The Wall

There was never going to be a wall.

Even Trump, who in the early going was undoubtedly a true believer in an actual wall between the United States and Mexico, in all likelihood came to understand fairly quickly that a multi-billion-dollar sea-to-sea structure of dubious efficacy traversing mountains, rivers, and canyons by way of a decades long construction project was not a real thing. Even he understood, if his core supporters did not, that “the wall” was not to be taken literally and really was about a menu of upgraded security measures – some wall, some fence, some technology, some manpower – along the 2,000-mile U.S. – Mexico border.

Real or symbolic, however, the wall was always the centerpiece of Trumpism – the thing that drew millions to him and the perfect metaphor for why so many saw him as a savior: His core support came from, and still comes from, people who blame their disappointments and fears on everybody but themselves – Mexicans, blacks, Washington elites, the media, Jews, Muslims, Wall Street, and various authority figures. A guy who gave them permission – encouraged them, as demagogues and despots have done since time immemorial – to blame their problems on all these outside forces was a guy they could get behind, and they did. A wall to keep those forces at bay was just the thing. 

The beating heart of wall love: Racism

Like medieval bishops arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, there has been considerable parsing lately of the word “racist” – who and what qualifies. In fact, it’s not that difficult, and certainly isn’t solely about overt hatred. As columnist Charles Blow put it, “Racism is simply the belief that race is an inherent and determining factor in a person’s or a people’s character and capabilities, rendering some inferior and others superior. These beliefs are racial prejudices.”

Front and center in all the agonized yammering about what is and isn’t racist has been the question of whether Donald Trump is one. The answer here is also not difficult: Of course Trump is a racist. As Blow puts it: “…it is not a stretch to understand that Donald Trump’s words and deeds over the course of his life have demonstrated a pattern of expressing racial prejudices that demean people who are black and brown and that play to the racial hostilities of other white people.”

The latest is the blatant racism of his now infamous “shithole countries” remarks, but there’s much, much more, going back to 1973 when the U.S. Justice Department sued him and his father for systematically discriminating against blacks in housing rentals. Here, courtesy of the New York Times, is “Donald Trump’s Racism: The Definitive List.”

And so, the wall – a quintessentially racist idea which works in perfect harmony with the quintessentially racist Trumpist/Republican obsession with immigration. They – Republicans in general and Trumpists in particular – have built a religion around immigration as the root of all evil and the stemming of it as the answer to all of our problems. This is a formulation beloved by the simple-minded – people who are pleased by the easy solutions promised by demagogues everywhere, always involving the vanquishing of the “hated other,” and who consider any objections to these solutions to be political correctness.

With a mindset like that, you have no problem with a political bargain that tears apart the families of “dreamers” in exchange for a wall that keeps out all those Mexican rapists.

Fraud Commission Fades Away

Amidst the clamor surrounding the publication of Steve Bannon quotes characterizing Donald Trump as the mindless simpleton we already knew him to be, it was quietly announced by the Trump administration that the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity – widely known as the voter fraud commission, set up ostensibly to investigate Trump’s contention that millions of votes were cast illegally in the 2016 election -- was being disbanded. The president blamed “continuing legal challenges,” but the reality is that the commission never found any evidence of fraud -- certainly not fraud on the massive scale Trump spoke of -- and having met just a couple or three times and come to the quick conclusion that it had nothing actually to do, has now disappeared into the gloaming with barely a whimper.

Some months ago, Flyoverland made an offer to president Trump: Point us in the right direction and we will investigate and report on – and collect our Pulitzer prize for – the story of the century. That story is the one about the most massive voter fraud in the history of the Republic, as revealed by the president who said the popular vote count, which he was on the short end of by quite a bit, was wrong because as many as five million votes had been cast fraudulently. Our reasoning in making the offer was as follows: He must have a reason for saying that; he must know something; he must have some information, some evidence. Tell us or any news organization what that is – point us in the right direction, give us something, anything, to go on – and we will get to the bottom of it.

He did not take us up on our offer. That, of course, is because no such evidence existed and there was no large-scale voter fraud. It was simply something he made up. The commission was nothing more than a lame attempt to give legitimacy to Trump’s fantasies. As Senate leader Chuck Schumer put it: “The commission never had anything to do with election integrity. It was instead a front to suppress the vote, perpetrate dangerous and baseless claims, and was ridiculed from one end of the country to the other.”

