Are you feeling adventurous on this cold winter morning? I didn't think so. Just thought I'd ask. Maybe I'll try a different creamer in my morning coffee. That's as adventurous as I can get.
Thursday, January 31, 2019
The Schultz Con
Spit out Schultz's shallow candidacy: His bromide-filled campaign will only help elect Trump
Weak brew. (Elaine Thompson / AP)
Most people don’t put V-8 in their coffee. But if you do, there’s a perfect presidential candidate for you: former Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz.
The Seattle billionaire is running as an independent. His campaign makes as much sense as adding vegetable juice to your espresso. Indeed, if Starbucks coffee were as weak and poorly brewed as the positions Schultz has ever so vaguely advanced so far, the coffee chain would go bankrupt.
His run will, however, make it possible for Trump to win a second term. All Schultz needs do is divert a few million votes from people who want Trump out but dislike voting for any Democratic Party nominee.
Schultz isn’t offering fully developed policy proposals yet, just bromides and claims of expertise. There’s someone sitting in the White House who did a lot of that in his campaign.
PAID POSTWhat Is This?
And what’s especially disturbing about the new businessman-politician on the block, 65, a lifelong Democrat, is that at a time of massive wealth inequality, his vague statements would sit just fine with both fellow plutocrats and Republican leaders on Capitol Hill.
For example, he says Medicare for All “is not affordable.” Instead he wants to adjust the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, so “corporations have more skin in the game.”
How would that cut costs and improve care?
Saying universal coverage is not affordable is a curious argument since every other modern country has universal coverage and lower costs, and most have better outcomes overall.
Despite the progress of the Affordable Care Act, our country still has about 30 million people with no health insurance and many millions more with inadequate coverage. Only in America do people lose their homes or go bankrupt because of medical bills.
Consider French health care, rated best in the world by the World Health Organization. The French economy is only 70% as large per person as America, yet the French enjoy high-quality care with little out-of-pocket cost.
If we spent per person what the French (or Germans) do, the savings would be the equivalent of eliminating income taxes for everyone who makes under $500,000. But Schultz says we can’t afford that. Say what?
On taxes, Schultz wants “tax reform.”
Don’t we all. But one person’s tax reform may be even lower rates for the rich, as with the Trump tax law, while working stiffs pay taxes before they collect their pay.
So what kind of reform does Schultz want? He opposes the proposed 2% tax on wealth over $50 million and 3% over $1 billion proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat. On his $2.8 billion of Starbucks stock, Warren would make Schultz pay $74 million a year.
Under current law, Schultz’s fortune will only be taxed if he sells shares or gives them to his family. Congress lets he and other plutocrats borrow against their wealth, currently at the lowest interest rates in seven centuries. That lets plutocrats enjoy spending their money without paying any tax. Done right, they can even deduct the interest on their tax returns.
And what about taxing private jets? In 2017, Starbucks rented a jet from Schultz for $3.2 million a year. On top of that, Starbucks shareholders paid all operating costs.
Schultz paid only for purely personal use of his jet. Under exceptionally favorable tax rules, Congress treated, and still treats, personal use by executives as income valued at 18 cents to 24 cents per mile. That means the income tax on personal use is at most 9 cents per mile flown. Nice deal if you can get it.
Asked by CNN if his candidacy might give Trump a second term, Schultz said, “I would never put myself in the position where I am the person who re-elects Donald Trump.” Keeping that promise is easy. Schultz just needs to stop his campaign today.
Johnston is author of “It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America.”
Keith Payne - The Broken Ladder (Book Review)
The author's thesis is that feeling poor is just as damaging as actually being poor. You can feel poor in comparison to others and not actually be poor as commonly defined by statistics. The author is a psychologist and uses many psychological research findings to buttress his arguments.
Wednesday, January 30, 2019
Glass - Movie Review
I saw it Sunday at Patton Creek. Ever since "The Sixth Sense" I've been hoping for another thrill from this director. Mr. M. Night Shyamalan disappoints again.
