As is self-evident, Republicans are gung-ho on cutting taxes because there is very little that government does that they truly value. The bigger the gaps are in the safety net, the better it is for many Republicans. The less protection of the environment, the more freedom there is, particularly for abusers. The more unregulated the financial institutions are, the more opportunity there is to create “funny money,” and the poor will only get a piece of that when it becomes a known counterfeit commodity.

We talk about the value of having a bird’s eye view of our society. If you could fly over every nook and cranny of our country, swooning down when desirable to get a better look, what would you see as America’s greatest, and most obvious problems? Since your flyover would include observations of the hollars in Appalachia as well as the neighborhood of Chicago’s west and south sides, you would see the abject poverty that reflects how tens of millions of Americans live.

You would also fly over Hempstead, the North Shore of Chicago and Beverly Hills. To a reasonable person, it might appear that the residents have more wealth than is necessary to live a comfortable life. That is particularly so when compared to the squalor in which so many of the others who we have seen are forced to live.

So, the obvious question arises. How can a country of so much wealth have so much poverty in it midst? This seems like such an obvious question to me. But that may be the problem. I am projecting my vision of America on everyone else, whether they agree with me or not. I don’t like the presence of poverty in our society, but clearly for many more, it is either a minor inconvenience or a badge of honor representing that some people clearly have it better than others.

For those who subscribe to the Bible, there is a line about the meek inheriting the earth. I guess that like virtually every other line in the Bible, it has a throw-away factor; a shelf-life only as long as it is convenient for someone the believe, or at least, espouse it. So, if I’m hung up on the economic disparity in our society, it may be that this is my problem and I need to “get over it.”

Like most people, I can be fairly stubborn and don’t like to sacrifice my values on a whim. But this leaves me in a position where I’m quite distant from the American mainstream.

I can be a bit of a policy wonk, but what good is advocating a set of policies if the public does not back them? The only other option is to grab an inordinate amount of the levers of power as so many well-healed Republicans seem to have done.

I could try to be preacher and spread the gospel of income inequality. But I think that many of our problems are papered over because there is the “preacher-industrial complex” telling us what to think and do.

I guess that the answer is for me to own my problem and hope that in small ways, the logic of the undesirability of income inequality will prevail. I can take a knee for that.

The post Is it my hang-up, or society’s, that we are so tolerant of poverty? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Consider two anecdotes:

The First: Recently I tried to get into the mind of a Trump supporter that had posted a status about the liberal media and their unfair treatment of the president. I had a logical path to lead this person on, thinking I had a silver bullet: we both agree there is bias in journalism. But if journalism is truly degenerate these days, why and when did it happen? I argued that the degeneracy of the press could be traced to Reagan-era media consolidation and privatization, which caused the rise of news-as-entertainment. Outlets like MSNBC and Huffington Post, I said, were merely marketed to liberals; they did not represent substantive left-wing thought. And Fox News is worse, peddling outright lies like the “Puppermaster” fantasy of George Soros, or the birther myth. So you shouldn’t blame Rachel Maddow for liberal “fake news”; Reagan, Milton Friedman, and Roger Ailes are the real culprits. Checkmate, or so I thought.

Nope, he said. The problem isn’t capitalism’s inevitable drive towards marketizing everything. The problem is liberal cynicism, “the media”, broadly construed, lying in order to bring down a man they considered a Nazi. My pro-Trump acquaintance acknowledged that the liberal media thought it was doing the right thing by demonizing Trump. But he was certain they were motivated by pure, hateful ideology.

The Second: R.L. Stephens recently came out with an amazing critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between The World And Me. Coates’ critically acclaimed book is a long-form essay on how he sees racism in the United States and the world. What Stephens takes issue with is Coates’ framing of racism as a force of nature, not a historical, class-based process: “One cannot subpoena an earthquake”, Coates writes. He proposes no solution, positing essentially that white people must self-reflect to the point where they are “woke” enough not to be racist. Stephens, on the other hand, writes that

The racialized tragedies faced daily by the masses require us to embrace class struggle, not       Coates’s demobilizing metaphysical maxims about how white people “must ultimately stop     themselves”…the only way to defeat racism was to fight it, every step of the way.

What tied these two incidents together in my mind was the implicit or explicit rejection of material causes for events. The pro-Trump guy from above could not fathom that the ideology he hated had its roots in capitalism, the economic system he loved; Ta-Nehisi Coates chooses to describe racism as an almost mystical force rather than the product of early capitalism’s desire for free labor and its many ramifications. Neither seems to be able to tie their abstract problems to the concrete reality of economic and social life, or propose a decent plan for dealing with said problems.

This fairy-tale of wicked ideologues is increasingly common across the discourse. At its root is a rejection of materialism and material conditions. Rather than acknowledge that ideology has its roots in history and economics, and is not simply the result of cabals of like-minded individuals enforcing their will upon the world.

The philosopher Hegel insisted that ideas and clashing ideologies propelled history forward; Marx and Engels said famously that they “found Hegel on his head” and “flipped him over”. In other words, materialism here refers not to avarice or selfishness but to an analytical frame that views history as the result of economic and material forces, not a battle of ideas.

