Class warfare

Gosh, who didn’t see this one coming?

Marco Rubio said the GOP plan to tax the poor to give to the rich is the first step before “instituting structural changes to Social Security and Medicare.” Translation: gut.

All fall the various agencies that rate bills have been saying this bill blows a $1.5 trillion hole in the deficit. In sharp contrast to what the GOP said when Obama was in office they have been saying, “Deficit you say? Hmm.”

I (and many others) saw through the ruse. I commented (in another person’s blog) that I was sure the day after the bill was passed this gaping deficit would suddenly become hugely important to the GOP, causing them to demand correspondingly huge cuts to government social programs.

I was wrong about one thing. The GOP started talking about this the day *before* the vote on the bill. That’s more evidence that they believe they’ve already rigged the 2018 election sufficiently so they can’t lose.

One of the big selling points of the bill has been the claim that if corporations had more money they would create more jobs and boost wages. Yes, some of them will. However, Toluse Olorunnipa of Bloomberg reports that major companies will give the money to their shareholders or take other actions to boost stock price (the Dow Jones average hit another milestone high today). And shareholders tend not to be poor or working poor. They tend to already be rich.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville reminds us this “tax” bill is class warfare. She explains:

One of the most common rhetorical fallacies in U.S. politics is that raising taxes on wealthy people to help fund social programs for people in need is "class warfare." That is not class warfare. That is a basic economic necessity to maintain anything resembling a functional capitalist society.

We hear an awful lot about how taxation of the wealthy constitutes "a war on the rich" and is part of a "wealth redistribution" scheme to give away rich folks' hard-earned money to layabouts who refuse to provide for themselves with an honest day's work.

That is a lie. It is also a perfect projection of the reality of conservative economic policy — which is entirely dedicated to giving working people as little compensation as possible and then taking even more in taxation, to subsidize and reward the lazy lifestyles of a class comprised of investors, heirs, and people who themselves might have worked very hard once upon a time but now spend their days guarding piles of gold coins like insatiable dragons.

"Class warfare" is economic policy that is designed to plunder wealth from the lower classes and redistribute it upwards to create ever higher concentrates among the already-wealthy.

I’ll add another point. The GOP likes to say that government is too big and are taking this step as a way to force government to be smaller. Their analysis seems to stop there, that a big government being a bad thing should be blindingly obvious. But they are making this claim for a particular reason. A smaller government can’t afford to help minorities and those of the poor and working poor classes.

My furnace learned a new trick today

When I got out of bed this morning the room was cold. I looked at my indoor/outdoor thermometer and saw the indoor temperature was 5F below what it should have been. Turning the thermostat off and on did nothing to rouse the furnace.

I looked online for a highly rated heating company. The closest one appeared best, so I called. I was surprised when the agent said someone would be there in a half hour. And he was!

After a while he came up from the basement and said he got the furnace to run. But the circuit board looked about to give out. Overall, furnaces tend to last 20 years and this one had lasted 24. Replacing an expensive circuit board didn’t seem wise. He gave me a quote for a new furnace and left.

A couple hours later I realized I hadn’t really warmed up. The thermometer showed the temp had dropped again. I called the heating company and said let’s do the new furnace. The agent said she would talk to the service man and get back with me.

After lunch I heard the furnace come on. The temp had dropped 5F. The furnace ran until the temp was back to my setting, then shut off. And stayed off until the temp had dropped 5F.

I heartily agree a furnace that drops 5F before turning on is a lot better than one that doesn’t turn on at all. It is cold outside! – though still above freezing.

The heating company isn’t sure whether the installation is tomorrow or Saturday.

Triple punch

Last Friday I wrote:

[FCC Chair Ajit] Pai is going to ignore what the American people want, and give the internet away to a few players like Comcast and Verizon.

After reading an article by Sarah Kendzior I think Comcast and Verizon are being used as a cover. Sure, Comcast and Verizon are quite willing participants in this effort and will certainly enjoy squeezing more money out of their customers (especially the ones who have no alternative internet provider). But it is much deeper than these internet companies.

Kendzior studies authoritarian regimes and how they operate. In an article for The Globe and Mail she writes about a triple punch that would likely kill democracy in America.

Over the past year we have been exercising our First Amendment rights in response to everything the nasty guy does.

We debunked lies, catalogued crimes, demanded justice and created a vast, informal movement dedicated to the pursuit of truth over alternative facts.

But without an open internet, also known as net neutrality…

The threat to net neutrality highlights the reliance on social media and an independent press for political organizing in the digital age. Should net neutrality be eliminated, those avenues will likely become curtailed for much of the public or driven out of business due to loss of revenue. Without the means to freely communicate online, citizens will be far less able to challenge the administration. It doesn't matter what cause someone prioritizes: The elimination of net neutrality will impede the ability to understand the cause, discuss it and organize around it.

Dictators don’t like free speech. But in the modern world free speech can be shut down without touching the constitution. Let the technology do the censorship. As for those pesky news sites, they can be shut down from a lack of business or litigated into compliance (from my perspective many are already compliant, not offering much informed resistance). With a subtle gesture of repealing net neutrality (we in the government aren’t going to censor you – blame the corporations!) the constitution will remain burnished but eliminated in practice.

That was the first punch.

Devin Coldewey of TechCrunch says the FCC is basing their actions on a bogus description of the internet, one that has failed in court already. Those challenging the FCC actions have a case to take to court.

At least for a while.

Which brings us to Kendzior’s second punch.

The GOP was diligent during the Obama administration in preventing his judicial picks from taking seats in federal courts. Merritt Garland, nominated for the Supremes, is the famous example. But there were well over 100 (maybe 175?) vacant seats when Obama left office. The nasty guy and his cronies in the Senate have been just as diligent filling those seats with conservative extremists. These judges could ignore constitutional rights and civil liberties. Since such appointments are for life they could be there for more than a generation.

