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Month: August 2017

“This painful story would be utterly unremarkable” by @BloggersRUs

“This painful story would be utterly unremarkable”
by Tom Sullivan

If you are arriving in Atlanta early for Netroots Nation (or leaving late), here’s a little historical side trip if you have a couple of free hours and the rain holds off. Gone With the Wind it’s not. Found on Facebook the other day. I never knew this story.

There is a lengthy New York Times treatment of Melvinia Shields’ history here:

In the annals of American slavery, this painful story would be utterly unremarkable, save for one reason: This union, consummated some two years before the Civil War, represents the origins of a family line that would extend from rural Georgia, to Birmingham, Ala., to Chicago and, finally, to the White House.

UPDATE: Now I don’t know if the monument is still in place or not: Monument honoring Michelle Obama ancestor is vandalized (2013)

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Gearing up for 2018

Gearing up for 2018

by digby

If you would like to contribute to progressive candidates, Blue America’s 2018 slate is up and growing.  (Individual endorsements here.)

If you want to get involved on the the ground, Indivisible is doing some really exciting grassroots work all over the country.  Here’s the latest:

It’s been just seven months since the Indivisible Guide went live and Indivisible groups began to bring it to life, owning their districts and mounting powerful accountability efforts nationwide. Our movement includes a diaspora of thought and backgrounds, bringing together longtime activists with many who are new to politics.

The Indivisible movement has accomplished an extraordinary amount already. Together, we’ve stalled Trump’s legislative agenda and fought off TrumpCare—a bill that was supposed to pass on the first day of Trump’s administration—for nearly seven months. This enduring fight to preserve healthcare for millions of Americans was unthinkable in November in the face of a unified conservative federal government. Our success so far shows the extraordinary potential of constituent power in American democracy.

Congressional lobbying isn’t enough—we also have to win elections. Lobbying members of Congress is one way to achieve the progressive change we seek. But it’s not the only way, and it’s not enough on its own. We have to turn the constituent power of the last several months into electoral power. We have to elect the kind of policymakers who will not only push back on this Administration, but also rebuild our democratic institutions and fight for a boldly progressive future.

For months on the Listening Tour, we’ve been talking to Indivisible groups about how we can help. We want to fight for candidates up and down the ballot who stand indivisible for the people. We want to take back the House and even the Senate. We want to win Governors’ races and state legislatures so that we can turn back the tide of partisan redistricting. We want to look beyond the midterms and build the kind of long-term political power that will reshape American democracy.

To achieve this electoral success, Indivisible groups want a policy platform and tools to see it adopted. We need a bold progressive vision. Not empty slogans. Not corporate campaign tricks. Yes, this means standing against this Administration’s assaults on our values, and it also means articulating what those values are. If they are to achieve this vision, groups tell us they need tools and resources to expand the electorate and to get involved in races up and down the ballot.

So through the Listening Tour and other outreach, we’re working across the Indivisible movement on two major projects:

  • A policy agenda to challenge our leaders and aspirant leaders to share in our vision.
  • Tools and resources to expand the electorate and bring more people—especially those who’ve been underrepresented or disenfranchised—into the political process.

To give you a sense of what this means and what to expect from us, here are some of the things that we’re working on:

Indivisible 435: Building power for the thousands of Indivisible groups in every one of the 435 congressional districts. Our government is what it is today because national campaigns make choices to write off whole swaths of the country as unwinnable, and Tea Party activists have driven the conversation to the right.

Too often, the Democratic Party has accepted rather than resisted this set of conditions, alienating working people and communities of color. The Indivisible movement’s fight against the Trump agenda has shown that there is a powerful progressive movement that reaches every corner of this country, and the special elections we’ve seen so far in 2017 have shown that that movement has the energy to change elections and force candidates to reckon with us.


