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Gasp!

Tuesday, July 16th, 2019

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Trump’s normal response to criticism is to double down on his original claim.

When asked about his racist rant against The Squad, his response was classic.

It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me

In other words, there is nothing wrong with racism as long as there are enough other people who share that view.

This is the core of Trump’s message.

White men run the country. If you don’t like it, you can leave.

Here’s a little history, just as a reminder that this message is the foundation of Trump’s worldview.

The Trump strategy dates back to his earlier forays into politics, when he falsely accused Barack Obama of being an illegitimate president who was secretly born overseas. During the 2016 campaign, he circulated a false tweet that claimed that most killings of white people were committed by African Americans and he spread a false tale about Muslim celebrations in New Jersey after the World Trade Center was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.

“They are trying to take away our history and our heritage,” he said of the mainstream media in August 2017, shortly after attracting widespread criticism for his sympathetic comments about those attending deadly white nationalist protests in Charlottesville.

I know that there are some Trump apologists who claim that this is just hyperbole. It’s Trump just stirring the pot. He’s just trolling liberals.

At some point along the way, you have to acknowledge that his words mean something. Ignoring them only emboldens him and those in this country who agree with those racists views.

What is even more disturbing is the response of the Republican Party. None of their leaders have spoken out. That’s because White Identity Politics has been at the foundation of virtually every Republican presidential campaign since Richard Nixon. They are familiar with this strategy. They know that it can work.

Trump is also right that a lot of people agree with him.

A December 2018 Pew Research Center poll found that 46 percent of white Americans said having a majority nonwhite nation in 2050 would “weaken American customs and values,” compared with 18 percent of black Americans and 25 percent of Hispanics. Asked whether having a majority nonwhite population would strengthen American customs and values, 42 percent of Democrats said it would, while only 13 percent of Republicans agreed.

What we have is two different visions of the country.

One vision is a pluralistic color-blind society which welcomes immigrants, gives everyone a chance to become a citizen, and celebrates diversity as a strength.

The other vision is a country where historical white privilege is jealously guarded. Only white men have access to power. Everyone else is expected to acknowledge and accept this hierarchy. Dissent is viewed as treason. Those who don’t like it are encouraged to leave or worse.

Trump has exposed the fear of some about what might happen if they lose their grip on power. The fear of the other is still alive and strong in parts of this country. He has leveraged this fear to his political advantage. He’s done this in textbook authoritarian style by blaming all the countries ills on immigrants, the media, and his political opponents.

It has been a winning strategy for him so far.

Here’s how Conservative Max Boot of the Wash Post summarized it.

Trump is a bigot and doesn’t even bother to hide it. In fact — and this is the truly appalling part — he parades his bigotry in the expectation that it will win him votes. And — what is even worse — he may well be right. Such appeals to prejudice might be exactly what Trump needs to mobilize some blue-collar, white voters in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida who haven’t seen any economic benefit from his tax cuts, much less his trade wars. Trump can’t reopen steel mills or coal mines — but he can stigmatize people of color and win the votes of bigots. I wish that weren’t the case, but I fear that it is.

Many Trump voters, to be sure, aren’t racists. But all who support him do not consider his blatant racism to be a breaking point. Many Republicans turn a blind eye to Trump’s bigotry because something else — tax cuts or judges or Israel — is more important to them.

Sorry, Republicans. There is nothing — nothing — more important in the United States than racism. Where you stand on that one issue defines who you are as a human being. Silence is complicity. All Republicans who stand mute in the face of Trump’s latest racism are telling you who they really are. It’s an ugly picture of a morally bankrupt party that has now embraced racial prejudice as a platform.

I can only hope that 2020 is the year when the country finally rejects this destructive political strategy.

In 2016, Trump built a coalition that explicitly included racists and White Supremacists. Those who voted for him for other reasons can rationalize their decision, but the reality is that a vote for Trump is a vote to advance the agenda of those who want to purge this country of anyone who isn’t white.

Simply rejecting the strategy, however, will not change the minds of those for whom it resonates.

Society will change only as those who make up that society change.

Racism, misogyny, and xenophobia must be called out every time they are practiced. It can no longer be acceptable in a free and open society to discriminate against anyone based on their race, color, creed, country of origin, or sexual preference. Until this becomes unacceptable as a political strategy as well as in polite company, our politics will continue to reflect our attitudes.

Posted in Bias, Immigration, Politics, Religious Conservatism, Trump, Trump | No Comments »

Racist

Monday, July 15th, 2019

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Well what do you know?

Trump snatches defeat from the jaws of victory because he just can’t leave stuff alone.

The democrats were going a good job of beating each other up over the differences in their caucus. Rather than let them continue to publicly feud over who’s in charge, he decided that he just couldn’t stand being left out of the party.

It is certainly possible that he was inspired by Tucker Carlson.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson can congratulate himself for the sentiment coming from the White House. Last week, Carlson apparently decided that the discussion on immigration featured an insufficient amount of racism and hate. So he attacked Omar, who arrived in the United States at the age of 12, for having the temerity to point out that this country doesn’t always live up to its own lofty ideals. “She has undisguised contempt for the United States and for its people. That should worry you and not just because Omar is now a sitting member of Congress,” said Carlson. “Ilhan Omar is living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country. A system designed to strengthen America is instead undermining it. Some of the very people we try hardest to help have come to hate us passionately.”

A sitting congresswoman, argued Carlson, was dangerous to the country — a threat.

From there, it’s a short conceptual walk to Trump’s racist claim that these women of color must, somehow, retreat to the “places from which they came.”

Regardless of where it came from, Trump has successfully reinserted himself into the national conversation first posting some racist tweets and then claiming that he isn’t a racist.

He followed that up with a threat to deport 1M illegal aliens that has failed to materialize and a promise to issue a new “rule” rewriting asylum law. Good luck with that.

But to get back to the core issue.

Here’s the series of tweets in question.

So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly …

… and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how. …

… it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!

While not naming his targets, it’s pretty clear that he is talking about “The Squad” – AOC, Tlaib, Pressley, and Omar.

Here are a few more facts. These four are all citizens of this country. They are all elected representatives of their districts in NYC, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Minnesota. Omar is the only naturalized citizen. She was originally born in Somalia.

Why this is a racist and sexist post is because they are all women of color.

What Trump objected to is that these women of color had the temerity to criticize this country in general and him in particular.

The clear and present undertone is that because they are women of color, they have no right to question how this white male country is being run. In this context, black and brown people, who can’t seem to run “their own countries”, shouldn’t be allowed to voice their opinion about this country until all countries run by black and brown people have created their form of “perfect union”.

The reality is that this country was built on the backs of people of color. It was stolen from Native Peoples. Much of its wealth was created on the backs of 250 years of free labor. If countries could have an original sin, this is ours. That “sin” has continued to influence government policies up the present day. The founding fathers punted on the whole question of slavery because they needed to build a coalition of colonies which included those with slave-based economies. Jackson conducted a war of genocide against native Americans because white people wanted their land. Lincoln freed the slaves, but Johnson and his successors simply created a new legal form of slavery with Jim Crow and the KKK. Wilson was the last admitted racist to occupy the White House, but Eisenhower refused to integrate the army in WWII. FHA redlining rules in the 50’s supported block-busting real estate practices which created the inner city ghettos and the lilly white suburbs that are now the scourge of big cities. These days republican states draw districts to take away votes from people of color and preserve Republican majorities at state and local levels even when they lose the popular vote. People of color are over represented in jail and underrepresented in management and government.

Charles Blow had a good summary.

Challenging America to own its sins and live up to its ideals isn’t a vicious attack, it’s an act of patriotism. As James Baldwin once put it, “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

And, who better to lead the charge than four women who represent the future face of America.

But, Trump — and many of his supporters and defenders — spew their racism and tell themselves that it is perfectly acceptable when it is read back to them, in much the same way that a dog will eat its own vomit.

So did AOC herself.

After arriving on Capitol Hill later Monday morning, Ocasio-Cortez called it “unfortunate” that Trump “feels the way he feels” about people of color and immigrants, adding, “it’s time to move on from him, and it’s time to move on from his conception of an America that we have tried to move past for a long time.”

