Trump Administration – Page 6

Controlling Our Brave New (Digital) World

Now that Net Neutrality rules have been eliminated by Trump’s FCC, the question is: how will the repeal affect ordinary Americans? What consequences will be seen by the millions of Americans who turn increasingly to the Internet for everything from information to entertainment to commerce?

The Brookings Institution has at least a preliminary answer.

On June 11, 2018, the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of the Open Internet Order—the net neutrality rules—went into effect. In the wake of this change, Americans are wondering how the repeal will affect them, and what it means for the future of internet access. Though consumers may not see changes quickly, the shift on net neutrality undermines the nation’s history on network regulation, creating a new era in how these networks operate in America.

So–in this brave “new era,” what can we expect?

The “quick and dirty” answer is: it depends. For one thing, there is a pending court challenge to the FCC’s authority to repeal Net Neutrality. For another, the Senate has passed Senate Joint Resolution 52, officially disapproving the repeal. (Under the Congressional Review Act, Congress can undo recently created rules by federal agencies.)

It still has to pass in the House, and then be signed by the president, which makes its prospects dicey, but perhaps Mueller will have completed his investigation…

That said, the need for a vote in the House should make protection of Net Neutrality an issue in the upcoming midterms. Every Congressional candidate should be asked whether they will vote to reinstate the rules. In December of last year, the Hill reported that 83% of Americans support Net Neutrality.

The pending court case is a consolidation of twelve separate challenges to the FCC’s authority to repeal the rules. The 12 lawsuits were filed by more than three dozen entities, including state attorneys general, consumer advocacy groups, and tech companies.

(If there is a Justice Kavanaugh sitting on the Supreme Court, and the case reaches the high court, its prospects dim: Kavanaugh is on record opposing Net Neutrality on the grounds that Internet providers are publishers, and protected from government interference by the First Amendment. Equating companies like Verizon and AT&T with media outlets like the New York Times requires some convoluted logic. )

More encouraging, a number of states aren’t waiting for Congress or the courts. California, not surprisingly, looks to be first out of the gate with a “robust” protection of Net Neutrality, but a number of other states are in the process of crafting similar bills.

The latest version of the bill restores provisions that would prevent broadband providers from exempting some services from customers’ data caps and would ban providers from charging websites “access fees” to reach customers on a network or blocking or throttling content as it enters their networks from other networks, according to a fact sheet released by Wiener, Santiago, and state senator Kevin de León.

The enumerated practices are those that big telecom companies are expected to engage in now that the FCC has repealed national protections.

The new version of the bill needs to be approved by both houses of the California Legislature, then be signed by Governor Jerry Brown. From there, it could face legal challenges from the FCC, which prohibited states from adopting their own net neutrality protections when it repealed the national net neutrality rules. During the press conference, Santiago said the California bill would stand up to legal scrutiny. Legal experts have told WIRED they are unsure whether the FCC has authority to preempt state law on the issue.

As 83% of Americans understand (at least in this context), this administration’s indiscriminate war on all regulatory activity more often than not just favors big business over the rest of us.

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Sabotage

While the media and the country are being distracted by the daily crazy/sleazy coming from Washington, the Trump Administration is working feverishly behind the scenes to dismantle the rules: rules that protect us from dirty air and water, from discrimination in housing and education, and rules that guarantee us access to health care, among others.

The unremitting attack on the Affordable Care Act has been particularly effective. The GOP may not have been able to repeal it outright, but regulatory sabotage has been the next best tactic. Thanks to the administration’s actions–neutering and threatening to eliminate provisions of the ACA that were included in order to keep premiums affordable, health insurance rates continue to rise.

According to Larry Levitt at the nonpartisan, respected Kaiser Foundation,

New analysis: Insurers did very well in Q1 of 2018 in the individual market under the ACA. If not for looming repeal of the mandate penalty and expansion of loosely-regulated plans, we’d be looking at modest premium increases and even decreases for 2019.https://www.kff.org/private-insurance/issue-brief/individual-insurance-market-performance-in-early-2018/ …

Evidently, however, the administration has decided that killing affordability by raising costs was too incremental; a recent article from The Washington Post reported on a much more direct attack.

The Trump administration took another major swipe at the Affordable Care Act, halting billions of dollars in annual payments required under the law to even out the cost to insurers whose customers need expensive medical services.

