Saturday, September 30, 2017

Today, Visit The Dark & Bloody Ground Of The US Racial Divide

Professor Steven Hahn offers an insightful review essay of white rage (real and imagined) in a maiden voyage into the murky waters of this blog. Again, there are no simple answers (or solutions) to be found. If this is a fair & balanced) muddle, so be it.

[x The Nation]
The Rage Of White Folk
By Steven Hahn


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Long banished from the political lexicon and long marginalized in analyses of American life (unless modified by the term “middle”), class has been thrust back into the mainstream of public discourse. Although the country’s growing inequalities in wealth are partly responsible for this turn, the apparent attraction of the white working class to an assortment of politicians on the right—Donald Trump chief among them—is clearly a driving force. Which is to say that, for many political observers, “class” seems to be most appealing when it can be attached to what is regarded as bad or irrational behavior or, perhaps, to some notion of “false consciousness.”

The attention isn’t entirely misplaced. As early as the Democratic presidential primaries in 1964, George Wallace showed strength among ethnic working-class voters in Northern states like Wisconsin, and, running as the candidate of the American Independent Party in 1968, he won votes among unionized industrial workers as well as rural and small-town white Southerners. The defection of white working-class ethnics from the Democratic Party was one of the keys to Ronald Reagan’s victories in 1980 and 1984, and many of the defectors—“Reagan Democrats,” as they’ve come to be known—refused to return to the Democratic fold even after Reagan left office.

By the time Donald Trump entered the presidential campaign, the frustrations and hostility of white voters across the Rust Belt and outside major metropolitan areas seemed to be boiling over; many readily embraced Trump’s economic nationalism and aggressive posture toward a range of perceived enemies at home and abroad. It was these white voters, pollsters and political professionals tell us, who enabled Trump to eke out his electoral-vote victories in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and, with them, the presidency.

The apparent political muscle of white working-class voters in the United States has been further validated by the rise of the radical right across Europe, and especially by the surprising victory of the Brexit vote last summer and the formidable run that Marine Le Pen of the National Front made for the French presidency this spring. In both cases, it seemed that older white voters from declining industrial districts, many of whom had once voted for the Labour Party in Britain or the Socialists and Communists in France, moved to the right, venting their discontent at the consequences of globalization and immigration—a so-called populist wave, as many media outlets described it.

Scholars and writers haven’t been slow to sink their teeth, both descriptively and analytically, into this phenomenon. In fact, over the course of Trump’s campaign, a burst of new works of memoir, history, and sociology—-including J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016), Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash (2016), Carol Anderson’s White Rage (2016), and Justin Gest’s The New Minority (2016)—appeared to have anticipated the emergence of the white working class as a significant political actor. Each of these books offers a different vantage point from which to view the discontent of white working-class people; taken together, they provide us with a look into the travails, anxieties, and developing rage of a constituency that is often depicted as helping to fuel this period of political reaction. With the exception of Gest’s book, they illustrate some of the limits that emerge when the phrase “white working class” is invoked and, as a result, remind us of the dangers of homogenizing white workers politically. They also serve as a reminder of just how little we still know about the moment we are in.

None of the books has received more attention or commanded a larger audience than Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir about growing up and finding a way out of the dysfunctional family and community life created by deindustrialization in America. At the ripe age of 31, having just earned a law degree at Yale, Vance decided to write a book to help people understand, in very human terms, what happens when “the industrial economy goes south.”

Vance was born and raised in Middletown, Ohio, a once-thriving steel town on the I-75 corridor between Dayton and Cincinnati, but his family roots are in eastern Jackson, Kentucky, a coal-mining district that his grandparents left in the 1940s. Indeed, as Vance tells it, the cultural arc connecting the two worlds—what he both proudly and disdainfully calls “hillbilly”—was and remains central to his own sense of identity.

Vance recognizes that his family’s history resembles that of thousands of other whites and blacks who left the South during and after the Second World War. But he is mostly interested in relating a morality tale: how proud, hardworking folk can lose their way and descend into a miasma of depression, substance abuse, and hopelessness when the familiar means of earning a living evaporate—and how the loving and resilient among them can come to the rescue.

Hillbilly Elegy has, in fact, the feel of a college or professional-school application essay, one that simultaneously acknowledges the helping hands that Vance was offered and trades in the very caricatures that readers might expect to find. Although Vance contrasts the white working-class world of his grandparents, in which old-fashioned values like hard work, faith, and self-reliance ruled, with that of his mother, in which consumerism, anger, isolation, addiction, and distrust now do, we see very little of the former and plenty of the latter.

Women like Vance’s mother either left home early or failed to go to college because they became pregnant, got married, and quickly divorced; many, also like his mother, went on to revolving-door relationships, antisocial behavior, and perhaps drug dependency. In the case of Vance’s mother, the very turbulent and abusive relationship between her parents contributed significantly to her downward spiral. As for the hillbilly men in Vance’s world, they are a muddle of familiar contradictions: proud, independent, touchy on matters of personal honor, and, of course, prone to violence, sexism, laziness, and ignorance, which Vance is happy to put on full display. Hillbilly Elegy’s popularity may well grow out of the cultural voyeurism (class porn) that it encourages, enabling readers and reviewers to define their own experiences in relation to the mess that seems to envelop the white working class. It also allows Vance to make the most of his own redemption.

Without a doubt, Vance’s was a narrow escape, at least by his own telling. Shuttling between households while growing up, he watched his mother succumb to drug and alcohol addiction, as well as get arrested for domestic violence. His schooling suffered, and he seemed headed down the same bleak hillbilly trail that he depicts in his book when his grandparents, and especially his grandmother, “saved” him: taking him in, imposing rules they expected him to obey, insisting that he get good grades, pushing him to get a job as a grocery cashier, telling him to “get off your ass.” It worked, though a stint in the Marines during which he was deployed to Iraq probably assured his escape. An undergraduate education at Ohio State and then law school at Yale followed.

