White House trying to end protection for people with "Pre-existing conditions" →

Robert Pear, in the New York Times:

A provision of the 2010 health law, added at the behest of Mr. Wyden, allows waivers for innovations in state health policy. The federal law stipulates that state programs must provide coverage that is “at least as comprehensive” as that available under the Affordable Care Act, and must cover “at least a comparable number” of people.

Under the new policy, states will be able to count people with short-term insurance as having coverage even though it does not provide all the benefits required by the Affordable Care Act. Such plans often omit coverage for maternity care, prescription drugs and treatment for mental illness and drug abuse. They often exclude coverage for pre-existing conditions, as well.

Is Fraud Part of the Trump Organization's Business Model? →

Trump’s remained rich despite his many failed ventures (most of which were secretly bailed out by his billionaire father before he passed away) because of money laundering (including for the Russian mafia and oligarchs since the 80s), fraud, and refusing to pay people for work done for him.

This stuff matters. It’s an extreme indictment of the corruption in our justice system: the richer you are, the less likely you are to be prosecuted, even though your crimes affect way more of society. And it establishes the pattern that Trump’s still following in office: laziness, unprofessionalism, serial lying, and criminal fraud. He doesn’t care to govern; he just wants prestige, influence (and the ability to buy both when he wants).

This month, two incredible investigative stories have given us an opportunity to lift the hood of the Trump Organization, look inside, and begin to understand what the business of this unusual company actually is. It is not a happy picture. The Times published a remarkable report, on October 2nd, that showed that much of the profit the Trump Organization made came not from successful real-estate investment but from defrauding state and federal governments through tax fraud. This week, ProPublica and WNYC co-published a stunning story and a “Trump, Inc.” podcast that can be seen as the international companion to the Times piece. They show that many of the Trump Organization’s international deals also bore the hallmarks of financial fraud, including money laundering, deceptive borrowing, outright lying to investors, and other potential crimes.

Millennials Need to Start Voting Before the Gerontocracy Kills Us All →

Research shows that voting is habit-forming, so the problem is getting out and voting in the first place. Our country doesn’t make it easy (states are closing more polling places then opening new ones; we don’t have a voting holiday; etc.), and neither political party has done a good job of living up to its ideals. But it’s still one direct way we have of exerting bottom-up influence on the system, and we need to use it, for the sake of our democracy, and, given the specific problems involved (climate change in particular), the world.

As “once in a lifetime” storms crash over our coasts five times a year — and the White House’s own climate research suggests that human civilization is on pace to perish before Barron Trump — our government is subsidizing carbon emissions like there’s no tomorrow. Meanwhile, America’s infrastructure is already “below standard,” and set to further deteriorate, absent hundreds of billions of dollars in new investment. Many of our public schools can’t afford to stock their classrooms with basic supplies, pay their teachers a living wage, or keep their doors open five days a week. Child-care costs are skyrocketing, the birth rate is plunging, and the baby-boomers, retiring. And, amid it all, our congressional representatives recently decided that the best thing they could possibly do with $1.5 trillion of borrowed money was to give large tax breaks to people like themselves.

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Some portion of this disparity is probably inevitable — there is no democracy in the world where the young outvote the old. Still, millennials in the U.S. are more underrepresented than their peers in most other developed countries…

But if America’s suppressive voting laws, and the Democrats’ political failings, are the biggest obstacles to smashing the gerontocracy, they aren’t the only ones. There is also the fact that many of my fellow millennials have very wrong opinions about how politics works.

Specifically, PRRI finds that 39 percent of Americans under 30 say that they do not vote, or engage in any other form of political participation, because doing so “wouldn’t make a difference”; 49 percent say that they do not “know enough about the issues” to get involved in politics; and 9 percent believe that voting is less important than “being active on social media,” which is the “most effective way to create change”…

…please consider the following evidence that your vote would make a difference — perhaps, even the difference — in averting our democracy’s collapse into senescence…

Trump Probably Engaged in Felony Tax Evasion →

We must demand that the rich and powerful be held to the same laws as everyone else.