The plot is not for me. I have no affinity for comic books. I have no interest in comic book heroes. I cannot connect to the backbone of this movie.
Samuel L. Jackson is great. Bruce Willis is okay. The psychiatrist is good. But with a plot that I connect relate to it is not enough.
I am still waiting, Director Shyamalan.
The plot is not for me. I have no affinity for comic books. I have no interest in comic book heroes. I cannot connect to the backbone of this movie.
Samuel L. Jackson is great. Bruce Willis is okay. The psychiatrist is good. But with a plot that I connect relate to it is not enough.
I am still waiting, Director Shyamalan.
Spreading
The measles epidemic. Weather extremes. Thank goodness we do not live in Minnesota. Ignorance as Trump disavows his own intelligence agencies. Republicans trying to eliminate the estate tax. They must be trying final Hail Marys before they think they will completely lose power in 2020.
Sunday, January 27, 2019
Pelosi
| Pelosi does not mess around’: Speaker emerges triumphant from shutdown |
| President Trump’s capitulation on the shutdown generated rave reviews for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as she kept an unruly party caucus united in the face of GOP divide-and-conquer tactics. |
| By Mike DeBonis |
Saturday, January 26, 2019
The Frankfurt School
If you want to understand the age of Trump, read the Frankfurt School
Why now is a great time to dust off this forgotten school of criticism.
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In 1923, a motley collection of philosophers, cultural critics, and sociologists formed the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. Known popularly as the Frankfurt School, it was an all-star crew of lefty theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse.
The Frankfurt School consisted mostly of neo-Marxists who hoped for a socialist revolution in Germany but instead got fascism in the form of the Nazi Party. Addled by their misreading of history and their failure to foresee Hitler’s rise, they developed a form of social critique known as critical theory.
Their ideas took shape when several of the critical theorists fled Nazism, landed in the US, and turned their gaze on American culture. They saw the yoke of capitalist ideology wherever they looked — in films, in radio, in poplar music, in literature. Adorno, one of the more prominent Frankfurt theorists, warned of an American “culture industry” that blurred the distinction between truth and fiction, between the commercial and the political.
Interest in the Frankfurt School has spiked since Donald Trump burst onto the political scene in 2016. The New Yorker’s Alex Ross even penned a piece last year arguing that the Frankfurt School “knew Trump was coming.” “Trump is as much a pop-culture phenomenon as he is a political one,” Ross argued, and that’s precisely what you’d expect in age in which “traffic trumps ethics.”
If the critical theorists do make a comeback, a new book by Guardian columnist Stuart Jeffries might help lead it. A group biography of the Frankfurt intellectuals, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School throws fresh light on a tradition of thought that feels depressingly relevant.
I spoke with Jeffries earlier this year about the book and what he learned from reentering the Frankfurt orbit. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
What’s the main intellectual contribution of the Frankfurt School?
Stuart Jeffries
I think the main contribution is their insistence on the power of culture as a political tool, and also the power of the mass media. They examined as closely as anyone how these instruments became politically relevant, and what the consequences of that were.
Sean Illing
And how were they influenced by the rise of fascism in Germany at the time?
Stuart Jeffries
In the 1920s, they were wondering why there was no socialist revolution in a sophisticated and advanced industrialized country like Germany. Why a successful Bolshevik Revolution a couple years before in Russia but not in Germany? They concluded that culture and the use of the media was the primary tool for oppressing the masses without the masses realizing that they're being oppressed.
This is what they witnessed in Germany, and it became the guiding insight of their work and the main source of their relevance.
Sean Illing
And yet they fell into irrelevance anyhow — why?
Stuart Jeffries
They became irrelevant because people didn't worry too much about culture — they were too comfortable to realize there was a problem. “Culture” is a difficult concept; hard to get your hands around it.
Sean Illing
Theodor Adorno coined the phrase “culture industry.” What did he mean?