It’s an impressive story, a testament to commitment and determination of many sorts. But Vance tells it for specific reasons: He wants to reveal why hillbillies are so angry at the political establishment—and, in particular, at Barack Obama—and why hillbilly culture (including a version of living on the dole) convinced him that the policies of the Democratic Party “weren’t all they were cracked up to be.” The anger, in his judgment, isn’t because of race, but because Obama’s elite pedigree, like that of many other Democrats, played to their deepest insecurities and sense of cultural inferiority. For these very reasons, Vance’s grandfather couldn’t bring himself to vote for Walter Mondale in 1984—but his grandfather was also a lifelong Democrat who never again voted Republican after Reagan. As for Vance’s grandmother, she ricocheted between radical conservatism and social democracy. And both claimed roots in the coal districts of eastern Kentucky that now swing Republican, but that also have long histories of labor militancy.

Vance isn’t interested in exploring or confronting the explanatory challenges that his family’s political stories present. Neither is he interested in discussing what the phrase “white working class” means (there’s virtually nothing in the book on the actual work that anyone does, either in Kentucky or Ohio), or in reflecting on the wider implications of his own intellectual development, which says much about the political complexities of Ohio and Kentucky alike. Instead, Vance concludes his book by telling us that he has comfortably embraced “modern conservatism,” which, he believes, allows him to maintain his ties to what he values in hillbilly culture while offering him a perspective from which to criticize it. Undoubtedly, this position has also been fortified by the wealth he began accumulating in Silicon Valley after graduating from Yale. The talk is that Vance may now be headed back home to explore financial prospects there.

Nancy Isenberg is interested in providing the history that Vance overlooks, and although three generations of social and labor historians will be surprised to learn that she is offering the “untold” 400-year history of class in the United States, general readers will find White Trash to be a sobering and unsettling story. Isenberg ambitiously begins in the world of Elizabethan England and ends in the contemporary world of "Duck Dynasty." Along the way, we are introduced to vagrants, indentured servants, poor freemen, squatters, crackers, rednecks, sharecroppers, hillbillies, and moonshiners; they populate chapters that deal with the Americas of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and the recent past. But there are two themes that encapsulate the chronological span and define the self-satisfied ways in which many Americans—especially those who have never had to worry about making ends meet—dismiss the relevance of class. The first is the notion that “the poor are always with us.” The second is the fact that the poor have long been likened to “waste” and “rubbish”—thus the “white trash” we have come to recognize and name.

A work of social and political analysis, this book is not. Readers interested in discovering how many poor white people there were at any point, how poor whites behaved politically, or what it means to be poor and white in America will be disappointed by White Trash. But that’s because Isenberg has set her sights on something else: to offer a cultural history of the representation of poor whites, mostly by their betters, who feared, scorned, or were simply disgusted by them.

Isenberg’s research here is impressive, and she has an engaging writing style. But for all the chronological sweep of White Trash, there is something fundamentally ahistorical about it. The poor have certainly always been with us, and Isenberg demonstrates that the metaphors of waste and rubbish have continually been invoked to describe them. So then what makes the 20th century different from the 16th, or the 19th century different from the 18th? In part, these are questions of social history and political economy, and Isenberg doesn’t really go there. Yet they are central to understanding how and why social groups become impoverished, how poverty is transmitted, and how class and class relations—yes, class is a relationship, not just a state of being or a cultural perception—take shape.

Since White Trash explores the cultural representation of the poor and claims to chronicle the long history of class, it is especially odd that Isenberg never addresses what she thinks class is, or how her perspective on it may be more useful compared with others’. Nowhere does she seem to recognize that the crass epithets of “waste,” “rubbish,” and “trash” reflect perceptions that poor whites have no class position, that they are truly déclassé; and nowhere in the book do the poor white folk get to speak for themselves—they are simply the objects of representation. But can class be created solely by those who seek to describe another group? And can poor white people constitute a class if they don’t see themselves as such and are often regarded as something less by others?

What’s more, although Isenberg focuses on poor whites who are Anglo-American and, for the most part, Southerners, she gives us no sense of how they should be seen in relation to other poor and working-class Americans—those who are black or immigrants from other parts of Europe, Asia, or Latin America, and who have made up the bulk of the working class and déclassé poor for most of our history. Are these different class experiences with different vocabularies of denigration and discrimination? Or are they all versions of the same process?

In truth, White Trash is less a book about class than it is about race. (Not incidentally, it may have been black slaves who were most important in devising and popularizing the term “poor white trash,” as the many volumes of the Works Progress Administration’s slave-narrative collections suggest.) Although Isenberg assumes that the cultural assaults on poor white folk are solely manifestations of class divisions and attitudes, what she really presents is a history of the racialization of certain white people (much as other social groups can be and are racialized)—the construction of categories of inferiority, cultural degradation, genetic deformity, and ignorance that, in turn, place limits on opportunity and social mobility. It is just the sort of thing that Vance shows us about “hillbillies”: their identification and denigration, and how they then use those cultural markers to redefine themselves.

Unlike Vance and Isenberg, Carol Anderson makes it clear in White Rage that she has no doubts about the centrality of race to the political dispositions and class resentments of white Americans. Indeed, she begins her book by describing an epiphany that came as she tracked the media’s obsession with black rage in the protests against the police murders of African Americans: “What was really at work here,” she realized, “was white rage.” It wasn’t so much the white rage manifest in violence, but rather the white rage that “works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies.” And the trigger for this rage, as she sees it, is “black advancement.”