Trump, she said, “relies on racism, division, and anti-immigrant sentiment to consolidate power because he does not have a positive vision for the future of America.”

Posted in Bias, Immigration, Politics, Trump, Trump | No Comments »

What?

Thursday, July 11th, 2019

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The torrent of lies that come out of the Trump administration and the Republican Party are just too difficult to keep up with.

I know.

I’ve tried.

But some of it reveals underlying opinions that can’t be allowed to pass without comment. As a warming, comment in this case requires a little longer post than I normally make.

7/3/19 Tweet from @realDonaldTrump

If Illegal Immigrants are unhappy with the conditions in the quickly built or refitted detentions centers, just tell them not to come. All problems solved!

I have a lot of problems with this statement, but let’s start by what it implies. The implication is that ALL southern border immigrants are illegal. That is not true. The bulk of those entering the country right now are seeking asylum. Rather than sneak into the country, they present themselves to border officials. Our laws REQUIRE us to hear their case before we make any determination whether they are legal or illegal.

Unfortunately, Trump’s lies about the border are broadly reflected in tweets supporting Trump.

Agree on that sir. If they don’t want to be detained then don’t come!

I am a U.S. citizen. I work hard everyday to take care of my family and pay my taxes. I’m a pipe welder and a pipe fitter. Everyday I go to the grocery store to buy food for my family there are people buying there food with food stamps that are not citizens. That’s not right

Everyone who thinks we should allow anyone to walk across our southern border should have to take them in their homes. The ones that scream the loudest to let them in live in gated communities or has walls and fences around their homes. Hypocrites…

POTUS, YOU ARE 100% RIGHT!!!
IF THEY DON’T LIKE THE DETENTION CENTERS TELL THEM THEY ARE FREE TO GO HOME!!!

Can you imagine sneaking into any other country in the world illegally;
Be appropriately placed in a detention center; and
Complaining about the conditions in the facility?

Exactly and for the woman who compared them to concentration camps, I see no one working them literally to death. I see no guards ready to shoot them without question, no fas chambers, no crematoriums. They can go back to their homes if they like, etc

Agree !! Come in legally or don’t come in at all. Keep the pressure on POTUS !!

Here’s how the NYT summarizes the situation.

A record number of asylum-seeking families, many fleeing persecution, violence or poverty in Central America, have filled facilities along the southwestern border that were built to only briefly hold adults before they were deported.

The Trump administration has tried to deter the immigration surge by raising fees on asylum applications, limiting the daily number of migrants who can apply for asylum at ports of entry and forcing more than 13,000 migrants to return to Mexico to wait for the outcome of their asylum cases.

In April, the administration also tried to deny bond hearings to migrants who illegally entered the United States, which would have kept them in jail until their immigration cases were resolved. The Justice Department’s order was blocked on Tuesday by a federal judge in Seattle.

In a statement on Wednesday, the White House said the Seattle ruling was “at war with the rule of law.”

“The decision only incentivizes smugglers and traffickers, which will lead to the further overwhelming of our immigration system by illegal aliens,” the statement said.

AND

Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, also on Wednesday called for the firing of Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, who was appointed last week to lead the agency.

Mr. Schumer, Democrat of New York, criticized Customs and Border Protection for the findings in the government report. He also excoriated the agency over a secret Facebook group of former and current Border Patrol agents that featured jokes about migrant deaths and obscene images of members of Congress.

“The horrid conditions C.B.P. has subjected children and families to at the border are nothing short of inhumane and downright inexcusable,” Mr. Schumer said in a statement. “Too much of C.B.P. has been an out-of-control agency for too long, and it must be reined in immediately.”

The House Oversight and Reform Committee has demanded that Mr. Morgan and Kevin K. McAleenan, the acting secretary of homeland security, testify at a hearing next week to discuss the problems.

I think it is reasonable to ask WHY the administration is trying to subvert existing laws, separate families, and treat children harshly. The result of this is a culture in the CBP which reflects the attitudes of the President and his supporters. The hypocrisy of a lawless culture as the best way to respond to “illegal aliens” is remarkable and difficult for any fair minded person to defend.

So why does it continue?

I believe that Trump feels that this is a winning strategy.

While his tariff announcement was in many ways a surprise, it also had a tinge of inevitability. According to current and former aides, who requested anonymity to speak freely, when Trump feels he has lost control of the narrative, he grasps at two issues: border security and trade. Those aides said he sees these topics as reset buttons, ways to rile both Democratic and Republican lawmakers and draw attention away from whatever dumpster fire is blazing in a given week. “Whenever a negative story comes around, his instinct is to pivot to immigration or trade,” a senior campaign adviser told me. “It’s kind of like his safety blanket. He knows that Fox and conservative media will immediately coalesce and change what the base is talking about.”

That tactic often works: By the end of a week in which the lies of the White House’s representation of the Mueller report became more apparent than ever, reporters, pundits, and the stock market were all responding instead to Trump’s latest attempt to curb immigration at the southern border. (The Dow Jones closed Friday at four-month lows in response to the tariffs.)

It is all a cynical exercise of controlling the news cycle. Whether or not it works is a different question that brings this into even more focus.

On trade it is not working.

[Trump’s] protectionist trade policies haven’t produced the kind of political boost in critical swing states that his backers are depending on. “Voter approval on trade policy appears to be no higher in key competitive states than in other states,” Goldman finds, “and overall presidential approval in those states has declined by more than the national average.”

One reason why Trump’s trade policies haven’t lifted his approval rating is that, aside from the original $50 billion of tariffs on Chinese imports announced last June, voters have on balance disfavored every one of his subsequent trade actions, including recent tariffs on China. … Voters’ disapproval is particularly severe when it comes to tariffs targeting U.S. allies such as Canada and Mexico.

While the Goldman study doesn’t take into account Trump’s newest threat against Mexico or the possibility of penalties on Australian aluminum, there are several reasons to believe both acts would be highly unpopular.

As a result, that’s why we are seeing a softening of Trump’s position. He has pivoted to a plan where he will announce weak agreements with China and simply misrepresent them as a big win for the country.

Much like Bush with the Iraq War, it is hard to deny that Trump’s approach to immigration has made the situation worse on the southern border. Nonetheless, there is also a real crisis there, and Americans believe immigration to be one of the most important policy issues facing the country. Unless Democrats can proffer a coherent and credible plan about what to do on the southern border, then Trump will be able to own this issue.

Even though this is a problem that Trump has created, at the moment he is the only one who claims he has a plan. His plan resonates with his supporters.

That plan has three components.

1.Characterize all immigrants as illegal even though asylum seekers are not illegal. This works because it appeals to the conservative moral foundation of respect for law.
2.Punish all immigrants through harsh treatment, family separation, and mass deportation. Much of this plan is illegal, but it also appeals to the conservative moral foundation who believe that is it more important that every lawbreaker be punished than it is to protect the rights of the innocent.
3.Lay all of the blame for the current conditions on his political opponents who are “soft on (fill in the blank)”. This finishes the trifecta of authoritarian appeal. He is the only one who is willing to take this stand. He will break the law if he has to because the end justifies the means. Those who oppose him are biased, can’t be trusted, and should also be punished.

I’m not surprised that Republicans have fallen in line behind Trump. That’s what Republican Party is good at. They gave way to the Tea Party when it had momentum. They marched into Iraq, supported torture, and domestic spying because Bush II claimed war powers. They even supported Reagan through the S&L and Iran Contra scandals because he was good at demonizing liberals. That’s because of another of the conservative moral foundations – respect for authority even if it is misplaced.

But you would think that those who respect a higher authority than the government would come to different conclusion. Unfortunately, white evangelicals remain some of Trump’s strongest supporters.

Approval for President Trump among white evangelical Protestants is 25 points higher than the national average. And according to a Pew Research Center survey, “White evangelical Protestants who regularly attend church (that is, once a week or more) approve of Trump at rates matching or exceeding those of white evangelicals who attend church less often.” Indeed, during the period from July 2018 to January 2019, 70 percent of white evangelicals who attend church at least once a week approved of Trump, versus 65 percent of those who attend religious services less often.

