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Trump's Job Approval: Gallup
Congressional Voting: 538.org
March
January 21, 2017
GET-ON-THE-BUS TO DC: Events at Somerset County Federation of Dem Women
"Non-violent demonstrations are twice as effective as violent demonstrations in effecting regime change."
Erica Chenoweth
Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict
(New York, NY: Columbia University Press, August 2011)
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Read
"At their core, the principles of civil resistance are inherently democratic:
non-violent campaigns require mass public support & participation if they are to succeed."
(This is an Uprising, Engler & Engler, 2016)
Gene Sharp
The Politics of Non-Violent Action, 1973
From Dictatorship to Democracy Handbook, 1993
Saul Alinsky
Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, 1971
Erica Chenoweth
Why Civil Resistance Works
Re-Consider
Remember
- The Economy -
When Obama took office, the Dow was 6,626; when he left, it was 19,875
The deficit reduced by $800 billion and gone from 9.8% to 3.2% of GDP
By January 2017, the US recorded 82 straight months of private sector job growth, the longest streak in US history
11.3 million new jobs were created under President Obama, far more than President Bush
Obama has taken unemployment from 10% down to 4.7%
Obama preserved the middle class tax cuts
Consumer confidence has gone from 37.7 to 98.1 during Obama’s tenure
Corporate profits are up by 144%
The Obama administration saved the US Auto industry; 10.4m American cars were sold at beginning of term, 17.5m upon exit
US Exports are up 28%
President Obama passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
He signed Credit Card reform so that rates could not be raised without notification
- Education -
He doubled Pell Grants for college education
High School Graduation rates hit 83%, an all time high
- Military -
Homelessness among US Veterans dropped by half
Travel for families of fallen soldiers is now paid for when remains are flown home
Obama added Billions of dollars to mental health care for our Veterans
He reduced the number of troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan
President Obama repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
Obama shut down the US secret overseas prisons
He banned torture
- Healthcare -
Uninsured adults decreased to <10%; 90% of adults are now insured, an increase of 20 million adults
People are now medically covered for pre-existing conditions
The growth rate of insurance premiums has slowed under Obama
Obamacare has extended the life of the Medicare insurance trust fund until 2030
Abortion is down
- Equality & Fairness -
He appointed the most diverse cabinet ever
Gays and Lesbians can now marry and enjoy the marital benefits
He outlawed Government contractors from discriminating against LGBT persons
He passed the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act
Obama banned solitary confinement for juveniles in federal prisons
Violent crime is down
- Security -
He negotiated with Syria to give up and destroy its chemical weapons
His bi-annual Nuclear Summit convinced 16 countries to give up and destroy their loose nuclear material so it could not be stolen
He normalized relations with Cuba
He killed Osama Bin Laden and retrieved all the documents in his possession for analysis
- Science -
He overturned the scientific ban on stem cell research
NASA landed a rover on Mars
Solar and Wind Power are at an all time high
Reliance on foreign oil is at a 40 year low
Resist
The New Yorker, 2/2017: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds
Steven Sloman, a professor at Brown, and Philip Fernbach, a professor at the University of Colorado, both cognitive scientists, believe sociability is the key to how the human mind functions or, perhaps more pertinently, malfunctions. They begin their book, “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone” (Riverhead), with a look at toilets.
Virtually everyone in the United States, and indeed throughout the developed world, is familiar with toilets. A typical flush toilet has a ceramic bowl filled with water. When the handle is depressed, or the button pushed, the water—and everything that’s been deposited in it—gets sucked into a pipe and from there into the sewage system. But how does this actually happen?
In a study conducted at Yale, graduate students were asked to rate their understanding of everyday devices, including toilets, zippers, and cylinder locks. They were then asked to write detailed, step-by-step explanations of how the devices work, and to rate their understanding again. Apparently, the effort revealed to the students their own ignorance, because their self-assessments dropped. (Toilets, it turns out, are more complicated than they appear.)
Sloman and Fernbach see this effect, which they call the “illusion of explanatory depth,” just about everywhere. People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people. In the case of my toilet, someone else designed it so that I can operate it easily. This is something humans are very good at. We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins.
“One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.
This borderlessness, or, if you prefer, confusion, is also crucial to what we consider progress. As people invented new tools for new ways of living, they simultaneously created new realms of ignorance; if everyone had insisted on, say, mastering the principles of metalworking before picking up a knife, the Bronze Age wouldn’t have amounted to much. When it comes to new technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering.
Where it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain. It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about. Sloman and Fernbach cite a survey conducted in 2014, not long after Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Respondents were asked how they thought the U.S. should react, and also whether they could identify Ukraine on a map. The farther off base they were about the geography, the more likely they were to favor military intervention. (Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine’s location that the median guess was wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.)
Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.
Partisanship as Tribal Self-Expression
Working-class Americans who voted for Donald J. Trump continue to approve of him as president, even though he supported a health care bill that would disproportionately hurt them.
Highly educated professionals tend to lean Democratic, even though Republican tax policies would probably leave more money in their pockets.
Why do people vote against their economic interests?
The answer, experts say, is partisanship. Party affiliation has become an all-encompassing identity that outweighs the details of specific policies. Ms. Mason, along with Leonie Huddy, a professor at Stony Brook University, and Lene Aaroe of Aarhus University in Denmark, conducted an experiment to test the importance of policy. They found that people responded much more strongly to threats or support to their party than to particular issues. They became angry at perceived threats to their party, and enthusiastic about its perceived successes. Their responses to policy gains and losses, by contrast, were much more muted.
“Partisan identification is bigger than anything the party does,” said Frances Lee, a professor at the University of Maryland who wrote a book on partisan polarization. Rather, it stems from something much more fundamental: people’s idea of who they are.
Why Do They Support Him?
The history of bait-and-switch between conservative electioneering and conservative governance … calls out not of how conservative voters see their leaders, but of the neglected history of how conservative leaders see their voters.
Consider the parallels since the 1970s between conservative activism and the traditional techniques of con men. Direct-mail pioneers like Richard Viguerie created hair-on-fire campaign-fund-raising letters about civilization on the verge of collapse. One 1979 pitch warned that “federal and state legislatures are literally flooded with proposed laws that are aimed at total confiscation of firearms from law-abiding citizens.” Another, from the 1990s, warned that “babies are being harvested and sold on the black market by Planned Parenthood clinics.” Recipients of these alarming missives sent checks to battle phony crises, and what they got in return was very real tax cuts for the rich. Note also the more recent connection between Republican politics and “multilevel marketing” operations like Amway (Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, is the wife of Amway’s former president and the daughter-in-law of its co-founder); and how easily some of these marketing schemes shade into the promotion of dubious miracle cures (Ben Carson, secretary of housing and urban development, with “glyconutrients”; Mike Huckabee shilling for a “solution kit” to “reverse” diabetes; Trump himself taking on a short-lived nutritional-supplements multilevel marketing scheme in 2009, and classically, the producers of “The Apprentice” carefully crafting a Trump character who was the quintessence of steely resolve and all-knowing mastery. American voters noticed. Linda Lucchese, a Trump convention delegate from Illinois who had never previously been involved in politics, told (author) that she watched “The Apprentice” and decided that Trump would make a perfect president. “All those celebrities,” she told me: “They showed him respect.”
The dubious grifting of Donald Trump, in short, is a part of the structure of conservative history.