[<<[AA] American corporations already have more money than they know what to do with. Their profits are at record levels. They’re using them to buy back their shares of stock, and raise executive pay. That’s what they’ll do with the additional $1 trillion they’ll receive in this tax cut. ... [BB] At a time when the richest 1 percent already have 40 percent of all the wealth in the country, it’s immoral to give them even more – especially when financed partly by 13 million low-income Americans who will lose their health coverage as a result of this tax plan (according to the Congressional Budget Office), and by subsequent cuts in safety-net programs necessitated by increasing the deficit by $1.5 trillion. ... [CC] In fact, because the tax plan bestows much larger rewards on big businesses, they’ll have more ability to use predatory tactics to squeeze small firms and force them out of business.
Don’t let your Uncle Bob be fooled: Republicans are voting for this because their wealthy patrons demand it. Their tax plan will weaken our economy for years – reducing demand, widening inequality, and increasing the national debt by at least $1.5 trillion over the next decade.>> (Excerpted from the comment at sl. no. I below.) II. <<Contrary to what some have suggested, white millennial Trump voters were not in more economically precarious situations than non-Trump voters. Fully 86 percent of them reported being employed, a rate similar to non-Trump voters; and they were 14 percent less likely to be low income than white voters who did not support Trump. Employment and income were not significantly related to that sense of white vulnerability. So what was? Racial resentment. Even when controlling for partisanship, ideology, region and a host of other factors, white millennials fit Michael Tesler’s analysis, explored here. As he put it, economic anxiety isn’t driving racial resentment; rather, racial resentment is driving economic anxiety. We found, as he has in a larger population, that racial resentment is the biggest predictor of white vulnerability among white millennials. Economic variables like education, income and employment made a negligible difference.>> (Excerpted from the comment at sl. no. II below.) III. <<Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) slammed former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in a tweet, and indicated that special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings on possible Russian collusion with the Trump campaign will only be “legitimate” if Republicans like his findings. The outburst began late Friday after Holder tweeted: “Speaking on behalf of the vast majority of the American people, Republicans in Congress be forewarned: any attempt to remove Bob Mueller will not be tolerated. These are BS attacks on him/his staff that are blatantly political-designed to hide the real wrongdoing. Country not party.”>> (Excerpted from the comment at sl. no. III below.) I/III http://www.newsweek.com/robert-reich-three-big-lies-about-trumps-tax-plan-750616 ROBERT REICH: THE THREE BIG LIES ABOUT TRUMP’S TAX PLAN BY ROBERT REICH ON 12/17/17 AT 5:43 AM [Video: 00:06 - 03:06] This article first appeared on RobertReich.org. Here are the three main Republican arguments in favor of the Republican tax plan, followed by the truth. 1. It will make American corporations competitive with foreign corporations, which are taxed at a lower rate Rubbish. Keep Up With This Story And More By Subscribing Now (1) American corporations now pay an effective rate (after taking deductions and tax credits) that’s just about the same as most foreign based corporations pay. (2) Most of these other countries also impose a “Value Added Tax” on top of the corporate tax. (3) When we cut our corporate rate from 35 percent to 20 percent, other nations will cut their corporate rates in order to be competitive with us – so we gain nothing anyway. (4) Most big American corporations who benefit most from the Republican tax plan aren’t even “American.” Over 35 percent of their shareholders are foreign (which means that by cutting corporate taxes we’re giving a big tax cut to those foreign shareholders). 20 percent of their employees are foreign, while many Americans work for foreign-based corporations. (5) The “competitiveness” of America depends on American workers , not on “American” corporations. But this tax plan will make it harder to finance public investments in education, health, and infrastructure, on which the future competitiveness of American workers depends. (6) American corporations already have more money than they know what to do with. Their profits are at record levels. They’re using them to buy back their shares of stock, and raise executive pay. That’s what they’ll do with the additional $1 trillion they’ll receive in this tax cut. 2. With the tax cut, big corporations and the rich will invest and create more jobs Baloney. (1) Job creation doesn’t trickle down. After Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush cut taxes on the top, few jobs and little growth resulted. America