Monday, July 31, 2017

ANS -- Who Ate Republicans’ Brains?

This is an opinion piece about what has happened to the Republican Party.  As you know, Brad Hicks and I think it started in 1964, but it didn't start showing up to public view until the '80s.  Can anything get them back to caring more for country than for party?  Is there a path back to morality when you have gone astray? Notice that Graham thought the Repeal and Replace was all wrong, but voted for it anyway.  I guess he felt his cushy job was more important than the country.  Notice how Republicans hate the government, but want to run it anyway.  They don't believe in government -- it's unnecessary and restrictive -- but they want to be in charge of it anyway.  They want to drown it in a bathtub -- but until then, they want to own it and all the perks it comes with.  They are willing to lie, cheat, and steal to be a part of something they don't believe in.  Isn't that weird?
Oh, and there's some good comments, the best one is this:  

Jay Buoy

 Perth W.A 7 hours ago

It's almost like they were snorting Koch...

--Kim


When the tweeter-in-chief castigated Senate Republicans as "total quitters"for failing to repeal the Affordable Care Act, he couldn't have been more wrong. In fact, they showed zombie-like relentlessness in their determination to take health care away from millions of Americans, shambling forward despite devastating analyses by the Congressional Budget Office, denunciations of their plans by every major medical group, and overwhelming public disapproval.

Photo
Senator Lindsey Graham on Thursday, speaking about the proposal to repeal the Affordable Care Act. CreditCliff Owen/Associated Press

Put it this way: Senator Lindsey Grahamwas entirely correct when he described the final effort at repeal as "terrible policy and horrible politics," a "disaster" and a "fraud." He voted for it anyway — and so did 48 of his colleagues.

So where did this zombie horde come from? Who ate Republicans' brains?

As many people have pointed out, when it came to health care Republicans were basically caught in their own web of lies. They fought against the idea of universal coverage, then denounced the Affordable Care Act for failing to cover enough people; they made "skin in the game," i.e., high out-of-pocket costs, the centerpiece of their health care ideology, then denounced the act for high deductibles. When they finally got their chance at repeal, the contrast between what they had promised and their actual proposals produced widespread and justified public revulsion.

But the stark dishonesty of the Republican jihad against Obamacare itself demands an explanation. For it went well beyond normal political spin: for seven years a whole party kept insisting that black was white and up was down.

And that kind of behavior doesn't come out of nowhere. The Republican health care debacle was the culmination of a process of intellectual and moral deterioration that began four decades ago, at the very dawn of modern movement conservatism — that is, during the very era anti-Trump conservatives now point to as the golden age of conservative thought.

Continue reading the main story

A key moment came in the 1970s, when Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism, embraced supply-side economics — the claim, refuted by all available evidence and experience, that tax cuts pay for themselves by boosting economic growth. Writing years later, he actually boasted about valuing political expediency over intellectual integrity: "I was not certain of its economic merits but quickly saw its political possibilities." In another essay, he cheerfully conceded to having had a "cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit," because it was all about creating a Republican majority — so "political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government."

The problem is that once you accept the principle that it's O.K. to lie if it helps you win elections, it gets ever harder to limit the extent of the lying — or even to remember what it's like to seek the truth.

The right's intellectual and moral collapse didn't happen all at once. For a while, conservatives still tried to grapple with real problems. In 1989, for example, The Heritage Foundation offered a health care plan strongly resembling Obamacare. That same year, George H. W. Bush proposed a cap-and-trade system to control acid rain, a proposal that eventually became law.

But looking back, it's easy to see the rot spreading. Compared with Donald Trump, the elder Bush looks like a paragon — but his administration lied relentlessly about rising inequality. His son's administration lied consistently about its tax cuts, pretending that they were targeted on the middle class, and — in case you've forgotten — took us to war on false pretenses.

And almost the entire G.O.P. either endorsed or refused to condemn the "death panels" slander against Obamacare.

Given this history, the Republican health care disaster was entirely predictable. You can't expect good or even coherent policy proposals from a party that has spent decades embracing politically useful lies and denigrating expertise.

And let's be clear: we're talking about Republicans here, not the "political system."

Democrats aren't above cutting a few intellectual corners in pursuit of electoral advantage. But the Obama administration was, when all is said and done, remarkably clearheaded and honest about its policies. In particular, it was always clear what the A.C.A. was supposed to do and how it was supposed to do it — and it has, for the most part, worked as advertised.

