Krugman writes: "The attack on Medicare will be one of the most blatant violations of a campaign promise in history."
Older Americans will face difficult choices if President-elect Donald Trump does not preserve Medicare. (photo: Eric Thayer/The New York Times)
The Medicare Killers
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
18 November 16
uring the campaign, Donald Trump often promised to be a different kind of Republican, one who would represent the interests of working-class voters who depend on major government programs. “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” he declared, under the headline “Why Donald Trump Won’t Touch Your Entitlements.”
It was, of course, a lie. The transition team’s point man on Social Security is a longtime advocate of privatization, and all indications are that the incoming administration is getting ready to kill Medicare, replacing it with vouchers that can be applied to the purchase of private insurance. Oh, and it’s also likely to raise the age of Medicare eligibility.
So it’s important not to let this bait-and-switch happen before the public realizes what’s going on.
Rudy Giuliani Once Helped Incite a Riot of Drunk, Racist Cops
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=31267"><span class="small">Radley Balko, The Washington Post</span></a>
Friday, 18 November 2016 14:54
Balko writes: "One black member of the city council was physically blocked from crossing the street by a drunk cop. Another was trapped in her car as cops rocked it back and forth. Both were bombarded with racist epithets."
Former mayor of New York City, Rudolph Giuliani. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Rudy Giuliani Once Helped Incite a Riot of Drunk, Racist Cops
By Radley Balko, The Washington Post
18 November 16
n Monday, I posted about Rudy Giuliani’s long history of vindictiveness and authoritarianism. At the time, he was reportedly under consideration to be Donald Trump’s attorney general. The latest reports have Giuliani being considered for the State Department. I’ve also seen multiple reports that he basically has his pick of high-ranking posts in the Trump administration.
In part of my post yesterday, I noted that during his first successful campaign for electoral office, Giuliani helped incite a riot involving thousands of mostly white, mostly drunk police officers. On Twitter, Aaron Stewart-Ahn sent along this local news account of the incident:
It’s worth noting that this report came shortly after the riots. They were actually quite a bit worse than described. Again, here’s longtime New Yorker and civil libertarian Nat Hentoff recounting them in a recent piece published at the Cato Institute:
It was one of the biggest riots in New York City history.
As many as 10,000 demonstrators blocked traffic in downtown Manhattan on Sept. 16, 1992. Reporters and innocent bystanders were violently assaulted by the mob as thousands of dollars in private property was destroyed in multiple acts of vandalism. The protesters stormed up the steps of City Hall, occupying the building. They then streamed onto the Brooklyn Bridge, where they blocked traffic in both directions, jumping on the cars of trapped, terrified motorists. Many of the protestors were carrying guns and openly drinking alcohol.
Yet the uniformed police present did little to stop them. Why? Because the rioters were nearly all white, off-duty NYPD officers. They were participating in a Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association demonstration against Mayor David Dinkins’ call for a Civilian Complaint Review Board and his creation earlier that year of the Mollen Commission, formed to investigate widespread allegations of misconduct within the NYPD.
In the center of the mayhem, standing on top of a car while cursing Mayor Dinkins through a bullhorn, was mayoral candidate Rudy Giuliani.
“Beer cans and broken beer bottles littered the streets as Mr. Giuliani led the crowd in chants,” The New York Times reported . . .
Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin described the racist conduct in chilling detail:
“The cops held up several of the most crude drawings of Dinkins, black, performing perverted sex acts,” he wrote. “And then, here was one of them calling across the top of his beer can held to his mouth, ‘How did you like the n*****s beating you up in Crown Heights?’”
The off-duty cops were referring to a severe beating Breslin suffered while covering the 1991 Crown Heights riots in Brooklyn.
Breslin continued: “Now others began screaming … ‘How do you like what the n*****s did to you in Crown Heights?’
“?‘Now you got a n****r right inside City Hall. How do you like that? A n****r mayor.’
“And they put it right out in the sun yesterday in front of City Hall,” Breslin wrote. “We have a police force that is openly racist …”
One black member of the city council was physically blocked from crossing the street by a drunk cop. Another was trapped in her car as cops rocked it back and forth. Both were bombarded with racist epithets.