Indivisible 435 is an extension of that movement energy, supporting and working alongside our local groups to continue owning their constituent power in their turf and pushing the national conversation back to the interest of the people. This program will involve:

  • Electoral tools and resources. One crucial tool that Indivisible groups lack is the voter file, which is absolutely necessary to effectively target outreach to specific households. We’re working on getting Indivisible groups access to the voter file, as well as calling and texting tools that they can use to contact and mobilize voters, independent of any candidate’s campaign.
  • Guidance and training. How do you run a voter registration drive or a canvass? How does your group engage with candidates or make decisions about who to support? How do you run for office yourself? These are just a few of the questions that we’re hearing from groups, and we want to help answer them or connect you with the folks who have the answers.
  • Expanding the electorate. Republicans have invested years in cynical tricks to keep some Americans out of our democracy. We will work with local groups and partner organizations to engage folks who are currently underrepresented in both voter registration and voter turnout. Building an inclusive movement requires our attention to make sure our elections, and our government, belong to everyone.
  • Strategic Targeting: Engaging on key races to reclaim congressional and state power. We’ll identify key congressional, senatorial, and state races where we have strong people power that could make the difference, and where there are opportunities to support emerging progressive leaders. We’ll seek out ways to direct resources and support to local Indivisible groups.
  • Defining our values. We’ll be using feedback from our movement to help publicly define our values and create a platform that guides us. We will always aim to be transparent about our theory of change and our plan to win.
  • Candidate Endorsements. We’ll be supporting our groups in endorsing key progressive leaders and candidates, based on alignment with our platform and other strategic factors.

You’ll start to see some of these tools and resources in the Fall and others in early 2018.

It’s also important to talk about what we’re not going to do. We are not going to act as an arm of the Democratic Party. We believe that vibrant independent progressive groups like the Indivisible movement play a critical role in holding both parties accountable and pushing them to be better. And we don’t think that any politician is entitled to hold on to their seat of power if they’re not representing their constituents and doing everything they can to protect American values and communities.

Our ideas are winning ideas. But we must behave, strategize, invest and vote like we believe in them. This is a critical moment for expanding what is possible for the Indivisible movement. This is not just about winning one or two election cycles, it’s about rising to this historic moment. It’s about recognizing the path that led us here, the path we need to build and the path that will lead us to what is newly possible: a radically inclusive, progressive and bold future led by regular people who are fed up.

Indivisible national is not doing any of this on its own. Every step of the way, we will be standing indivisible with local group leaders to define and implement this electoral strategy. Together, we will add electoral muscle to constituent power. Together, we will win.

August Recess ToolKit: The BudgetBudget

August Recess Toolkit: Upcoming Tax Cuts FightTax Reform

August Recess Toolkit: ImmigrationImmigration

August Recess Health Care Toolkit: Keep TrumpCare DeadHealth Care

Cray-cray o’ the day

by digby

The left hand doesn’t know what the very small right hand is doing:

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley lashed out at leaks of classified information in a Fox News story Tuesday morning on North Korean missiles, saying it is “incredibly dangerous” that it was reported, even after President Trump tweeted out the story. [to his millions of followers]

The story used anonymous sources to report that North Korea loaded anti-ship missiles onto a patrol boat near the coast, something that Haley refused to confirm or comment on because it is “classified information.”

Her comments on “Fox & Friends” bashing the spread of classified information come after Trump retweeted the article that uses anonymous sources, though it is not clear whether she knew he shared the story.

Then this news hit the wire:

Check out what the president tweeted after that news hit the wires:

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I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed …

I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed …

by digby

I’m listening to all the analysts on TV panic that within months North Korea’s ICBM’s and miniaturized nukes will be able to reach New York and Washington.

Sure, they could reach Seoul, Tokyo, Honolulu, Anchorage, Los Angeles, Seattle and San Francisco before that but let’s face it, that may just be a price we have to pay. If they get to the east coast we really have a problem on our hands.

I’m joking. Sort of. It’s monumentally annoying to the rest of the world and the rest of the US that the media nexus of New York and DC reports this story and others as if a threat of nuclear war is only serious if it is possible for it to hit their cities. I’m not saying that anyone should be more alarmist than they already are, but it’s a good illustration of why those of us who don’t live in those two cities sometimes feel as if the news media and the political establishment think they are the center of the universe.