I’ve been working, doing what I can, to prevent the third punch, though my actions may come to late. The GOP has been active…

with gerrymandering, restrictive voter ID laws, a bogus "voter fraud" commission, insecure voting machines, and foreign interference that is not only unchallenged but is sometimes encouraged by Republicans all adding up to the likelihood that the 2018 midterm elections will not be free or fair. Voter suppression will likely be rampant, with non-white and immigrant Americans the primary targets of disenfranchisement.

Put the three punches together and we get a horror:

Consider this scenario for 2018: The repeal of net neutrality will stem the flow of information, making voter suppression harder to document. The packing of the courts will make the voter suppression that is documented harder to challenge. And the long-standing solution to purveyors of unpopular policies – vote them out – will be, by definition, impossible, since the election is rigged and the rigging uncontestable. This carefully constructed web of repression is how democracy dies.

Evidence? The GOP is working hard to pass a trillion dollar giveaway to the rich disguised as a middle class tax cut that has a 25% approval rating. They no longer care about public opinion. Kendzior concludes:

What can we Americans do? Talk about it – while we still can. Call our representatives, organize in our community, and have a plan for what we'll do should these repressive initiatives pass. Over the past year, citizens have had success exerting public pressure on officials and raising consciousness over social issues. The internet was key to these endeavours, which is precisely why the administration wants to eliminate equal access to it. If we, as Americans, want to retain our voice, we must speak up now, or forever, involuntarily, hold our peace.

Count everybody

Danny Vinik and Andrew Restuccia of Politio report that the nasty guy is leaning towards naming Thomas Brunell to the top operational job at the US Census Bureau, which is gearing up for 2020, where it will try to count everyone living in America.

Vinik and Restucca will guide us in listing why Brunell at Census is a really bad idea.

* He is a political science professor with no government or administrative experience.

* He is (as we’ll see) a very partisan choice (did we expect anything different from the nasty guy and his vice?) for a job where his predecessors have been a carefully nonpolitical choice, a career civil servant with a background in statistics. The nasty guy intends to politicize the census.

* The GOP has long sought to add a question to the census asking: Are you a citizen? The census is supposed to count *everybody*. Such a question will drive down minority response rates. Putting Brunell in the job makes Dems fearful the question might actually make it in.

* In Brunell’s 2008 book “Redistricting and Representation,”

he argued that partisan districts packed with like-minded voters actually lead to better representation than ones more evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, because fewer voters in partisan districts cast a vote for a losing candidate. He has also argued that ideologically packed districts should be called “fair districts” and admits that his stance on competitive elections makes him something of an outlier among political scientists, who largely support competitive elections.

Even though he criticized partisan gerrymandering (he did?) the GOP had repeatedly used his research in their geerrymandering efforts.

From my own work in attempting to get rid of partisan gerrymandering I know that districts with like-minded voters tend to elect more extreme candidates who might share views with perhaps as little as a quarter of the voters.

* Brunell, with oversight of the agency’s budget, could decide where and how little to advertise the census, so that minorities don’t know it is coming.

* Brunell has no experience with the richness of the data the Census collects (used by a wide variety of researchers) and with what data the agency collects between its 10 year events.

Other Census concerns:
* The whole operation is being underfunded – fewer people to go to addresses to track down people who didn’t mail in their questionnaire.

* A partisan census (one that decides not to count those people) would have an astounding ripple effect on Congressional reapportionment and on how funds for government programs are distributed.

* A partisan census would cause public and Congressional confidence and integrity of the census to plummet.

This job does not require Senate confirmation, so Congress can’t block the hire.

Treat people humanely

When conservative talking heads look at inner cities they see trouble. They rant about black-on-black crime. They propose two basic solutions – flood the streets with police and enact stricter laws to send more people to jail.

Kelly Macias of Daily Kos discussing a story by Emily Badger of the *New York Times* says there is another way – treat people humanely.

In particular Badger notes:

Local nonprofit groups that responded to the violence by cleaning streets, building playgrounds, mentoring children and employing young men had a real effect on the crime rate.

These are communities where the people in them worked hard for change with little credit. This community effort may not drive down the crime rate by itself, but it is a “missing piece,” something ignored in national debates.

Macias adds:

Of course, the idea of communities working hard to address problems and transform their reality doesn’t fit the conservative narrative that these are lazy, pathological communities of color who prefer to do more race-baiting than problem solving. But statistics don’t lie.

Badger supplies some of those statistics.

Between the early 1990s and 2015, the homicide rate in America fell by half. Rates of robbery, assault and theft tumbled in tandem. In New York, Washington and San Diego, murders dropped by more than 75 percent.
…
This long-term trend has fundamentally altered city life. It has transformed fear-inducing parks and subways into vibrant public spaces. It has lured wealthier whites back into cities. It has raised the life expectancies of black men. And even in an age of widening urban inequality, it has meant that the daily lives of the most disadvantaged are less dangerous now than they were a generation ago. These poor neighborhoods, [New York University sociologist Patrick] Sharkey has found, have been the greatest beneficiaries of this tectonic change in safety.

Macias concludes:

These findings affirm something that is missing from traditional ways of looking at crime prevention—that understanding people’s social, emotional and psychological needs are a vital part of culture and behavior change. “Any time people’s basic needs are met, violence goes down—that’s not new,” said Noreen McClendon, who directs the nonprofit Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles. When structural racism, classism and capitalism combine and there is money to be made in locking people up, unfortunately, there is no real need for lawmakers to come up with holistic solutions. And it’s really too bad because it’s such a simple lesson. The more that individuals and communities have resources, the more violence can be prevented. It’s certainly not a fix-all, but it’s a start.

I add: So, all you people at the top, what keeps our cities safer – what keeps you safer – oppression or community?

Science guy

I went out to a movie this afternoon, *Bill Nye: Science Guy*. It is a documentary about what the host of a popular kids science show is doing now.

The show ended a while ago. Even so, when science teachers need a break they still play an episode for the class. Nye joked during a convention of science teachers that he taught many of their classes. Nye is also still highly popular with the youth. Frequently when he is in public kids pull out phones and ask for a selfie with him. He is good at leaning in, smiling, and moving on.