cut taxes on corporations in 2004 in an attempt to get them to bring their profits home from abroad, and what happened? They didn’t invest. They just bought up more shares of their own stock, and increased executive pay. (2) Companies expand and create jobs when there’s more demand for their goods and services. That demand comes from customers who have the money to buy what companies sell. Those customers are primarily the middle class and poor, who spend far more of their incomes than the rich. But this tax bill mostly benefits the rich. (3) At a time when the richest 1 percent already have 40 percent of all the wealth in the country, it’s immoral to give them even more – especially when financed partly by 13 million low-income Americans who will lose their health coverage as a result of this tax plan (according to the Congressional Budget Office), and by subsequent cuts in safety-net programs necessitated by increasing the deficit by $1.5 trillion. 3. It will give small businesses an incentive to invest and create more jobs Untrue. (1) At least 85 percent of small businesses earn so little they already pay the lowest corporate tax rate, which this plan doesn’t change. (2) In fact, because the tax plan bestows much larger rewards on big businesses, they’ll have more ability to use predatory tactics to squeeze small firms and force them out of business. *** Don’t let your Uncle Bob be fooled: Republicans are voting for this because their wealthy patrons demand it. Their tax plan will weaken our economy for years – reducing demand, widening inequality, and increasing the national debt by at least $1.5 trillion over the next decade. Shame on the greedy Republican backers who have engineered this. Shame on Trump and the Republicans who have lied to the public about its consequences. GettyImages-632212568 Trump donor Sheldon Adelson attends the Inaugural Luncheon in the US Capitol January 20, 2017 in Washington, DC. AARON P. BERNSTEIN/GETTY Robert Reich is the chancellor’s professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, and Time magazine named him one of the 10 most effective Cabinet secretaries of the 20th century. He has written 14 books, including the best-sellers Aftershock, The Work of Nations and Beyond Outrage and, most recently, Saving Capitalism. He is also a founding editor of The American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and co-creator of the award-winning documentary Inequality for All. HIs latest documentary, "Saving Capitalism," is available on Netflix. II/III. https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/12/15/16781222/trump-racism-economic-anxiety-study The past year of research has made it very clear: Trump won because of racial resentment Another study produces the same findings we’ve seen over and over again. By German [email protected][email protected] Dec 15, 2017, 2:40pm EST Chris Kleponis/Pool via Getty Images More than a year after President Donald Trump won the election, there are still some questions about what drove him to victory: Was it genuine anxiety about the state of the economy? Or was it racism and racial resentment? Over at the Washington Post, researchers Matthew Fowler, Vladimir Medenica, and Cathy Cohen have published the results of a new survey on these questions, with a focus on the 41 percent of white millennials who voted for Trump and the sense of “white vulnerability” that motivated them. The conclusion is very clear: Contrary to what some have suggested, white millennial Trump voters were not in more economically precarious situations than non-Trump voters. Fully 86 percent of them reported being employed, a rate similar to non-Trump voters; and they were 14 percent less likely to be low income than white voters who did not support Trump. Employment and income were not significantly related to that sense of white vulnerability. So what was? Racial resentment. Even when controlling for partisanship, ideology, region and a host of other factors, white millennials fit Michael Tesler’s analysis, explored here. As he put it, economic anxiety isn’t driving racial resentment; rather, racial resentment is driving economic anxiety. We found, as he has in a larger population, that racial resentment is the biggest predictor of white vulnerability among white millennials. Economic variables like education, income and employment made a negligible difference. The survey looked at millennials because they will be the largest share of the voting-eligible population in 2018, so they’re an important bellwether for future trends. (At the same time, most millennials backed Hillary Clinton in 2016, not Trump.) To anyone who’s been following the research on this, the findings should come as little surprise. There have now been numerous studies that found support for Trump is closely linked to racial resentment, defined by Fowler, Medenica, and Cohen as “a moral feeling that blacks violate such traditional American values as individualism and self-reliance.” This is crucial to understanding both Trump’s rise and how to overcome Trump. As