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Daily Archives: November 5th, 2017

What’s in the tax reform bill for Johnny Lunchbucket?


By Dana Milbank | The Washington Post
14 hours ago
Washington • Poor Johnny Lunchbucket. He’s been had.
President Trump promised to look out for the forgotten man and to fix a “rigged” tax system. Now he and congressional Republicans have proposed a tax cut that makes the rich richer and shifts the burden onto the working class.
The numbers don’t lie, but if you need more evidence? Consider this: Billionaires Sheldon Adelson, Todd Ricketts, and Charles and David Koch are paying tens of millions of dollars to persuade working-class Americans to support a tax bill that would net these billionaires even more billions. In a cynical twist, they’re not even arguing, primarily, about trickle-down or rising-tide economics. These plutocratic populists are actually claiming the tax cuts would go to the middle class.
“What’s in it for you?” asks a new ad, reportedly backed by $10 million, from the “45 Committee,” founded by Adelson and Ricketts.
“The Republican tax cut saves middle class families more than $1,200 a year, according to independent analysis. The first $24,000 of your income would be tax free,” the announcer says, over images of a factory floor. “It will simplify your taxes and close loopholes so everybody pays their fair share. More money in your pocket. A stronger economy. That’s what’s in it for you.”
Then there’s the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity ad in which a young woman speaks earnestly. “The powerful, the well-connected, the politicians — they’ll stop benefiting from a rigged system,” says this ad, paid for by the powerful and well-connected.
“It means everyday Americans will have more to spend on what’s important to them.”
Finally, we have American Action Network. It doesn’t disclose donors but big oil and big pharma acknowledge contributing.
Says a mom from her kitchen: “A simpler, fairer tax code with tax cuts for working families will give us some peace of mind, and closing loopholes means everyone pays their fair share.”
Fair? The proposal cuts corporate taxes by $1 trillion, gives $200 billion to the richest Americans in the form of estate-tax repeal, and tilts the other $300 billion in cuts in favor of the wealthy. And that doesn’t take into account the hit the working class would take eventually from reduced benefits — health care, education and the like — to pay for the up to $1.5 trillion the legislation would add in debt over a decade.
An analysis by the Tax Policy Center of an earlier version of the bill found that it would reduce taxes by $660 for the typical family, but the richest 1 percent would get an extra $129,000 a year, and the richest one-tenth of 1 percent would get an extra $723,000 — or about $1,100 for every dollar Johnny Lunchbucket gets. The share of taxes paid by the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans would shrink. The share rises for those in the middle.
If this works, we can surely expect these billionaires to try the same plutocrat-as-populist ruse on other matters. Let’s consider how the Adelson and Ricketts “What’s in it for you?” script could be adapted to try to trick working-class Americans into supporting other sops to the rich:
What’s in it for you? The Republican health care bill saves you from the inconvenience and wasted time of visiting doctors.
You hate medical visits — all that poking and prodding, and hard-to-swallow pills. Health care reform simplifies your life, because you know how to cure your illness. Not well-connected doctors. That’s what’s in it for you.
What’s in it for you? The Republican Social Security bill saves middle-class families from the shame of retirement. You don’t want to retire. You’ll be bored. Retirement relief, by removing your retirement benefits, will help you work longer. That’s what’s in it for you.
What’s in it for you? The Republican education bill saves middle-class families from more than 12 years of education. Education relief will put more workers into the workforce sooner. Less hifalutin stuff like “knowledge” and “skills.” More workers.
That’s what’s in it for you.
What’s in it for you? The Republican deregulation plan saves middle-class families from the humiliation of wearing hard hats and eye protection. Airplanes would arrive faster without air-traffic control, according to an independent analysis. If your coworker dies in a crane accident, there’s more work for you, and smaller crowds in the lunchroom. That, Johnny Lunchbucket, is what’s in it for you.

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The Truth About Women and White Supremacy


Charlottesville
August 13, 2017
6:32 pm
By
Laura Smith

When James Alex Fields Jr.’s mug shot was released after he drove his Dodge Challenger through a counterprotest in Charlottesville on Saturday, no one was surprised by what the image revealed: a young, white man with a neo-fascist undercut. “Alt-right” figures like Richard Spencer absorb nearly all the media glare on white nationalism, creating the impression that this is a single-sex movement, and as many have pointed out, the white supremacists who rallied on Saturday were mainly men.
When it comes to identifying the perpetrators of racial hatred in this country, it is tempting to comfort ourselves with gender tropes. But women have always played a determining role in white-supremacist movements.