White Rage is a riveting and disturbing history that begins with Reconstruction and lays bare the efforts of whites in the South and North alike to prevent emancipated black people from achieving economic independence, civil and political rights, personal safety, and economic opportunity. Even after the Reconstruction amendments established a foundation for black citizenship and political equality, their effects were steadily hedged in, whittled down, observed in the breach, or barely enforced. Onetime Republican allies soon abandoned African Americans to the mercies of their onetime masters; the Supreme Court narrowed the reach of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments and then validated the Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement that swept the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This meant that vigilantes and lynch mobs got the green light to execute thousands of blacks who dared to challenge the abject submission that whites demanded of them. Indeed, African Americans seemingly had no white allies they could count on for protection or support.

Little changed as African Americans migrated north during the 20th century. The combination of government policy, real-estate covenants, and white hostility left them in growing ghettos that offered dreadful housing, substandard education, and few prospects for escape. The civil-rights movement, Anderson argues, provoked massive resistance in the South and relatively slow responses in the North. And the many impressive gains that the movement made in the face of formidable social and political obstacles were soon rolled back by policy-makers—from both parties—-who worried about black militancy, court-ordered desegregation, and what they saw as a rising tide of drug-related crime. Obama’s election in 2008, while appearing to signal a new orientation and ease about race, quickly catalyzed a level of rage not seen for decades, together with concerted attacks on minority voting rights.

Anderson doesn’t blame racist rage on any particular group of white people; whites of all backgrounds are effectively homogenized as a social and political force. But however unsatisfying and misleading this might be, Anderson does make a deeper point that we must confront about white rage against black Americans and racialized others: It is by no means a new phenomenon. Instead, this rage has a history as long as the country’s, and although it presents itself in myriad ways (in what some distinguish as “soft,” “hard,” and lethal forms), it has always been close to the surface, ready to be summoned in times of crisis and distress, however much the forms of expression may have changed. And, as Anderson suggests, it’s the potential power and authority of African Americans and other racialized minorities that strike terror in the hearts of many whites.

Of all the books under review, only Justin Gest’s The New Minority has failed to win much popular notice: It didn’t make the best-seller lists, nor was it reviewed in mainstream publications. This is unfortunate, because The New Minority has a depth and range missing in the other books. Gest is a professor of public policy at George Mason University and the author of a previous book (2010) about Muslim communities in Western democracies. The New Minority blends historical, sociological, and ethnographic analysis into a comparative study of working-class politics in two declining industrial towns: East London, England, and Youngstown, Ohio.

The comparative nature of his study enables Gest to depict a transatlantic working—class political culture with similar dynamics despite the regional differences. For Youngstown and the American side, The New Minority adds ballast to the picture of the social and cultural consequences of deindustrialization. Youngstown was once a booming steel town—Republic Steel, US Steel, and Youngstown Sheet & Tube were all there—with a multiethnic working class that achieved a high level of home ownership and economic stability. But while census officials would define the population as somewhere between 70 and 80 percent white in Youngstown’s heyday, “white” was a broad rubric that included many immigrant groups from Europe and the Middle East and that therefore elided a great deal of cultural and ethnic differentiation.

The bottom fell out of the Youngstown steel industry in the late 1970s. Within six years, 50,000 steel-related jobs were lost (worth $1.3 billion in wages), and the population began a steady decline, with white residents more likely to leave and black ones more likely to stay. These days, Youngstown has about one-third the population of its midcentury peak, and it is strewn with empty lots and abandoned houses that are often taken over by drug or prostitution rings. Corruption seems to have infected most corners of political life: In the past three decades, the city has seen a sheriff, judge, prosecutor, and US congressman (James Traficant) indicted, and a prosecutor nearly assassinated by the mob. Like any number of Rust Belt cities—Toledo, Erie, Gary, Michigan City, Flint—Gest calls Youngstown’s condition “post-traumatic.”

Gest’s study thereby reveals a narrative that resonates with Vance’s and others like his. The collapse of the steel industry left those working-class whites who stayed in Youngstown in precarious circumstances: few jobs with decent pay and benefits, limited horizons for themselves and their children, low expectations for what government could do, and high levels of isolation and impoverishment. (Of course, African Americans presumably faced similar challenges.) Gest uses the concept of “deprivation”—of political power, economic well-being, and social stability—to account for what he calls a sense of “minoritization” among Youngstown’s white residents. By this, he means a perception of decline in their numbers, a dramatic loss in their status, and a feeling that other ethnic and racial groups are gaining social advantages at their expense. And those who experience “deprivation” most profoundly are also most likely to veer toward the radical right, which offers them a heritage-based identity and an antiestablishment alternative.

Readers may call some of Gest’s correlations into question (though he presents impressive statistical evidence), but there are several things about The New Minority that are especially helpful in explaining the current moment. One is that Gest refuses to put all working-class whites into the same political box, recognizing that they evince a range of responses to the traumas of recent decades. After all, Youngstown’s Mahoning County voted for Hillary Clinton rather than Trump, unlike its county neighbors.

Gest also shows how important the political context of Youngstown (and, by extension, similar towns) is to working-class political culture, especially the power of a triumvirate of unions, steel companies, and organized crime that either bypassed or compromised the official political structure. Finally, he implicitly draws into question the social and political usefulness of the very notion of a “white working class.” The New Minority demonstrates that class formation in Youngstown was a lengthy and complex process that involved both collective struggles and significant ethnic and racial divisions.

Since so many liberal pundits and political observers were quick to blame Trump’s election on white working-class rage, all of these books are helpful in raising some questions and doubts. They suggest that what has been assumed about American class politics may not really capture the dynamics at play—or even provide a meaningful description of who was angry and for what reasons.