Ideology, particularly American reactionism, is rooted in material conditions: many fundamentalist Christian strains grew out of rejection of the New Deal; the adding of “under god” to the pledge of allegiance was aimed at countering godless communism (thought the pledge itself was written by socialist Francis Bellamy; modern conservatives use abortion as a wedge issue to divide Left-leaning voters. In each case ideology served a particular function for the ruling class, strengthening and consolidating their sway on society.

My pro-Trump friend realized that a “liberal media” exists, but couldn’t conceptualize that it’s societal function might be to serve as the liberal wing of a capitalist state, and to make its owners money. Coates details in exquisite language the abject misery inflicted upon black Americans, but seems to provide nebulous solutions: White Americans should engage in rigorous self-criticism, but interracial mass politics is off the table, or ignored.

When presented with irrational ideological conclusions, the answer is not to respond with more dogma. Rather, presenting material conditions and solutions may dispel the smoke of vicious belief. That is the thesis of the Sanders crowd: Clinton ran on the phrase, “they go low, we go high” to indicate a campaign centered on national honor and decorum; they should have said, “when they go low, we provide material solutions to your problems, like free healthcare, education, an end to corporate dominance, and the empowerment of the working class”. To be fair, Clinton’s slogan was probably more attractive than mine.

But we’ve lost that frame of analysis. Postmodernism, and the overwhelming onslaught of modern mass media have us looking at Twitter and Facebook for the reasons behind things. This means my pro-Trump friend thinks posting about liberal bias is a crucial part of politics. Ta-Nehisi Coates seems to think that cultural critiques of racism and endless talk of “bodies” is a crucial part of anti-racist struggle. Not to suggest that Coates is equally incorrect: He’s a great writer with an eloquence I envy, and I think that Between The World And Me has given a lot of people a lot to think about. But I see a common thread of politics and the struggle for justice reduced to analysis of culture.

It seems likely that center-left liberals and far-right conservatives both subscribe to Milo Yiannopolis’ thesis: Politics is downstream of culture.

The first step in defeating Trump and company is to understand that they are not evil for the sake of it, and they are not evil because of their uncouthness. They are evil because they are the result of a decades-long movement on the right towards a brutal variant of state capitalism and xenophobia.

The defeat of the right-wing ideologues currently running the country will not come when we “stand together”, “learn to love one another”, or any such amorphous truism. It will come when millions of working- and middle-class Americans band together to enact a specific progressive agenda.

The post Material Conditions First! appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Each Thursday on the PBS NewsHour, plain-speaking economist Paul Salmon explains difficult issues in his “Making Sen$e” segment. This past week he focused on the economic changes in the town of Janesville, WI, which happens to be the home of House Speaker Paul Ryan.

As to what is wrong with Janesville, it begins with the standard story of an industrial town highly dependent on manufacturing lost its main factory. The initial problem that followed was high unemployment which has now been replaced by under-employment. For government solutions (or non-solutions) It now regularly votes for Ryan. However, in the 2016 presidential race, it favored Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.

As Salmon clearly points out in his May 4 report, Janesville serves as a poster child for how manufacturing jobs have disappeared from so many communities in the northeastern quadrant of the United States. Since 1919, its lifeblood was a General Motors assembly plant which initially produced tractors then later Chevrolet automobiles. During World War II, it produced munitions; then it became a primary producer of GMT900 trucks such as the Chevrolet Suburban. But by 2008, higher gas prices created a slow-down for full-size sports utility vehicles. First the plant shut down one of its two shifts; then it closed all together.

As the older factories across the upper Midwest became less efficient and newer ones were built either below the Mason-Dixon line or overseas, the people in towns like Janesville were left with choices that included moving to sometimes-available manufacturing jobs elsewhere, or adapting to a new local economy with no hub industry. In an attempt to build a “new economy,” Salmon shows the efforts that were made to provide new job training opportunities for those who had been displaced.

On the surface, it appeared that a number of citizens were enrolled in the job training programs and many “graduated.” But it’s important to never lose sight of what the real goal is, and in Janesville it was not to retrain workers. The goal was to find new jobs for the former industrial workers, jobs that had pay scales comparable to what the United Auto Workers had negotiated for them with General Motors. But the sad truth was that while job re-training succeeded, employment with UAW-level wages did not come back. Yes, after a hike in the employment level, people found jobs, but they were more in the service sector and the pay scale was often only half of what they previously made. This is a classic case of under-employment – workers having jobs that either do not utilize their full skills or do not pay that to which they had become accustomed.

One of the indicators of the unseen hardship within the community is an unmarked and usually closed room in Janesville’s Parker High School full of donated food, toiletries and other personal supplies for students in the school whose families cannot afford basic necessities. There is more than one dirty secret in this high school and a big one is that Parker is now serving the role of provider of all level of community services, much as is often done within inner-city neighborhoods.

To Ryan, this is the way the free market works. And if you’re primarily concerned about allowing the captains of industry to make decisions in their own interest and with minimal government interference, then Janesville is a success story. But if your priorities are the best interests of the citizens of a community, then the free market is failing in Janesville and a new approach is needed.

Two things are clear:

1. For people who are left without good jobs, a social safety net must be in place to help them through difficult times.
2. Perhaps more importantly, with modern technology and the growth of artificial intelligence, we may be past the time when our society could produce well-paying jobs for all. We may be able to supply ourselves with almost everything we need without a full-employment economy. That means that we are experience fundamental structural change in our economy.