Now what? Maybe, just maybe, Republicans will work with Democrats to make the health system work better — after all, polls suggest that voters will, rightly, blame them for any future problems. But it wouldn't be easy for them to face reality even if their president wasn't a bloviating bully.

And it's hard to imagine anything good happening on other policy fronts, either. Republicans have spent decades losing their ability to think straight, and they're not going to get it back anytime soon.

Sunday, July 30, 2017

ANS -- What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class

Here is yet another attempt to explain the Trump voters to the liberals.  I have no idea if it's correct.  My friends have praised it, so here goes.  
--Kim


What So Many People Don't Get About the U.S. Working Class

NOVEMBER 10, 2016

RECOMMENDED

nov16-10-55948705

My father-in-law grew up eating blood soup. He hated it, whether because of the taste or the humiliation, I never knew. His alcoholic father regularly drank up the family wage, and the family was often short on food money. They were evicted from apartment after apartment.

He dropped out of school in eighth grade to help support the family. Eventually he got a good, steady job he truly hated, as an inspector in a factory that made those machines that measure humidity levels in museums. He tried to open several businesses on the side but none worked, so he kept that job for 38 years. He rose from poverty to a middle-class life: the car, the house, two kids in Catholic school, the wife who worked only part-time. He worked incessantly. He had two jobs in addition to his full-time position, one doing yard work for a local magnate and another hauling trash to the dump.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he read The Wall Street Journal and voted Republican. He was a man before his time: a blue-collar white man who thought the union was a bunch of jokers who took your money and never gave you anything in return. Starting in 1970, many blue-collar whites followed his example. This week, their candidate won the presidency.

For months, the only thing that's surprised me about Donald Trump is my friends' astonishment at his success. What's driving it is the class culture gap.

One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that "professional people were generally suspect" and that managers are college kids "who don't know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job," said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad "could not say the word doctor without the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters…and professors were without exception phonies." Annette Lareau found tremendous resentment against teachers, who were perceived as condescending and unhelpful.

Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals — but not of the rich. "[I] can't knock anyone for succeeding," a laborer told her. "There's a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I'm sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have," chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. "The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else," a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one's own business — that's the goal. That's another part of Trump's appeal.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect. Look at how she condescends to Trump as unfit to hold the office of the presidency and dismisses his supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic.

Trump's blunt talk taps into another blue-collar value: straight talk. "Directness is a working-class norm," notes Lubrano. As one blue-collar guy told him, "If you have a problem with me, come talk to me. If you have a way you want something done, come talk to me. I don't like people who play these two-faced games." Straight talk is seen as requiring manly courage, not being "a total wuss and a wimp," an electronics technician told Lamont. Of course Trump appeals. Clinton's clunky admission that she talks one way in public and another in private? Further proof she's a two-faced phony.

Manly dignity is a big deal for working-class men, and they're not feeling that they have it. Trump promises a world free of political correctness and a return to an earlier era, when men were men and women knew their place. It's comfort food for high-school-educated guys who could have been my father-in-law if they'd been born 30 years earlier. Today they feel like losers — or did until they met Trump.

Manly dignity is a big deal for most men. So is breadwinner status: Many still measure masculinity by the size of a paycheck. White working-class men's wages hit the skids in the 1970s and took another body blow during the Great Recession. Look, I wish manliness worked differently. But most men, like most women, seek to fulfill the ideals they've grown up with. For many blue-collar men, all they're asking for is basic human dignity (male varietal). Trump promises to deliver it.

The Democrats' solution? Last week the New York Times published an article advising men with high-school educations to take pink-collar jobs. Talk about insensitivity. Elite men, you will notice, are not flooding into traditionally feminine work. To recommend that for WWC men just fuels class anger.

Isn't what happened to Clinton unfair? Of course it is. It is unfair that she wasn't a plausible candidate until she was so overqualified she was suddenly unqualified due to past mistakes. It is unfair that Clinton is called a "nasty woman" while Trump is seen as a real man. It's unfair that Clinton only did so well in the first debate because she wrapped her candidacy in a shimmy of femininity. When she returned to attack mode, it was the right thing for a presidential candidate to do but the wrong thing for a woman to do. The election shows that sexism retains a deeper hold than most imagined. But women don't stand together: WWC women voted for Trump over Clinton by a whopping 28-point margin — 62% to 34%. If they'd split 50-50, she would have won.

