Wednesday, December 20, 2017

WHY GOP CONFIDENT OF SELLING BOTH UNPOPULAR TAX BILL AND FOXCONN

By Dominique Paul Noth

The tax bill that just passed Congress and will be signed by Trump without a single Democratic vote has turned both sides into P.T. Barnums.  How can the GOP sell it and how can the Democrats keep it alive as a negative campaign issue in 2018?

It will take more than Paul Ryan's smug grin
to sell this tax bill.
The Democrats are basically right that this is a horrible tax bill that mainly rewards the Republican wealthy  donor class at the long-range cost of the middle class. It is a bill whose internal flaws will need to be revised probably within a year by whatever party is in power. It unconscionably burdens future generations. 

But the Democrats may go overboard in describing the downside horror since most of the public will not feel that in their pocketbooks or daily economy for several years. If it is Armageddon as Nancy Pelosi says, it is delayed Armageddon that gives the GOP room to camouflage.

Something similar is happening with the Foxconn deal, which will be discussed later.

Some eight of 10 taxpayers – including the working class and middle class -- will not sense  any immediate pain from the tax bill  and actually some rewards into 2020. If they only read their own selfish tea leaves, it will take them years to realize the supposed gains have slipped away into greater costs.

The GOP needs to sell the front end of the tax plan as hard as humanly possible to keep voters in 2018 from realizing what is waiting for them around the corner.  As bad as the bill is polling now, look for a blitz of counter-claims for the holidays.

That may work, since we live in an age of instant gratification.  The GOP has the money and advertising largesse – thank-you ads to the wizard Trump behind the curtain are already being planned – and its marketers are quite confident the voters haven’t yet been aroused enough to reject the past techniques of money and soundbite advertising luring them to the cliff’s edge. 

The Republicans think they have the proven inside track  in  this salesmanship game by exaggerating  how much middle class households will get in extra cash without noticing or caring how the donor class and the other filthy rich are getting in the meantime. (It is now estimated that the seven largest banks will see their profits increase by 14%, which translates into billons.) They take away with one hand – personal exemptions – while giving with the other – child tax credits, hoping no one looks at the ledger.

The voters  --  they rightly believe based on past ostrich behavior --  will  not notice how many loopholes remain and that Congress traded away simplified tax codes to favor insiders.

The Republicans are selling a trickle down myth that should have disappeared with Herbert Hoover -- that if the rich do well they will hire more people and raise wages.  Most companies you know will line their own pockets and play up to their shareholders. If they could make money hiring more people, trust me they would have.  When was the last time Wall Street stock went up for adding rather than reducing labor?

For the public to buy this package the citizens will have to cling to such myths as thinking the federal inheritance tax (cleverly renamed the death tax) was harmful to the common man.  The myth, and Trump repeated it, was that  dumping the tax would save the humble farmer who wants to pass his 40 acres on to his family.  Except it is more a gift to those owning 400,000 acres and it is really only a handful of the rich – the millionaires under $22 million – who benefit from this elimination.

The true deficit hawks, if any are left, will balk at the $1.5 trillion expected weight on future taxpayers, but such hawks turned into GOP chickens quick enough.  Remember when Paul Ryan tried to sell himself as a deficit hawk, not a gleeful thumper for a bad bill that outrageously inflates the deficit?

No, deficit hawks seem to evaporate from the Republican Party when it is the GOP spending the money.  No one believes their main canard, that a flourishing economy will pay for the tax bill, since even 4% benchmarks  won’t come close and we are hovering at 3% thanks mainly to a president named Obama.

But the Democrats have to back away and admit the GOP has only a path up on public reception to this tax bill, which is at an all-time low.  Think of that for a moment. Usually the entire citizenry is enthused by tax cuts, but here right now only 25% think this is a good bill and a majority know it will not benefit the middle class as much as the top 1%. It’s hard to imagine such disapproval numbers going lower.

If voters are as easily misled by money and simple exaggerations as they have been in the past, though, the Republicans have a lot of avenues to sell the tax bill before the November 2018 vote.  

Wisconsinites will recognize the similarity of the technique with Foxconn.  Front-load the goodies and hope the voters don’t see the dark side until after the 2018 elections.