Ryan, like so many Republicans, are living in a world that they dreamed was yesteryear. The future is changing at a much more rapid pace than even was the decline of Janesville and other similar communities. Our first goal is something that former President George H.W. Bush fumbled about in 1987, “that vision thing.”

The post What’s the Matter with Janesville? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It looks like Trump-appointee Ajit Pai over at the FCC is setting his sights on unraveling regulations that guarantee net neutrality.

This radical change would mark a reversal of strong net-neutrality protections put into place during the Obama administration by former FCC chairman Tom Wheeler. The history of how open Internet advocates won the first-round fight for net neutrality and defeated paid prioritization is revealing. After initial missteps in 2014, when Wheeler’s proposal to allow companies like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon to create pay-to-play fast lanes caused massive online protests and pushback from the tech industry, the future of the open Internet seemed assured. At the time, open-Internet advocates cheered Wheeler on when he reversed course and decided to base net-neutrality rules on Title II of the Communications Act of 1939.

How times have changed. The Trump administration is engaged in a frenzied destruction of a host of Obama-era regulatory protections. It looks like net neutrality may be next on the list. It’s been reported that FCC Chairman Pai has been huddling with telecom lobbyists representing AT&T, Comcast, Charter, Sprint, Verizon, and T-Mobile. These meetings and Pai’s statements to the press seem to be signaling that the chairman is setting the stage for a policy shift that would favor the bottom line of the telecom giants over the interests of everyone else—meaning the interests of every other sector in the economy. In lock step with the broadband industry, Pai has consistently stated his dissatisfaction with the Title II designation, which classifies broadband companies as utilities and subjects them to utility-like regulation.

Reporting from Recode, an online tech blog, indicates that Pai may be considering voluntary compliance to ensure open access. Let’s be honest. That’s a joke by any objective standard. Pai needs to produce a single example of a corporate giant voluntarily deferring on potential profits as well as a commitment by the Trump administration to tough enforcement before voluntary compliance can be taken seriously. This is how Recode reports on the direction Pai may be considering:

“Under Pai’s early blueprint, Internet providers could be encouraged to commit in writing that they won’t slow down or block Internet traffic. If they break that promise, they could be penalized by another agency, the Federal Trade Commission, which can take action whenever companies deceive consumers.”

The issue of net neutrality is the fight that won’t go away. After all, we now live in a world where literally everything depends on affordable, open access to Internet service. The players and the stakes are high. The fight for open access pits the telecom giants in a struggle with the tech industry and the public at large.

What is net neutrality and why does it inspire such passion? Net neutrality is the principle that the Internet should remain a level playing field for all users. Net neutrality preserves the rights of all users to communicate freely online, and net neutrality has been the engine for fostering a new and robust online marketplace.

Who benefits from net neutrality? The answer is everyone and everything except the Internet service providers. Net neutrality fosters job growth, competition, and innovation. It’s essential for small-business owners, online retailers, entrepreneurs, and startups, for online job sites, streaming entertainment providers, free-speech advocates, students, and political, social, and arts groups that lack access to mainstream media.

When it passed rules to protect net neutrality, the Obama administration was hardly a radical outlier in understanding the economic, social, and political benefits of an open Internet. As you can see in the map below, the rest of the connected world understands as well—the exceptions being Russia and China where suppression of free speech is the norm, and net neutrality threatens government control of political dissent.

The American tech industry is another player that understands what’s at stake in this fight. This is how a spokesperson for the Internet Association, a lobbying group for Silicon Valley tech companies, summed up the industry’s battle readiness to fight for strong net neutrality protections and against paid prioritization:

“Internet companies are ready to fight to maintain strong net neutrality protections in any forum. ISPs [Internet service providers] must not be allowed to meddle with people’s right to access content and services online, and efforts to weaken net neutrality rules are bad for consumers and innovation.”

What happens if the service providers win this round and we lose net neutrality? Here’s a short list of what could happen, and it’s pretty grim.

Open access would disappear, and innovation would be stymied. Free speech could be curtailed. Cable and phone companies could create Internet fast and slow lanes and slow down or block Internet traffic as they choose. The fast- and slow-lane system would effectively create online winners and losers. Extra charges could be levied to content companies that could afford to pay for faster speeds and preferential access, thus limiting competition. Those extra charges would be passed on to all of us, and the cost of Internet service would increase for consumers and small businesses. Internet service providers could slow down competitors’ content and block political or social opinions the provider might disagree with.

So get ready everyone. Round two is about to begin.

The post Net Neutrality: Round Two appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Another day, another corporation receiving massive tax breaks by the government. Most recently, it was $7 million from the Trump/Pence administration to Carrier (owned by United Technologies) to stop the company from moving a factory to Mexico. Not all the jobs will be saved, but it’s still being considered a win by the Capitalist-in-chief. Even before he entered politics, Trump the businessman knew how to work the system to get himself millions of dollars in tax breaks. This practice of corporate welfare isn’t new or even that unusual.

Here is a map of the United States, filled in by which company got the largest handout (via targeted tax breaks, grants, and other subsidiaries) in each state.