This episode, though perhaps not as “sexy” as many of the dozens to hundreds of lies and scandals attributable to Trump, is instructive. It typifies his capacity for both self-delusion and for unashamed prevarication, not to mention his willingness to undermine vital American institutions for his own ends; and it serves as vivid testimony to the willingness of his more ardent followers to happily accept as truth whatever he says, no matter how frivolous or unsubstantiated.

I’m pretty sure that Trumpists, and Republicans in general, would not have accepted at face value the exact same claim, utterly evidence-free, if Hillary Clinton had made it: That five million fraudulent votes had cost her the election. Their howls of anger and ridicule would have been heard throughout the land.

The Real Targets: Social Security and Medicare

Flyoverland is the first to admit that it is not a tax expert, but the contention here is that you don’t have to be a tax expert to understand a few basic facts about the tax plan soon to be approved in the congress.

1. Remember just a few short months ago when the undertaking was characterized as a massive overhaul that would greatly simplify the taxpaying process? Well, tax preparers and accountants need no longer hold their breath on this if they ever did. There will be plenty for them to do next April – about as much as there was last April and all the Aprils before. People won’t be filing their returns on a post card.

2. The idea that the tax cuts will “pay for themselves” – i.e. that the economic growth they spawn will generate enough new revenue to offset the revenue losses they create – is, as George H. W. Bush so aptly put it, voodoo economics. No one really believes it, including – in this opinion – the authors of this legislation. What’s really in play here is a ballooning deficit, which Republicans will point to with alarm (even though it’s their creation) and then call for massive spending cuts, with Social Security and Medicare squarely in their crosshairs. Attacking and neutralizing so-called entitlement programs is the GOP Holy Grail and it’s what this entire tax undertaking is really all about.

3. The idea that corporate tax cuts are a growth engine because they’ll encourage companies to expand and hire is nonsense, as any CEO will tell you. Companies expand their facilities and hire more workers when increased demand tells them they need to make more of whatever it is they make. If they perceive that demand, they will do what needs to be done regardless of their tax situation. If they don’t perceive it, they will not expand and hire – again, regardless of the taxes they pay. In either case but especially the latter, any tax savings will go directly into the bank accounts of the shareholders.

4. Donald Trump’s assertion that the tax “reform” bill will hurt him financially is simply a lie.

The Flipping Begins

One of the things we know about Trump’s more ardent supporters, and even a fair number of folks who dislike him or are indifferent to him, is that they see the Russia investigation as either a plot on the part of vindictive, sore-loser Democrats, a media concoction, or as largely incomprehensible background noise without any real significance. They haven’t paid much attention to it, they don’t understand it, and, so, they don’t really believe it. Maybe Russians got into the 2016 election, and maybe not. In any case, what’s the big deal?

So let’s set the record straight on that with the following three easy-to-understand points.

One -- They did it.
That the Russians did interfere with the election, and in a fairly big way, is not in dispute. That ship has sailed. It is attested to by the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, and a dozen or so other government agencies whose job is to protect the country from just such activities. It is accepted as settled fact by the House and Senate Intelligence committees, by most members of the House and Senate, by the military, and by the Trump-appointed Secretaries of State and Defense. And by Facebook, which we now know ran Russian created and paid for advertising designed to influence the election results. So, Trump supporters, let’s understand: A hostile foreign government carried out a cyber attack on your country, by messing with the single most important component of our democracy – elections. They did that, and you should be appalled and angry, and you should be demanding to know what your government is doing about it.

Two -- Americans helped them do it.
While that was happening -- during the campaign and transition -- at least 12 Trump associates had contacts with Russians. There were at least 19 face-to-face interactions with Russians or Kremlin-linked figures. There were at least 51 communications -- meetings, phone calls, email exchanges, etc. And these Trump associates lied about all of this, issuing blanket denials of any contacts with Russia. On at least nine occasions, Trump and his senior officials denied that there had been any contacts whatsoever with Russians during the campaign or that there were any ties between the campaign and Russians. That these people have something to hide in this matter, which involves multiple interactions with Russians, many with close ties to the Kremlin, is simply beyond dispute.

