained that Trump voters feel that ‘political correctness’ has gone too far. But what does Trump mean by ‘political correctness’? He means sexism and racism. So what is really being said is that Trump supporters resent that sexist and racist discourse and policies have been banned from the public sphere. There is ample proof that Trump’s use of ‘political correctness’ identifies it with sexist and racist remarks and actions.

Yet another asserted that ‘some of’ Trump’s positions ‘are not that extreme.’ Exhibit A was his praise for Planned Parenthood. But he wants to outlaw abortion, i.e. overturn the current law of the land, which is extreme. (A majority of Americans support the right to choose, so he is in a minority).

Chris Matthews explained to us that people hoped he would do something for the country rather than for the government.

But Trump has made it very clear that he is not interested in a significant proportion of the people in the country. He is a white nationalist, and his message is that he will stand up for white Christian people against the Chinese, the Mexicans, and the Muslims. Just as Adolph Hitler hoped for an alliance with Anglo-Saxon Britain on racial grounds (much preferring it to the less white Italy), the only foreign leader Trump likes is the ‘white’ Vladimir Putin. That he won the evangelical vote again in Nevada is helpful for us in seeing that American evangelicalism itself is in some part a form of white male chauvinist nationalism and only secondarily about religion.

By the way, the idea that Trump won the Latino vote in Nevada is nonsense. In one of a number of fine interventions at MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out that something on the order of 1800 Latinos voted in the Nevada GOP caucuses, of whom perhaps 800 voted for Trump, i.e. 44% of this tiny group. Trump lost the vote of even this small group of hard right Latinos, since 56% of them voted for someone else.

There are 800,000 Latinos in the state of Nevada (pop. 2.8 million). In 2012, 70 percent of Latinos voted for Barack Obama, while Mitt Romney got 25%. My guess is that Trump can’t do as well among them as Romney did.

It has been a dreadful performance by the press and by party leaders. They are speaking in such a way as to naturalize the creepy, weird and completely un-American positions Trump has taken.

This is how the dictators came to power in the 1920s and 1930s. Good people remained silent or acquiesced. People expressed hope that something good would come of it. Mussolini would wring the laziness out of Italy and make the trains run on time.

When Benjamin Franklin was asked by a lady after the Constitutional Convention what sort of government the US had, he said, “A Republic, Madame, if you can keep it.”

You have to wonder if we can keep it.

Juan Cole is a professor of history at the University of Michigan and maintains the blog Informed Comment.

 

See:http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/how-us-went-fascist-mass-media-makes-excuses-trump-voters?akid=14008.123424.GcZEKd&rd=1&src=newsletter1051277&t=8

Republican Party’s Nightmare Coming True as Trump Gets Closer to the 2016 Nomination

Trump is positioned to win big on Super Tuesday.

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: AlterNet

Author:Steven Rosenfeld

Emphasis Mine

The Republican Party is running out of time and options to stop Donald Trump after winning as expected in Nevada’s Tuesday night caucuses, although party insiders are increasingly desperate about what to do.

Trump, who was leading in Nevada polls—where he has a big Las Vegas hotel-casino—won his largest percentage yet in any of 2016’s caucuses and primaries, with 46 percent of the vote, which was almost twice as much as both Marco Rubio (24 percent) and Ted Cruz (21 percent) received.

So far, 1.2 million Republicans in four states—Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada—have participated in caucuses or voted, in contests where 133 delegates have been at stake under party rules where 1,237 are needed for the presidential nomination. Cruz won Iowa. Trump has won everything since. And next week is when 12 states, with 632 delegates, will vote on March 1, so-called Super Tuesday.

Right now, the latest polls in those states listed on RealClearPolitics.com show Trump ahead in nine of those states—Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia, Arkansas and Vermont. Cruz is ahead in Texas and Arkansas. And Ben Carson is ahead in Colorado, but that survey was taken in November, rendering it meaningless. If Trump wins all these states, he stands to gain upward of 400 delegates, where as the prior states only had 133 delegates in play and awarded some to non-winners.

Beyond the math, the Republican Party establishment is in a real tizzy over what to do. An array of scenarios have been floated—such as pundits like Larry Sabato suggesting Rubio and John Kasich team up, creating a way to likely win Florida and Ohio in the fall. Others have pushed a Cruz-Rubio ticket. Still others have said true conservatives may need to back a third-party candidate. And other GOP strategists have suggested that maybe New York City’s former mayor Michael Bloomberg might be more acceptable than another Clinton presidency. Or they are saying principled Republicans might just have to sit this one out, while others respond that’s impossible, they cannot surrender the party’s brand.

