Month: November 2017

Government taxation of its citizens goes back at least six thousand years, and at least as far back as the Greeks, the purpose of taxes have always been twofold: To raise revenues for the government and to guide public policy. In the case of Athens, the social policy was to go to war with other nations, as Athens would raise taxes on a temporary basis to finance war-making. But Athens also taxed every inhabitant who did not have an Athenian mother and father, which certainly advanced a public policy that has recently gained adherents in many western nations: limit immigration.

Societies and governments are much more complex than they used to be. Most industry sectors and most of the utilities that define modern life like electricity and natural gas service didn’t even exist 200 years ago. Tax policy can’t help but favor certain industries and individuals, and typically the hand-up—be it in the form of tax credits or deductions—is a conscious attempt by our leaders to make people and industries do something, or stop doing something.

The overall dynamic of the current Trump GOP tax plans is to give most people a tax break today, but heavily weigh the benefits to top wage earners, especially in the financial industry, and those whose income comes mostly from investments; the tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy are permanent, while most of the breaks for everyone else are temporary. In either of its forms, the proposed new tax system will not be revenue neutral, but raise the budget by 1.5 trillion dollars. Despite this enormous increase in the deficit, the Trump GOP tax plan still needs to raise taxes on many people and cut government programs and services to pay for what can most accurately be described as an enormous tax break for the wealthy.

Within this broad outline are the details, most of which assert a public or social policy, and they certainly are devilish. Let’s then, take a look at the public policy implicit in both the overall thrust of the plan and in its minutiae.

On the macro level, the tax plan suggests that its developers do not believe that people have any responsibility to society and that society should be a cold and inhumane place in which everyone essentially is on their own, sink or swim, with no help to the poor or disadvantaged to level the playing field of a market economy of private actors.

I understand full well the Republican line on tax cuts for the wealthy dating back to before the Great Depression, nonsense that the wealthy and corporations will reinvest their tax savings to create new jobs and that high rates of taxation harm society’s producers. But all historical evidence going back at least to the 16th century in Spain demonstrates that in the real world raising taxes on the wealthy and lowering taxes on everyone else generally produces economic growth, whereas lowering taxes on the wealthy generally causes stagnation or economic decline, especially when accompanied by raising taxes on everyone else. An analysis of the cash flow when rich folk, everyone else and the government get more money demonstrates the almost offensive illogic in believing that lowering taxes on the wealthy creates wealth that flows down to everyone else. Governments spend all the money in their coffers, sooner or later, and for most modern governments, it’s sooner. That spending becomes jobs, government contracts and benefits to the poor and middle class, which then get spent. When everyone but the rich get more money, they spend most of it and save only a little, again putting money into the economy. The rich, by contrast, will stick most of the extra money into dead assets, that is, assets that do not create wealth such as collectibles, real estate and stocks that are bought on the secondary market and not directly from companies.

Except for the stupid and the fanatical, most elected officials and certainly most of the right-wing’s well-paid horde of think-tankers know that the idea that cutting taxes on the wealthy will unleash growth is a ridiculous myth. We must therefore look behind their overheated rhetoric to understand the true public policy in the Trump GOP plan. If we judge the plan by past history and the outcomes predicted by virtually all mainstream economists, it’s clear that the public policy goes beyond laissez faire to create a society that favors the already wealthy and provides no helping hand to anyone else.

The provisions of the plan involve some radical truly social thinking. In the case of education, Ted Mitchell, President of the American Council on Education, put it best when he called the Trump GOP tax plan “a reverse GI Bill.” The GI Bill put millions of veterans of World War II through college free or at a very low cost, through government support of public higher education. By contrast, the Trump GOP plan removes many of the tax breaks that help people pay for their college education, making college even less affordable than it already is in the 21st century:

• Repeals the interest deduction for student loans, which is taken by more than 12 million people.
• Repeals the $2,500 tax credit that middle-class parents can take for having children in college.
• Forces graduate students to pay taxes on the tuition waivers they receive, which will make many leave school.
• Places a 1.4 percent excise tax on college endowments that exceed a specific limit, which will affect over 150 colleges and reduce the funds these institutions have for scholarships to needy students. Thus, in the same bill that gives corporations a tax break and continues the carried income tax break for hedge fund managers, most major universities will pay a new tax.

