“The Great Humbug Of Donald Trump”: Instead Of Substance, We Will Get More Circus Coverage Leading The News
Thanks to the world-class narcissist now driving the Republican clown car, it ought to be clear to Americans just how badly the donor class has lost control of the presidential primaries, which they once had rigged to dictate who we could vote for.
Millions of Americans seem not to grasp that Donald Trump’s campaign is a mirage, an inchoate blending of the political/showbiz film satires Wag the Dog and Simone, thrown together with all the integrity of P.T. Barnum’s notorious FeeJee Mermaid.
On Wednesday, one of the dimmer figures in the presidential race threw a spotlight on what we should all be seeing clearly: Trump threatens the continued existence of the Republican Party.
That’s because Donald Trump’s campaign is built on hate mongering and discord, while a growing body of surveys, polls, focus groups, and an analysis of demographic trends shows that Americans are embracing the progressive ideals in our Constitution. Whether it’s marriage equality or a path to citizenship for those who entered the country illegally, the tide of history is against not only Trump, but the 15 other Republican candidates who all broadly side with him — just in more subtle language.
And I’m not the one saying that the Republican Party may soon go the way of the Whigs (last seen in 1854).
No, that insight comes from former Texas governor Rick Perry, who’s currently taking a back seat in the clown car.
Fortunately for the donor class, most political reporters only heard Perry say “Trumpism” is a “cancer on conservatism.”
That line alone just doesn’t capture his overall point. Neither did most of the coverage of the rigorously written, nuanced speech that Perry read.
Trump, Perry said, is selling “a toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness, and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition” unless Trumpism is “clearly diagnosed, excised, and discarded.”
Perry also made note of Trump’s rare appearances in church, an apparent effort to undercut conservative Christian support. After all, when it comes to religion, The Donald is a devotee of Mammon, but he’s angling for support from primary voters who think GOP stands for God’s Own Party.
The new reality that political reporters obscured is this:
We once had a primary system that required candidates to genuflect before the oligarchs. But now one low-level oligarch is thumbing his nose at the rest of them — and under this new system, the much richer oligarchs, from Sheldon Adelson to the Koch brothers, are as helpless to shape the direction of events as — well, as the mass of voters who don’t have billions to donate.
The Republican nightmare is that Trump doesn’t need donors to stay in the race. The power of all that Koch and Adelson money is discounted, the way Trump sometimes pays creditors just pennies on the dollar.
And so while candidates who never had a chance anyway – Carson, Huckabee, Jindal, Pataki, and Perry among them – will be forced to withdraw for lack of donations, Trump can party on. And Trump told “Morning Joe” Scarborough Friday that if he is denied the nomination, he might run as an independent — unless the Republican establishment starts treating him respectfully.
Political reporters are missing the big story because they get rewarded for covering the horse race, not the issues; for going with the herd, not standing apart. Step apart from the herd and you’ll get picked off, perhaps by an editor or anchor taking a shot at you from the home office, perhaps by the hyenas on the campaign staff.
Telling the news the candidate’s handlers want told, regurgitating manufactured controversies, and highlighting gaffes – those are the stories that make the careers of campaign reporters.
And, besides, it’s easier to focus on who is ahead in the polls than it is to actually learn important policy matters — such as how raising the minimum wage affects job creation, how tax cuts affect various income classes, or the significance of the words “corruption of blood” in the Constitution.
Instead of substance, we will get more circus coverage leading the news. Bowing to that reality, here are two things we know for sure about Trump’s fortune. And it should get some media attention because Trump wants us to judge him by the contents of his wallet, so:
- Trump is worth at least $1 billion, but no verifiable evidence exists to support his exclamations that his net worth is more than $10 billion.
- Trump reported that his production company took in just $4 million over the last 18 months for Apprentice and other Trump television properties, far below the $65 million annual fee he put out in 2011, a number so absurdly unrealistic that his broadcaster, NBC, derided it as “grossly inaccurate.”
Other news we still have yet to see make the major news reports: Donald’s long, unsavory connections to businesses run by organized crime and the lawsuits by minority workers at multiple Trump companies complaining about harassment.
