IMPORTANT READS

EDITOR’S PICK-- An unexpected medical bill or a dip in the stock market would be all it took to send two-thirds of Americans into financial distress, according to a new poll that finds lingering lack of confidence in the U.S. economy. 

Despite reports of falling unemployment, growing wages, and rising consumer confidence, a full 57 percent of respondents to the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey describe the national economy as poor. Only 22 percent of people say the economy has mostly or completely recovered from the Great Recession.

And while 66 percent of Americans describe their current financial situation as "good"—suggesting they are able to pay their regular bills, go out to eat more, and think about buying a new car or house—the picture is decidedly "precarious," as the Associated Press puts it.

"Even though there are signs that the economy has improved in recent years, a lot of people are not feeling that the recovery has reached them,” said Trevor Tompson, director of The AP-NORC Center. "There is evidence of optimism among the more affluent, but two-thirds of Americans would have trouble immediately paying an unanticipated bill of $1,000."

Indeed, according to the AP, "these financial difficulties span all income levels":

Seventy-five percent of people in households making less than $50,000 a year would have difficulty coming up with $1,000 to cover an unexpected bill. But when income rose to between $50,000 and $100,000, the difficulty decreased only modestly to 67 percent.

Even for the country's wealthiest 20 percent — households making more than $100,000 a year — 38 percent say they would have at least some difficulty coming up with $1,000.

"The more we learn about the balance sheets of Americans, it becomes quite alarming," Caroline Ratcliffe, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute focusing on poverty and emergency savings issues, told the AP.

What's more, most employed Americans have not seen a salary increase in recent years; less than a third have confidence they would be able to find equal or better employment if they left their current position; and few workers expect to have enough savings to retire on their own timetable.

"It's just real shaky right now," said Dorothy Mszanski, 60, a former steelworker who had to retire on disability, to the AP. "It's like nobody can figure out what to do."

The People's Budget, released earlier this year by the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), spoke directly to this unease, aiming to fix "an economy that, for too long, has failed to provide the opportunities American families need to get ahead."

"Despite their skills and work ethic," the CPC said in a statement at the time, "most American workers and families are so financially strapped from increasing income inequality that their paychecks barely cover basic necessities."

In its analysis of the proposal, the Economic Policy Institute declared: "The People’s Budget aims to improve the economic well-being of low- and middle-income families by finally closing the persistent jobs gap that has plagued the U.S. economy since the Great Recession began."

(Deirdre Fulton writes for Common Dreams  … where this piece first appeared.)

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SPORTS POLITICS--That’s béisbol. In English or Spanish, that’s baseball, the hallowed institution that serves to remind us of the way we were in those innocent days when George Halas’ Chicago Bears were the Decatur Staleys, named after the local corn-processing magnate in the little Illinois town, population 43,818.

Times have changed in sports and life, but the brawl between the Texas Rangers and the Toronto Blue Jays suggests how slowly change happens in our national pastime. 

Underlying the feud between the teams was a bat flip by Toronto’s Jose Bautista after his three-run homer in the deciding Game 5 of the 2015 American League Division series, a grandiloquent gesture—more so because it was in the postseason on national TV—that was either iconic or will live forever in baseball infamy.

Underlying that is the ongoing and only occasionally acknowledged rift between U.S. and Latino players.

This brawl started between two Latinos only because Rougned Odor, a Venezuelan, was in the path of Bautista, a Dominican, who was hit by a pitch likely ordered up by Texas manager Jeff Bannister, who waited until Bautista’s last at-bat in the teams’ last regular season meeting to get even for last fall’s bat flip. 

The bad feelings with the longstanding Latino-Anglo divide, however, go a lot further back than last fall.

Baseball takes great pride in its history of integration. After decades of being for whites only, the league now presents itself as a social pioneer with an annual Jackie Robinson Day in which everyone dons his No. 42.

Meanwhile, baseball takes little or no cognizance of its current problem.

The problem isn’t that Latinos are being barred. On the contrary, with most Latinos signed outside the draft process, giving the game a steady stream of cheap, dirt-poor, hungry, blue-chip prospects, there are more of them—29 percent of the major league players in 2016.

Acceptance is something else. Latinos are living in a time like African-Americans did in the 1950s and 1960s—after Robinson’s arrival, but before everyone realized there was no other way—and the Red Sox became the last to integrate, with infielder Pumpsie Green in 1959.

What’s in people’s hearts changes at its own pace, and in baseball, it’s a slow one.

Robinson retired in 1956 after the Dodgers, who had been praised as liberal pioneers, traded him to their archrival, the Giants.

Viable as Robinson was commercially—he was hired as a vice president by Chock full o’Nuts—he had no place in baseball until becoming a part-time Montreal Expos broadcaster in 1972.

You can argue whether the divide between U.S. and Latino players is racial or cultural, but there’s no doubt that it’s there.

As chronicled by Matt McCarthy, a pitcher in the Angels system, in his 2009 book, “Odd Man Out,” Latinos dominated on the field and went their own way off it.

“Separate but equal,” was how [teammate] Blake Allen described the team dynamic to me. ... “You’ve got your Dominicans and you’ve got everybody else. You don’t want anything to do with the Dominicans. They’re loud, they have no respect for nobody and for God’s sake, don’t ever go in the shower when they in there.”

The team was in fact divided between the Dominicans (a catchall phrase for Hispanic players) and those of us from the United States. There were a dozen Dominicans on our team from Venezuela, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Panama and, yes, the Dominican Republic. And Blake was right. They were loud and didn’t speak English.

Just 17 or 18 years old, many had been snatched out of poverty within the last year and signed to lucrative six-figure contracts. Wearing large smiles, larger gold chains and designer sunglasses, they seemed to be playing life with Monopoly money. ...

“But I tell ya what [Allen told McCarthy], in every goddamn town we go to this year, the Dominicans will have fat white girls waiting for them.”

Anonymous as McCarthy was—his 2002 season in Provo, Utah, was his only one in organized professional baseball, after which he graduated from Harvard Medical School—his story was too nitty-gritty to go down easily with the powers that be.

The New York Times noted McCarthy’s manifold errors of fact, noting that he quotes “people stating incorrect facts about their own lives and tells detailed (and mostly unflattering) stories about teammates who were in fact not on his team at the time.”

The Times went on to ask the publisher, Viking Press, and Sports Illustrated, which ran an excerpt, about its fact-checking lapses.

Nevertheless, as far as the big picture—the disturbing accounts of prejudice—is concerned, the Times article didn’t deal with McCarthy’s credibility or lack thereof.

Actually, the Anglo-Latino divide McCarthy cited dovetails with other accounts.

In a 2014 piece for Bleacher Report, Dirk Hayhurst, who pitched briefly in the majors and was hired as an in-house correspondent by the Blue Jays, quoted an elderly scout, noting, “This team has too many Latinos on it to win. Get too many of them together on a club and they take over.”

You could have heard that one about Latinos in baseball 50 years before.

In 1960, Look Magazine did a cover story about the Giants, the Blue Jays of their day with all their African-American (Willie Mays, Willie McCovey) and Latino (Juan Marichal, Orlando Cepeda, Felipe Alou, Matty Alou) stars. The handsome Cepeda, known as the Baby Bull, was on the cover, naked from the waist up.

The story, however, was anything but a puff piece. In it, manager Alvin Dark said Cepeda wasn’t the team player that Mays was, claiming Harvey Kuenn and Jim Davenport were more important to the team than Cepeda was.

The deeply religious Dark once stated that God didn’t create everyone equal, insisting that He “gave every race and ethnic group special attributes.”

No manager would dare say such things now. But it’s not necessarily progress, just political correctness.

A 2015 USA Today study showed that 87 percent of the bench-clearing brawls of the previous five seasons started between players of different ethnic backgrounds. Of those, Anglo-Latino square-offs accounted for 66 percent.

Bud Norris, a Padres pitcher—and an Anglo—told USA Today’s Jorge Ortiz that the numbers weren’t coincidental.

“This is America’s game,” Norris said. “This is America’s pastime, and over the last 10-15 years, we’ve seen a very big world influence in this game, which we as a union and as players appreciate. We’re opening this game to everyone that can play. However, if you’re going to come into our country and make our American dollars, you need to respect a game that has been here for over a hundred years, and I think sometimes that can be misconstrued. There are some players that have antics, that have done things over the years that we don’t necessarily agree with.

“I understand you want to say it’s a cultural thing or an upbringing thing. But by the time you get to the big leagues, you better have a pretty good understanding of what this league is and how long it’s been around.”

If this fire has smoldered for decades, Bautista’s bat flip was like hooking up a gasoline pipeline to it.

Hidebound intolerance came out of the shadows in reaction, taking the form of a defense of the game’s cultural norms.

“Bautista is a f—-ing disgrace to the game,” Goose Gossage, the ’80s reliever with the menacing Fu Manchu moustache, told ESPN in March at the Yankees’ camp where he was an instructor.

“He’s embarrassing to all the Latin players, whoever played before him. Throwing his bat and acting like a fool, like all those guys in Toronto. Yoenis Cespedes [of the Mets], same thing.”

Showing how deep feelings ran, Hall of Fame third baseman Mike Schmidt, a traditionalist but one a good deal calmer than Gossage, said it showed “flagrant disrespect for the game.”

Gossage, an equal-opportunity hater, also ripped Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred.

“The game is becoming a freaking joke because of the nerds who are running it,” said Gossage. “I’ll tell you what has happened, these guys played rotisserie baseball at Harvard or wherever the f—- they went, and they thought they figured the f—-ing game out. They don’t know s—-.”

You may notice there’s a lot of anger in baseball, which asserts itself in defense of The Code, an all-but-biblical summary of what a player can’t do without “Disrespecting the Game,” and what happens if he does.

To encapsulate it:

If you’re winning by a lot, you had better not do anything to upset the other team, like stealing a base or even taking too big a swing, let alone getting a big hit in a close game and making the opponent feel even worse by celebrating the wrong way.

The whole thing is a joke. Everyone talks as if Moses came down from Mount Sinai with The Code engraved on stone tablets.

Unfortunately, no two teams can agree on what The Code is from day to day, leading to beaucoup disagreements in the form of brawls, beanballs, near beanballs, takeout slides, et al.

Players don’t talk about a code in the National Football League and the National Hockey League, which are more violent, or the National Basketball Association, where huge players could do major damage to each other if so inclined.

NBA players used to brawl, but do so no longer, barred by then-commissioner David Stern after the 2004 Auburn Hills riot. As much as fans in all sports like a little discreet violence, the NBA has gotten on nicely without it.

If that’s the enlightened approach, baseball differs by 180 degrees.

Bautista’s flip triggered such an outcry, commissioner Manfred was obliged to comment.

Manfred, a graduate of Harvard Law like those other nerds Gossage cited, noted:

“If I were a player I wouldn’t do that. What [Bautista] did did not offend me. It was a very, very exciting moment at a point in time of great excitement for that particular franchise, one that hadn’t been a great team for a long time. You know, it’s one of those moments that happens, and it’s exciting, people liked it, and probably on balance, it’s good for the game.”