Peter Wehner of the Ethics and Public Policy Center has a good article in the Atlantic describing the damage the is being done to the evangelical movement as a result of their political position.

There’s a very high cost to our politics for celebrating the Trump style, but what is most personally painful to me as a person of the Christian faith is the cost to the Christian witness. Nonchalantly jettisoning the ethic of Jesus in favor of a political leader who embraces the ethic of Thrasymachus and Nietzsche—might makes right, the strong should rule over the weak, justice has no intrinsic worth, moral values are socially constructed and subjective—is troubling enough.

But there is also the undeniable hypocrisy of people who once made moral character, and especially sexual fidelity, central to their political calculus and who are now embracing a man of boundless corruptions. Don’t forget: Trump was essentially named an unindicted co-conspirator (“Individual 1”) in a scheme to make hush-money payments to a porn star who alleged she’d had an affair with him while he was married to his third wife, who had just given birth to their son.

While on the Pacific Coast last week, I had lunch with Karel Coppock, whom I have known for many years and who has played an important role in my Christian pilgrimage. In speaking about the widespread, reflexive evangelical support for the president, Coppock—who is theologically orthodox and generally sympathetic to conservatism—lamented the effect this moral freak show is having, especially on the younger generation. With unusual passion, he told me, “We’re losing an entire generation. They’re just gone. It’s one of the worst things to happen to the Church.”

and

Labberton speaks about what it means to live as people in exile, trying to find the capacity to love in unexpected ways; to see the enemy, the foreigner, the stranger, and the alien, and to go toward rather than away from them. He asks what a life of faithfulness looks like while one lives in a world of fear.

He adds, “The Church is in one of its deepest moments of crisis—not because of some election result or not, but because of what has been exposed to be the poverty of the American Church in its capacity to be able to see and love and serve and engage in ways in which we simply fail to do. And that vocation is the vocation that must be recovered and must be made real in tangible action.”

There are countless examples of how such tangible action can be manifest. But as a starting point, evangelical Christians should acknowledge the profound damage that’s being done to their movement by its braided political relationship—its love affair, to bring us back to the words of Ralph Reed—with a president who is an ethical and moral wreck. Until that is undone—until followers of Jesus are once again willing to speak truth to power rather than act like court pastors—the crisis in American Christianity will only deepen, its public testimony only dim, its effort to be a healing agent in a broken world only weaken.

At this point, I can’t help but wonder whether that really matters to many of Donald Trump’s besotted evangelical supporters.

I wonder as well.

Evangelicals have allowed themselves to be seduced by political power. Now that they have it, they want to use it to exact some sort of revenge for past injustices. As a result, they fear that if they lose that power, “liberals” will exact some sort of revenge in return.

Many white evangelical Christians, then, are deeply fearful of what a Trump loss would mean for America, American culture, and American Christianity. If a Democrat is elected president, they believe, it might all come crashing down around us. During the 2016 election, for example, the influential evangelical author and radio talk-show host Eric Metaxas said, “In all of our years, we faced all kinds of struggles. The only time we faced an existential struggle like this was in the Civil War and in the Revolution when the nation began … We are on the verge of losing it as we could have lost it in the Civil War.” A friend of mine described that outlook to me this way: “It’s the Flight 93 election. FOREVER.”

Trump is an expert at tapping into this fear.

The result is that people who claim to have faith, have lost their faith in Jesus. Instead they have placed their faith in one of the false prophets that the bible warned us all about. They have replaced humility with hypocrisy. They have replaced fidelity with tribalism. They have replaced love with hate. These people are right to fearful, but the judgement is not going to come from “liberals”. God will be their judge and His judgement will be righteous.

Posted in Bias, Immigration, Politics, Religious Conservatism, scandals, Trump | No Comments »

The Great Potato Famine

Monday, January 21st, 2019

This isn’t the first time poverty, starvation, and violence have caused people to flee their country.

The Great Potato Famine forced 2M Irish to come here.

The British believed that the natural course of free markets would solve the crisis.  The head of relief said, “Great Britain cannot continue to throw her hard-won millions into the bottomless pit of Celtic pauperism” and “The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated”.

1M Irish died.

The Irish fled on cheap converted freighters.  Conditions were deplorable.  They were called “coffin ships” because half didn’t survive the voyage.

Americans complained that the British were not sending their best people.  These Irish were poor, unskilled, and Catholic.  Conspiracy theories raged.  Priests raped nuns and killed babies.  The pope was moving to Cincinnati where cannon law would be imposed.

The Irish were portrayed as drunken disease-ridden hideous criminal apes.

The Know-Nothing Party promised to restore “Temperance, Liberty, and Protestantism” by supporting native-born Protestant candidates.  Massachusetts required 21 years of residency before naturalized citizens could vote.

In 1855, Lincoln despaired of the whole situation.  “When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

We are mostly a nation of immigrants.  Each new wave of immigration also creates politicians who use xenophobia and racism to gain power.

Those of us with immigrant ancestry owe them a debt.  Opposing legal asylum seekers ignores the sacrifices others made for us.

Jesus said welcoming the stranger is an immigration requirement for heaven (Matt 35:31-40).  Christians who oppose the legal rights of asylum seekers are building their own wall between political beliefs and their own salvation.

Those who claim to be pro-life, but then oppose the rights of some children born in this country to become citizens, are hypocrites indeed.

Those who claim all immigrants are lawbreakers are ignoring the fact that asylum seekers are OBEYING our laws.  The government breaks the law when turning asylum seekers away, purposely under staffing the courts, and callously ignoring the humanitarian crisis they created.  They’re using threats of imprisonment, sickness, child abuse, and death as deterrents.  It’s shameful.

In my case, several of my ancestors came to this country at different times from England.  The first bunch came on the ship that resupplied the Mayflower.  They were Puritans fleeing religious persecution.

The next bunch came here during the potato famine.  The potato crops failed in England too.   Two brothers made their way to Buffalo.  One headed for the Canadian side of the border.  The other walked to Lake Geneva Wisconsin where he started a dairy farm.  Some distant cousins are still milking cows there 170 years later.  From Wisconsin some of my relatives helped open up the Oregon Trail and Texas territories.  I think I can say with certainty, that they all believed in the American Dream and many took risks and made great sacrifices in the hope of a better life.

Today’s immigrants, relatives of past immigrants, and most current citizens all share the same simple desire for a better life for our children.  That is the promise and blessing of this country.  It was how our country was settled.  It is an experience that is renewed with each new wave of immigrants that come to our country.  Now is not the time to turn our backs on those who want the same chance today that our ancestors were seeking when they took their own long and dangerous journey to a new land.

Posted in Immigration, Politics | 19 Comments »

The Wall

Friday, January 4th, 2019

White evangelicals are getting a lot of attention in the larger press these days. That’s because they appear to be the most loyal demographic of Trump’s support.

I’ve posted on this topic before. Most recently, I speculated that it was Trump’s support of Christian Nationalism that could explain at least some of it.

I’ve also posted about the revisionist history that is a popular by-product of the fundamentalist belief that the founders intended this be a Christian nation. In fact, reliable historical accounts prove that their intent exactly the opposite. They realized that this experiment with democracy would fail if religion become politicized. Just as they distrusted the ability of a king to reflect the best interests of the people, they also believed the best way to get religion out of politics was to create a government with no religious preference.

So let’s dig into the question a little bit more to see if we can figure out why the white evangelical support for Trump is unwavering even as his support from other groups erodes.

White Evangelicals
The first question we need to address is why it appears to be specifically WHITE evangelicals rather than evangelicals in general, or even whites in general.

According to surveys, white evangelicals are more conservative than the larger white population on things like welfare, climate change, and immigration. 80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016. 59% of whites in general voted for Clinton. This may be the result of a fundamental fear of demographic change in general and racial resentment in particular.

Twice as many white evangelicals oppose climate change spending compared with other non-white evangelical groups. Twice as many white evangelicals oppose raising taxes on the wealthy compared with other non-white evangelical groups. White evangelicals are significantly more conservative on racial issues like Black Lives Matter or apologizing for slavery. 50% of white evangelicals believe that immigrants hurt the economy. Less than a quarter of non-white evangelicals share that belief. White evangelicals have the most negative attitudes toward immigrants of all US religious groups. That is in spite of the fact that most conservative white evangelical leaders strongly favor a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Here’s the answer that researchers have come up with.

