Month: August 2017

WHITE RAGE IS NO FIX FOR DEEP PROBLEMS OF THE WORKING CLASS

The angry white power movement that helped propel Donald Trump’s ascendancy from provocateur to president rests on one truth and two lies. The truth is that the so-called forgotten and downtrodden middle class really has been seriously harmed and ignored. These are the lies: its travail was caused by non-whites, and Trump will make everything better.

Over the past decade, the “American Dream” that many of us grew up on has faded slowly into oblivion. Gone is the social compact by which hard work – with or without a college degree – delivered the good life, complete with home ownership, medical insurance, a retirement plan, and a spouse able to stay home to raise the kids and manage the household. There is a trove of economic data that paints a dismally bleak picture for middle America. Real wages keep falling. Good jobs are disappearing. Hope has morphed into anger.

Of course, this dream was always a white thing, at least in terms of attainability. Statistically, far more Caucasians got there than racial minorities, or women not married to a man. That explains the results of a recent poll that showed white men are far more angry about their economic plight than blacks, Hispanics, Latinos or women of any race. This, despite the fact that women and minorities are still at an economic disadvantage compared to white males. The idyllic middle-class life was built with decent paychecks issued mainly to guys who were white. When the jobs fueling this lifestyle started to disappear, the dream faded, leaving a thick residue of anger in its wake.

And along came Trump, the pied piper for angry white men. He wowed them with a simple two-note tune: America is overrun by people who don’t look like us; and, we need to bring back all the good jobs we lost. Here he is, waxing polemically with one-eighth of a run-on sentence during the campaign: “We’re going to bring back our jobs, and we’re going to save our jobs, and people are going to have great jobs again. . .” Unsurprisingly, he won the votes of white males without a college degree by a margin of 49 percentage points. And it’s been a love-and-anger fest ever since.

Those white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville may have been on the fringes of this movement, but they voiced the fears of many in their demographic by chanting, “You will not replace us.” In 1980, whites were 80% of the U.S. population. They are now at 63%, heading to under 50% by 2043. Of course, there is not a scintilla of economic evidence linking white economic malaise to an increase in diversity. But anger always breathes better with a bogeyman, particularly in authoritarian politics.

Still, Trump was on to something that most politicians ignored. The middle class’ economic pain was much more than aftershocks of the Great Recession. The lost jobs aren’t coming back. We are in the throes of a massive structural change, marked by an obscene income disparity, and a growing inability of ordinary folks to support themselves. The situation has gotten so bad that, for the first time in decades, the life expectancy of middle aged white Americans has started to drop. Earlier this year, Princeton University researchers attributed the trend to what they called “deaths of despair”. They identified four causes: stress of economic struggles, suicides, alcohol and drug overdoses.

Unfortunately for Trump’s base – and the rest of America – anger alone will not restore middle class vitality and viability, particularly misplaced anger. Nonwhites, whose economic woes are far worse than those of their Caucasian counterparts, are not to blame. Neither are trade agreements or globalization. Sure, NAFTA wreaked some havoc on our jobs, but that was more than 20 years ago. Most of that work is now performed by robots or other nonhuman technological processes.

Two Ball State professors examined manufacturing job losses between 2000 and 2010. They found that 13% were lost due to trade agreements and 87% through automation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the high-paying manufacturing sector accounted for 34.4% of the country’s jobs in 2000, but only 8.7% in 2015. Despite the dramatic loss of manufacturing jobs, productivity has remained relatively constant. That’s because more stuff gets made with fewer workers. The Brookings Institute says it now takes only six workers to generate $1 million in manufacturing output. The same level in 1980 would have taken 25 workers.

Simply put, the problem facing America’s working class is pervasive and systemic. The inertia of uncontrolled technology is redefining the world of work, and eliminating millions of good jobs. Tragically, nobody is doing anything about it. Plenty of people are thinking about it – economists, academicians, think tanks. Fixes like massive worker retraining, job creation, technology regulation and a guaranteed annual income are out there. But they haven’t gone beyond the pondering stage because most of our elected office holders have lacked the courage to seriously tackle this issue.