So the movie talks about his show, how it developed, and what it did. It also talked about his family, showing family movies that include his parents, brother, and sister and what they are doing now. We even see a session with a researcher asking him what fame has done to him.

And we see what he is doing now. And that is trying to combat the strong antagonism to science in our society. That antagonism comes from two sources, those denying evolution and those denying climate change.

We see Nye go to the Creation Museum and debate its founder Ken Ham. Everyone thought Nye easily won the debate – everyone except Ham’s supporters. All Ham had to do was bellow, “But that’s just wrong!”

Nye went to the Ark Encounter, another of Ham’s projects and tried another debate. Nye was criticized for that because afterword Ham told his followers we’re being attacked by Nye and donations shot up. Nye lamented the garbage this place feeds our kids…

Nye went off to Greenland. He saw the effects of climate change and spent time at the research facility that drills into the ice cap (down to two miles) and analyses the ice and air trapped in it to show climate history and how the level of carbon dioxide correlates with temperature.

Nye tries to engage Joe Bastardi, Meteorologist for Fox News and climate change denier. What was interesting during these scenes was watching Bastardi’s son Garrett, who is in college studying Meteorology and grew up watching Nye’s show. A little bit of internal conflict there.

One more thing Nye is doing is preside over the Planetary Society, which advocates for humans in space. This organization was started by Carl Sagan, whom Nye admires. The Society floundered after Sagan died until Nye took over. Sagan proposed the idea of a light sail. We see a clip where Sagan presents the idea to Johnny Carson. But the one attempt in Sagan’s life failed when the spaceship carrying it fell into the sea. Under Nye the Society got the idea going again and actually got a light sail launched.

Doing it fraudulently

Yesterday in my post about Ajit Pai of the FCC wanting to end an open internet I wrote, “1.52 comments in opposition left on the cumbersome FCC website versus only 23,000 in favor.”

A correction to that sentence. It should be “1.52 million comments…” I apologize for leaving out a very important word.

And an explanation. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reports that data scientist Jeff Kao analyzed the comments. He determined that 1.3 million of the comments in favor of ending an open internet were generated by bots and thus were fake. Kao calculated that “more than 99% of the truly unique comments were in favor of keeping net neutrality.” So my corrected sentence above shows data after Kao’s analysis. All those fake comments – and the acknowledgment that they are fake – allows “Pai’s office to argue that the comments should not be seen as a legitimate expression of public opinion.”

Eric Boehlert of Shareblue reports the corrupted the comments aren’t a new revelation. The comment page was opened in April. By May, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman started investigating. Some of those fake comments came from people whose identities were misused (a better word might be “stolen.” That includes tens of thousands of New Yorkers and hundreds of thousands nationwide. Schneiderman has repeatedly asked the FCC to hand over records. He hasn’t received any reply.

Wrote McCarter:

Pai is going to ignore what the American people want, and give the internet away to a few players like Comcast and Verizon. He's doing it fraudulently, by ignoring cheating and lying. Because of course he is. That's how Republicans get everything they want.

Sticking others with the bill

In the mall near me the Macy’s store closed. Corporate Sears, one of the other big stores in the mall is on shaky ground. The wall otherwise looks healthy with only a few empty stores. The other big stores are JC Penney (in dubious health) and Kohl’s.

I wrote back in April that between October 2016 and April 2017 89,000 retail workers had been laid off. The reason given at the time is competition from online stores. Other reasons given include Millennials who might be more penny-pinching than their elders, likely because wages have stagnated. Or Facebook and social networks mean public spaces aren’t necessary.

Hunter, writing for Daily Kos considers another reason, as noted by David Dayen of the New Republic. Private equity companies can kill off a chain by “purchasing it, loading it with debt, and sticking others with the bill.” In a bit more detail, they buy, borrow massively, use corporate reserves to pay themselves, then declare bankruptcy. Workers, who actually supply value to the company, see nothing. If the workers aren’t laid off immediately they lose their jobs anyway when the whole thing collapses. Congress could stop such cannibalism, if they had the spine to mess with top political donors.

Maximum profits over human needs

Back in May I wrote a couple of posts about robots and computers soon taking over most jobs. The first discussed that we may all be out of a job soon. Will this no need for work be a workers paradise? In the second post my friend and debate partner replied saying it won’t be a paradise because those at the top are heavily invested in ranking and keeping the rest of us poor and miserable so that their position is secure.

Jim Hightower writes the Hightower Lowdown, and describes it as “Dispatches from the Populist Rebellion.” He also looks at the robot situation in both the September and October issues. I’ll only refer to the latter one. I’ll start with his summary:

THE ISSUE BEFORE US is not robots or no robots. They are here and spreading, like it or not, with everyone from Silicon Valley engineers to savvy Ghanaian teenagers designing ever-smarter versions.
…
Further, many people around the globe are shackled to exploitative jobs so impoverishing, dreary, awful, or deadly that humans should not be doing them. Let the robots have them.

Our goal, then, is not to kill all robots, but to reject the socially poisonous corporate ethic that prizes maximization of profits over human needs and egalitarian values. Machines are not stealing jobs from us (as intelligent as they are, they have no capacity to conceive such a move). Rather, what’s happening is that capital is displacing labor–or, more precisely, capitalists are displacing human labor with robots and then pocketing the paychecks of the employees they discard. The progressive movement should keep making this distinction–and keep the public’s focus on our real adversary.

To get to life after work Hightower proposes a few paths.

* A permanent Work Progress Administration. Bring this New Deal program into the 21st Century. Pay people to create art and to rebuild and maintain public infrastructure.

* More time off. Spread the available work around and give each a living wage for a shorter work week. People have more time for family, education, civic participation, and community work.

* Redefine work. Pay for socially valuable but currently unpaid jobs, such as parenting, care for elderly, teaching assistants, mentors, and such.