My research indicates white evangelical conservatism correlates strongly with their perceptions (of) anti-white discrimination, even after taking into account economic status, party, age and region. Fully 50 percent of white evangelical respondents to our 2016 survey reported feeling they face discrimination that’s comparable to, or even higher than, the discrimination they believe Muslim Americans face. Those who hold this perception are more likely to hold conservative attitudes on issues as wide-ranging as climate change, tax policy and health-care reform.

This racial resentment is exacerbated by the rapid growth in non-white evangelical membership.  While 66% of evangelicals are still white, their numbers are declining rapidly.

The number of white evangelical Protestants fell from about 23 percent of the US population in 2006 to 17 percent in 2016, and only 11 percent are under 30, according to a survey of more than 100,000 Americans.

A Wall
67% of white evangelicals support building a wall. That is compared with 39% of the larger population. Here’s some additional research.

“For white evangelicals who see the sun setting on white Christian dominance in the country, the wall is a powerful metaphor,” said Jones, who has spent many years analyzing the attitudes of religious voters, and published the book “The End of White Christian America.”

Jones added that this metaphor embodies a white evangelical view of the world “as a dangerous battleground” made up of “chosen insiders and threatening outsiders,” as well as an “embattled minority trope that is rooted deep within southern culture,” such as the “Lost Cause theology following the Civil War,” and in “evangelical culture generally.”

Trump’s wall is a metaphor for the belief that Trump will protect white evangelicals from the demographic and cultural changes that they feel threaten their way of life.

On this score, historian John Fea has noted a longtime strain in white evangelical culture of “racial and religious fear” built on anxiety over immigrants, secularization, modernization and demographic change. While white evangelicals are not a monolith, Fea argues, many believe Trump is God’s vessel for “delivering them from the ‘captivity’ of the Obama administration,” so there’s little Trump could do that would “lead white conservative evangelicals to abandon him.”

As Stewart points out, some leading evangelical figures have even talked about this in wall metaphors. One such figure, who appears in the film, has declared that “America has become a nation without walls,” and that Trump will “restore the crumbling walls that separate us from cultural collapse.”

Walls appear deeply ahistorical as responses to the actual challenges to national sovereignty mounted by the facts of 21st-century globalization, Brown writes, but their overtones of long-vanished historical times are key to what makes them reassuring.

Walls have long been a metaphor for cultural strength and rebuilding community. Here’s how David Barton of the revisionist history WallBuilders movement describes it.

In the Old Testament book of Nehemiah, the nation of Israel rallied together in a grassroots movement to help rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and thus restore stability, safety, and a promising future to that great city. We have chosen this historical concept of “rebuilding the walls” to represent allegorically the call for citizen involvement in rebuilding our nation’s foundations. As Psalm 11:3 reminds us, “If the foundations be destroyed, what shall the righteous do?”

King Cyrus
There is a belief spreading among white evangelicals that Trump is a modern day version of King Cyrus.

This has been prompted by the release of a new movie, “The Trump Prophecy,” which tells the tale of a former firefighter who experienced an epiphany in 2011 that Trump would be elected president.

Analyzing the film, Katherine Stewart, a journalist who covers the Christian right, notes that it positions Trump as a modern-day “King Cyrus,” the 6th-century B.C. king of Persia who freed Jews from captivity in Babylon. As Stewart notes, Cyrus is the “model for a nonbeliever appointed by God as a vessel for the faithful,” and in the eyes of white evangelicals, Trump plays that role. In this telling, Trump is a savior figure for “Christian nationalism,” so his personal failings and misconduct are beside the point. Indeed, Stewart notes, his autocratic and anti-democratic conduct is a virtue, since it is being marshaled toward that end of rescuing evangelical culture from extermination.

Summary
To be clear, this is not an economic issue.

Economic anxiety isn’t a primary reason for white evangelicals supporting Trump. They fear losing racial status. White evangelicals’ belief that they’re the targets of discrimination – more so than other groups — influence far more than simply their votes for Trump.

While facts don’t support this fear, it remains an issue of belief just as strong as any other evangelical interpretation of the Bible. The problem is that you simply can’t argue belief.

So it doesn’t matter what the Mueller investigation turns up. Even if there is evidence that Trump committed treasonous acts, this particular group of supporters will continue to believe that God is working out His plan through Trump.

I believe that God IS working out his plan through Trump, but that His plan has no more to do with politics now than it did 2000 years ago when some questioned whether or not Jesus planned to overthrow the Romans.

As a result, I believe that the white evangelical group will face the same reckoning that every other group that confused politics with piety have faced throughout history. Unfortunately, pride goeth before the fall. Where there is great pride, as in the expectation of white privilege, the fall will be also be great.

God’s plan is simple. As the Bible tells us, God is no respecter of persons, or wealth, or influence, or privilege. His plan is that we work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. The best way to secure that salvation is to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, provide clothes to the needy, care for the sick, and visit those who are imprisoned. God will judge all of us the same way. He doesn’t need our help separating the sheep from the goats. He doesn’t need a wall to carry out his plan. He doesn’t need a King. He certainly doesn’t need a president. He just needs us to love each other, listen humbly for His direction, and follow the leadings of Truth.

 

Posted in Bias, Immigration, Politics, Religious Conservatism, Trump | 35 Comments »

Tinkerbell Effect

Monday, October 15th, 2018

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This is a term which describes things that are thought to exist only because people believe in them. One of the areas where is it used fairly widely is with money. Money has no intrinsic value. It only works because everyone using it believes that it will continue to work for the foreseeable future.

Populism at its core is built on the Tinkerbell Effect. Populists believe that “crowds” are self-validating. Whatever the crowd believes must be fact because everyone in the crowd shares the same belief.

Science, while it studies the “wisdom of crowds”, has never accepted the claim that belief should replace proof regardless of how popular any particular belief might be.

The modern era began with the introduction of the scientific method in the 17th century. That method requires all assumptions to pass a series of rigorous tests in order to gain credibility. The scientific method created the concept of objective truth. It freed reality from being narrowly defined by popes or potentates. Instead it handed the responsibility of understanding the world to a select group of highly decentralized critical thinkers around the world – experts in their particular fields. These groups are self-selecting based on their areas of interest. Anyone can join, regardless of race, color, creed, or nationality. They simply have to prove through their publications that they have sufficient understanding of the subject matter to be taken seriously by their peers.

When Galileo improved the Lippershey telescope to provide ultimately 30x magnification, he was able to confirm the Copernican helio-centric theory of the solar system. This was a direct challenge to the Biblical claim supported by the Catholic Church that the universe revolved around the earth.

Galileo championed the idea that all of the laws of nature are mathematical. That meant that natural outcomes should not only be predictable, but also repeatable by anyone with a comparable understanding of the underlying mathematics. In other words, you didn’t have to be Galileo to see the moons of Jupiter transit across the face of the planet. You only had to have the same telescope that Galileo had and understand what those dots moving across the image of Jupiter actually represented.

This ushered in a new age where scientists could reliably explain all natural phenomena. Reality was no longer dependent on opinion or dogma. Instead there was (and is) an unbiased group of experts who could not only separate fact from fiction, but were eager to test new ideas even if they questioned accepted theories. This group almost by definition is constantly pushing the boundaries of understanding while simultaneously strengthening those theories that survive rigorous testing.

This group earns the right to test all theories about reality through the professional credentials they acquire, the reputation they have with their peers, and their own success in producing original work that can be duplicated by other experts in the field.

By definition, these experts also know more about their subject than any random crowd regardless of its size.

Therein lies the rub.

Populist movements, including the one in this country, strive to take back the right to determine what is fact and what is fiction. They reject any and all outside groups who suggest that any but their own trusted group can dictate their beliefs.

Here’s why all of this is important.

Trump’s lying is not a character flaw or pathology. It is not a “salesman” characteristic. It IS a deliberate strategy to weaken our collective ability to distinguish truth from falsehood. Steve Bannon summarized this strategy when he said, “The way to deal with [the media] is to flood the zone with s**t.”