This infographic was published first on reason.com

The post The United States of corporate welfare appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Should I recommend Michael Moore’s 2016 movie,” Where to Invade Next”? On the plus side, there are some really good jokes.  The biggest laugh came when Moore asked someone whose alphabet does not include the letter “W” if they dropped the letter during the last Bush administration.

No doubt Moore is really good at a certain kind of humor.  The movie is also worth watching just to see parts of other countries we probably wouldn’t normally get to visit.  For example, a prison on an island in Denmark.  Or the office of the president of Slovenia.  Or the balcony of an Italian couple overlooking a lovely village.

The downside of the experience is the shock of realizing how brutal our American culture is compared to more evolved societies.

Moore visited a young Italian couple to find out what kind of vacation time Italian workers enjoy.  He is a police officer.  She is a buyer for a women’s clothing firm.  They described their summer vacation, their December holiday getaway, and the extra pay they receive in December to enjoy their time off work.  The reasoning is that the workers have to spend the money they earn all year on living expenses which doesn’t leave them anything to pay for a holiday vacation.

Seriously.  I’m not making this up.  By law, all Italian workers receive several weeks of paid vacation each year because they need time to nurture their minds, bodies and family connections.  Healthier workers are more productive, and families that enjoy relaxed time together are much less likely to fall apart.

This same attitude toward the importance of a healthy lifestyle was evident in two other countries Moore visited.  He wanted to see the inside of a factory and talk to the CEO’s.  At noon, a whistle blows and the workers go home for a two hour lunch with family.  Again, it’s the family connections that are so important.  The workers return to work refreshed and, usually, in a good mood.

Workers are appreciated and given benefits even beyond what is required by law.  Moore interviewed the CEO’s of a factory that makes motorbikes.  The man and his two sisters own and run the company.  They think of the workers as their friends, and  because everyone wants the company to succeed, workers feel free to offer suggestions if they think of a better or faster way to get the job done.

Moore asked why the owners don’t pay themselves more like the CEO’s in America.   One of the women answered:  “What’s the point of being richer?”   She said keeping too much wealth for themselves would put a barrier between them and the workers who are their friends.

In one of the countries, it is mandated that half of the seats on company boards must be held by workers.  Not just a token seat, but half.  And they are listened to and respected.   Workers who have a vested interest in the success of a company will be more productive and enjoy better health in the long run.

Focusing on well-being

In all of the interviews Moore conducted, the main goal in each case seems to be the health and well-being of the people.

And it starts with babies and children.  In one country, Moore discovered that women who give birth receive five months paid leave to bond with their babies.  One new mother asked Moore how women in America can bond with their babies if they are not with them for those first important months.  He didn’t have an answer.

When those babies are old enough to go to school, they will be fed nutritious food and given plenty of time to build relationships with other children.

Of course France was the highlight of the school lunchroom tours.  Children have plenty of time for lunch and are served at round tables on real china with real silverware.  No Styrofoam plates or plastic forks and spoons.

Food is prepared by a chef with the help of several cooks.  A food committee meets once a month to plan the next month’s menus. The goal is fresh, healthy food, plenty of water, and time for the children to develop relationships with each other.  Lunch time is considered to be another class where students learn to eat right and share food family style.  Sharing and bonding with others seems to be at the heart of most of what Michael Moore saw in Europe.

Moore showed the French children photos of what American children are served as school lunches, and the kids were confused.  They didn’t recognize what they saw as food.  One child asked if American children really had to eat what they saw in those photos.  The general feeling was sympathy if not shock.

Finland is recognized worldwide as offering the best opportunity for children to learn and grow into healthy, well-adjusted adults.  It wasn’t always that way.  When Finnish educators reworked their public education system, they  focused on creating happy, healthy productive adults.  Students attend classes only twenty hours a week, but the time is spent productively with the kids choosing how they want to learn.  There are no standardized tests.  In fact, when Moore asked the teachers what they would change about American education, they were adamant about getting rid of standardized tests.  They said children don’t really learn anything by memorizing facts that they will forget immediately because they have no connection to the students’ lives.  Learning experiences are actual experiences that leave an imprint on the brain.

Moore visited classrooms where students were building things, learning to cook, and playing games.  Yes, “playing” is considered part of the curriculum.  Again, the emphasis is on developing relationships and learning to care about others.  Admittedly, this is much easier in a country with a smaller, fairly homogenous population.  But what a great concept…… producing happy, healthy adults with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed personally and contribute something to society.

In Slovenia, Moore visited a university where tuition is free with open admissions and the classes are taught in English.  Students from the U.S. are finding out about this free education and transferring there.  One American young woman said she couldn’t even afford to go to community college in the U.S.  Another American student said he already had $9,000 in debt and didn’t want to add to that.  Moore asked the Slovenian students what kind of debt they had, and the students had to ask someone to explain the word “debt” to them.

Prisons

First off, there is no death penalty in European countries, and they asked what we think we accomplish by executing people.  In Denmark, there is one prison that is on an island and every inmate has a job to keep the operation running.  Their “cells” are small rooms such as we would see in an old-fashioned college dormitory complete with private shower and flat-screen TV.  Each resident has the only key to his room.  There is enough space for shelves where they can keep their books and other personal belongings.  The longest sentence in Denmark is 21 years.