But the lack of that coverage is no more surprising than Barnum’s avoiding hard questions about his fake mermaid.
By: David Cay Johnston, The National Memo, July 24, 2015
“Incessant Flailing”: GOP Peddles Hard The ‘Hillary Can’t Be Trusted’ Line
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is the runaway pick among voters when asked who among the presidential candidates is the most credible, honest and trustworthy, and even the most compassionate. Her rank on the voter trustworthy meter is far higher than that of Barack Obama and easily tops that of all other GOP presidential contenders. The problem with this is the AP-Ipsos poll that gave Hillary high marks on trustworthiness was taken in March, 2007.
The two big questions are: What happened in the eight years since that poll was taken and today to change voter’s attitudes on the trust issue toward Clinton? The other even bigger one is: Does this pose a real problem for Clinton’s campaign?
The trust issue and Hillary has been the sole fixation of the pollsters and they seem to crank out a new poll monthly hitting that theme. If one believes the barrage of polls, one comes away with the notion that voters, especially Democrats, simply don’t trust Hillary.
Playing up Clinton’s supposed free fall in integrity has been the one constant in the run-up to the 2016 presidential campaign. The Republican National Committee early on put Hillary dead in its hit sights to do everything possible to render her candidacy stillborn even before it officially became a candidacy. It not so subtly recycled the old trumped up scandals of the past from Whitewater to the Lewinsky scandal. It then cranked out a sneering “poor Hillary” video that touted Hillary’s quip that she and Bill were “dead broke” when they left the White House. It then intimated that she shook down poor cash strapped universities for her alleged outrageous speaking fees.
There was little doubt that the first chance the GOP got it would seize on a real or manufactured Obama foreign policy flub and make Clinton their hard target. The Benghazi debacle seemed to be just the right flub. In August 2013, the Republican National Committee rammed the attack home with a half-minute clip of her Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony earlier that year on the Benghazi attack.
The aim as always was to embarrass and discredit her not because of her alleged missteps as Secretary of State, but as a 2016 presidential candidate. Republicans got what they wanted when their phony accusations against her of cover-up and incompetence got tons of media chatter and focus and raised the first shadow of public doubt. The GOP then tirelessly searched for something else that could ramp up more public doubt about Clinton’s honesty. It didn’t take long to find.
This time it got two for the price of one. Congressional Republicans jubilantly waved a fresh batch of Clinton emails to the media, claiming that it proved that she deliberately mislead Congressional investigators, and the public, on what she knew and how she handled or allegedly mishandled the Benghazi debacle. This ties in with the GOP’s and the media’s incessant flailing of Clinton for supposedly hiding, deleting or misusing her private emails for some sinister and nefarious reason during her stint as Secretary of State. There will be more to come on this rest assured.
Meanwhile, the GOP mockingly ridicules Clinton’s attempt to reimage her campaign and herself as a hands, on in the trenches with the people, caring, feeling candidate as just more of the Clinton con, and an ineffectual one to boot. The supposed proof of that is to finger point her plunging favorability numbers in the polls. Of course, what’s conveniently omitted from the Hillary smear is that every one of her GOP rivals is doing an even lousier job trying to convince voters that they are any more “trustworthy” than Clinton. In the case of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, and especially Jeb Bush, their integrity meter score with the public fall somewhere between Watergate Richard Nixon and that of a used car salesman.
There’s more. A USA Poll and an ABC-Washington Post poll found that not only does Clinton have solid numbers in terms of approval with voters, but bags big time general favorability numbers from Democrats. This is even more impressive given the spirited, and populist issues run that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is making at Hillary.
It’s certainly true that voters do want a president that they can trust to say and do the right thing both on the issues and in their dealing with the public. But they also want a president who is experienced, well-versed, thoughtful, and firm on dealing with the inevitable crises that will confront the country, here and abroad. There’s absolutely no hint in the polls or anywhere else that the general public has shut down on Clinton in this vital area of public policy. But this won’t stop the GOP and those in the media obsessed with depicting Hillary as two-faced from peddling that line.