And that gave Trump an opening. Long fueled by anger himself, the Donald opportunistically saw what others wouldn’t: millions of outraged and forgotten people, fed up with negative balances and surrounded by folks who weren’t like them. Nobody seemed to give a damn about their plight. Then along came the star of “The Apprentice”, every bit as worked up, bitter and belligerent toward the ruling class as they were. Why wouldn’t they drink the Kool Aid?

Meanwhile, deaths of despair are now baked into the American Dream. Trump’s promise to bring all the great jobs back was nothing more than slick Willy Loman bravado. However, there is still time to rewrite the next act of this play. Are you listening, Democrats? It’s time to fill the Republican void with a smart, effective, Ted Kennedy-like program that will save the middle class. Mocking Trump’s failures is not sufficient. What we need is a sound legislative plan, an all-out campaign to replace despair with hope.

TRUMP ECLIPSES THE SUN & MOON IN SEARCH OF NAZI LOVE

Forget the eclipse. The biggest astronomical event of the past 10 days has been nothing short of a spectacular, once-in-a-lifetime sighting of presidential time travel. Some 72 years after this country and its allies defeated Hitler’s fascism, Donald Trump saddled up to the neo-Nazis. And, 152 years after Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army surrendered at the Appomattox Court House, effectively ending the Civil War, our president embraced and saluted those who fought to preserve slavery – past and present.

For us aging boomers, this has been a time warp from hell. We grew up with daily news of murdered civil rights workers and KKK lynchings, of frightened black children escorted by armed troops into previously all-white schools. We remember the pain, the fear, the hate. We also remember the powerful forces for change: Martin Luther King, Malcom X, Stokely Carmichael, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Very slowly, things got better. Bigotry never disappeared, but it seemed to move off center stage, and into the fringes and dark reaches of a netherworld most of us rarely saw.

Yet, there they were, more than a half century later, hundreds of them, all white and mostly male, marching through the streets of Charlottesville, waving Confederate flags and Swastikas, shouting vile chants against Jews, blacks, gays and immigrants. It was a convention of wickedness: the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, the so-called “alt-right” and white nationalists, all united in a common bond of white supremacy. Once confined to whispering their bigoted messages through code words and dog whistles, Trump’s election unleashed these hate mongers from their caves and ushered them into the daylight of a world unprepared for a relitigation of basic human rights, dignity and decency.

It was a rare moment of totally unambiguous moral clarity. The bigots represent an evil world view, long ago dismissed as despicable by decent people everywhere. A high school student council president could have easily delivered that message. Donald Trump, however, neither could, would, nor did. Those marchers are part of his cherished base, and he spent days entangled in linguistic gymnastics, trying desperately not to lose the love of those who hate.

It was a huge turning point in this presidency. Trump has always been obsessed with branding, from luxurious high-rise condos, to wine, steaks, neck ties and bottled water. Let the history books note, with unequivocal clarity, that the Trump brand now stands for neo-Nazism, the KKK and white supremacy. Unlike all of the other political issues he has botched with his utter incompetence, petulance and arrogance, this one has legs. The president’s post-Charlottesville moment called for a simple, clear-cut, binary, which-side-are-you-on choice. Trump picked the wrong side. He will forever be the president who brought the Nazis, the Confederacy, and the KKK back from the dustbin of history. He will spend the rest of his life paying for that decision. Rest assured, it will be part of his obituary.

In fact, the ramifications of the president’s moral weakness and waffling have been mounting daily. For example:

• News magazines – in the U.S. and Europe – produced covers showing Trump in either a Nazi salute or some version of a KKK hood.

• Republican officials at every level have repudiated the President’s handling of the Charlottesville march, including at least 23 members of Congress and eight current or former GOP governors.

• So many major business leaders resigned from two presidential commissions over Trump’s remarks that he was forced to abolish both groups.