It’s clear that the Trump GOP do not see the benefit in providing or facilitating the educational aspirations of its citizens and see no benefit to society to educating the next generation of managers, engineers, physicians and other medical professionals, technicians, communicators, software developers, translators, urban planners, human resource professionals, teachers and the myriad other professions that require higher education. Nor do the Republicans place any value on the pursuit of knowledge or research and development.

Let’s move on to healthcare. From its many failed attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act we already know the GOP has no interest in providing low-cost universal healthcare, a birthright enjoyed by the citizens of virtually every other industrialized country of the world. Again, the GOP espouses the false idea that the marketplace will provide less expensive, higher quality healthcare, and again the facts belie this nonsense. The citizens in our private sector healthcare system pay more than those in other industrial nations and we get less, as our infant mortality and life expectancy rates are much worse. In truth, the rightwing that controls today’s Republican Party does not believe that healthcare is a birthright and questions the idea that it is in the best interests of society to keep its citizens heathy at an affordable price.

The Senate version of the tax bill reinforces the Trump GOP notion that it’s every person for himself when it comes to healthcare by ending the individual mandate that makes those who don’t buy healthcare pay a special tax. Most experts agree that ending the individual mandate will leave 13 million more people uninsured and raise premiums for everyone else by 10%. Both bills end the deduction for unusually high medical expenses. It’s clear that Trump and the GOP do not really care about the health of Americans—at least not as much as they care about giving the ultra-wealthy more money.

For decades, the federal government has encouraged support of charities and religious institutions by allowing deductions for charitable contributions. But to take the deduction, the tax filer has had to itemize deductions. By raising the standard deduction (which cuts taxes) and lowering the maximum that can be deducted, the Trump GOP plan provides less incentive to give to charities and will likely result in charities receiving less funding. Moreover, ending the estate tax will likely lead to fewer and less generous major gifts, as the wealthiest one-fifth of one percent—the lucky few whose estates are large enough to be assessed estate taxes—will no longer feel the need to give to charities to reduce their tax burden. Thus, where once the public policy of our tax system encouraged charitable giving, the public policy advanced by the Trump GOP tax bill encourages selfishness.

The GOP tax plans rescind a number of tax credits, each of which was instituted to support a public policy deemed beneficial to American society as a whole. The credits up for repeal include the adoption tax credit, the credit for the elderly and the totally and permanently disabled, the credit associated with mortgage credit certificates, and the credit for plug-in electric vehicles. The GOP prefers lining the pockets of the already privileged over encouraging adoption, helping the elderly and disabled, supporting home ownership and building the market for non-polluting vehicles. To those who argue that the temporary (!) tax cuts partially or entirely offset the loss of credits and deductions miss the point: The changes collectively replace the use of tax policy to implement public policy with a kind of brutish and brutal lack of concern for the direction of the country.

The tax plan, of course, fits together with the budget. Proposed budget cuts to keep the deficit increase under $1.5 trillion also reflect public policy. The example of our foreign policy expenditures truly represents a turn that will be dangerous to both the United States and the rest of the world. The Trump budget calls for slashing the State Department by more than 30% while adding more than a 100 billion to the already bloated defense budget, including for the development of robot weapons and more sophisticated nuclear weapons. The social policy behind this shift is easy enough to see: We now prefer to go to war or oversee wars others fight for us than to achieve diplomatic solutions to world problems and disagreements with adversaries.

Other proposed budget cuts show a disregard for the importance of research and development, public education and environmental protection.