It will be some time before the results of the 2016 election are fully analyzed, but it already seems plain that the base of Trump’s support defies early assumptions. Both in the primaries and in the general election, the majority of Trump’s supporters were not white working-class swing voters, but, rather, hailed from the ardently Republican middle and upper classes (especially small-business owners and their commercial allies). Trump also bested previous Republican presidential candidates among evangelical voters, and he outpolled the party’s 2012 candidate, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, in suburban areas. In fact, only about a third of Trump’s voters might be regarded as working class (as is the case in the US population as a whole), whether by income (households below the national median of $50,000), occupation, or education (no more than a high-school degree, a dubious marker in any event).

To be sure, a number of Rust Belt counties that had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 shifted to Trump in 2016, helping him to break what was thought to be a “blue wall” in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Yet the enthusiasm for Trump in these places may have been limited, and some of their swing to Republican candidates related to recent plant closings or the inordinate casualties they’d suffered in recent wars, which they blamed on Democrats. Then, too, recent election cycles in both the United States and Europe suggest not so much a right-wing populist “wave” as an extreme volatility among voters discontented with the establishment parties and deeply distressed by the growing inequalities in wealth, and who therefore seek candidates from outside the political mainstream, whether on the left or right. Bernie Sanders startled the Democratic Party with his remarkable run as an avowed socialist; the far right in France and the Netherlands faltered in recent elections; and Jeremy Corbyn-—running on an explicitly socialist platform—stunned the overconfident Conservatives this summer in Britain, nearly driving them from power.

What we must recognize is that, in many ways, the configuration of the white working class, like that of the populism often associated with it, is very much the product of a particular political moment, one made possible by the transformation of the global economy over the past half- century. Declining industrial employment, stagnating wages, the dramatic weakening of large private-sector unions—all results of new economic forces and a relentless offensive on the part of manufacturers and financiers—ended the historic compromise that industrial workers struck after World War II. At the same time, the Democratic Party, like its Labour counterpart in Britain, moved to the center and also helped to undermine the material conditions and political leverage these workers had achieved. The “white working class” and contemporary “populism,” then, are expressions less of an emerging social and political landscape than of the contempt with which leaders in both center-right and center-left parties regard those who have lost ground in the last several decades and are now seeking outlets for their anger. (This is where Isenberg’s book has much to teach us.)

Angry whites have certainly earned some of that contempt. The far right has played to their fantasies of a world restored and to their fears of those who could be blamed for destroying it, and many white Americans have bought into this explanation, sometimes becoming shock troops of reaction, particularly when alternative options have been marginalized. But as was true with Vance’s grandmother, the political dispositions of those who have taken it on the chin in the new global economy are by no means set or easily shoehorned into the category of right-wing or left-wing populism. They can, as Gest shows, make any one of several political moves: They can take their fight into the established parties; they can withdraw from active participation in politics; or they can veer to the right, aiming to disrupt the political system they believe has failed them. “Populism” is meant to stand in for the last of these choices, when anger among the humbled and poorly educated threatens to rupture the political sphere. This populism has no program—indeed, it rarely even calls itself “populist”—but is instead the embodied rage, often awash in conspiracy theories, of those who detest the establishment and their clients and who imagine they can retrieve a world they have already lost.

Yet it is worth recalling that in the late 19th century, amid the extravagances of the Gilded Age, there was a different sort of populism that emerged: a Populist movement and party that challenged the rule of those they called “robber barons” in order to readjust the balance of economic and political power to the benefit of “producers”—workers and small farmers. The Populists of this era—and they were willing to call themselves “populists”—had their share of warts; some traded in racism and xenophobia. But they had an analysis of how political power and the distribution of wealth reinforced each other, and they developed a program—based on public control of the money supply, the nationalization of the means of transportation and communication, and cooperative exchanges—that aimed to rein in competition, exploitation, and corruption, and to make the industrial transformation of American society more democratic. Some also sought to extend their hands to potential allies across the lines of race, ethnicity, and region—at times with impressive results.

In the embers of their defeat, these Populists left a legacy of social-democratic thinking and activity that would influence the left wing of American progressivism, early 20th-century socialism (which was particularly robust in many Populist hotbeds like Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas), and the New Deal era of the 1930s. How we got from there to the populism of today, and from the producers of the Gilded Age to the white working class of the moment, holds the key to understanding our current dilemma. It might also allow us to better navigate our future and devise the social policies that can energize a new popular movement. # # #

[Steven Hahn is a professor of history at New York University and the author, most recently, of A Nation Without Borders (2016). See other books by Steven Hahn here. His honors include: Pulitzer Prize in History (2004), Bancroft Prize in American History (2004), Frederick Jackson Turner Prize in History (1984), Allan Nevins Prize (1980), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1990), Fellow at Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford CA (1994-95), Rogers Distinguished Fellow in the Nineteenth Century, Huntington Library, Pasadena CA (2016-17); NEH Research Fellowship (2012); American Council of Learned Society Fellowships (1981,1987). Hahn received a BA (history) from the University of Rochester (NY) as well as an MA, MPhil, and PhD (all history) from Yale Unversity (CT).]