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Maybe there’s more to this election thing than we armchair critics think there is

Maybe there’s more to this election thing than we armchair critics think there is


by digby

This is an important point from Nate Silver:

When Democrats think about their party’s problems on the political map, they tend to think of President Trump’s ability to win the White House despite losing the popular vote and Republicans’ potent efforts to gerrymander congressional districts. But their problems extend beyond the Electoral College and the House: The Senate hasn’t had such a strong pro-GOP bias since the ratification of direct Senate elections in 1913.

Even if Democrats were to win every single 2018 House and Senate race for seats representing places that Hillary Clinton won or that Trump won by less than 3 percentage points — a pretty good midterm by historical standards — they could still fall short of the House majority and lose five Senate seats.

This is partly attributable to the nature of House districts: GOP gerrymandering and Democratic voters’ clustering in urban districts has moved the median House seat well to the right of the nation. Part of it is bad timing. Democrats have been cursed by a terrible Senate map in 2018: They must defend 25 of their 48 seats1 while Republicans must defend just eight of their 52.

But there’s a larger, long-term trend at work too — one that should alarm Democrats preoccupied with the future of Congress and the Supreme Court.

In the last few decades, Democrats have expanded their advantages in California and New York — states with huge urban centers that combined to give Clinton a 6 million vote edge, more than twice her national margin. But those two states elect only 4 percent of the Senate. Meanwhile, Republicans have made huge advances in small rural states — think Arkansas, North and South Dakota, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana and West Virginia — that wield disproportionate power in the upper chamber compared to their populations.

We can quantify the partisan bias of Congress over time by measuring the distance between each national presidential result and each year’s presidential result in the median House and Senate seats. So in 2008, for example, Barack Obama won the popular vote by 7.3 percentage points, but Democrats won the median House seat by 4.4 points — a pro-GOP bias of 2.9 points.

Today, the pro-GOP biases in both chambers are at historic highs:

In 2016, Trump lost the national popular vote by 2.1 percentage points, but Republicans won the median House seat by 3.4 points and the median Senate seat by 3.6 points — that’s the widest Senate gap in at least a century and tied with 2012 for the widest House disparity in the last half-century. That doesn’t mean Democrats can’t win the House and Senate back — they won control of both chambers in 2006 despite a Republican-bias that year, for example — but they’re starting from a truly historic geographic disadvantage, even with the political wind at their back.

Consider: In 1980, there were 18 states where the presidential margin was at least 5 points more Democratic than the national result, 18 states where it was at least 5 points more Republican than the national result and 14 states in between. Hypothetically, over three successive election cycles, all either party needed to do to win a Senate majority was win all 36 of the seats in the friendly states plus at least 15 of the 28 swing-state seats.

Today, Republicans don’t even need to win any “swing states” to win a Senate majority: 52 seats are in states where the 2016 presidential margin was at least 5 percentage points more Republican than the national outcome. By contrast, there are just 28 seats in states where the margin was at least 5 points more Democratic, and only 20 seats in swing states.

The GOP’s current 52-seat majority makes the Senate look tantalizingly competitive. But a look at the map reveals that the Democrats hold far more seats on borrowed time than Republicans do. The GOP doesn’t hold a single Senate seat in those 14 states that are more Democratic-leaning than the country overall. Meanwhile, Democrats hold six seats in the 26 more-Republican-than-average states, and all six are at risk in 2018.

In 2010, when Democrats passed the health care law Republicans are now seeking to repeal, they needed “yes” votes from all 60 of their senators, including 13 from states that then-President Barack Obama had lost in 2008. What did it take for the party to be able to obtain 60 seats? The Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina and a stock market crash, which generated a huge backlash against President George W. Bush and Republicans in 2008.