Three -- Donald Trump is involved

Donald Trump stopped the FBI’s investigation of Russian election interference in its tracks, or tried to, by firing the head investigator, James Comey. Amid all the nonsense cooked up by the Trump team regarding the reason for the firing, Trump admitted in front of millions on national TV that he fired Comey because he wanted the Russia investigation stopped. Instead of expressing righteous anger at the invasion of our sovereignty and launching a no-holds-barred effort, with the full backing of the executive branch, to get to the bottom of it, he did his best to stop to the investigation of it. He did not want the investigation to go forward because he knew this: it would reveal something he did not want people to know. There is no other explanation. The betting here is that it has something to do with ties to Russian oligarchs and/or the Russian Mafia (which in turn have ties to Vladimir Putin), and/or indebtedness to Russian interests.

So…

The Russians invaded our country, they were given aid and comfort by American citizens in that invasion, and the president is determined to keep everyone from knowing anything about it. Easy to understand. Very important. The media didn't do it, the Dems didn't do it. (Note: Defenders of the regime keep saying there is no evidence of collusion with the Russians on the part of Trump people. On the contrary, there is a mountain of evidence. What there isn’t is proof.)

Yet.

There will be. Trumpers are whistling past the graveyard if they think the dots aren’t going to be connected and the whole truth found out (as Gen. Flynn and others tell all to save their own skins.) The guess here as to what we will learn: Various Russian interests, including Putin, are being hit hard by economic sanctions and want them lifted; and they saw in Trump and his people a group that could be talked into, or coerced into, or blackmailed into lifting them. So they went to work to get him elected. The Trump folks were more than happy to accept and facilitate their help.

And now, the Russians want to be paid.

Medicare for All?

(Note: This is a Flyover article from April of this year. It is re-posted here concurrent with Bernie Sanders' recent introduction of Medicare-For-All legislation.)

Chipping In

From an article in the New York Times magazine, we learn of a woman – uninsured, due to a complicated set of circumstances – who suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage (brain bleed) and spent time in the hospital, and later starting getting bills: $16,000 from the hospital, $50,000 for the air ambulance, $24,000 from a physicians’ group, $54,000 from the same group for additional charges and late fees, and then, another from the hospital for $356,884.42.

The article, which is about “the arcane, sprawling classification system that doctors and hospitals have learned to game” as one big reason for the high cost of health care, is definitely recommended reading. But even if we did nothing about this system or about the other major contributors to the problem – drug prices, too much  testing, high price tags on basic procedures – even if the woman’s bills for hundreds of thousands of dollars were totally legitimate – there is something we could do: Chip in and help her pay the bills. If we did that, it would cost each of us a couple of bucks and save her a fortune – indeed, save her from total financial ruin. And if we chipped in to buy her insurance against those medical bills, as opposed to paying the bills themselves, it would cost not bucks but pennies.

This is something we already do with national defense, roads and bridges, schools, police protection, parks and libraries, sewers and sanitation, water treatment, air traffic control, and on and on -- things too numerous to mention. We chip in. We pay for them collectively. We pool our money to buy things we want and need but which it makes no sense to buy as individuals.

It’s called taxation. 

(Also included in that list, by the way, is keeping old people out of penury by giving them money -- Social Security -- and by helping them pay for health care -- Medicare. The idea that people “pay into” these systems and are therefore merely retrieving the money they contributed and to which they are therefore entitled when they get old is a myth. In fact, people pay taxes to the federal treasury – it doesn’t matter what names those taxes are given – and part of that money is then paid out, from the federal budget, for social security and Medicare benefits, in exactly the same way that money comes out of the budget to pay for an aircraft carrier.)

But, I digress. The point here is this: People may kvetch about paying taxes and about government spending – something everyone is against in the abstract -- but they want the things that tax dollars buy. It’s that simple. The idea that one group of people is more “fiscally conservative” than another is fiction. The argument is never whether tax dollars are going to be collected and spent. The argument is always about how -- which of the things those dollars buy is more important to me as opposed to the ones that are more important to you. 

The obvious question: What’s more important than health care? Needless to say, it is essential to our well-being. But more than that, its high cost is a terrible problem, and the two previous administrations were right in giving it high priority. It puts millions of Americans on the brink of financial catastrophe and/or deprives them of medical care altogether, it exercises undue influence over where and how we live and work and what we do for a living, and it sucks billions of dollars to itself at the expense of all other sectors of the economy. Given the demonstrated inability of the health industry or any outside actors to stabilize costs let alone bring them back to earth, the contention here is that including health insurance on the list of things we spend tax dollars on is therefore a not unreasonable idea. Why not “chip in” for health care?