* Universal Basic Income. Tax the unearned windfall of corporations when the zero out their payrolls. Use the money to give *every* citizen enough money to live on. No need for bureaucracy to figure out who needs it. UBI experiments are underway in Finland, Uganda, Canada, the Netherlands, even Oakland, CA. Alaska’s oil wealth has been giving its residents a UBI since 1982 (though maybe not enough to live on), giving the state the lowest rate of poverty and the highest rate of well-being. Madhya Pradesh, a state in central India, experimented with UBI. Sanitation, housing, nutrition, overall health, and employment went up. The employment rate went down for only one group – children. More of them were in school.

I’ve said frequently (such as above) a big reason for what the corporate bosses are doing isn’t about the money (though they definitely enjoy that). It is about oppressing us so we can’t challenge them for their spot at the top of society. They aren’t going to accept these ideas without a big fight. So we need to start talking about it (which is what I’m doing with this post). Even so,

With concepts like UBI, rather than simply worrying about “getting a job,” people can focus on getting a life. It’s a chance for workers everywhere to get out from under the boss hierarchy and decades of a relentless 9-to-5 schedule, freeing them to build their lives and communities around the myriad of things they really want to do.

These watershed moments rarely come around, and we should grab this one to launch local, national, and international discussions about a new, egalitarian social order based not on our one-dimensional role of “worker,” but on the whole human.

In an article I spotted on the Lowdown website Hightower asks the GOP, “Why are you even considering giving more tax breaks to corporate giants?” He gives four reasons why those breaks are a bad idea.

* The rich are already wallowing in wealth, “refusing to invest it to benefit the vast majority of people they’ve been knocking down and holding down.”

* You shouldn’t give away public money when there is a budget deficit and there are huge needs in public investment.

* The people's sense of equality and social unity has been fracture by huge wealth inequality, so intentionally widening that gap is “criminally stupid…and dangerous.”

* “Why would you think over-paid, over-pampered CEOs deserve more pampering? They’ve become imperious potentates who feel entitled to gouge, cheat, defraud, lie, and otherwise run over us commoners.”

The GOP is doing this (as I said above) because it isn’t about the money. It’s about ranking and keeping the lower ranks of society oppressed.

Thoroughly not supported

The head of the Federal Communications Commission Ajit Pai is proposing removing the net neutrality rules, or open internet rules. The FCC board will, I think, vote on it in mid December. That board has 3 GOP members and 2 Dems.

Removing the open internet rules means that an internet service provider (ISP), a company that connect your computer or phone with the internet, can do such things as:

* Charge you extra for certain content, such as a competitor’s streaming service, because they want to prod you to use their own streaming service.

* Instead, they may slow down the info from certain sites (like competitors), enough that using those sites become irritating to use.

* Or they may simply block some sites. One big internet company, ClearChannel, is owned by fundamentalists. And we know what kinds of sites they would want to block.

I’m lucky that I live in an area that has (I think) four companies that could connect me to the internet. If I get pissed off at the current one (and opposing an open internet is a big reason) I can switch – even though doing so will be a pain because I’d have to change my email address and so many websites I visit are geared to that address.

But two-thirds of American consumers have only one choice of provider. These companies are monopolies.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville calls this “dreadful news.” “Kyriarchy” is a word she uses for what I call ranking – the widely held belief that some people are supposed hold a societal rank over others.

One of the most dangerous potential outcomes of subverting Net Neutrality is that media with the broadest potential audience — i.e. kyriarchy-upholding garbage, which makes money hand over fist — will be the most cheaply accessible, while specialized media — i.e. kyriarchy-challenging material, which struggles to turn a profit — will be the most expensive, since media producers invested in social justice don't tend to get rich from their work.

That kyriarchy-challenging material refers to any site run by any minority (black or ethnic, LGBT, feminist, Muslim, etc.) that challenges white male supremacy. We may lose our diverse voices.

That prompted a response from reader Ignatius Cheezburger:

The other concern being that if the ISP happens to endorse or support certain political or cultural views as a matter of corporate policy, that ISP can now selectively filter certain content for priority delivery that is in keeping with their views and other content that runs contrary to those views for lower priority delivery, or no delivery at all. For example, NARAL or Planned Parenthood suddenly finds its alerts and updates getting bounced from all of its members within the ClearChannel family. Not good. Not good at all.

McEwan urges us to make noise in Congress and mentions ways to do so. I’ve done it and urge you to do it to.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a series of tweets, notes how thoroughly this move by Pai is not supported by the public – 1000 small business owners, investors, and tech startups. 900 video creators whose content is viewed by 240 million viewers. 200 international businesses. 52 racial justice, civil rights, and human rights organizations. Dozens of ISPs across the country. 120,000 libraries. Privacy organizations. Attorneys General from a dozen states. 60 mayors. National Association of Realtors. 1.52 [ETA] million comments in opposition left on the cumbersome FCC website versus only 23,000 in favor. 77% of Americans (73% of GOP and 80% of Dems) as shown by a poll.

So if the public and virtually every facet of Internet culture (including ISPs) oppose the FCC’s plan, then why are we even going down this path? To put it simply: the FCC is not serving the public interest but is rather serving the interests of the very few but massively vertically integrated ISPs that support the current agency’s agenda.

Put another way: campaign cash.

In reply Paul Geffen tweeted:

Also the interests of the government in controlling access to information and communication.

Walk on eggshells

The huge amount of news of women accusing men of sexual harassment and abuse prompted a series of tweets from Linda Tirado. She wants justice and doubts we’ll get it.

Not to be this bitch but I have precisely zero faith that “justice” is the next step. We went in the “long public apology” direction instead.

What’s most likely: the rich dudes who get outed get golden retirements. The poor ones will become unemployed. We’ll declare victory for women.

Then the backlash.

Like hi, I’m a woman in media. There are a few men out there wondering whether I’m going to name them. It’s unlikely that just one incident will get them fired. So I have to figure out: how pissed and weird are the dudes gonna be after the smoke clears? How will they do business now? Are they even less inclined to give women spots just in case? Preemptively make “no mixed gender after hours events” and set up another boys club that way? Or do they figure that if they still have work they probably never crossed a line and it gives them confidence? If I’m in a room with one of those dudes again will they assume they didn’t cross a line because I didn’t press the case, will they be encouraged by that?

