Tim Libretti is a professor of U.S. literature and culture at a state university in Chicago. A long-time progressive voice, he has published many academic and journalistic articles on culture, class, race, gender, and politics, for which he has received awards from the Working Class Studies Association, the International Labor Communications Association, the National Federation of Press Women, and the Illinois Woman's Press Association.
Trump’s top economic advisor Larry Kudlow has hinted that another supposed middle-class tax cut may be in the works, a “Tax Cut 2.0” to be delivered—Surprise! Surprise!—in time for the 2020 election season, an bare naked ploy to try to convince average Americans he really cares about and their economic interests. As the saying goes,…
In response to news that the economy created 266,000 jobs in November and the unemployment rate dipped to 50-year lows, CNN editor-at-large Chris Cillizza rehashed the tired but nonetheless damaging and deceptive narrative that “the economy” is indeed strong, providing Trump a clear path to re-election if only he were politically deft and disciplined…
Back in 2004, Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter with Kansas? elevated the state as the textbook case of how the Republican party has been able to leverage a platform of conservative social values to sway the electorate to vote against its economic interests. Railing against abortion, affirmative action, big government, elitism, political correctness, and…
Speaking before the Ohio Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia in February of 1950, Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy waved a piece of paper before his audience’s eyes, insisting he had a list of over 200 communists working in the state department. He had, of course, no such list. His anti-communist crusade is now…
Remember in 2016 when an armed Oregon militia group, led by Ammon and Ryan Bundy, occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Princeton, Oregon? They viewed the federally managed land as an encroachment on their land use rights as ranchers and as an example of the federal government’s overreach in asserting its authority against the…
In a recent interview with CNN, billionaire Leon Cooperman choked up, visibly upset as he talked about the future he envisioned for his vast fortune and the havoc he imagines a wealth tax, like those proposed by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, would wreak on his plans. He characterizes her proposal as “socially and morally…
Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax proposal has certainly sparked debates not just about basic questions of fairness, of morality, but also about the economic effectiveness and very meaning of taxation. The debate raises the question of what it means to invest in America. Beto O’Rourke, in the last debate, jumped on the Warren-bashing bandwagon, accusing Warren’s…
After last Thursday’s House vote to advance the inquiry into the impeachment of President Donald Trump, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) labeled the proceeding a “soviet style impeachment process” and effectively accused democrats of hijacking the 2020 election, usurping the people’s democratic rights because of their sour grapes over the 2016 presidential election results. “Clearly,” he…
The national security threats the behavior of President Donald Trump and his administration have posed to the United States have justifiably been the focus and concern of those members of congress leading the impeachment inquiry. After all, the Mueller report compellingly concluded that the Russian Government “interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and…
While pollsters continue to assess the American electorate’s appetite for impeaching and removing President Donald Trump from office for his criminal behavior, finding still a population virtually split down the middle, voters seem to have far less tolerance for the fraudulent enterprises of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Evidence suggests, in fact, that making the impact…
The wealth taxes Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have proposed continue to provoke the malice of Wall Street, corporate democrats, and now even other Democratic candidates running for president. As I have written in PoliticusUsa.com (here and here), the intensity of the energy devoted to this criticism, combined with the lack of…
While we don’t yet know how the Supreme Court will decide the major civil rights question before it regarding whether or not gay and transgender people are protected under federal legislation that outlaws employment discrimination “on the basis of sex,” the nature of the debates and the questions raised from the bench last week when…
Media pundits often wonder why Republicans have turned a blind eye to and refused to call out the myriad and fairly well-documented behaviors of both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s Russian government, which gravely undermine the U.S.’s national security, interfere in our election processes, and generally influence the White House to pursue policy that serves…
While the Turkish continue to deny this history to this day, in 1915 the nation of Turkey engaged in a genocide of the Armenian people. The mass killing reduced the Armenian population from two million to 400,000. Last week, with the knowledge and approval of U.S. President Donald Trump, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered…
The latest tact of Republican apologists for President Donald Trump’s violating his oath of office by publicly urging China to interfere in the 2020 presidential election is to insist that Trump was just joking. As Jason Easley reported for PoliticusUsa.com , Representative Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, in an interview with George Stephanopolous Sunday morning on…
A lot of energy has gone into railing against the tax policy proposals forwarded by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. In the most general terms, they both push hard for raising taxes on the extremely wealthy, the wealthiest of the wealthiest, who have been able to avail themselves of the opportunities this nation affords to…
The handling of the Mueller report should serve as a cautionary tale. The report was full of facts, and Democrats kept trying to confirm them instead of blaring and declaring them. The facts dissipated, losing credibility.