Stuart Jeffries
Well, he was distinguishing art from culture. Art is something that's elevating and challenges the existing order, whereas culture is precisely the opposite. Culture, or the culture industry, uses art in a conservative way, which is to say it uses art to uphold the existing order.
So the culture industry peddles an ideology that supports the prevailing power structure — in the case of America, that ideology was consumerism.
Sean Illing
What changed for Adorno and the other critical theorists when they landed in America? Why did they see American culture as ripe for fascism?
Stuart Jeffries
Well, Adorno came to the states and was appalled by the culture industry; it was an utter scandal in his mind. He saw the culture industry controlling the minds of Americans in much the same way Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist, controlled the minds of Germans.
So Adorno and the other critical theorists saw culture as inherently totalitarian, and this was particularly true in America. This, of course, didn't go over well with the public. You have these Germans coming to your country with their old attitudes and their defense of bourgeois art, and they're critical of every aspect of American culture and regard it as an artistic wasteland.
Americans struggled with this idea that popular culture, their popular culture, could be subversive in this way. And, to be fair, many of the critical theorists didn’t get American culture, and so they undoubtedly overreached at times.
Sean Illing
What was so unique about the culture industry in America? Adorno seemed to think it was a prop for totalitarian capitalism, and that it was all the more insidious because it was more camouflaged than it was in Germany.
Stuart Jeffries
He thought it was so insidious because it didn't appear to have an ideological message; it was never self-consciously ideological in the way that German propaganda was. It wasn't that America was equivalent to Germany or that American propaganda was equivalently awful; rather, it was that America's culture industry smuggled its consumerist ethos into its art with a similar goal of producing conformity of thought and behavior. Having just fled Germany, Adorno saw this as a precursor to something like fascism.
Sean Illing
The goal of German propaganda at the time was obvious, but what was the goal of American propaganda? To manufacture consent by way of mass distraction?
Stuart Jeffries
Manufacturing distraction is exactly what it is. If you read Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, you see him struggling with this problem. He sees in 1964 that everyone is getting too comfortable to revolt against oppression of any kind. People are distracted by the sexual revolution, by popular music, by virtually every aspect of mass culture.
As you can see, it's really hard to sympathize with these guys, because they're bringing such a sweeping critique that it's, frankly, hard to believe. But I'm convinced there's some truth in it.
Sean Illing
One thing I appreciate about the critical theorists was their willingness to identify totalitarian tendencies on the left and the right. They recognized that ideological single-mindedness was the real danger.
Stuart Jeffries
They were true critics in that sense, and that resonated with me as well. I used to be involved in the Communist Party, and very often the "left fascism" that Habermas, one of the more famous Frankfurt scholars, described is what I saw — the shutting down of debate in particular. While they incited hatred on both sides of the aisle, you have to admire their intellectual consistency.
Sean Illing
Why did you write this book about the Frankfurt School now? It seems strangely relevant given what’s happening in our politics at the moment, but obviously you undertook this project a few years ago when things were quite different.
Stuart Jeffries
After the economic crisis in 2008, books like Karl Marx's Capital were suddenly best-sellers, and the reason was that people were looking for critiques of contemporary culture. So it seemed like a good time to dust these guys off and revisit their work. And then someone like Trump comes along and proves it even further.
Sean Illing
A lot of people are fumbling for constructive ways to think about what’s happening right now, both politically and culturally. I’ve watched Trump bulldoze his way to the presidency for over a year now, and I still can’t quite believe it.
Stuart Jeffries
There's a lot of similar factors operating in the UK, where I live, and in America. You see this with Brexit and with Trump. There's a resurgence of racism and a kind of contempt for liberal democracy.
From the perspective of critical theory, Trump is clearly a product of a mass media age. The way he speaks and lies and bombards voters — this is a way of controlling people, especially people who don't have a sense of history. I saw the same thing in the months leading up the Brexit vote earlier this year: the lying, the fearmongering, the hysteria. Mass media allows for a kind of collective hypnosis, and to some extent that is what we’re seeing.