Even when we’re fighting back we have to be very very careful. Even with deluges of public support we walk on eggshells.

A healthy tax break

My Thanksgiving was calm. I went to visit my sister and her wife. Our other sister and her daughter came too.

A couple brief items…

Mick Mulvaney may be the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, but he doesn’t seem to be any smarter or kinder than his boss the nasty guy. Mulvaney insisted, while talking to CNN’s Jake Tapper that the prez. won’t sign a bill that raises taxes on the middle class. Except both the House and Senate versions do exactly that. Mulvaney also said repealing the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act, which requires everyone to have insurance, is good because it is a tax on the middle class. So, losing your health insurance is a tax break.



This message from the website Smite the Patriarchy:

The real reason mass shootings keep occurring is quite simple: the shooters are violent white men. The law makers … also violent white men.

I don’t see wages going up

Some bits of news…

A little bit of the hideous GOP tax “cut” bill: Graduate students are frequently given free tuition and a living stipend, which is never generous. In exchange, these students teach undergrad courses and conduct (or assist in) research. The stipend has been counted as taxable income. The tax bill wants the tuition to be taxable income as well. That could quadruple the tax bill and leave a lot less money for things such as … food.

That means a lot fewer students could afford to get graduate degrees. Only the rich kids could afford them. Which is another way of saying this is another way to prevent us lowly people from challenging the rich in their position of top dog.



At a Senate Finance Committee meeting Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio talked about the tax “cut” bill.

I just think it would be nice, just tonight, before we go home, to just acknowledge, well, this tax cut really is not for the middle class; it's for the rich. And that whole thing about higher wages, well, it's a good selling point, but we know companies don't just give away higher wages. They don't just give away higher wages, just 'cause they have more money. Corporations are sitting on a lot of money now; they're sitting on a lot of profits now. I don't see wages going up. So, just spare us, spare us the bank shots, spare us the sarcasm and the satire—

Which brought hot sputtering denials from Senator Orrin Hatch.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville thinks Brown struck a nerve – and Hatch hates the truth.



Catherine Rampell is an opinion writer for The Washington Post. She asks an important question of the GOP tax bill:

Nearly every claim Republicans are using to market their tax plan is at best a distortion, at worst a deliberate falsehood.

Which raises the question: If their plan is really so great, why not sell it on the merits?
...
Presumably because Trump and Republican lawmakers know they’re offering a plan the public doesn’t want. Ergo, they need to promise things the tax plan doesn’t do.

Rampell debunks the GOP talking points (see her article for details):
* The bill is so pro-growth it will reduce the federal debt.
* The plan primarily helps the middle class. Nope, it primarily helps the rich. And hurts the poor.
* The plan will hurt the nasty guy.
* This will be the biggest tax cut in history. Not even the biggest in the last five years.
* The economy desperately needs a tax cut.



Rupert Neate, writing for The Guardian reports that the dollar millionaires (0.7% of all adults, about 36 million) now own half the world’s wealth, or about $140 trillion dollars. 3.5 billion (more than half) of the world’s poorest adults individually have assets less than $10,000 and together have just 2.7% of the global wealth.



Talking Points Memo has a longform piece discussing how Millennials are leaving religion. I didn’t read it because most of it is behind a subscriber button. However, what caught my attention is a couple of the comments showing on that intro page. This is from marty110:

Several months back, Christians were frantic over the thought that their wives and daughters would be groped in a bathroom by a trans or gay person - now they overwhelmingly voted for a man who brags about groping women? I fear we are in the minority in the church who saw what was in front of our faces on TV during the campaign and were repulsed. A sweet, kind, and sensitive woman in my church (almost in tears) said to me after election - "Didn't they see? Didn't they hear what he said"?

Commenter drtv noted they supported Trump for one reason: the seat on the Supremes.

The purpose of her art

I was off to an orchestra concert last night – two works by Richard Strauss and a symphony by Johannes Brahms. That’s music by two German composers played by a French pianist led by a French conductor. A fine evening.

Friday night I went to a performance by a very good community theater group in Detroit, the Park Players from the North Rosedale Park neighborhood. A friend and colleague from my days in the auto industry got involved with this group a few years ago and is now serving as the board president. This show was presented in the neighborhood community house. Their website shows their new home in a nearby restored theater (complete with pipe organ!). The Detroit News wrote about the move.

The play was To Be Young, Gifted, and Black; A Portrait of Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you who she was, though many years ago I saw her one famous play, A Raisin in the Sun.

The show I saw on Saturday told a bit about Hansberry’s life. In the first act we see scenes of that life between selected scenes from Raisin. That famous play is about a black family moving to a white suburb. This is a story that Hansberry lived. It was her father who challenged racial residency laws in a case that went to the Supremes. The play went to Broadway, making Hansberry the first black woman playwright on Broadway.

The second act was about the rest of Hansberry’s life, some of it about struggling how to follow such a success and to what purpose her art should serve. That story is interspersed with scenes from her much less famous play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. One major scene is about a Park Avenue woman annoyed that her sister married a Jew and trying to prevent her second sister from marrying even worse.

My friend said the play was written (assembled?) by Hansberry’s husband after she died much too young from cancer. The original play specified eight actors playing all the characters. This troupe divided the characters amongst 28 actors, including several playing Hansberry at different times in her life. Friday usually isn’t a slow night for this theater, but the night I went the audience barely outnumbered the cast.

Ten candles

Happy Birthday dear blog!

Amazingly, I’ve now been writing this blog for 10 years!

In that time I’ve written 3,571 posts (this one is 3,572) on a wide variety of subjects – I’ve used 674 different topic tags, of which 241, the most relevant for now, are displayed on the left side of the main blog page. The most used tags are: On the enjoyable side are Gay Marriage-Marriage Equality (678 posts) and personal stories (361 posts). On the resistance side are the GOP (559 posts) and fundamentalism (278 posts).