• All 16 members of the President’s Committee of the Arts and Humanities resigned, telling him: “Reproach and censure in the strongest possible terms are necessary following your support of the hate groups and terrorists who killed and injured fellow Americans in Charlottesville.”

• More than 15 large charities have canceled scheduled fundraising events at Trump’s Mar-a-Largo Club in Florida, all concerned with losing major donors as a result of Trump’s embrace of the hate groups.

• For the first time since the Kennedy Center Honors program started in 1978, neither the president nor first lady will attend, nor will there be a pre-show reception at the White House. That move was made after some of the honorees talked of boycotting the event because of Trump’s recent comments.

Of course, the country has been sharply divided over Trump since election day. Some saw him as the only hope for a very sick system. Others saw him as an emblem that went to the very heart of that sickness. Both sides made credible points. Workers and the middle class have been losing ground for decades, and their needs have been ignored by too many politicians – from both parties. One view had it that only an outsider like Trump could turn that around. The counterpoint: Trump was way too self-absorbed, inexperienced and rich to successfully navigate a meaningful redistribution of wealth. Or so the arguments went.

Charlottesville totally changed the game board. It removed all of the gray, leaving behind only black and white. As the late, great Pete Seeger sang, “Which Side Are You On?” There are no nice Nazis, vintage or neo. There are no good Ku Klux Klansmen. White supremacists spewing hatred toward Jews, blacks, gays and immigrants are worthy of nothing but our deepest scorn. What they represent is, simply and purely, evil. That’s one side. The other side, filled with olive branches for hateful hooligans bearing Swastikas, is the one that Donald Trump chose. That choice tarnished the White House so badly that repair can only come from a new occupant. Until that happens, more than a century of human rights’ gains hangs in the balance. Seeger’s question has never been so easy to answer. Choosing a side right now means moving forward or backward. It’s the difference between right and wrong.

FUELING FIRE & FURY: HOW TRUMP SPENT HIS SUMMER VACATION

It’s too early to tell for sure, but a former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard might have seriously messed with Donald Trump’s concept of what it means to win. More on that later, after a recap of the president’s winning ways of threatening nuclear annihilation.

A few days ago, I suggested in this space that President Trump, as a result of his inability to grasp the difference between a strategy and a tactic, had become the embodiment of what losing looks like. So, why doesn’t he do a course correction, or, in the parlance of organizational change, order a reset? The answer is simple: he is absolutely convinced that he is winning. A win to the Donald is any day that he can see himself as the most important and powerful man in the universe, the only person capable of solving the world’s problems through the sheer force of his strength and will. That, and the adulation of his base through constant public attention, is what winning is all about to this president.

Take nuclear war, for example, which Trump has latched onto like an obsessed teen with a new video game. Military expert Herman Kahn introduced us to the treacherous and dystopian world of nuclear bombast with a 1962 book called “Thinking about the Unthinkable”. Every U.S. president since then has spoken of nuclear devastation in measured and carefully chosen words. Not Trump. Nothing unthinkable to him about the prospect of obliterating millions of people.

With almost manic glee, he warned that North Korea will be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Two days later, he became the first world leader to threaten war on Twitter, warning North Korea that the U.S. is now “locked and loaded”. Predictably, most sober-thinking adults in Congress were stunned and chagrined by the presidential war mongering. So were most heads of state, including our allies. North Korea responded with a threat to fire missiles at the U.S. territory of Guam, saying, “Sound dialogue is not possible with such a guy bereft of reason (Trump) and only absolute force can work on him.”

As Armageddon anxiety set in, Trump basked in his own glory. He was, after all, winning. At least in his own head, the only venue that matters to him. He argued that millions of Americans are cheering him for his tough North Korea talk. “It’s about time that somebody stuck up for the people of this country,” he told reporters last week.