Would that mean a tax increase? Sure, assuming we can’t find offsetting savings in other areas. (The betting here is we can’t, as those “other areas” tend to have powerful constituencies). But it’s important to understand this: We are already paying that “tax.” We may not call it a tax, but whether it’s in the form of health insurance we buy on our own or higher prices charged by employers that buy it for us, it’s money leaving our wallets. Just like the money we pay to the tax collector, it’s money we have no choice but to part with. Either way, we’re gonna pay. But there is considerable likelihood that we would pay less because of the preventive care that such a system would pick up the tab for and because of the elimination of insurance company overhead and hospital billing costs. So from a financial outlay standpoint, it appears it would be, at worst, a wash.

As for reducing medical costs within the existing system to any meaningful extent as a way to get this problem under control, it appears that for the time being at least, we will have to play it as it lays, so to speak – get people insured against costs as they now stand, and then take up the challenge of reducing costs. And a challenge it is, because the business of health care, for a variety of seemingly intractable reasons, has shown itself to be unresponsive to the normal pressures of a free market. Under the current system, in which there is zero price competition, costs are not going to go down and therefore the price of insurance isn’t going to go down, either. (Free market enthusiasts cite the example of Lasik surgery, the cost of which, due to competition, has come down considerably over the years. But Lasik is elective and people can shop around at their leisure for the low-cost provider. With things like cancer care, cardiac surgery, and organ transplants – well, not so much.) 

What’s being suggested here is not socialized medicine or a government takeover of health care, an accusation that critics draw like a gun whenever this subject comes up. The government would own no facilities or employ any medical personnel. It would simply pick up the tab for insurance – as it already does, efficiently and effectively, with Medicare. For people who object to Medicare on principle, the question is this: Would you like to be paying the medical bills of your elderly parents and having them live in your basement because they can’t afford their own housing? Medicare is a system that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe in and view with gratitude and relief. Thank God for Medicare, is what just about everyone says as they approach old age.

We all chip in for insurance for seniors. Why not chip in for insurance for everyone?

(Note: For an in-depth discussion of why the American health care system is unresponsive to normal free market forces, Flyover can recommend the book “An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back” by Elisabeth Rosenthal. Here is a review in the New York Times Book Review.)

If a Tree Falls in the Forest...

A decade or so ago, local television news gave extensive coverage to what they described as a Klan event – a rally, a demonstration, a parade, whatever -- being planned for an Illinois suburb of St. Louis. Local media knew it was in the offing, of course, because a participant told them it was. And they, in effect, did his bidding, by dutifully reporting on the plan and thereby drawing attention to and unavoidably magnifying into something of significant import what would have been a universally ignored non-event involving a tiny squadron of mouth-breathers. Just what the doctor ordered, as far as the KKK boys were concerned.

If memory serves, the thing turned out to be a circular walk on a suburban street by half a dozen comically costumed, sign-waving morons, witnessed by a sparse gathering of mildly curious – but neither pro nor con – onlookers who weren’t exactly sure what was going on. Only they and the television cameras witnessed this little confederacy of dunces doing their posturing and chanting.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound? If hate-spewing wing-nuts wave their signs and shout their idiot slogans and no one pays them any attention, do they make a sound? The thinking here is no, not so much.

No question, our instinct -- the other 98% of us who actually have a brain – is to fight back, to shout them down, to throw rotten fruit at them, or maybe kick them in the shins or slap some sense into them. And there is nothing wrong with that instinct. In fact, it can be argued that it’s important to do that – to loudly and proudly protest their stupid but dangerous “ideas” and not let them go unchallenged. But, wow – talk about giving these fools what they crave – attention – and talk about risking portraying their ludicrous pity parties as events of vastly greater magnitude than they actually are and focusing vastly more attention on them than they deserve.

So there is also an argument for not engaging – for not showing up at all, or, if folks just can’t resist, for counter-protesting in a totally passive, turn-the-other-cheek mode – signs, sure, but no taunting or shouting, no sticks and stones; and maybe most important, no treating by the media every escape from the home by these zombies as a news event warranting breathless, wall-to-wall coverage. Here’s the thing: When the cameras are rolling and brickbats are being hurled in every direction, it’s impossible to know, unless the bad guys are all wearing black hats and the good guys white, who’s doing what to whom. And it’s precisely that confusion that gives surface plausibility to the preposterous notion that there were two equally-to-blame “sides” at Charlottesville. When that notion is picked up and spread around by a weak-minded but vastly influential figure like the president of the United States, trouble ensues. So maybe the best way is to make sure it's unmistakeably clear who's doing the acting out.

