How America's Elite Lost Their Grip

Time Magazine- Opinion.  How America's Elite  Lost Their Grip

https://time.com/5735384/capitalism-reckoning-elitism-in-america-2019/

Resistance- California Fights Back

State of Resistance – California Fights Back Fred Glass December 5, 2019 The Stansbury Forum At the same moment that Trump was riding his horse Xenophobe through a narrow passageway in the Electoral College to the presidency, California elected only Democrats..., extended progressive tax revenues and ...locked out anti-immigrant policy... 2015: San Francisco, CA.: H&R Block demanding the government give back billions. Unhoused person resting at a bus stop., Copyright 2015: Robert Gumpert State of Resistance: What California’s Dizzying Descent and Remarkable Resurgence Mean for America’s Future, by Manuel Pastor (New Press, 2018, 278 pages) California Fights Back:  The Golden State in the Age of Trump, by Peter Schrag (Heyday Press, 2018, 112 pages) “California is America fast-forward,” says Manuel Pastor in State of Resistance:  What California’s Dizzying Descent and Remarkable Resurgence Means for America’s Future.  I hope he’s right, and the author gives us reason to think so.  So does former Sacramento Bee editor Peter Schrag in California Fights Back:  The Golden State in the Age of Trump. Schrag foresees an attainable national future in the state’s self-assigned role as lead organizer of the opposition to Trump:  “Given California’s size, demographic diversity, economic heft, and its (mostly) blue political hue, it’s not surprising that the state is both the leader of the resistance […] and, at the same time, a bright model of an alternative.” Although each book largely presents latter-day California history with accuracy and insight, State of Resistanceprovides a deeper dive into the state’s complex social relationships, while California Fights Backfeatures a thinner but useful empirical recitation of how the state’s political actors have fought the Trump regime’s offense against immigrants, facts and common decency. ( n.b. California fights back is more useful.  But, both are pre Trump) In both books we learn how, by the late twentieth century, the once lustrous Golden State had lost its sheen.  When Governor Pete Wilson found himself behind in the polls in 1994, after his first term in office, the hitherto moderate Republican came up with an explanation for the state’s economic doldrums:  illegal immigrants.  He fashioned a ballot measure, Proposition 187, to deny undocumented immigrants and their children most state sponsored services, including public education, and sailed to reelection on these mean-spirited winds.  (Prop 187 was soon found unconstitutional.) A decade later, Arnold Schwarzenegger couldn’t plausibly finger immigrants as the source of his failure to deliver on bombastic campaign promises to “blow up the boxes” of government bureaucracy, since he had arrived on these shores from elsewhere himself—although, with Wilson, Iago-like, whispering in his ear, he briefly tried.  Instead, the wealthy governor made scapegoats of public employees and their unions, and called a special election to deal what he imagined would be deathblows to these mortal enemies of the people.  His ballot measures proposed to dismantle pensions, strip away job protections, and wrest for himself dictatorial control over the state budget. But the electorate didn’t see things his way.  Instead, teachers, nurses and firefighters, powered by grassroots organizing and a much smarter media strategy than Schwarzenegger’s, molded themselves into a secular Holy Trinity, and their union-funded campaign solidly defeated the once and future movie actor’s nasty ballot measures.  Their cause was helped along by the Governator’s contemptuous demeanor, transparent lies about his opponents, and abrupt policy zigazgs.  Both authors see this as a turning point, or at least the moment that revealed California’s tectonic shift from celebrity media politics, conservative gutter ideologies and austerity policies a couple decades ago, to the present day when the state stands as a bulwark of ethnic tolerance and serious, if insufficient efforts to address the threats of economic inequality and climate change.  Pastor in particular digs below the surface of electoral politics and personalities to diagnose the structural problems that led to the state’s decline and analyze its path to improvement in ways that might help others. Thus two-time governor Jerry Brown often received plaudits, especially outside California, for the state’s phoenix-like rise from the Great Recession, during which time right-wing pundits enjoyed calling liberal California a “failed state.”  (They still do, not having noticed, or choosing to ignore, the changed circumstances.)  At the moment he was elected in 2010, public education was losing ten thousand K-12 teaching positions a year; services to seniors and the poor were slashed to the bone; and four of the top ten counties in the country hit hardest by the sub-prime housing crisis were to be found in the Central Valley.

Great Employment Numbers: 44% of Fully Employed Make $18,000 a Year or Less

Great Employment Numbers: 44% of Fully Employed Make $18,000 a Year or Less: Beneath the rosy employment report lives a reality of low-paying part-time and temporary work with no benefits or security.

Why we don't have healthcare for all.

We could have paid for health care for all in the U.S., and child care for all infants
with the money that was stolen by corruption in Afghanistan.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/world/asia/afghanistan-war-documents-takeaways.html

“We were given money, told to spend it, and we did — without reason,” the unidentified official told investigators in a 2016 interview. An unidentified contractor reported being told to give out $3 million each day for projects in a single Afghan district.

Corruption Is Endemic

With that much money flowing into Afghanistan, it was perhaps inevitable that some of it would line local leaders’ pockets.

The documents describe American officials ignoring widespread skimming by the Afghan government that, ultimately, undermined the war strategy. One retired Army colonel who advised three American generals said that the problem persisted not just among judges and security officials, but became a “kleptocracy” throughout the government of former President Hamid Karzai.

U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement—Weak tea, at best

News from EPI › U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement—Weak tea, at best: The revised U.S.—Mexico—Canada Agreement (USMCA), announced today by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and endorsed by the AFL-CIO, represents a significant improvement on the draft agreement first released in 2017. Negotiators for labor and House Democrats strengthened the provisions on labor rights, environmental standards, and the enforcement of these rules, and also removed costly and egregious…

Trump Cripples World Trade Organization

Trump Cripples World Trade Organization
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/business/trump-trade-war-wto.html?

'We Were Proven Right,' Says AOC After Amazon Expands in New York Without Taking Billions in Public Cash

'We Were Proven Right,' Says AOC After Amazon Expands in New York Without Taking Billions in Public Cash

WTO Shutdown: Free Trade Agreements

WTO Shutdown: The Kids Are Alright