Today, it would take even more cataclysmic events under GOP rule to propel Democrats to a supermajority over the next six years. (Of course, those events sometimes happen, particularly given a long enough time frame.) Meanwhile, all Republicans would need to obtain 60 seats would be to win every seat in the 30 states that Trump won — no Clinton states needed. That’s a plausible outcome over a few election cycles, thanks to today’s extraordinarily high rates of straight-ticket voting — if the basic contours of the nation’s political geography don’t drastically change in the next decade.

The implications beyond Congress, especially for the Supreme Court, should deeply worry Democrats. Even if there’s a Democrat in the White House in 2021, the Senate majority that is so critical to confirming his or her nominee could be much harder to come by than it has been in decades past.

Democrats have to win landslides and they have to win them in all the right places in order to win a congressional majority and the presidency. They did it in 2006 and 2008, in the wake of a disastrous war and an epic economic meltdown. But the right has to be so discredited that their people stay home in droves and the lefties have to be so motivated by their disgust with the Republicans that they put aside their differences for that to happen.

This is difficult. Not impossible, but difficult.

I’m not sure people have fully grokked just how fully the GOP has been able to tilt the playing field in their favor. They need to. Just blaming “bad messaging” and “bad candidates” is lazy and simplistic. There’s something much more fundamental going on here.

It’s going to be very difficult for Democrats to win in 2018 because of these structural impediments.  And just becoming more aggressively progressive is unlikely to be the panacea that many people erroneously assume it will be. Maybe in the past that wasn’t such a dangerous assumption. We had time to learn and experiment and figure out through trial and error how to progress.
There are a lot of extremist, right wing Republicans in this country and they are spread all over in places where they have an electoral advantage despite the fact that they are fewer in numbers.

Trump and the Republicans have to be stopped. Maybe the Resistance will be enough to do that. But it would be nice if every left of center American recognized just what it’s going to take to get that accomplished, however, and we all put our shoulders to the wheel.

On the other hand, I suppose it’s always comforting to watch Republicans win and then stand around blaming the Democrats for being embarrassing losers.  It’s so familiar.

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Immigrant Song

Immigrant Song

by digby

Joshua Zeitz at Politico Magazine took a look at the history of immigration in the US in light of Trump’s immigration plan:

The United States is currently experiencing a “historic flow of unskilled immigration,” warned Stephen Miller in a bruising news conference last week that saw the White House senior policy adviser harangue a CNN reporter over the famous Emma Lazarus poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty. Miller, who is also the chief wordsmith behind President Donald Trump’s revanchist agenda, speaks with the conviction of a true believer.

Unveiling the administration’s new immigration proposal, Miller suggested a shift in who does, and who doesn’t, earn a coveted green card. “Does the applicant speak English? Can they support themselves and their families financially? Do they have a skill that will add to the U.S. economy? Are they being paid a high wage?”

It’s perfectly reasonable to revisit American immigration policy, which has remained mostly consistent for over 50 years and favors family reunification over skills-based quotas, unlike many other Western countries. But to claim that the current flow of “unskilled” immigrants into the United States is “historic”—or a break from precedent—is to betray history.

The great immigration wave that delivered some 40 million newcomers to the United States between 1830 and 1940 was comprised largely of unskilled workers with minimal English-language proficiency. For every third- or fourth-generation white ethnic family, there is a stunning success story, but in the aggregate, their ancestors experienced little economic mobility in their own lifetimes. Many of them had little interest in even being American; they came to earn money and return home.

The proposed shift to a skills-based system might be good for the country; it might be bad. It’s the prevailing system in Canada and Australia, two countries that aren’t known for their hostility to immigrants. But on one important point, Miller is clearly wrong: Trump’s plan would signal a dramatic break with American history and tradition.

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Americans often think of their history as uniquely providential. But we have always existed in a wider global context. The 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed a seismic economic reordering in which people, capital and ideas flowed within and between national borders. The same forces that drove European and Asian migration to the United States—the rise of commercial agriculture and the attendant trend of land consolidation, industrialization and growing international trade—also generated massive waves of internal migration from rural to urban areas and immigration to magnet countries like Brazil, Britain and Canada. The United States was a major part of a much larger story.