Giuliani never condemned the riots, the signs or the racist cops. He rode the wave of support from police and law-and-order voters into the mayor’s mansion. When his own campaign produced a report criticizing him for egging on the cops and then acquiescing to them after the fact, he ordered the report destroyed.
Yes, the riots happened more than 20 years ago. And perhaps they could be overlooked if it weren’t for the fact that today, Giuliani is reliably among the first public figures to condemn the activists who protest police brutality. He has practically made a second career of it.
Giuliani has said that the very name “Black Lives Matter” is “inherently racist.” The hypocrisy is only uglier when you consider what the two protests were about. Black Lives Matter and other racial justice groups are protesting police violence against black people. You can disagree with their methods. You can disagree with the cases they choose to highlight. You can even disagree with the general assumptions behind their protest — that police departments and the criminal-justice system are plagued by systemic racism. But it’s hard to object to their ultimate aim — they want equal treatment under the law.
The cops that Giuliani egged on were protesting something much different. They were protesting the suggestion that they should be held accountable to the people they serve. (If we’re honest, many of them appeared to have been protesting the very idea of reporting to a black mayor.) That is why they rioted. They didn’t want to be held accountable to the people of New York.
As Hentoff points out, not only did Giuliani never condemn the riots, but after the death of Eric Garner he assailed New York Mayor Bill de Blasio for daring even to acknowledge that the NYPD has a history of racism. Giuliani knew full well that this was true — he benefited from it politically.
That Giuliani could launch his electoral career on the riots, go on to a long career in politics, emerge as both a prominent and consistent critic of anti-police-brutality protesters, and now be under consideration to become the chief diplomat for the most powerful country in the world — all without ever condemning or distancing himself from even the most vile, racist, and violent of the rioting cops — is all pretty good evidence that Black Lives Matter has a point.
FOCUS: Obama Has an Opportunity to Place Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court
Friday, 18 November 2016 13:05
Dayen writes: "The outgoing president has one final trump card - and he should play it."
President Obama with his Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
Obama Has an Opportunity to Place Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court
By David Dayen, New Republic
18 November 16
The outgoing president has one final trump card—and he should play it.
ome January, President Barack Obama will be consigned to the sidelines as Donald Trump occupies the Oval Office and begins the work of dismantling his legacy. But there is one action that Obama could take on January 3, 2017 that could hold off some of the worst potential abuses of a Trump administration for up to a year. Obama can appoint his nominee Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court on that date, in between the two sessions of Congress.
Based on everything we know about Obama’s temperament and politics, he won’t resort to this. But given how Republicans relentlessly obstructed his efforts for eight years, he would be completely justified in playing one final trump card. And there’s a cost to ignoring that card. The fact that Democrats prefer to maintain governance norms, even while Republicans break them time and again, inescapably pushes the policymaking apparatus of the country to the right.
Here’s how it would work. Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution states, “The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate.” This has been used for Supreme Court vacancies before—William Brennan began his Court tenure with a recess appointment in 1956. Any appointments made in this fashion expire at the end of the next Senate session. So a Garland appointment on January 3 would last until December 2017, the end of the first session of the 115th Congress.
Why January 3? Because the president’s recess appointment powers were significantly constrained by a 2014 Supreme Court ruling. In a 9-0 decision in National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning, the Court said the president cannot appoint individuals to fill vacancies if the Senate holds “pro forma” sessions every three days. Though these sessions, common since 2011, merely gavel in and gavel out the Senate chamber, they have the practical effect of keeping the Senate active, therefore blocking the recess appointment power.
But even the Court’s most conservative members acknowledged that a president can make recess appointments during “inter-session” recesses—such as the break between the first and second year of a Congress, or the break between outgoing or incoming Congresses. There simply has to be an end point there, as a metaphysical matter. Theodore Roosevelt once used a short inter-session recess to make hundreds of appointments.
Justice Stephen Breyer, writing for the majority, included language in the decision saying that Senate breaks of any kind, inter-session or intra-session, must be longer than ten days for appointments to be valid. However, legal scholars refer to this language as “dicta.” It was not relevant to the actual decision in Noel Canning, which was solely about whether pro forma sessions were legitimate. The clause about the length of a recess, more provocative lawyers argue, is authoritative but not binding. They say it goes beyond the facts before the Court, represents the individual views of the judge, and cannot be cited as legal precedent.