Imagine picking up a newspaper, or scrolling through your favorite internet news source, and coming across articles with headlines such as “How to Burglarize Your Neighbor’s Home,” “How to Undermine Public Education for America’s Children,” or “How to Destroy Sidewalks and Streets and Sabotage Other Infrastructure.” I like to think you’d find that news source…
As talk of a looming recession increases in volume, looking back to the Great Recession in 2008 to assess the effectiveness of how we as a nation responded to it seems like a good idea. It’s always healthy to learn from one’s mistakes and process the past, right? And there were mistakes. The government approved…
Last Thursday the Trump administration announced its intention to revoke California’s right to set its own auto emissions standards. The state’s special authority to set its own standards, stricter than federal regulations, dates back to the 1960s when California was battling particularly severe air pollution. Since then, however, California has been influential in encouraging other…
When asked about his approach to education in last Thursday’s Democratic primary debate, Pete Buttigieg’s response boiled down the difference between his approach and Donald Trump’s to its most basic element. “Step one,” he said, would be to “appoint a secretary of education who actually believes in public education.” Buttigieg’s pithy statement put sharply into…
Defending conservativism against charges it is an inherently racist ideology has become de rigeur among not just that sector of Republicans that has for some time sought to distinguish and distance themselves from Trump but also among more recent apostates jumping the sinking Trumpist GOP Titanic. As Trump’s overt racism threatens to expose, or indeed…
President Donald Trump, in comments made at the recent G-7 summit in France, positioned himself as the protector of United States’ wealth, justifying his refusal to address, much less believe in, climate change on grounds that investing in green energy production would damage the nation’s economic standing. The U.S. has “tremendous wealth,” Trump told reporters….
We hear a lot about progressive democrats campaigning on platforms promising “free stuff” to voters: free healthcare, free college, free childcare, and so on. Critics love to take these progressives to task, as if it’s some kind of “gotcha” moment, pointing out that obviously none of this stuff will be “free.” Or else they take…
This week’s stock market antics and the occurrence of an inverted yield curve have provided compelling evidence portending another economic recession. These economic indicators, in addition to spurring stock sell-offs and turbulent market volatility, also sparked a firestorm of debate and commentary regarding how a potential recession would impact Trump’s 2020 re-election bid. The word…
President Trump, we should know by now, is the master of distraction, making it hard for the news cycle to keep up with his endless string of controversy-inspiring tweets and incendiary behaviors. As the media gets caught up in dissecting the language and meaning of one text, he is on to something else. It is…
Back in the day, during the Reagan era, New York Democrat and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan termed the GOP the “party of ideas” because of their growing reputation for intellectual prowess. At the 2016 Republican National Convention, despite all indications to the contrary, self-proclaimed idea-man Paul Ryan kept this illusion alive, declaring, “It still comes…
Just yesterday I attended a fair in Port Oneida, Michigan celebrating rural culture. While the focus on Michigan, when it comes to economic matters, tends to be on the manufacturing sector, largely, of course, because of the dominance of the auto industry, the importance of the rural economy and population loom large, not just in…
When Donald Trump tweets something patently racist, as when he tweeted the squad of four should go back where they came from or when he derided Baltimore as “rat and rodent infested mess,” media pundits can spend days debating whether or not Trump is racist. The idea seems to be that if Trump can be…
Joe Scarborough, former Republican but still self-proclaimed conservative host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, has hoisted himself into media and political limelights of late with his popularizing of the moniker “Moscow Mitch” for senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, who has refused to bring to the senate floor for a vote a bill to fund measures to…
Trump’s controversial tweet about sending the squad of four— Representatives Ayanna Pressley, Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar—back to where they came from has certainly captured the media’s attention the past week, recycling seemingly endless and pointless debate about whether or not Trump is a racist Don’t we have bigger issues of racism to…
In the first round of Democratic primary debates, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand spoke up strongly not just in favor of women’s democratic rights but in favor of the necessity of having women representing themselves both on the political stage and in the proverbial political back room in advocating for their own interests. The second part of…
When he resigned his position as Labor Secretary in the Trump administration yesterday, Alexander Acosta explained, “It would be selfish to stay in this position and continue talking about a case that’s 12 year old, rather than the amazing economy we have right now.” For his part, Trump hailed Acosta as “a great labor secretary,”…
That the clock is ticking when it comes to initiating impeachment proceedings against Trump is steadily becoming a kind of common wisdom among Democrats and media pundits alike. Writing for AP News, Laurie Kellman captures this increasingly popular position, insisting that “the tick-tock of time is an inexorable one as the 2020 presidential and congressional…
In an interview on Morning Joe after two nights of Democratic primary debates, Colorado Senator and Presidential candidate Michael Bennet pointed out that during those two nights not one question was asked of the twenty candidates regarding educational policy. Indeed, he continued, no question was asked of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the 2016…
Despite the fact that Donald Trump wooed disgruntled working-class Americans with promises to protect and even create well-paying jobs, it’s not hard to see that these promises were empty and that he’s been no advocate for the American worker.