The tax plan provides more benefits to the ultra-wealthy than to the wealthy. It favors those whose income derives from investments over those who work for a living and get paid well for it—the Trumps and Mnuchins over LeBron James and Giancarlo Stanton. What’s the social policy there? To reward capital over labor, even high-priced labor.

We could go on, but let’s take a look at the vision of the future created by these different strands of public policy: A society of rich and poor in which most people are less educated and less healthy and live in a more polluted world than now and drive on crumbling roads and bridges to crumbling schools and shoddy public spaces, a world in which the elderly, disabled and disadvantaged are left to pretty much fend for themselves and in which no one will ever know peace as we fight or support dozens of regional and civil wars around the globe. Dystopia.

The overriding policy of Trump and the Republicans is to push the country into dystopia to satisfy the greed of a handful of billionaires. Among those ultra-wealthy are the members of the Trump family, who stand to gain tens of millions from the tax breaks right away. Upon the death of Trumpty Dumpty, that amount would increase to the value of his estate, which could be anywhere from $400 million to $4 billion or more, depending on whose estimate of his net worth you use.

In the future, when most American are living from hand to mouth trying to navigate their way along potholed roads and in broken down mass transit, the air foul with particles and carbon dioxide, their tap water undrinkable, most people in debt all their lives paying off their college degrees, the entire country running on obsolete and ramshackle early 21st century technology, the billionaires won’t care. They’ll have their own computer servers, servants, concierge medical service, security staff, airplanes and real estate in the more civilized locations of Paris, Berlin and Shanghai. It’s the ultimate end game of the politics of selfishness.

Imagine stand-up comic Henny Youngman, king of the one-liners, describing the Trump GOP tax proposals with one of his classic bits:

 So how big is the tax break for the wealthy in the new tax bill?

Why it’s so big that raising the deficit by trillions of dollars won’t cover it…

Why it’s so big that raising taxes on the middle class won’t cover it…

Why it’s so big that gutting Medicare, Medicaid, the State Department and other government programs won’t cover it…

That’s right folks, the Republicans have hit the trifecta of inequality. Raising taxes on the middle class, increasing the deficit and gutting important programs that help every American so that the wealthy can get another tax break. Each represents a wealth exchange in which the ultra-rich get richer and someone else gets poorer. Any of these three wealth exchanges would in and of itself injure the economy while creating greater inequality of wealth. Making all three is likely to send the country into a deep recession or a real depression.

The Trump GOP plans are perfectly crafted to offend all democratic principles: The richer the person, the bigger the tax break. The larger the corporation, the bigger the tax break. The more someone’s wealth is in capital such as financial assets and real estate—as opposed to salary—the bigger the tax break.

The GOP says that when you lower taxes, rich folk and corporations invest in creating more jobs and in paying better salaries. That’s not what history says. History tells us that rich folk pocket the money and then invest it in the secondary stock market (meaning it doesn’t help the company whose stock you bought although it helps the senior executives with lots of stock options; the company only benefits from the initial sale of the stock); buy government bonds to fund the deficit that their tax break created; and dump it into other assets like fine art, yachts, apartments in Manhattan and beach front properties. Meanwhile, money will have been taken out of the economy, as all the spending done by laid off government workers, recipients of government aid and the middle class before tax hikes will be gone. Within a few years of passage of either the House or the Senate version of “The Great Heist of 2017,” a new asset bubble will form then burst after which the economy will go into a rapid tailspin. Just like 1929, 1987 and 2008.

The wealthy pay historically low rates on their income in the United States, even after two mild tax increases during the Obama years. In the 1950’s, when the economy mostly boomed and there was less inequality of wealth than at any other time in American history, rich folk paid 91% of incremental income in federal income tax. Remember that means that they only paid 91% on the income over a certain amount, maybe a million dollars, truly a lot of money in those days. With all progressive income tax systems, everyone pays the same amount within income levels. The top rate always applies only to income above that limit. Everyone pays the lowest rate on their income up to that limit.