A roomful of table questioners greeted
Democratic candidates for governor
Dec. 19 I attended a beer and bingo event much like  speed dating with most  Democratic candidates for governor – organized in a basement union room and attracting an overflow  crowd that even this early wants to hear what these candidates would do in office. 

Among the names who didn’t attend were Kelda Roys and Tony Evers, the state school superintendent who many list among the leaders and certainly has drawn the wrath of Scott Walker.

But almost everyone else was there, including some candidates largely unknown to the public and unlikely  to advance – Jeffrey Rambauch, Michelle Collins and Ramona Rose Whiteaker, who in their own ways reflect the alarm at Walker’s Wisconsin  among all forms of workers even those lacking the tools to be governor.

But the musical chairs technique – rotating the candidates every eight minutes among 9 or 10 tables – drew regular citizens,  candidates for other offices and the informed curious.  Most tables had as many kibitzers as seated participants.

Working Families Party and Our Wisconsin Revolution sponsored this event and want to hold dozens like this around the state to give voters a more intimate look at the leading voices on the Democratic side without subjecting citizens to a long, full fledged forum.

There may be a drawback in how some questions were introduced at the tables, since both sponsoring groups are highly friendly to the Bernie Sanders camp and kept introducing questions  in which they  wanted to hear back echoes of Sanders’ language.  The biggest candidates handled that well by insisting on their own terms.

It was an exercise in rapid-fire sweat-inducing messaging and personal appeal table by table, question by question – one popular candidate, Rep. Dana Wachs, joked that it was the first time he had lost weight at an event offering free pizzas. 

But the candidates did unleash a few gems that speak right to the heart of how the Republicans will try to sell both Foxconn and the tax bill. 

Key question – will the Democrats in 72 counties work together for a change?  All expect the GOP to use geography, race and personal job needs to  “divide and conquer” with Foxconn as they will with the tax bill – turning factions of the opposition against each other. Will the Democrats fall for that again?  Construction workers sure want the jobs but they also want a change in leadership.  College tech students and disenfranchised blacks want jobs, families with kids and families without want tax relief, but will they work together for the long haul?

Wachs and Kathleen Vinehout both noted how important it was for them to become as well known in Milwaukee as they are in northern districts where their progressive policies are well received. Both communicated what I have heard from both Democrats and Republicans who live  in areas like Fox Valley and Eau Claire – the Foxconn deal angers them deeply.  It is far removed from their economies yet they will be part of the tax burden which has now climbed to more than $4 billion.  Wachs pointed out that even Racine is split on the giveaway and fears  it will reward workers in Illinois more than Wisconsin. 

Flynn discussed the hidden environmental impact.  Gronik detailed how much Wisconsin was paying out without sufficient clawbacks. Vinehout has countered Walker’s crazy budgeting quarter by quarter with basic common sense. Mahlon Mitchell asked why companies native to Wisconsin weren’t getting the money they need to grow while interlopers were.

At many tables you sensed their anger at the deal and their fear of how to sell its negatives.  Joined by Mike McCabe they anticipated the Republicans will paint them as anti-business as opposed to anti this size of selling out.

(Generalities? Gronik is selling himself as Mr. Fixit, Mitchell as the fire chief to the rescue,  Flynn as the veteran hand, McCabe as the articulate definer of a common sense way forward, Vinehout as a keen analyzer of  the spending and how to refine it.)

Several candidates  noted that initially the south of the state will be seduced by the construction jobs, the vaunted hiring teams, the special new roads, etc., without worrying about the cost around the corner or, as Flynn said, how Foxconn could well come back hat in hand to ask for more giveaways in a few years.

But a state often split between rural and urban thinking has to knit together for a Democrat to win. Such get-togethers may drive that home.

The candidates concede that the anger at Foxconn in the north may be harder than opposition in the south, just as the tax bill opponents will have to struggle against the initial sense of  benefit to some families and businesses to focus on the future collapses in their sights.

The game for 2018 is to  hope the voters have grown out of responding like Pavlovian result merchants to what is immediately in front of them rather than  to the constrictions lying in wait. 

The battle lines are drawn.  But Democrats have to grow up fast to realize the 
Republicans do have cards to play, and even some aces up their sleeve.

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 Urban Milwaukee. 