Of course, the president should have been forceful and unequivocal in his condemnation of the jackasses that caused this problem. But maybe the problem could have been avoided, or at least mitigated, if they’d been allowed to put their stupidity on display in splendid isolation.

(For an alternative method of handling these events, we can look to a small town in Germany.)

What He Might Have Said

He said this: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides….on many sides.”

Here are just a few things he might have said if he had had an honest heart and had reacted with the spontaneous revulsion most of us felt...

“450,000 American soldiers and sailors died fighting the scourge of Nazism in World War II. People flying Nazi flags and banners and making Nazi salutes on a street in the United States of America is a goddamned outrage. If I could I would round them up myself, throw them in jail, and throw away the key. It makes me so mad I could spit.”

Or…

“What happened in Charlottesville was 100-percent the fault of gibbering morons who took to the streets to put their irrational hatreds on display. None of this would have happened if they had not emerged from the rocks they live under to spew their poison.”

Or...

“These cockroaches who proclaim white supremacy and allegiance to Adolph Hitler, the murderer of six million innocent men, women, and children, need to be horse-whipped, then tarred and feathered and run out of town. There is no place in America for them, and my Justice Department will do everything in its power to shut them the hell up.  What a bunch of weenies.”

Or maybe...

“Members of the KKK are a bunch of semi-conscious mouth-breathers -- pathetic losers who blame everyone but themselves for their chronic failures and take out their total inadequacy on strangers of a different color. We as Americans need to rise up against them and loudly disavow their disgusting poison.”

A few suggestions about what might have been.  Just sayin'.

Mainstream Media Hatred: Time to Get Over It

Donald Trump said to the president of Mexico, in effect: You know you’re not going to pay for the wall and I know you’re not going to pay for the wall, and, really, we both know there was never going to be any wall. But will you please pipe down about it?  This remarkably revealing conversation once again underscored Trump’s total contempt for his most devoted acolytes – the contempt he first unveiled in his remarks about shooting people on a New York street. This time, we learn – if we didn’t already suspect as much – that their most cherished and emblematic political talisman and the thing that most endeared Trump to them, The Great Wall, was always, in his mind, a crock of you know what – nothing more than a way to harvest votes from the politics of resentment.

Bizarrely, so unswerving is the devotion of the cult of personality known as “The Base” to Trump that this revelation probably won’t change anything for them. But for the rest of us, it is, among other things, a reminder of just how critical the free flow of information is to our way of government. We in America operate in a democracy and that has many meanings and ramifications, but one that can’t be emphasized too strongly is this: Every single person who works for the government, elected or appointed, from the town dog-catcher to the president of the United States, is an employee of us, the people. And for that reason, we are entitled to know what every single one of them is up to. Full stop.

There are exceptions having to do with national security – the date, time and troop strength of the D-Day invasion was not something we all needed to know – but the default position with regard to the words and deeds of government “officials” must be total transparency. What our employees in government are doing and saying is what tells us who to vote for. And knowing who to vote for (or against) and then doing so is the very meaning of democracy.

Certain species of politician are forever telling us they’re going to get rid of waste, fraud, and abuse by running the government like a business, but the difference between for-profit businesses and government entities is instructive. The former are mechanisms for turning money into more money – for making a profit on invested dollars. The people charged with making that happen – management -- are accountable only to the people who employ them – the business’s owners, aka the shareholders. How do the shareholders know if their hired-hand managers are doing their jobs properly? Pretty simple: They look at the bottom line to see if their profit expectations are being met.

We who employ dog catchers and senators and presidents, on the other hand, don’t have such a convenient and obvious metric for deciding if those folks are doing what we want them to do. What do we have? This and only this: Information. And where do we get that information? Hold on to your hats, mainstream media haters: We get it from a free press. That’s why press freedom is protected in the constitution – because it was clearly understood by the framers (and by everyone now who doesn’t dislike and/or distrust the press for telling them facts as opposed to what they want to hear), that information regarding what our employees are doing, documented and conveyed to the citizenry in the press, is essential to the operation of a democracy. In a system of checks and balances, it’s the most important check there is.