Moore visited the father of one of the teenagers who was murdered a few years ago in that horrible killing spree at a youth camp on an island.  Moore asked the grieving parent if he would want the killer of his son to be executed.  The man immediately said no.  Moore asked if he didn’t want to kill the man himself.  He answered that he wouldn’t want to “go down that ladder” and become like that murderer.  He respected himself too much to want to kill someone, even the man who murdered his son.   That murderer received the harshest penalty of 21 years in prison with 10 of those in solitary confinement.  What that means in Denmark is probably not what we picture as solitary confinement in the U.S.  The Danes feel that keeping someone from their family and even from other prisoners is punishment enough.

The Portuguese decriminalized all drugs and provide readily available mental health services for addicts wishing to quit.  There are no drug gangs because there is no profit to be made by selling illegal drugs.

The only country outside of Europe that Moore visited was Tunisia in northern Africa. The Tunisian women were instrumental in overthrowing the last dictator and establishing a representative government. In a Muslim country, the Islamic political leaders stepped down voluntarily when they saw the people were serious about wanting more power over their lives.

Financial systems

Moore’s final stop was in Iceland which suffered the collapse of most of its biggest banks in the 2008-2009 meltdown.  The men who ran those banks into the ground and lost millions of other people’s money were tried, convicted and sent to prison.  What a concept !  The only bank that didn’t collapse was one run by three women.  Moore interviewed those women and asked why their bank was immune.

The answer will probably not be surprising to female readers of this little movie review.  The female bankers did not feel the pressure to outsmart each other in order to achieve “top dog” status.  They said that men are too concerned with power and their “rank” among their male peers.  Women don’t have the hormonal drive to be the richest, most important “king of the hill.”  They value and want to achieve success, of course, but not necessarily at the expense of their customers or clients.  Banking and investing is not a game to them.

When the movie ended, we were asked if we had any comments.  There was so much to think about that we needed time to digest what we had seen.

Some noted that we definitely need more women in positions of authority.   Others said what most of us were thinking.  The United States of America has not evolved as much as some countries have in terms of reaching a more just, humane, and nurturing society.

Michael Moore showed scenes from some American jails where men, mostly black men, were being treated worse than most of us would treat a wild animal.   I couldn’t help turning away from those scenes.  Why have we allowed the “law enforcement” and “correctional” systems to become so dehumanizing?

Moore believes that white, privileged Americans with the power to do it, reacted to the civil rights protests and, particularly, to the militant Black Power groups, with the purposeful objective of  destroying black families with illegal drugs.  The vehicle?  Crack cocaine.  I vaguely remember something about the CIA bringing drugs back from Central America, selling it and buying weapons for the Nicaraguan Contras.  How much of that is true, I don’t know.  But, if someone wanted to tear apart a community, encouraging gang wars would certainly be a good place to start.

And was it just a coincidence that, when women were pushing to add an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the reproductive rights issue surfaced?  Roe v Wade was in 1973.  The ERA fell short of ratification by three states.  The anti-abortion issue has been front and center ever since. I doubt that most men in positions of power back then cared one way or another about abortion, but they realized they could use that issue to convince voters to send them to Congress and state legislatures where they could push their free market, anti-tax agenda.

What’s the matter with America?

Thomas Frank spelled this out in “What’s the Matter with Kansas” years ago.  People will vote against their own interest and that of their families when they are stirred up emotionally about a particular issue.

We’ve been electing anyone who promises to lower our taxes which ultimately means weaker and weaker bonds that hold us together.  While we are arguing over having to pay too much for governmental services and screaming about “big government” taking away our freedoms, our lives are becoming meaner and less secure.

It’s not just about rebuilding our infrastructure although we are decades behind more developed countries in that regard.  And it’s not just about the good paying jobs that rebuilding creates.  It’s about whether we are a society that takes care of ourselves and our neighbors or not.  Do we really want an “every man for himself, dog eat dog” society?  Isn’t that what we supposedly left behind when we established a representative government with the goal of minding the “general welfare”?  Michael Moore told folks in Europe that “welfare” is a dirty word in the U. S.  They were shocked.

We could have the same level of civilized society as most European nations  if we paid more in taxes.  But we’ve trapped ourselves into believing we shouldn’t pay a penny more in taxes than we absolutely must.  And millionaires can stash their wealth in other countries without penalty.

The movie included a graphic showing the level of taxes we Americans pay and the much higher level that Europeans pay.  But then the costs we bear were added to the U.S. column, and it jumped to the top of the screen.  We don’t think about how much we pay for health care, education (especially post-secondary) or other things that are included in the European tax system.  If we paid our schools enough to offer healthy food and if women could stay home and bond with their babies and workers were given enough time off to take care of their health and happiness, what a different society we would have.

Americans are proud of the myth of “rugged individualism.”  We reward success and appreciate incredible talent.  That’s all well and good.  But we have also evolved to the point where we know that we are all better off when no one is left behind.  The Progressive Era in the early 1900’s was one of those periods.  We instituted the income tax and gave women the right to vote.  We gave government the responsibility of protecting our food supply.  We established the Federal Reserve System to avoid financial chaos.

The Great Depression showed us that we needed to take better care of our most vulnerable citizens including the elderly, orphans and the handicapped.   After another period of stepping back to digest the changes, we pushed ahead again in the 60’s and 70’s for more civil rights, a cleaner environment and subsidized health care for senior citizens.