Unfortunately for Manfred, there isn’t much he can do, even if he wanted to. The baseball commissioner is the weakest of the four commissioners in the major U.S. leagues. The game has been run at the pleasure of the players’ union since then-commissioner Bud Selig called its bluff and had to cancel the 1994 World Series.

Not that it takes much to touch off a spark among baseball players who tend to be angry and, when crossed, menacing.

Having covered all four major sports, I thought of my time on baseball as sport journalism’s version of Hunter Thompson going out to cover the Hell’s Angels.

Despite their immense size, NFL players are well mannered in comparison, members of a rigidly hierarchical system. NBA players are flashy and a delight, with no problem if rivals show off to their heart’s content. NHL players are as unpretentious as your next-door neighbor.

Happily for baseball, that suggests its problems with Latinos are, indeed, cultural rather than racial. If there were no Latinos in the game, the Anglos would just get mad about something else, as they did when Ty Cobb was honing his spikes long before players of color arrived.

Unhappily for baseball, the rift is deeply cultural, attitudinal and, in the absence of acknowledgment that the game has a problem, not going away.

(Mark Heisler is a former NBA at large reporter for the LA Times and Tribune chain. He blogs at truthdig.com where this article was first posted. Check out TruthDig.com for other writers and thinkers, Robert Scheer, Chris Hedges, Amy Goodman, Bill Boyarsky among them.)
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GUEST WORDS--Because advertising is a barometer that often accurately measures America’s psychological atmosphere, attention must be paid to this: From May 23 through the presidential election, Budweiser beer will bear a different name. Eager to do its bit to make America great again, the brewer will replace the name “Budweiser” with “America” on its 12-ounce bottles and cans. 

The Financial Times says this is “a bid to capitalize on U.S. election fever.” (Before the Chicago Cubs bestrode the world like a colossus, T-shirts proclaimed “Cubs Fever: Catch it — and die.”) A beer bottle metaphysician at the brewer of soon-to-be America says, “We are embarking on what should be the most patriotic summer that this generation has ever seen.” This refers to the once-in-a-generation, light-the-sparklers opportunity to choose between two presidential candidates roundly disliked by American majorities. It is enough to drive one to drink something stronger than beer. 

Budweiser’s name change is part of an advertising campaign featuring the slogan “America is in your hands.” The brewer says this will “remind people … to embrace the optimism upon which the country was first built.” So, between now and Nov. 8, whenever you belly up to a bar, do your patriot duty by ordering a foamy mug of America. Nothing says “It’s morning in an America that is back and standing tall” quite like beer cans festooned with Americana by Anheuser-Busch InBev, a firm based in Leuven, Belgium, and run by a Brazilian. 

The beer brands most familiar to Americans — Budweiser, Miller, Coors — are foreign-owned. Want to win a round of cold Americans this summer? Wager that no one in the saloon can identify the American-owned brewer with the largest market share and say what that share is. The answer is: D.G. Yuengling & Son with just 1.4 percent of the market, slightly more than Boston Beer Co., which makes the Sam Adams brand. 

Years ago, historian Daniel Boorstin said that whereas Europeans went to market to get what they want, Americans go to discover what they want. Nowadays the market comes to customers everywhere via ubiquitous advertising, precious little of which is designed to create desires for new products. 

Beer commercials are not supposed to make viewers thirsty or to prompt them to buy beer rather than Buicks. Rather, the commercials’ primary purpose is to defend and expand a brand’s market share. They do this by giving particular beers distinctive personalities. By doing so, they stroke consumers’ psyches, drawing beer drinkers into what Boorstin called “consumption communities.” Consumers are moved to covet a product less for its intrinsic qualities than its manufactured meaning. Advertising does this by reducing its information content and increasing its emotional appeals. 

Budweiser is the “king of beers” — we know it is because Budweiser says it is — but will not be saying so during this advertising campaign. The slogan will be replaced by “E Pluribus Unum.” This is Latin for “Perhaps a gusher of patriotic kitsch will stanch the leakage of our market share to pestilential craft breweries.” 

America has more than 4,000 craft breweries. Most American adults — 235 million of them — live within 10 miles of a local brewery. And more than 40 percent of Americans 21-to-27 have never tasted Budweiser. They prefer craft beers (a craft brewer ships no more than 6 million barrels a year; Budweiser shipped 16 million in 2013, down from 50 million in 1988), which perhaps explains Budweiser’s current weirdly truculent commercials, such as this: “Proudly a macro beer. It’s not brewed to be fussed over. … It’s brewed for drinking, not dissecting. … Beer brewed the hard way. 

Let them sip their pumpkin peach ale.” And this: “Not small. Not sipped. Not soft. Not a fruit cup. Not imported.” Not cheerful. 

Last year, craft brewers, which are increasing at a rate of almost two a day, won 12.8 percent of the $105.9 billion beer market. And 2015 was the sixth consecutive year, and the 12th time in 15 years, in which beer’s portion of the nation’s alcohol revenue declined as more Americans drink cocktails like the characters on “Mad Men.” 

If, however, these aspiring Don Drapers hoist an America, they will have in their hands bottles and cans adorned with snippets of American Scripture — the Pledge of Allegiance, “The Star Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful.” The psalmist said that joy cometh in the morning. Fat lot the psalmist knew. Joy cometh in the evening when you crack a cold can of America and anticipate the thrills of the looming “patriotic summer.” Go ahead. It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.

(George Will is a national political columnist. His work appears regularly at Freedoms Back  … as did this piece.)

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GUEST WORDS--Donald Trump is a serial liar. Okay, to be a bit less Trumpian about it, he has trouble with the truth. If you look at Politifact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning site that examines candidates’ pronouncements for accuracy, 76 percent of Trump’s statements are rated either “mostly false,” “false,” or “pants on fire,” which is to say off-the-charts false. By comparison, Hillary Clinton’s total is 29 percent.

But if Trump doesn’t cotton much to the truth, he doesn’t seem to cotton much to his own ideas, either. He waffles, flip-flops and obfuscates, sometimes changing positions from one press appearance to the next, as Peter Alexander reported on NBC Nightly News this past Monday — a rare television news critique of Trump.

I say “rare” because most of the time, as Glenn Kessler noted in The Washington Post this week, MSM — the mainstream media —  just sit back and let Trump unleash his whoppers without any pushback, even as they criticize his manners and attitude.

In an ordinary political season, perhaps Trump would be under fire for his habitual untruths, like the one that Ted Cruz’s father might have been involved with Lee Harvey Oswald. This time around, though, neither the media nor the public — least of all his supporters — seem to care. Which leads to the inescapable conclusion that these days, as far as our political discourse goes, truth, logic, reason and consistency don’t seem to count for very much.

The question is why.

One simple explanation is that Trump has changed the rules. He is not a politician but a provocateur, and he isn’t held to the same standards as Clinton or Bernie Sanders or even Cruz, all of whom actually have policies. For Trump, policies are beside the point.

Another explanation is that long before Trump, social scientists observed that truth matters less to people than reinforcement, and that most of us have the ability to reformulate misstatements into truth so long as they conform to our own biases. We believe what we believe, and we are not changing even in the face of opposing facts (without this capacity for self-deception there would be no Fox News).

There is, however, another and even more terrifying explanation as to why the truth doesn’t seem to matter. It has less to do with Trump or our own proclivities to reshape reality than it has to do with infotainment — with the idea that a lot of information isn’t primarily about education or elevation, where truth matters, but entertainment, where it doesn’t. You might call it “the Winchell Effect.”

Walter Winchell, about whom I wrote a 1994 biography, was a hugely popular New York-based gossip columnist for the Hearst newspaper chain and an equally popular radio personality, although saying that is a little like saying that Michael Jordan was a basketball player. Winchell was the gossip columnist, with an estimated daily audience of 50 million. He practically invented the form, and the form was a long chain of snippets — rumor, prediction, innuendo — racing down the page, separated by ellipses.

Some of these snippets were scarcely more than a noun, a verb and an object: Mr. So-and-so is “that way” about Miss So-and-so. Does her husband know? In this way, Winchell became not only the minimalist master of gossip but also, quite possibly, the first tweeter – before Twitter.

If you are wondering how this is relevant to the 2016 campaign, in time Winchell turned his roving eye from entertainment to politics, deploying exactly the same arsenal to the latter as he had to the former. Thus did gossip leap the tracks from Hollywood and Broadway to Washington. In this, Winchell’s approach was a precursor of modern election coverage. He was obsessed with letting readers in on what was going to happen — the clairvoyance of rumor — rather than with what was happening or what it actually meant. That is, he was a horse-race handicapper long before horse-race coverage became the dominant form of political journalism.

One prominent example: At the behest of the White House, Winchell spent months floating trial balloons for Franklin D. Roosevelt and his ambitions for a third term. Basically, it was presidentially endorsed gossip.

But Winchell’s influence didn’t stop at conflating entertainment with politics — and this is where the indifference to truth comes in. Winchell reported dozens of tidbits of gossip each day. Presumably, that’s why people read him or listened to him on the radio; they wanted to be ahead of the curve. But the vast majority of these tidbits were unverifiable, and nearly half of the flashes that were verifiable turned out to be false, according to a survey conducted for a six-part New Yorker profile of Winchell by St. Clair McKelway. Since there was always a passel of new scoops every day, no one seemed to notice — or care — that he was usually wrong.

One can only assume this was because readers seemed to relish the excitement of the “news” more than they desired its accuracy. Or, to put it another way, gossip was entertainment, not information. Thus the Winchell Effect.

The Winchell Effect is alive and well in today’s politics in two respects. First, candidates can get away with saying pretty much anything they want without being held accountable so long as what they say is entertaining and so long as they keep the comments coming. Trump has been the major beneficiary of this disinclination by the MSM to examine statements. The blast of his utterances always supersedes their substance. And the MSM plays along.

To wit: Trump announced his tax plan way back in September 2015. With kudos to the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, which did look at his plan, it is just this week that most of the MSM are getting around to examining it — even as he changes it. (I may have missed it, but I still have yet to see a single story delving into Trump’s tax policies on the network news.)

Perhaps better late than never, but the fact that he could throw out wild schemes involving trillions of dollars without the media feeling the need to vet them means that primary voters had no way to understand his tax plan and see its flaws. Of course, from the MSM’s perspective, analyzing a plan would be tackling policy, not providing entertainment. And make no mistake, the candidate and the mainstream media are in the entertainment business.

And that is the second way in which the Winchell Effect changes our politics. If candidates are not accountable, neither are the political media. Like Winchell, they are not only besotted with strategies, polls, predictions, and — in the case of a few cable networks — wild, unverifiable charges, they are, like Winchell, seldom challenged when they get it all wrong.

They were wrong about Trump not being a serious candidate. They were wrong about Jeb Bush’s and Marco Rubio’s chances to get the nomination. They were wrong about the likelihood of a contested GOP convention. Since they won’t call one another out, no one calls them out. In effect, they are implicated in the Winchell Effect as much as Trump is, which may be one reason why they don’t challenge him. Neither Trump nor the press has to be right. They just have to keep ginning up the excitement.