Studies by Thomas Piketty and others have established that the economy actually grows when we raise taxes on the wealthy—that is, until we raise them too much and it begins really to cut into spending and investment in job growth. And what’s the point when raising taxes on high tax brackets begins to hurt the economy? Piketty computed it to be a taxation rate of 70%, or roughly twice what the current maximum tax on income is.

In other words, instead of decreasing taxes on the wealthy, Congress should be raising them—and then investing the money in the kind of things that we did with our tax money in the 1950’s and 1960’s: pure scientific research, infrastructure improvement (focusing more on mass transit and less on roads and airports this time), public school and university education, energy development (solar and wind instead of nuclear), healthcare and helping the disadvantaged.

Many of the Republicans know that, if passed, their tax bill will sink the economy and increase inequality of wealth in the United States. Most don’t care because they serve as mere factotums to the ultra-wealthy who finance their campaigns and provide them with cushy sinecures after they retire from elected office. Today Republican candidates and elected officials—and many Democrats, too–count dollars not votes and represent a narrow constituency consisting of a handful of selfish multi-billionaires.

Talk about the other shoe dropping. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wasted no time after changing one regulation that will decrease access to news and freedom of the press to change another that does the same thing. Less than a week after announcing it would allow companies to own both broadcast stations and newspapers in the same town, the FCC is proposing to end net neutrality.

Yes, you read right.

The Trump FCC is on the verge of overthrowing net neutrality, the policy that Internet service providers (ISP) and governments must treat all data the same way. Net neutrality prevents ISPs from discriminating or charging different rates because of the user, content, website, platform, application or type of attached equipment.

Current net neutrality rules prohibit ISPs from slowing down, blocking or charging more for the delivery of Internet content. Without net neutrality, ISPs like Spectrum, Verizon and Comcast could create different levels of service, sending the content of big corporations that can afford the higher rates at faster speeds and slowing down other content. You could experience slowdowns in receiving and in sending content. As the New York Times points out in the first story it did on the new FCC plan, Verizon could slow down delivery of movies from Netflix because Netflix competes with Verizon’s FiOs.

The most profoundly disruptive part of the FCC plan—constructed by telecom henchman and FCC chair Ajit Pai—is the reversal of an Obama administration decision to consider Internet broadband service to be a utility. Because utilities such as electricity, landline phone service, home natural gas service and water, are considered essential to the participation in modern life and the economy, they are allowed to be heavily regulated—not just by the federal government, but by states as well. Governments regulate many aspects of a utility’s business—for example, what it can charge, how it can charge, the level of service it must provide, when it must provide free or subsidized rates, how it can advertise, where and how it can extend service, and standards and procedures for beginning and shutting off service.

There is currently little regulation of broadband service, but the Internet is still relatively new. Considering broadband to be a utility will make it easier in the future to institute those regulations that will make high-quality broadband service available to everyone at reasonable rates, like water and electricity. The FCC decision to take the “utility” label off broadband service is short-sighted and will eventually lead to more expensive or lower quality Internet connections for many, if not most people. It will be the equivalent of suddenly turning off the water tap or limiting electricity service to certain hours of the day.

Just as with the FCC decision to allow companies to own both broadcast and print media properties in one locale, Pai’s rationale for ending net neutrality is to enable telecoms to compete with Google and Amazon. And once again, the reasoning makes no sense. Google, Amazon and other Internet portals are not ISPs. They neither provide nor enable electrons to pass over wires or radio wave impulses to travel through air according to strict and highly detailed engineering specifications. All Amazon and Google do is provide content—a whole heck of a lot of it, to be sure.