Those personal stories in the last 3 years included the death of my father, brother, sister-in-law, mother, and aunt.

In the last couple years readership hit a low of about 40 views per post in June 2016. There has been a definite trend upward since then. In February views per post spiked to a high of 185. Last month there were 124 views per post. In the last month the countries with the most pageviews have been Italy with twice as many reads as second place United States. Third place is France.

I think I’ve told this origin story every years. Back in November of 2003 I started writing and sending emails to family and friends about LGBT news stories. The big event that prompted me was the ruling that the Massachusetts Supreme Court required marriage equality in the state within six months. A few years later my niece suggested I write a blog and be a bit more public in what I have to say. And here we are 10 years later.

It is this blog that helped me develop my understanding of ranking, in which some people declare they are better than others. I have come to see how pervasive ranking is to American and world politics and culture. The current moment of women speaking up to identify men who harassed and assaulted them resulted from men thinking they ranked above women, which entitled them to act as they pleased. The actions of the nasty guy are also because he constantly must prove that he ranks above everyone else.

I still find interesting and important things to write about. Sometimes it is to celebrate community, sometimes it is to resist those who try to enforce ranking and tear community apart. Lately I’ve moved away from LGBT issues, because the broader culture is accepting us. I’ve been focusing on politics because those threats are, at the moment, so much more dire.

I’ll keep writing.

3% own half

I’ve heard the statistic that there are enough guns in America for everyone to have one. Lois Beckett, writing for The Guardian delves into that a bit more. Here’s a bit of what she reported.

American civilians own at least 265 million guns. Ownership is so private that estimates have gone as high as 400 million – more than 100 million between estimates. For a population of about 315 million, 265 million is indeed close to one each (and might be one each for every adult), in other terms this is at least 85 guns per 100 people. This is the highest rate of gun ownership in the world. Second is Yemen at 55 guns per 100 people.

I don’t have a gun and most people I know don’t pack heat. That leads to the second observation: The number of adults who actually own a gun is somewhere between 22% and 31% (see above on difficulty of estimating). Ownership is concentrated.

Out of the gun owners, nearly half own just one or two guns. And most of the rest average 3 guns (yeah, that stat seems especially vague – how did they decide what gets included in the average?).

But America’s gun super-owners have amassed huge collections. Just 3% of American adults own a collective 133m firearms – half of America’s total gun stock. These owners have collections that range from eight to 140 guns, the 2015 study found. Their average collection: 17 guns each.

That’s about 7.7 million super-owners. Wow!

Which leads to a quandary for law enforcement. The Last Vegas shooter had 42 guns in the hotel and at home. But personal arsenals of 40 guns are rather common. How to tell the difference between a potential terrorist and an enthusiastic collector?

Super-owners tend to be less diverse – more likely to be male and white – than gun owners overall.

Some gun violence statistics:

* 36,000 Americans were killed with guns in 2015. That is broken down to:

22,000 suicides
13,000 homicides (about 750 were related to domestic violence, the vast majority of victims are women)
1,000 shot to death by police

* More than 60,000 are shot each year and survive.

* A quarter of gun homicides are in neighborhoods with only 1.5% of the population. Homicide rates here are 400 times higher than in other high-income countries. Even in those neighborhoods the violence is concentrated. In Oakland, CA about 0.3% of the population was involved in 60% of the city’s murders.

As many have noted before 36,000 deaths in a year and the resulting public outcry would get Congress scurrying for a solution. Even automobile deaths prompt investigation and safety features. Yeah, there are exceptions, such as the AIDS epidemic.

I wonder why these white guys feel the need for so many guns? That question is important because to me guns are for violence and violence is for enforcing ranking. Which means these white guys have guns to protect their privilege and your life is a whole lot less important to them than maintaining that privilege.

So what might be the reason why these guys switch from admiring their arsenals to using them? What might make them feel their white male privilege is threatened?

We now have a guy in the White House and one prominent campaign theme that got him there is an assertion of white male privilege. His words and actions loudly proclaimed that it is good to be bigoted. So might all these white dude super-owners feel threatened if their champion is ousted?

Australia!

Members of Parliament in Australia tried weaseling their way out of approving same-sex marriage by throwing the question to the public in a mail-in survey. The results are now in: With almost 80% participation, 62% yes, 38% no! This 24 point spread is being called a landslide.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has vowed to get a marriage bill through Parliament by Christmas. He is also denouncing conservative plans to load up the bill with “religious liberty” amendments. Such amendments, he says, are “non-starters.”

Not a decision taken lightly

This evening I went to see the documentary Human Flow, directed by Ai Weiwei. He’s a famous Chinese dissident artist, though I think the word “dissident” is way too mild. Let’s add humanitarian, truth teller, and resistance leader. I saw the movie mostly because of Ai Weiwei’s reputation (and I saw some of his art in Grand Rapids a few months ago). The subject of the movie is the movement of refugees. They are escaping war, famine, and other nasty and deadly conditions, or perhaps simply seeking a better life.

The story starts with Syrians crossing to Greece. We watch the boats arrive and government officials begin to process the passengers. We see them start to walk to other countries in Europe, then get stopped at the Macedonia border. The EU makes an agreement with Turkey to take back the refugees and they settle into camps in Turkey. But the movie doesn’t stop there. Jordan also houses Syrians. The Rohinga of Myanmar tell their story. Afghanis who have spent 30-40 years in camps in Pakistan are invited home to help rebuild – though their original village can’t take them back and they end up in city slums. There are windy camps in Kenya with refugees from South Sudan and Eritrea. The oldest camps are in the West Bank. The biggest camp is Gaza. There are rather nice camps (even indoors) in Tempelhof Airport in Berlin. In Calais thousands try to catch a ride to Britain and the French destroy their camp. There may not be camps, but there are refugees along the US-Mexico border.

