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The Same Old Scare Tactic about Socialism

I keep hearing a lot about “socialism” these days, mainly from Donald Trump and Fox News, trying to scare Americans about initiatives like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, universal child care, free public higher education, and higher taxes on the super-wealthy to pay for these. 

Well, I’m here to ask you to ignore the scaremongering.

First, these initiatives are overwhelmingly supported by most Americans.

Second, for the last 85 years, conservative Republicans have been yelling “socialism” at every initiative designed to help most Americans. 

It was the scare word used by the Liberty League, in 1935when President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed Social Security.

In 1952, President Harry Truman noted that “Socialism is the epithetthey have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years….” 

Truman went on to say,“Socialism is what they called public power…social security… bank deposit insurance. ..free and independent labor organizations.,, anything that helps all the people. Truman concluded by noting “When the Republican candidate inscribes the slogan ‘Down With Socialism’ … what he really means is, ‘Down with Progress.’”

Third, if we don’t want to live in a survival-of-the-fittest society in which only the richest and most powerful can endure, government has to do three basic things: regulate corporations, provide social insurance against unforeseen hardships, and support public investments such as schools and public transportation.

All of these require that we pool our resources for the common good.

Regardless of whether this is called democratic socialism or enlightened capitalism, all are necessary for a decent society.

Fourth and finally, America spends very little on social programs compared to other industrialized nations. As a result, almost 30 million Americans still lack health insurance,nearly 51 million households can’t afford basic monthly expenses including housing, food, child care, and transportation. And we’re the only industrialized nation without paid family leave. 

Our infrastructure is literally crumbling, our classrooms are overcrowded and our teachers are paid far less than workers in the private sector with comparable education.

We can and must do more. 

So don’t let them scare you with words like “socialism.” These policies are just common sense.

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So delighted to announce Let’s Eat Grandma as tour support for these dates in November. Tickets on sale at - https://chvrch.es/#shows

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Trump’s family separation policy has created trauma that could last for a lifetime in thousands of children. But the children being detained with their families are also at risk. Here’s me, on what “toxic stress” does to children’s bodies and minds, and why only genuine safety and freedom can help these kids. 

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The Constitutional Crisis is Now

I keep hearing that if Trump fires Mueller we’ll face a constitutional crisis.

Or if Mueller subpoenas Trump to testify and Trump defies the subpoena, it’s a constitutional crisis.

Or if Mueller comes up with substantial evidence that Trump is guilty of colluding with Russia or of obstructing justice but the House doesn’t move to impeach him, we’ll have a constitutional crisis.

I have news for you. We’re already in a constitutional crisis. For a year and a half the president of the United States has been carrying out a systemic attack on the institutions of our democracy.

A constitutional crisis does not occur suddenly like a coup that causes a government to collapse. It occurs gradually, as a system of government is slowly weakened.

The current crisis has been unfolding since the waning days of the 2016 campaign when Trump refused to say whether he’d be bound by the election results if Hillary won.

It continued through March 4, 2017 when Trump claimed, without evidence, that Obama had wiretapped his phones in the Trump Tower during the campaign.

It deepened in May 2017 when, by his own admission, Trump was thinking of “this Russia thing” when he decided to fire FBI Director James Comey, who had been leading the bureau’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, andthen admitted to Russian officials that firing Comey had relieved “great pressure” on him “because of Russia,” according to a document summarizing the meeting. 

A constitutional crisis becomes especially dangerous when a president of the United States tells the public it cannot trust the government of the United States.  

Over the last few weeks, Trump has done just this.

First he accused the FBI of sending a spy to secretly infiltrate his 2016 campaign “for political purposes.” Then he issued a “demand” that the FBI investigate the spying – resulting in the Justice Department sharing portions of the FBI investigation with Trump’s allies in Congress.

Trump blamed the entire Mueller investigation on a conspiratorial “deep state” intent on removing him from office. He used pardons to demonstrate to those already being investigated that they shouldn’t cooperate because he can pardon them, too, and then bragged to reporters that he is considering 3,000 more pardons —thereby anointing himself the judge of what is fair, rather than the judicial branch.

He claimed he has the absolute right to pardon himself and can thereby immunize himself from any outcome; and asserted he has the power under the Constitution to end the investigation whenever he wants.