By: Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Associate Editor of New America Media; The Blog, The Huffington Post, July 19,2015
“Why So Many Americans Feel So Powerless”: Most Working People Have No Choice; It’s Now Take It Or Leave It
A security guard recently told me he didn’t know how much he’d be earning from week to week because his firm kept changing his schedule and his pay. “They just don’t care,” he said.
A traveler I met in the Dallas Fort-Worth Airport last week said she’d been there eight hours but the airline responsible for her trip wouldn’t help her find another flight leaving that evening. “They don’t give a hoot,” she said.
Someone I met in North Carolina a few weeks ago told me he had stopped voting because elected officials don’t respond to what average people like him think or want. “They don’t listen,” he said.
What connects these dots? As I travel around America, I’m struck by how utterly powerless most people feel.
The companies we work for, the businesses we buy from, and the political system we participate in all seem to have grown less accountable. I hear it over and over: They don’t care; our voices don’t count.
A large part of the reason is we have fewer choices than we used to have. In almost every area of our lives, it’s now take it or leave it.
Companies are treating workers as disposable cogs because most working people have no choice. They need work and must take what they can get.
Although jobs are coming back from the depths of the Great Recession, the portion of the labor force actually working remains lower than it’s been in over thirty years – before vast numbers of middle-class wives and mothers entered paid work.
Which is why corporations can get away with firing workers without warning, replacing full-time jobs with part-time and contract work, and cutting wages. Most working people have no alternative.
Consumers, meanwhile, are feeling mistreated and taken for granted because they, too, have less choice.
U.S. airlines, for example, have consolidated into a handful of giant carriers that divide up routes and collude on fares. In 2005 the U.S. had nine major airlines. Now we have just four.
It’s much the same across the economy. Eighty percent of Americans are served by just one Internet Service Provider – usually Comcast, AT&T, or Time-Warner.
The biggest banks have become far bigger. In 1990, the five biggest held just 10 percent of all banking assets. Now they hold almost 45 percent.
Giant health insurers are larger; the giant hospital chains, far bigger; the most powerful digital platforms (Amazon, Facebook, Google), gigantic.
All this means less consumer choice, which translates into less power.
Our complaints go nowhere. Often we can’t even find a real person to complain to. Automated telephone menus go on interminably.
Finally, as voters we feel no one is listening because politicians, too, face less and less competition. Over 85 percent of congressional districts are considered “safe” for their incumbents in the upcoming 2016 election; only 3 percent are toss-ups.
In presidential elections, only a handful of states are now considered “battlegrounds” that could go either Democratic or Republican.
So, naturally, that’s where the candidates campaign. Voters in most states won’t see much of them. These voters’ votes are literally taken for granted.
Even in toss-up districts and battle-ground states, so much big money is flowing in that average voters feel disenfranchised.
In all these respects, powerlessness comes from a lack of meaningful choice. Big institutions don’t have to be responsive to us because we can’t penalize them by going to a competitor.
And we have no loud countervailing voice forcing them to listen.
Fifty years ago, a third of private-sector workers belonged to labor unions. This gave workers bargaining power to get a significant share of the economy’s gains along with better working conditions – and a voice. Now, fewer than 7 percent of private sector workers are unionized.
In the 1960s, a vocal consumer movement demanded safe products, low prices, and antitrust actions against monopolies and business collusion. Now, the consumer movement has become muted.
Decades ago, political parties had strong local and state roots that gave politically-active citizens a voice in party platforms and nominees. Now, the two major political parties have morphed into giant national fund-raising machines.
Our economy and society depend on most people feeling the system is working for them.
But a growing sense of powerlessness in all aspects of our lives – as workers, consumers, and voters – is convincing most people the system is working only for those at the top.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, April 26, 2015
“The Dangers Of Democratic Complacency”: The Last Thing Democrats Need Is To Be Lulled Into Complacency
It’s only mid-April, but with “Why Hillary Clinton Is Probably Going to Win the 2016 Election,” New York‘s Jonathan Chait has zoomed into the lead in the race to win this year’s chutzpah-in-punditry award.