Thursday, December 14, 2017

TO COUNTERACT TRUMP, START BY HOLDING YOUR CHILDREN CLOSE

By Dominique Paul Noth

It’s the children who have the most to worry about from a Trump regime.

Not just the children in actual age but the budding offspring of business entrepreneurship. 

Lionel Barrymore as Mr. Potter
The nature of his attack on regulations – quantity over quality – and on net neutrality basically protect the rich status quo while impacting the growing children of technology – the new Facebooks and Twitters as it were, the emerging fuel industries and environmentally sensitive companies that will have to struggle harder to prove themselves against the now protected giants. 

Orrin Hatch as Mr. Potter
From that perspective, Trump is moving against the natural growth of the economy and the natural protection of our environment (the latest is his plan for oil drilling in the Arctic wildlife refuge, which somehow was stuck into the tax bill).

Those are the figurative children. But I am really worrying about what is happening to the literal children – the young of the world.

It’s moved far past my casual speculation about how a mother like Sarah Huckabee Sanders can lie daily to the press and still go home to teach values to her kids.  Every real news story forces us to hope that the natural resilience of children can somehow rise above the challenge Trump poses to their thinking about responsible adult behavior.

I raised mine in a time when I may have agreed or disagreed with the politics but I could believe in the basic values and procedures of society and government, that they were striving in their statements if not always their actions to articulate equality under the law and the democratic instincts the nation was founded upon. There were many sides to the economic debate and a willingness to consider facts. The decisions might go awry for my beliefs, but the underlying purpose was clear and often welcome.

Now I fear my grandchildren will no longer see the US form of government through similar eyes or read the policies being perpetrated as akin to the real United States Constitution their parents talked about (or my parents, refugees from Hitler’s Germany, viewed with such affection).  They may regard the Trump regime as purposefully harsh, bleak and devoid of genuine concern, under the flag-waving, for the humanity under his control.

The recent children of America, now with children of their own, might decide it is better to start the revolution now rather than wait until he destroys the optimism and solidarity of advance that his manners and methods are deliberately giving short shrift.

Consider the long bipartisan CHIP program – children’s health insurance affecting one in three US kids.  Despite lip service from both parties it remains unrenewed at this writing, forced to a backseat by the push for a hodgepodge tax bill.

Sounding like an echo of Mr. Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” even the GOP co-sponsor of the original CHIP, Utah’s Orrin Hatch, muttered Potterlike on the senate floor about the US being short of money that shouldn’t be wasted on freeloaders – like 12 million children?

So children are now placed deliberately at the rear of the congressional bus, where many think the entire grownup middle class has also been placed.

But it is even worse for children.  They are not supposed to follow or even worry about the to-and-fro of politics though it now affects their future years in a harsher way than the tax burden ever could. One is only money.  The other is attitude. It speaks to how poorly they are viewed by the adults in government – and they can feel it.

Looking around at what society is willing to spend on their education, or forgive in terms of their educational debt, looking at how they are expected to bust their butts only for the jobs and pay scales that legislators think are worth anything, they may decide little has changed since the age of Dickens in real and cruel indifference to anyone not born with a silver spoon in their mouth.

There is also the largely unmeasured psychological impact on how native and immigrant children feel about their future treatment in the United States, particularly if their skin isn’t white but now even extending to sensitive  white children.

Political action and conscience have made the nation more understanding of the disenchantment and even anger felt by black adolescents raised in poverty or mixed in society’s minds with the troublemaking youth gangs regardless of what they achieve on their own.  We keep asking them for patience to let society improve while our president suggests police should more deliberately stomp their heads – and then we wonder why so few in these communities believe our words anymore and look elsewhere for relief.

These are different times and centuries, but we are a nation founded on our openness to what Trump labels “chain migration” -- people encouraging family and neighbors to join them in the great migration to the new freedom and opportunity in the Americas, not measuring their worth  by what  old jobs they could repeat but what new jobs they could create. Many families here, both Republican and Democrat, can look back fondly on such roots.

Migration as a US glory should remain a strong vision in the American value system despite the growing negativities you hear about "illegals" among us (most better behaved and more knowledgeable about America than the native born). Immigration is the DNA of our social fabric despite broad efforts to keep out immigrants from Muslim-strong countries as well as from across the Mexican border, which brings a historic reminder of a time when we didn’t need or even want a wall.

