Another year, another Presidential Budget. With this proposal, the largest ever at $4.75T, supporters of President Trump have cast away any claims to fiscal conservativism to join those “family values” Republicans who sold out years ago just to wave a red pennant. In fact, the only ideologically consistent tenet of the President’s platform is now a white nationalist one, what with the rallies, and the wall thing, and the carrying on like a street performer doing Mussolini.

In proposing an unprecedented Presidential Budget, it’s amazing, really, that this administration has still found a way to make cuts at all, let alone the evisceration of social safety-net programs which many of us refer to as “humanity.” It is a good thing that the Presidential Budget is really kind of a marketing document, and that Congress actually makes all of those decisions. But the president’s budget speaks volumes to the instincts and preferences of the man in the White House.

I’m sure that analysts will find nuggets of misanthropy deeply buried in the document for weeks to come, but just behind the military parades and silly walls there is an implication much more telling of just how much contempt this president and his new party have for the public. Look, for instance, at education spending.

This budget suggests a 12% cut to the Department of Education, which includes slashing the Pell Grant funding that assists lower- and middle- class households in sending children to college. It also funds the Arts in Education Program, which as seen as much as 50% budget cuts since Republicans took control of Congress in 2012. Taken with consistent calls by this administration to defund the Endowment for the Arts and the Endowment for Humanities, we can interpret this as a real cynicism toward a liberal arts education.

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM), on the other hand, is so hot right now. In spite of deep cuts to education spending, we now have new grant opportunities for Computer Science, STEM, etc. from that same agency on the heels of this administration’s promise to invest $200M in those fields. Hot dang! Education!

And that looks great. We’re funding programs to prepare kids for the world. Except that the programs that would someday hire those kids, NASA, the NIH, the NSF, the Department of Agriculture, etc., are also looking down the barrel of billions of dollars in budget cuts.

This begs the question: who stands to gain here?

The answer, of course is Facebook. Google. Tech. What we have in this budget is the framework for a public education system that serves at the pleasure of Big Technology. Where a narrowly educated workforce is churned out heavily in debt to toil toward profits of Byzantine proportions that will be shared by a very few.

It should come as no surprise that the items of Federal R&D budgets which did see proposed increases were for Artificial Intelligence and 5G broadband: the underpinnings of our new surveillance economy and the data hegemony of these same mega-companies.

We see in this budget the cynical view that the government should serve corporate interests above all. With the influence of money in modern politics, this should not surprise us (the tech industry spent $220M on elections in 2018).

Until we get money out of politics this is the new normal: where government works for the interest of private sector growth, and not for the individuals who cast the votes.

Leave This Blank:Leave This Blank Too:Do Not Change This:

Your email:

 

Like

Good lord, we’re going to reelect Donald Trump next year.

With Bernie Sanders’ entry into what was already shaping up to serve as a clinic in how not to win an election, the only thing that would add more fuel to the fire is for Hilary Clinton to run again.

We are just chomping at the bit to tear each other apart over the narcissism of small differences, aren’t we? Kamala Harris failed her constituents as a District Attorney. Bernie Sanders is an old, white, single-issue misogynist. Elizabeth Warren is terrible on foreign policy, and something about a DNA test? Cory Booker is a phony progressive and a sellout. Meanwhile there is a literal Nazi sympathizer in the White House and it feels a bit like we on the left are having a hard time focusing on that.

Clear, widespread, and well-funded voter fraud was rampant in North Carolina, and yet the New York Times prefers to call it a “Scheme” for the 20 hours the story was even on their website. Commercial drugs are now more likely to kill you than driving, you are currently being harmed by global warming, and, technically, you’re living in an oligarchy.

Even Tucker Carlson is mad as hell, and isn’t going to take it anymore.

And yet, here we are, just lining up to pick each other bloody like a bunch of damn poultry.

To be fair there are better and worse candidates on the left, and the primary system is a decent way to suss that out. Bernie did a lot of good to energize his progressive base and move the Democratic party to the left. But with the nervous hand wringing and dissonance that is already shepherding in the next election cycle, we’re getting ready for a second term of 45.

All of the candidates will have some kind of problematic past, or record, or stupid party costume when they were 19. All of the candidates are 100 times better than what we currently have. During primary season their differences will feel profound. They will be separated by chasms in debates over healthcare, foreign policy, and the environment.

The Republican establishment is already laying a foundation to vilify the left as baby-murdering eco-terrorists, but the reality is that nothing that is proposed in the next election cycle will be particularly earth shattering. Policies that are rejected here as radical and socialist are commonplace in most of the industrialized world. What has passed for progressive in the United States for decades has been nothing left of center-right on any honest conversation of scale.

