Tuesday, December 13, 2016

PICKING A PATH THROUGH A CABINET OF HORRORS

By Dominique Paul Noth

Exxon boss Rex Tillerson, whose
 company runs its own international games,
 may start out in this government
  as Secretary of State.
The Nation, a formidable and lively magazine of the left, has flatly suggested that all Trump cabinet nominations should be fought ferociously. I respect the sentiment but don’t agree (though it seems Trump is going out of his way to dissolve every  gain if not the federal  agency itself). But his opponents must keep their heads as he is losing his.

Picking the fights – and there will be many fights on many fronts –  remains both important and selective. It will also require a  focus that has often eluded the Democrats. “I’m not a member of an organized political party – I’m a Democrat,” Will Rogers famously joked nearly a hundred years ago, and it still feels  true.  Democrats’ strength and weakness? They love to talk themselves around, into and out of things before settling on a course of action. 

Trump foes will need more aggressiveness today dealing with an unsavory and unpredictable celebrity apprentice who seems to have little concern about some essential directions set in the last 30 years.

Despite impending lawsuits for violating campaign finance laws, Trump intends to wrap the mantle of the America electorate around him at every opportunity, even inflating the size of his victory – he won, get over it – even  denying the Russian cyber  invasion and defying the courts to make him give up his global  business interests. It’s foolish to expect him to crash quickly or his voters to quickly admit to his errors – or to theirs. The country will likely crash before he does.

Citizens will need abnormal energy to oppose Trump’s cabinet of fossil fuel fanatics.  People right now are succumbing to the holiday spirit – goodwill toward men, Holly Jolly Christmas  – rather than girding up for the many combats ahead.  Even his foes can’t always tell what is in imminent danger from a whimful  president elect.

Some of his cabinet selections may act as a brake.  I’m pretty sure Trump  picked a retired Marine general for Secretary of Defense because he liked his nickname – Mad Dog. But if you examine the career and quotability of James Mattis, he might actually serve as a mollifying influence.  Another retired Marine general, hawkish Jack Kelly, has been tapped for Homeland Affairs but actually has experience in several of the crucial areas of a too immense department.

The horror began with two appointments that Congress has nothing to say about – no Senate advise and consent.  They include yet another retired general – didn’t Trump once proclaim he knew more than the generals? – as national security adviser, Mike Flynn, whose closeness to Russia and crazy tweets have led fellow military experts to label him near  demented.

Then there is senior advisor Steve Bannon, in a struggle with more centrist Republicans for Trump’s alt-right soul. Bannon seems the power behind Trump’s virulent backhand, a guy willing to take on Kellogg because of a trade remark and the  pulling of ads from his beloved Breitbart.  Bannon is much like Trump -- only they are allowed to Snap, Crackle and Pop.

It’s not just that anti-Obamas infest his cabinet, it’s the way Trump does it. A day after he meets with Al Gore and is quoted as being open to discuss environmental issues seriously, he turns around and appoints an outrageous thorn in the Environmental Protection  Agency’s side to be its new head.

Scott Pruitt is not only a climate change denier, he has sued the EPA to roll back orders affecting his cherished Oklahoma oil companies, whose executives  actually wrote some of his complaining letters. 

Another feint involved the Secretary of State position where respectable names such as Mitt Romney and  foreign affairs specialist Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) were trotted out and pumped up over self-promoting Rudy Giuliani (Hangers-on ego is a definite no-no in the Trump world; only he and Bannon are glorifiers in chief; Rudy should have kept his nose out of these reindeer games). 

After toying with Romney,  Trump hosed him. He chose for State the head of Exxon Mobil, Rex Tillerson, another oil giant with close business ties to Russia. In fact, many fear the Senate will let slide a CEO whose company’s policies have frequently been at war with America’s interests.

Tillerson is a rarity in this cabinet. He thinks climate change is real.  But he embodies a jaded GOP theory: Businessmen --   who  expend their talents exploiting animal and mineral resources and  making deals for corporation profits --  will turn on a dime and put  all that life experience aside for  public service.  A George Schultz who can leave business and succeed in government is a rarity, yet amazing how people still believe that myth.

