THE CORRUPT BARGAIN

THE CORRUPT BARGAIN

There are many outrages in the (now 99 day old) Trump Administration.

They include hypocrisy,  nepotism,  corruption,  incompetence and dishonesty.

Just to name a few.

But the biggest outrage, and the one that gains the least attention, is the outrage inherent in how he does it.  

Trump's approval rating is at 40% and was lower for much of the past few months, it having advanced ever so slightly in the last two weeks largely as a consequence of the bombing in Syria. These are historically low approval numbers.  In fact, they are the lowest in the history of presidential polling for the first 100 days of any administration.  They reflect Trump's practiced and continuing aversion to the truth, his rampant narcissism and in-your-face "I am the greatest" sheer boorishness, and the fact that, lacking any real commitments on policy that extend beyond a video clip designed to boost ratings, he has been captured by the far right in the Republican Party and is supporting their extreme agenda.  That agenda includes gutting health care, enormous tax cuts for the wealthy, de-funding environmental protection and education, and a somewhat schizophrenic foreign policy in which the Commander-in-Chief talks tough and threatens unilateral action in his service to "America first" nationalism,  while his seconds tour the planet re-assuring a nervous world that we remain committed to our longstanding strategic alliances.

The domestic side of that agenda is radically unpopular and, on foreign policy, the Administration is at no better than break even.

  

As an example of the former, Trump's and the GOP's on-going effort to repeal Obamacare comes in the face of the Affordable Care Act now being supported by 60% of the country.  Americans understand that Trumpcare -- or, more accurately, Ryancare -- would eliminate insurance for more than 20 million people and, in the latest proposal now being bantied about on Capitol Hill, would also likely eliminate coverage for many with pre-existing conditions. The right-wing GOP's new proposal allows states to avoid the ban on exclusions for those conditions that Obamacare enacted and the public overwhelmingly supports.  It does so by allowing states to claim their own plans will result in lower premiums overall and ostensibly equal or greater coverage as a consequence of that lower cost. 

Conservatives claim they can accomplish this hat trick through the creation of high risk insurance pools. 

Good luck with that.  Because . . .

Absent enormous government-funded subsidies, those high risk pools into which all those "pre-existing" diabetics and cancer patients will be thrown will be pools where premiums will  be extraordinarily high and therefore unaffordable for many who need the coverage most.

And when was the last time Mississippi ever voted to subsidize those who can't afford something?

Nevertheless, among the 62 million or so who actually voted for Trump last November, 96% still support him.

This is what is known as a disconnect.

It exists for two reasons. 

First, among that portion of those 62 million voters who are wealthy, Trump is a windfall waiting to happen.  They are willing to forgive and forget his transparent personal failings (narcissism, sexism, dishonesty, and ignorance) in exchange for the millions in tax cuts he promises and the right wingers in Congress are eager to enact. Second, among the middle and poor swaths of that voting group -- in other words, among the rural, white working class that hasn't had a raise in thirty years and is moving down, not up, the economic ladder -- Trump has sold them a bill of goods that holds immigrants abroad, minorities at home, and globalists in D.C. responsible for their economic plight.

The sale was and is fraudulent.  

But those who want to repeal Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society have been making this same  pitch for more than thirty years.

And it is working.

There are really only two ways to improve economic conditions for those in the middle and at the bottom.  The first is to improve economic productivity as a whole, and the second is to both  insure that the gains from any improved productivity are distributed widely on the one hand while re-distributing wealth to those who still lose out on the other.  Fair productivity distribution depends largely on the existence of equal bargaining power between capital, the investing class, and laborers, the working class, and  re-distribution can take many forms -- unemployment insurance, food stamps, housing subsidies, college loans, increased payments under social security, increases in the minimum wage, even old-fashioned work of the sort created by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.  

But you can't improve without both.  

And for thirty years we haven't had both.  