We were due for the next progressive era in the 1980’s or 1990’s, but it didn’t come.  Why?  One reason was the well-organized and well-financed strategic plan by free market Republicans to infiltrate the various levels of political power and take the reins of government at the highest level.  I refer anyone who wants to read the outline of their plan to look up the Powell Memorandum online.

As we become more and more selfish as a society, we also increase the fear  that someone will take away what belongs to us.  As we become more afraid of each other, we become more prone to violence against others and ourselves.  The suicide rate among middle aged Americans increases every year.  These are people who used to be comfortably middle class, but the rug was pulled out from under them by the “Great Recession” and subsequent changes in the job market and economy.   We’ve always known that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but it’s not just a truism anymore.  It’s dangerous to the point of lethality.

Donald Trump is the grotesque end result of decades of well-organized, well-funded propaganda that has convinced us to take care of “number one” and to hell with everyone else.  We want and need scapegoats because we realize we can never make up what we’ve lost financially.  We feel helpless as the rich and powerful suck more and more life out of our sense of self-worth.

Climate change deniers control Congress while we suffer the consequences of the decades we’ve lost when we could have been building a healthier energy system. What happened to the 1970’s push to save Mother Earth?

What happened to “no more war”?  And the right of women to control their own bodies?  And the Montessori system of educating children as individuals instead of as cogs in a machine?   What happened to the movement to include the history of women, African-Americans and Native Americans in our textbooks?  Have we really ever come to grips with the sins of our fathers?  In Germany, children are taught about the Nazis, the Holocaust, the personal horror suffered by Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies and other targeted groups.  The names of those who died in concentration camps are embedded in the city sidewalks so they can never be dismissed or forgotten.

How have we allowed ourselves to be trapped in this tea party nightmare?  Some speculate that Trump will lose badly, the Democrats will gain control of Congress and our long national nightmare will be over.  Sen. Bernie Sanders and his legions of supporters have pushed the Democratic Party to include more progressive ideas in the party platform.  They plan on attending the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia to make sure their demands are met.  Is this the beginning of the next Progressive Era?  Does Bernie’s “revolution” start soon?  There are signs that the tide is turning (recent Supreme Court decisions, the “sit in” by House Democrats  for gun violence legislation, the anti-Trump coalition of different ethnic groups.)

The main editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on July 4, 2016 is about Thomas Jefferson’s belief that we all owe a “debt of service” to our nation.  This is something to think about as we celebrate on the 240^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.   We may never reach the level of concern for our fellow citizens that the Europeans have developed, but we certainly can make life safer and healthier for everyone living within our borders

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One of the oddities, for me, about what is happening in education now is how those promoting more standardized testing are called “reformers.” Really, what kind of reform? I guess that it’s similar to those who advocated that prisons move away from rehabilitation and just focus on warehousing.

But now, the standardized test addicts have new friends in, of all people, hedge fund managers. Yep, those Wall Street folks who know how to make money without making anything else. Well, the hedgers love numbers, and many of them are very good at using them to their personal advantage, while not contributing anything tangible to society. And now that seems to be what they’re doing in the far-flung field–from them–of education.

Justin Miller reports in The American Prospect, “How Hedge Funders Built the Pro-Charter Political Network.”

The hedge-fund industry and the charter movement are almost inextricably entangled. Executives see charter-school expansion as vital to the future of public education, relying on a model of competition. They see testing as essential to accountability. And they often look at teacher unions with unvarnished distaste. Several hedge-fund managers have launched their own charter-school chains. You’d be hard-pressed to find a hedge-fund guy who doesn’t sit on a charter-school board.

Apparently what hedge fund managers like in education are (a) charter schools, (b) competition and (c) accountability. They don’t like teachers’ unions. It might seem innocent enough, but let’s drill down a bit.

Charter schools were initially established to create competition for public schools. That, in itself, was a controversial idea because it involved siphoning money from the public school coffers and directing it toward individual schools outside the system. The teachers in those schools did not have to be unionized, so that created a threat to public school teachers. But the upside would be that these new schools could go in their own direction and use techniques that often-calcified public schools rejected out of hand. They could focus more on the needs of the individual students without having to protect a system that was top heavy with a large bureaucracy. In a sense, it would be a marriage between the independence of private schools with the access to public monies that public schools have.

Since large urban public school districts were mostly in financial distress, it would have been difficult to imagine that schools affiliated with the systems would make money. But hedge fund managers, and before them “education companies,” knew where to look for profit sources. The plan with charter schools was to make their operation more efficient than public schools, to reduce expenses so that there would be a profit to skim off the top. Additionally, charter schools set up profitable arrangements with universities in partnerships, presumably to improve the educational offerings to students. Large corporations saw charter schools as opportunities for philanthropy, and then the possibility of claiming partial responsibility for how well these charter schools could do.

But how would they know if the charter schools actually did “better” than public schools? The answer lay in standardized test scores. The model had been tried for decades, with companies like Princeton Review and Kaplan offering tuition-based courses to high school students to improve their college admission test scores. That seemed to work, in part because what Princeton Review and Kaplan were doing was to prepare students to take tests that they were more-or-less indebted to take.