If the FCC or the federal government have a problem with Facebook or Google, they should go after these companies, not create new regulations that threaten access to the Internet and freedom of speech. It’s increasingly clear that both Facebook and Amazon control vast amounts of information and business. For Amazon, the answer is simple—break the company up, like the government broke up Standard Oil and AT&T. The case of Facebook is less simple, because as a social media site it has become something of a utility. We could declare Facebook a utility and then break the profit-making part of the business—selling ads on Facebook—into several businesses, perhaps based on territory, which was the basis for the AT&T breakup. But when the FCC blames Facebook and Amazon as the excuse for ending net neutrality or allowing companies to own more local media outlets, it’s creating more large and problematic business behemoths instead of addressing the concerns about the existing behemoths.

Note, too, that this primary rational involves the impact on businesses, not the greater good of consumers or society. As usual, a right-winger is making the argument that if we help the already powerful, they will have the tools to help all of us. As with lowering taxes on the wealthy, it’s faulty logic that fails in real world conditions.

According to the Times short article, the FCC will vote on ending net neutrality in its December meeting, with the tally likely to be along party lines, 3-2 in favor of the proposal.

That means we don’t have much time to protest. Write to the FCC, to Donald Trump, and to your Senators and Congressional representatives. Attend any rallies or marches organized to uphold net neutrality. Spread the word via social media.

I imagine those who want to preserve net neutrality will be getting a lot of help from the large content-providing corporations that funded the protests in 2015 when the Obama FCC was considering the net neutrality issue. Those who naturally feel squeamish supporting anything that big corporations are behind, keep in mind that it was the support of big corporations that helped win the fight for gay marriage and transgender equality. Big corporations also helped to preserve the Affordable Care Act. Many are lining up against the GOP’s awful proposal to cut taxes on the wealthy and pay for it by raising taxes on the middle class, increasing deficits and cutting programs. Sometime you don’t get to choose who your trench mates are. You join hands and fight the common enemy, knowing you may be fighting your fellow soldier in another battle once this one is over.

Like so many of the battles being fought against the current administration, a lot is at stake. If we want to continue to have an open society with an easy flow and equal access to information and commerce, we must preserve net neutrality and the concept that broadband Internet is a utility.

We typically blame the decline of the news media in the 21st century on one of two factors: the growth of the Internet as a 24/7 source of news and the proliferation of fake and false news.

But given much less attention is the consolidation of news media and news-gathering operations. It used to be that the federal government had strict regulations about the number of radio and television stations any company could own and forbade ownership of both newspapers and broadcast stations in the same town. Even when single newspapers came to dominate many towns, there were typically many different organizations searching for and presenting the local and national news. A series of laws and new regulations over the past 35 years—aka the Reagan Era—has consolidated media ownership.

The key law was the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which enabled companies to own more stations. Larger companies bought smaller ones and suddenly instead of hundreds of owners of TV and radio stations across the country, there were only dozens.  We saw the impact on radio as Clear Channel, and recently Sinclair Broadcasting, and other companies owned by right-wingers gained control of the editorial policies of more and more stations.  Pretty soon the range of opinion on radio narrowed and moved extremely right. While Rush Limbaugh began making a name for himself before 1996, it was the consolidation of media ownership that led to the domination of talk radio by Rush and his clones—Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Michael Medved, ad nauseum.

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) took a major step in making the problem worse by voting to allow a single company to own both print and broadcast media in the same town. The FCC also voted to increase the number of TV stations one company can own in any given market. It was a close vote, 3-2, on party lines. Don’t be embarrassed if OpEdge is the first you’ve heard of this awful decision. It received very little coverage; the New York Times buried the news on page two of the business section.

The Obama Administration FCC also announced its intentions to end the restriction on ownership of both print and broadcast media in 2011, but eventually backed down. This time, under its brand new Trump-blessed FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, an Obama appointee to the FCC known for his pro-broadcasting industry views, the FCC has made good on the threat.

The rationales today and in 2017 are similar: That local media needs to consolidate to be able to compete against the giants of Facebook and Google. Pai, for example, has argued that local media companies would have a better chance to compete against Internet behemoths by combining local market resources.