Unions have been weakened to the point of practical non-existence and globalism without labor standards has arbitraged wages down even as cheap imports have helped consumers.  You can't consume if you don't have a job, and as a consequence, the lives of all those West Virginians living in poverty (18% of the state's population at last count) have not been improved much merely because tchotchkes in Wal-Mart became cheaper.  Meanwhile, the GOP's love affair with tax cuts and inflated defense spending has put enormous and predictable pressure on any spending designed to redistribute or level the playing field.  In fact, that was the whole point of their tax cuts in the first place.  They were designed to "starve the beast" of government, as President Reagan's first budget director, David Stockman, admitted in a moment of honesty back in the '80s. With high deficits and lower revenues, the safety net has been gutted and even Social Security and Medicare have been put on the potential chopping block.

None of this should sell in West Virginia.

But it does.

Because the right wing's corrupt bargain between Wall Street's rich and West Virginia's poor is that the former get their tax cuts and de-regulation windfalls so long as the latter believe their poverty has its roots in illegal immigration and affirmative action.

Trump did not create that bargain.  

But his neo-fascist campaign and Presidency by insult, thuggish rallies, and fact free propaganda has done more than anything in the last thirty years to seal it.

PRETENSE AND REALITY

PRETENSE AND REALITY

Sooner or later, it happens to them all.

Reality intervenes.  

And what, until then, at least resembled the assumed menu of challenges and options on which one had puzzled for some time and about which arguably workable solutions existed, becomes the rough equivalent of the immovable object meeting the unstoppable force.

For JFK, that day came in April 1961, only months into the New Frontier, when he authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by CIA trained para-militarists who counted on igniting ostensibly homegrown opposition to the Castro regime in the expectation that this would lead to the regime's fall.  

For George W. Bush, it came on September 11, 2001, again months in, when a mildly unpopular Presidency  focusing on the education of elementary and middle schoolers in Florida was startled by news that what the CIA had warned them about in August, and about which the President himself had been somewhat dismissive, turned into a full blown terrorist attack on New York City and the Pentagon.

For Donald Trump, that day came yesterday, when Bashar Al Assad unleashed chemical weapons on rebels in Khan Sheikhoun in northwestern Syria,  and North Korea test launched yet another ballistic missile mere days before a scheduled meeting between Trump and China's President Xi.  

Assad's attack killed sixty-five, including eleven children, all of whom writhed in pain from inhaling either sarin gas or chlorine, and injured another 350.   Meanwhile, Trump's Secretary of State appeared to have invited Assad's attack and ignored North Korea's launch.  The day before, he said that Assad's fate was up to the Syrian people, implying that America's long-stated policy that Assad must go had been jettisoned.  And in the wake of the North Korean launch, he said nothing (or, as he put it, "North Korea launched yet another intermediate range ballistic missile. The United States has spoken enough about North Korea. We have no further comment.").

For his part, Trump did not do any better.

Though he condemned Assad's use of chemical weapons, he spent a large part of his statement on the attack blaming President Obama. On this view, Obama's unheeded "red line" warning to Assad years ago, before chemical weapons had been used, followed by his accession to an internationally negotiated protocol (under which Syria's chemical weapons were to be destroyed) in lieu of an international military operation, after chemical weapons had been used, is the cause of yesterday's attack, and Tillerson's pass on Assad's on-going status -- along with the implied change in American policy -- is beside the  point.  As to North Korea, among the Administration's words "spoken enough" about the subject have been Trump's own, in an interview two days ago with the Financial Times: "If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will."

Trump is in a box.

In his pretend Presidency of tweets and bombast, everything is clear, winning is inevitable, and all that stands between the (way more often than not) invented failures of yesterday and the promised successes of tomorrow is Trump himself.  In that world, there is health care for everyone without the Affordable Care Act, Executive Orders banning travel from six (and at first seven)  majority-Muslim countries without deference to the Constitution, a right-wing Supreme Court without loss of the Senate filibuster,  and enormous economic growth (north of annual rates of 4%) without trade deals like NAFTA or the TPP. 