From the transcript of an interview with Bill Black, on The Real News:

BILL BLACK: There is every evidence that the claim is, and I know this will shock people, a lie. First, he’s not self made. Second, it’s entirely due to the money he got from Dad. Indeed, if he had taken the money he got from Dad and simply put it in a Vanguard account, he really would have well over $10 billion today. Instead he’s a terrible real estate developer. So he lost money and defaulted on all kinds of loans, which also, by the way, he said made him smart, that all the great ones in real estate stiff the creditors; you know, including the banks and the workers who don’t get paid for doing these things. So it’s lie upon lie upon lie.

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The Trumps did the same thing. What they did is massively overcharge Dad’s companies for their services. Now, they weren’t providing real services, either. It was a scam upon a scam upon a scam. But it dramatically reduced Trump’s Dad’s profits. And then, remember, he is someone who makes his money from the public, through all these rental assisted housing for poor people. And he used the fact that he was now paying these much, much, much higher costs to his kids, where they were literally raising the cost by 300 percent, 400 percent, 500 percent, as his excuse for rent increase on these rent controlled dwellings.

So they were- again I emphasize it isn’t genius that explains these kinds of frauds. It’s audacity. And the Trump family simply exemplifies this combination of incompetence, moral degeneracy, but with just extraordinary audacity.

The press helped build Donald Trump's lie; now it has to reckon with that →

Donald Trump rose to prominence and the presidency on the strength of his self-proclaimed mastery of “The Art of the Deal.” It was that business acumen, Trump claimed, that allowed him to turn a paltry loan from his father into a vast empire. But last week, The New York Times revealed that Trump was not the self-made billionaire he had claimed to be but rather the recipient of at least $413 million from his father, in part through tax schemes the paper described as “outright fraud.”

The painstaking investigation by Times reporters David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner is not just a skillful demolition of the origin story Trump told. It’s also a rebuke to generations of journalists who bolstered Trump’s tale. Trump provided the myth, but he needed the press to trumpet it out to the public.

Boys to Men: With the GOP stamp of approval, the Proud Boys go mainstream →

The Republican Party is increasingly flirting with fascism. The GOP now has its own ready-made Brownshirts, and at least some state Republican Parties are embracing them.

Every organization needs to police its own, and the Proud Boys are violent extremists which should be rejected swiftly and totally. That the GOP hasn’t yet, is a bad sign. It’ll be important to watch carefully if and what Trump does about the new would-be thug wing of the Republican Party, besides issue empty denunciations.

On Friday, members of the Proud Boys assaulted leftist protesters outside New York City’s Metropolitan Republican Club, the state GOP’s home base in the city and a center of Trumpism in Manhattan, following an appearance by their leader, VICE co-founder Gavin McInnes. Joined by prominent members of the city’s racist skinhead scene, they screamed slurs as they stomped on heads; afterwards, they posed for group photographs. Not to be outdone, their compatriots on the West Coast repeated the performance on Saturday, attacking an anti-police violence vigil in Portland. A week earlier, Proud Boys had attacked counter-protesters at a “Resist Marxism” demonstration in Providence, Rhode Island.

The past three years have seen a proliferation of such groups: organized reactionaries of various political tendencies seeking out ideological enemies (mostly, but not exclusively, on the anti-capitalist left) to beat to a bloody pulp. The more hardcore elements of the so-called alt-right—the Nazis, the neo-Confederate KKK affiliates, the esoteric fascists and white separatists—sneer at the Proud Boys as insufficiently radical. In a sense, they’re not wrong: the Proud Boys are closer to the mainstream of American conservatism than Andrew Anglin and Richard Spencer. That, however, is what makes them so dangerous. The Proud Boys aren’t just a less overtly racist branch of the alt-right; they’ve become a militant wing of the Republican Party. Anglin and Spencer aren’t getting invited to speak at GOP events, but McInnes is; Atomwaffen Division isn’t running security for Republican candidates for Senate, but the Proud Boys are. McInnes “is part of the right,” Ian Reilly, Executive Committee Chair of the Metropolitan Republican Club, told Gothamist, comparing him to previous guests Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter.“We promote people and ideas of all kinds from the right.” Reilly continued:“We would never invite anyone who would incite violence.”