Class trumps gender, and it's driving American politics. Policy makers of both parties — but particularly Democrats if they are to regain their majorities — need to remember five major points.

Understand That Working Class Means Middle Class, Not Poor

The terminology here can be confusing. When progressives talk about the working class, typically they mean the poor. But the poor, in the bottom 30% of American families, are very different from Americans who are literally in the middle: the middle 50% of families whose median income was $64,000 in 2008. That is the true "middle class," and they call themselves either "middle class" or "working class."

"The thing that really gets me is that Democrats try to offer policies (paid sick leave! minimum wage!) that would help the working class," a friend just wrote me. A few days' paid leave ain't gonna support a family. Neither is minimum wage. WWC men aren't interested in working at McDonald's for $15 per hour instead of $9.50. What they want is what my father-in-law had: steady, stable, full-time jobs that deliver a solid middle-class life to the 75% of Americans who don't have a college degree. Trump promises that. I doubt he'll deliver, but at least he understands what they need.

Understand Working-Class Resentment of the Poor

Remember when President Obama sold Obamacare by pointing out that it delivered health care to 20 million people? Just another program that taxed the middle class to help the poor, said the WWC, and in some cases that's proved true: The poor got health insurance while some Americans just a notch richer saw their premiums rise.

Progressives have lavished attention on the poor for over a century. That (combined with other factors) led to social programs targeting them. Means-tested programs that help the poor but exclude the middle may keep costs and tax rates lower, but they are a recipe for class conflict. Example: 28.3% of poor families receive child-care subsidies, which are largely nonexistent for the middle class. So my sister-in-law worked full-time for Head Start, providing free child care for poor women while earning so little that she almost couldn't pay for her own. She resented this, especially the fact that some of the kids' moms did not work. One arrived late one day to pick up her child, carrying shopping bags from Macy's. My sister-in-law was livid.

J.D. Vance's much-heralded Hillbilly Elegy captures this resentment. Hard-living families like that of Vance's mother live alongside settled families like that of his biological father. While the hard-living succumb to despair, drugs, or alcohol, settled families keep to the straight and narrow, like my parents-in-law, who owned their home and sent both sons to college. To accomplish that, they lived a life of rigorous thrift and self-discipline. Vance's book passes harsh judgment on his hard-living relatives, which is not uncommon among settled families who kept their nose clean through sheer force of will. This is a second source of resentment against the poor.

Other books that get at this are Hard Living on Clay Street (1972) and Working-Class Heroes (2003).

Understand How Class Divisions Have Translated into Geography

The best advice I've seen so far for Democrats is the recommendation that hipsters move to Iowa. Class conflict now closely tracks the urban-rural divide. In the huge red plains between the thin blue coasts, shockingly high numbers of working-class men are unemployed or on disability, fueling a wave of despair deaths in the form of the opioid epidemic.

Vast rural areas are withering away, leaving trails of pain. When did you hear any American politician talk about that? Never.

Jennifer Sherman's Those Who Work, Those Who Don't (2009) covers this well.

If You Want to Connect with White Working-Class Voters, Place Economics at the Center

"The white working class is just so stupid. Don't they realize Republicans just use them every four years, and then screw them?" I have heard some version of this over and over again, and it's actually a sentiment the WWC agrees with, which is why they rejected the Republican establishment this year. But to them, the Democrats are no better.

Both parties have supported free-trade deals because of the net positive GDP gains, overlooking the blue-collar workers who lost work as jobs left for Mexico or Vietnam. These are precisely the voters in the crucial swing states of Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that Democrats have so long ignored. Excuse me. Who's stupid?

One key message is that trade deals are far more expensive than we've treated them, because sustained job development and training programs need to be counted as part of their costs.

At a deeper level, both parties need an economic program that can deliver middle-class jobs. Republicans have one: Unleash American business. Democrats? They remain obsessed with cultural issues. I fully understand why transgender bathrooms are important, but I also understand why progressives' obsession with prioritizing cultural issues infuriates many Americans whose chief concerns are economic.