The argument is completely specious for two reasons. First of all, most broadcast stations and daily/weekly newspapers are already owned by large chains. It’s not the case that the various media in Cincinnati will join forces to do one great job on local news. Instead, one national giant that also controls Toledo, Ohio, Syracuse, New York and four dozen other localities will end up owning all the media in Cincinnati. The new rule will surely lead to ever greater concentration of media outlets in the hands of fewer companies.

The second problem with Pai’s argument is the confusion of news-gathering with news media. Despite the alarming decrease in the number of daily newspapers over the past few decades, the number of absolute media outlets has increased: Internet news sites, cable news and specialty weekly and monthly pubs have more than made up for the decline in newspapers.

The problem is that while media outlets have increased, news-gathering on both the local and national level has decreased, as recent studies by the Pew Foundation and the FCC . And consolidation of media outlets is a major cause. When a company buys more than one newspaper, it can use the same news-gathering staff for all the news, except for the news that pertains to each newspaper’s particular readership, something most often defined by locality. All the newspapers in the Gannet or Tribune chains get the same national and international news and columnists. But each local paper has to find its own local news, typically in competition with the three or four local TV stations, the local business paper and the local alternative weekly.

Now that a single company is allowed to own all of these local properties, the company will be stronger, but primarily because it is able to cut costs through using the same news room to cover stories. The impact on overall news production will be horrific: Instead or more editorial boards deciding what is newsworthy, one will. Instead of three or more points of view on a story, there will be only one. Instead of three or more sets of reporters trying to dig deeper, only one will—that is, on those stories that the editors and business sides decide is worthy of delving. Instead of three or more sets of opinions on local issues, only one. Finally, instead of three or more organizations with ties to differing networks of national and international news gathering, there will be but one. The result will be less reporting.

Instead of actual reporting, what we’ll see once large media companies start buying up local properties is more of the same filler that has been replacing real news for the past 15 years or so, including more opinion pieces like this blog; more coverage of celebrities and sports; more repackaged how-to’s and advice columns; more part-and-parcel use of news release, fact sheets and “articles” produced by the government, rightwing think tanks, large companies and public relations firms; and more “sponsored” news reports, which are advertisements pretending to be news.

If the FCC and the current administration really cared about freedom of the press and creating a stronger marketplace of ideas, instead of allowing companies to buy more media properties, it would implement regulations and put pressure on Congressional leaders to break up the media industry oligarchy and stop the pilfering of free content that occurs on Facebook and Google News that denies news-producing media outlets needed revenues. Unfortunately, it would take Congressional action to do most of what I’m recommending:

• Limit ownership of media properties to a total of 10 properties, including television and radio stations, newspapers, news magazines, cable networks and websites, and push for expedited divestiture by the current media giants.
• Prohibit companies from owning more than three cable networks, and make all cable networks provide at least two hours of news coverage a day.
• Prohibit companies owning ISPs from also owning media outlets.
• Reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine, which used to make every broadcast television and radio outlet to devote some airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. The Fairness Doctrine was the law of the land from 1949 until 1987, when the Reagan FCC voted to end it.
• Allocate billions of dollars in aid to nonprofit or small for-profit media outlets to produce original reporting and fund it at least partially by taxing social media services and Internet service providers (ISPs) like Spectrum and FIOS for their “free use” of news.
• Legalize strict principles of journalistic ethics and start to prosecute journalists and media company executives for knowingly disseminating fake and false news. I propose to walk a fine line between censorship and responsible reporting. But by focusing exclusively on the reporting of facts and not the spouting of opinions, I think we can protect true freedom of the press.

I am not very optimistic about any of my recommendations being pursued by either a Republican or Democratic administration and Congress. Politicians of both parties have cozy relationships with the mainstream news media and conservative ones seem not to mind that so much in the rightwing media is false or fake news. Thus we face an ironic future in which there are many ways to access the same limited and somewhat flawed set of facts and conjectures about current events, society and government activity.

