Donald Trump Is Costing Us One Precious Thing: Time

By Bill McKibben, Guardian UK

09 June 18

The constant sense of crisis that the president creates robs us of the concentration we need to focus on long-term issues like climate change

onald Trump may be costing us many things: a sense of national decency, a stable global order, a generation of professional civil servants and diplomats. Or maybe not. Maybe we can claw those losses back – perhaps the reaction will begin with the midterm elections and we’ll slowly return our way towards something that looks like the old normal.

But he’s definitely costing us one precious thing, and that’s time. It rolls past every day as we stand necessarily transfixed by his transgressions, and since it can’t be rolled back there are victims who – whatever the future holds – are paying an unrefundable price.

These thoughts were on my mind as I protested outside the Vermont governor’s office with other local members of the Poor People’s Campaign, the nationwide renewal of Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s final crusade. (We were hoping to do a sit-in, but the door to the governor’s office had been cleverly locked, perhaps after they’d heard us singing We Shall Not Be Moved for 20 minutes outside. If you need a crime performed efficiently, perhaps best not to hire an idealist.)

This Poor People’s Campaign has been by many measures a great success, moving tens of thousands of people to action in every state capitol, around issues ranging from immigration and racial justice to healthcare and environmental justice. But it has barely broken through the president’s nonstop noise into the national news, and so the stories of the people involved have been too little heard. “Grinding poverty” is a cliched phrase but it has a real meaning: the day-in day-out erosion of lives when there’s too little money for doctors, for food, for transportation. This is happening, now. Real lives are being lived, and lived in needlessly cruel conditions. Real lives are being lost.

Similarly, we’ve all but stopped paying attention to climate change, the single greatest crisis the planet has ever faced. I sat down yesterday to read through the New York Times op-ed page from the start of the year to the first of June. There were, roughly, 660 essays, of which six seemed to bear some relation to this planet-scale trauma. Two, by Nick Kristof, were straightforward reminders of our peril, one from Bangladesh and one from Easter Island. Two, by Tom Friedman, touched on the political implications of climate change on troubles in the Gaza and Iran. One, by Paul Krugman, laid out the excellent news about falling prices of renewable energy. And one, by rookie righthander Bret Stephens, didn’t mention climate change specifically but did excoriate myself and Naomi Klein for our dimwitted refusal to understand that our “Promethean species has shown the will and the wizardry to master” any challenge that presents itself.

One percent of the possible attention is too little for this crisis, but I’m not calling out the New York Times. Its editorial board, for decades, has been stalwart in its commitment to climate action. And I’m not sure if I was editor I would have done anything differently: how do you not write about Roseanne, about Rudy Giuliani, about Russia. When the president is baiting North Korea and separating infants from their mothers, how do you write about anything else? Its coverage of the current moment has been responsible, even exemplary. Thank heaven we’ve thought about harassment and about guns in new and powerful ways.

But the constant sense of crisis that Trump creates – the endless tweets implying he might be about to further upend the constitution, or launch some new trade war – takes a toll beyond each day’s chaos. It is robbing us of the concentration we need to focus on issues that demand that attention over the long term, attention that can’t endlessly be drawn away.

Climate change comes with a time limit. We don’t have four years to waste ignoring it, not when Arctic sea ice is reaching new lows and temperatures are breaking records. (This week, key scientists called for tacking on a Category 6 to the top of the hurricane intensity scale.) And not when there are promising fronts beyond Washington: the biggest climate news of the year was probably New York City mayor Bill de Blasio’s January decision to divest its giant pension funds from fossil fuels and sue the big oil companies, but one that slid by amid the constant Trumpian clatter.

The biggest climate summit since Paris will happen this fall in California, but it may get lost amid season three of “Unpatriotic Football Players” or what ever new provocation Trump dreams up. And that would be terrible, because this is time we’ll never get back. Even if a new president someday takes up climate seriously, the carbon we’re spewing now will still be in the atmosphere to haunt us over geological time. Time is the trouble.

Krugman, writing in the fall of 2016 during the presidential debate season, said it well: “It’s time to end the blackout on climate change as an issue … There is, quite simply, no other issue this important, and letting it slide would be almost criminally irresponsible.”

And King, as was usually the case, said it even better: “Human progress,” he wrote, “never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to work to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.”

Inequality Has Been Growing in the US, and the Trump Administration Is Making It Much Worse

By Lauren Carasik, Al Jazeera

09 June 18

n June 1, Phillip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, released a report on the United States. It outlined his searing critique of the Trump administration's policies, arguing that they are deepening entrenched inequality and increasing misery.