While North Korea readies its rockets for Guam’s shoreline, the island’s governor, Eddie Baza Calvo, used the right passwords to secure a soulful telephone exchange with Trump. “Mr. President, . . .” Calvo said in opening Saturday’s phone chat, “I have never felt more safe or so confident, with you at the helm.” It was another winning moment for the commander in chief, who quickly agreed with the governor. “You seem like a hell of a guy,” Trump said. “They should have had me (as president) eight years ago.” Despite the fact that that Guam’s existential fate rests in the hands of two would-be nuclear bombers, who together lack anything resembling a full deck, Trump had good news for the governor: “Eddie,” he said, “I have to tell you, you’ve become extremely famous. All over the world, they’re talking about Guam . . . your tourism, you’re going to go up like tenfold with the expenditure of no money. I congratulate you.”

That pretty much captures Donald J. Trump’s life story: get the name out there any way you can, build the brand, then monetize it. To our president, nuclear war is just another profit center. His tough talk is drawing attention, and that keeps his juices flowing. Trump reportedly spends hours a day glued to television news. For an attention addict, cable news is the fix that never ends. According to the Washington Post, the three top cable news networks rarely cover any subject other than Trump during prime-time hours. For this president, Trump-All-The-Time is winning.

But wait, David Duke and his fellow neo-Nazis may have inadvertently punctured the contours of the Donald’s delusional winning loop. Duke, the former KKK wizard, and hundreds of angry white supremacists violently took to the streets in Charlottesville, VA on Saturday. Remember those poor forgotten white guys Trump championed on the way to the White House? The Charlottesville disaster was all about them. One person was killed and 19 others were injured. While political leaders of every stripe immediately decried the protest’s bigotry and racism, Trump, the Twitter insult king, was at a loss for words to describe the repugnant evil of white power nuts, many wearing Trump’s Make-America-Great-Again caps, staging a violent rampage on Virginia streets.

For the first time in his life, Trump tweeted with delicately selected words. He condemned violence generally, but avoided specific criticism of his own supporters, that shrinking base that keeps him “winning” by cheering his tough rhetoric. Even his stilted messaging drew this Twitter response from former Imperial Wizard Duke: “I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency. . .” One neo-Nazi web site praised the president for his reaction to the Charlottesville riot: “Trump comments were good. He didn’t attack us. . .No condemnation at all. When asked to condemn, he just walked out of the room. Really, really good.”

This must leave the president highly confused. He rains down insults on his own party’s congressional leaders. He uses graphic imagery to threaten a nuclear holocaust. And he believes he is winning because his base cheers his toughness. But now, part of that base – sheet-wearing bigots and red-caped goons – have slithered out from behind their rocks in answering Trump’s clarion call to make America white again. A stunned and saddened nation looks at pictures of Charlottesville’s death and destruction, waiting for their president to renounce these domestic terrorists. But how does a man renounce part of himself, part of what he created? If he does, who will cheer for his madness? And without their cheers, what becomes of his winning? Forget nuclear war. For Donald Trump, this is the new “Thinking about the Unthinkable”.

TRUMP’S GUIDE TO LEADERSHIP: THE ART OF THE HEEL

Donald The Swamp Drainer is now fully enmeshed in the morass of governance, but none of the ensuing noise and chaos has led to a single dollop of drainage. If this guy has anything even remotely resembling a strategy, on any issue, it has to be the best kept secret in Washington. All we’ve seen in the first 200 days of this presidency is a bizarre jumble of impulsive, sophomoric tactics that have done absolutely nothing to advance his agenda.

A theory emerged during the 2016 campaign that, instead of being loony, Trump was a brilliant four-dimensional chess player, always strategizing multiple moves ahead of his opponents. The concept has the same level of evidentiary support as the flat earth and faked moon landing propositions. Take a quick look at the Donald’s recent chessboard navigation.

Trump:

• Publicly threatened a number of Republican senators with various forms of retaliation if they didn’t vote to repeal Obamacare. Not surprisingly, Trump didn’t win their votes and the bill went down in flames. Senators’ job security rests with voters in their home state. Caving in to a public threat is not an image that curries favor with the electorate.