Recently Republican Congressman Sean Duffy from Wisconsin, in an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, framed the looming prospect of Donald Trump’s impeachment as ridiculous. His reason? The economy is supposedly booming. He told Hayes, “They have higher wages, lower unemployment. We’re killing it in Wisconsin. You want to impeach that guy?” Hayes, of course, challenged…
In the early moments of the American republic, the nation’s sovereignty and security presented no small worry to the founders. In the 1790s, independence was in its fragile infancy, a nascent experiment threatened by the former mother country; and the French Revolution created anxiety those violent passions would spill overseas, inspiring more upheaval in the…
As Don Draper, the central character of AMC’s hit show Mad Men, likes to say, “If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.” For the GOP across the nation these days, though, the prevailing attitude is more to the effect of, “If you don’t like what’s being said, repress the conversation.” The GOP…
We need to know, and the nation’s knowing depends on Congress taking the lead, not waiting for the people’s will to catch up.History shows that’s not how we realize our ideals and uphold the Constitution.
In a tweet last March, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded to the elitist assaults on her that attempt to diminish and discredit her intellect and governing abilities based on her working-class roots and identity: “I find it revealing when people mock where I come from, & say they’re going to ‘send me back to waitressing,’ as…
We can hear the authoritarian echoes in both Trump’s and Bolsonaro’s policies to lower higher education.
The “then what” is that Trump’s insistence he can make up the rules when he doesn’t own the ball is inflicting devastating damage on farmers and workers in the U.S. and on the U.S. economy overall.T
British economist John Maynard Keynes famously wrote in 1923, in a tract on monetary policy, “In the long run, we’re all dead.” Economists have debated the significance of this wry theoretical phrase. Some have critiqued him, along with other economists who sought to moderate the austerity policies of governments during times of intense economic retraction,…
We know that the Philippines, Kuwait, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia are among the foreign governments booking large blocks of rooms at the Trump International Hotel with the hopes and intents of currying favor with the President. And we know that foreign lobbyists, particularly from Saudi Arabia, are doing the same. And we know that Trump’s…
A recent study conducted by the University of Queensland in Australia may very well provide some very valuable insights to help Americans understand and assess President Trump’s behaviors, beliefs, and policy positions. This study, published in Intelligence magazine, identifies a correlation between homophobia and lower cognitive abilities, linking hatred and prejudice with lower intelligence. The…
The best chance of shifting America’s popular mind might be to focus on these campaign promises, keeping the conversation on what Trump has done. Has he worked for the American people? Or is he working for Trump and lining his own pockets?
Can we call an economy “successful,” if people living within it are being harmed, not served?
Recalling Roosevelt’s four freedoms helps us realize exactly the damage Trump is doing but also helps us keep our eyes on the prize of what we need to correct, restore, and achieve to enjoy Roosevelt’s ideals of freedom.
Recognizing that granting imprisoned people voting rights is essential to challenging racism and achieving democracy stands as a key and crucial challenge for progressives if we are to approach the achievement of democracy.
Back in February 2017 at a Black History Month event, President Donald Trump regaled his audience with his insights about famous African Americans’ contributions throughout U.S. history. He identified Frederick Douglass as “an example of somebody’s who’s done a great job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.” Shamefully, he hasn’t received any…
And are we foolish enough to believe Putin and the Russians care about the healthy and secure futures of American workers? Of America’s children?