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Friday, September 29, 2017

Today, Eags (Timothy Egan) Offers A Lesson In AssHattery 101

Eags speaks truth to idiocy, incompetence, and pathetic behavior — not power — because the AssHat-in-Chief has only his Twitter fingers and Executive Order signing pens. His vacuous regime is upheld by his "base" — millions of people in this country who have administered the equivalent of a prefrontal lobotomy on themselves on November 8, 2016 and thereafter. The Asshat's "base" is a real-life equivalent of the living dead. If this is (fair & balanced) George Romero nightmare, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Trump Fog Machine
By Eags (Timothy Egan)


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Do you remember what monstrous, contemptible or demonstrably false thing Donald Trump said one year ago? Six months ago? OK, last week? Probably not. The effect of this presidency-by-horrors is to induce amnesia in the public, as if we’d all been given a memory-loss drug.

To recap: A year ago, Trump lied repeatedly in his first debate with Hillary Clinton, and was reminded that he had called women pigs, slobs and dogs. Six months ago, he settled for $25 million two lawsuits and a fraud case regarding his phony university, a huckster scheme that duped people out of their personal savings. And last week, he unleashed an attack on the free-speech rights of athletes, using a profanity that could not be repeated on the news without a warning to children.

It’s. All. Going. According. To. Plan. The Trump presidency is a monumental failure on multiple levels. None of what he has promised — the wall, paid for by Mexico, repealing Obamacare, “so much winning” — has been achieved. He’s made much of the world hate us, and a majority of his fellow citizens believe that he is unfit for office.

But while his legislative agenda is in tatters, his master strategy — throwing out distraction bombs on a regular basis, while turning the screws of power toward a backward era — is working. In just the last two weeks, he has allowed a humanitarian crisis affecting more than three million American citizens to fester, reportedly mocked a dying senator, and threatened to annihilate a nation of 25 million people.

But what are we talking about? Football. And whether the people who play the sport have the same right as every other American to express themselves — which, legally, is not even a question. In Trump’s view, athletes should just shut up and take their brain damage. While Americans in Puerto Rico clung to life on an island without power or adequate water and food, Trump tweeted 24 times about football.

What’s been forgotten at times in the blur of bloviation is astonishing. Possibly colluding with Russia to hijack an American election. Firing the FBI director who was looking into that maze of questions. Pulling out of the Paris climate accord. Rolling back protections for clean air, water and workplace safety. Losing half his staff to scandal, deceit or overt idiocy.

He has made a joke of civility, promoted bullying and sexual assault by his words. He pardons one criminal, a racist sheriff found guilty of contempt of court, and implies that he would do the same thing for the people around him who may have sold their country out to Russia.

This week, we learned his White House is full of high-ranking staffers doing the very thing for which he said Hillary Clinton should be locked up — mixing private emails with government business. He failed, again, with something he promised would happen on Day 1 — repealing Obamacare. He also lost a Senate race in which he had a personal stake; he now backs a lawbreaking bigot, the former judge Roy Moore, to fill that seat in Alabama.

If a Muslim said the things that Roy Moore has said — calling homosexuality a “crime against nature,” advocating government by theocracy — Trump supporters would be crying Shariah law. But Moore gets a pass, “a great guy,” the president called this deranged man.

The Trump Fog Machine erased all his Tweets supporting the other guy in Alabama. No need for that. We do it for him, by following the fresh distractions. Trump is not Teflon. Things do stick to him. But he survives by saying or doing something so outrageous, so regularly, that we forget the last atrocity, and turn on one another.

So, this week his cabinet official charged with taking away health care from the poor and cutting the budget for cancer research is using our money to fly private planes at his pleasure. The multimillionaire treasury secretary wanted the same perk for his honeymoon. And the EPA director is spending a small taxpayer fortune to cocoon himself inside a high-security bubble — all the more to keep inconvenient scientific facts from getting to him.

Trump will make us forget these government grifters with some fresh tweet. He’s already tweeted the word “loser” 234 times, “incompetent” 92 times and “pathetic” 72 times. Call them projection tweets, showing the man for what he truly is. But they take us away from the serious damage he is doing to the country. He does the same thing at his hate-filled rallies.

Now it’s taxes. He’s already lied about whether his tax plan will benefit the rich and his own family. It will, by eliminating the estate tax, and ensuring that the top 1 percent will get nearly 50 percent of the windfall.

Those details will soon be lost in the Trump Fog Machine. He will say something awful, do something horrible, insult some vulnerable person. We will be shocked just long enough to forget what happened yesterday. # # #

[Timothy Egan writes "Outposts," a column at the NY Fishwrap online. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan's most recent book is The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero (2016). See all other books by Eags here.]

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Thursday, September 28, 2017

Roll Over, Ross Perot — The Next Giant Sucking Sound Will Leak Out Of The Kremlin When Our AssHat POTUS Visits His Russian Friend

The AssHat-in-Chief engages in misdirection (unpatriotic NFL) as the footsteps of Special Counsel Robert Mueller grow louder and nearer to the White House. In another attempt at misdirection, the AssHat scoffs at the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election as "a hoax" or "a witch-hunt." Liars of a feather flock together: AssHat and Vlad. If this is a (fair & balanced) wish that FBI agents will kick in the door of the presidential bedroom in the White House, à la Paul Manafort, so be it.

[x MoJo]
Putin’s Pro-Trump Operation May Have Been Far Bigger Than We Yet Know
By Bill Buzenberg


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It’s been nearly a year since the US intelligence community publicly announced its determination that the Russian government took covert actions to sway the 2016 US election. We now know that Russia did so in part by buying Facebook ads and weaponizing bots, trolls, and other social media tools created by US tech giants. But there is still much that eludes the public about these attacks, as New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg pointed out on Monday: We don’t know what these Facebook ads looked like, we don’t know who they were targeting, and we don’t know how many millions of Americans may have been exposed to them. As the Washington Post reported, congressional investigators “have grown increasingly concerned that Facebook is withholding key information that could illuminate the shape and extent of a Russian propaganda campaign.”