Back when blue-collar voters used to be solidly Democratic (1930–1970), good jobs were at the core of the progressive agenda. A modern industrial policy would follow Germany's path. (Want really good scissors? Buy German.) Massive funding is needed for community college programs linked with local businesses to train workers for well-paying new economy jobs. Clinton mentioned this approach, along with 600,000 other policy suggestions. She did not stress it.

Avoid the Temptation to Write Off Blue-Collar Resentment as Racism

Economic resentment has fueled racial anxiety that, in some Trump supporters (and Trump himself), bleeds into open racism. But to write off WWC anger as nothing more than racism is intellectual comfort food, and it is dangerous.

National debates about policing are fueling class tensions today in precisely the same way they did in the 1970s, when college kids derided policemen as "pigs." This is a recipe for class conflict. Being in the police is one of the few good jobs open to Americans without a college education. Police get solid wages, great benefits, and a respected place in their communities. For elites to write them off as racists is a telling example of how, although race- and sex-based insults are no longer acceptable in polite society, class-based insults still are.

I do not defend police who kill citizens for selling cigarettes. But the current demonization of the police underestimates the difficulty of ending police violence against communities of color. Police need to make split-second decisions in life-threatening situations. I don't. If I had to, I might make some poor decisions too.

Saying this is so unpopular that I risk making myself a pariah among my friends on the left coast. But the biggest risk today for me and other Americans is continued class cluelessness. If we don't take steps to bridge the class culture gap, when Trump proves unable to bring steel back to Youngstown, Ohio, the consequences could turn dangerous.

In 2010, while on a book tour for Reshaping the Work-Family Debate, I gave a talk about all of this at the Harvard Kennedy School. The woman who ran the speaker series, a major Democratic operative, liked my talk. "You are saying exactly what the Democrats need to hear," she mused, "and they'll never listen." I hope now they will.

***

Pre-order Joan Williams's book, White Working Class.

Williams_Cover (1)


Joan C. Williams is Distinguished Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Center of WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. Her newest book is White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.

Saturday, July 29, 2017

ANS -- How India and China Have Come to the Brink Over a Remote Mountain Pass

I heard on Canadian radio last night that China and India are on the brink of war.  I thought it odd that we hadn't heard anything about it in American news.  but, it turns out the New York Times had something about it, so here it is, just in case you didn't know about it.  
--Kim


Continue reading the main story

Batang La

China's road

INDIA

CHINA

Doka La

Standoff

Disputed

border

DISPUTED AREA

Between China

and Bhutan

Gamochen

BHUTAN

On a remote pass through Himalayan peaks, China and India, two nuclear-armed nations, have come near the brink of conflict over an unpaved road. It is one of the worst border disputes between the regional rivals in more than 30 years.

The road stands on territory at the point where ChinaIndia and Bhutanmeet. The standoff began last month when Bhutan, a close ally of India, discovered Chinese workers trying to extend the road. India responded by sending troops and equipment to halt the construction. China, the more powerful of the two, angrily denounced the move and demanded that India pull back.

Now soldiers from the two powers are squaring off, separated by only a few hundred feet.

The conflict shows no sign of abating, and it reflects the swelling ambition — and nationalism — of both countries. Each is governed by a muscular leader eager to bolster his domestic standing while asserting his country's place on the world stage as the United States recedes from a leading role.

Jeff M. Smith, a scholar at the American Foreign Policy Council who studies Indian-Chinese relations, said a negotiated settlement was the likeliest outcome. But asked whether he thought the standoff could spiral into war, he said, "Yes I do — and I don't say that lightly."

Both sides have taken hard-line positions that make it difficult to back down. "The messaging is eerily similar," Mr. Smith said, to the countries' 1962 slide into a war that was also over border disputes.

Continue reading the main story

Why the Territory Matters

On the surface, the dispute turns on whether the land belongs to China or Bhutan. It is only about 34 square miles, but it is pivotal in the growing competition between China and India over Asia's future.

Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story

Border

China tried to extend

this road south.

DISPUTED

BHUTAN/CHINA

TERRITORY

Observation

post

Indian troops

blocked construction.

Indian Army Outpost

DOKA LA

CROSSING

INDIA

500 Feet

The dispute dates to contradictory phrases in an 1890 border agreementbetween two now-defunct empires, British India and China's Qing dynasty, that put the border in different places. One gives Bhutan control of the area — the position that India supports — and the other China.