What this means is that our politics is no longer politics in the traditional sense of policy and governance. It is, as most of us realize, a show, a game, an ongoing reality TV saga. This is nothing new. The media have been bored with policy for a long time and have been pressing the horse-race narrative over real reporting for just as long. And when they do discuss policy, as The Huffington Post’s Jason Linkins observed, in a typically smart piece, they are likely to prefer the windy, absurd generalities of a Trump to the wonky policies of a Clinton. It makes better copy, and it has the added benefit that it doesn’t require any fact-checking.

Trump is the fullest flower of a non-political politics and the fullest product of the Winchell Effect. With their mutual lack of interest in the truth, Trump and the MSM deserve one another — a synergy of the showman and the gossip columnists. But do we deserve them? Only if we allow our politics to become a way of amusing ourselves rather than the way to select a leader.

Meanwhile, Trump and the MSM will keep the misinformation coming, on the sadly correct assumption that many of us don’t really care about facts so long as we are being titillated.

(Neil Gabler is an author of five books and the recipient of two LA Times Book Prizes, Time magazine's non-fiction book of the year, USA Today's biography of the year and other awards. He is also a senior fellow at The Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California, and is currently writing a biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy. This piece was posted first at Bill Moyers blog.) 

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VOICES-Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman recently wrote about Donald Trump, expressing the view of most educated people from the Right, Left, or Middle of the political spectrum. Krugman puts the matter directly: "Donald Trump is an ignoramus.” 

University educator Arthur Camins’ article in Huffpost says that perhaps the Trump candidacy has come about due to the fact that schools fail at teaching Citizenship Development. As an educator of public policy and an educational researcher for many decades, I agree. A great failure of public education is the sparse teaching and learning about citizenship and what it means to live in a nation of laws. 

The operant question seems to be, why are so many Americans willing to support Trump, a man who seems to be a distorted and uninformed clown, a showman and greed merchant who is proud of his ignorance and is so egocentric that he does not even want to learn?   

This group of voters presents a frightening prospect for our society. For example, on Thursday, Mother Jones magazine’s David Corn reported  that Anthony Senecal, who served as Trump’s butler for 17 years before becoming the real estate mogul’s in-house “historian” at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida, has been taking to Facebook to rant about how the current president should be hanged. “Looks like that sleezey bastard zero (O) is trying to out maneuver Congress again, if the truth be known this prick needs to be hung for treason!!!” Senecal declared on his Facebook page on April 21, 2015. 

The work of William Shirer from the early 1960s, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” rings alarms that resonate today as we see fellow citizens rushing into the arms of this potential despot – one who could possibly create a nuclear holocaust with his hand on the red phone. This theme is the core message of Ionesco's remarkable play, “Rhinoceros,” depicting those who rushed to join the Anschluss in Germany and throughout Europe before WW II. Many people today feel safe to express their hate for others of different nationalities, different religions, different skin colors; and Trump offers them permission to divide Americans and incite violence. 

Are all these American voters virulent bigots who are against immigrants, Jews, Muslims, the educated, teachers, and almost everyone else in the main stream in the US? Will they be rushing to turn in their neighbors who may then be hauled away to 21st century gas chambers? Will they be standing by to steal all their land and worldly goods, as happened under the Nazis? 

Are these voters striving to somehow be seen as billionaire wannabes? Or are they poor, uneducated and easily taken in by a snake oil salesman who wants to "Make America Great Again?” 

Do these “know-nothings” follow the lead of “The Turner Diaries,” wanting only to have a White Christian country where people are able to string up from the light poles all people of color and people of other religions, as depicted in this hate-filled book? 

This is the moment to figure out who the “Trump voters” are and why they exist…and then, what we can do as a community to fix the problem. 

Is John Dewey somehow responsible for this frightening turn of events? Is it what has been taught (or not taught) in our public schools over the past 60 years that has created a society that is no longer a marketplace of ideas? Have we devolved into a “march of the marionettes,” willing to follow Trump toward national, and possibly planetary, destruction? 

Or is it more reasonable to look at post-World War II American economics and culture to find an answer? 

The stream of recent history, from the era of Bundles for Britain and Rosie the Riveter to today, is marked with the upsurge of contemporary robber barons who idolize and idealize Wall Street and the Free Market. The confluence of universal education and the union movement after WWII built the strongest middle class that history has ever known. But then came the 180 degree turnabout with the rise of the Reagan Revolution. Eventually, this led to 2008: worldwide bank scams and the bundling of credit default swaps and collateral debt obligations, all of which destroyed the economy and broke the middle class.

The downfall of the middle class can be traced from the banks that are “too big to fail” (the ones that are now able to take endless risks on the public dole, like using public cash in the form of FDIC guarantees to banksters who reap the rewards) to the redistribution of wealth to the 1%, to the rise of the entertainment industry that includes Faux (Fox) News, a pop music industry that urges you to “do your own thing” (i.e. cop killing or rape) and the endless murder that is shown in films, cartoons, and television.  

How mind bending and inculcating is it to have tiny children watching iPads and TV screens, seeing and hearing the devolution of an orderly respectful society of laws? In its place, we have “heroes” that are tattooed and pierced gangster-types who beat and kill others for unleashed super powers?  

And now in the 21st Century, the billionaire class led by Eli Broad, the Waltons, Rupert Murdoch, Pete Peterson, Michael Milken, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, and their ilk, is fighting to do away with public education. They want to privatize all public schools for profit, undermining universal free education and critical thinking. They want to create unquestioning cogs to fit their corporate needs, while attempting to kill off the entire union movement. Keep 'em poor and dumb and manageable. That seems to be the goal. 

Oligarchic profiteering, paired with keeping the populace ignorant through a managed media, is leading America into arms of Donald Trump and David Duke -- and straight to fascism. The rush to make big bucks by devaluing our society of laws and universal free education, the glorifying of infotainment news (owned mainly by Murdoch) that skims facts with a quick rush to judgement about how the world works, has led too many to demand, buy, keep, and use their guns, including automatic mass killing weapons. These people want easy answers to complex situations, want only what pleases them, and exhibit a selfishness that shows up as freeway rage, gang wars, racist clashes, mass murder, and finally … voting for a Know Nothing like Donald Trump. 

Is America finished as a democratic republic? Are we now to become a nation of roaming mobs intent on killing, beating and stealing from others who do not agree with us?  

I see little connection to public school education, but rather a strong correlation to the overarching greed of the billionaire class which insulates itself from harm as it instigates internecine warfare in America.

(Ellen Lubic, Director of Joining Forces for Education is a Public Policy educator/writer. Views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the views of CityWatch or its ownership.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams. 

-cw

FRIEDMAN, MCGOVERN MAKING A COMEBACK--Imagine a world where you get a check each month that allows you to cover your basic costs — but don’t have to work to earn it. 

It’s called the Universal Basic Income and free-market economist Milton Friedman loved a version of the idea, as did liberal presidential candidate George McGovern. 

Some of the globe’s top economic thinkers gathered last week in Zurich to discuss the future of UBI, as it is known, prompted by the prospect of mass job displacement as technology makes more workers obsolete. The conference was timely: Next month Swiss voters will decide in a referendum whether to approve the first national basic income. If it passes, every adult will receive about $2,500 a month, while all kids will get $625. 

UBI will also be tested soon in parts of Finland and the Netherlands. Meanwhile, in the U.S., tech investors like Sam Altman are working on American corollaries. 

Capital & Main spoke to Rick Wartzman, senior advisor to the Drucker Institute and former business editor of the Los Angeles Times, about UBI. Wartzman, who addressed the Zurich conference, is the author of a forthcoming book on the changing nature of employer-employee relationships. He is also a board member of Capital & Main. 

What is driving the conversation now on Universal Basic Income? 

The real reason is because of great concern that the exponential advance of technology is poised to wipe out so many jobs so rapidly. There is a lot of fear that this could happen in the not too distant future—in our kids’ lifetimes. There’s a fear that technology could for the first time in history destroy more jobs than it will create. The impact will be felt because of everything from driverless cars to artificial intelligence that will erode white-collar professions. 

Is it true that UBI is being embraced by both the left and right? 

There is a long history of UBI being embraced by the left and the right. At the conference in Zurich, you had everyone from the Roosevelt Institute and Bob Reich endorsing UBI, to people from the Cato Institute who were also speaking in its favor. 

For the left, this is another mechanism to advance social justice and better take care of people who, especially in an era of massive jobs loss, might really suffer. What’s appealing to those on the right is this is an efficient and nonintrusive way for government to take care of those most in need. As they see it—and here’s where the left and right don’t necessarily agree—the UBI would replace most, if not all other, social welfare programs.

How do you pay for UBI? 

There is no shortage of potential financing mechanisms. At the conference, I heard about the possibility of a broad-based consumption tax, a financial-transactions tax and more. The bigger thing, perhaps, is that UBI would require a mind shift of handing everyone a check and they decide what to do with it. They can work or not work—or at least work less in a regular job than they do now. The feeling is most people will still do something productive, whether it’s making art or music or volunteering, because they get a sense of purpose from contributing to the world. This may expand our concept of what work is. 

Is it means tested? 

Not, it’s universal and unconditional — everybody would get it. Even Donald Trump would get it.

How does labor view UBI — is it seen as a threat to organizing efforts?

I have heard that there are a number of labor leaders who don’t like it because it kind of undercuts their raison d’etre. I don’t know if that’s universally true, and the great exception for sure is Andy Stern — he has a book coming out on the case for Universal Basic Income. 

What would have to change in American political culture for UBI to have a chance? 

The best hope for it is to start locally, maybe in some cities, and to start with pilots. Pilots are smart — you learn things, and if it really is a good policy that may begin to build some momentum.  

He talked about who holds power and inequality being a problem. He asserts—and I agree—that we are living in a world of abundance. The problem is it’s not being distributed fairly. If you look now at the platform economy — Uber, Airbnb — the platform owners are extracting huge amounts of wealth, and the networks that create the wealth — the people driving their cars or renting out their homes — are getting scraps. It’s really disproportionate. There is a feeling that UBI is a way to help even out the pie. 

Reich also talked about how important it is, if we’re going to sustain the health of our economy, to create enough aggregate demand. Currently, there is not enough dough in consumers’ pockets to keep the machine humming. When wealth is concentrated, it’s a problem for expanding GDP and creating jobs. The aggregate demand problem is very real. 

What is your interest in UBI? 

My main interest is in how this ties into people’s sense of how work is changing. Will tech destroy more jobs than it creates? How will people make their living in the future? How will we define work and the workplace? 

(Danny Feingold is the publisher of Capital & Main, and previously led the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy's communications efforts for more than a decade. Prior to that, Danny worked as a journalist for the LA Times. This piece was posted first at Capital and Main.) 

-cw

PERSPECTIVE-Politicians have a knack for making some of the dumbest statements. Hillary Clinton not only made one, but chose the worst place to utter it. 