At the turn of the 20th century it was quite common for immigrants from Europe, Asia or Central and South American to come here to learn what they could and then return on their own countries – 40% to 50% by some records –to help them flourish.  Rather than try to once again find that comity, Trump wants to slam shut the gate.

The US has already tampered quite a bit with a natural pattern of ebb and flow in immigration, and Trump’s dark simplistic view of the world has turned tampering into obsession. Immigrant families who happily came here in the last 20 years and future immigrants who still try to look at the US for salvation and cling to the established American dream even harder than the natives – well, they now have daily reasons from the White House to doubt American values and wonder how they will be received or even if they should try to get in.

Imagine being the child from Yemen who finds Trump’s travel ban is so broad as to prevent his ailing 80 year old grandfather from visiting?  Imagine the adolescent Dreamer watching his or her parents being deported to a country they haven’t seen for decades. Imagine the young Bangladesh worker who finds the behavior of one oddball nut in New York has ruined his chances to find a new life in the US.

The Trump administration policy wants educated technical savvy immigrants first – which sounds reasonable at first until you look at two countries curiously not on the travel ban list – Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. They may be key allies we don’t want to offend with travel regulations but their advanced schools are famous for producing terrorist leaders.  Here as in other countries, the US may be better off with rawer less educated material given the bias in native institutions of higher learning.  But then again, we have to realize that living in our county right now is not reassuring to many legal immigrants or to most Dreamers.

A look at recent mass shootings and individual terrorist activities, which pale in injury to what the crazy white shooters have done to us, reveals a harsh reality of mentally ill people or confused young people  radicalized within our shores, not in any journey here.  Yet rather than target such behavior, the Trump administration has rained a blanket of hatred on their native countries or religion, hardly making us safer as they ratchet up the reasons for hatred.

Do we expect these children and adolescents to feel kindly toward our government?  What unseen havoc to their psyches has resulted from Trump’s refusal to build compassion and individual judgment into an ethics policy, reviving what our American justice system was once famous for?

The terrorists on the Internet could have no better recruiting tool than Donald Trump.

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.  His award-winning theater reviews appear at urbanmilwaukee.com.


Monday, December 4, 2017

GIVE TRUMP BENEFIT OF DOUBT – AND WHAT HAVE YOU GOT?

By Dominique Paul Noth

As much as I dislike Trump, let’s put the fairest possible interpretation on the speculation around  his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, pleading guilty to lying to the FBI and making it known he has higher ups at the White House to implicate.

The Internet has exploded with graphics about
Flynn's guilty plea and pledge to cooperate.
Bluntly and clearly, Trump’s team violated the “one president at a time” doctrine of longstanding in our culture. It did so despite clear warnings from the Obama White House not to meddle with sanctions imposed because of Russian interference in the US presidential election.

Of course, Nixon did something similar to LBJ, we learn from historical documents, by advising North Vietnam to stall negotiations, which if LBJ had revealed could have been interpreted as treason by a then functionally bipartisan Congress.  But he didn’t.  And Reagan apparently suggested Iran should wait until he was in office before releasing hostages, so Carter wouldn’t look good.  But historians point out some crucial difference in these past cases of dirty politics.  This time it wasn’t pre-election tampering.  The sanctions were already in place under Obama when Trump’s team was undercutting actual completed US policy. 

Trump was openly warned in advance, yet Flynn was quietly telling the Russians not to worry about the sanctions or the appropriated property. That was the message after the election that Flynn was carrying to the Russians while Obama was president, which gives new colorations – even a promise --  to Putin last December not to react then to the Russian diplomats thrown out of the country and property assets seized (though the Russians have since struck back after new sanctions by Congress). 

Those married to the Trump camp still claim there is not yet proven criminal collusion before his election as opposed to afterward.  “Collusion during” seems his big worry – that his presidency is tainted.  So he may openly defy Flynn’s guilty plea by saying in effect, So I jumped the gun, so what?

That does seem the defiant state of mind behind his Dec. 2 tweet admitting he fired Flynn for lying to the FBI as well as to Pence.  He has always claimed there was nothing illegal in poaching in Obama’s waters, though I know constitutional lawyers who disagree with him. (This is unaffected by claims that it was not Trump but his lawyer that posted that tweet. The White House early on established Trump’s tweets are “official statements from the President.”)