Don’t get me wrong. Even with the general election still 19 interminable months away (that’s 571 days, but who’s counting?), Chait makes a strong case for a Clinton victory. But I still wish he hadn’t written the column. The last thing Democrats need is to be lulled into complacency. Yes, they have a number of demographic advantages going into the next election cycle. But that doesn’t mean Clinton will coast to victory.
Chait relies heavily on a new Pew poll, and much of his analysis is sound. Democrats are indeed likely to benefit from two demographic trends: the “emerging Democratic majority” (which is a product of liberal-leaning segments of the population growing at a faster rate than conservative-leaning ones) and the replacement of more conservative older voters by more liberal younger voters.
But Chait fails to note a finding in the Pew poll that should give him pause — namely, that 39 percent of the public now identifies as independent. That’s the highest level in over 75 years of polling.
It’s true that many of these independents are “closet partisans” — functionally Republicans or Democrats in their ideological leanings. But not all of them are, and even some of those who lean one way or the other are persuadable by the other side under the right circumstances and by the right candidate.
This appears not to trouble Chait because, as he notes at the conclusion of his column, he has faith that the Democrats are the only “non-crazy” party in the U.S. at the moment, and thus the only party that will appeal to non-crazy voters.
I submit that this might make a decisive difference if the GOP ends up nominating Ben Carson — which it won’t. It may also prove important if they go for Ted Cruz — which is highly unlikely. And it may even have some effect if they put up Scott Walker or Rand Paul.
But bland-and-boring Jeb Bush? Or Cuban-American pretty boy Marco Rubio? I don’t think so.
Sure, Chait — a loyal Obama supporter and merciless scourge of the right — thinks the GOP nominee doesn’t matter, because the party (as displayed most vividly by its congressional brinksmanship since 2011) is fundamentally nuts. Even a temperamentally moderate Republican president would have to ride the Tea Party tiger while in office.
I largely agree. I just doubt most voters will. If Republicans can manage to nominate a candidate who sounds halfway reasonable, Hillary Clinton will have a real fight on her hands.
Democrats are going to have to work hard to prevail in 2016. The left’s sharpest minds would be well advised not to encourage Democrats to deny this fact.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, April 16, 2015
“Should Voting Be A Choice?”: Voter Non-Participation Is A Giant Pimple On The Face Of American Democracy
President Obama gave a rather unusual answer to a question about money in politics during an event in Cleveland this week. His antidote for the burgeoning influence of fat stacks of Supreme Court-sanctioned cash on elections was fairly simple: make everyone vote.
“If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country,” he said, adding that voting was mandatory in other countries. Universal participation would “counteract money more than anything.”
He might have a point.
Voter participation–or, more accurately, non-participation–is a giant pimple on the face of American democracy, one that the U.S. been unable to pop since the 1960s.
Every two years, an average of 56 percent of eligible voters (PDF) participate in their own self-governance, weighed heavily towards presidential contests. Midterms usually draw around 40 percent, putting 2014’s dismal effort only slightly below average.
Line that up next to other industrialized democracies and it’s not pretty. Great Britain usually gets around three quarters of its population to the polls in national elections.
Greece, the birthplace of democracy and modern geopolitical punchline, gets 86 percent. Australia’s citizens turn out in droves, averaging a 95 percent turnout down under.
How do the Aussies do it? Quite simply, they make their citizens vote–or at least show up.
They are forced to register, forced to appear at a polling station on Election Day, and forced to at least make a mark on the ballot paper. By law, they don’t actually have to choose a candidate or party, but you’d imagine the phrase “might as well” applies here.
Australia, cited by the president in his Wednesday remarks, is not the only country with compulsory voting, and not the only one to see strong turnout. Argentina has it, and usually sees around 85 percent participation. Brazil does too, and usually turns out at a rate around 80 percent. All of these are enforced compulsory systems: that is, there is a penalty (normally a fine) if a citizen cannot reasonably explain why they did not vote.