This next year, let’s recognize that we as Americans elected an authoritarian, right wing nationalist government. Not Romania, not Ukraine. The President of the United States is on the record defending neo-Nazi violence. And he has been met, generally, with disdain.

Donald Trump is, hands down, the least popular president we have had in modern memory, which is a good thing. Sort of like Brexit, it’s as though we made a panicky, emotional decision that we didn’t really mean. Frankly, we blew it. Unlike Brexit, we can do our best to make it right, and vote him out in a landslide.

But in order to do that, we need a candidate who can energize voters and get them to the polls. This will not happen if we spend the next year or so ruining the credibility of the pool. All of the democratic prospects are functionally identical in that they are not Donald Trump. Let’s not forget that, because doing so will all but guarantee a second Trump term, and that is unforgivable.

Leave This Blank:Leave This Blank Too:Do Not Change This:

Your email:

 

 

Like

Last week our newly reasonable House of Representatives introduced long overdue legislation to require background checks on pretty much all firearm purchases. The timing so early in this Congress at once signifies that gun control is a priority for progressive voters, and corresponds with the 8th anniversary of a mass shooting that targeted, well, Congress. It is the latest step by our elected officials to stint what is now a hallowed American tradition of gun violence.

In spite of overwhelming public support for gun reform, this bill is laughably basic and still expected to face fierce opposition in the Senate. It’s likely dead in the Halls of Congress, like Gabrielle Giffords nearly was (and six people, including a child were) eight years ago. The bill is also unlikely to curb the American epidemic of violence, but then it isn’t really meant to.

Epidemic is a great word to describe our culture of gun violence because it is so harmful and pervasive, but also because it evokes an analogy of disease or infection, which is apt.

Say, for instance, you have a badly abscessed molar. You have let it go far too long because a Good Guy with essential oils, or quartz crystals, or something, convinced you that it would help. Your cheek is very swollen and puss oozes into your mouth and it’s much too painful to chew and your European friends and loved ones are starting to stare. You have a problem, and you’ve finally decided to listen to your mother and go see a dentist.

Your dentist sees the problem clearly and prescribes a suite of treatments: narcotics for the pain, steroids for the swelling, and antibiotics for the infection. You take the pain pills and anti-inflammatories, obviously, but those won’t treat the root cause. That is basic, commonsense gun control. Stemming violence requires more.

This is not an argument against gun control. When your tooth is pussing and bleeding you take the damn pain pills until the antibiotics kick in. But the root of gun violence is the root of violence, which can’t be addressed by treating symptoms.

35,000 people die from gunfire in the United States every year. That’s about four times as many Americans as have died in the War on Terror, and more than half as many as died in the entire Vietnam War. Two thirds of these deaths are suicides, gun murders tend to be concentrated in city centers, and about 500 women are shot to death each year by partners (which is certainly under reported). These numbers can be reduced, but not eliminated, with meaningful gun control.

For instance, where states impose more restrictive gun policy, firearm suicides drop dramatically and suicides in general decrease. Where gun restrictions were repealed, suicides increased.

Any NRA talking head can quickly rattle off the exploding rates of knife violence in the United Kingdom, where gun ownership is very low. It’s easy to blow them off as partisan hacks, but at some level they’re right. The Brookings Institute has found that violence in general stems from social and economic uncertainty. Gun control will not address the underlying issues that drive violence: manufactured resource scarcity, social inequality, and the poisonous politics of masculinity that drive domestic violence.

Gun control will, however, make us much less lethal while we work out the real problems.

Time will tell whether the recent Congressional slide to the left has the staying power to effect meaningful change to the social and economic policies that underscore widespread violence. Meaningful reform to health care, urban planning, food security and wealth equality is necessary to treat the systemic sickness that drives violence.

But while the antibiotics are at work, you still take the Lortab. Gun control is not the answer but it is a stint to save lives while we do the real work. It’s the least that we can do.

Leave This Blank:Leave This Blank Too:Do Not Change This:

Your email:

 

Like

Hot damn, the government is back open! President Trump has come around, finally, that it was sort of a silly idea all along, and that yes, he will be blamed for suspending nearly 1,000,000 of his employees for no reason. He even seems to be realizing that he will not receive funding for his pie-eyed campaign promise to build a southern border wall (he long ago abandoned the promise that Mexico would pay for it), and reverted again to musing about declaring a State of Emergency to get what he wants.