In a rare Saturday afternoon announcement, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said it will stop collecting and paying out money under the ACA’s “risk adjustment” program, drawing swift protest from the health insurance industry.

Risk adjustment is one of three methods built into the 2010 health-care law to help insulate insurance companies from the ACA requirement that they accept all customers for the first time — healthy and sick — without charging more to those who need substantial care.

As the article goes on to explain, two of the three methods were temporary; risk adjustment, however, was to be permanent. Federal health officials are supposed to annually calculate which insurers had relatively low-cost consumers, and which had more expensive customers. Those with the lower-cost customers would make an adjustment payment to those whose customers were more costly.

This idea of pooling risk has had significant practical effects: encouraging insurers to participate in the insurance marketplaces the ACA created for Americans who cannot get affordable health benefits through a job.

In its announcement, CMS said that it is not going to make $10.4 billion in payments that are due to insurers in the fall for expenses incurred by insurers last year.

The announcement that payments due under the law would simply not be made is just the most recent measure taken by the Trump administration to demolish a law the GOP was unable to repeal legislatively. (It’s a tactic Trump is undoubtedly comfortable with–throughout his “successful” development career, he routinely stiffed architects, engineers and contractors. Wheelers and dealers who are willing to ignore the terms of contracts to which they are party are unlikely to have qualms about ignoring the obligations imposed by laws to which they are subject. But I digress.)

The administration has taken a number of steps to dismantle the ACA through executive powers.

Last year, health officials halved the length of the annual sign-up period for Americans to buy ACA health plans and also slashed by 90 percent the federal funds for advertising and other outreach efforts to urge people to enroll. Last October, the president ended another important subsidy to insurers: cost-sharing reduction payments, which cushioned them from the law’s requirement to provide discounts on deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs to low-income customers.

This year, the Department of Labor and HHS have worked to make it easier for people and small companies to buy two types of insurance policies that sidestep benefits required under the ACA and some of the law’s consumer protections.

There have been a couple of lawsuits in the lower courts over past calculations of these payments, with inconsistent results, and the administration blamed the withholding of funds on one of those decisions–a transparently trumped-up excuse. (Pun intended.)

“Risk adjustment is a mandatory program under federal law,” said Scott Serota, president of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. “Without a quick resolution . . . this action will significantly increase 2019 premiums for millions of individuals and small business owners. . . . It will undermine Americans’ access to affordable coverage, particularly for those who need medical care the most.”

Matt Eyles, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, noted in a statement that the timing of this latest move could be particularly disruptive, because this is the season during which insurers around the country decide whether to take part in ACA marketplaces for 2019 and, if so, what rates to charge. “This decision . . . will create more market uncertainty and increase premiums for many health plans,” Eyles said.

Of course it will. That’s the whole intent.

And if thousands of people are bankrupted or die as a result? Too bad. They weren’t Republican donors anyway.

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How Low Can We Go?

You have probably all seen this reported, and in the global scheme of things, it’s just one more (relatively minor) national embarrassment.

But still!

The United States government opposed a U.N. resolution recommending breastfeeding.

A resolution to encourage breast-feeding was expected to be approved quickly and easily by the hundreds of government delegates who gathered this spring in Geneva for the United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly.

Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother’s milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes.

Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations.

American officials sought to water down the resolution by removing language that called on governments to “protect, promote and support breast-feeding” and another passage that called on policymakers to restrict the promotion of food products that many experts say can have deleterious effects on young children.

And it wasn’t just a pro-forma vote. U.S. diplomats “twisted arms” and threatened supporters of the resolution. Ecuador had planned to introduce the measure; according to reports, American officials warned Ecuador’s representatives that if they refused to drop their sponsorship of the resolution, “Washington would unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid.”

The Ecuadorean government–understandably–caved.

Health advocates scrambled to find another sponsor for the resolution, but at least a dozen countries, most of them poor nations in Africa and Latin America, backed off, citing fears of retaliation, according to officials from Uruguay, Mexico and the United States.

Speaking of threats, some American delegates evidently went so far as to suggest that the United States might cut its contribution to the World Health Organization, which uses America’s significant contribution to fund a variety of important global medical initiatives.

In the end, the Americans’ efforts were mostly unsuccessful. It was the Russians who ultimately stepped in to introduce the measure — and the Americans did not threaten them.