This is a highly aggressive and probably doomed strategy, without question. But we know that Congress understands the potential for inter-session recess appointments because Representative Chris Collins (a member of the Trump transition team) filed a constitutional amendment this year to end them. Collins specifically cited the Garland issue as his justification: “It’s been 111 days since President Obama nominated Merrick Garland for the bench and, while the Senate has continued to hold their ground on proceeding, we need to ensure the president cannot fill this slot—in the form of a recess appointment.”
It goes without saying that Obama appointing Garland in this fashion would be highly controversial. Indeed, it would make the nation’s collective head explode. Conservatives would demand the Court immediately block the appointment. However, it is likely they would need Garland to participate in a case that gets a ruling so they could have a plaintiff with standing to say they have been harmed by the Garland appointment. And then they would have to move that case through the lower courts. That process would take several months, and all the while the Supreme Court would have a center-left majority.
The intervening months would be filled with outrage and talk of treason. The media would be consumed with debating the question. Trump and his allies would denounce Obama’s lawlessness. Dahlia Lithwick is correct to call the prospect a “grotesque spectacle.” And potentially nothing else would get done, which, if you’re interested in not having the Republican majority govern effectively, is a little side benefit.
All that said, this would be completely out of character for Obama, who plans to spend his final two months in office as a horse whisperer to Trump, not an antagonist. The gambit would have an extremely low likelihood of permanent success—even if the Court didn’t rule the Garland appointment unconstitutional (and it probably would), he’d be out in a year.
More than that, it just wouldn’t be sporting. It would break a long-held governing norm, that you don’t use the powers of the office for short-term political gain. Obama would see reversing this as highly treacherous.
And that’s the real point. Republicans have absolutely no problem breaking any norm in their path to power. They turned the filibuster from a seldom-used tool to a routine exercise. Tom DeLay saw advantage in doing a second redistricting in Texas in 2003 to pick up extra GOP seats, even though states normally redistrict every 10 years; he succeeded. Congress typically passes the debt limit without comment, but Republicans took the country to the brink of its first default, extracting concessions in the process. A minority of the Senate prevented the confirmation for years of any director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau simply because they didn’t like the agency. The opposition party would never attempt to conduct foreign policy that differed from the president’s, until Republican senators tried it before the Iran deal.
And, of course, the year-long blockade of Garland, who has not even received a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee, violated a long-standing norm.
Republicans surely view Democrats in the same manner. They would cite the Senate’s use of the “nuclear option” to end the filibuster on executive branch and judicial appointees (though not Supreme Court justices), and the Obama administration’s reliance on executive orders on policies like immigration. But anyone weighing the two claims dispassionately would conclude that Republicans have shown far more willingness to bend the rules of governance to their will, and far less respect for how those rules have traditionally been administered.
There are consequences to one party being more aggressive about defying governing norms. If liberal legislation can’t break a Republican filibuster, but Democrats don’t offer the same resistance, the playing field is tilted to conservative policy. If Republicans use any maneuver to get appointees in place, and Democrats don’t, conservatives become more likely to be ensconced at executive agencies. If Republicans are willing to blackmail the government and Democrats aren’t, they get more concessions from that blackmail. If Republicans use gerrymandering and voter suppression and every available tool more sharply than Democrats, we get conservative government even if we vote for a liberal one.
Democrats, in short, bring a butter knife to a gunfight. They may be correct on the merits that institutional norms allow the government to function properly. But as long as Republicans don’t care about such niceties, that respect is equivalent to surrender.
Taibbi writes: "Donald Trump may have won the White House, but he will never be a man like his predecessor, whose personal example will now only shine more brightly with the passage of time. At a time when a lot of Americans feel like they have little to be proud of, we should think about our outgoing president, whose humanity and greatness are probably only just now coming into true focus."