Tillerson might become  the cutting edge of fights during the confirmation hearings. Fury is building among cold war veterans in the Senate  who fear this Rex is too cozy with the machinations of that  Machiavellian czar (Putin). Tillerson has negotiated massive Exxon deals in Russia and nearly 50 other countries, many to the advantage of Exxon but not US commitments. He’s yet another notch in seeing Trump as the fossil fuel president.

Another big fight probably won’t happen.  Thirty years ago, Jeff  Session couldn’t muster enough Senate votes to be appointed  judge and he has dodged claims of racism all his life. But this forceful denier of climate change --  and even of bills to enhance legal immigration -- has now made chums in the Senate as well as Alabama. Fighting his elevation to Attorney General would be all uphill – and take place even before Trump is inaugurated. The new minority leader, Sen. Chuck Schumer, has other challenges to test his boxing skills. 

After Trump railed about Wall Street greed  during his campaign, his Treasury Secretary nominee is  Steve Mnuchin,  a former Goldman Sachs banker and hedge fund operator  whose California bank foreclosed on 38,000 homeowner victims of  the housing crash.

He heads a Trump staff  noted for billionaires who hardly ever shared their wealth with people lower on the scale. The billionaire nominee for Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, owned the  Sago Mine in West Virginia when 12 workers were killed in a 2006 explosion (three years later he closed the mine), raising memories of Trump’s promise to keep coal alive.

Coal maybe; its miners not so much. 

If Trump wanted to nominate a nightmare for the working man,
 he found one in Andrew Puzder.
The Labor Department has a strong record of accusing Hardees and Carl Jr. of violating minimum wage and overtime rules, but now that CEO, Andrew Puzder, is nominee for Labor Secretary. He’s also a leading opponent of the $15 minimum wage and has openly longed for the day when robots can make his burgers, replacing humans who fight back on age, wage and sex discrimination. Compared to Trump he is squishy on immigrants because he loves the chance at ever cheaper labor.

The outrage of this  choice may well galvanize organized labor in new ways. Unions don’t fear robotics as much as heartless bosses. Unions can now argue that working men and women should not look at joining because of what the union can do for them now – which has diminished in many states as well as Wisconsin --  but on why solidarity and modernized tactics will be the mobilization force of the future.  So far the only successful putdown of Trump tweets has come from a union leader at Carrier who bluntly corrected his facts.

Orthopedic doctor and House member, Tom Price
 clearly wants to break the bones of
 Obamacare at HHS.
Some observers think it will be nigh impossible to gut the essentials of Obamacare even if it is now called Trump care. The Donald has indicated several things he likes that require some kind of continuing federal mandate. But look at who he is nominating for HHS Secretary – Rep. Tom Price who has led that House charge against the Affordable Care Act and wants to privatize that law and Medicare. A new group of doctors has formed to protest how backwards is this choice.  

A likely unchallengeable choice is imminent for Secretary of the Interior, an agency that handles the  National Parks Service, the Bureau of Land Management,  the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the US Geological Survey, all of which can’t function well without investigating climate. His nominee is  Montana’s lone congressman, Rep. Ryan Zinke, a westerner in a state where the federal government has enormous holdings.  A former Navy SEAL,  Zinke has put clean air and water as his top priorities.  

Even if Zinke were someone to fear,  like Price,  it would be a case of getting Congress to oppose one of its own, which doesn’t often happen.  

After admitting he was unprepared,
Ben Carson is picked for HUD
There’s no way to justify the choice of Ben Carson to head Housing and Urban Development unless you also think the pyramids were built to store grain.  Carson originally made points for sanity  by admitting he had no expertise to be part of Trump’s cabinet.  But now he wants in, putting fair housing and block grant issues under his thumb, a notoriously uneasy thumb outside an operating room. 

The whole administration is looking like the Peter Principle in action.

Ignorance is no barrier to joining this cabinet. Former Texas governor Rick Perry became a laughing stock in 2012 debates when he couldn’t remember the name of the Department of Energy.  Now Trump seems to have tapped him to lead it, probably to shift the efforts back to the fossil fuels of Texas from the renewables the agency has been helping develop.