No matter the fanciful fantasy embraced, the reality is the clock is running out on the GOP to stop Trump’s hostile takeover of the party. This is not a conclusion based on the particulars of Trump’s showing in Nevada—as he is very well-known there—but more on the weaknesses of Rubio and Cruz as seen in that state. As Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com noted, Rubio still hasn’t won a single state, and Cruz lost badly in Nevada and before that in South Carolina among constituencies thought to be his best supporters.

“He carried only 27 percent of the white born-again and evangelical Christian vote, behind Trump’s 41 percent. Cruz also lost this group in New Hampshire and South Carolina,” Silver and Harry Enten co-wrote. “Cruz also trailed among ‘very conservative’ voters in Nevada, 34 percent to Trump’s 38 percent.” In short, even if Cruz wins his home state of Texas and nearby Arkansas next Tuesday, as RealClearPolitics’ latest polls have him 4 to 5 points ahead of Trump in both states, it is looking like the beginning of the end of the Cruz campaign.

Of course, the only thing certain about the 2016 campaign trail is nothing is certain. But next Tuesday’s dozen GOP contests with half of the delegates needed to secure the nomination in play is going to be a milestone that can’t be ignored. It is likely that the most virulent voters in the party’s base, who have embraced Trump’s boasts, bullying, bigotry and brashness will be on their way to vanquishing their party’s pro-corporate elites.

Where this goes next is unclear, but it’s surely not toward scenarios where cooler heads will prevail—even if Trump will surprise everyone by trying to sound more moderate after fanning the flames. Anybody who has been on the receiving end of GOP tirades (pro-choice women, LBGT individuals, voters in communities of color, climate change scientists, undocumented migrants, labor unions, etc.) or suffered from their obstructionism—as epitomized by Senate Republicans refusing to consider a Supreme Court nomination—knows the modern GOP has been extremist for years.

The difference now is Trump’s ascent seems to have brought an old and ugly form of mob rule into mainstream view, whereas pledges years ago by now-Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to impede President Obama at every turn and create a failed presidency were cloaked in more “acceptable” partisan gamesmanship under Washington’s political rules.

As many people have noted, Republicans have sown the seeds of Trump’s increasing electoral successes for years. But now they have to live with the consequences, which may mean the end of their party as many know it. The time appears to be running out to stop Trump from gaining the nomination, making the immediate future a belwether for where one of the country’s major parties is going—over the edge and toward a darkening unknown.

Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America’s retirement crisis, democracy and voting rights, and campaigns and elections. He is the author of “Count My Vote: A Citizen’s Guide to Voting” (AlterNet Books, 2008).

See:http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/republican-partys-nightmare-coming-true-trump-gets-closer-2016-nomination?akid=14008.123424.GcZEKd&rd=1&src=newsletter1051277&t=4

The GOP Still Doesn’t Understand the Monster It Created in Donald Trump

In many ways, Trump’s rise to GOP superstardom was inevitable. Yet establishment Republicans still don’t get it.

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: AlterNet

Author: Heather Digby Parton/Salon

Emphasis Mine

The big showdown in South Carolina is over and it came down pretty much as everyone expected. Donald Trump came in first with 32.5 percent, Rubio and Cruz nearly tied for second with Rubio ever so lightly edging Cruz with 22.5 percent to Cruz’s 22.3. The bottom three, Bush, Kasich and Carson all landed with 7-ish points each. The big news was that Jeb Bush dropped out of the race within minutes of the results being called.

So, what does this all mean? Well, nothing new really. Trump declared victory with an odd admission of what really turns him on about running for president, when he said, “It’s tough, it’s nasty, it’s mean, it’s vicious…. it’s beautiful. When you win, it’s beautiful.” He is very, very good at being mean, nasty and vicious. Nobody can say that isn’t working for him.

The pundits are all wondering what happens next, with two rivals still fighting for second place and a couple of others hanging on despite the fact that they are not actually getting anywhere. According to the New York Times, members of the establishment are starting to panic:

Henry Barbour, a Republican National Committee member from Mississippi, sounded a note of alarm about Republicans continuing to wait to see how the race plays out.

“After Trump has won in New Hampshire and South Carolina, Republicans are crazy and about to blow the White House if we don’t rally to stop him,” he said. “It’s certainly time that we have to consolidate the race.”

He predicted that Mr. Trump’s nomination would not only cost Republicans the White House but also hurt the party’s chances of keeping its majority in the Senate.

If the idea is to stop Trump, then somebody is going to have to drop out and drop out quickly. The delegate scheme that was hatched to prevent a re-run of Romney’s long slog against such luminaries as Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum has turned into a formula for a victory for Donald Trump. Recall this New York Times article from last fall:

In the starkest sign of how unsettled the situation is, what once seemed unthinkable — that Mr. Trump could win the Republican nomination — is being treated by many within the Republican establishment as a serious possibility. And one reason his candidacy seems strong is a change by the party in hopes of ending the process earlier: making it possible for states to hold contests in which the winner receives all the delegates, rather than a share based on the vote, starting March 15, two weeks earlier than in the last cycle.