Now, none of those three are examples of ideal democratic outcomes at present, but at least they have robust participation. The United States faces a formidable participation gap, partly because, quite frankly, not enough people care.
But the U.S. has also been doing all the wrong things, policy-wise, for decades.
Rather than make it easier to vote, lawmakers here have been putting up barriers to participation.
New York and Ohio eliminated same-day voter registration in 1965 and 1977 respectively. According to political scientist Marjorie Random Hershey, turnout dropped by 7 percent in the subsequent elections and between 3 and 5 percent over the longer term (PDF). Many states have imposed early closing dates for registration, and if there were no closing date (in other words, same-day registration), some experts “estimate that…turnout would increase by 6.1 percent” across the nation. Early voting has also been scaled back in a number of states, including Ohio and North Carolina, where 7 in 10 black Americans vote early.
Then there are Voter ID laws, passed to combat the largely mythical phenomenon known as voter fraud.
To start, voter fraud does not exist in any significant sense. Out of the 197 million votes cast in federal elections between 2000 and 2005, only 26 (yes, twenty-six) votes eventually resulted in convictions for voter fraud. That is .00000013 percent, and it indicates that no one committing voter fraud could have affected any federal election in any way during that time.
Yet eight states have strict photo ID requirements to vote, and a further six have strict non-photo ID policies. And these policies can suppress the vote.
Hershey’s study cites Vercellotti and Anderson’s (2006), which found that “non-photo and photo ID rules were associated with lower turnout in 2004, in the range of 3 to 4 percent.” Laws enacted in Kansas and Tennessee dropped turnout by 2 percent between 2008 and 2012, according to the non-partisan Government Accountability Office. Texas’s policies, some of the most restrictive in the nation, were also heavily scrutinized after the 2014 election.
All of these figures are across the demographic board, leaving aside that these policies have been accused of being partisan and discriminatory, disproportionately affecting minorities and the socioeconomically disadvantaged.
Voter ID is just the latest in a long line of counterproductive policies when it comes to the ballot box. The suppression numbers associated are not huge, but there is a pile-on effect.
That’s because the decision to vote is an economic one. There’s an element of civic duty or pride, sure, but the individual essentially conducts a cost–benefit analysis with regard to how they spend their time and money. The more obstacles that are put in the way of voter participation, from restricting early voting to banning voting out-of-district to requiring IDs (which cost time and money to procure), the higher the opportunity cost and the fewer people will vote.
The end result is that the laws and regulations governing voting in some states are thoroughly undemocratic.
Thankfully, though, the U.S. is not some sort of uniformly hopeless electoral dystopia. Some states are making progress. Oregon, along with more recent converts Washington and Colorado (the Civic-Minded Stoner Bloc) has conducted all mail-in voting for years. All enjoyed turnouts of 64 percent turnout or higher in 2012, well above the national average, with Colorado at 71 percent.
This week, Oregon crossed into new territory in its efforts to get out the vote. Under the new policy, all eligible voters will be registered automatically unless they opt out. Now the Oregon secretary of state’s office will mail all voting-age citizens a ballot 20 days before any election. They need only send it back with a few marks of a pen.
Oregon’s is a step in the right direction, emphasizing ease of voting over mandates. Compulsory voting does not hold all the answers–though some political scientists credit it with as much as double-digit gains in turnout percentage–and there are other ways to avoid ghastly-looking turnout numbers. After all, Britain and Greece are doing just fine without it. Belgium, where mandatory voting policies have not been enforced since 2003, averages 90 percent turnout.
Though it would likely bring more people to the polls, it’s not immediately clear how, as the president says, mandatory voting would combat money’s influence on American politics. Maybe he’s hoping that the few people whose lives aren’t consumed by political advertisements in the run-up to Election Day–that is, who don’t own a TV or computer–would show up. Maybe his roots in community organizing tell him there’s strength in numbers, that there’s power to be found in the kind of mass participation by informed citizens that is simply lacking today.
By: Jack Holmes, The Daily Beast, March 20, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 