Which brings us to the subject of leaks, on its way to becoming the least understood and most over-used perjorative in the language. The clandestine release of national-security-sensitive information to the press – the “leaking” of it – is a bad thing. Such leakage shouldn’t be done by the leaker nor accepted and/or used by its recipient, and most major news organizations are much more sensitive to this than their detractors would like to believe. But the overwhelming majority of so-called leaks are nothing more than information about goings-on in government that have nothing whatever to do with national security but that someone doesn’t want the world to know about because it would be politically embarrassing to them. There is nothing illegal about them.  Hence, the tendency to “classify” information – to put under lock and key information the public has a perfect right to by invoking national security and then branding its release – it’s leak – as felonious.

That’s exactly what Attorney General Sessions is up to now. This is, of course, an attempt to persuade the world that the problem isn’t the content of the leaks – the lies, abuses, and general foolishness revealed in them – but the existence of the leaks themselves. Or, to put it another way, the problem isn’t that this government is overrun with stupidity and miscalculation, but that the public is finding out about all of it. Trump understands that perfectly, and that’s why he constantly tries to de-legitimize the media, going so far as to brand it the enemy of the people. Well, “the people” need to get over their childish resentment of the mainstream press and their baseless dismissal of it as hopelessly biased, and understand that in this democracy, it is not their enemy. In a world where politicians will tell you to look at the shiny thing they hold in one hand while they steal your money and your freedom with the other, a free press may be the only friend you have.

Dreaming in Flyoverland

“I know, I know, there are few things more boring than people telling you what they dreamed about last night, but I gotta tell you about this one. It is so completely crazy.”

“Okay. If you must.”

“So, I dreamed that Trump hired a new guy to be his communications director named Scaramucci. Calls himself ‘The Mooch.’ Little guy with a lotta slick hair and a sharp suit, and the first thing out of the box, he does an interview where he channels Joe Pesci in “Goodfellas” – talks tough, cusses like a sailor, threatens people, comes across like a Mafioso wannabe. Out loud, in front of the world.”

“Cusses?”

“OMG! He calls Priebus a fucking paranoid schizophrenic! He says he wants to fucking kill all the leakers! He says the swamp is trying to defeat him but they’re going to have to go fuck themselves! He says Bannon sucks his own dick and is trying to build his own brand off the fucking strength of the president!”

“That’s disgusting.”

“Hey, it’s not me saying this stuff. It’s my dream. Anyway, then he says he’s calling the FBI about the leak of his financial disclosure form, which he says is a felony, only he doesn’t know that it isn’t a leak at all because the form is a public document, available to any and all. Then, after he says all this stuff to a reporter, he blames the reporter. He says he made a mistake in trusting a reporter.”

“So, Trump fires him, right?

“No! In fact, he doesn’t say a word. In fact, what he does is fire Priebus, so not only does he not fire The Mooch, but everyone thinks he’s gonna make him his next chief of staff.”

“Does he?”

“No. He gives that to John Kelly, the head of Homeland Security. Everybody says Kelly’s a no-nonsense kinda guy. So a commentator on one of the talk shows says he believes Kelly’s the right medicine – that he’ll bring order to the White House and get Trump to behave. Everyone laughs. Meanwhile, Trump’s Interior Secretary, Zinke, calls up Senator Murkowski and does a Mafia don thing on her about her health care no vote. He says Alaska is such a pretty state – me and the Donald would hate to see anything ugly happen to it. Or words to that effect.”

“Then what happened?”

“That’s when I woke up.”

"Boy, that was some crazy dream. The Mooch! Where do you come up with this stuff?"

Adoption = Sanctions

For Trump supporters who discount his Russia problems, or blow them off as being too complicated to understand, or see them as a plot by Democrats and the media, a discussion of adoptions might be enlightening. When Trump folks talked about this subject, adoption, at the infamous Donald, Jr. meeting, and when Trump himself kicked it around with Putin at G-20, it’s important to understand that they were talking about one thing and one thing only: sanctions.