Migration patterns varied widely both between and within countries, but for the most part, immigrants to the United States between 1830 and 1940 hailed from areas undergoing fast economic change. The poorest peasants tended not to embark for America, lacking the financial wherewithal to make the journey. Instead, it was more often the displaced landowner or semi-skilled journeyman or artisan—someone who had already made the intermediary migration from countryside to town, and who had at least a modicum of exposure to small-city life—who made the journey. Studies of Italian immigrants in early 20th-century Rochester, Utica and Kansas City reveal a population of families that owned small homesteads in the old country, rather than day laborers or the very destitute. The same trend was evident in other cities and among other immigrant populations.

Yet if they weren’t the poorest of the poor, most immigrants were not skilled or educated. In San Francisco in the 1880s, Irish immigrants were five times as likely to be unskilled as the city’s broader population. In Detroit, German immigrants were almost twice as likely to be unskilled workers as their native-born neighbors. In Pittsburgh in 1900, fewer than 10 percent of Polish immigrants and just 18 percent of Italian immigrants were skilled workers.

We like to think of America as the kind of place where an unskilled but industrious newcomer can quickly climb the economic ladder. And sometimes it is. But those cases were few and far between a century ago. Most of the country’s first-generation white ethnics arrived as unskilled factory and farm laborers and remained as such in their lifetimes. In Poughkeepsie, three-quarters of Irish immigrants remained unskilled workers until retirement or death. In his famous study of Boston, the historian Stephen Thernstrom found that just 13 percent of working-class residents born in the 1850s—many of them immigrants—clawed their way into the middle class; among those born in the first decade of the twentieth century, only 14 percent. These trends were the norm.

Even the most model of “model minority” groups—Eastern European Jews who arrived in the United States between the 1880s and early 1920s—were principally engaged in the unskilled needle trades or as small business owners. Stereotypes notwithstanding, in the 1940s just 24 percent of Jewish men in New York—first and second generation, alike—claimed a college- or graduate-level education. In 1957, that figure climbed to 28.5 percent, and, by 1970, it was 36.4 percent—well above similar educational achievement levels for Protestants and Catholics, but still far short of a majority. While 75 percent of Jewish men in that decade qualified as “white collar,” most were small business owners; only 14 percent worked in licensed professions like law, medicine or insurance.

In the same way that immigration to the United States was part of a global phenomenon, it was also usually an economic strategy. Leaving aside groups like Eastern and Central European Jews, and the Irish, who had compelling economic and political reasons to make a permanent journey, a large portion of immigrants to the United States were “birds of flight”—temporary residents who came to America to work, stock up money and return home, usually with dreams of buying a farm or shop in their native countries. Over half of all southern Italians came and went. So did 64 percent of Hungarians, 59 percent of Slovaks and 40 percent of Germans.

We think of that generation as different and special, and for those families that took root in the U.S., they were. (Certainly, that’s how I regard my great-grandparents: with reverence for the sacrifices they made so that I could one day write this article.) But most immigrants came here with mixed and often hardheaded intentions. Some came in search of opportunity and a fresh start. Others came to experience political enfranchisement and personal liberty. But most were not starry-eyed dreamers—they were ordinary people trying to do the smart thing for themselves and their families; in an age when America experienced rapid urban and industrial growth, moving to New York, Chicago or San Francisco was simply a logical decision.

Large numbers of early immigrants arrived in the United States without English-language skills. Even among many Irish newcomers in the mid-19th century, Gaelic, not English, was standard. Studies of second-generation Germans in Wisconsin in 1910 found that roughly one-quarter spoke only German. In Chicago in the 1920s, most movie theaters in ethnic neighborhoods deployed subtitles, as large numbers of first-generation residents could not understand English.