Except, this is exactly what they had done: McInnes was at the Metropolitan Club to celebrate the fifty-eighth anniversary of the assassination of Inejiro Asanuma, leader of the Japan Socialist Party, by the ultranationalist Otoya Yamaguchi, on live television in 1960—an “inspiring moment,” McInnes wrote on Instagram, which he re-enacted with his employee (and fellow Proud Boy) Ryan Katsu Rivera …

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New York Republicans, meanwhile, are doubling down on their decision to welcome McInnes into the fold.“We want to foster civil discussion, but never endorse violence,” Metropolitan Club officials said in a statement on Sunday night. “Gavin’s talk on Friday night, while at times was politically incorrect and a bit edgy, was certainly not inciting violence.” It bears repeating: McInnes was invited to the state party’s headquarters in New York City to celebrate the televised murder of an ideological enemy.

For all the scorn heaped on the Proud Boys by the leading lights of the white nationalist movement, they appear to be doing what people like Andrew Anglin, Richard Spencer, and Matthew Heimbach could not: creeping closer to formal, state power in the form of a political alliance with the GOP. They receive sympathetic media coverage from Fox News while actively recruiting new members not only from the alt-right, but from racist skinhead scenes across the country. A violently reactionary subculture that, left to its own devices, had in recent years remained relatively self-contained, racist skinheads (“boneheads” to leftist skins) under the leadership of charismatic demagogues like McInnes on the East Coast and Joey Gibson of Patriot Prayer on the West Coast are now spilling into the streets of America’s most liberal urban centers.

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Bound together by violent misogyny and ultranationalism, these groups stand for nothing resembling a conventional political program or platform—but that does not mean they are apolitical. Pragmatically sidestepping the question of race, they now make their proto-fascist appeal in the language of patriotic individualism: pro-America, pro-capitalism, and pro-Trump. (Its effectiveness should not be understated: for years, antifascists in New York City’s soccer supporter scene have been working to alienate Antillon, a frequent attendee of New York City Football Club matches at Yankee Stadium, from friends and fellow fans who don’t have Nazi tattoos—with little success.) Around the country, the Proud Boys have replicated this strategy, appealing primarily to people’s class interests—as small business owners, for example, or as the children of families who fled socialist revolutions—as well as traditionalist gender politics, temporarily deferring the white nationalist project in the interest of swelling their ranks. As it happens, this is the strategy that has also allowed them entry into the Republican mainstream.

When ‘Conservatives’ Turned Into Radicals

Jane Coaston, in the New York Times:

What my time at that student paper taught me is that conservatism has long had two faces — one for its ideological elites and another for its voters. Its intellectual class debates free markets and constitutional law, but the message for voters is consistently different, full of sinister socialist plots and black welfare recipients soaking up tax money…

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But this dynamic had been clear for at least a decade. From my first year of college to the weeks in which, as editor in chief, I closed my final edition of the paper, I came to a realization: Whatever conservatism told me it was intellectually — whatever ideas we discussed, whatever policy papers I read — could never compete with what conservatism was in practice. At the conferences the Collegiate Network sent me to, no one was discussing tax policy or the nature of effective governance; they were debating whether Barack Obama was a “real” American and whether Sarah Palin could unseat him in 2012, based on pure and unfettered loathing. Nothing was being conserved.

Conservative voters have known this for some time. This is why they voted last year for a president who swore not to preserve but to upend. Since Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign for the presidency, Republicans have worked to maintain a two-tiered party — one for the ideologues who believed in Burke and Buckley, free markets and free minds, and one for the voters, who are often moved less by a system of ideas than by id and grievance. It was always the voters, though, who really mattered. And it was the voters who won.

The “Southern Strategy” that Nixon ran on led to a massive constituent shift, with the substantial bulk of white racists (of varying degrees) fleeing the Democratic Party. Reagan, and every GOP president since, has used racially-coded white-identitarian appeals during campaign season in order to keep its shaky coalition of conservative ideologues and paranoid white middle class members voting together, only to ease up on the extremism after getting into office, which no doubt explains some of the anti-elite backlash.