The standardized test factor was a great metric, if the idea was to find a way in which elementary and secondary schools could be tracked. But what did it measure? Well, it measured students’ abilities to perform well on tests, and teachers’ skills in preparing them. Never mind that this was a perfect storm to create cheating, and it did, but it was somewhat like the tail wagging the dog. In this case, the tail was the standardized tests and the dog was the students.

Is this really what America wants to provide learning opportunities for its children? Schools that are test-driven and sources of profit for corporations that include hedge fund managers. Where is each individual student’s curiosity, critical thinking skills, and pure love of learning? It’s time to “stop the madness,” but neither hedge fund managers nor charter school companies have been known for doing that. Perhaps they should take a renewed look at the movie, “Race to Nowhere,” which questions so much of what they are doing.

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It’s nothing new to say that sometimes Hillary Clinton is her own worst enemy. I’ve been a Bernie supporter, but I really want to enthusiastically support Hillary because (a) she likely will be the Democratic nominee, and (b) all things being equal (or even close to equal), I certainly would prefer to have a woman candidate, and then president.

It’s interesting how Hillary has been involved in so many “cover-ups” beginning with Whitewater in Arkansas, and then Gennifer Flowers (yes, with a ‘G’), an alleged Bill femme fatale in days past. Her modus operandi seems to be to disclose considerable information, but not enough to put people’s concerns to rest. But interestingly enough, none of the alleged scandals, or wrong-doings that have come to light over the past twenty-five years have turned out to be anything close to what the accusers say they are. I imagine that the F.B.I. investigation of her personal mail server, which she used while serving as Secretary of State, will again determine that while her judgments were less than optimal, overall the situation is much ado about nothing.

The transcripts of her three speeches before Goldman-Sachs and other Wall Street firms may not be as insignificant as she would like us to believe. As of now, we know little about them. Politico has reported that during one of the Goldman speeches, “Clinton offered a message that the collected plutocrats found reassuring, according to accounts offered by several attendees, declaring that the banker-bashing so popular within both political parties was unproductive and indeed foolish.”

This tidbit is far from being either conclusive or damning. But as mystery shrouds the contents of her speeches, they are a breeding ground for rumors, and there is little doubt that Donald Trump will use fact or fiction without distinction to try to bring her down.

Like so many, I am very curious about what she said in those speeches. If it’s left up to Hillary, it’s close to a certainty that I will never find out. But The Hill is now reporting that “GOP operatives on the prowl for secret Clinton transcripts.” This is what we call opposition research. I have always disliked such action because it seems to be the engine that drives negativity in politics. But when there is something in the dark that needs to be sanitized by sunlight, then I will grudgingly accept it.

According to The Hill,

Ian Prior, the communications director for the well-funded Republican group American Crossroads, said information about the Goldman Sachs speeches could prove cataclysmic for the Democratic Party.

Finding and releasing the transcripts “would be a heck of a way to outflank Hillary on her left [in a general election] and stop Bernie’s supporters from voting for her,” he said.

American Crossroads is one of those Karl Rove-founded Super-Pacs that excels in raising money (hundreds of millions in the 2012 presidential cycle), and in losing big (a success rate in the single digits). But that doesn’t mean that it can’t hire sleuths to investigate real or imagined transgressions by opponents. The truth doesn’t matter; what counts is arriving at a conclusion that could be embarrassing in the cross-hairs. Consider it to be the 2010s version on the 1970s “plumbers” established by Richard Nixon.

What I’d like American Crossroads to find would be the truth; i.e. an actual transcript of what Hillary Clinton said in those speeches. In a sense, it would be a relief to Hillary Clinton; she would no longer have to stonewall this issue. It’s also quite possible that she wisely hedged her bets when she spoke on Wall Street and said very little to the moguls that would inflame Democrats. If she said more, she could explain it to many by saying that she had to throw out some red meat to the crowd because she was being paid $225,000 a pop for these speeches. Americans could understand that as they accept Trump’s fixation with being wealthy.

But perhaps most importantly, Hillary Clinton could do what so many would like her to do … say that that was then and this is now. In the past, she felt that she had to kowtow to Wall Street go gain their good graces and their political donations. If she becomes the Democratic nominee, that will no longer be necessary, she can try to emulate Bernie Sanders’ small donations strategy once she eschews the big bucks coming from a concentrated and very powerful segment of the American population.

It’s not just a question of changing her ways in order to win the election. With Trump as the likely Republican nominee, she will be the odds-on favorite to win the presidency. But governing with questions unanswered that should be answered will plague her throughout her presidency. In a former life, Clinton was on the staff of the Senate Watergate Committee; she needs now to review her notes from that period. It’s been extremely difficult for Barack Obama to govern without a scintilla of a scandal or cover-up. If Clinton wins the presidency, it well may be nothing but trouble if she even has the appearance of withholding what the public deserves to know. That’s why in this one rare case, I’m rooting for American Crossroads to do Hillary a favor and to find the transcripts.

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If you are a reasonably affluent progressive, the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner had to be a real gas. President Obama and comedian Larry Wilmore came out swinging, taking jabs at just about anyone of any political stripe. This was not an event for everyone. You had to be politically knowledgeable, even politically sophisticated. You needed to know how to give and take. You needed to be comfortable mocking the foibles of others while absorbing the punches that knock you off your pedestal. Perhaps most importantly, you had to be able to mock yourself. Obama and Wilmore are very good at that.