The narrative is straightforward enough and easy to follow. In 2012, the U.S. Congress, in an overwhelming bi-partisan vote (365-43 in the House, 92-4 in the Senate), passed the Magnitsky Act -- a law, just so we're clear – that imposed sanctions on Russia for human rights violations; specifically, the murder in a Russian prison of whistle blower Sergei Magnitsky. Putin was plenty mad about these sanctions and to retaliate he took it out on innocent children, decreeing that adoptions of Russian children by Americans would no longer be permitted. That’s the “adoptions” connection. Putin’s heartless action of course did nothing to alter these sanctions or others that are equally rankling to him – the ones that were imposed for his country’s bloody invasion of its sovereign neighbor Ukraine and ruthless takeover of Crimea and those that were imposed by President Obama for Russia’s cyber-attack on the United States.

And then came the Trump administration. Putin unquestionably sees this administration as fertile territory for getting these sanctions lifted. Why? Almost certainly because Trump has major business interests (i.e., entanglements) involving Russia that give Russia leverage over him. It is those business entanglements, and what they might mean to Trump’s ability and willingness to do his solemn and sworn duty to protect the interests of his country (as opposed to those of himself and his family), that are being investigated by two congressional committees and the office of the Special Counsel. It is now beyond obvious that Trump is hiding something and working very hard to keep whatever it is hidden, and it is increasingly clear that the sanctions, because of whatever hold the Russians have on Trump, are in play. He has thrown every conceivable roadblock in front of these investigations, undercutting or firing every government official involved, attempting to de-legitimize the work of the Special Counsel, throwing his own intelligence people, including the FBI and the CIA, under the bus, and, now, feeling out the idea of pardons.

As for those who maintain that the Russia thing is a non-issue, a distraction, they should understand this: By siding with Russia, the Trump people are protecting a country whose leadership, to maintain their hold on power, works assiduously and ceaselessly to discredit Western democracy, lest their own people get ideas. That work has included an attack on the United States by way of a disruption of our electoral processes – a strike at the heart of what makes America America. People who continue to claim that Trump’s Russia problems are small potatoes are either whistling past the graveyard or don’t understand the problem. Or their unwholesome, see-no-evil hero worship has rendered them completely delusional. In any case, Trump’s stance on all of this is unsustainable. The dots are being connected. It’s all going to come out. The fat lady is about to sing.

Trumpcare Makes its Exit

The problem from the beginning with the GOP’s train wreck of a health care bill – a bill that got worse with each iteration, if that was possible – was that Donald Trump and Republican senators and congressmen never really knew or cared if the ACA was a good thing, a bad thing, or a thing in between. Their antipathy for Obamacare was never really about Obamacare. It was about their antipathy for Obama. And for anything of value for which Democrats could take credit.

So, for political survival, they were left with cobbling together something that purportedly did what people wanted but which they could plausibly say was not Obamacare. The result: a thing that was architecturally the same as Obamacare – and, for that matter, the same as “Romneycare,” the GOP-inspired program on which Obamacare was modeled -- but with provisions whose consequences, intended and unintended, helped no one and would have returned millions to the pre-Obamacare tender mercies of the insurance companies.

What Republicans should do (but clearly lack the stomach for) is stick to their religion and advocate for not only the repeal of Obamacare but for a complete and total absence of government involvement in health care. Get medical insurance from your employer, buy it on the open market, don’t get it all, but keep the government out of it. That is GOP orthodoxy and Republicans should advocate openly for it and accept the electoral consequences. But they won’t do that because they know what those consequences would look like. It’s not what the American people want. What they want is help – help from the government, which is to say help from each other -- in dealing with the outrageously burdensome cost of health care in this country.

Therefore, what Democrats should step up to is getting fully behind Medicare for all, and be willing to put that to the electoral test. That way, people who want zero government involvement in health care and people who want full government involvement will have a clear choice to make, and won’t have to settle for well-intentioned half-measures like Obamacare or malicious-intentioned ones like Trumpcare. As for those in the former group who worry about the taxes that will be needed to pay for Medicare for all, they should understand this: We are already paying that “tax.” We may not call it a tax, but whether it’s in the form of health insurance we buy on our own or higher prices charged by employers that buy it for us, it’s money leaving our wallets. Just like the money we pay to the tax collector, it’s money we have no choice but to part with. Either way, we’re gonna pay.