Trump’s singular success as a politician has been his ability to create an alternate reality in which he and his supporters live. He has been successful because he is exploiting a weakness in our democracy. That weakness is the power that we invest in the chief executive. An untrustworthy chief executive in our system can acquire a lot of power very quickly. The only checks to that power are congress, the courts, and voters. A free and independent press is supposed to inform the voters so that their choices are fact based.

Trump’s strategy is to delegitimize the press, create an alternate reality where he is the only arbiter of truth, and demonize all those who oppose him. Because he is the President, he has the power to accomplish that. Facts are no longer relevant in this discussion because Trump’s supporters reject experts as biased elites and the press as “the enemy of the people”. Democrats are “traitors” and “evil people”. All those who oppose Trump, in the minds of his supporters, should be “locked up”. The Republican Party has long since abdicated any role in checking the President’s power. Those who might provide leadership have either died or been drummed out of the party. The courts are slowly being bent to Trump’s will too as his appointments flood positions that a Republican Senate majority had kept open during the Obama administration.

The only reliable check that remains is voters. That fact isn’t lost on Trump and Republican either. Trump has already built the narrative that any vote that doesn’t go his way must be the result of a rigged system or voter fraud. Republicans have stepped up their efforts at every level of government to suppress the vote from those who generally vote for Democrats.

This brings us to the current crossroad.

Our country appears to be split.

We have conservatives who vote based on a set of ideological beliefs that they share regarding government, taxes, the free market, and personal responsibility. Whether smaller government actually increases human freedom is never questioned. If tax cuts and deregulation don’t result in faster economic growth, at least they are giving individuals more control over their own property – which seems to be good enough. Conservatives believe that people choose to be poor and that any attempt to mitigate the circumstances surrounding poverty discourages people from putting in the work that would improve their condition. There is no data to support this view either, but put that hasn’t stopped Trump from blaming the poor, immigrants, and people of color for the country’s problems.

Republicans were concerned about debt and deficits when a Democrat was in the White House. Now that Republicans control all branches of government, they are running up deficits and increasing the debt at an historic rate.

Liberals on the other hand are focused these days on achieving a pragmatic balance between the market and the state. They view government as tool to constrain corporate excess. Decisions on each specific issue of government involvement are the result of extensive evidence-based study and a good faith attempt to produce outcomes which benefit the most people. If liberals have a religion it is the belief that science will always produce the best answer. One of the potential outcome of this philosophy is a technocracy where all power as well decision-making is concentrated in a small group of supposed experts. China claims that this is their form of government, but it looks a lot more like an oligopoly because the Chinese “experts” who have the power are also personally benefiting from their decisions. While that isn’t the case in this country, there is a deep suspicion among conservatives that those who are making decisions based on their academic credentials MUST somehow also be benefiting personally from the positions that they are taking. There is no proof to support that claim, but conservatives still insist that “experts” can’t be trusted. This leaves conservatives free to insist that their beliefs are more credible because they are based in “common sense”.

From an ideological perspective, however, modern liberalism in this country may not be well equipped to deal with the anti-state anti-intellectual radicalism that has become the Republican Party. The pragmatic Clintonian Democrats come off as passionless technocrats rather than true believers. This more than anything else explains the rise of the Bernie Socialists. Democratic Socialism is on the rise because it brings a new vision of the expanded role of the state that can match the populist fervor that swept Trump into office. Both the Democratic Socialists and the populists share a deep distrust of what they view as the establishment. They both want to tear it down and build something new.

The populist challenge is they have failed to dislodge the Republican establishment. Instead the Republican establishment has figured out how to ride this populist wave. The result is that the power of establishment has increased. The only difference is that this establishment is speaking in populist terms rather than traditional conservatism. The policies, however, are the same as they have always been.

All indications are that the Democrats will regain control of the House and make significant gains at the state level.

What will that mean for the next two years?

If past is prologue, the path forward is pretty obvious.

Regardless of the election outcome, Trump will double down on his authoritarian tactics. He will try to end the Mueller investigation. He will increase attempts to suppress the 2020 vote. He will refuse to comply with court orders limiting his power. He will refuse to cooperate with congressional investigations. The resulting constitutional crisis will have to be resolved in a Supreme Court where Kavanaugh could be the deciding vote. Whatever the Supreme Court decides will only increase divisions between those who believe in their own views and those who seek the objective reality.

He will crack down on protests and try to further weaken the influence of the press. He may cause an international crisis in an effort to boost his status as a “war” president. He will almost certainly continue his misguided trade war.

Finally, the recession that we have all been waiting for will arrive. Trump will fumble the response and deepen the crisis rather than resolve it. Trump will use the crisis to impose even more draconian immigration enforcement in an effort to blame the failure on Muslims, Hispanics, and the poor. Violence against all of those groups will increase.

Next up a different take on this whole picture.

Posted in Bias, Economy, Immigration, Politics, Religious Conservatism, Science, Trump | 31 Comments »

Fleeing to Another Country

Saturday, July 7th, 2018

 

Fleeing to another country is the ultimate act of parental desperation.  Yet somehow those parents who are seeking asylum in this country are being cast as the villains in Trump’s twisted passion play.

Instead of embracing this situation with the compassion that we as a country normally exhibit when when people are in need, politics have overwhelmed the immigration discussion.

Here are a few facts in an effort to bring some reason to what otherwise seems dominated by emotion.

  1. Illegal immigration is at the lowest point in recent history. Border patrol apprehensions were 1.6M in 2000. Now they are a little over 250K. That’s a 6x reduction.  Even more important is for the last four years we have deported more people than entered the country illegally.  As a result, the number of illegal immigrants in this country has been going down.
  2. Our constitution and laws guarantee those seeking asylum the right to a fair hearing on their claims within a reasonable period of time.
  3. There are legal limits to the amount of time the government can hold a child.
  4. Numerous credible studies find that immigrants (regardless of status) reduce violent crime in the communities in which they settle. The numbers Trump uses have been widely debunked.
  5. Many of the mayors of border cities have said that illegal immigration is not currently a problem for them.

Here’s what has changed.

In past administrations, 90% of those seeking asylum presented proof of a “credible fear” of harm if they returned to their home country. Those people (mostly families) were released in the US while awaiting their hearing. In the current administration, the rates of release have dropped to single digits.  As the asylum seekers go up, those crossing in search of work has gone down.

The result is that a “zero tolerance” plan that may have been designed to discourage young single men from crossing the border to look for work,  has created a humanitarian disaster by traumatizing families and abusing children.

Most asylum seekers flee their country with their whole family. Those who have chosen to criticize the parents for putting their children at risk, clearly misunderstand the law AND are unwilling to admit that they would do the same thing if their family were similarly threatened.

The lawbreakers in this case are the Trump administration. They ignored asylum claims because it was politically inconvenient. Instead, they treated all those who cross the border as criminals. Once they committed to putting everyone who crossed the border in jail including those who presented themselves seeking asylum, they committed to family separation. It’s also because they wanted to use those separated children as leverage to coerce those in jail to drop their asylum claims in return for the promise of being reunited with their children.  Court documents indicate this promise was also a lie.

3000 children were separated from their parents by the time that Trump was forced to stop the practice. Courts found against the administration and ordered the Trump administration to quickly reunite children and their parents. The relevant child protection agencies finally had to admit what lawyers and immigrant activists had been saying from the beginning.  No records have been kept which can be used to reunite children with their parents.  For children under 5, the Trump administration has been forced to resort to DNA testing to even have a clue to who the parents might be.

The reason no records were kept was because the agencies charged with placing these children either with relatives or in suitable foster care were never setup to reunite parents with children.  They were setup during the Obama administration to deal with the flood of unaccompanied minors who started crossing the border in 2014.  While there were efforts to reunite these children with their parents, those parents were generally not being held in US jails awaiting an immigration trial.  No efforts were made prior to the implementation of the “zero tolerance” policy to add a layer of record keeping to the processes that were already in place.  These agencies and the Trump administration ignored all the warnings they received when they first announced their intentions to treat everyone as a criminal.