But whether the racism of the GOP could have been slowly undone, the concurrent rise of the jingoist, reactionary “right-wing” media echo chamber, along with decades of failure of elites (on both sides) to argue for and provide adequate economic opportunity, made Trump inevitable. So for the time being, we’re stuck with a Republican Party that’s been radicalized and is increasingly cozying up to its violent extremists. The real conservatives need to take the party back, but that’s going to take time because there are so few moderate voices left, and they may not be able to make enough of a difference without addressing the lingering racism in the party, or taking on the worst of the fake news industry which has a stranglehold on truth among a large proportion of the GOP base. The Democratic Party is deplorable, too, but for now, the GOP is so extreme that it simply needs to be voted out of office, at least at the federal level.

Trump creates space for white supremacists to be violent

Through Trump, the Republican Party has finally embraced (if only implicitly) violent white supremacy. Trump flirts with violent white supremacist groups through his speeches, and he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care. Various radical “right” fringe groups (neo-Nazi organizations, “Oath Keeper” and similar paramilitary groups, Proud Boys, etc.) are growing larger and more violent because Trump’s created and sustaining a rhetorical smoke screen for them. At his rallies and on Twitter, he “jokes” about how he wishes people would beat up protestors and the press. And at the same time he lies about the violence on the “left,” to distract from the current near-monopoly that the “alt-right”/far right has on political violence. The largest source of domestic terrorism are far-right white supremacist groups, and the vast majority of headline-worthy, politically-motivated violent events are perpetrated by the white men who make up 90% of their membership. The Republican Party so far has either ignored or embraced the turn to violence, and if it (and the country) is going to survive with a minimum of violence, we need to vote it out of the government until it purges its violent streak.

Jonathan Chait, in New York magazine online:

…In the closing weeks of the 2018 midterm elections, Republicans have taken this message national. Democrats are an “angry mob,” charges President Trump. “You don’t hand matches to an arsonist, and you don’t give power to an angry, left-wing mob. And that’s what the Democrats have become.”

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One difference between anti-Trump protests and anti-Obama protests is a handful of episodes where left-wing protesters have confronted high-ranking Republicans in restaurants. I don’t think that tactic makes much sense, unless you’re prepared to defend conservative protesters doing the same thing to Democratic officials in restaurants next time around, which I am not. It’s worth noting that the restaurant screamers have been organized by Democratic Socialists of America, a group outside of and usually hostile to the Democratic party. Either way, the debate around protesters is almost entirely partisan special pleading over low-stakes tactical disputes.

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What actually is new to American politics is Trump’s assault on democratic norms. French dismisses the “lock her up” chants as empty rally talk. In fact, the chant, which began in the campaign, prefigured Trump’s deadly serious ambition to turn the Department of Justice into a weapon of personal control, that would harass Trump’s enemies while simultaneously quashing any wrongdoing by him and his allies…

What’s more, defining “lock her up” as the Republican offense erases from the equation the entire authoritarian spirit that has infused Trump’s political style. He offered to pay legal bills to supporters who beat up protesters at his rallies. This is a president who has repeatedly attacked the news media as “the enemy of the people,” an epithet used by communist dictators, and has at least gestured at using his power to punish them. (Trump has mused about challenging licenses for television stations that report independently, and instructed the post office to raise rates on Amazon as retribution for critical coverage in the Washington Post.)

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The method on display is familiar if you study any historical episode of democratic backsliding. One party, either from the far left or the far right, sets out to attack and weaken democratic norms. The small-d democrats resist, trying to maintain democratic norms. But they’re fighting at a disadvantage against a ruthless foe that does not observe their limits, and at least some of the opposition undertakes a more drastic action. Any offense becomes a pretext for the authoritarians, who exaggerate the threat of violence and chaos by their enemies to justify the antidemocratic measures they were planning all along.

The threat Trump poses does not excuse the left from upholding democratic standards. (I have made this case repeatedly, in fact.) That said, Trump’s illiberalism only works because respectable conservatives cooperate with his fiction that he is more victim than aggressor. French writes, “It’s time to stop excusing, rationalizing, and minimizing behavior that is dangerous, menacing, and threatening.” Indeed it is.