"This comes down to both countries having a reasonable claim," said Ankit Panda, a senior editor at The Diplomat, an Asian affairs journal.

Bhutan and India say that China, by extending its road, is trying to extend its control over an area known as the Dolam Plateau, part of a larger contested area.

The plateau's southernmost ridge slopes into a valley that geographers call the Siliguri Corridor but that Indian strategists know as the Chicken Neck.

TIBET

CHINA

NEPAL

BHUTAN

INDIA

Dolam Plateau

Siliguri Corridor

BANGLADESH

INDIA

MYANMAR

150 Miles

This narrow strip of Indian territory, at points less than 20 miles wide, connects the country's central mass to its northeastern states. India has long feared that in a war, China could bisect the corridor, cutting off 45 million Indians and an area the size of the United Kingdom.

India's Aggressive Response

Few countries have been eager to confront China's regional ambitions as directly with military forces, which has made India's response to the construction so striking and, according to analysts from both countries, so fraught with danger.

But in recent months, India's leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has shown that he is willing to flout China's wishes — and ignore its threats.

Photo
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and President Xi Jinping of China in Goa, India, in 2016. The border confrontation has soured relations. Both men attended the recent G-20 meeting in Germany but did not hold a one-on-one meeting that might have defused tensions. CreditManish Swarup/Associated Press

In April, a top Indian official accompanied the Dalai Lama to the border of Tibet, shrugging off China's public insistence that the journey be halted. In May, India boycotted the inauguration of President Xi Jinping's signature "One Belt, One Road" project, saying the plan ignored "core concerns on sovereignty and territorial integrity."

The border skirmish arose even as Mr. Modi visited Washington to court President Trump's favor as India vies with China for influence in Asia.

"I hope the Indian side knows what it's doing, because the moment you put your hand in the hornet's nest, you have to be prepared for whatever consequence there is going to be," said Shiv Kunal Verma, the author of "1962: The War That Wasn't," about the bloody border conflict the two countries fought that year.

Chinese officials say the construction of the road was an internal affair because, they say, it took place within China's own borders. On Tuesday, China's foreign minister, Wang Yi, reiterated the country's warning to India to withdraw as a precondition for any broader talks. "The solution to this issue is also very simple," he said during a visit to Thailand, addressing the Indians directly. "That is, behave yourself and humbly retreat."

Bhutan, Caught in the Middle

Photo
Indian migrant workers at a construction near Paro, Bhutan, last year. India contributes nearly $1 billion in economic and military aid to the country's budget. At the same time, China has sought to woo it with offers of aid, investments and even land swaps to settle border disputes. CreditAdam Dean for The New York Times

Bhutan, which joined the United Nations in 1971, does not have diplomatic relations with China. It has always been closer to India, particularly after fears stemming from China's annexation of Tibet, another Buddhist kingdom, in the middle of the 20th century.

Since then, India has played a central role in the kingdom's administration, contributing nearly $1 billion in economic and military aid annually in recent years. China has sought to woo Bhutan with its own offers of aid, investments and land swaps to settle border disputes.

Two weeks after the construction began, Bhutan's Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying it violated earlier agreements, and called for a return to the status quo.

"Bhutan has felt uncomfortable from the start," said Ajai Shukla, a former army colonel and consulting editor for strategic affairs at Business Standard, a daily newspaper in India. "It does not want to be caught in the middle when China and India are taking potshots at each other. Bhutan does not want to be the bone in a fight between two dogs."

Photo
Chinese and Indian soldiers at a border crossing between the two countries in India's northeastern Sikkim state, in 2008.CreditDiptendu Dutta/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The confrontation, meantime, has soured already tense relations.

Mr. Modi and Mr. Xi both attended the recent Group of 20 meeting in Germany but did not hold a meeting, one on one, that might have defused tensions. India's national security adviser is expected to attend a meeting in Beijing this week, which analysts say could signal whether any face-saving compromise is possible.

Mr. Xi is preparing for an important Communist Party congress in the fall that will inaugurate his second five-year term as president and consolidate his political pre-eminence. Given the unbending nature of Chinese statements, few analysts believe he would do anything that would seem weak in response to India's moves.

"It may be harder to make concessions until after that gathering," Shashank Joshi, an analyst at the Lowy Institute, wrote in an essay posted on Friday, "while it may even suit Beijing to keep the crisis simmering through this period."