Now, this is something that has received quite a lot of attention, but we should summarize here: there is no illegal immigration crisis. It is completely invented. Undocumented immigration rates have been steadily declining for a decade. Immigrants do not commit crimes at a higher rate than citizens. Not only do undocumented immigrants pay taxes, they contribute more to federal budgets than they use.

Even if illegal immigration was a problem (it’s not), a border wall would not correct the issue. Most undocumented immigrants enter the country legally as tourists or students and overstay their visas. The vast majority of drug smuggling occurs through ports of entry, and if we were actually serious about stinting the drug trade we would do the only thing that works: legalized and regulated marijuana in the US led to a 70% decrease in drug seizures at the Mexican border from 2013 to 2018.

So we’ll say it again. There is no illegal immigration emergency at the border. And even if there was, a wall wouldn’t fix it.

Now, just because there is no illegal immigration state of emergency, that does not mean that everything is all good. There are a number of emergencies facing the United States (and humanity) right now, and none of them are illegal immigration.

Here’s a short list:

Citizens United and the Decay of News Media Credibility

This is a big one. Generally speaking I like to think that most of us just want everyone to be happy and prosperous and to do the right thing. And, sure, we disagree on how best to do that. That’s what makes this country great! As we sift through this Great American Experiment, it only makes sense that we’ll blow it every once in a while. There are good policies and bad policies, and we can probably be trusted to figure it out and do the right thing, given real information.

That’s the problem with unfettered campaign finance policy, the evisceration of small and medium newspapers, and a relatively recent effort to undermine the credibility of the media (a move made easier by bone-headed reporting in pursuit of The Big Scoop!). These issues are much more problematic than individual policies because they influence how we make decisions about policies. With real information, we humans can probably, usually, come up with something like the right answer. But with cultural and policy missteps that degrade how we get information, we probably can’t be relied on to make the right call. That’s why half you idiots think there’s a state of emergency at the border.

Global Warming

This is another one of those manufactured controversies. Of course what’s manufactured here is that there is any controversy at all. Global warming is not controversial. It is happening. Humans are causing it. Giving up straws is not going to fix it. Driving everywhere all the time in a Prius is not going to fix it. Buying any kind of “green” gadget is not going to fix it. Immediate, dramatic change, both collective and individual, may help. Sorry not sorry.

Wealth Inequality and Widespread Financial Insecurity

The 1% take a lot of flak, and that’s fine, but they don’t get nearly as much shit as Millennials. Good lord. It seems like “kids these days” are ruining everything from macro-brewed beer to terrible restaurants. It’s pretty amazing, really, that all these twenty- and thirty-somethings manage to kill so much and still have time to piece together part time side hustles in the gig economy.

Young people now have more debt, less financial security, and fewer prospects than our parents’ generation. The dream of the American Meritocracy, where those who work hard will succeed, is now a myth, and ours is the first generation in memory that will be worse off than our parents. This is a bummer for us, sure, but it’s bigger than “poor me.” People born after 1980 are not buying houses, which is pretty much how Americans have built wealth since forever, but we’re also much slower to settle down, get married, and have kids. And that will be a problem.

In fact four decades from now this will ruin us, and we can look to Japan, where 20% of the population is older than 70, to see why. Longer, higher-quality lives and historically low birth rates are wreaking havoc as a contracting work force and decreased productivity ripples through economy and social services there.

Runaway wealth inequality and a precarious economy is not about whiney Millennials and avocado toast – it’s about the cannibalization of the American economy and how that will reverberate into the future.

 The Anti-Vaxxers

I’m not sure how this needs to be said, but good lord. Did you see that an outbreak of an easily curable disease is ravaging the children in an enclave of people who think vaccines are poison? And that they’re afraid, and don’t know what to do? I wonder if this comes back to how and where people get their information . . .

Shit maybe we’re due for a plague.

Latin American Refugee Crisis

And you know just because there’s not an illegal immigration crisis at the border does not mean there isn’t a humanitarian one. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that of the 700,000 people who overstayed visas in 2017, 20% were from two countries: Venezuela and Brazil, where economic turmoil and right wing governments have made life untenable. We’ve discussed before that pretty  much every cultural and economic driver of Latin American human migration has roots in American colonial foreign policy. Whether we were trying to get cheap bananas or make sure those scary communists didn’t get a chance to provide healthcare, there are American fingerprints on the vast majority of coups, death squads, and genocides in Central and South America. We did this, it’s our responsibility, at least, to recognize our role and try to make right what we can.

Leave This Blank:Leave This Blank Too:Do Not Change This:

Your email:

 

Like