There are only two conclusions at this point regarding this policy. The first is that the Trump administration are incompetent liars. They put a policy in place with no understanding that it would separate so many children from their parents. They lied about their planning and ability to reunite those children with their parents. It was only after a judge intervened that the truth about the scale of this monstrous effort became clear.

The second conclusion is that the Trump administration are cynical liars. They knew that they were going to create a problem for which they had no solution, but they didn’t care. They felt that it was a controversy that would help motivate their base to rush to their defense when the truth came out about the abuse they had visited on innocent children. So they lied about virtually everything that they had done and then sat back as the media, those shocked by these actions, and the rest of the world reacted to what they were seeing.

Those who support Trump responded exactly as Trump had hoped. They blamed the media for bias. They repeated all Trump’s lies about secure borders, laws passed by Democrats, crime, and that old standard law and order. They blamed Democrats for criticizing something that Obama also did. They blamed the parents for putting their children in harm’s way. They blamed liberals for wanting an open border and lawlessness in return for increasing the ranks of illegal voters. They claimed it was all a conspiracy put up by the media and liberals to make Trump look bad.

The only person they didn’t hold accountable was the ONLY person who caused this calamity and the only person who eventually was forced to stop it – President Trump.

Objecting to this program is not advocating for open borders or lawlessness. Instead it is holding the current administration accountable for failing to abide by all the laws concerning immigration.

Those trying to defend these actions on the basis of politics, media bias, or parent-blaming should themselves be ashamed of what they have allowed themselves to become.

Posted in Immigration, Politics, Trump, Trump | 3 Comments »

The State of the Union is Fantastical

Wednesday, January 31st, 2018

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President Trump’s first state of the union speech was just as remarkable as his first year in office.

David Graham from the Atlantic had a good summary.

The reality is somewhat less rosy: By a wide margin, Americans believe that the nation is on the wrong track, and the president’s approval rating is historically low. Trump has struggled to push his agenda through Congress, just squeaking a big tax cut in at the end of last year. That presents three challenges for the president, and his speechwriters: How do you boast about victories you haven’t had? How do you present new proposals when many of the old ones are still on the table? And how do you handle the Russia story that seems to consume most of politics each week?

The answer from Trump was simply to conjure his own reality, outlining a set of some accomplishments, delivering the standard list of policy proposals, and ignoring the Russia probe altogether.

This president is not often good at hiding his emotions, but he did so Tuesday. As a result, not only was the picture he painted of America removed from reality, but Trump himself was also practically unrecognizable. The speech somehow managed to render Trump the one thing he almost never is: boring.

One has to go no further than his claims of economic success to reveal the gulf between reality and fantasy that exists in the White House.

Since the election, we have created 2.4 million new jobs, including 200,000 new jobs in manufacturing alone.

Only 1.8M new jobs were created since he took office according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Instead of citing the real figure, he chose to cite a figure that included three months where jobs could only be attributed to Obama.  It’s also because during his first full year in office, the 1.8M new jobs was the slowest job growth since 2010. The reason is that employers are having a hard time finding workers, which is what he also could have said.  Instead he left the impression that this was an extraordinary accomplishment.

Of those jobs created during his time in office, 184,000 were in manufacturing which would also been a good number compared to the 16,000 jobs lost in 2016. But that doesn’t mean that manufacturing is in good shape. Total manufacturing employment is still down by more than 1M workers compared to 2007.

After years of wage stagnation, we are finally seeing rising wages.

Wages did grow from 2014 through the third quarter of 2017, but the rate of growth has slowed and in Q4 wage growth actually declined (from $353/wk to $345/wk)  So why didn’t he mention that?

African American unemployment stands at the lowest rate ever recorded, and Hispanic American unemployment has also reached the lowest levels in history.

During Trump’s campaign, he claimed that more than half of African American youth were unemployed. The real number was 19.2%. African American unemployment fell from a high of 16.8% in 2010 to 7.7% last January. Since then it has fallen to 6.8%.  Why didn’t he just say that?  It is still really good news, and given his past campaign exaggerations, would have indicted a new respect for the facts.

Unemployment claims have hit a 45-year low.

That statement was true on January 13th. Last week the number went up. That’s still a good number, but it is only a six week low, not a 45-year one.  Why not simply say that they hit an 45-year low two weeks ago.

The stock market has smashed one record after another, gaining $8 trillion in value. That is great news for Americans’ 401(k), retirement, pension and college savings accounts.

Only about 50 percent of Americans own stocks directly or through retirement funds, according to a Gallup survey. And most of the value in stocks is held by the top 10 percent. And the bull market in the US is actually weaker than market gains in the rest of the world. So the truth is that the US markets are just part of a larger global trend, and if anything Trump has discouraged investment in US markets rather than encouraged it.

BTW, the markets fell more than 1% on Monday as money moved from stocks to bonds. This is generally an indication that at least some traders think that this market may be near its peak. Almost $360B is stock market wealth (using Trumps calculus) disappeared as a result.

Just as I promised the American people from this podium 11 months ago, we enacted the biggest tax cuts and reform in American history.

This claim is just wrong and has been widely debunked. Depending on how you count, it ranks 8th in terms of size. Both of Obama’s tax cuts were larger.

Our massive tax cuts provide tremendous relief for the middle class and small businesses

More wrong. This tax plan benefits large corporations and wealthy people. According to Moody’s, three-quarters of the $1.1T in individual cuts go to people earning more than $200K/year in taxable income. Those represent only 5% of all taxpayers. The same report warns that this plan will have negative consequences on federal and local government finances.

We slashed the business tax rate from 35 percent all the way down to 21 percent, so American companies can compete and win against anyone in the world. These changes alone are estimated to increase average family income by more than $4,000.

More voodoo math. As FactCheck.org points out, if every household averaged a $4,000 increase in income, that would add up to $500B/year. Corporate taxes collected last year only totaled $300B. Even if all corporate taxes were eliminated and all of that money flowed directly into individual income, it still couldn’t add up to the increase Trump claimed.

The real numbers, according to the Tax Policy Center, are closer to $1,610. That’s $135/mo. Most people are smart enough to realize that they are not the ones getting a big break.

Since we passed tax cuts, roughly 3 million workers have already gotten tax cut bonuses — many of them thousands of dollars per worker.

Less than 2.5% of the work force have received one-time bonuses.  That’s why the remaining 97.5% know that this wasn’t a good deal for them.

Since we passed tax cuts … Apple has just announced it plans to invest a total of $350 billion in America, and hire another 20,000 workers.

Apple DID give workers bonuses because of the tax plan. They do plan to repatriate $38B in overseas profit as a result of the plan. They did not say that their $350B five-year investment plan was the result of the tax plan. The capital part of that plan seems in line with past levels of annual investment.

The foundation of REAL economic growth is productivity. Productivity requires a large percentage of the population to be employed in doing things that make money. It is very difficult to increase productivity when you have a large growing retirement population. The only way to do that is to add as many new workers through immigration as you have retiring. You can’t simultaneously support lowering immigration, increasing retirement, and have a high growth economy. Japan already proved that it can’t be done.

The other end of productivity is businesses investing in new plants, new technologies, etc. That’s how you increase productivity without adding new workers. That investment is also NOT currently happening because businesses are able to make money without making those investments.

Another gauge of a healthy economy is the saving rate. Savings rates go up when people have more disposable income. The rate of savings is going down, which suggests that households are strapped for cash or they are drunk on spending. Neither is good. The first suggests that the cost of living is rising more rapidly than wages. The second suggests that any boost that the economy may be getting from consumer spending is short lived.

Finally, the government has a role in economic development too. That’s to stimulate the growth of new emerging industries. Trump is failing there too. That’s because of the stake in the ground that Trump planted regarding coal. First he has failed to keep the promise that he made to coal workers. Second his wrongheaded tariffs on solar panels is costing jobs in a rapidly growing sector of the industry while failing to make any difference in the coal industry which is in decline.

The problem with short term incentives like tax breaks and repatriation is that they are candy rather than substance. Bringing $38B of profits back to this country from Apple will make it appear as if something got made in this country. Unless Apple invests that money in making more stuff in the United States than it may have otherwise made, it will not be reflected in any increase in either jobs or productivity. If Apple just uses the money to buy back their stock and increase their dividends, any economic boost will be short lived and perhaps make the next stock market correction that much more severe.