Meanwhile, the outlandish cost of health care continues to put millions of Americans on the brink of financial catastrophe and/or deprive them of medical care altogether, to exercise undue influence over where and how we live and work and what we do for a living, and to suck billions of dollars to itself at the expense of all other sectors of the economy. Given the demonstrated inability of the health industry or any outside actors to stabilize costs let alone bring them back to earth, the contention here is that including health insurance on the list of things we spend tax dollars on is therefore a not unreasonable idea. Why not “chip in” for health care? (And, no, it’s not “socialized medicine” or a government takeover of health care. The government would own no facilities nor employ any medical personnel. It would simply pick up the tab for insurance – as it already does, efficiently and effectively, with Medicare.)

No doubt, the underlying problem – the thing that drives all of these discussions and that makes insurance so pricey – is the cost of healthcare products and services themselves: practitioners, facilities, medicines, and all the rest. This is a mind-bogglingly complex problem with many moving parts, and it will not be solved by a magical stroke of legislation or an executive order from King Trump. The system is riddled with inefficiencies, unexplainable cost inconsistencies, duplication, non-standardization, fraud, and so on, and is remarkably resistant to the normal market forces that shape cost/price matters in other industries. A way to address all of this in a systematic way is elusive, but that’s what has to be done if the system is going to be tamed and prevented from having the excessive influence over the way we live our lives that it now has.

Selling Out the USA

“…have the Trumpites not been telling us for six months that no collusion ever happened? And now they say: Sure it happened. So what? Everyone does it. What’s left of your credibility when you make such a casual about-face?” Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post

Not only are Trump backers saying spying, as exemplified by Russia’s interference in a U.S. election, is routine, going both ways and, for that matter, every which way, but they are also saying that concerns about Russia, whom they see as largely benign, are overblown or even groundless and that Vladimir Putin is a figure to be admired. Clearly, they understand nothing about Russia and its leader and have no interest in any such understanding. Nevertheless, we offer up some noteworthy information about the object of their admiration, Mr. Putin, and the country he rules...

The KGB, in which Putin was a high-level player, was a Soviet secret police organization whose specialty was the suppression of internal dissent, in the service of which it imprisoned and/or exiled and/or murdered thousands and thousands of people within Russia itself and in the many “satellite” countries Russia had taken over by force after World War II. Internal dissent was defined by, among many other things, the practice of religion, which was forbidden in the Soviet Union and brutally suppressed, and by any criticism of communism or the government. The organization was the embodiment of Orwell’s “Big Brother,” with operatives and informants everywhere, in a closed-off, paranoid society in which the only “news” was government propaganda and in which it was necessary to be extremely careful about whom you were talking to and who might overhear, lest you be grabbed up in the night, held incommunicado, and sent to the Gulag for the rest of your life. The KGB was a merciless and brutal force, not unlike the reviled Gestapo and SS of Nazi Germany.

Under Putin, the Russian economy as measured by GDP is about 1/12th the size of America’s. America’s is the largest in the world; Russia’s is 13th. It has a robust and predatory mafia, endemic and rampant corruption at every level of government, and an oligarchy/kleptocracy that puts vast wealth in the hands of a miniscule minority, the connected, and precious little in the hands of everybody else. It produces little else but oil, military hardware, government bureaucrats, and spies. Putin’s leadership consists of persuading his countrymen that life would be good if they could only return to their chest-thumping ways of old when they strutted on the world stage and enslaved most of Eastern Europe. It also consists of silencing anyone who questions the aims and values of the regime. U.S. allies in Europe, countries we have solemnly promised to defend and who have promised to defend us as members of NATO, are deathly afraid of Russia. And Russia gave a vivid and bloody demonstration of just how justified that fear is by its ruthless theft of Crimea from Ukraine, one of the former Soviet satellites ruled over by the Kremlin with an iron fist.

Russia and its cyber attacks are a very big deal. Those who kiss them off as a minor distraction are flirting with the end of democracy in the United States. Or worse. If Russia, or anyone else, should hack its way into our power grid and/or our financial system? Well, good night and good luck. And let’s be clear: This is not theoretical. It happened. Russia hacked its way into the computer network of the Democratic National Committee. So it has the intention and it has the means. If any Americans worked with them to make that happen, and it certainly appears that some did, that would be the biggest deal of all.

“Republicans’ willingness to accept even national betrayal — that’s what Trump Jr. was willing to undertake, after all — will disgrace the party and its leaders for years, if not permanently. It is a party no longer capable of defending our national interests and Constitution from foreign enemies.” Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post