The refugees tell their stories, such as the man who shows us the 17 identity cards he has for members of his family, then tearfully tells us five didn’t make it. A few tell their stories with their back to the camera. Sometimes all we need is the expression on faces.

People from various refugee agencies describe what they are doing and what the refugees are facing. One says that as long as there is inequality there will be refugees, and the wider the inequality becomes the more refugees there will be.

In most camps in most countries things are set up so that the refugees cannot better themselves, cannot escape the horrors of camp life. The intent is the refugees will eventually go home, though the average stay in a camp is 26 years.

Along the way we are told refugees are serious in their trek. Leaving one’s home is not a decision taken lightly. Even so, 34,000 people a day make that choice to flee persecution.

The closing credits lists 15 camps seen in the film. I could only count them as the credits scrolled. The credits lists the names of everyone featured in the film – and the list is long. I saw this list (and the movie as a whole) as a very humanizing thing for the director to do.

Flush with money already

I’ve been wanting to write about the tax reform bill (more accurately known as a tax cut for the rich bill) that the GOP in Congress is pushing. Yeah, the Senate bill is different than the House bill, but they are in agreement on general intent – a windfall for the already rich.

So, I won’t get to all those sources I’ve been saving up. Instead, I’ll quote from an interview I heard yesterday.

We're better off if this tax bill fails. And the reason is simple, twofold. One, two of the greatest problems we face in this country - one is income distribution or maldistribution. This bill exacerbates it. If you're very wealthy, you do a lot better than if you're middle class or poorer. It also gives tax breaks, huge tax breaks, to the wealthiest of corporations. These corporations are flush with money already. They're not creating jobs. More money isn't going to have them create. But the other thing it does, as somebody who cares about a government functioning, and as we move into the 21st century and technological forces push the average person around so much, they need government to help them. And this will sort of really hurt the government because the deficit is going to be so deep for so long.

I’m pleased to note these are the words of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. He did an interview with Robert Siegel of NPR’s *All Things Considered*.

Freedom means…

While doing my weekly cleaning this morning I listened to two episodes of Radiolab’s series More Perfect. This is from the second season of the series of stories of important Supreme Court cases.

The first case, described in a 21 minute episode, is one currently before the Supremes. The title is “Who’s Gerry and Why Is He So Bad at Drawing Maps?” Yes, the subject is gerrymandering, something I’m quite involved with at the moment with the campaign to end the practice in Michigan. The particular case before the Supremes is Gill v. Whitford and is about gerrymandering in Wisconsin.

In a previous case Vieth v. Jubelirer in 2004 the justices said gerrymandering is really bad, but we have no way to measure whether it actually happens. Yeah, that was Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote. The current case now comes with a mathematical formula called the efficiency gap. I describe it here.

The episode also mentions another measuring tool that will please my mathematical friend and debate partner. Computers, using Big Data, construct a huge number of possible maps. The maps are rated across a bell curve continuum. The map being reviewed by the courts is also placed on this continuum to see if it is near the center (and thus represents the overall population) or towards the edges (and thus discriminatory). In a 20 minute program they don’t get into how the maps are constructed or rated. One of the related links may have more details.

Along the way they discuss the “earmuff” district in Illinois. Two separate Latino neighborhoods near (maybe in) Chicago are joined into one district. This allows them to have a strong influence on one representative which they wouldn’t have if the two neighborhoods were in two districts. This is a good use of weird shaped districts.

On to the second episode, “The Gun Show.” For about 130 years the Second Amendment was rarely mentioned in any federal court documents. Cases related to gun ownership simply didn’t happen. Now it is one of the most talked about amendments, one that divides the nation, and one that some people say makes all the others possible. The 72 minute episode tells the story in 3 chapters.

In chapter 1 we hear about Bobby Seale who helped found the Black Panthers in 1966. They were fed up with police violence in Oakland, CA. Their solution was to obviously arm themselves and observe the police. Seale recounts one incident where police stopped a black person and the Panthers lined up on the other side of the street and watched. This freaked out the police who wanted to confiscate their guns – black men aren’t supposed to have guns. Another scene was at the California Capitol and featured Ronald Reagan, then Governor. Laws were quickly passed to disarm the populace. Yes, this is very much about racism.

Chapter 2: But that upset white gun owners. And we hear about the National Rifle Association, who for a hundred years (started in the 1870s) were very much non-political. Their mission was gun safety and helping young men be comfortable around guns so they knew how to use them when the next war came around. We hear about the NRA meeting in the mid 1970s where one faction, who very much wanted to be political, overthrew the existing leadership, creating the NRA we know today.

The third chapter is about the 2008 Supreme Court case, District of Columbia v. Heller, the case that proclaimed that gun ownership is an individual right, though there are cases where it is appropriate for a society to refuse to let certain people (such as convicted criminals) own guns. The NRA trumpets the first half of the ruling and ignores the second.

The program lets plaintiff Dick Heller speak. I was reminded of a couple things I hear a lot from him and his brethren.

* Freedom means the government cannot restrict what Heller can do, very much including his right to discriminate against other people. Freedom means the ability to enforce his ranking over others.

* Freedom is not for these people wishing to live without discrimination and oppression.

He went low. She went to the Capitol.

A few important highlights from yesterday’s election, one year into the nasty guy’s regime, as listed by Melissa McEwan of Shakesville.

Virginia

* The governor’s office stayed in Democrat hands.

* The Lieutenant Governor went to Justin Fairfax, a black man.

* Danica Roem, a transgender woman, was elected to the House of Delegates. She beat out long-time incumbent GOP Bob Marshall. He introduced Virginia’s anti-trans “bathroom bill” so it is fitting he lost to a trans person. Marshall is an overall vile person. Roem is full of grace and composure. McEwan tweeted: “Danica Roem defeated a dude who is profoundly transphobic and was personally abusive to her. He went low. She is going to the Capitol.”

* Two Latinas were elected to the House of Delegates, beating GOP incumbents to do so.