When the President bases policy on false beliefs, the country will pay the price.

Adding $1.5T in additional debt now is a REALLY bad idea according to the IMF.

The I.M.F. warned against assuming that the current economic cycle would go on indefinitely, however, particularly given the towering debt of the United States and other countries. By borrowing so much, the government can crowd out other investors and drive up interest rates. At the same time, giant deficits crank up pressure to cut government spending on health care and housing, policing and schools. With less money to go around, spending dries up and consumer demand — the economy’s primary engine — slows.

This was the SAME warning that Republicans used during the Recession. It turned out not to be true, because that’s when the government SHOULD be spending money to get the economy going again. That deficit spending worked. The economy recovered. And NOW is the time to increase taxes in order to make investments in the future industries that will support the next generation of businesses and employment. That’s because a growing economy can support a higher tax rate.

Cranking down on immigration at a time of low unemployment and baby boomer retirement is another REALLY bad idea.

A single immigrant can bring in unlimited numbers of distant relatives

This was Trump’s big lie from his speech.  Politifact labeled is Mostly False.

We should be welcoming immigrants AND their families. New family formation is the bedrock of the consumer economy. Immigrants who bring in family members provide their own support system for those immigrants.  That means they will have places to live, jobs, churches, mosques, and people like them who will help them make the peaceful transition to becoming citizens. This family process that includes a path to citizenship is why we don’t have the same problems with domestic terrorism that we’ve seen in England, Germany, and France.  There is no good reason to scrape the family immigration system.

Trading citizenship for 1.8M Dreamers for cutting LEGAL immigration in half (from $2.1M to $1M) is a bad deal for the economy.  Dreamers are already here and already have jobs.  Reducing the ability for immigrants to bring in their family members will just reduce the number of legal immigrants.  I have no problem making our immigration system more merit-based, but the number of legal immigrants should be set by the number of unfilled jobs in the economy.  Right now that number is 6M.  What is wrong with expanding the H1B program which is merit and employer based until the number of unfilled jobs is reduced?

The only reason we can’t do that is because Trump has told the country that immigrants are dangerous.  He did that again last night.  Canada on the other hand has built their economy on merit-based immigration and has already told the world that if the US doesn’t want you, you are welcome to come to Canada where their political culture realizes the economic value of skilled immigrant workers.

The REAL problem we are dealing with in this country is the disconnect between reality and fantasy.

Until we have a government willing to tell the truth, we are going to struggle for any sort of reliable and unified plan for growth and stability.

Posted in Economy, Finance, Immigration, Politics, Trump, Trump | 22 Comments »

Really?

Monday, January 22nd, 2018

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“What we have just witnessed on the floor was a cynical decision by Senate Democrats to shove aside millions of Americans for the sake of irresponsible, political games,” Mitch McConnell – 1/20/18

The problem with this statement is that it is the Republicans who are playing cynical games. These games mask a radical shift in the position of that party regarding immigration.

This all started when Trump rescinded the executive order known as DACA in September, 2017. Rather than work out a legislative compromise, he simply tossed a ticking time bomb into what was then the tax debate. If Congress didn’t act is six months, he threatened to end the program. He said that he took that action in order to encourage Congress to act. That’s the same reason Obama cited when he signed the executive order. Trump also said that his preference was action to protect the “Dreamers”. He spoke very sympathetically about them.

We’re going to show great heart. DACA is a very, very difficult subject for me. I will tell you. To me, it’s one of the most difficult subjects I have,” Trump said at a press conference in February.

“But you have some absolutely incredible kids — I would say mostly. They were brought here in such a way. It’s a very — it’s a very very tough subject. We are going to deal with DACA with heart. I have to deal with a lot of politicians, don’t forget. And I have to convince them that what I’m saying is, is right. And I appreciate your understanding on that,” Trump said.

“But the DACA situation is a very very, it’s a very difficult thing for me because you know, I love these kids,” he added. “I love kids. I have kids and grandkids and I find it very, very hard doing what the law says exactly to do.”

In fact the NYT reported that his aides were imploring him to dial it back.

Why?

We’ll get to that in a moment.

First let’s go through the timeline.

In September, 2017 Trump made a deal with Schumer and Pelosi which setup this particular confrontation. The Democrats agreed to a three month raise in the debt ceiling and some hurricane relief in return for a deal on DACA. Republicans were upset with this deal because they thought Trump didn’t get much for delaying a confrontation with Democrats three months. As a result of that and pushback from anti-immigrant factions in his party and his base, Trump reneged on the dinner deal he had with Schumer and Pelosi.

The Democrats said that they were not going to approve another increase in the debt ceiling without some movement on DACA. Graham and Durbin hammered out a bi-partisan deal which was EXCACTLY what Trump had asked for in September. All it required was Trump’s approval and there would have been no shutdown. Trump blew that deal up too because Tom Cotton convinced Trump that his base wants NO DACA deal effectively moving the goalposts again.

The Democrats kept their promise to the DACA dreamers and refused to support another extension of the debt ceiling.

Schumer at this point put another deal on the table over the weekend offering to include approval of money for a wall in return for DACA relief. Trump was ready to make that deal too until Kelly, Miller, and GOP leaders blew that deal up.

This gets to the core of the problem.

87% of voters support allowing those who qualified under the DACA program to remain in this country including 79% of Republicans.

A majority of voters also oppose building a wall, but 70% of Republicans support it.

67% of voters support shutting down the government in order to force renewed CHIP funding.

Yet during the process Republican language regarding DACA Dreamers changed. They were no longer “incredible kids”. Now they were just part of the larger “illegal immigrant” population committing crimes, harming low skilled US workers, and committing terrorist acts. Instead of “great people who have done a great job” they became “criminals on parole”.

What DACA has exposed is the dark secret of Trumpism. Immigrants are the problem. It doesn’t matter how they got into the country. They are no longer welcome.

If the dreamers are just another species of criminal alien, then Democrats had better give up a lot — cuts to legal immigration and changes to family-based migration — to gain their protection. But it remains unresolved whether Trump and Republicans are willing to legalize the dreamers at all — whether they actually do or do not view them in sufficiently sympathetic terms. If they can’t get to Yes — if no reasonable set of concessions is enough — it will be because treating the dreamers as fundamentally different from other undocumented immigrants is a Rubicon they cannot cross.

Further evidence is the Cotton Perdue proposal to cut LEGAL immigration by 50%. This isn’t strengthening our borders or reducing the number of people who manage to get here illegally. This is effectively using “merit” or “skills” to reduce the number of immigrants we admit. One has to look no further than the proposal that only those who pass the “merit” screening would be admitted. The “merit” visa includes no provisions for family unless they can also pass the same screen. We admit 1.2M immigrants legally every year. 140,000 come through the merit program that is currently employer sponsored. Only 70,000 of those are the actual employees.

At this point there is likely going to be a lot of partisan scorekeeping.

Here’s my take.

  1. CHIP gets funded for six years. Republicans delayed funding CHIP because they knew that they would need something to trade. Keeping 9M kids hostage for political purposes will be something Democrats will remind voters in 2018. Republicans traded this for Democrats keeping the government open for another three weeks.
  2. Schumer and McConnell have a deal to put a bill on floor to address DACA by Feb 8th. This will be another important test of whether government can work to address an issue that has broad bi-partisan support.
  3. Trump, the great dealmaker, was not only put out to pasture on this deal, he and his anti-immigrant advisor Stephen Miller were both exposed as hazards to dealmaking. With approval ratings already in the dumper, it’s hard to tell what affect this will have.
  4. If a DACA bill passes, it will almost certainly be the Senate that passes it. It is unclear what the House will do. If the House doesn’t act on it, and deportations start in the months before the November election; a bad situation for Republicans will only get worse.
  5. A lot of Democrats are going to be very angry about this deal. You can tell who, by looking at those senators that voted against it. What happens in the next couple of weeks will determine if that is anger that will affect Schumer’s position. If McConnell doesn’t deliver on his promise, the shutdown post February 8th could be very ugly.
  6. What will also be ugly are the xenophobic arguments that will surface over the next couple of weeks. We’ll see how far right the Republican base has really moved. Is this still the party of “incredible kids” or has this become the party that wants to shut immigration down completely. If it is the later, Trump has to take the blame for his rhetoric and his playing footsy with White Supremacists and Neo-Nazi’s. You can also bet that Democrats will use the racist xenophobic statements that are certainly going to show up to ramp up voter registration in places like Texas and Arizona.
  7. The shutdown itself will be old news by the 2018 election. Republicans lost a government shutdown in 2013 and still won big in 2014.