If Mr. Trump draws one-third of the Republican primary vote, as recent polls suggest he will, that could be enough to win in a crowded field. After March 15, he could begin amassing all the delegates in a given state even if he carried it with only a third of the vote. And the later it gets, the harder it becomes for a lead in delegates to be overcome, with fewer state contests remaining in which trailing candidates can attempt comebacks.

They wanted to end it earlier in order to prevent the nominee from being forced so far to the right that he will be hamstrung in the general election as Mitt Romney was. That calculation is no longer operative. At this point they’ll be happy to elect a nominee who won’t cause what’s left of the Republican Party to implode completely.

The assumption among the establishment types is that if only Cruz, Kasich and Carson would get out of the way, all those voters would go to Rubio and they could finally knock out Trump and carry on with the plan. Unfortunately, even if they were able to finally get Rubio a free lane in which to run, there’s no guarantee that he would be the beneficiary of all those freed up votes.  That’s because Trump draws from every demographic. As Ronald Brownstein in the Atlantic pointed out:

On most fronts, the big story in South Carolina was the breadth of Trump’s appeal. Repeating the New Hampshire pattern, Trump in South Carolina ran slightly better among men (36 percent) than women (29 percent). He carried 29 percent of voters who identified as very conservative; 35 percent of somewhat conservative voters; and 34 percent of moderates. That also followed the New Hampshire precedent of little ideological variation in Trump’s support.

In South Carolina, Trump won 33 percent of independents and 32 percent of self-identified Republicans; in New Hampshire he had carried exactly 36 percent of both groups. Trump ran somewhat better last night among voters older than 45 (35 percent) than those younger (26 percent). In New Hampshire, by contrast, Trump’s support varied little by age, though he also performed somewhat better with older voters in Iowa.

(Trump also won a plurality of evangelical voters who turned out in huge numbers to vote. The exit polls don’t delve down quite so deeply, but my suspicion remains that he draws from the “prosperity theology” disco-evangelical crowd, which is a lot less culturally conservative than the more traditional evangelicals who went, as expected, for Ted Cruz.)

Indeed, according to this article in the New York Times, even some Jeb Bush donors are considering joining the Trump bandwagon — or at least letting it carry on without any obstruction from them:

Fred Zeidman, a major Republican donor and longtime Bush family friend who had backed Mr. Bush, said he planned to take a breath and see how things played out. The same was true for Woody Johnson, the owner of the Jets football team, who was Mr. Bush’s national finance chairman. An aide to Mr. Johnson pointed out that he had knocked on doors in early states for Mr. Bush and invested lots of time to help him, and he was not ready to shift allegiances so soon.

Mr. Johnson, who has long been a friend of Mr. Trump, has nonetheless found himself used as an object lesson over the last week by Mr. Trump, who named him at rallies as an example of special-interest donors who supported candidates like Mr. Bush. And in conversations on Sunday morning, there was evidence of interest among some of Mr. Bush’s former donors about possibly backing Mr. Trump.

So what this all adds up to is that the GOP establishment is just as flummoxed about what to do with the Trump phenomenon as before. And this should be no surprise considering that the only thing that changed was a guy who was in 4th or 5th place finally realized he was dead in the water and dropped out.

Still, there is another pundit take-away from the South Carolina results that might be a bit more troubling down the road. One of the more astonishing aspects of Trump’s win in that gothic southern state is that he proved once again that it doesn’t matter what he says, as long as he delivers his lines with that big swinging attitude of his. As Igor Bobic and Ryan Grim point out in a piece at the Huffington Post, over the course of the South Carolina primary campaign Trump summarily executed a number of GOP sacred cows:

Trump declared that former President George W. Bush had lied about weapons of mass destruction to march the country to war; blamed Bush for the 9/11 attacks, arguing that he ignored intelligence community warnings; defended Planned Parenthood; boasted that he was the only Republican who would not cut Social Security or Medicare; said he approved of the individual mandate in Obamacare; and promised to slap onerous tariffs on companies who outsource jobs.

He also vowed to stay neutral in disputes between Israel and Palestine, which is the equivalent of carpet bombing and entire herd of sacred cows.

Pundits on TV and elsewhere were quick to interpret the fact that Trump won so decisively in such a traditional state to mean that all those Republicans were drawn to him because they agree with him on those issues.  They seem to think this might signal that the GOP is becoming a mainstream populist party.

I would argue the opposite is true. They voted for him in spite of his apostasy on all those issues. Indeed, it’s pretty obvious they were willing to rationalize all of it because they believe so strenuously in all the other issues on which he running. They are ecstatic over his anti-“political correctness” campaign to deport millions of undocumented immigrants and their American children and ban 1.6 billion Muslims from entering the country, while putting the ones who are already here under surveillance. These voters cheer wildly for his enthusiastic endorsement of torture, his promise to kill the families of terrorist suspects and his pantomimes of summary executions of soldiers accused of desertion.