Barack Obama speaks to the press. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty)
President Obama's Last Stand
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
18 November 16
Even Obama's critics will soon have plenty of reasons to appreciate him
arack Obama raised an eyebrow or two this week, when he had this to say about why the Democrats just lost the White House:
"You know, I won Iowa not because the demographics dictated that I would win Iowa. It was because I spent 87 days going to every small town and fair and fish fry and VFW hall, and there were some counties where I might have lost, but maybe I lost by 20 points instead of 50 points. … There are some counties maybe I won that people didn't expect because people had a chance to see you and listen to you."
Ouch. There's no way to read that except as a stinging indictment of the Clinton campaign's failure to compete in "lost" territory.
In the past week, Obama has ventured some explanations for Donald Trump's rise. He pointed out that Trump had made a "connection" with his voters that was "powerful stuff."
This felt like a double-edged dig, thrown at both the rabid lunacy of Trump's crowds and Hillary Clinton's infamous (and oft-disputed) struggles on the personal-connection front.
Obama said Trump reached people who are "feeling deeply disaffected," and added during remarks in Greece that "we have to deal with issues like inequality … and economic dislocation." He noted, in the context of both the Brexit vote and Trump's win, that these issues perhaps "[cut] across countries."
Obama's remarks have been coolly received, to say the least, among blue-staters and in traditionally Democratic-friendly media outlets. Dana Milbank of the Washington Postblasted the outgoing president for his "above the fray approach." Others have wondered why Obama has not taken on a "more antagonistic posture."
There are a lot of people these days wondering if the election of the race-baiting Donald Trump will end up staining or outright repudiating the legacy of Barack Obama. I think it will be the other way around. Trump's presidency is almost sure to throw the best qualities of this unique and powerful historical figure into relief.
Trump was carried into the White House by an electorate that outlets like the Harvard Business Review tell us was obsessed with the concept of "manly dignity," but it's Obama who has been the great model for young men of his generation. And ten years from now, when the millions of young people who grew up during his presidency start to enter the workforce and become leaders and parents, we'll see more clearly what he meant to this country.
As a politician, Obama wasn't exactly without disappointments. Reporters who covered his first presidential campaign in 2007-2008 will laugh if they go back to their notes and read the promises he made back then.
In Philadelphia in April of 2008 Obama told the AFL-CIO in no uncertain terms they could trust him not to sign bad deals like the South Korea Free Trade agreement. "You can trust me when I say that whatever trade deals we negotiate when I'm president will be good for American workers," he proclaimed. Four years later he was aggressively lobbying that same deal and promising that it would create 70,000 jobs, and supported the even worse Trans-Pacific Partnership to the end.
He told us repeatedly he would never have a registered lobbyist in the White House, and practically minutes into his presidency he was making Mark Patterson, a Goldman lobbyist, the number two man at Treasury. He promised to support drug reimportation from Canada and gave up on that after a few discussions with Pharma bigwigs.
He pledged to push for "a world without nuclear weapons" at the beginning of his presidency, and was pushing for a brand-new trillion-dollar program by the end of it. He pledged to clean up Wall Street and then presided over a historic stretch of regulatory and prosecutorial inaction. The betrayals on security-state issues like drone assassination, secrecy and surveillance have been breathtaking.
On all these questions Obama seemed either to be unable to assert himself in the center of a hurricane of interests, or else he was really just a run-of-the-mill corporate Democrat regressing to an insincere mean one once Election Day was safely in the rearview mirror.
Still, if it was the latter, the usual policy disappointments somehow felt less awful in his hands. Obama seemed also to be fighting a two-front war as president and it was the other narrative, the historical battle, where his considerable intelligence seemed more focused.
He faced an extraordinary challenge, entering the White House as the first African-American president at a time when the economy was in ruins and the culture war was spiraling out of control. His political path forward was a tightrope. A presidency weighed down by corruption, indecisiveness or personal weaknesses would have been a disaster.
Imagine the reaction if Barack Obama had been caught in Kennedy- or Clinton-style bedroom scandals, or even if he'd spoken publicly in the style of Carter's “malaise” speech, or suffered a bad come-from-ahead second-term loss à la George H.W. Bush.
Any of the above would have led to the door closing on African-American politicians at the national level for a long time, a generation maybe. This burden was every bit as unfair as the one Hillary Clinton just had to shoulder as the first woman to win a major-party presidential nomination. It was crucial not only that he win, but win twice, and convincingly, and on the power of his own charisma and resolve.