However, I could not help thinking about what a closed club this was. The people in the ballroom at the Washington Hilton Hotel were almost without exception dressed in formal wear, and it’s likely that most of them were owners of what they wore rather than renters. An exception was Bernie Sanders who has never worn a tuxedo. Perhaps his unwillingness to become a full-fledged member of the club inside the hall was reason why President Obama directed perhaps his harshest criticism (or jokes) at him. “Bernie, you look like a million bucks.” (Laughter.) “Or to put it in terms you’ll understand, you look like 37,000 donations of 27 dollars each.” (Laughter and applause.) To me, that joke came across as mocking Sanders as a bit of a “low-life” in the room who neither knows how to dress like the elite or raise money in their special and secret hideaways.

Nielson Ratings don’t do this, but I wonder how many television views of the festivities were the angry white blue-collar workers (and non-workers) who have pledged their allegiance to Donald Trump. I doubt that there were many. Why should they? They would not be able to “understand” most of the humor, and that which they could might well come across as directed at them. That’s because it was. The makers and shakers in the room, journalists, politicians, moguls and other celebrities, were very comfortable within their skin within that room. It was a night off for them; they could afford to lavish themselves in their luxury and forget about the working people of America who for all intents and purposes have not had a real wage increase since the early 1970s. But oh, I forgot, most of the people in the room tend to forget about that every day, and that makes the Trump supporters (and others of their demographics) even madder.

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is essentially a liberal event because it involves a lot of irony. That is something that frequently escapes Republicans.  But there are different kinds of liberals from those who were in attendance at the Dinner. It’s hard to tell if their numbers are dwindling or if they will multiply as part of the Bernie bandwagon effect.

Social critic Thomas Frank has written about the schism in the liberal ranks in his new book Listen Liberal. Historian Steve Fraser has also done so in his book, The Limousine Liberal.  You can get a taste of both of them from this review in the New York Times. A key point in both is that there is a wide gulf, or perhaps more accurately described as a disparity, between the liberals in that room that night and the people who once counted on them to champion their causes.

President Obama was funny that night (to me and many others). But like Hillary Clinton, he has become seems more immersed in the gestalt of “being liberal” than really fighting the battles of those in need. If Hillary takes the podium at next year’s WHCD, it will be interesting to see if she is (a) as funny, and (b) any more connected to the masses not in the room.

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Michael Moore’s new film has a coy title, “Where to Invade Next.” And that’s where the trouble begins. Based on the title, you might think that the movie is going to be a wry protest against America’s misguided adventures in the Middle East and elsewhere. But it’s not. It purports to satirize America’s unenlightened policies regarding issues such as healthcare, taxation, prisons, education and work. The premise is that European countries do all of those things better, and that we should “invade” those countries and claim the best of their policies for ourselves.

As always, Moore does it cute—starting with the title, and then using person-on-the-street interviews, archival footage, clips from old movies, ambush interviews of public figures, a heavy-handed musical score, and drippingly sarcastic commentary. But, sorry to say, it just doesn’t work this time. It’s the same technique he used—to much better effect—in his earlier movies. The best of those was “Roger and Me.” That movie worked because Moore seemed to have more passion for the subject—the dire economic state of  his hometown Flint, Michigan. And he told the story in format that was new and refreshing at the time. But with this latest effort, Moore has run out his string with this movie-making style, and it’s just gotten tiresome.

He does, however, make some valid points about the contrast between European nations and the US. Italians have more vacations and days off and better working conditions than most Americans. Finland’s schools don’t have homework or standardized tests, and its educators believe that kids should play more and have time off from school. French people pay less in actual and virtual taxes and get a lot more in social benefits—free healthcare etc. Slovenia provides free higher education. Iceland sent its corrupt bankers to jail, and the one bank that survived was run by women. Tunisia’s women took to the streets and gained equal rights. Prisons in Norway treat prisoners humanely, and there is no death penalty. Germany teaches its students about Nazi atrocities.

I agree with Moore that these differences make America look bad. There’s plenty to be outraged about, and a lot that the US could learn. Unfortunately, Moore makes these points in a very annoying way: He is clownish and boorish. He presents himself as a know-nothing, ugly-American stereotype. His movie-making style is self-indulgent: He just can’t resist being the center of every scene. [I was particularly annoyed when he just had to include his own story of being at the Berlin Wall when it was being demolished. And his interview with a Norwegian man whose son was killed in the infamous 2011 mass murder was absolutely cringe-worthy, as he repeatedly tried to goad the man into saying that he would want the death penalty for the murderer.]

Worst of all, for a movie whose central arguments actually have merit, Moore’s hyperbole, oversimplifications–and repeated, unfunny flag-planting stunt–undermine the seriousness of his intent. Examples:There is a lot more behind Italy’s generous work policies than Moore explains. And I seriously doubt that, as Moore claims, German schools remind students “every day” about what the Nazis did during World War II.

Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy political satire. Making serious points by making people laugh is a very effective strategy. Moore just didn’t get it right, this time.

Better editing and a less middle-school attitude could have made this a much better documentary—one that might even have had the potential to enlighten some of America’s real know-nothings.

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