The constitutional crisis worsens every time Trump berates judges who disagree with him, attacks intelligence agencies that won’t do his bidding, and calls journalists and news organizations that criticize him “enemies of the people,” and their reporting, “fake news.”

It deepens when he avoids news conferences and instead communicates with his followers through tweets and rallies.

And when he treats Americans who didn’t vote for him or who disapprove of him as his personal opponents, rather than as citizens to whom he is as constitutionally accountable as to his most loyal supporters.

It intensifies when he uses the presidency as a personal fiefdom to enrich himself and his family; unilaterally breaks treaties and starts trade wars with long-standing allies; and expresses admiration for some of the most murderous dictators in the world.

The crux of America’s current constitutional crisis is this: Our system of government was designed to constrain power, but Trump doesn’t want to be constrained.

Our system was conceived as a means of promoting the public interest, but Trump wants to promote only his own interest.  

Our system was organized to bind presidents to the Constitution, but Trump doesn’t want to be bound by anything.  

The crisis will therefore worsen as long as Trump can get away with it. An unconstrained megalomaniac becomes only more maniacal. He will fill whatever political void exists with his unbridled ego. 

The only legal way to constrain Trump is to vote for a Congress, this November, that will stand up to him. And then, in November 2020, vote him and his regime out of office.

If he refuses to accept the results of that election, as he threatened to do if he lost the 2016 election, he will have to be forcefully removed from office.

Friends, we are no longer trying to avert a constitutional crisis. We are living one. The question is how to stop it from destroying what’s left of our democracy.

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Lauren Ruth Ward - Blue Collar Sex Kitten

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THE BUYBACK BOONDOGGLE IS BEGGARING AMERICA

Trump and Republicans branded their huge corporate tax cut as a way to make American corporations more profitable so they’d invest in more and better jobs. 

But they’re buying back their stock instead. Now that the new corporate tax cut is pumping up profits, buybacks are on track to hit a record $800 billion this year. 

For years, corporations have spent most of their profits on buying back their own shares of stock, instead of increasing the wages of their employees, whose hard work creates these profits. 

Stock buybacks should be illegal, as they were before 1983.

Stock buybacks are artificial efforts to interfere in the so-called “free market” to prop up stock prices. Because they create an artificial demand, they force stock prices above their natural level. With fewer shares in circulation, each remaining share is worth more.     

Buybacks don’t create more or better jobs. Money spent on buybacks isn’t invested in new equipment, or research and development, or factories, or wages. It doesn’t build a company. Buybacks don’t grow the American economy.

So why are buybacks so popular with Corporate CEOs?

Because a bigger and bigger portion of CEO pay has been in stocks and stock options, rather than cash. So when share prices go up, executives reap a bonanza. The value of their pay from previous years also rises – in what amounts to a retroactive (and off the books) pay increase on top of their already outrageous compensation.

Buybacks were illegal until Ronald Reagan made them legal in 1982, just about the same time wages stopped rising for most Americans. Before then, a bigger percentage corporate profits went into increasing workers’ wages. 

But since corporations were already using their profits for stock buybacks, there is no reason to believe they’ll use their tax windfall on anything other than more stock buybacks.

Let’s not compound the error. Make stock buybacks illegal, as they were before 1982.

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Relief

When I was a kid, my mom would buy anything marked “stress relief.” Tea, soaps, CDs, you name it. I didn’t know what to make of it. It just seemed like being an adult was a matter of constantly draining stress from your body, like water from a flooded basement. 

I get it now.

Living through the Internet language wars of the ‘10s has made me cautious about using the word “triggered” in any but the most formal contexts. But we’ve all been stewing in sexual violence news for about a week. 

Keep reading

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Trump’s Labor Day

This will be the first Labor Day of the presidency of Donald J. Trump, who came to office riding a wave of anti-establishment anger from average working people. No one can say they didn’t see it coming.

By the time Trump was elected, the typical American household had a net worth 14 percent lower than the typical household in 1984. The richest 1 percent owned more than the bottom 90 percent.

Last year’s annual Wall Street bonus pool alone was larger than the annual year-round earnings of all 3.3 million Americans working full time at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

While 90 percent of US adults born in the early 1940s were earning more than their parents by the time they reached their prime earning years, only half of adults born in the mid-1980s are earning more than their parents in their prime earning years.