Saying, “...we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business…” in a state that mines 10% of the nation’s output of the fossil fuel seems comparable to some of Donald Trump’s many foot-in-mouthisms. 

The statement was taken out of context – Clinton did indicate her administration would help prepare coal miners for different careers – but specific solutions were neither offered nor alluded to beyond unspecified retraining. 

Retraining: a promise we’ve heard before from many candidates at all levels. But if you are going to suggest it as a solution to a group facing the growing prospects of unemployment, then specifics are in order, not to mention facing up to reality. 

Coal miners do have generic traits any employer would welcome: fierce work ethic, commitment to productivity, unselfishness….but the transition from a lifetime in the mine shafts to other industries where technological skills are becoming increasingly common will represent an insurmountable challenge for many. 

Determining what industries or skills would provide the best prospects for miners is almost a crap shoot – even retail. How many WalMarts can West Virginia support? In any event, competition for any job will be fierce. Some employment opportunities could also involve relocation, a prospect which may not be practical for many. 

A more sensible approach is to let the coal industry die a natural death over a long period of time. It is already in a steady state of decline in Appalachia: five major coal companies have filed for bankruptcy within the last twelve months. Mining jobs have also vanished, especially in West Virginia. It hasn’t helped the state that easier-to-mine coal can be found in Montana and Wyoming, and cheaper natural gas is abundant. 

There is no need to rush it along for the sake of climate change, especially when coal is and will continue to be heavily burned in China and India. We will also always need some coal production, as it is important to have diverse and secure energy sources. 

In the long-run, though, coal usage will diminish as cleaner sources become more economical. That’s a good thing. 

Let as many as possible of the current generations of miners work to retirement. Encourage the rising generations in the coal mining regions of Appalachia to aspire to other careers by emphasizing the benefits of science, business, engineering, agriculture and technology careers in schools. More importantly, apply the resources necessary to make that happen. 

According to CNA (it is not an acronym,) a company specializing in economic, social and defense research, referring to Appalachia,  “the national focus on college and career readiness for all students presents a particular challenge in a region where, in the past, college was neither needed nor desired and careers outside the coal industry are limited.” 

CNA’s study also suggested a strong desire for students to remain close to home and choose occupations where a college education is not required. 

That particular aspect of the region’s culture has to change. The support of the adult population is critical in order for that to occur. 

Pulling the rug out from under those whose livelihoods depend on the coal industry is not how you win their hearts and minds. 

The bad feelings will not be limited to West Virginia either. The swing state of Ohio is in play, where 33,000 are employed in the industry and coal provides 69% of the state’s electricity. Those employees have friends and relatives, so the potential for a meaningful block turning out in a tight race is there. 

I have no horse in this presidential race, but I understand the volatile mix present in this nation which could make the outcome go either way.

(Paul Hatfield is a CPA and serves as President of the Valley Village Homeowners Association. He blogs at Village to Village and contributes to CityWatch. The views presented are those of Mr. Hatfield and his alone and do not represent the opinions of Valley Village Homeowners Association or CityWatch. He can be reached at: [email protected].) Photo: LA Daily News. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

THE FROG PARABLE INFORMS POLITICS--There's an old adage that says, "If you put a frog in boiling water it will jump out. But if you put the frog in water and slowly raise the temperature around it, it will boil to death." 

Given that we do not have the luxury of a parliamentary democracy, which most often requires a coalition between different political parties in order to govern, and given that we do not have a "none of the above" option on our ballots, it seems likely that we will be left with a choice between the lesser of two evils. 

If we decide to vote for Hillary Clinton, can we truly say that she is the lesser of two evils? Or will she just be the latest installment of an exclusively corporate-financed agenda adopted by a homogeneous Democrat and/or Republican controlled government? Ever since one-term President Jimmy Carter was forced out of office 1981, this government has not deviated in the slightest when it comes to big corporate-backed issues. Endless oil-wars-for-profit in the Middle East and a complete laissez-faire approach to dealing with the mega-banks and Wall Street have seen the richest get richer more than any other time in history. At the same time, we’ve seen the needs of the lower, blue collar and middle classes systematically ignored by government. 

Can one really expect the present Democratic Party will institute any different policies under Hillary Clinton than would the Republican Party? After all, the administration of Barak Obama has bombed seven more countries than Bush did; he spied on our allies and went after Edward Snowden and other whistle blowers for exposing grossly illegal government behavior in violation of the Constitution. And of course, Hillary Clinton was intimately involved with all of this as Secretary of State from 2009-2013. 

Now we are supposed to believe that Hillary Clinton, who has amassed an obscene campaign war chest from Wall Street and the big banks, will somehow be able to objectively deal with the multinational corporations who only pledge allegiance to the country giving them the best deal.

The expectation of such neutrality from a Hillary Clinton presidency ignores human nature. If the Democrats and Republicans up until now have not enforced laws dealing with such clear conflicts of interest, why would you believe that Hillary would enforce them now? 

Let's face it, the corporations own her. Just take a look at her political history starting in college with her support for conservative Barry Goldwater. She has never held a belief that she was not willing to compromise or outright change for a price or perceived political advantage. 

Is there any reason to think that a third Clinton administration (the first two got rid of protections like Glass-Stleagal) will be anything other than the continued completely unconscionable laissez-faire approach to Wall Street and mega-banks that are "too big to fail," – institutions that will continue to foster overt corruption with no legal consequences, irrespective of who is in power? And when a candidate like Bernie Sanders dares to question this corporate agenda, Hillary Clinton has attacked him for being an "unrealistic political idealist." She has shown a complete unwillingness to question the entrenched corporate for-profit agenda. 

If people can momentarily conquer their more than justifiable revulsion at the offensive superficiality of Donald Trump, is it fair to ask what a Trump presidency might be like? For starters, some surprising insight comes from the candidacy of Bernie Sanders and his unprecedented independently financed and truly revolutionary campaign. He has mounted it against our present corporate-homogenized government – even though the Sanders candidacy has been relegated to the "not serious" category by corporate media from its inception. Was it coincidental that the corporate media took the same approach to Trump...and is still using that against him? 

Might the palpable fear generated by the idea of a Trump presidency finally inspire a motivated and energized democratic electorate across the political spectrum – one that will no longer be apathetic in the face of the extremes that Trump makes possible? 

People who support Sanders -- and to some extent those Trump supporters of good faith who are not wall-building racists -- do so because they can no longer rationalize doing nothing. The majority of those on the Right and the Left reject corporate-controlled government policies, especially since, taken to their logical and predictable conclusion, they threaten the future existence of our democracy. 

I recognize the risk of putting a Donald Trump in power, considering what transpired after the initial democratic election of Adolph Hitler in Germany in 1933. I also see what a greater and more certain catastrophe it would be if our country continues down a road that includes the corporate usurpation of our democratic processes, rationalized by people like Hillary Clinton. Witness how she attacks the new “New Deal ideas” of Bernie Sanders as being "no longer realistic." 

Feel free to send me to hell for my heresy, but I would encourage you to think about why you are so sure that the tepid business-as-usual approach of Hillary Clinton -- given the critical nature of issues like global warming -- would be any less threatening than a Donald Trump presidency. It might just engender opposition that could reinvigorate our comatose democracy. 

Could that opposition to the limited powers of a President Donald Trump force us into a new era of democratic compromise between the Left and the Right? Could this finally challenge the exclusive short-term profit motive of corporations – entities that, if allowed to continue unchecked, will push this country over the edge?

(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He was a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected]) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

POLITICS-It took the Roman Republic five centuries to devolve into a centralized despotism. It may take ours roughly 240 years to get to the same place, but with decidedly less upside.

Concern over a crossing of a constitutional Rubicon – the northern Italian river whose passage by Julius Caesar and his legion in 49 B.C. occasioned the death of the Republic – has centered on Donald Trump. The Donald might not have conquered Gaul, or written a brilliant account of his exploits, but his Caesarist attributes – overweening self-regard, contempt for existing institutions and a touch of glamour – are all too obvious.

No surprise, then, that some on the left, perhaps rehearsing their roles as cheerleaders for Hillary Clinton, see Trump as a “tyrant” – a Caesar in training. Others see a reincarnation of Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and link Trump’s success to that of the rising European populist parties, which progressives often label, sometimes accurately, as protofascist.

Many on the intellectual right also see in The Donald an imperial pretender. New York Times Republican stalwart Ross Douthat has called the likely GOP presidential standard bearer “a protofascist grotesque with zero political experience and poor impulse control.”

Two faces of incipent fascism

Trump may seek, as House Speaker Paul Ryan suspects, an imperial presidency. His proposed mass deportations of undocumented immigrants or proposed ban on nonresident Muslims entering the country would certainly require a robust and oppressive central state. As Rich Lowry of National Review notes, “Donald Trump exists in a plane where there isn’t a Congress or a Constitution. There are no tradeoffs or limits. There is only his will and his team of experts.”

But there’s also a progressive side to incipient fascism in America. After all it’s the militants of the Left who try to shut down Trump rallies, not the other way around. Free speech? It’s now common place for social-justice warriors to shout down conservative speakers. And their influence seems leading to new forms of control over the Internet, as recently seen at Twitter and Facebook.

Even the establishment Left appears increasingly Caesarist, brooking no real restraint on executive power, if they hold the reins. Hillary Clinton has already made clear she won’t follow her husband’s path of compromise with the Republican Congress; if they refuse to go along, she will go around them – just like President Obama has. Her “results”-oriented authoritarianism, notes left-leaning journalist Matt Yglesias, seems increasingly alluring to progressives.

Here in California, our septuagenarian state duce, Jerry Brown, enthusiastically embraces “the coercive power of the state” in order to enforce his dictates on climate change. And, for his part, Barack Obama has extended rule by decree to unprecedented lengths. During its first six years, the Obama administration promulgated more than twice as many major rules as during the first six years of the predecessor George W. Bush administration.

Progressive variations of fascism may be more accepted by the media than the Trump version, but both represent a remarkably similar impulse.

Roman Replay?

Restraints on central power are critical to the great republics, but these are clearly loosening in America. Our founders were highly conscious of the Roman Republic’s structure and sought to emulate it. They saw the need, as did the Romans, for a balance of interests, with limited tenure for consuls, and ways for the common citizenry to express their preferences through elected tribunes. The whole system, notes historian Adrian Goldsworthy, was built around “the desire to prevent any one individual from gaining to too much permanent power.”

Roman Republican ideals helped shape our constitutional system – with its emphasis on checks and balances – but Rome’s eventual demise also presents a cautionary tale. As the Roman Republic extended its reach, including more races and peoples under its domain, old structures began to fray. The Senate became a pit of corruption, and there was the rise of various charismatic leaders – Sulla, Marius, the Gracchi – who uprooted the old system and gradually denuded it of meaning. When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon en route to seizing power, he assumed complete control of the state, dismantling the old system.

Caesar was an effective reformer, notes historian Mary Beard, modernizing everything from transportation to time-keeping. He created new colonies to resettle the capital’s poor and extended Roman citizenship to those living far north of the city. His essential argument was that great things could only be accomplished by dismissing the old republican system with its checks and balances.