His puerile insults and schoolyard bullying are seen as signs of strength. His profane language is appreciated for its gritty machismo. He treats the press with total contempt, and the voters love it.

Over and over again, when asked to explain what they like about him, Trump supporters exclaim, “He knows what I’m thinking!” And what these people are thinking is that he’s making it safe for them to be “politically incorrect” again, giving sanction to publicly express their resentment toward people who don’t look and act like them. There are certainly reasons why these voters feel that way, but they are not due to populist anger toward the 1 percent. After all, the man they are cheering on with such enthusiasm is a man who spends half his time on the stump bragging about his vast wealth and explaining that it’s perfectly normal for businessmen like himself to bribe and cajole politicians to do his bidding. He’s never promised to change that system, not once. And his fans have never once asked him to.

Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

See: http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/gop-still-doesnt-understand-monster-it-created-donald-trump?akid=14000.123424.RnPZCq&rd=1&src=newsletter1051187&t=4

Here’s How 7 of Bernie’s Economic Proposals Would Radically Improve the Majority of Americans’ Lives

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: AlterNet

Author: Gerald Friedman Dollars and Sense

Emphasis Mine

No one should be surprised by the popular support that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has attracted in his run for president as a democratic socialist. Nor should we be surprised that he has drawn attacks charging that his policies will bankrupt the United States. Sanders’ proposals for infrastructure, early-childhood education, higher education, youth employment, family leave, private pensions, and Social Security would total over $3.8 trillion over 10 years. While this is a large number, it would be barely 6% of federal spending for 2017-2026.

Apart from any benefits these programs would bring directly, their cost would be reduced in four ways: Two operate by offsetting current spending and tax policies—either replacing existing federal spending or reducing tax breaks currently subsidizing private spending. The other two, which account for over 70% of the cost reduction, are the “dynamic effects” of increased economic growth—boosting tax revenues and reducing federal safety-net spending when the economy expands.

A quarter of new spending would be offset by savings and by faster economic growth. (See Figure 1.) The ongoing effects of the Great Recession that began in 2007 have left many resources underutilized. By putting unemployed workers and discouraged workers (who have stopped looking for jobs) back to work, the Sanders program would increase economic activity and government revenues while reducing spending on safety-net programs like Supplemental Nutrition.

Taking these dynamic effects into account, the net cost to the public treasury would be about $2.7 trillion, instead of $3.8 trillion, over 10 years. That is, over a quarter of the total tab would be offset by reductions in other forms of government spending and by increased tax revenue derived from faster economic growth.

Each of the seven spending proposals would benefit from offsets and dynamic effects. (See Figure 2.) Universal childcare and free college tuition, for example, would replace existing spending on programs for childcare assistance and much of the spending on Pell Grants for students at public colleges, spending on infrastructure would offset some required maintenance spending, and raising Social Security benefits would allow some seniors to avoid dependence on Supplemental Nutrition (SNAP) and other safety net programs. The programs would also increase tax revenues by eliminating some existing “tax expenditures”—tax breaks that subsidize private spending—like deductions for employer-provided child care.

The programs would accelerate the recovery from the Great Recession. (See Figure 3.) Eight years after the beginning of the Great Recession, the American economy remains depressed. While the economy has been growing steadily since the end of 2009, output remains nearly 5% below capacity. Only 59% of the adult population is employed, down from over 63% before the recession and the lowest level in 30 years.

I estimate that, due to increased government spending, the Sanders program would increase GDP growth rates for 2017-2026 enough to result in a projected GDP in 2026 $4 trillion higher than without the programs.

The Sanders program would add six million new jobs. (See Figure 4.) The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that, due to sluggish economic growth, the percentage of the working-age population employed will fall between now and 2026, from 59% to 57%. The Sanders program would directly create jobs in infrastructure, in child-care services, in higher education, and for young people. It would also create additional jobs indirectly, as the newly employed and others spend their additional income. All told, I calculate that the program would raise employment by six million jobs by 2026.

Government spending would decline relative to GDP within the decade. (See Figure 5.) Federal spending would initially increase faster than GDP under the Sanders program. After 2021, however, federal spending would be lower as a percentage of GDP than it would be under Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections, because of the strength of the economic recovery engendered by the Sanders stimulus. This is actually a conservative estimate of the boost to GDP because it does not include the productivity-raising effects of infrastructure spending and increased education.

Gerald Friedman teaches economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author, most recently, of “Reigniting the Labor Movement” (Routledge, 2007).

 

See: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-how-7-bernies-economic-proposals-would-radically-improve-majority-americans?akid=13995.123424.I4YXYv&rd=1&src=newsletter1051042&t=14