He has already failed in his effort to "repeal and replace" Obamacare and (thus far) in his effort to turn his campaign promise of a ban on Muslim entry into a legal travel ban.  The former effort failed because the replacement was almost universally despised. It would have resulted in the loss of insurance for about 24 million Americans while providing enormous tax breaks to the wealthy. That alone should have been sufficient to kill it.  But, in addition, the so-called Freedom Caucus in the House (a group of forty or so hard-right legislators) objected because the replacement bill did not go far enough in getting rid of Obamacare; in addition to getting rid of the individual mandate, the right wingers wanted to in effect repeal the ban on insurance company exclusions for pre-existing conditions and end essential benefits requirements.

Similarly, on the travel ban, Trump's second order has fared no better than his first, even though the second was supposedly written to avoid the constitutional infirmities which plagued the first. Those infirmities were stark -- the first ban created a religious test by favoring Christians in any post-ban entry petitions.  In the case of the second ban, the explicit religious test is gone but Trump's words haunt him (and the courts); put differently, when Trump said during the campaign that he wanted to ban all Muslims from entering the country, the judges believed him and now think the second travel ban is just a "Muslim ban" in not particularly good disguise.

How quaint!  

Maybe words matter after all.

Meanwhile,  the GOP's Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, plows on with his pledge that Judge Neil Gorsuch will be confirmed "this week" to the Supreme Court.  The Democrats have announced they will filibuster Gorsuch, thus precluding an up or down determination, and they have the votes to do it.  In response, McConnell has told the Democrats that, if they do this,  he will have the Senate eliminate the filibuster.

In which case, the old politics of personal destruction will merely have led to the new politics of institutional destruction.

The US Senate is considered the "greatest deliberative body" for a reason.  The reason is that it takes sixty votes, a more or less super-majority these days, to cut off debate on most issues.  In other words, if you can't get to sixty, you have to talk some more, i.e., deliberate, and persuade your colleagues that the time has come to vote.  Eliminate the filibuster and the Senate turns into another version of the House of Representatives, where there is no real debate and a gerrymandered majority controls the floor.  This is not to say that the filibuster does not have real costs -- for liberals as well as conservatives, Democrats as well as Republicans.  In fact, for much of the century following the Civil War, it effectively made the passage of any Civil Rights bills impossible.  Now, however, it is just standing in the way of the theft of a Supreme Court appointment that President Obama was entitled to make last year.

Either Gorsuch or the Senate loses here.   Both can't win.

More reality.

And you can't understand it -- or change it -- with tweets.

The same is true with Assad and North Korea.  On the first, Trump has few if any options and none that will be acceptable to Vladimir Putin, whom Trump never criticizes (itself extraordinary inasmuch as he seems to criticize everyone else).  You can put American boots on the ground, enforce a no-fly zone to protect humanitarian enclaves, and/or arm some rebels.  The first option is opposed by the country in view of our less than stellar results in Iraq and Afghanistan; it also runs the risk of becoming open ended inasmuch as the middle east's locals never seem to get around to peacefully resolving disputes the American military is effectively containing by its presence.  The second risks military run-ins with Russian and Turkish fighter jets now up in that air space.  And the third could result in arms winding up in the hands of ISIS or other terrorists.

On the second, the only thing Trump can do to North Korea if he acts alone is bomb their missile sites or invade, and he will do neither, mostly because either approach would likely provoke an attack on Seoul, as well as the re-emergence of China as a real supporter of the North.  The Chinese are not perfect on this issue but they are, as they say, "all we got."  They are keeping Kim Jung Un on a short economic leash and have on occasion voted in favor of UN sanctions against North Korea's earlier missile tests. But China won't allow the fall of the Communist party in the north.  

And since they are what "we got," Trump had better find a way to work a deal with them . . .

In other words,  do what  The Art of the Deal said he was good at.

Unfortunately, in this tweetstorm of a Presidency, where the lead guy -- in love with lies, pre-occupied with past opponents and score settling, and looking at personal poll numbers that drive him to distraction -- has an attention-span not all that large to begin with and infinitesimal knowledge on questions of actual policy . . .

Maybe that too was just pretense.