It wasn’t just breastfeeding. The thuggery was extensive.

The confrontation was the latest example of the Trump administration siding with corporate interests on numerous public health and environmental issues.

In talks to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Americans have been pushing for languagethat would limit the ability of Canada, Mexico and the United States to put warning labels on junk food and sugary beverages, according to a draft of the proposal reviewed by The New York Times.

During the same Geneva meeting where the breast-feeding resolution was debated, the United States succeeded in removing statements supporting soda taxes from a document that advises countries grappling with soaring rates of obesity.

The Americans also sought, unsuccessfully, to thwart a W.H.O. effortaimed at helping poor countries obtain access to lifesaving medicines. Washington, supporting the pharmaceutical industry, has long resisted calls to modify patent laws as a way of increasing drug availability in the developing world, but health advocates say the Trump administration has ratcheted up its opposition to such efforts.

Words fail.

We have an administration that separates desperate families that have come to us to escape violence and (often) certain death. We put their babies in cages. Now we discover that the American government–our government– bullies health professionals who are working to save lives, in order to protect the pocketbooks of its political donors.

Permit me to modify Joseph Welch’s immortal lines : “Until this moment, I think I never really gauged the Trump team’s cruelty or recklessness… Clearly, they have no sense of decency.”

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File Under “Kick ‘Em When They’re Down”

A few days ago, a neighbor shared a blog post by a friend of hers.

The post referenced a recent report by the United Nations, accusing the Trump Administration of intentionally making life more difficult for poor Americans while taking steps to enrich the already privileged. I had seen an article on the report in the Guardian, but so far as I–and the author of this blog– know, that was the only news source that addressed it.

Were it not for the source, it would hardly be news to learn that the United States can’t take care of its most needy—that it may be the richest country, but it is also increasingly, appallingly, unequal in how its wealth and opportunities are shared. When the various dimensions of human security are examined, critics have long noted that the US falls short, whether in treatment of children, poverty rates, income gaps between rich and poor, or even life expectancy. All this has been amply documented in annual reports of the United Nations Development Programme (http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/2016_human_development_report.pdf), which I’ve discussed in previous blogs (#9 for example).

But now comes an update from a distinguished international legal scholar who is the United Nations special rapporteur for extreme poverty and human rights. Philip Alston visited several deep pockets of poverty, from Los Angeles to West Virginia and Detroit to Puerto Rico, at the end of 2017. His report (UN General Assembly Doc. A/HRC/38/33/Add.1, May 4, 2018) is a devastating indictment of the government that underscores the large and growing contradictions between the American Dream and reality. Alston told The Guardian that Trump’s policies amount to “ a systematic attack on America’s welfare program that is undermining the social safety net for those who can’t cope on their own. Once you start removing any sense of government commitment, you quickly move into cruelty.”

The report acknowledges that previous administrations haven’t distinguished themselves by their concern for these inequities, but quotes Alston to the effect that the Trump Administration has “deliberately targeted the most vulnerable in society, kicking away every ladder of social wellbeing in order to serve Trump’s rich supporters and his alt-right agenda”.

In other words, it’s not that this government can’t take care of the poor. It won’t. It has no interest in doing so.

The blogger, Mel Gurtov, provides examples of the measures that Alston identified as particularly onerous to the most vulnerable:

• Debasing civil society: Supporting limits on voting rights with specious arguments about voter fraud and “covert disenfranchisement” such as gerrymandering and various ID requirements.
• Giving huge tax breaks to millionaires and big corporations while about 40 million people live below the poverty line—among them, 23.8 million considered in extreme or absolute poverty. The richest 1 percent of Americans now account for 20 percent of national income, double the percentage in 1980. “The proposed tax reform package stakes out America’s bid to become the most unequal society in the world,” says Alston in a separate statement (www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=22533).
• Putting new limits on basic anti-poverty measures such as work requirements for welfare, food stamps, subsidized housing, health insurance, and veterans’ benefits.
• Limiting opportunity: “The United States now has one of the lowest rates of intergenerational social mobility of any of the rich countries. . . . The equality of opportunity, which is so prized in theory, is in practice a myth, especially for minorities and women, but also for many middle-class White workers.”
• Promoting racist stereotypes that seek to stigmatize non-whites as being mainly poor, lazy, and unworthy of uplifting.
• Tolerating the highest rate of infant mortality, the highest rate of youth poverty, and the highest income inequality among all rich countries.*
• Treating Puerto Rico as a colony, and imposing fiscal discipline that fails to take into account people’s need of social protection. (The mayor of San Juan says it all: Trump’s , total neglect has to be called [out]. The United Nations says that when people are denied the right to access to basic human services — like electric power, like water, like food, like appropriate medical care — that it is a violation of human rights.”)