a presidential candidate, Trump made all sorts of racist comments — suggesting that Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists, proposing a ban on all Muslims entering the US, saying a US judge should recuse himself from a case simply because of his Mexican heritage, and deploying dog whistles about “law and order.” As president, Trump equated a group of neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and white nationalists who descended onto Charlottesville, Virginia, with the anti-racism protesters who stood against bigotry. His administration has also pursued policies that will disproportionately hurt minority groups, including his travel ban, immigration restrictions, “tough on crime” policies, and potential voting restrictions. The studies suggest that these kinds of comments and actions are not just incidental to Trump; they are at the core of his political success. If Democrats want to defeat him, they will need to overcome that racial resentment. The latest findings are backed by many other studies This is not a one-off finding. At this point, the evidence that Trump’s rise was driven by racism and racial resentment is fairly stacked. One paper, published in January by political scientists Brian Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta, found that voters’ measures of sexism and racism correlated much more closely with support for Trump than economic dissatisfaction after controlling for factors like partisanship and political ideology. [Graphs] Brian Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta Another study, conducted by researchers Brenda Major, Alison Blodorn, and Gregory Major Blascovich shortly before the election, found that if people who strongly identified as white were told that nonwhite groups will outnumber white people in 2042, they became more likely to support Trump. And a study, published in November by researchers Matthew Luttig, Christopher Federico, and Howard Lavine, found that Trump supporters were much more likely to change their views on housing policy based on race. In this study, respondents were randomly assigned “a subtle image of either a black or a white man.” Then, they were asked about views on housing policy. The researchers found that Trump supporters were much more likely to be impacted by the image of a black man. After the exposure, they were not only less supportive of housing assistance programs, but they also expressed higher levels of anger that some people receive government assistance and were more likely to say that individuals who receive assistance are to blame for their situation. In contrast, favorability toward Hillary Clinton did not significantly change respondents’ views on any of these issues when primed with racial cues. “These findings indicate that responses to the racial cue varied as a function of feelings about Donald Trump — but not feelings about Hillary Clinton — during the 2016 presidential election,” the researchers concluded. There is also a lot of other research showing that people’s racial attitudes can change their views on politics and policy, as my colleague Dylan Matthews as well as researchers Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel previously explained for Vox. Simply put, racial attitudes were a big driver behind Trump’s election — just as they long have been for general beliefs about politics and policy. To confront Trump, opponents will need to confront racism At some point, you might start to wonder why journalists keep writing about the link between Trump’s support and bigoted beliefs. The election is over. Do we really need to analyze what happened over and over again? The point, at least for me, is not to demonize Trump voters. The point is to understand them in order to better grasp what motivated them to vote for someone who ran a clearly bigoted campaign and who most voters agreed is unqualified for the nation’s highest office. As Schaffner, MacWilliams, and Nteta wrote in their paper, there’s growing evidence that 2016 was unique — in that racism and sexism played a more powerful role than in recent presidential elections. “Specifically, we find no statistically significant relationship between either the racism or sexism scales and favorability ratings of either [previous Republican candidates] John McCain or Mitt Romney,” they wrote. “However, the pattern is quite strong for favorability ratings of Donald Trump.” The concern, then, is that this is the beginning of a modern trend in which politicians like Trump directly and explicitly play to people’s prejudices to win elections — and it works. This is in many ways an outgrowth of the Southern Strategy and tactics that play into people’s racism, like dog whistles — only it’s more explicit in its bigotry. If that’s really what’s happening, it’s important for anyone interested in limiting the power of bigotry in US politics to know and demonstrate what’s going on. Studies like this put a bigger imperative on getting to the root of the problem and figuring out ways to reduce people’s racial biases. To this end, the