* At least 14 seats in the House of Delegates flipped red to blue. A few races are too close to call, so there might be enough to flip the whole chamber to Dem control.

Elsewhere

* Transwoman Andrea Jenkins was elected to the Minneapolis City Council.

* Transman Tyler Titus won a seat on the Erie, PA school board.

* Jenny Durkan was elected as Seattle’s mayor. She is the first female mayor since 1928 and the first out lesbian.

* Wilmot Collins is the first black mayor of Helena, MT. Collins was a refuge from Liberia.

* Melvin Carter is the first black mayor of St. Paul.

The huge Dem victory in Virginia is in part a response to the violence in Charlottesville, about 3 months ago.

McEwan wants to make clear: The GOP definitely noticed. And will work hard to make sure it can’t happen again. That badly misnamed Commission on Election Integrity is still working hard on voter suppression and the nasty guy is busy filling court vacancies (held open for him by Mitch McConnel) with judges who think voter suppression is just fine.

Twists and turns

The nasty guy is touring Asia. Air Force 1 stopped in Hawaii along the way. A protester held a sign, “Aloha POTUS! Welcome to Kenya.”



I’ve written many times about gerrymandering and I’m active in a campaign in Michigan to end it (I’m doing a presentation on it tomorrow). But how to draw attention to the issue without eyes glazing over? Jeremy Loeb of Blue Ridge Public Radio in a report for NPR reported on one idea.

North Carolina is highly gerrymandered. The state is nominally a swing state, but the GOP got 10 of 13 congressional seats. One way they did it is to carve up the Democratic stronghold of Asheville so both pieces are overwhelmed by the GOP leaning voters around it.

The local League of Women Voters organized the Gerrymander 5K, a run (or walk) through the city on the line that divides the two districts. One of the runners said afterward, “I’ve never gone on a race with so many twists and turns.”

Misogyny is a national vulnerability

Fannie Wolfe of Shakesville reviews the misogyny that brought the nasty guy to office. She also discusses the mainstream media’s complicity in the win, including granting the nasty guy continuous benefit of the doubt while slamming Hillary Clinton repeatedly (only one example is the 600 days she was kicked for her emails). Fannie wrote:

Misogyny is a national vulnerability and it was leveraged against our nation to our detriment. Donald Trump and Mike Pence have continued to lead a racist, misogynistic backlash to progress that proves to be profoundly stupid in that it will harm not only women/people of color, but many of the people who support these men.
…
Going forward, a good thing to keep in mind is that those with the loudest and largest media platforms to cover these current events continue to be white men, many of whom are entertained by or actively complicit in the oppression of women.
…
More than any time in my recent memory it has become apparent that a fundamental way rape culture has saturated our culture so thoroughly, and yet sometimes so imperceptibly, is because so many national narratives in the news, politics, and Hollywood are told by misogynists who tip the scales for other misogynists, the massive effect of which has been to normalize the widespread hatred and subordination of women.

I listen to NPR news usually 1 to 1½ hours a day. During last year’s campaign and since then I’ve felt NPR political commentaries have been rather bland at best and tilted towards the GOP at worst. The most recent annoying example has been Mara Liasson, political commentator, nattering on about how badly the GOP needs the to pass their proposed tax bill – with nothing said about how disastrous that bill will be for everyone but the rich. There may be a reason for it…

For a couple years Michael Oreskes has been senior vice president for news at NPR. Last week he resigned over a rising number of complaints of sexual harassment.

That pulls the sarcasm out of Melissa McEwan, also of Shakesville:

If you, like me, are wondering whether the head of NPR's news division being a misogynist predator with zero respect for women might have influenced their coverage of the first woman ever nominated for the United States presidency by a major party, well, that's just another mystery lost to the sands of time.

Cough.

Refuse to allow the fear to become too great

Yesterday I saw the play A Bright Room Called Day by Tony Kushner. It was put on by The Theatre Company in the intimate theater inside the downtown YMCA. The Theatre Company is run by the theatre department of University of Detroit Mercy. Their way of working is to cast a show with a combination of students and area professional actors, so the students get a feel for working in a professional atmosphere.

I got a delightful surprise when I went to the box office and said I wanted one ticket for the evening performance. The guy behind the counter said a patron just returned a ticket, which I could have for free!

Tony Kushner is the guy who wrote Angels in America, which I saw in the mid 1990s – yes, all seven hours. It looks at gay life during the AIDS epidemic. It was fascinating, strange, and bloated.

This play was not bloated, though on occasion still strange. The story takes place in Berlin during 1932-33. Yes, this is when the Nazis came to power. The story revolved around Agnes, her lover Husz who is Hungarian, lesbian Annabella, movie actress Paulinka, and gay Baz. Most of them are part of the German Communist Party or other labor movements. They try to make sense of the Nazi rise to power. Can it be stopped? Surely the workers will rise up! They then struggle over how to respond: Join the Nazis to be able to keep working? Resist? Flee? Muddle through? Surely this will last only a few months (it lasted 13 years and destroyed Germany).

Every so often there is a scene set in 1990, when Germany reunified. Zillah, an American, travels Germany for some excitement in her life – the Reagan era was way too boring. She hooks up with Emil, who doesn’t speak a word of English (the actor speaks German and I could understand bits of it) and she doesn’t speak German. Both in 1933 and in 1990 there is a discussion of evil. Zillah says that Hitler has defined the top end of the scale of evil, but he is so far out there the scale has become meaningless. How many deaths do you need to be responsible for before you can be placed on the scale? Millions? One?

Both the playwright and the director draw parallels to today. In a note in the program Kushner wrote:

I think democracy is always in peril. It is always dependent on the various groups that comprise the progressive community making common cause with one another. … People need to focus on what leads up to the Holocaust, what brings us to the point of genocide, to monstrous crimes against humanity.

Director Jamie Warrow wrote:

Thus, for me, A Bright Room Called Day is clearly a warning against political complacency within everyday existence – a mandate to act – to refuse to allow the fear to become too great.

The play will be presented two more weekends.