We do know an elaborate plan for influencing the election reportedly was drawn up in 2016 by the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank controlled by the Kremlin, according to reporting by Reuters. One document “recommended the Kremlin launch a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets to encourage U.S. voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia than the administration of then-President Barack Obama,” according to seven US officials cited.

Another document that came from that Russian think tank last October, according to Reuters, “warned that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was likely to win the election. For that reason, it argued, it was better for Russia to end its pro-Trump propaganda and instead intensify its messaging about voter fraud to undermine the U.S. electoral system’s legitimacy and damage Clinton’s reputation in an effort to undermine her presidency.”

There are at least four ways the Russians followed that blueprint for a broad attack that only now is beginning to come into greater focus for the American public.

Facebook Ads

As reported earlier this month in the New York Times, Facebook has disclosed that “a shadowy Russian company linked to the Kremlin” bought some 3,000 ads, using 470 fake accounts, at a cost of more than $100,000. Facebook said it has shut down the fake accounts and acknowledged that these were “divisive ads on hot-button [social] issues” such as race, gay rights, gun control, and immigration, according to a post on Facebook by Alex Stamos, the company’s chief security officer. The ads ran from June 2015 until May 2017 and echoed themes favorable to presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Fake News

Throughout the election season, false and misleading articles were posted on Russian media sites and amplified through social media in an effort that former FBI agent Clint Watts has described as an updated form of the classic Soviet “active measures” technique to plant false information and undermine democracy. As Mother Jones has previously reported, Trump and his associates at times during the campaign picked up these false news stories and quoted them.

Trolls and Bots

As Watts described to congressional investigators, the Kremlin used armies of Twitter bots to spread fake news using sock-puppet accounts that appeared to be individuals such as swing-voter Republicans in the heartland. The idea, Watts said, was for Americans to “see somebody and they look exactly like you, even down to the pictures.”

“Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery,” the Washington Post reported, “including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human ‘trolls,’ and networks of websites and social-media accounts—echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.”

Senate intelligence committee leaders have received reports, according to the Huffington Post, that Russia hired at least 1,000 trolls to spread fake news stories to hurt Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton during the presidential election. According to Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), these efforts apparently focused on “swing states in an attempt to influence votes there—Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania—where people were reading during the waning days of the election that ‘Clinton is sick,’ or ‘Clinton is taking money from whoever for some source’…fake news.'”

The margin of victory for Trump in all three states combined was fewer than 80,000 votes.

Watts and other national security experts created the Hamilton 68 dashboard this summer to track Russia-linked influence networks that continue to operate on Twitter.

Fabricated Events

The Daily Beast has reported “that Russian operatives hiding behind false identities used Facebook’s event-management tool to remotely organize and promote political protests in the U.S., including an August 2016 anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rally in Idaho.” A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to the Daily Beast recently that several events were shut down and had been promoted with paid ads.

The Daily Beast added that these “Facebook events—one of which echoed Islamophobic conspiracy theories pushed by pro-Trump media outlets—are the first indication that the Kremlin’s attempts to shape America’s political discourse moved beyond fake news and led unwitting Americans into specific real-life action.”

While Facebook hasn’t publicized many specifics about the Russian political ad efforts, the Wall Street Journal reports that special counsel Robert Mueller has copies of the ads and information about the accounts that purchased them, as well as about the targeting criteria they used.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign was known for its extensive use of Facebook in 2016—both for its use of the social network’s marketing tools and for its partnership with Cambridge Analytica, a firm controlled by major Trump donor Robert Mercer that specializes in “psychological” data mining from Facebook.

It remains unclear whether the Trump campaign efforts had any connection with the Russian efforts. But in reviewing how social media figured into the 2016 campaign in general, a recent piece in the New York Review of Books argued persuasively that, “Donald Trump is our first Facebook president.” # # #

[Bill Buzenberg is the former Executive Director of the Center for Public Integrity, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative news organization in Washington, DC. He was previously vice president of news for both National Public Radio and Minnesota Public Radio / American Public Media. He received a BA (journalism) from Kansas State University.]

Copyright © 2017 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress



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Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Sorry, Joanie-No-Baloney (And King James) — The AssHat-In-Chief Is Lower Than A Bum (Choose A Rhyming Word That Begins With "Sc")

The AssHat-in-Chief must have been born with his foot in his mouth. The past several days marked the nadir of the presidency. The AssHat is the W-O-R-S-T occupant ever to sit in the Oval Office. The AssHat likes to use the SOB epithet, but if there is Son-of-the Beach it is the scum of the earth who defiles the presidency with every breath. This blogger has never seen the like and longs for the end to the ordeal. If this is (fair & balanced) proof that Dr. Samuel Johnson was right in asserting that "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," so be it.

[x The Nation]
LeBron James Is Right: Donald Trump Is a Bum
By Joan (Joanie-No-Baloney) Walsh


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U bum. Cleveland Cavaliers star LeBron James spoke for a grateful nation Saturday morning, when he slapped down President Donald Trump on Twitter for essentially trying to start a race war with the country’s black athletes. James might have said the same thing Monday night, after the president took to Twitter and blamed the devastated territory of Puerto Rico for its tremendous suffering in the wake of Hurricane Maria.

Here’s how it went down, courtesy of the Politico Playbook:

@realDonaldTrump at 8:45 pm: “Texas & Florida are doing great but Puerto Rico, which was already suffering from broken infrastructure & massive debt, is in deep trouble..” … at 8:50 pm: .”..It’s [sic] old electrical grid, which was in terrible shape, was devastated. Much of the Island was destroyed, with billions of dollars….” … at 8:58 pm: .”..owed to Wall Street and the banks which, sadly, must be dealt with. Food, water and medical are top priorities—and doing well. #FEMA.”