So the Republic gave way to the Empire, which, tragically, did not always have leaders of the quality of Caesar or his adopted son Octavian, later know as Augustus. Trump, sadly, has a personality more reminiscent of Nero or Caligula.

The public: Both problem, potential solution

Trump’s appeal, like Caesar’s, has its roots in changing social mores and economic changes. In Caesar’s Rome, displaced farmers and ex-soldiers felt little sympathy for the patrician elites of their day. Similarly, America’s middle and working classes, particularly among the white majority, hate the economic and political leadership that have flourished while they have suffered through more than a decade of falling real earnings and depressed middle-class opportunities. They also see a popular culture that largely disregards, and even demeans, the traditional values of family, small enterprise or patriotism. Further, they face an oligarchy – mostly lining up behind Hillary Clinton – that dominates both the economy, media and the political system.

These voters, as the New York Times’ Nate Cohen has observed, are not primarily the uneducated, racist bumpkins often portrayed in the media. Voters embraced Trump not just as an expression of “hate,” as progressives claim, but because he, like Bernie Sanders on the left, has intuited their concerns. Like Mussolini, who wished to revive the glory of Caesar’s Rome, however, Trump’s xenophobic notion of “making America great again” is classically fascist.

Rather than a choice, we face a contest between two different kinds of imperial pretenders. After all, liberals, not conservatives, advocate witch hunts against those with dissenting views on such issues as climate change, and even seek to exclude the politically incorrect from donating to museums, seeking to make sure our cultural institutions also follow the party line.

So are we threatened – as in pre-Imperial Rome, post-World War I Italy and Weimar Germany – with witnessing ever more intense battles, possibly in the streets, as two authoritarian movements seek to control the national agenda by seizing power in Washington.

The only hope for changing this course relies on what used to be thought of as the common sense of the American people. If both Trump and Clinton have little regard for constitutional niceties, the people of this country – Republican, Democrat, independent – still generally favor solutions developed at the local level and suspect the power of the federal government.

Roughly half of Americans, according to a 2015 Gallup poll, now consider the federal government “an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.” In 2003, only 30 percent of Americans felt that way. Survey research finds confidence in large governmental institutions – beyond the military and police – now sits at record lows.

Even millennials, although largely liberal in their orientation, particularly on issues such as immigration and gay marriage, appear to favor community-based, local solutions as opposed to “top down” approaches to key problems. A recent National Journal poll found that millennials, are far less trusting of major institutions than their Generation X predecessors.

“Millennials are on a completely different page than most politicians in Washington, D.C.,” notes pollster John Della Volpe says. “This is a more cynical generation when it comes to political institutions.”

These sentiments are likely to be submerged as Americans get to choose between two utterly unlikable authoritarians. Yet, if the Republic survives either of these likely miserable regimes, there is hope that, at some point, Americans will turn back from the idea of an imperial presidency and again see the wisdom in the dispersal – not the concentration – of both political and economic power.

(Joel Kotkin is a R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism in Houston. His newest book is “The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us.” This was first posted at newgeography.com.

-cw

VOICES FROM THE SQUARE-When choosing among presidential candidates, Americans find plenty to debate about their fitness for office, experience, and economic and foreign policies. But the framers of the Constitution made no mention of such qualifications; they were primarily concerned that the president be truly American. And one of the ways that a president counted as truly American was to be, in the Constitution’s phrase, a “natural-born citizen.”

In the modern era, this phrase has been particularly contentious. There was the clamor over whether Canadian-born presidential candidate Rafael Edward “Ted” Cruz met that requirement; there were accusations that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. We can go back at least to 1968, when candidate George Romney had to explain his birth in Mexico.

The concerns appear to arise from a kinetic modern world that impels millions of people to cross political borders seeking refuge or opportunity, and then cross social borders, falling in love and having children. But the fluid nature of nationality and citizenship isn’t just a modern condition—it’s a defining feature of American identity that dates all the way back to the beginnings of the republic.

The idea of nationality and citizenship being fixed at birth derived from the feudal concept of fealty owed by vassals to their lords, according to William Blackstone, the preeminent authority on English law at the time of the American Revolution. “Natural-born citizens” were those “who are born within the dominions of the crown of England,” including its colonies. Then there were “aliens”—“such as are born out of it.” Birthplace mattered, Blackstone explained, because “immediately upon their birth” natural-born subjects “are under the king’s protection; at a time too, when (during their infancy) they are incapable of protecting themselves. Natural allegiance is therefore a debt of gratitude which cannot be forfeited, canceled, or altered,” at least not by the mere will of the individual.

Though Blackstone’s concept awarded citizenship to children of aliens born within the British Empire, it also posed obstinate impediments to immigrants wanting to enjoy the rights of freeborn Englishmen, not least the right to own land. The same principle of natural allegiance determined that an alien’s loyalty remained fastened to a foreign sovereign. Immigrants might become “naturalized” citizens only if they renounced old allegiances, swore new oaths of allegiance, and demonstrated over some designated number of years their loyalty to the adopted nation.

In the American environment, these rigid notions of national identity eroded amid the turbulent streams of migration pouring into the colonies. Outside New England, which remained an Anglo-American bastion restrictive to immigration, most American colonies competed with one another to draw immigrants. Some extended property rights to resident aliens, while others legislated their own naturalization laws, which were often more inclusive than English law. They tossed out religious barriers against Catholics, Jews, and Protestant dissenters and exempted Quakers and others from having to violate their faith by taking an oath of allegiance. South Carolina, among the most liberal, granted white Protestant immigrants who came into the colony all the rights and privileges “as if they had been born of English parents within the Province.” It even welcomed refugee debtors by prohibiting the collection of debts owed by aliens prior to migration.

By 1775, historians estimate that less than half the inhabitants of the 13 colonies were of English descent. British officials, wary of dissident aliens and fugitive debtors filling their American dominions, tried to inhibit immigration by restricting westward settlement and resisting permissive naturalization laws in the colonies. Among the grievances in the Declaration of Independence, one denounced the king for “obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners.”

But once they had a nation of their own, Americans worried about the dangers of aliens insinuating themselves into the highest reaches of power in the fragile young republic. In The Federalist Papers No. 68, Alexander Hamilton warned of foreign intrigue among those “deadly adversaries of republican government” who harbor desires “to gain an improper ascendant in our councils” and might raise “a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union.” Hamilton held this belief even though he was himself an immigrant to New York born in the British West Indies (as those who have seen the current eponymous Broadway musical know). Even though it’s hard to find evidence of actual plots, Hamilton and his fellow Federalists were especially worried that America’s frail, young confederation would fall prey to foreign intrigue emanating from jealous European empires (Britain, Spain, and France) not ready to relinquish their ambitions in North America.

The idea that the president of the United States must be a natural-born citizen originated apparently with John Jay, a friend and collaborator with Hamilton on The Federalist Papers. As president of the Continental Congress and as a diplomat during and after the Revolution , Jay developed a healthy distrust of sinister European powers abroad. Jay wrote to George Washington in Philadelphia during the Constitutional Convention: “Permit me to hint, whether it would not be wise and seasonable to provide a strong check to the admission of Foreigners into the administration of our national Government, and to declare expressly that the Command in chief of the American army shall not be given to, nor devolve on, any but a natural born Citizen.”

Washington thanked him for his “hint,” but the convention adopted language that was far more elastic. Article II, Section 1, specifies:

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

This language not only allowed immigrants such as Jay’s friend Hamilton to run for president, it also made George Washington eligible. Washington and Hamilton had been born British subjects; both became citizens of the United States on July 4, 1776, the day the nation was born.

How did that alchemical transformation happen on that specific day? As David Ramsay, a South Carolina historian, explained in the 1789 pamphlet, A Dissertation on the Manner of Acquiring the Character and Privileges of a Citizen of the United States, once King George cast Americans outside his protection and Parliament—in effect, declaring war on the colonies—the bond of natural allegiance between subject and sovereign was broken. The Declaration of Independence announced that the people of the United States, absolved of all allegiances to the British crown, were now citizens of new “Free and Independent states.” By this revolutionary stroke, nearly 3 million people “who had been subjects, became citizens,” though Ramsay took pains to clarify that “Negroes are inhabitants, not citizens,” that is, not among the “mass of free people, who collectively possess sovereignty.”

Ramsey was adamant that people could not claim American citizenship as a birthright unless they were born after the Declaration of Independence called the nation into existence. But he outlined additional paths to becoming an American that included residency within the United States. In a republic based on consent of the governed, he explained, simply living under the new government as a consenting adult demonstrated loyalty. This explains why the framers wanted American presidents not only to be natural-born citizens (or, for the time being, citizens at the time of adoption) but also to have lived 14 years as adults under the new government.

Ten of the first 12 presidents were born British subjects; for them and all future presidents the requirements of residency and citizenship would mitigate suspicion of lingering effects of “natural allegiance” to foreign sovereigns. The framers built into the Constitution an ingenious process of Americanization with proofs of birth, residency, and loyalty that expressed a new concept of citizenship in which individual consent and choice, as much as the “natural allegiance” derived from the accident of birth, determined one’s nationality.

Even if the framers were acting on genuine fears of foreign enemies, we should recognize they were also making room, even in the highest office of the land, for talented immigrants who threw themselves in with the revolutionary republic.Where and when people were born didn’t necessarily determine their national allegiance. Those “distinguished revolutionary patriots,” Constitutional scholar Joseph Story put it, “had entitled themselves to high honours in their adopted country.”

The framers did not allow their fears to close the door on the talent and ambition of immigrants who chose to shed old, and adopt new, allegiances—that is, they allowed newcomers to become American.

(Don H. Doyle is McCausland professor of history at the University of South Carolina and author of The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (2015). This piece was posted first at Zocalo Public Square.) 

OPEN AND ACCOUNTABLE-The California Legislative Transparency Act has moved a step closer to qualifying for the November ballot. More than 585,000 signatures (of the 930,000 gathered) have been submitted to the Secretary of State’s office by the Hold Politicians Accountable Committee. 

The measure would amend California’s Constitution to require all bills to be publicly posted online in their final form at least 72 hours before a vote on the Assembly or Senate floor, require all open legislative meetings to be video recorded and posted online within 24 hours, and guarantee the right of every individual to record and share videos of open legislative meetings. 

The Secretary of State will begin to notify all counties to begin the random sample of signatures to qualify the initiative for November. The Committee expects to file over 930,000 signatures which is well above the 643,000 required to qualify a constitutional amendment ballot measure on a random sample. 

The Act is supported by a growing bipartisan coalition including California Common Cause, California Forward, the California Chamber of Commerce, Californians Aware, the First Amendment Coalition, the Howard Jarvis Tax Association, the National Federation of Independent Business, and the California Black Chamber of Commerce, among others. 

“We’re grateful for the support our initiative is receiving from the hundreds of thousands of voters who have signed our petitions so far,” said former California State Senator Sam Blakeslee. “Voters are making it clear that they are fed up with special interest legislation being passed in the middle of the night, without time for input or careful consideration of how new laws impact them. We look forward to seeing these common sense reforms become a reality when all Californians have the opportunity to vote for this measure at the polls this November.” 

