Useful to keep in mind, especially now, with white supremacy and fascism-lite back in style:
The paradox states that if a society is tolerant without limit, their ability to be tolerant will eventually be seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Popper came to the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.
Stephanopoulos tells Papadopoulos he wasn’t scrupulous with the populace about his opulence but Papadopoulos cops to operants with a monopoly on scurrilous pomposity and on and on it goes for us in a monotonous pop-political ouroboros. https://t.co/uzBgBs0poK
— Nat Cassidy (@natcassidy) September 9, 2018
If we were actually serious about a functioning, competitive market-based economy, companies wouldn't be allowed to pay people so little that they have to rely on food stamps and other public services in order to survive. It's corporate welfare, and our bought-off politicians have allowed it for decades. Wal-Mart and McDonalds are two of the biggest crony capitalists in this regard, having cost us billions of our tax dollars, even though the companies are profitable, so could afford to pay their employees a living wage. Same goes for Amazon and its warehouse workers.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) have introduced a bill that would tax companies like Amazon and Walmart for the cost of employees’ food stamps and other public assistance. Sanders’ Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act (abbreviated “Stop BEZOS”) — along with Khanna’s House of Representatives counterpart, the Corporate Responsibility and Taxpayer Protection Act — would institute a 100 percent tax on government benefits that are granted to workers at large companies.
The bill’s text characterizes this as a “corporate welfare tax,” and it would apply to corporations with 500 or more employees. If workers are receiving government aid through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps), national school lunch and breakfast programs, Section 8 housing subsidies, or Medicaid, employers will be taxed for the total cost of those benefits. The bill applies to full-time and part-time employees, as well as independent contractors that are de facto company employees.
An important movement to watch. Prison serves many purposes (punishment, temporary removal to keep communities safer), but one of them should be reform: it's our moral duty (and it costs less in the end).
Instead, in numerous ways, prison life is unnecessarily degrading and petty; the for-profit vendor supply chain is rife with cronyism, abusing a literally-captive population. If we're trying to rehabilitate those who can be reformed, then we're failing, and these people are taking extreme measures to draw attention to their abuse.
Trump's administration is unstable. His own hand-picked advisors are cutting him out of decision-making, which is short-circuiting the ability of the executive branch to get things done, for good or ill. If Trump really is this incompetent, though, his continuation illustrates a massive, system-wide political failure: one party is essentially keeping the president in office because they find him a useful tool. This is a constitutional crisis.
Indeed, much of Washington seems to know and accept this—even members of the majority party. “He concerns me,” said Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee in an interview with the New York Times last October. “He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation.” Corker, who leaves office at the end of the year, said Trump was treating the presidency like “a reality show,” with reckless threats that could put the United States “on the path to World War III.” Peter Wehner, a veteran of the last three Republican presidential administrations, has written of private conversations with unnamed Republican lawmakers, who disparage Trump as a “child king,” “incompetent,” and “unfit” for the office.
...
Washington may understand and acknowledge the fundamental dysfunction of the Trump White House, but the relevant power brokers—congressional Republicans and their allies—have shown no desire to act upon this slow-motion collapse of the executive branch. Their reasons are narrowly self-interested: Trump may be incapable of effectively carrying out the duties of the presidency, but there is enough of a working policymaking apparatus to accomplish key goals like crippling the regulatory state and building a durable conservative majority on the federal judiciary.
...
More than the public nature of President Trump’s deterioration, it’s the inaction and complicity of the majority party that truly differentiates the present situation from those of Woodrow Wilson and Richard Nixon. Like them, Trump has a cadre of aides and advisers essentially acting in his stead as president, working around him and circumventing his worst impulses. But unlike those presidents, Trump is also insulated by a political movement that ranks pursuit of its ideological goals above all else, including the integrity of the presidency.
Trump's administration is filled with people that put themselves before the rest of us. Far from choosing the best people, he mostly chooses corrupt rich people like him. Thankfully the law is finally catching up with some of them, though they've already harmed our country.
George Papadopoulos will be sentenced today. So, if you're keeping score at home:
— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) September 7, 2018
Trump's Lawyer: Felon
Trump's Campaign Chairman: Felon
Trump's Deputy Campaign Chairman: Felon
Trump's National Security Adviser: Felon
Trump's Foreign Policy Adviser: Felon
It’s true, as some observers have pointed out, that people inside an administration often resist the president’s views and preferences. It’s also true that all administrations leak. Indeed, members of all recent administrations have apparently leaked to Woodward in particular.
But what’s happening in the Trump administration is very different. My research, and that of others who study presidential advisers, suggests that what we’re seeing is essentially unprecedented.
First, the stories of the past 48 hours are not about civil servants in the bureaucracy — whom Trump characterizes as a shadowy “deep state” working against him. Rather, they are about presidential advisers and Cabinet officials, who are by nature political actors.
...
We know from research on the politics of advising that controlling and even manipulating information is part of what advisers do. They set agendas, formulate and vet options, and process and distill information for leaders whose time is severely limited.
But once a decision is made, presidents can expect advisers to fall in line, even if they may slow-roll implementation...
But removing a paper that, if signed, would carry out the president’s preferred policy is quite different.
What’s even more striking, if Woodward has the story right, is that Trump did not notice the paper had disappeared — even though it would have undone a trade agreement. Antipathy to trade agreements is one of the few fixed beliefs that Trump has held for decades. That reveals an inexperienced leader failing to oversee policy execution and implementation on one of his core issues. All presidents struggle to get their policies implemented, even by top advisers they’ve appointed. But this episode suggests a major breakdown in presidential ability to make and carry out decisions...
Impeachment is a constitutional mechanism. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment is a constitutional mechanism. Mass resignations followed by voluntary testimony to congressional committees are a constitutional mechanism. Overt defiance of presidential authority by the president’s own appointees—now that’s a constitutional crisis.
If the president’s closest advisers believe that he is morally and intellectually unfit for his high office, they have a duty to do their utmost to remove him from it, by the lawful means at hand...
On Wednesday, though, a “senior official in the Trump administration” published an anonymous op-ed in The New York Times, writing:
Many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.I would know. I am one of them.
The author of the anonymous op-ed is hoping to vindicate the reputation of like-minded senior Trump staffers. See, we only look complicit! Actually, we’re the real heroes of the story.
But what the author has just done is throw the government of the United States into even more dangerous turmoil. He or she has enflamed the paranoia of the president and empowered the president’s willfulness.
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Speak in your own name. Resign in a way that will count. Present the evidence that will justify an invocation of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, or an impeachment, or at the very least, the first necessary step toward either outcome, a Democratic Congress after the November elections.
Your service in government is valuable. Thank you for it. But it is not so indispensable that it can compensate for the continuing tenure of a president you believe to be amoral, untruthful, irrational, antidemocratic, unpatriotic, and dangerous. Previous generations of Americans have sacrificed fortunes, health, and lives to serve the country. You are asked only to tell the truth aloud and with your name attached.