With billions of dollars owed to Wall Street and the banks, which, sadly, must be dealt with.” The poster boy of profligacy, the man of six corporate bankruptcies—even a golf course he mismanaged in Puerto Rico wound up being forced into bankruptcy—the boy whose father made him, to begin with, and then secretly made him whole, funneling him money by purchasing $3.5 million in casino chips from one of his schlocky, mismanaged Atlantic City gambling resorts; this grifter is lecturing Puerto Rico about its troubles and insisting its debts “must be dealt with.” U bum.

Let’s review: One minute Trump is railing against the threat of black football players’ taking a knee during the national anthem to protest police violence, and the scourge of uppity black basketball players (in this case, the Golden State Warriors’ Stephen Curry) who refused a customary visit to the White House as long as Trump’s in it. The next, he’s lecturing an island of brown people about their insufficient readiness for disaster, and their underwhelming claim on the resources of the United States—even though they are citizens. It’s just like Steph Curry said, discussing the fact that the players Trump has attacked all happen to be African American. “I don’t know why he feels the need to target certain individuals rather than others,” Curry told reporters on Saturday. “I have an idea of why.” Me too, Steph. Same with Puerto Rico.

Now Trump has turned his attention from black Americans to brown ones, trapped on an island devastated by centuries of colonization and exploitation. Puerto Rico’s 3.5 million residents may be without power for as long as six months. They lack adequate drinking water. The island’s farmland is devastated; green fields have turned a sickly brown. It’s true: The debt to Wall Street has made the commonwealth poorer, as did an agreement reached last year that cut public workers’ pay and hours, and precluded investment in the indeed decrepit infrastructure.

I wondered if Trump’s Puerto Rico rant had been inspired by another slight he suffered Monday night: The entire Dallas Cowboys team and staff, including owner and GOP donor Jerry Jones, took a knee before the national anthem during the "Monday Night Football" game against the Arizona Cardinals. Yes, that Jerry Jones, the iconic old-school owner of America’s Team! Sure, Jones was driven by his wallet—he can’t afford to be on a different team, so to speak, from his overwhelmingly African-American players. But Jones had to be the very picture of the man Trump had in mind Friday night as he urged NFL owners, “when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!’” Trump went on to muse: “You know, some owner is going to do that. He’s going to say, ‘That guy that disrespects our flag, he’s fired.’ And that owner, they don’t know it [but] they’ll be the most popular person in this country.” If he thought that owner might be Jerry Jones, who in the past criticized the anthem protests, he was very disappointed Monday night.

“It was real easy for everybody in our organization to see that the message of unity, the message of equality was getting, if you will, pushed aside or diminished by the controversy,” Jones said at a post-game news conference. It’s true the cagey owner managed to stage the show of unity before the anthem, so that his players were standing, not kneeling, while it was played. But the insult wasn’t lost on Trump, who tweeted Tuesday morning: “The booing at the NFL football game last night, when the entire Dallas team dropped to its knees, was the loudest I have ever heard. Great anger.”

So he’s back to bashing black football players—and now, the white team owners too—and taking a break from debt-shaming the unlucky citizens of Puerto Rico. On MSNBC Tuesday morning, FEMA director Brock Long brushed aside questions about Trump’s callous tweets to say the president had approved “100 percent” of his requests for aid to this forlorn American territory.

But even if Trump has belatedly authorized aid, the lack of care and attention, and the nasty tweets, reveal his entitled corporate worldview. Even though as a developer he’s been a grifter, pulling in government favors, stiffing small contractors, and ultimately stiffing large banks if he needed to, as a president he is first and foremost the president of American capitalism, and debts must be paid. That same mindset—rules apply to other people, not to us—can be seen in the news that at least six high-ranking members of the Trump administration, including daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, used private e-mail to do government business, after being part of a campaign that promised to imprison Hillary Clinton for the non-crime of doing the same. Rules apply to other people, not to us.

Thus the rule that debts “must be dealt with” applies to Puerto Rico, and not to Trump. It’s not irrelevant that the island’s residents are mostly citizens of color: In the New York of Trump’s formative years, the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, a Puerto Rican immigration surge made them a scapegoat to the white ethnics in places like Trump’s hometown of Queens. Disrespecting Puerto Ricans, along with black athletes, is just Trump revving up white grievance politics again, which is especially essential as his legislative agenda circles the drain.

There has been speculation on cable news and social media that Trump’s inattention to the suffering in Puerto Rico stemmed from his ignorance that the island’s residents are in fact citizens, that he is their president too (even though they didn’t get a vote). It’s the modern Republican paradox: Are they ignorant, or are they lying? Ignorant, or just evil? As readers answered resoundingly when I asked that question about the GOP’s many, many lies about the Graham-Cassidy Obamacare repeal, the answer is often both. In this case, Trump has advisers who can, presumably, remind him that Puerto Rico is part of the United States, and he is the territory’s president. And yet he sent those three cruel tweets anyway, because he is a bum. # # #

[Joan Walsh is The Nation’s National Affairs Correspondent and an MSNBC political analyst. Prior to joining The Nation in 2015, Walsh was the editor-in-chief at Salon. She is the author of What’s the Matter With White People: Finding Our Way in the Next America (2012). See her other book here. Walsh received a BA (history) from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.]

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Tuesday, September 26, 2017

The Burning Question O'The Day: Who's Painted Hisself Into A Corner?

