“Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Katrina vanden Heuvel: How to mount a progressive resistance
The Portland, Ore., City Council just struck a direct blow at inequality, passing a path-breaking law that will slap a surtax on large corporations that pay their chief executives more than 100 times what they pay their typical worker.
Cynics immediately scorned the act both as mere symbol and as likely to drive business out of the city. In fact, the law is far more likely to generate similar measures in cities across the country. Donald Trump has trumpeted that Republican control of Congress will enable him to cut taxes, roll back regulation and overturn all things Obama-related, including signature health-care and climate-change reforms. Portland’s act suggests Trump’s biggest opposition may come from cities and from blue states across the country. [..]
Trump, of course, still can wreak havoc, stripping millions of health care, trashing America’s leadership role in addressing climate change, unleashing a new lawless era of crony capitalism and sowing division rather than decency. But even with Republicans in control of Congress, neither he nor his Cabinet of bankers, billionaires and generals will have a free hand. Resistance will come, not only in the streets but also from leaders in states and cities who are intent on making America better.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: Through The GOP, The Wealthy Are Waging War On The Old
If you’re an older American — or expect to be someday — and you aren’t wealthy, you may have concluded that the Republican Party is at war with you. If so, you’re not wrong. Republicans are pushing proposals that protect and expand the wealth of the wealthy at the expense of the elderly. (The disabled, working people and the poor are also targets.)
Some progressives are troubled by metaphors of war. But this assault will claim lives, through hunger and inadequate medical care. Not every wealthy person supports it, of course, but those who do have plenty of Republican foot soldiers in Washington.
The motive, to a large extent, is tax avoidance. Taxes in the US are actually low compared with other countries, especially for the wealthy and corporations. But Republicans, including Donald Trump, want to cut them even more — especially for the wealthy and corporations. (Many middle-class Americans would actually pay more under Trump’s plan.) The Republican push for “entitlement” cuts should be seen in that light: as an attempt to further enrich the wealthiest few at the expense of the elderly and disabled.
Eugene Robinson: Trump is assembling an anti-government. Did Russia help get him here?
Good Lord. We are about to inaugurate as president a man whose election, according to the CIA, was aided by a Russian intelligence operation. Try as we might, we cannot pretend this didn’t happen.
We can’t ignore outrageous interference by an adversarial foreign power because President-elect Donald Trump’s actions question his own legitimacy, or at least his fitness to hold the nation’s highest office, virtually every day. [..]
Trump notes that the CIA is hardly infallible, citing its flat-wrong conclusion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He has a point. But there is little or no dispute within the intelligence community that operatives linked to the Russian government tried, at the very least, to sow doubt about the U.S. electoral process.
To that end, the Russian government directed the hacking of emails to and from Democratic Party organizations and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and then selectively disseminated this material through WikiLeaks and other outlets. The Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reached that conclusion months ago and said so in a public statement on Oct. 7.
The only real question is whether Russia’s aim went beyond creating confusion to actually helping elect a specific candidate: Trump.
Christine Todd Whitman: I was EPA administrator. Advice for the next one: Don’t walk back environmental progress.
President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt (R) to head the Environmental Protection Agency has drawn criticism because of Pruitt’s public stances against the agency’s authority and his numerous lawsuits to block agency regulations in his state. Given Pruitt’s obvious dislike for what the agency does, I am disappointed in his selection, but his appointment does not come as a surprise given the professed views of the president-elect and many of his closest aides.
As a former EPA administrator under a Republican president, I recognize that it is easy to hate regulations in general. After all, regulatory action causes people to spend money or change behavior, often to solve problems they do not believe exist. Regulations have certainly gone too far in a number of areas, but it’s important to remember that regulations are meant to be protective, and when it comes to the EPA, that means protecting human health and our world. Pruitt would be wise not to try to walk back the real progress that has been made.
Let’s not forget the atmosphere in which the EPA was created. The nation was experiencing great turmoil in 1969 and 1970, with riots on college campuses and in many cities. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire, and our air and water sources were being polluted by actors not required by any governing body to protect our citizens. People demanded that Washington protect them, and they got a Republican president to work with a Democratic Congress to establish the EPA and enact the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. To forget that the EPA was borne out of public demand is to invite a real backlash.
Robert S. McElvaine: How Putin Would Be Able to Control Trump
Why, in the midst of the growing indications that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee and leading people in the Hillary Clinton campaign to influence the election to help make Donald Trump president, are Mr. Trump and his aides so adamant in their focus on rejecting the claim that the Russians also hacked the Republican National Committee and other Republicans?
The first and lesser reason is that the Russians not releasing Republican electronic communications while they were doing so with the Democrats’ messages is further proof that their intent was to help to elect Donald Trump. Releasing any damaging private messages among Republicans would hurt Trump, and that, plainly, was not the objective of Vladimir Putin and his minions.
The far more significant reason—and one which virtually no one seems to be addressing—is what the Russians having hacked Republicans but not released what they found will almost certainly mean for their ability to control Trump as president. All President Putin’s men will be in a position to threaten to release during a Trump Administration what they held back, for their own purposes, before the election, unless he does their bidding even more completely than he might otherwise do.
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