Alston painted a grim picture of the country's current circumstances and its likely trajectory, not only for those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder but for American society itself.

The report presents a withering appraisal of American exceptionalism. As Alston observes, "the United States is alone among developed countries in insisting that, while human rights are of fundamental importance, they do not include rights that guard against dying of hunger, dying from a lack of access to healthcare or growing up in a context of total deprivation."

The high rates of child and youth poverty are particularly alarming, since they "perpetuate the intergenerational transmission of poverty very effectively, and ensure that the American dream is rapidly becoming the American illusion".

While people outside the US might be shocked by the conclusions of the report, for many Americans they are painfully clear. Aspects of the US political system and long-term socioeconomic policies have kept the poverty rate high and hampered social mobility. This reality predates the Trump administration, but its policies will just make it worse.

Poverty and corporate control over lawmaking

Inequality and extreme poverty are not new, nor is the persistent social exclusion that accompanies them. Decades of neoliberal policies have valorised and promoted private enterprise and flouted state responsibility for the well-being of its citizens.

Economic and political power are mutually reinforcing. The corrosive influence of money in politics has consolidated corporate capacity to advance its own interests. The majority of lawmakers are beholden to their big donors instead of the interests of their constituents. Too few care to ensure that their poor voters too can live the "American dream".

Many of them - like President Donald Trump - also embrace the view that poverty is essentially a function of personal failings rather than structural disadvantage.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that instead of working to level the playing field or widen the social safety net for those at the economy's margins, Trump has supported efforts to improveprofitability for corporate companies.

His administration has rolled back protections for workers, eased restrictions on banks, and gutted safety and environmental regulations.

The regressive $1.5tn tax cut package passed last December inured to the benefit of the wealthy and exacerbated inequality.Republican groups, led by the Koch brothers, invested millions to market the tax cuts as helpful to middle class and to promote the law.

The trumpeted trickle-down benefit to workers has largely failed to materialise, as many corporations have pocketed their tax breaks instead of passing them along. The tax cuts were historically unpopular, and have grown increasingly so.

No wonder there is widespread pessimism: a Pew Study found that 62 percent of people believe the country's economic system "unfairly favors powerful interests," while just over a third believe it is "generally fair to most Americans."

Eroding political rights

Political marginalisation foments economic misery. Yet impediments to political participation, including felon disenfranchisement and voter suppression, are undermining the ability of Americans to shape a more just system. Most of these predate Trump.

These obstacles are designed to keep poor and minority voters from registration rolls, in part because the projected mid-century shift to a majority non-white nation bodes ill for Republicans.

Efforts to forestall the impending demographic shifts and a corresponding realignment of political power are also evident though increasingly hardline immigration policies aimed at keeping non-white migrants out of the country, propelled by fear-mongering that intensifies existing tensions.

In his report, Alston invokes the example of Puerto Rico to highlight the nexus between poverty and political rights. The impoverished territory lacks meaningful political representation yet is precluded from real self-governance - all part of the legacy of ongoing colonisation.

After touting the federal government's efficient disaster response to last September's devastating hurricane and the storm's low death toll, Trump lashed out at local leaders pleading for more assistance, calling them "politically motivated ingrates".

Amid recent confirmation that the initial death toll was woefully undercounted, it's sadly unsurprising that a study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that the island's federally imposed oversight board is prioritising debt repayment over the needs of a population ravaged by a humanitarian crisis.

A moment of opportunity

It is a bleak time for the US and the global community, with the resurgence of populist authoritarianism raising vexing questions about the ultimate compatibility of democracy and unbridled global capitalism.

These queries are made more urgent by worries about the sustainability of the current system and its ability to adapt to the existential threat of climate change.

As people's struggles mount, their social support narrows, and their prospects dim, there is a real risk of escalating social conflict and instability, fuelled by Trump's divisive and inflammatory rhetoric.

But it is also a moment of opportunity for a unifying grassroots mobilisation around demands for a more socially and economically egalitarian society.

Those efforts are already well under way, with emerging strategies to push back against the ravages of market fundamentalism and advance a truly transformative agenda, including a revived Poor People's Campaign and the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative for a new Social Contract, constructed and driven by communities rather than imposed from above.

As presidential candidate Bernie Sanders' popular success showed, calls for distributive justice are no longer a fringe concept. In these moments of despair, a clear-eyed vision about the structures that undergird and perpetuate social and economic inequality will inform the best strategy to transcend them.