He also had to manage this while somehow not allowing himself to be rattled by the torrent of abuse he received. Think of the discipline and equanimity it must have taken to not show anger and maintain an air of positivity given the vicious absurdities he had to work through, including the ones emanating from none other than Donald Trump about his birth origin.
The birther controversy was racism and profiling elevated to a Wagnerian level: Here was a black man who'd made it all the way to the Oval Office, and a giant portion of the population still considered him to be literally trespassing.
That such an idiotic campaign may have launched Trump into the White House to succeed Obama is an incredibly bitter pill, but this story isn't exactly over yet. When Trump takes over he will immediately have to reckon with Obama's example, and this is a historical popularity contest His Orangeness seems doomed to lose.
From a personality standpoint, Obama is everything Trump isn't. He's in control of his emotions, thick-skinned, self-aware, ingratiating, strategic and temperamentally (if not politically) consistent. A striking quality of Obama as president is that he did his job without seeming to need to take credit for things all of the time, which kept the political price down on many of his decisions.
People rarely make it to the presidency without first acquiring a weakness for embarrassing self-glorifying spectacles like George W. Bush's asinine "Mission Accomplished" flight. When presidents throw parades for themselves after every tiny political win, it only makes the fall from grace hurt that much more when circumstances inevitably cycle back downward. Most of them never learn because most politicians are pathological: 99 percent of them are ruled by drives rather than thoughts.
Obama wasn't that way. To use a hokey sports metaphor, he did his job in the manner of an offensive lineman: The less you heard about him, the better he was probably doing. (Obama would appreciate the comparison. He will go down with Dick Nixon and George W. Bush as one the most unhealthily genuine sports fans to occupy the Oval Office).
His performance this week testified greatly to this quality. He didn't have a lot to say about the election results, but what few lines he did speak conveyed a lot. This is a characteristic of strong people. Contrast this to Donald Trump, who vomits out great quantities of verbiage, taking so many positions at once that no one of them has much meaning after a while.
President-elect Trump will surely talk himself into a jackpot a dozen times before inauguration. Obama hasn't done it, really, since his infamous "guns and religion" speech. Eight years is an awfully long time to go without blinking.
Obama's parting message, about how he won Iowa, was a calm admonition to his own party to not give up on those sections of the country where the "demographics" don't suggest success.
This was an extraordinary statement to make in the wake of such a massive affirmation of racist and xenophobic attitudes. At one of our lowest moments, the person at the very center of this horrible maelstrom of hate was the one urging us not to give up. Obama's detractors may not hear this message now. But history will.
Donald Trump may have won the White House, but he will never be a man like his predecessor, whose personal example will now only shine more brightly with the passage of time. At a time when a lot of Americans feel like they have little to be proud of, we should think about our outgoing president, whose humanity and greatness are probably only just now coming into true focus.
It's more than just a release for anger – taking to the streets is a necessary way to participate in democracy. Watch here.
Goodbye, American Neoliberalism. A New Neo-Fascist Era Is Here.
Friday, 18 November 2016 09:41
West writes: "The neoliberal era in the United States ended with a neofascist bang. The political triumph of Donald Trump shattered the establishments in the Democratic and Republican parties - both wedded to the rule of Big Money and to the reign of meretricious politicians."
Professor Cornel West. (photo: VICE News)
Goodbye, American Neoliberalism. A New Neo-Fascist Era Is Here.
By Cornel West, Guardian UK
18 November 16
Trump’s election was enabled by the policies that overlooked the plight of our most vulnerable citizens. We gird ourselves for a frightening future
he neoliberal era in the United States ended with a neofascist bang. The political triumph of Donald Trump shattered the establishments in the Democratic and Republican parties – both wedded to the rule of Big Money and to the reign of meretricious politicians.
The Bush and Clinton dynasties were destroyed by the media-saturated lure of the pseudo-populist billionaire with narcissist sensibilities and ugly, fascist proclivities. The monumental election of Trump was a desperate and xenophobic cry of human hearts for a way out from under the devastation of a disintegrating neoliberal order – a nostalgic return to an imaginary past of greatness.