Gaining notoriety for its historical financial support of anti-LGBTQ organizations, fast-food restaurant Chick-fil-A, it was recently reported, has continued to donate to such causes to the tune of $1.8 million, according to recently released tax documents. Some seven years ago, you may recall, the company was thrust into the center of a national controversy when…
In short, the danger in Trump’s language is that, for the surprisingly impressionable national audience, he degrades our democratic processes and safeguards against tyranny by recasting the fundamentals of democracy as instead the coarse and brutish misdeeds of a dictatorial power grab.
For all the talk about socialism and the Green New Deal, though, what really drives Ocasio-Cortez, what is really at the root of her thinking, is her recognition of the need to achieve democracy in America in the most fundamental of ways and in ways, at least in my experience, most Americans rarely think about.
To perhaps an unprecedented degree in the United States, we are witnessing an increasingly serious debate playing out about the relative merits of capitalism and socialism.
In short, Trump’s policies aren’t helping, and the prospects aren’t looking good.
One of my favorite book titles is that of Tom Moylan’s 1986 study of utopian literature: Demand the Impossible. He explains, if memory serves, that he saw those words spray-painted on a wall in the Paris streets during the 1968 mass rebellions. The phrase stayed with him, clearly, as it has with me The phrase…
Nonetheless, his complete lack of response and sense of urgency with regard to the first part of Barr’s summary detailing the plot and practices of Russian election interference still must worry us, whether or not his lack of response surprises us.
The proposal Ms. Trump celebrated and the budget the President proposed, both calling for severe reductions in the funds available to those aspiring to a college education, come at a time when well-qualified students are encountering increasingly formidable financial barriers to attending college, which, by historical standards, are more severe than ever.
Trump’s recent rants against General Motors and the United Auto Workers for the closing of the Lordstown, Ohio plant where the Chevy Cruze was assembled reveal that Trump indeed has his own version of capitalism, one rooted in an understanding of economics that has little to no resemblance to capitalism.
Remember President Donald Trump’s State of the Union addresses last February and in particular in January 2018 amid a wave of teachers’ strikes? Can you recall the talking points he elaborated on the need to support public education? No? Well, that’s because since taking office he’s uttered barely a word about our at-risk public education…
The outrage the college admissions scandal has inspired tends to be directed at those it deems undeserving, not at meritocracy and the class hierarchy and inequality it fuels and justifies. The outrage, put another way, is calling for a more “just” inequality in which those who truly deserve more than others get it.
Though the U.S. government has opened for business again, it is worthwhile to understand the anti-worker venom that perhaps motivated and certainly prolonged Trump’s Republican-backed government shutdown, which has the notoriety of being longest shutdown of the federal government in American history. Justifiably, the lion’s share of the media coverage and political debate around the…
The conservative assault on women’s basic human rights just doesn’t stop. And just as the GOP hired Arizona-based sex-crimes prosecutor Rachel Mitchell to serve as a kind of figleaf to cover the obscene nakedness of their shameful misogyny, we also see Republican-aligned women coming out in full force to play an identity-politics game geared toward…
Even while many in our culture are finding some measure of satisfaction and a sense of justice being done in the prison sentence doled out to Bill Cosby for his years of sexually predatory behavior, the GOP at least seems to have consciously decided, as a matter of political strategy, to take a hard-line against…
While Donald Trump, as we have heard in the infamous Planet Hollywood tape, gloats about how his wealth and power enable him to violate women sexually without consequences and while he smears those, such as Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who call him on this behavior, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts recently offered a stunning contrast…
Democrats and progressives of all stripes will need to paint a vivid portrayal of the wonderful life we might have been living with Hillary Clinton as President and the possibilities they can deliver if they achieve congressional majorities.
Dan Gilroy’s 2017 film Roman J. Israel, Esquire, starring Denzel Washington and still lingering in theaters, has either been critically panned or just plain overlooked.
In a political moment when the American president not only stokes the fires of sexism, racism, and the hate they represent but also seems to embody these values, Martin McDonagh’s 2017 film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, in its thoughtful, sympathetic, and loving approach to understanding hate, could not be more timely. Condemning the hate…
Celebrants of the recent tax bill have claimed, echoing Trump’s top economic advisors, that the massive corporate tax cut will indeed trickle down or, to mix metaphors, serve as the proverbial rising tide that will lift all boats. CNBC’s Patti Domm was quick to validate this exuberant claim, pointing to announcements from Wells Fargo and…
Over the last July 4 holiday, in an infamous moment inspiring public outrage, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was captured on film enjoying a public beach with his family. His family were the only ones on the beach, as the beach had been closed to the public because the state, due largely to a Christie…
One hallmark of Donald Trump’s presidency to date has been his ignorant blustering about the office he holds, notoriously over-reaching in his assertions of power and bumping up against the checks and balances our founders put in place precisely to protect our democratic institutions against bullying tyrants such as Trump has proven himself to be….