• Said the Senate healthcare vote made Republican leaders “look like fools” and promised to stop funding the lawmakers’ own medical insurance if they didn’t cancel their August recess and try again to repeal Obamacare. The Senate recessed and left town within 48 hours of the president’s threat and name-calling.

• Announced suddenly via Twitter that transgender people will no longer be allowed to serve in the armed forces. This was supposedly a Trump “strategy” to end a squabble over whether the military should pay for trans-related medical costs. That disagreement, which reportedly was well on its way to resolution, is holding up a spending bill that includes funds for Trump’s Mexican wall. Paralysis quickly ensued from the president’s transgender ban tweet, and nothing has moved since – on either the ban or the wall.

• Attacked, loudly and repeatedly, the Russian sanctions imposed by the Obama administration for Moscow’s interference in last year’s election. Congress, controlled by Trump’s own party, responded by passing veto-proof legislation enhancing the sanctions and specifically prohibiting the president from altering them.

• Ridiculed and demeaned his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, in an attempt to get him to resign so he could replace him with someone who would either control or fire Robert Mueller III, the special counsel investigating possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russia’s election tampering. Sessions refused to resign. The Senate initiated a parliamentary maneuver that prevents Trump from making a recess appointment during the current congressional break. There is also a bipartisan push for legislation that would allow Mueller’s removal only on approval of a federal judge.

Every day – every tweet – brings more examples. There isn’t a single strategy to be found in Trump’s arsenal, only a limited repertoire of tired, angry, bullying tactics, the same kind of shtick he used to throw at Rosie O’Donnell and Cher. A very prophetic 5th century BC military strategist, Sun Tzu, wrote, “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Trump likes to announce phony victories – initial passage of healthcare in the House, release of his own budget that has gone nowhere, etc. – with the phrase, “This is what winning looks like.” Well, Mr. President, right now, this is what losing looks like: all tactics and no strategy; the noise before defeat.

I came across Sun Tzu’s wisdom early in my career as a union negotiator. I had just verbally pulverized an opponent at the bargaining table. I had done my research and really had the goods on this guy. I let everything fly, humiliating and embarrassing him in front of his peers. Before I could take a bow, my mentor whispered into my ear, “Now what? You just destroyed him, but how is that going to help us reach a contract settlement?” That’s when I first read Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War”. My insults were an empty tactic, totally lacking any strategic connection to the goal of negotiating a decent agreement. That painful memory came rushing back yesterday, after it was reported that the president warned his unhinged North Korean counterpart that “threats will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” So, now what? What’s the next move on the road to world peace?

And so it goes with Trump. He knows no art of the deal when it comes to leading our country. Other than the late Don Rickles, nobody has ever achieved success by lobbing insults at people. Yes, the president’s hard core base loves it. They adore Trump for his anger, and his total disregard for civility and respect in dealing with the swamp dwellers. They cheer him for it at his rallies, and then chant, “lock her up,” and other golden oldies. Some of them will stay with their angry guy all the way to the end, even if the swamp is never drained. To them, Trump is like a country-western crooner, singing the same old sad songs that somehow make them feel better, even though their lives are no less wretched when the concert ends.

Yet, polls show that Trump’s ineffectiveness in enacting his promised swamp drain is bringing his numbers down in every category, including his treasured demographic of white men without a college education. The New York Times reported Sunday that many key Republicans are already maneuvering for the 2020 presidential election with the belief that Trump will not be the party’s candidate. Regardless of what happens three years from now, it’s hard to see how this president can hope to successfully govern with no strategy beyond a string of angry tweets. A devoted and enraged base, in the low 20% range, screaming “fake news” at an occasional rally, is neither a strategy nor a mandate to govern.

A COLLEGE GROUP FOR TRUMP TO BOND WITH: RAPISTS

If you are a male college student accused of sexual assault, your good bro, Donald Trump, has your back. Yes, this administration seems to have finally found itself a friendly constituency in academia. For those poor partying frat boys, forced to parse the word “consent” in the middle of an all-night kegger, help is on the way.