CA Fwd has been a strong advocate for citizens redistricting, the top-two primary and term limit reform, and believes these reforms have reduced partisan gridlock and encouraged bipartisan compromises. In 2014, CA Fwd released its Path Toward Trust, which included the 72-hour in print provision. 

“As longtime advocates of creating more transparency and accountability in our state government, California Forward is pleased that voters will have the opportunity to approve this measure at the polls in November,” said California Forward President and CEO Jim Mayer. “The California Legislature Transparency Act will significantly improve governance in California and go a long way toward reducing the influence of a few special interest groups over legislation that impacts all Californians.” 

To learn more about the California Legislature Transparency Act, visit: www.holdpoliticiansaccountable.org. 

(Ed Coghlan is a contributing editor and special correspondent for California Forward and the California Economic Summit, dealing with all matters related to California's sputtering economy and how we as a state can get it back on track. He is a veteran of television news at all levels and serves as a media consultant in his spare time.) Photo: Jon Connell/Flickr. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

NEW GEOGRAPHY-In an election year in which the top likely candidates come from New York, big cities arguably dominate American politics more than at any time since New Deal. The dynamics of urban politics, which are characterized by high levels of inequality and racial tensions may be pushing Democrats ever further to the left and Republicans toward the inchoate resentment of Donald Trump.  

Yet, if politics are now being dominated by big cities along the coasts, the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data suggests that when it comes to their own lives, Americans are moving increasingly elsewhere, largely to generally Republican-leaning suburbs and Sunbelt states. In other words, politics and power are headed one way, demographics the other. 

Perhaps no American president has been less sympathetic to the suburbs than Barack Obama. Shaun Donovan, Obama’s first secretary of Housing and Urban Development, proclaimed the suburbs’ were “over” as people were “voting with their feet” and moving to dense, transit-oriented urban centers. More recently, Donovan’s successor, Julian Castro, has targeted suburbs by proposing to force them to densify and take more poor people into their communities. Other Democrats, notably California’s Jerry Brown, have sought to use concerns over climate change to make future suburban development all but impossible. 

This divergence between politics and how people choose to live has never been greater. As economist Jed Kolko has observed, the perceived “historic” shift back to the inner city has turned out to be a relatively brief phenomena. Since 2012, suburbs and exurbs, which have seven times as many people, again are growing faster than core cities. 

This is not likely to be a short-lived phenomena. Generally speaking, Kolko notes that an aging population tends to make the country more suburban. The overwhelming trend among seniors is not to move “back to the city” but to stay in or move out to suburban or exurban areas. Between 2000 and 2012, notes demographer Wendell Cox, 99.6 percent of the senior population increase in major metropolitan areas was in the suburbs, a gain of 4.3 million compared to the gain of 17,000 in the urban core. 

There is also the well-demonstrated tendency for people entering their 30s, prime child-bearing age, to move to suburban locations for safety, space and better schools. Here’s the basic score: Core counties last year lost a net 185,000 domestic migrants, while the suburban counties gained 187,000. Rather than a reversal of suburbanizing trends, we see something of an acceleration. 

Primarily Republican-leaning areas may be losing their political power for now, but their demographic growth is relentless. Like the suburbs, the sprawling Sunbelt metros were widely predicted by urban pundits to be heading toward an inevitable extinction.     

Yet the 2015 census data shows something quite different: Virtually every fast-growing metro region in the country is located far from the Eastern Seaboard, and increasingly outside of California.

Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta and Phoenix each gained more people last year than either New York or Los Angeles, which are three to four times larger. 

Among America’s 53 largest metropolitan areas, nine of the 10 fastest-growing ones are in the Sunbelt: Austin, Orlando, Raleigh, Houston, Las Vegas, San Antonio, Dallas-Fort Worth, Nashville and Tampa-St. Petersburg. The only outlier is Denver, which has become a destination for people and companies fleeing higher priced areas, particularly the West Coast. 

Perhaps even more revealing are the trends in domestic migration. The leaders in total domestic net migration parallel almost precisely those that have experienced the strongest total population growth, led by Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth and Phoenix; together these metro areas added 150,000 net domestic residents. In percentage terms the big winners are Austin, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Raleigh, and Orlando. 

So which states are losing out among domestic migrants? The biggest loser is the home of our likely next president. New York experienced a net out-migration of 160,000 between 2014 and 2015. Over the past five years its metropolitan area has lost 701,000 net domestic migrants after suffering a population loss of nearly 2 million in the first decade of the new millennium. Chicago and Los Angeles also have experienced net out-migration as have some cities -- such as San Jose and Washington, D.C. -- even as they experienced impressive economic booms. 

These latest numbers confirm the likelihood that highly suburbanized areas, particularly in the Sunbelt, will continue to represent our demographic future. For all the hype and hysteria surrounding the urban revival, dense cities are not irresistible lures to most people. For the most part, they are experiencing sub-normal, and even declining, growth. The most urban of our urban cores, New York City, illustrates this slackening of population. For one year, the Big Apple grew at 1.2 percent (2011), above the national average of 0.7 percent. Yet, its growth dropped in 2015 to 0.6 percent, well below the national average. Brooklyn’s population growth declined in half from 2011 to 2015, while Manhattan’s declined by two-thirds. The only borough to show strong growth has been its poorest, the Bronx. 

None of this suggests that dense core cities are irrelevant to the future. As economist Kolko suggests, inner city gentrification, particularly close to the urban core, has accompanied strong income growth and remains attractive to relatively small parts of the population: the highly educated, the affluent childless, single as well as the uber-rich. These places loom large also because that’s where the media is increasingly concentrated. And with a big city, East Coast-oriented person in the Oval Office next year, they could find themselves more influential, at least in the short run, than at any time in recent history. 

This divergence between power and population sets the stage for future political conflicts, particularly given likely Democratic Party electoral gains this year. Attempts to crack down on suburban housing and resource industries, notably fossil fuels, seems likely to hit hardest many places that are growing quickly, and which generally lean to the GOP. 

It could well be, as some progressives have forecast for over a decade, that the movement of New Yorkers and Californians, combined with the growth of minorities, in places like Texas and Arizona will paint these places Democratic blue. This seems reasonable, but what happens when Washington adopts policies that clearly hurt the new suburban homeowners, and the industries that have sparked Sunbelt growth? 

The new Texans and Arizonans may well be more socially liberal than the current denizens, but one has to wonder if they would like to see the prospect of better professional opportunities and affordable homes squelched by Washington’s urban-centric elite. 

This could turn out to be a bad election for those middle American aspirations, but over time progressive triumphalism could engender a grassroots rebellion capable of overturning the 2016 election results in shockingly fast fashion.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, “The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us,” will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of “The New Class Conflict,” “The City: A Global History,” and “The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050.” He lives in Orange County, CA. This piece first appeared by Real Clear Politics.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

PERSPECTIVE--Three out of every four Californians have an unfavorable view of Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee for president. In a poll taken before his opponents dropped out, four of 10 California Republicans would be “upset” if he won the nomination.

California has been making national headlines with bold liberal policies in the past few weeks, so the state’s coolness to Trump—and the antipathy on display when he visited the state two weeks ago—might seem unsurprising. After all, on Trump’s signature issues–demonizing Latino immigrants and building a wall to keep them out—he is far outside the state’s mainstream; a recent poll shows that less than a quarter of Californians agree with his stances on “illegal” and Muslim immigration, and just 16 percent of Californians support widespread deportations.

But Californians who might be tempted to pat themselves on the back for their state’s open-mindedness should make no mistake. When it comes to insulting immigrants and building walls to keep them out, the Golden State started it.

Today’s anti-immigrant campaigns began not with New York billionaires or white conservatives in rural America, but with middle-class professionals, both Democrats and Republicans, in California. For most of U.S. history, fomenting anti-immigrant sentiment was a project of labor unions and working people who feared job competition from newcomers. In these movements—particularly those directed at Chinese people in the 19th century—California was a national leader.

Trump draws votes mostly from a 21st-century version of that working-class demographic. But his rhetoric on immigration is much newer—it comes straight from an anti-immigrant movement begun 25 years ago by educated, mostly white California suburbanites from across the political spectrum.

Trump has famously said he will force Mexico to pay for a new wall on the entire southern border through a variety of pressure tactics, among them increasing fees on all Mexican border crossers. While this idea may sound very Republican today, my University of Oregon colleague, the political scientist Dan HoSang, has shown that it originated with our own Democratic U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, former mayor of liberal San Francisco.

In 1993, the newly elected Feinstein became the first California senator in decades to make immigration control a major political issue. She wrote in the Los Angeles Times that “illegal” immigrants cost the state billions and filled its jails with criminals; she brought that same message to talk shows and the U.S. Senate. How to crack down? Feinstein’s proposal: Charge a $1 toll on anyone entering the country and use the money to increase funding for the Border Patrol.

When it comes to insulting immigrants and building walls to keep them out, the Golden State started it.

Trump also wants to end the birthright citizenship that is currently guaranteed by the Constitution. That idea first picked up steam in California, too. It was proposed in the early 1990s by Simi Valley’s Republican Congressman, Elton Gallegly, and soon gained the support of a neighboring congressman, Democrat Anthony Beilenson.

I was in high school in Los Angeles in 1994 when California voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 187, a ballot initiative to deny public services, including education and health care, to undocumented immigrants. In hindsight, most remember this as the signature issue of Republican Governor Pete Wilson. Yet observers at the time noted that Wilson had previously focused on ensuring that the state’s agricultural interests had as many immigrant workers as they needed. It was actually the stand of the liberal Feinstein, a fierce political rival of Wilson’s, that “inspired” the conservative governor’s turn to a strongly anti-immigrant agenda.

Furthermore, the grassroots energy for the proposition did not come from the working-class white folks that support Trump today. Rather, both HoSang and another scholar, Robin Dale Jacobson, found that Proposition 187 activists were middle-class professionals: accountants and engineers, secretaries and educators. Their rhetoric did not focus on job competition as earlier anti-immigrant movements in the United States had. Rather, they decried “billions of tax dollars” spent on public services for immigrants and accused them of importing “rape, robbery, assault”—the same allegations Trump is making today.

California’s politics may have changed since those days, but many Californian people and ideas of that time, having relocated to Trump country, are part of today’s anti-immigrant campaigns. Trump swept Georgia and Alabama, two states that passed high-profile anti-immigrant laws in recent years, and whose immigration histories I have spent a decade researching. Those laws bear the fingerprints of California. In Alabama, the anti-immigrant law was pushed by the Alabama Federation of Republican Women—whose president, Elois Zeanah, was a longtime city councilwoman and mayor in her 25-year home, the LA suburb of Thousand Oaks.