Now he is actually glorying in telling the American people that he intentionally tried to deceive them to smuggle unpopular legislation harmful to the American people through Congress.
Remember last July when Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced sanctions against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro Moros and his regime? At the time the Maduros regime was attempting to re-write Venezuela’s constitution to erode provisions enforcing democratic institutions in order to secure dictatorial powers for himself. Mnuchin issued a statement last July 31 that, looking back,…
While Colin Kaepernick has effectively been locked out of the National Football League, his kneeling protests continue to inspire controversy and comment.
The problem is, again, that those constituents you and I might call people, the GOP, federally and at the state level, have decided are “not even people.”
The recent uprisings at Republican town halls are demonstrating the power of the people to withstand and turn back the assault on democracy
James Madison said representatives should be able to “withstand the temporary delusion” to “give time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection.”
Trump’s presidency, with its emphasis on law and order, is trying to sell us the idea that a repressive society is a free society.
“What is the best way to decimate a community? Deny its people access to healthcare.” “What is the best way to decimate a community? Shut down its largest employer.” These questions were asked and answered by Tim Egan, CEO of Chicago’s Roseland Community Hospital, last Sunday, January 15, as he opened his comments at a…
Efforts to undermine unions diminish democratic operations in our schools and disempower those who are most attuned to what our children need.
Is there a minimum wage of whiteness? When will those whites, of all classes…cease to feel a benefit of racism and see a benefit in solidarity?
In a post-election episode of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough and political analyst Mark Halperin insisted that the Trump victory should have been foreseeable by anyone watching and thinking rationally. The signs of disaffection with Washington were everywhere, and the antipathy to Hillary Clinton—and the Clintons as an institution (and foundation!)—glaringly saturated the electorate. If,…
Trump has effectively functioned as a smoke screen for the remarkably consistent orchestration of a Republican scorched earth policy at the state level
“Can we wonder that many reformers think that measures are not likely to be taken on behalf of women, unless their wishes could be publicly represented by women?”
Ignoring the greater good, Trump has shown himself to be far more interested in using the people’s government to serve his private interests
The GOP has given up on governing and instead dedicated itself to aggressively redistributing wealth to the top at the expense of the rest
Rauner has chosen to plunder the state for his own private interest and those of his cronies.
Rauner is falling in with the strategy we have seen from Sam Brownback in Kansas, Scott Walker in Wisconsin, and Rick Snyder in Michigan
The problem has nothing to do with Washington, D.C. “choking off” infrastructure spending. The problems lay in Snyder’s tax cuts
It has been claimed Sanders is unelectable and unrealistic, but his years as senator suggest his ability to hold onto his ideals while he works the daily grind of the political process
Trump’s own business practices are and have been characterized by the drive to decrease wages and benefits for workers while it has been precisely governmental efforts, on both Federal as well as state levels, which have succeeded in legislating or attempted to legislate higher minimum wages.
Witness the reality of the GOP’s keep-the worker-down economics and its persistent drive to re-distribute wealth from the bottom to the top
The health of an economy should correlate directly to the health of the people living within it, not to their economic impoverishment. Bernie Sanders’ socialist presence in the presidential primary mix as well as populist sentiment brewing on both sides of the political aisle promise, hopefully, to keep the much-needed conversation on income inequality front…
Although New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is tired of hearing about increasing the minimum wage, it is worth noting that this January 1, nine states, including New Jersey, will see their minimum wages rise because of indexed increases.
We have come to serve the economy rather than the economy serving us. We ask people to suffer to save the system that produces suffering, instead of creating a system that seeks to eliminate suffering.
So how exactly can we address income inequality by simply asking everyone to learn new skills and find a better job, avoiding the reality of the need for a re-distribution of social resources? We can’t.
If we were able to ask the average American if s/he would be willing to pay $12.50 annually so that thousands upon thousands of people who work for a living might stand a chance of meeting their basic needs, I wonder how s/he would respond?
Rather than asking individuals to increase their value, we need to transform how we as a society value the work individuals do.