Remember how President Obama took on the issue of campus rape? Disgusted to learn that one in five female college students had been sexually assaulted, the former president made the subject a keystone of his domestic agenda. He ordered the Department of Education to launch investigations into the way schools were dealing with the problem. Under threat of losing federal funds, those institutions became far more aggressive in handling sexual assault complaints. All that is about to change.

Enter Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her recently appointed leader of the department’s Office for Civil Rights, Candice Jackson. They are on a mission to roll back many of the Obama era policies designed to make campuses safer for female students. The duo spent time last week hearing from alleged sexual assault perpetrators, who insisted they did absolutely nothing to justify their expulsion. DeVos and Jackson also met with representatives of a white male advocacy group called the National Coalition For Men. The NCFM believes there is a huge problem of women lying about being raped by men.

Although Jackson, head of the Education Department’s civil rights office, is herself a rape survivor, the men’s rights lobby couldn’t have found a more kindred spirit. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Jackson dismissed the complaints of more than a dozen women accusing Trump of sexual assault or unwanted advances, calling them “fake victims”. She was equally dismissive of rape complaints from women college students, saying that “90% (of the accusations) fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up and six months later. . .she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right.’”

DeVos agrees with Jackson that the pendulum has swung way too far in favor of the accusers. They want to reverse course. The Education Department has jurisdiction because Title IX of the Civil Rights Act prohibits sex discrimination at any school receiving federal funds. Under the Obama administration, the department issued 19 pages of guidelines for colleges to use in investigating sexual assault and harassment charges. It also warned the schools that their failure to comply could result in a loss of federal funding. Under the Obama guidelines, schools were urged to use a “preponderance of the evidence” test in adjudicating sexual misconduct complaints. It’s the same standard of proof used in most civil litigation. Basically, it means the party with the strongest evidence prevails.

The men’s rights advocates, however, insist that students should never be expelled and have their lives ruined by what they regard as a low standard of proof. Their solution is for colleges to turn sexual assault complaints over to the criminal justice system and take no independent action. It’s an absurd suggestion. First of all, this is not an either-or situation. A student who is raped can – and should – file complaints with both the school and the police. They are separate systems, with different interests and outcomes. To get a rape conviction in court, the state needs to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Such a high standard of proof is justified on the basis that the government is seeking to take the defendant’s liberty away. It’s a different story when it comes to colleges and universities trying to maintain a safe learning environment. Schools routinely expel students if the weight – or “preponderance” – of the evidence shows they committed, say, plagiarism. Do we really want to treat sexual assault as a less egregious campus offense than copying a term paper from Wikipedia?

The ugly truth here is that a rape culture reigns supreme on many campuses, fostering the unfortunate belief that sex-while-intoxicated inherently implies consent. It does not. But many prosecutors shy away from taking such cases before a jury. A he-said-she-said prosecution, laced with an alcoholic haze, is often a tough sell for a jury. All the more reason for colleges to expel students when the weight of the evidence – a bar lower than that of a criminal court – shows that they engaged in inappropriate sexual conduct. Otherwise, a decision not to prosecute means the accused attacker remains on campus.

We have always used dual tracks in dealing with actions that may violate the rules of a workplace or university, as well as the law. And the levels of proof have always been different. We have this unalienable right to liberty, and it can be taken away only upon the highest standard of proof. The right to hold a job or attend a specific school is not so unalienable, and while nobody should be fired or expelled without proof of wrongdoing, the test for that proof is not necessarily the same as that used in a criminal court. A student caught selling drugs on campus, or stealing equipment from the biology lab, is likely to be kicked out of school, regardless of whatever criminal action may be taken. Sexual assault should be treated no differently.

Yet, the men’s rights lobby is pushing a seemingly receptive Trump administration to tell colleges to take no disciplinary action for sexual misconduct until, and unless, there has been a criminal conviction. That might play well for Trump’s base of supposedly forgotten, angry and trod-upon white men. It is nothing short of a nightmare for any student looking for a safe place to learn.