White working- and middle-class fellow citizens – out of anger and anguish – rejected the economic neglect of neoliberal policies and the self-righteous arrogance of elites. Yet these same citizens also supported a candidate who appeared to blame their social misery on minorities, and who alienated Mexican immigrants, Muslims, black people, Jews, gay people, women and China in the process.
This lethal fusion of economic insecurity and cultural scapegoating brought neoliberalism to its knees. In short, the abysmal failure of the Democratic party to speak to the arrested mobility and escalating poverty of working people unleashed a hate-filled populism and protectionism that threaten to tear apart the fragile fiber of what is left of US democracy. And since the most explosive fault lines in present-day America are first and foremost racial, then gender, homophobic, ethnic and religious, we gird ourselves for a frightening future.
What is to be done? First we must try to tell the truth and a condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. For 40 years, neoliberals lived in a world of denial and indifference to the suffering of poor and working people and obsessed with the spectacle of success. Second we must bear witness to justice. We must ground our truth-telling in a willingness to suffer and sacrifice as we resist domination. Third we must remember courageous exemplars like Martin Luther King Jr, who provide moral and spiritual inspiration as we build multiracial alliances to combat poverty and xenophobia, Wall Street crimes and war crimes, global warming and police abuse – and to protect precious rights and liberties.
The age of Obama was the last gasp of neoliberalism. Despite some progressive words and symbolic gestures, Obama chose to ignore Wall Street crimes, reject bailouts for homeowners, oversee growing inequality and facilitate war crimes like US drones killing innocent civilians abroad.
Rightwing attacks on Obama – and Trump-inspired racist hatred of him – have made it nearly impossible to hear the progressive critiques of Obama. The president has been reluctant to target black suffering – be it in overcrowded prisons, decrepit schools or declining workplaces. Yet, despite that, we get celebrations of the neoliberal status quo couched in racial symbolism and personal legacy. Meanwhile, poor and working class citizens of all colors have continued to suffer in relative silence.
In this sense, Trump’s election was enabled by the neoliberal policies of the Clintons and Obama that overlooked the plight of our most vulnerable citizens. The progressive populism of Bernie Sanders nearly toppled the establishment of the Democratic party but Clinton and Obama came to the rescue to preserve the status quo. And I do believe Sanders would have beat Trump to avert this neofascist outcome!
In this bleak moment, we must inspire each other driven by a democratic soulcraft of integrity, courage, empathy and a mature sense of history – even as it seems our democracy is slipping away.
We must not turn away from the forgotten people of US foreign policy – such as Palestinians under Israeli occupation, Yemen’s civilians killed by US-sponsored Saudi troops or Africans subject to expanding US military presence.
As one whose great family and people survived and thrived through slavery, Jim Crow and lynching, Trump’s neofascist rhetoric and predictable authoritarian reign is just another ugly moment that calls forth the best of who we are and what we can do.
For us in these times, to even have hope is too abstract, too detached, too spectatorial. Instead we must be a hope, a participant and a force for good as we face this catastrophe.
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uring the campaign, Donald Trump often promised to be a different kind of Republican, one who would represent the interests of working-class voters who depend on major government programs. “I’m not going to cut 
n Monday, I posted about Rudy Giuliani’s long history of vindictiveness and authoritarianism. At the time, he was reportedly under consideration to be Donald Trump’s attorney general. The latest reports have Giuliani being considered for the State Department. I’ve also seen multiple reports that he basically has his pick of high-ranking posts in the Trump administration.
ome January, President Barack Obama will be consigned to the sidelines as Donald Trump occupies the Oval Office and begins the work of dismantling his legacy. But there is one action that Obama could take on January 3, 2017 that could hold off some of the worst potential abuses of a Trump administration for up to a year. Obama can appoint his nominee Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court on that date, in between the two sessions of Congress.
arack Obama raised an eyebrow or two this week, when he had 
he neoliberal era in the United States ended with a neofascist bang. The political triumph of Donald Trump shattered the establishments in the Democratic and Republican parties – both wedded to the rule of Big Money and to the reign of meretricious politicians. 