Is Betsy DeVos the hatchet to chop up public education?
Betsy DeVos – and here’s a big fight, the biggest on my list of lamentables – is an Amway billionaire, along with her husband. Public school teachers are already mounting a response.

Through American Federation for Children and other groups DeVos  has plunged big money into the battle for voucher and charter schools against public education. Many of their attack ads have nothing to do with education, just slime. So of course she’s being offered as Secretary of Education. This looms as a devastating setback to true education initiatives.

Linda McMahon, best known for participating in mock domestic battles in the ring on her way to serving as  CEO (for her husband) of World Wide Wrestling, expects to head the Small Business Administration. That is strange way to put entrepreneurship on steroids. 

The Transportation Secretary choice is not only Sen. Mitch McConnell’s wife but a former Labor Secretary under George Bush, Elaine Chao.  In the past she has denied connection with her family’s enormous shipping business, but she certainly qualifies as the ultimate D.C. insider.

Most of the choices are the exact opposite of Trump’s rally posture. They are a defiant slap in the face of his own voters as he chooses not a democracy but a plutocracy.  Rather than “draining the swamp” as he promised, he invited the Creatures From the Black Lagoon for a swim. 

The only good news this December is that all these Trump picks are on paper – no one eligible has been confirmed. Optimists keep hoping they won’t act as bad as they look.  But if they prove as ideologically extreme as their records, not only is the US in big trouble, Trump’s own voters are going to be taken for the carnival ride of their lives. 

Where will  the unhappy majority fight back?  How will they find the energy? And what specific looming issues demand a battle?  The Mission Impossible clock is ticking.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com. 


Sunday, December 11, 2016

MAJORITY GEARS UP TO SURVIVE TRUMP YEARS

By Dominique Paul Noth


Who is this man and what can he teach us
about dealing with the Donald?
Let’s not pretend the legal majority of American voters are happy about what the minority of American voters have foisted upon them. 

It’s not just Hillary Clinton voters – 2.8 million more than her opponent, easily matching the 2% national edge suggested earlier in national polls. With every expansion of his cabinet of Caligulas, with threats to core expectations about old age security, the environment, health care and public education, the unhappiness is now spreading among the free riders -- the 42% of eligible citizens who did not exercise their right to vote. I don’t have to call  out “shame on them” because events are doing just that.

The dilemma is, how in the US do any of us proceed? Many are simply not ready for the collegiality, respect of the Constitution and reliance on giving the new president a chance embodied by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. 

For those leaning that way, Trump stepped on them with his rambling obfuscations.

From his New York Tower he is hurling  cross-punches of cabinet choices and rally revels (denying these are plutocrat picks to the crowds, ignoring the crassness with which he fakes one way then lands on an extremist in the end).

The comically prescient Aptil 27 cartoon from the New Yorker
 and a profile of the author behind it tinyurl.com/hwrqsod
It will take the public weeks to figure out how to react. Those unhappy with this issue or that appointee, even those trying to read intentions into so manic a presidential manner – handshake by day, tweeting storm at night --   are bollixed about how to object or how to fight. It’s like facing the revolving head vomit in “The Exorcist.”

To the constant cries of “You lost, we won, get over it,” most of the country seems not getting over it and not about to, sour grapes aside. They lump the folks who are happy about this state of affairs with degenerates from the 19th century who can’t face up to a modern multicultural America.

The “get over it” trolls don’t yet grasp the fear and dismay because many live in a fantasy world where it’s okay for Trump not to release his taxes or falsely claim three million noncitizens voted against him. Stuck in irrationality, they may never understand. 

Now comes the likelihood that Russia was committing cyberwar to assure Trump’s success and even holding back on what it knew about the Republicans.  That’s deeply  disturbing even without knowing if the efforts were decisive.  It’s even more disturbing that Trump and his trollops deny it happened. Recent polls do indicate some 60% of those who voted for Trump believe the exact opposite of the facts about unemployment, the economy, foreign interference and much more.