Sean Illing
I’ve thought a lot about what Trump’s success says about our culture — mostly how empty and decadent it is. But I wonder if that’s too easy, if I’m missing something deeper.
Stuart Jeffries
That's interesting. I had a friend involved in Democratic politics in Pennsylvania this year, and he kept asking people if they were going to vote for Hillary, and they'd often say, "No, I can't do it — God will decide." I find that sense of fatalism and that failure to take one's responsibility seriously terrifying. And yet it's been brought to life in the most vivid way imaginable, and I have to hope that the consequences of this will force people to reengage.
Sean Illing
It’s hard not to see Trump’s election, and really the state of discourse in general, as an indictment of our broader culture, a culture nurtured by the very instruments of control the critical theorists worried about.
Stuart Jeffries
I think things have become more heightened by mass media, but I'm not sure anything has fundamentally changed. Look, I’m doing my best to be optimistic here, but I mostly share your angst. Like the critical theorists themselves, I don’t have the solutions. That we have problem, however, is rather obvious.
Sean Illing
Here’s the thing: If Trump’s rise represented an actual substantive rebellion, that at least would suggest a revolution in consciousness. But it’s not that serious. There’s no content behind it. Trump is just a symbol of negation, a big middle finger to the establishment. He’s a TV show for a country transfixed by spectacle. And so in that sense, Trumpism is exactly what you’d expect a “revolution” in the age of mass media to look like.
Stuart Jeffries
Sadly, I agree. If you listen to Trump speak, it's all stream-of-consciousness gibberish. There's no real thought, no real intellectual process, no historical memory. It's a rhetorical sham, but a kind of brilliant one when you think about it. He's a projection of his supporters, and he knows it.
He won by capturing attention, and he captured attention by folding pop entertainment into politics, which is something the critical theorists anticipated.
Sean Illing
The Frankfurt School lost its luster decades ago. Do you see their ideas making a comeback given all these political and cultural transformations?
Stuart Jeffries
Definitely. There's a lot to learn from the critical theorists, whatever your politics might be. They have a lot to say about modern culture, about what's wrong with society, and about the corrupting influence of consumerism.
That alone makes them essential today.
This article was originally published on December 27, 2016.
Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer - Fault Lines - (Book Review)
This book by two prominent historians is a history of the US since 1974. It is a good reference for all of the evens since than. The book is mostly dull, dry narrative history, but valuable as a reference.
The authors discuss Ford's pardon of Nixon. As others have done, they point out that this act might have cost Ford the 1976 election to Carter. Yet I believe that Ford did the right thing. Gerald Ford was a good and honorable man. Such Republicans are in short supply today.
There is not much credit given to Jimmy Carter. As time moves forward, Carter will eventually receive his rightful due. Will Carter ever rise above his malaise?
The current polarization has been a long-time building. The beginning was mostly due to Ronald Wilson Reagan.
This period is a study of the declining effort to find "common ground." Such doesn't exist anymore more and more. Today we live on different grounds.
In his second term, Clinton turned conservative.
The authors discuss Ford's pardon of Nixon. As others have done, they point out that this act might have cost Ford the 1976 election to Carter. Yet I believe that Ford did the right thing. Gerald Ford was a good and honorable man. Such Republicans are in short supply today.
There is not much credit given to Jimmy Carter. As time moves forward, Carter will eventually receive his rightful due. Will Carter ever rise above his malaise?
The current polarization has been a long-time building. The beginning was mostly due to Ronald Wilson Reagan.
This period is a study of the declining effort to find "common ground." Such doesn't exist anymore more and more. Today we live on different grounds.
In his second term, Clinton turned conservative.
Trump Caves
The partial government shutdown of over 30 days is over. Trump signed the bill to reopen without any funds for his border wall. The public perception is that he "caved" to Pelosi and the Democrats.
There are situations in life when you have to say "NO" and stick to it. Give ANY ground and you lose especially to bullies who bully because they are weak and desperate not to show it. I think Nancy Pelosi just set a new example.