Most also have less economic security than their parents.  Nearly one out of every five American workers is in a part-time job. Two-thirds are living paycheck to paycheck.

Most are working more hours than they worked decades ago and taking fewer sick days or vacations.

The gap in life expectancy between the nation’s most affluent and everyone else is also widening.

Increasing numbers of Americans on the downward economic escalator are succumbing to opiods, chronic liver cirrhosis, and poisonings that include drug overdoses.

The standard explanation for why all this has occurred is that most American workers are no longer “worth” as much as they were before digital technologies and globalization. So they must now settle for lower wages and less security.

Rubbish. 

This doesn’t explain why workers in other advanced economies facing similar forces haven’t succumbed to them nearly as dramatically as have workers in the United States.

Or why the pay of top executives at big companies has soared from an average of 20 times that of the typical worker 40 years ago to almost 300 times now.

Or why the denizens of Wall Street, who in the 1950s and 1960s earned comparatively modest sums, are now paid tens or hundreds of millions annually.

And it can’t account for the decline in the starting wages of recent college graduates. A college education is now a prerequisite for joining the middle class but no longer a sure means for gaining ground once admitted to it.

To attribute all this to the impersonal workings of the market, and assume it’s because most workers aren’t “worth” as much as before, is to ignore the increasing ability of moneyed interests to alter the system for their own benefit – demolishing trade unions, turning full-time employees into contract workers, and monopolizing industry.

America’s economic and political elites could have used their growing political and economic clout to help workers get ahead – through better schools and more affordable college, comprehensive job retraining, wage insurance, better public transportation, and expanded unemployment insurance.

They could have pushed for universal health insurance.

They could have paid for all this by accepting, even lobbying for, higher taxes on themselves.

They could have sought to reduce their own political clout by demanding limits on campaign spending.

But they did the reverse: They spent more and more of their ever-growing wealth and power to rig the game to their own advantage.

As a result, trust in all the major institutions of our society has plummeted.

In 1964 more than 60 percent of Americans thought government was “run for the benefit of all the people” while just 29 percent said government was “pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves.”

Nowadays the numbers are almost reversed, with 76 percent believing government is run “by a few big interest” and just 19 percent saying government is run “for the benefit of all.”

In the early 1960s most Americans said they had a “great deal of confidence” in the nation’s major companies, banks, and financial institutions.

Now just one in ten has a great deal of confidence in them.

In his first seven months as president, Trump has done nothing for American workers. In fact, his attempt to undermine the Affordable Care Act, his retreat from Labor Department regulations boosting overtime pay, and his proposed tax cuts for the wealthy and big corporations will make most workers worse off.  

But he is in office because of their anger and distrust, and he’s still feeding off it. “The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country,” Trump said in his inaugural address. “Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs.”

Tragically, Trump was right.

Now all of us are paying the price.

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Mad Man Moon Mixtape by Virgin Magnetic Material #np on #SoundCloud

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If it’s some mean streets I have to walk today, it’s some Pleasure Curses that I’ll want to take with me on that risky traipse. The Portland based indie dance duo would put an assured spring in my step and plenty of swagger in my strut with their glitzy disco meets steamy chillwave piece, Mean Streets. The sexy dashing throwback single is lifted from the pair’s Screens EP, set to be released May 16th via Prince George Records. It doesn’t matter if the streets are nice, mean, or unpredictably insane outside the door. You’ll want to sashay and shimmy your way across the asphalt with your smoothest moves to this succulent tune. 

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THESE NEW YORK GARDENERS ARE FIGHTING THE SYSTEM BY GROWING FOOD.

MEET THE WOMEN TAKING OWNERSHIP OF THE RESOURCES THAT COMMUNITIES OF COLOR HAVE ACCESS TO.

PHOTO BY NAIMA GREEN FOR THE FADER.

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Our days are numbered. 

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https://soundcloud.com/karlswan/chinsmokers-cl0ser-vicer0y-remix92

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https://soundcloud.com/karl-j-swan/emik-danceshocklee104e

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https://soundcloud.com/karl-j-swan/kfly-bl00d-in-the-cutlah-remix89