As for Georgia, its grassroots anti-immigrant movement began just a few months after Proposition 187’s passage, in the fast-growing Atlanta suburb of Cobb County. Members of a local neighborhood group borrowed the pro-187 campaign’s language in a letter-writing campaign to elected officials: Immigrants “drain our economy,” “crowd our school system,” and are responsible for “criminal activity.”

Most of Cobb’s residents at that time were interstate transplants, including thousands of ex-Californians. One of them, a former resident of Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, wrote to his mayor: “At one time The Valley was 90+% white. The streets were very clean. Crime was very low. All of that has changed. During the last 10 years the Valley has been invaded by people from Mexico and all points south. … It is happening right here in Georgia. We need to stop it before it gets out of hand.”

Cobb remains the hub of the state’s anti-immigrant movement: one of the first Georgia counties to pass a local anti-immigrant ordinance, and home to the state’s most prominent anti-immigrant group, the Dustin Inman Society. The society’s mission? To prevent the coming of “Georgiafornia”—“the chaos that has befallen the once wealthy and desirable state of California,” thanks to “illegal” immigration.

Californians can be proud that, as a whole, they no longer support the anti-immigrant agenda. But before they smugly dismiss nativism as a faraway phenomenon in which they are not implicated, Californians should remember their own recent history. Anti-immigrant sentiment has been present throughout U.S. history. But it was Californians who renewed it at the end of the 20th century, giving it the legs Trump has commandeered on his run into the 21st.

(Julie M. Weise is assistant professor of history at the University of Oregon and author of Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910. She was previously an assistant professor at California State University, Long Beach. This perspective originated at Zocalo Public Square.) 

-cw

EDITOR’S PICK-Search the Internet for articles on the so-called "migrant crisis," and half a million results pop up in a matter of seconds. 

There's just one problem: There is no such crisis.

"A right that only exists for the rich it not a right at all."
—Alex Scrivener, Global Justice Now

"What we call a 'migrant crisis,' is actually a crisis of global injustice caused by war, poverty, and inequality," said Global Justice Now director Nick Dearden, introducing a new briefing that draws attention to the multiple crises that are actually forcing people to relocate and calls for "free movement for everyone."

Published Monday, the briefing—Migrant Crisis or Poverty Crisis? Why Free Movement is Vital in the Battle for Global Justice (pdf)—lays blame at the feet of overlapping root causes including: 

• Poverty and economic inequality;
• War and conflict;
• Climate change;
• Unfair trade deals; and
• Colonialism, "or at least the long term legacy of it."

"Framing the increased flow of people fleeing war and poverty as a 'migrant crisis' misses the point," the document reads. "It assumes that it is the arrival of these people, rather than the situations they are trying to escape, that is the problem."

In turn, cracking down on the migrants themselves is "not the solution," Global Justice Now declares.

"Rich countries, with the help of the highly profitable security industry, have tried their best to use cruel migration controls, fences, walls and even guns to force people to accept lives of violence and destitution," the briefing says. "This is not the solution. No matter how high the walls of Fortress Europe become, the only way to solve this problem is to deal with its root causes."

Dearden added: "To demonize those making a rational choice on the part of themselves, their family and their community, obscures the truth. Migration is bringing those of us in Europe face to face with the reality of the brutal and unjust world our leaders have constructed."

According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), an estimated 184,887 migrants and refugees have entered Europe by sea in 2016, arriving in Italy, Greece, Cyprus, and Spain. At least 1,357 have died in the same time period.

Instead of "pulling up the drawbridge," Global Justice Now calls for governments to work toward freedom of movement, supported by "properly funded public services" and "decent employment laws," among other things.

Not to do so amounts to "apartheid on a global scale," said Alex Scrivener, the author of the briefing and GJN policy officer.

"It's unacceptable that people from rich countries are free to go almost anywhere in the world while people from the global south are denied freedom of movement, even when they are fleeing war and extreme poverty," Scrivener argued. "A right that only exists for the rich it not a right at all. There's one rule for 'expat' Europeans and North Americans and another for the rest of the world."

The Global Justice Now briefing also calls for an end to immigration detention as soon as possible.

On Saturday, simultaneous protests took place at more than a dozen immigrant detention centers across the UK and in The Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and Iceland. A mass "Refugees Welcome" rally is planned for May 25 in London, while the UK-based Stand Up to Racism coalition is organizing a major aid convoy to the Calais camp in France in conjunction with trade unions, the People's Assembly Against Austerity, and others beginning June 18. 

(Deirdre Fulton writes for Common Dreams where this piece was first posted.)

-cw

LATINO PERSPECTIVE-According to a new finding released last week by the Pew Research Center a declining share of Latinos in the U.S. are speaking Spanish and a growing number speak only English at home. This serves to confirm that Latinos whether born in the United States or not are easily assimilating into American culture and traditions. 

EDITOR’S PICK--As this dystopian election campaign has unfolded, my mind keeps being tugged by a passage in Plato’s Republic. It has unsettled — even surprised — me from the moment I first read it in graduate school. The passage is from the part of the dialogue where Socrates and his friends are talking about the nature of different political systems, how they change over time, and how one can slowly evolve into another. And Socrates seemed pretty clear on one sobering point: that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.”

What did Plato mean by that? Democracy, for him, I discovered, was a political system of maximal freedom and equality, where every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are filled by a lottery.

And the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more democratic it would become. Its freedoms would multiply; its equality spread. Deference to any sort of authority would wither; tolerance of any kind of inequality would come under intense threat; and multiculturalism and sexual freedom would create a city or a country like “a many-colored cloak decorated in all hues.”

This rainbow-flag polity, Plato argues, is, for many people, the fairest of regimes. The freedom in that democracy has to be experienced to be believed — with shame and privilege in particular emerging over time as anathema. But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehending. And when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy. There is no kowtowing to authority here, let alone to political experience or expertise.

The very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled: “We almost forgot to mention the extent of the law of equality and of freedom in the relations of women with men and men with women.” Family hierarchies are inverted: “A father habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shame before or fear of his parents.” In classrooms, “as the teacher ... is frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light of their teachers.” Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The foreigner is equal to the citizen.

And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment. (Read the rest.) 

-cw

NEW GEOGRAPHY-With her massive win last month in New York, followed up with several other triumphal processions through the Northeast, Hillary Clinton has, for all intents and purposes, captured the Democratic nomination. And given the abject weaknesses of her two most likely opponents, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, she seems likely to capture the White House this fall as well. 

So the question now becomes: How does Hillary govern? She may win a decisive victory over a divided, dispirited Republican Party, but she will not return to the White House with much of the aura that surrounded President Obama. As feminist writer Camille Paglia has pointed out, she is widely distrusted by the majority of Americans, including younger women. Older feminists may worship her as the incipient queen, Paglia notes, but few others seem ready to kowtow. 

Instead, Clinton will enter the presidency more disliked and distrusted than any incoming executive in history. Her trajectory, notes Paglia, has more in common with that of Richard Nixon, whose persistent scheming and ample intellect allowed him to win in 1968, another year marked by intense political divisions. 

Alternative one: Obama third term 

When Bill Clinton entered the White House in 1992, he did so as the standard-bearer for “New Democrats” of the Democratic Leadership Council, a pro-business, pro-individual responsibility faction that captured control of the party from its labor and grievance industry old guard. When I worked for the Progressive Policy Institute, the DLC’s think tank, in the early Clinton years, many powerful interests – greens, feminists, minority advocates, trade unions – opposed many of the Arkansan’s policy innovations, ranging from welfare reform to NAFTA. 

But the party that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton now inherits is not hers, it is Barack Obama’s. In the Clinton years, Democrats competed, and sometimes won, in Republican strongholds in Appalachia and the South. After Obama, these areas are, for the most part, solidly GOP, while the Democratic Party has become increasingly dependent on its heavily minority, and young, urban base along the coasts. As a result, there is little need for, or interest in, appeasing the less urbanized, more conservative voters across the country. 

Energy and land use are two areas where Clinton may be able to pick up the Obama mantle. Despite Clinton’s fundraising among fossil fuel firms, which has netted some $3 million, she has continually won established environmental support from groups like the League of Conservation Voters. She can be counted on to advance Obama’s green agenda. 

In effect, she will be tempted to support the mounting Environmental Protection Agency onslaught on power generators. This will hurt many Rust Belt economies but won’t do much damage to party strongholds like Manhattan or the Bay Area. The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s escalating campaign to force middle-class suburbs to accept more poor people and high-density housing may undermine the dreams and aspirations of millions of middle-class Americans, including many minorities, but could appeal to the urban developers who now can continue their ethnic cleansing of attractive inner-city areas. 

Hillary, no stranger to following the political breezes, could simply serve as the heir to the Obama legacy, in effect, giving him a third term. She could prove to play Stalin – ruthless, unlikeable but politically savvy – to advance the president’s progressive program. There are signs of this, for example, in such things as her turn against the Keystone XL pipeline, after tentatively embracing it as secretary of state, or her rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. She might, under pressure from the Sanders forces, also agree on the platform plank for a ban on fracking, which would end our drive toward energy self-sufficiency, as well as deeply wound many economies, particularly in Texas, Oklahoma and Appalachia. 

Triangulation: Clinton third term? 

Hillary Clinton has been forced left by the growing radicalization of her party. It’s as if John Kasich and John McCain suddenly decided that they needed to sound like Donald Trump on immigration and Ted Cruz on religion. Yet, the big question is whether she will shift to the center, as her husband did, when she actually holds the reins of power. 

But triangulation requires a strong and determined opposition, as Bill Clinton faced after 1994 with a GOP controlled House run by Newt Gingrich. In states where the Republican Party has, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist as a serious political force, such as here in California, moderation tends to be drowned out by the incessant yammering from the social justice warriors and environmental zealots. Gov. Jerry Brown, for example, is most often challenged not by Republicans but those from his left who want, if anything, more extreme economic and environmental policies.

If this year’s election ends up with a total wipeout of the Republicans, Clinton would have little reason to move to the center. After all, you cannot triangulate between Right and Left when the Right has all but evaporated. If Hillary wants to reprise Bill, she should hope the GOP does not completely disappear as a political force. 

One other, and particularly troublesome, barrier to triangulation could be the growing concentration of power in the executive branch under President Obama. Clinton has already made it clear she happily will rule by decree if the recalcitrant Republicans in the House refuse to go along with her ideas. With the bureaucracy allied with the progressive cause, and a judiciary that also increasingly embraces a centralist ideology, she may not need to appeal to Republicans or moderates at all, at least to get her program through. 

Ultimately, this may all depend on the economy. President Obama’s ratcheting up of federal housing and environmental powers has taken place amidst a gradually improving economy, particularly in his base coastal states. This has also been key to Gov. Brown’s ever more draconian environmental stance. Prosperity, at least among the gentry, tends to let regulators ignore the economic consequences of their decisions. 

What matters most may be expediency – and money 

Hillary Clinton is often castigated for her supposed lack of basic principles. Yet, her opportunism could benefit the country more than the kind of narcissistic posturing that has dominated the Obama years. If the economy weakens, for example, she might not want to put more screws on businesses, and certainly will not threaten to persecute the financial interests who have financed her campaign, not to mention the Clinton Foundation. 