While the march in Charlottesville occurred in reaction to the proposed removal of a statue of a Confederate general, women were responsible for the erection of many of these Confederate statues across the country at the turn of the 20th century. In the 1920s, women composed the most influential arm of the KKK. And lest we forget the election that emboldened these modern white supremacists: More than half of white women voted for Trump. To overlook the comprehensive picture of who makes up the extreme right is to seriously underestimate its reach.

To overlook the comprehensive picture of who makes up the extreme right is to seriously underestimate its reach.
When we think of the Klan — one of this country’s most notorious and instantly recognizable hate groups — we imagine male faces under the pointed white hoods. But a historical examination of that organization’s most effective period tells a different story. The 1920s were a boom time for the Klan. Membership was roughly 4 million — a number that dwarfs the fringe organization that it is today — and carried no stigma.
While William Joseph Simmons was the founder of that era’s Klan, a woman was the mouthpiece and arguably its most influential member. According to historian Kathleen Blee’s book Women of the Klan, Elizabeth Tyler was “the first major female leader” of the 1920s Klan. In the midst of financial turmoil, the Klan hired Tyler to publicize and recruit new members. One of her most important contributions was galvanizing the KKK’s base by expanding the list of targeted Klan enemies beyond Black people: Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and communists. Under her leadership, the Klan underwent “a dramatic reversal of fortune.” An estimated 85,000 new members joined. At one point, insurgent Klansmen argued that she was the actual head of the Klan and that Simmons was just a figurehead. A congressional investigation agreed.
Tyler’s role could have been chalked up to an anomaly were it not for what happened next. Tyler spearheaded the Women of the Klu Klux Klan, the all-women, autonomous arm of the KKK that had roughly half-a-million members during the 1920s. As I wrote in a Timeline piece on the WKKK, the organization was savvier than its male counterpart because “they were better than the men’s group at hiding their white supremacist mission behind a facade of social welfare.” The group helped to normalize the terrorism of the men’s KKK. Pamphlets from the time read, “Are you interested in the Welfare of our Nation? As an Enfranchised woman are you interested in better government?” Through picnics, lunches, and cross burnings, these white women rallied around racist immigration laws, anti-miscegenation, and segregation.
Due to infighting scandal and the Klan’s general loss of momentum, the WKKK died out by the end of the decade. But there’s no doubt that the Klanswomen channeled their xenophobia into other spheres — the classroom, the school board, local and national politics.
There may be fewer of them marching with lit torches, but rest assured women are playing a powerful role wherever they can.
Undergirding this troubling belief that women aren’t central to racist movements is another: That racism occurs in a vacuum. Those who think white supremacy is a “white guys’ thing” must ask themselves about the nature of the fantasy they have constructed. Do we really believe the men holding torches in these photographs live in some sort of single-gendered society, or that the women they interact with hold no sway in their communities? There may be fewer of them marching with lit torches, but rest assured women are playing a powerful role wherever they can enact their agendas. If the 1920s Klan showed us anything, it’s that racist ideologies are nurtured in communities — not in isolation — and woven into a society’s very fabric. We will never understand the mechanisms that enact racism until we understand the whole societies from which they spring.
Take the “alt-right,” for example. Figures like Anne Coulter have been touting Trumpian ideas long before Trump made any moves toward the White House. Lauren Southern has become, according to Vice, the alt-right’s “not-so-secret weapon.” As a Harper’s feature recently highlighted, a group of “self-made female pundits” with a white-nationalist agenda are seeking to amplify their voices. Across Europe, a wave of women leaders promoting an anti-immigrant, white-populist hard-line are trying to galvanize women voters.
The women within these movements have warned of the foolishness of ignoring them. Not long after Donald Trump was elected, Lana Lokteff, a woman member of the “alt-right” gave a speech intended to galvanize other women. She told the crowd, “Our enemies have become so arrogant that they count on our silence.” After all, as Lokteff said, “When women get involved, a movement becomes a serious threat.”

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