“I spoke not a word of English when I started school,” remembered Jerry Della Femina, who later became an advertising executive in Manhattan. “But then why should I have? Italian was spoken at home. I lived in a claustrophobically Italian neighborhood, everyone I knew spoke only Italian, so it was natural that I didn’t know English.” Della Femina grew up in Brooklyn—not in the 1920s, but in the 1940s and 1950s.

So Stephen Miller got that wrong, too.

There’s more at the link.

It’s fine to say that America’s immigrant policy hasn’t always been open door or that there has been plenty of prejudice and discrimination against immigrants in the past. But the Trump administration really is doing something different.

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Circling the wagons

Circling the wagons

by digby

Greg Sargent has an insightful column today about Trump’s feral survival instinct:

Because Trump is undermining our democratic norms and processes in so many ways, it is often easy to focus on each of them in isolation, rather than as part of the same larger story. But, taken together, they point to a possible climax in which Trump, cornered by revelations unearthed by Robert S. Mueller III’s probe and by ongoing media scrutiny, seeks to rally his supporters behind the idea that this outcome represents not the imposition of accountability by functioning institutional safeguards, but rather an effort to steal the election from him — and from them.

[From ‘I need loyalty’ to ‘Witch Hunt’: Trump’s second 100 days, in his words and ours]

On ABC’s “This Week,” Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway yesterday dismissedthe “entire Russia investigation” as a “total fabrication” to “excuse” Hillary Clinton’s loss. This echoed Trump himself, who recently told a rally that the probe is an effort to “cheat” his supporters out of their legitimately elected leadership (i.e., him) with a “fake story” that is “demeaning to our country and demeaning to our Constitution.”

Trump administration officials and senators from both parties on Aug. 6 commented on proposals in the Senate to limit President Trump’s ability to fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. (Video: Bastien Inzaurralde/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

It bears repeating that Mueller’s investigation is looking at how a hostile foreign power may have sabotaged our democracy, and at whether the Trump campaign colluded with it, and at conduct by Trump himself that came after the election: Whether the firing of former FBI Director James B. Comey after a demand for his loyalty was part of a pattern of obstruction of justice. The first of these has been attested to by our intelligence services, and evidence of the second (at least in the form of a willingness to collude) and the third of these has been unearthed by dogged scrutiny by news outlets. It is hardly an accident that Trump continues to cast doubt on the credibility of both those institutions, even as he and his spokespeople continue to cast the entire affair as an effort to reverse the election by illegitimate means.

This threatens damage on multiple levels. By casting the entire Russia story as fiction, Trump seeks to undermine the credibility of efforts to determine how our electoral system might be vulnerable to further attacks, separate and irrespectiveof what is learned about the Trump campaign’s conduct, possibly making it less likely that we secure our system against any such future sabotage.

We don’t know what all the ongoing scrutiny will produce in the way of revelations. But if it does produce any serious wrongdoing by Trump and/or his campaign — or even evidence of serious misconduct that is not criminal — it’s not difficult to imagine what might happen next. Trump’s advisers regularly tell us he will cooperate with Mueller’s probe and play down the possibility of any effort to remove the special counsel. But Trump has confirmed that he is furious with his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for failing to protect him from the Russia investigation. That Trump confirmed thispublicly only further underscores that he has zero sense of any obligation to the public to follow any rules of conduct, and plainly views any efforts to hold him accountable to those rules as illegitimate.

Conservative writer Matt Lewis floats a scenario in which Mueller, under pressure to produce results, slips into prosecutorial overreach, giving Trump voters legitimate reasons to feel that the presidency is being stolen from them. It is fair to worry about such an outcome, and we must remember that we are far from knowing the full truth about what happened in 2016. But it’s also easy to envision the flip side: Trump demagoguing his supporters into a frenzy of rage, at rallies that are exactly like the ones we’ve seen in recent days, in the face of legitimate revelations.

To be sure, there are new signs that Republicans in Congress are taking steps to set up safeguards, should Trump try to remove Mueller. There is reassuring evidence that our institutions are holding — for now, anyway — and as Brian Beutler notes, it’s likely that more future revelations about Trump’s unfitness for the presidency will further undercut his efforts to cast institutions holding him accountable as illegitimate. But Trump is already giving every indication that he will go all out in trying. And how much damage that will cause is anyone’s guess.