Unfortunately for her, many of the consequences of Obama’s policies may force her hand. The president has delayed many of the more challenging parts of Obamacare, leaving it to Hillary to cope with cancellations, rising fees and other problems. Clinton will also be forced to deal with rising suburban resistance to HUD policy which, under the principle of “disparate impact,” will try to force diversity and density on communities which do not discriminate but remain not dense enough or diverse enough to meet the demand of regulators. 

She will also have to cope with other residues of the past eight years – for example, rising crime, growing race tensions and a rapidly deteriorating foreign environment. The new President Clinton may have to cope with mass unemployment in the energy belt and among manufacturers, as the administration’s greenhouse gas policies begin to get implemented. Whereas Obama benefited from the fracking boom that he never quite embraced, Clinton may reap the full weight of the political and economic ramifications from ending the practice. 

Whether these realities – a direct threat to Democrats in many states and districts – will lead Clinton to adopt more pragmatic approaches is not yet knowable. But at the end of the day, arguably, our best hopes for the first woman president revolve around her profound opportunism and political common sense, which could lead her to a more pragmatic, and ultimately far less damaging, approach than now seems all too likely.

(Joel Kotkin is a R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism in Houston. His newest book is “The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us.” This was first posted at newgeography.com.  Photo: AP/Ron Frehm/Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Matt Rourke/Toby Talbot. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

TRADE WINDS--Welcome back, ’90s; I’ve missed you.

The last decade of the previous millennium is suddenly all the rage, claiming a growing slice of our cultural mindshare. Monica Lewinsky is on the speaking circuit. American cable networks have served up series based on the O.J. Simpson trial and Anita Hill confirmation hearings, as well as remakes of everything from Twin Peaks to the X-Files.

WHO WANTED ACA TO FAIL?-One can't help but wonder if those who did, do, and still defend the "Affordable Care Act" believe that its opponents truly wanted it to fail, or if its opponents hated the principles of health care access and affordability. But the same question can be laid at the feet of those who opposed the Iraq Conflict--did they want that effort to fail, and did they oppose democracy in the Middle East ... or as with the ACA, was it doomed to fail all on its own? 

Arguably, this was NOT anything that should have been called "Obamacare" because the President knew very little of what was in it (kind of like former President G.W. Bush and Iraq--he didn't know what the substance and the problems of the Iraq challenge was, and had to keep patching it as he went along).   

To paraphrase House Minority Speaker Nancy Pelosi, we now know what's in it because it's passed, and as the bill gets higher and higher--with a surge in costs going up next year just as the President leaves office--there is also a surge of Americans who disapprove of the law, according to U.S. News and World Report. 

Which merely proves the point that this law--written by the same health plans who in part (but only in part...see below) got us into this mess--can only be supported either by those who are not affected, or by those who hate Republicans and other opponents of the President more than they love and care for the well-being of their fellow Americans. 

The ACA passing Supreme Court muster based on this law being the single biggest tax hike on the middle class in recent memory, despite it being billed as anything but a tax hike?  Don't care. 

The ACA requiring childless adults to pay for comprehensive plans that include pediatric psychiatry? Don't care. 

Requests from ACA insurers throughout the nation asking for premium hikes that average from 9.4% to 37.1% in 2017?  Don't care. 

Tens of millions of Americans ripped away from their health plans and their doctors, despite being promised that such a nightmare would never happen?  Don't care. 

California fighting for adult illegal immigrants to get ACA coverage after granting it to their children for free, despite promises that such an effort would neeeeeeeever happen, because illegal immigrants should pay for their own families' expenses?  Don't care. 

And it's funny--actually pretty sad, but funny in a grim sort of way--that the ACA plans and the patients with health care through their employment (and with traditional plans that were allowed to be grandfathered into the ACAD) remain the most profitable and the most affordable (and most appreciated by patients). 

Which meant that either a Bush or an Obama Administration that focused on JOBS--not crappy, lousy, part-time jobs without benefits that "officially" and artificially placed Americans off the unemployment rolls--but real JOBS with benefits could have obviated the need for most of the ACA, particularly since the push to eliminate pre-existing conditions was already a bipartisan effort. 

So it's NOT just the health plans, but a lack of focus on full-time, family-friendly, quality of life-enhancing JOBS WITH BENEFITS that made health care access and affordable so elusive. 

And the anemic U.S. Economy, which is expanding at 0.5%--the lowest and slowest pace in two years, could that at all be aggravated by the ACA hobbling businesses from hiring with traditional benefit plans, and expanding because profits are being slammed as we enter a global slowdown? 

I know, I know.  You don't care.  You just don't care. 

Because dammitall, we're going to stay the course with the ACA--just like we did in Iraq--and a surge of sorts will do us all a lot of good. 

And it was great to take a swing at "The Man", and all those screaming Republicans, wasn't it? 

But one question, after you got to take that giant swing: why is the taste in your mouth not one of true victory, but the taste of your own blood? 

(Ken Alpern is a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at  [email protected]. He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Mr. Alpern.)-cw

EDTITOR’S PICK--People around the world are increasingly identifying as global citizens, according to a new BBC poll that shines a light on changing attitudes about immigration, inequality, and different economic realities. 

Among all 18 countries where public opinion research firm, GlobeScan conducted the survey, 51 percent of people see themselves more as global citizens than national citizens. It is the first time since tracking began in 2001 that a global majority identifies this way, and is up from a low point of about 42 percent in 2002.

The trend is particularly strong in developing countries, the poll found, "including Nigeria (73%, up 13 points), China (71%, up 14 points), Peru (70%, up 27 points), and India (67%, up 13 points)."

Overall, 56 percent of people in emerging economies saw themselves as global citizens rather than national citizens.

"The poll's finding that growing majorities of people in emerging economies identify as global citizens will challenge many people's (and organizations') ideas of what the future might look like," said GlobeScan chairman Doug Miller.

In more industrialized nations, the numbers skew a bit lower. The BBC's Naomi Grimley writes:

In Germany, for example, only 30% of respondents see themselves as global citizens.

According to Lionel Bellier from GlobeScan, this is the lowest proportion seen in Germany since the poll began 15 years ago.

"It has to be seen in the context of a very charged environment, politically and emotionally, following Angela Merkel's policy to open the doors to a million refugees last year."

The poll suggests a degree of soul-searching in Germany about how open its doors should be in the future.

Not all wealthy nations were opposed to newcomers. In Spain, 84 percent of respondents said they supported taking in Syrian refugees, while 77 percent of Canadians said the same. A small majority of Americans—55 percent—were also in favor of accepting those fleeing the ongoing civil war.

As Grimley points out, the concept of "global citizenship" can be hard to define, which makes it difficult to determine answers about identity.

"For some, it might be about the projection of economic clout across the world," she writes. "To others, it might mean an altruistic impulse to tackle the world's problems in a spirit of togetherness—whether that is climate change or inequality in the developing world."

GlobeScan interviewed 20,000 people in 18 countries between December 2015 and April 2016.

(Nadia Prupis writes for Common Dreams  … where this piece was first posted.) –cw

EDITOR’S PICK-Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. Once upon a time, I considered longing for a long-lost past a relatively innocuous exercise. I don’t really go for the iconic schmaltz of Norman Rockwell paintings, but I never thought that idealizing days of yore could be a dangerous activity.

But that was before Donald J. Trump launched a presidential campaign on the promise of making America great again.

On the surface, the real estate mogul’s pledge of renewing national greatness doesn’t seem so bad. After all, like any politician, he seems to be simply appealing to national pride and ambition. Couldn’t that just get our collective competitive juices flowing and produce more gross national excellence?

Well, no, actually.

Making a comeback or triumphing over one’s hardships requires more than nostalgia. Sometimes it requires the ability to visualize—literally—what a better future would look like. In a brilliant 2014 essay on beauty and justice, Harvard art historian Sarah Lewis explores the power of images to propel people forward. She cites the example of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who decided to seek his freedom from slavery after spending too many Sundays feeling taunted by the gentle, unhindered movement of the sailboats on Chesapeake Bay.

Douglass would later argue that those most capable of inspiring change—poets, prophets, and reformers—are those who can conjure images that capture the contrast between what is and what could be. “They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is,“ he said, “and endeavor to remove the contradiction.”

By contrast, the image of the future Donald Trump is offering is not a reflection of what is, but rather of what may or may not have been. He hearkens back to a past in which Americans—or at least some of them—enjoyed unchallenged economic and cultural dominance. While it isn’t particularly clear what era he’s nostalgic for, “Making America Great Again” is less about achieving a shiny new vision as it is about restoring a gauzy old one. He is propelling us backwards.

“Making America Great Again” is less about achieving a shiny new vision as it is about restoring a gauzy old one.

The late Russian-born novelist and playwright Svetlana Boym made a distinction between two types of nostalgia, reflective and restorative. While the former tends to be wistful and dreamy (think of Reagan’s “Morning in America” imagery), the latter, which lies at the core of many modern national and religious revival movements, is deadly serious.

Restorative nostalgia has two essential plot lines, the first being the return to a hallowed past and the second being the conspiracies that explain why that past was lost. As such, these nostalgic movements come to be more about the search for scapegoats than they are about recapturing any sort of tradition. They’re particularly attractive to groups who feel victimized by change in the modern world.

Of course, Trump’s politics of nostalgia certainly has its cast of villains, including Mexicans, Muslims, China, and Japan. His rhetoric of restoration is clearly more focused on dealing with enemies—both within and outside our borders—than it is on inspiring or building the intrinsic capacity of the people whose greatness he says he hopes to reclaim.

Such aggrieved nostalgia may feel novel in a U.S. presidential race, particularly given the collective pride in our unwavering focus on the future. Yet it is all too common around the world. It underlies Islamist movements’ anger towards the West, Vladimir Putin’s project to restore Russia to its rightful place in the world, and the more virulent strains of Chinese nationalism. In places like the Balkans, a victimized sense of nostalgia is practically a birthright. Hence one of the paradoxes of the Trump phenomenon is that in seeking to “Make America Great Again” by invoking a litany of wrongs committed against us, he sure is making America more like the rest of the world.

The most extreme form of restorative nationalist nostalgia could be seen in Adolf Hitler’s Germany. While anti-Semitism had existed for centuries, Hitler employed what UCLA historian Saul Friedländer has called “redemptive anti-Semitism,” a national salvation myth that held that Germany’s prominence could only be regained through the removal of Jews. Since Hitler blamed Jews not only for Germany’s defeat in World War I but for the subsequent collapse of the monarchy, he argued that their expulsion—which later led to genocide—was necessary to make Germany great again.

I’m not implying that Trump intends to commit mass murder. But the rhetorical mechanism he employs is essentially the same. Far from being a quaint stroll down memory lane, the politics of nostalgia is a recipe for resentment, and potentially, revenge. It’s also a perfect way to blame others for your lot in life.

(Gregory Rodriguez is the founder and publisher of Zócalo Public Square and the author of the Wanderlust column. Posted originally at excellent Zocalo Public Square.)

-cw