research also shows it’s possible to reach out to Trump voters — even those who are racist today — in an empathetic way without condoning their prejudice. The evidence suggests, in fact, that the best way to weaken people’s racial or other biases is through frank, empathetic dialogue. (Much more on that in my in-depth piece on the research.) Given that, the strongest approach to really combating racism and racial resentment may be empathy. One study, for example, found that canvassing people’s homes and having a 10-minute, nonconfrontational conversation about transgender rights — in which people’s lived experiences were relayed so they could understand how prejudice feels personally — managed to reduce voters’ anti-trans attitudes for at least three months. Perhaps a similar model could be adapted to reach out to people with racist, sexist, or other deplorable views, although this possibility needs more study. But all of this involves a lot of legwork, outreach, and a kind of empathy that people may not be comfortable with in an era of highly polarized politics. Knowing what caused Trump’s win is crucial to gauging whether all of this work and effort is worth doing — and the growing body of evidence suggests that it truly is. III. http://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/cornyn-challenged-mueller-rpobe_us_5a35b328e4b0ff955ad37eec Texas Senator Challenges Legitimacy Of Mueller Probe As Push For Firing Continues "Legitimacy" of Mueller's findings depend on "what they are," says John Cornyn. 17/12/2017 6:50 AM IST 5.9 K Mary Papenfuss Trends Reporter, HuffPost Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) slammed former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in a tweet, and indicated that special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings on possible Russian collusion with the Trump campaign will only be “legitimate” if Republicans like his findings. The outburst began late Friday after Holder tweeted: “Speaking on behalf of the vast majority of the American people, Republicans in Congress be forewarned: any attempt to remove Bob Mueller will not be tolerated. These are BS attacks on him/his staff that are blatantly political-designed to hide the real wrongdoing. Country not party.” Holder was apparently referring to the GOP’s mounting calls to oust Mueller amid complaints that the former FBI director’s investigation has been biased against the Trump administration. Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) has said that the latest rumors indicate that President Donald Trump was preparing to fire Mueller — possibly before Christmas — as the probe into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia inches closer to the president’s associates. Cornyn shot back that Holder does not speak for the majority of Americans. Eric Holder ✔ @EricHolder Speaking on behalf of the vast majority of the American people, Republicans in Congress be forewarned:any attempt to remove Bob Mueller will not be tolerated.These are BS attacks on him/his staff that are blatantly political-designed to hide the real wrongdoing. Country not party 8:04 PM - Dec 14, 2017 21,973 21,973 Replies 44,333 44,333 Retweets 102,624 102,624 likes Twitter Ads info and privacy Senator JohnCornyn ✔ @JohnCornyn You don’t https://twitter.com/ericholder/status/941315510179893249 … 7:28 AM - Dec 16, 2017 16,231 16,231 Replies 2,036 2,036 Retweets 4,976 4,976 likes Twitter Ads info and privacy Senator JohnCornyn ✔ @JohnCornyn But Mueller needs to clean house of partisans https://twitter.com/StevenTDennis/status/942052593001549825 … 9:04 PM - Dec 16, 2017 9,215 9,215 Replies 290 290 Retweets 578 578 likes Twitter Ads info and privacy When Washington Post reporter Greg Sargeant asked Cornyn on Twitter if he would accept Mueller’s findings as legitimate, Cornyn responded: “Makes sense to see what they are first.” Greg Sargent ✔ @ThePlumLineGS Will you accept the findings of the Mueller probe as legitimate, @JohnCornyn? https://twitter.com/johncornyn/status/942055255516344320 … 9:43 PM - Dec 16, 2017 122 122 Replies 229 229 Retweets 715 715 likes Twitter Ads info and privacy Senator JohnCornyn ✔ @JohnCornyn Makes sense to me to wait to see what they are first https://twitter.com/theplumlinegs/status/942065269270343681 … 1:15 AM - Dec 17, 2017 1,300 1,300 Replies 130 130 Retweets 368 368 likes Twitter Ads info and privacy In a May statement, after Mueller was appointed special counsel, Cornyn said that Mueller “is perhaps the single most qualified individual to lead such an investigation, in my view, and he’s certainly independent.” Trump and Republican legislators have begun to harp on what they charge is Mueller’s bias as the investigation intensifies. During a House Judiciary Committee hearing this week, they indicated that Mueller’s investigation is compromised. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said there’s no reason dismiss Mueller. Trump’s attorneys want a second special counsel to investigate the special counsel. -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