The bottom line is nobody looks good in a shutdown, but there is an opportunity for moderates who engineered this compromise to also start driving bi-partisan legislation through a polarized Congress. Trump will probably sign whatever makes it to his desk. I’m not sure his knows how to spell veto.

Unfortunately Trump’s confusion, lack of control, flip-flopping, and fundamental inability to personally resolve a fairly minor domestic crisis is going to concern our allies and embolden our enemies. When even he agrees that standing down is the best thing that he can do for the good of the country – our future is at best cloudy.

Posted in Immigration, Politics, Terrorism, Trump, Trump | 1 Comment »

Our Failing Naked Emperor

Friday, October 6th, 2017

via GIPHY

One of the defining characteristics of the Trump campaign and administration is the utter disregard for the facts.  There was some hope by Trump supporters that once he transitioned from campaign mode to presidential mode, he would also abandon his strategy of habitual fabrication.  That hope died with the inauguration.  Trump’s inaugural crowds were factually smaller than Obama’s, but no one in the Trump administration and no one in the Republican establishment were willing to call Trump out as a liar.  Instead we’re dealing with this interesting situation where he, his administration, and his supporters blame media bias for every report that details yet another Trump lie.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the emperor is still naked.

That “nakedness” is finally causing more than embarrassment.  This “strategy” has made it more difficult for Republicans to govern.  We are now 9 months into a legislative session where Republicans control all branches of government, and the ONLY enduring evidence of this control is Gorsuch’s SCOTUS appointment.  Even that has an asterisk because McConnell had to remove the 60 vote filibuster in order to get it done.

The fundamental operating principle of this administration is that Trump can never fail, he can only be failed.  As a result, any form of failure must either be a lie or someone else’s fault.  I won’t try to go into the psychology of this particular form of egotism.  We’ll save that for another day.  At this point, let’s just look at the consequences of never admitting that you’ve been wrong.

One example is the recent failure to pass healthcare which Trump blamed on the filibuster rule in the Senate.  The FACT was that the healthcare reform bill wasn’t subject to a filibuster.  It only required a simple 50 vote majority to pass because of reconciliation rules.  It failed to get 50 votes because several Senators from the President’s own party refused to vote for it.  McCain refused to vote for it because Republicans bypassed the normal committee process where all interested parties would have an opportunity to comment and all points of view could be considered.  Paul refused to vote for it because it wasn’t conservative enough.  Collins refused to vote for it because she feared it would have resulted in the loss of healthcare insurance coverage in her state.  The bill died before it could ever get a vote, so we don’t know how many others would also have voted against it.

Another example is his regular rant about the biased media and fake news failing to report on his accomplishments.  The problem is, just like the inauguration, there isn’t much there.  Worse yet, Trump’s own obsession to dominate every news cycle makes it difficult for even his modest accomplishments to get much play.  Instead he regularly distracts from his legislative agenda by picking fights and fanning the flames of the culture war.

A third example is the Republican establishment who, in Trump’s description have let the Russian investigation get out of control and secretly oppose his agenda.

What is true is that Trump’s agenda, if in fact he truly has one, is failing because he hasn’t provided the policy to support his bold promises.

Healthcare failed three times because he had promised to provide better coverage to more people at a lower cost.  None of the bills that were proposed accomplished that, even though Trump at one point or another supported all of them.  Instead they were thinly (and in the last case not so thinly) veiled attempts to dismantle Medicaid.  As those realities became apparent to more people, opposition mounted and the bills failed.

Tax reform will suffer a similar fate.  Though Trump promised a bill that would benefit the middle class and not reward the wealthy, the bill that is currently being considered does what every other Republican tax initiative has done.  The bulk of the benefits go to the wealthiest 1% of the country.

This is not the result of a conspiracy of the Republican establishment to undermine Trump.  If anything, Trump has passively allowed Congressional leadership to fill in the blanks on his promises.  The problem is that the bills in their final form were not even close to what Trump promised, and he didn’t seem to care.

The cause is years of Republican bad faith campaigning.  Republicans promised that they could replace Obamacare with something better if they only had the majority to implement their ideas.  They never actually proposed any new ideas.  Instead they were content to demonize liberal Democrats.  When voters finally gave Republicans a chance to prove they could do better, they failed.

The same thing will be true about taxes.  Trickle down tax cut plans that were supposed to make life better for the middle class have failed spectacularly at the state level and nationally.  But here it comes again in even a worse form than what was passed during the Bush years.

Republican voters are unhappy that the party isn’t delivering on Trump’s promises.  Trump used this anger to get himself elected.  But voters haven’t stopped there.  They continue to elect bomb throwers at the state and local level.  Newly elected Senator Moore in Alabama has said he shares Rand Paul’s view regarding healthcare reform and would have joined him to vote against that bill.  Moore will likely make it more difficult rather than easier to get Trump’s agenda through the senate.

The bottom line is that Trump lies have painted the party into a corner on many issues.

The claims that Obamacare is failing make it more difficult to pass bipartisan legislation that most agree would solve the current set of problems.  Passing that legislation would force Trump to admit that Obamacare isn’t failing and can be improved with a couple of simple tweaks.  If that’s true, then why the continued effort to tear it down and replace it with something that kills Medicaid and takes coverage away from millions of people?

Claims that we have to build a very expensive wall across our southern border to protect our country from the threat of illegal immigration makes it more difficult to pass a bill to address the plight of “Dreamers”.  Trump’s base perceives a dreamer deal to be a loss for Trump in the fight to kick illegal immigrants out of the country.

The obsessive insistence by Trump that the various Russian investigations are a hoax, fake news, and a politically motivated witch hunt makes it nearly impossible to make any progress on preventing future Russian election hacking.  That’s because Trump simply can’t acknowledge the obvious fact that Russians did attempt to disrupt the 2016 election and continues to be engaged in social media meddling.  Trump’s war with the legit press in this country has given Russians all of the cover they need to continue their REAL fake news activities.  The latest example is coverage of the Las Vegas shooting where Russian sources promoted stories that the shooter was an anti-Trump liberal jihadist who had secretly converted to Islam.

Trump’s various lines in the sand regarding Korea have only encourage Kim Jong Un to become more aggressive.  In other administrations, tough talk in public is cover for behind the scenes diplomacy that ultimately resolves the issue.  That doesn’t work in Trump-world where he has to win and is willing to undermine his own Secretary of State’s efforts to defuse this dangerous escalation.  Tillerson became the person who failed Trump on Korea.

Trumps pathological need to always be right was on public display in his response to the hurricane devastation in Puerto Rico.  While people were suffering because of the logistics challenges of getting aid from the ports out to the people, Trump was picking a fight with professional athletes.  When the mayor of San Juan called him out on it, he suggested that it was her fault and a cultural failing of the Puerto Rican people that there weren’t enough truck drivers willing to leave their struggling families to get supplies off the docks.  Doesn’t the army have truck drivers?  I thought that disaster relief was all about sending a bunch of people into an area to do those things that the local population couldn’t do for themselves.  We fill in the gaps until the local population can get back on their feet and take care of their own needs themselves.

During his tour of the island, he told those without shelter, food, clean drinking water, sanitation, and medical services that they should be grateful that it wasn’t a real disaster like Katrina.  The implication being that if it were a REAL disaster like Katrina, the government would have been better prepared and would be providing more help.  But the government WASN’T prepared to deal with the aftermath of Katrina and it wasn’t prepared to deal with the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico.  That’s Trump’s fault.

We all know how the story of the naked emperor ended.  It will be interesting to see when and how truth ultimately takes down this naked President.

 

Posted in Bias, Immigration, Politics, scandals, Trump | 28 Comments »

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