Yeah. I don’t think he’ll get any wiser. And neither will his hardcore followers.  I hesitate to even imagine what some of them might do if they believe that he’s being forced out.

If the NRA has anything to do with it, there will certainly be some reaction.

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Climate Change Report Predictions by tristero

Climate Change Report Predictions 

by tristero

The New York Times has obtained a not-yet-public climate change report that, of course, contradicts the blithering ignorance of Donald Trump and his minions. There are several possible outcomes:

1. Trump will release the report and the media will fall all over itself praising him for acting like a president. Part 1: Very unlikely. Part 2: Definitely.

2. The report will be suppressed and never see the light of day. The report’s findings will be ignored. Part 1: Very likely. Part 2: Definitely.

3. The Times will release the report after Trump refuses to. The Times will be sued out of business by the Trump administration. The report’s findings will be ignored. Part 1: Very likely. Part 2: Likely. Part 3: Definitely.

4. Recognizing that the fate of the planet literally hangs in the balance, there will be a worldwide protests demanding the release of the report, and increasing civil unrest in the US. Bowing to the will of the people, the Trump administration will release the report and embrace its findings. Part 1: You’re kidding, right? Part 2: Now I know you’re kidding.

5. We’re fucking doomed because the American government is run by insane idiots. A foregone conclusion.

Here’s hoping that I am proven completely, thoroughly, and hilariously wrong.

Fighting over crumbs by @BloggersRUs

Fighting over crumbs
by Tom Sullivan

Startup billionaire Nick Hanuer published a 2014 open letter of warning addressed to “My Fellow Zillionaires.” Hanauer wrote:

But let’s speak frankly to each other. I’m not the smartest guy you’ve ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I’m not technical at all—I can’t write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now?

I see pitchforks.

At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country—the 99.99 percent—is lagging far behind. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent.

In essence, Hanauer’s intuition tells him if these trends don’t change a revolution is coming (in some form). They come gradually, and then suddenly.

What’s tricked downward since the Reagan era have been prospects for paycheck workers in this country. What’s trickled up are the anxieties of barely staying afloat in an economy that caters to the wealthy and corporations. It is the “middle class squeeze” Elizabeth Warren described a decade ago.

David Leonhardt provides an eye-popping graph in this morning’s New York Times that illustrates what we already know. After seeing a chart from Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman (above), Leonhardt asked them to produce one to illustrate the shift in income distribution from 1980 to 2014. The animated gif is more stunning than their chart above:

The message is straightforward. Only a few decades ago, the middle class and the poor weren’t just receiving healthy raises. Their take-home pay was rising even more rapidly, in percentage terms, than the pay of the rich.

The post-inflation, after-tax raises that were typical for the middle class during the pre-1980 period — about 2 percent a year — translate into rapid gains in living standards. At that rate, a household’s income almost doubles every 34 years. (The economists used 34-year windows to stay consistent with their original chart, which covered 1980 through 2014.)

In recent decades, by contrast, only very affluent families — those in roughly the top 1/40th of the income distribution — have received such large raises. Yes, the upper-middle class has done better than the middle class or the poor, but the huge gaps are between the super-rich and everyone else.

“Actually, there’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years, and my class has won,” Warren Buffett told CNN in 2011. He made a splash for his truth-telling and upset members of his own class for giving away the game, but little has changed. Democrats as a national party may be belatedly getting a clue, but they have yet to act on it. The reason they have no power to is their own tardiness.

Meanwhile, the conservative media conditions the distractable masses to fight each other — as our friend Billabong yesterday — over which of their fellow mice deserve crumbs and which don’t.

But, I’m sorry. Like Buffett and Hanauer, we are not supposed to admit there is a growing class problem in this country, much less engage in the gauche politics of class warfare. In America, the class problem we don’t have is like the race problem we don’t have.

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