We’ve gone from a war on poverty to a war on the impoverished.

We’ve become a country without compassion, where the shameless and greedy eat bon bons and watch the poor scramble for crumbs. Our cruelty, together with the President’s erratic and embarrassingly ignorant behavior, has squandered America’s claim to any vestige of continued moral authority.

How long can this go on before it becomes irreversible?

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Religion And Moral Authority

Americans face daily reports of truly outrageous (and often previously unimaginable) things this administration is doing. In our name. To our shame.

Nothing we have seen thus far, however–not the disregard for poor Americans, the efforts to ensure that healthcare will continue to be a privilege rather than a right, the dismantling of environmental protections, the attacks on public education and the rule of law– not even the greed and stupidity of the looters who currently rule us–has been as morally repugnant as the Trump Administration’s practice of separating children from their parents at the border.

The pictures of screaming children being torn from the arms of their parents are enough to rip your heart out.

In a column for the Guardian, Marilynne Robinson asks a reasonable question: in the face of this assault on decency and humanity, where the hell are all those “family values” Christians?

She begins by explaining what is happening

As a matter of recent policy, agents of the American government take children from their parents’ arms at our southern border. They are kept at separate facilities for indeterminate periods of time. The parents are jailed and the children are put in the care of non-governmental agencies, sometimes in other states. It is hard to imagine that the higher rate of incarceration and the new system of calculated injury to children would not soon overwhelm existing arrangements no matter how many shelters and beds are provided for a frightened, heartbroken population of the very young, whose miseries are intended as a disincentive to future potential border-crossers.

The only nod to shared humanity in this policy is an obvious understanding that a child’s grief is a particularly wrenching experience for a parent, powerful enough – so the designers of the policy clearly believe – to weigh against the threats to that same child’s safety and health and prospects for a better life that bring parents and children to the American border. This effect would be much heightened by any parent’s knowing that the one sufficient comfort for any child in almost all circumstances, and especially one like this, is to be taken into his mother’s or his father’s arms.

Robinson notes the hardening of American partisanship and the not irrelevant fact that what is left of the GOP is mostly an amalgam of gun owners, people “who claim to be religious,” and people who resent immigration. (What she doesn’t say, but should have acknowledged, is that “resentment of immigration” is more often than not a euphemism for deep-seated and virulent racism.) As she does acknowledge, there are profound differences of worldview between those who fall into those categories and the rest of America–these are fearful people, and Trump has continually stoked their fears of the “other” with his anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric.

Behind much of this is a spurious Christianity that has spread through the culture on the strength of the old American habit of church-going, and which propounds a stark vision, the embattled faction of “the saved” surrounded by continuous threats to their souls – otherwise known as the American population at large.

Obama was impolitic, but not wrong, when he suggested that frightened people cling to their guns and their bibles. Robinson points to the irony of self-described “patriots” who hate the country, and self-identified “Christians” who insult and deprive the poor and the stranger.

Those “Christians” (note quotes) are Trump’s base and enablers. Their overwhelming hypocrisy is the reason so many Americans, especially young Americans, are rejecting religion. After all, the only justification for organized religion–at least, the only justification that makes sense to reasonable people–is that it is capable of prompting moral behavior.

Of course, history teaches us that religion is also quite capable of excusing atrocities.

When clear-eyed people see religious dogma being used to support adherents’ delusions of superiority, when they see it used to justify and excuse behaviors that all good people condemn as immoral, is it any wonder they see it as a cynical prop to tribalism rather than an appeal to the “better angels” of our humanity?

“Religious” folks who are conspicuously silent when children are ripped from the arms of parents who are seeking sanctuary–who show no compassion for people fleeing intolerable situations in an effort to give those children a better life–aren’t worshipping any God worthy of the name.

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