How do you fight a shape shifter? Some feel overwhelmed,  as if America was under constant barrage.  Many  don’t have the courage to go to the mattresses in a street war – Trump after all is not yet the Mafia. Some can’t find a good system to respond and others feel  torn between the respect for peaceful transition demonstrated by Obama and their anger that the very strengths of America (openness, belief in an exchange of ideas, trust among opposite parties) have been used to shatter our expectations. It’s no longer about a Clinton robbed of victory, but belief that Trump succeeded in large part by appealing to our most ignorant and most fallen angels. 

And yet, you have to concede that some people had legitimate reasons to oppose Clinton and an understandable longing to wipe away the smug grins on the left.  You have to acknowledge that genuine appeal for  change played a role even while fearing that dupes and dumbness are the  real victors. How do you balance all that and keep a fire for survival alive in your bosom – for four frightening years? Is constant rebellion wise or productive?

We’re already seeing the fallout of internal conflict among Trump opponents, including Republicans. Some 20 groups are organizing protest marches around Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration in D.C., a big march of women for the day after. Currently clearance for their licenses to protest are hung up awaiting Trump’s inaugural committee to release details of how they will create a “fabulous” show though so many  name performers are refusing to participate.

(First small irony, the performers who won’t cooperate with Trump are slowing the process for the millions who also want to signal defiance.)

Yet that’s not the big news. It’s how many people who dislike Trump say these rallies and the online petitions  are a waste of time. You’ve surely heard that doubt or seen that shrug about efforts to return the Electoral College slates to their original purpose (a corrective when the voters lose their way) and about efforts to make the winner of the popular vote the president, like all the other civilized democracies  do. It is, after all,  the second time in 16 years the popular vote has been ignored and this one is the biggest, clearest margin in history where the will of the people has been abandoned.

But even serious haters of Trump are asking “what’s the point?” These protests are simply gnats of annoyance not focused on specifics, they say. Remember how even recent mass protests focused on a specific  – millions who marched against the war with Iraq and are only now acknowledged to have been correct  – were dismissed by the media and the public in Bush’s era, demonstrating to many cynics how sophistication and hesitation about methods prevent enduring impact in the media or among the targets. 

Well,  let’s explore that. There was an interesting moment recently when Rep. John Lewis’ third memoir won the National Book Award – the first time a graphic novel broke through to the top.

John Lewis before protests succeeded
The awards banquet chose to honor this civil rights icon by resurrecting his long lost mug shots from three arrests in the early 1960s when his efforts were being laughed at  or beaten away. There, looking for all the world like the people arrested today for Black Lives Matter and other grassroots protests, was proof how police and courts regarded him time and again as a criminal -- for peaceful protests against bad laws that have now all been changed (and that many fear Trump will change back again).

Look at those mug shots. Badges of honor.


Another set of Lewis police profiles.
Lewis admitted they brought him to tears at the memories, including how as a youth he had learned about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  from a 16 page comic book, part of the inspiration to tell his own story with drawings and text.  How often he had tried and failed in civil rights protests, even being beaten bloody at Selma. How immense his triumph of peaceful disobedience.


John Lewis today
Recalling how in the South his parents “told me not to get in the way, not to get in trouble,”  he didn’t listen then and  won’t now,  urging people to get into “good trouble” even hard trouble:

“If you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have a moral obligation to do something about it.” 

Many citizens have an ill-defined moral objection to Donald Trump. It’s like what a noted Republican  justice said about  pornography. You can’t define it, but you know it when you see it.

But now it can’t be about a phantom menace Trump. It has to be a more watchful vigilance and an intelligent reaction rather than just general distress.  His methods look horrible and actually a reversal of what he promised crowds during the election but actually he’s done nothing but threaten. It’s which Trump emerges from the White House and what fights selectively can be raised against his largely objectionable team of advisers (assuming he will ever listen to any of them).

The issue was framed in a New York Times opinion piece:  “Those who can will need to speak out boldly and suffer possible retaliation.” 

Yet marches around his January 20 inaugural  are being waved off by some progressives as simply a satisfying  blowing off of steam. I don’t agree, because there can be messages in millions, particularly if the pool of motivated then divides up to face particular threats to their core beliefs.  Trump may try but can’t dismiss the millions who assemble in general alarm and then  unify around specific dragons. 

The lessons of John Lewis suggest there is a moral power that can resonate even into the gold-leaf chambers of Trump Tower.


About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com.