There are situations in life when you have to say "NO" and stick to it. Give ANY ground and you lose especially to bullies who bully because they are weak and desperate not to show it. I think Nancy Pelosi just set a new example.
Until we get rid of Trump and his Republican vermin the country will continue to be in constant trouble.
Thursday, January 24, 2019
Nancy calls
President Trump announced his decision hours after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rescinded her invitation for a speech next week and asked for a “mutually agreeable” date once the government has reopened.
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
The Symbolism of the Wall by Heather Digby Parton
But the wall is a symbol for something much more fundamental. CNN's Ron Brownstein wrote a comprehensive analysis of these findings which back up his central thesis of a nation divided between what he calls the Republican "coalition of restoration" versus the Democratic "coalition of transformation." He writes:
In this sharply divided political alignment, the wall looms as a concrete (literally, in earlier versions of Trump's plan) manifestation of deeper views about whether these changes are rejuvenating the country or threatening its traditions.
You won't be surprised to learn that the PRRI poll shows that wall supporters are just as hostile to legalimmigration as they are to undocumented immigrants who cross the border illegally. Or that they are upset when they are exposed to people who don't speak English and believe they are threatening our traditional values. So all this folderol about "border security" isn't really about crime. It's just about keeping foreigners out of the country.
These folks have similar attitudes about race and gender too. Wall supporters see no problems with systemic racism or police violence, and in fact believe that whites are more discriminated against than African-Americans. They don't believe feminism reflects what most women believe, and a majority of them think men are just as discriminated against as women.
Wall opponents believe the opposite on all those issues. Indeed, it appears that one can fairly well determine what a person's values and beliefs about what America stands for simply by asking their position on the wall.
Starting to feel the heat over the government shutdown from Republicans, President Trump gave a desultory speech over the weekend in which he pretended to offer a compromise on the government shutdown. This would allow DACA recipients as well as immigrants with Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, a three-year reprieve in exchange for a bunch of money to put even more equipment, people and other resources on the border -- as well as, of course, the $5.7 billion Trump is demanding for his wall. Considering that he's the one who withdrew the protections for the DACA and TPS immigrants in the first place, it took some nerve for him to "offer" to allow them to stay in the country temporarily. No one has ever accused Donald Trump of not having chutzpah.
When the White House finally released its full plan on Monday, of course, it turned out to be yet another bait and switch.
As Spencer Ackerman and Scott Bixby of the Daily Beast explain it, this proposal would balloon the ICE budget, with at least $1 billion more than previously allotted, along with an additional 2,000 agents. But that's not the worst of it. The proposal severely limits legal immigration while increasing detention and deportation. Worst of all, it eviscerates the asylum protections for refugees, taking particular aim at Central American children, pretty much making it impossible for them to seek safety in the United States. According to Ackerman and Bixby:
The bill’s stipulations include the “Central American Minors Protection Act of 2019,” which would create a “new system” for seeking asylum promised by President Donald Trump in a 20-minute speech outlining the proposal. That act would legally bar minors hailing from El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras from applying for asylum inside the United States, and instead require them to apply at “a Designated Application Processing Center in Central America.”
Remember, the young people in question are fleeing their home countries because they are in mortal danger. As Jonathan Ryan, executive director of the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) told the Daily Beast, “The first and most critical step in not dying in a house that’s on fire is to get out of the house.”
The proposal is contradictory and logically absurd, filled with Catch-22s that would leave a bunch of kids stranded at the border for months. It also eliminates judicial review, leaving all decisions in the hands of the Director of Homeland Security, whose job under the Trump administration seems to be completely focused on punishing children who cross the Mexican border.
The Democrats have rejected this proposal for obvious reasons. The "deal" to reopen the government is getting more unacceptable to them by the day. It didn't take a genius to see that if they believe the wall is an immorality, doubling down on the cruelty toward Central American children seeking protection and refuge in was not an effective way sweeten the deal.
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