He can now draw the line and say yes, there was collusion while Obama was president – just to signal a new openness from the White House and even a willingness to reverse certain sanctions.  But taint my election?  No proof yet.

For that to stick, Trump supporters have to believe there was no quid pro quo – something promised Putin during the election cycle that, beyond Putin’s natural hatred of Clinton, would reward Trump if American voters were further pummeled with misleading stories about her emails, her morals as well as all the long-standing bogeymen of the right against the left. Including the Democrats will tax you to death myth that the GOP's new bill flatly disproves.

His remaining champions have to ignore the likelihood that the Trump team and the Putin team were talking, maybe in code or wink, about you rub my back and I’ll rub yours whether it works or not.  You don’t even have to get to the worst things being said about Trump, that the Russians have long had something on him, to realize this is slimy. 

Our national hubris is a longstanding benefit for any Russian involvement.  Many voters just won’t believe their tactics influenced them.  Though we are learning more daily about the depth of their attack on our social media, most American voters will never confess they voted in error or admit their vote was based in any way on the false information sent.  We are not sheep being led by the nose, they will pontificate, I made up my own mind.  This is a built-in sense of righteousness in a nation that protects the most miserable type of speech imaginable.

Those who don’t use Internet social media will scoff “I wasn’t affected,”   without considering the bleed-over into their regular lives, conversations and radio-TV-cable outlets.  Those who now are forced by proof to accept that the Russians meddled will further demand to know the exact degree.  And they will say in hindsight it never affected them in the voting booth, without examining how months, even years, of dissembling may have seeped into their mental processing.  They have to claim that generations of advertising, dark money and even the power of gossip had no impact on their strong minds.  

True believers in American democracy are right to be outraged about this foreign cyberwar – in the abstract, apparently.   Not among the elected GOP as long as they can finagle a long-desired tax bill.  A lot of our citizens shrug Russia off unless it directly affects them, and they have some curious ideas about what is “direct.”

Blunt basics. The president lied when he insisted there was no collusion between his team and the Russians.  The only remaining question is how deep was his involvement.  MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow has an amusing graph pointing out there are already 19 Russians now involved in meetings with Trump’s team, most ahead of his taking office.  So now we know his staff lied about some or all of that.  The only question is what he knew.

His defenders will still argue he didn’t know what his team was doing, which hardly sounds like the way Trump treats his own shop – he demands to know everything.  Yet his diehard fans will fall back on the belief that right now there is no evidence he was playing up to Russian meddling before the election.

This is hard to swallow, given the peculiar timing of Trump’s election tweets on the days before a Clinton dump by Wikileaks and a bizarre history of how Russia didn’t act  -- or did they? -- throughout the 2016 election. 

The American public now has to believe Trump was elected not riding a wave of Russian created efforts but on his own persona.  It’s possible, given how much of the country is sick of the pace and gridlock built into our system. They might be tempted, in one misplaced vote, to throw everything away for a strongman riding in from the hills (or the towers of Manhattan), standing silent as he disables all the mechanisms of checks and balances, proven historic legacy and intelligent appointments of staff.

Writer Ezra Klein
But that is where we stand.  Pundit Ezra Klein,  in a provocative piece suggesting America is too scared of using impeachment powers, points out that it’s pretty much up to Congress to define what constitutes “high crimes and misdemeanors” – there is no  established list, so the GOP could attack Clinton for lying about sex or put Nixon’s misuse of power on the pedestal, forcing him to resign ahead of jailtime.

Ezra’s point is simple: “Being extremely bad at the job of president of the United States should be enough to get you fired.”

Perhaps he's right in a normal world, but can anyone see this Republican dominated Congress accepting such  realities?  Not only cynics say they are keeping Trump around just long enough to protect their flanks. For them, the reality was passing a misleading tax bill that will please their big donors – hardly just a Democratic line of complaint but obvious to anyone reading the bill where all the last minute changes came from lobbyists.

Despite this president and this tax bill, no American wants the economists to be right in the prediction that the economy is heading for a terrible downward spiral in 2018 or 2019 because of built-in excesses and lack of controls, enhanced by this White House.  Sadly, only if that happens do we expect the public to rise up and discover if We the People have any real power left.

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.  His award-winning theater reviews appear at urbanmilwaukee.com.