The world is going to the hot place (imaginary or not) in a handbasket: North Korea, Iran, Europe yada, yada, yada and the AssHat-in-Chief wants to talk/tweet about his patriotic fantasies that would have all of his white knuckledraggers raising their right arms and chanting "Heil, Trump!" Well, the man who has painted himself into the corner of white supremacy was given a ringing reply on every NFL game on Sunday afternoon/evening and concluded with a final ringing reply on "Monday Night Football" in prime time. Early this AM, the AssHat was still virtually babbling on Twitter about his "victory" over the NFL. If this is a (fair & balanced) depiction of public lunacy, so be it.

[x The Nation]
For The NFL, It Was "Choose-Your-Side Sunday"
By Dave Zirin


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The 1960s and ’70s saw a hurricane of political athletes: legends like Muhammad Ali, John Carlos, Tommie Smith, Curt Flood, and Billie Jean King. But nothing, literally nothing, in the history of sports and politics can compare to what happened on Sunday.

Expressions of dissent broke out in every single NFL game during the playing of the national anthem. Some players kneeled (sic, knelt), some sat, some raised fists, and some linked arms. But all of them were standing in opposition to Donald Trump. Announcers and commentators discussed their actions sympathetically. The booing one might expect from fans was sparse. Two anthem singers—a black man in Detroit and a white woman in Tennessee—took a knee during the last note of the song. How did this happen? How did the sport that—from ownership down—has historically been associated with the most conservative politics see this maelstrom of united discontent?

It starts with Colin Kaepernick, and it ends with understanding the “brotherhood” that exists in NFL locker rooms. Kaepernick, of course, is the blackballed (or whiteballed) free-agent NFL quarterback who took a knee and protested during the anthem last season to highlight the issue of police violence. I can say unequivocally from my reporting that, while only a small group of NFL players joined Kaepernick in this protest last season, the respect he garnered throughout the community of players for doing it week after week for four straight months, weathering all kinds of brutal criticism, was deep. Kaepernick lit the match. It was kept alight earlier this season by players like Seattle Seahawk Michael Bennett, Philadelphia Eagle Malcolm Jenkins, Oakland Raider Marshawn Lynch, and a dozen members of the Cleveland Browns and others, but the gasoline was poured upon this flame by Donald Trump on Friday. People no doubt are aware of what should be known as “the Alabama speech,” in which he called for protesting NFL players to be fired and referred to anyone who protested as a “son of a bitch.”

This is where we get to the question of solidarity. Donald Trump never played football, and therefore does not understand what Bennett calls “the brotherhood.” Football players are very tight-knit as a community. It’s certainly not always a positive solidarity, most pointedly seen in the reticence of players to speak out when a teammate commits an act of violence against women, as well as in the pressure to play when hurt, which often comes from your “brothers,” not coaches. But this “brotherhood” also means that when someone threaten the livelihoods of the players and disrespect their families, they will stand as one.

From Trump’s perspective—leader of, as former NFL player Adalius Thomas called it in a scathing critique of Trump on MSNBC, “The Divided States of America”—these players probably seemed like a smart target. Trump reserves his greatest venom for black people and women—as we have seen time and again—and certainly thought that going after wealthy black athletic dissenters was a clever move. But it didn’t line up as he had hoped. First the union came out strongly in defense of players and challenged management to do the same. Then team owners and Roger Goodell came out—far less strongly, but still making it perfectly clear what side they were on. Even though their comments were not exactly fiery, they stood with the dissenting players. This matters, when we consider just how many of these owners supported Trump in the campaign. (If they were truly on the side of angels, not to mention meritocracy, they wouldn’t just talk the talk, but they’d sign Colin Kaepernick.)

Then this tumult spilled over into the Sunday morning shows. People like former NFL player Anquan Boldin had a platform on ABC News to say, “I don’t like the hate speech that is coming out of [Trump’s] mouth. Neither do the players in the locker room.”

Seahawk wide receiver Doug Baldwin shamed Trump with a statement so eloquent one wondered why he couldn’t be president.

Then there was the declaration of the entire Seahawks organization, on team letterhead, which read, “As a team we have decided we will not participate in the national anthem. We will not stand for the injustice that has plagued people of color in this country. Out of love for our country and in honor of the sacrifices made on our behalf, we unite to oppose those that would deny our most basic freedoms. We remain committed in continuing to work towards freedom and equality for all.”

But even beyond these voices, there was also Fox announcer—and Southern NFL icon—Terry Bradshaw, who said, “Not sure if our president understands those rights, that every American has the right to speak out and also to protest.”

Then there was former NFL coach Rex Ryan, a vocal Trump supporter who campaigned for the man. He said, “I’m pissed off I’ll be honest. I supported Trump, and I’m appalled at these comments. SOBs? Not the men that I know.”

One could certainly be forgiven for wondering what Trump he was watching during the campaign. But all of it speaks to the very intense, if at times deeply distorted, sense of solidarity that exists throughout the league at every level.

This is what Trump lacked the capacity to understand—and the divider in chief painted himself into a corner [emphasis supplied]. For one day [and a following evening], the NFL was united.

The line of the day that explained it all was said by ESPN NFL commentator and future Hall of Famer Charles Woodson. He said, “This is choose-your-side Sunday. It really is. And what side are you on?”

When it comes to the NFL, that “side” does not involve standing with Donald Trump. In the 1960s, athletes made history. On Sunday, a new link was forged. # # #

[Dave Zirin is The Nation's sports editor. He is the author of Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports (2007), A People's History of Sports in the United States (2009), The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World (2011), and Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down (2013). Most recently, he has written Brazil's Dance with the Devil: The World Cup, the Olympics, and the Fight for Democracy (Updated Olympics Edition, 2016). His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Sports Illustrated (online) and The Progressive. He also was named one of the "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Our World" by the Utne Reader. Zirin received a BA (media and cultural studies) from Macalester College (MN).]

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