We like to conceive of history as a steady progress of human ingenuity solving problems and bringing an ever higher standard and quality of life to more and more people. But our 10,000 years of recorded history has seen many eras in which people were far worse off economically than the decades and centuries before, for example, during the 300 year transition from medieval times to the industrial revolution during which the world experienced the “Little Ice Age.”

In the same way, we have not seen steady progress in the spread of knowledge. After the death of Charlemagne, for example, Europe entered a centuries-long epoch in which scientific knowledge and literacy declined and intellectual activity retreated into monasteries.

It seems to me that America is are entering another intellectual dark age, in which people in general will know less, be able to reason less effectively and have less access to the gamut of human knowledge, from science to the arts. It’s not just the consolidation of the media and the decline in the number of news-gathering operations that is driving the drift towards ignorance. The large number of ideologically inclined think tanks churning out false research. The gradual starving of public schools. The increased involvement of for-profit corporations both in operating schools and in supplying material such as learning guides to public and private schools. The blurring of the distinction between the entertainment and news divisions of media companies and between advertising and news. The politicization of text books. The denial of basic scientific facts by one of our two major parties. The continued glorification of celebrity and mocking of intellectual achievement in the mass media. Virtually every trend in the marketplace of ideas is making Americans less educated, less informed and less capable of sifting through assertions and understanding which are reliably factual information and which are sheer nonsense.

Society has made an historical flip-flop in two paired values we hold about teenaged girls, especially aged 12-16.

In the old days, there was little wrong with a 32 year old man courting a 14 or 16 year old girl. As a citizen of the 21st century, I personally find it both distasteful and weird, a signal of an immature male adult. But in the old patriarchal days, the age difference didn’t matter that much. As recently as the late 1940’s, my Syrian grandfather—born and weaned in Aleppo—married off my 16 year old aunt to a man in his late twenties.

In those days, however, the sexuality of young girls was deemphasized, especially in middle and upper class families. Their dress was more modest. In some cultures, girls were educated separately or isolated from males of all ages. In some cultures, dates were chaperoned. For the most part, only bad girls manifested their sexuality.

Our attitudes about the normalization of adult-child marriage and the sexualization of young girls have both done a complete 180 over the course of the past century, not a sharp turn, but a slowly accelerating curve. Nowadays, we rightfully frown on sexual and romantic relationships between children and adults. From at least the 1970’s onward, there might exist some relationships between girls under 16 and boys between 18-24, but no gap as wide as 32 and 14, or 32 and 17 for that matter.

Yet American mass media sexualizes young women on a daily basis. No, change that to on a nanosecond-by-nanosecond basis. By the time a girl attains 14, she has been introduced to a wide array of clothes, cosmetics, toys, books, electronic games, advertisements and movies that reduce her and other young girls to sexual objects. Sexualization begins as early as four and five for girls participating in youth beauty pageants. Fulfilling or enhancing your sexual being unleashes a literal cornucopia of needs that products and services can provide, so it is a powerful tool for marketers and advertisers. As our consumer society has advanced, so has the sexualization of women—and men to a lesser extent—of all ages.

Through much of human history, the distinction between childhood and adulthood was not as stark as it has been in the 20th and the 21st century industrialized societies. Many children worked in prior centuries and there were few if any organized groups of or for children. Society in general was much less child-centered than today, for two reasons (if my memory of reading books on the subject has not failed me): Firstly, many children died in childbirth, which hardened people to death and caused them to invest less emotional energy in their children’s lives. Just as important, however, were the more constrained economic circumstances before the industrial revolution and then the great redistribution of wealth downward in the first two-thirds of the 20th century. As people have had more disposable income, they have gradually focused more of their expenditures on their children. A contemporary Thorsten Veblen would say that we are engaging in conspicuous consumption to demonstrate how much we love our children and how well-off we are. Children have joined—and perhaps started to replace—women on the fetishized pedestal of consumerism.

Today’s society has it three-quarters right. There should be a separation between childhood and adulthood. Societies in which children are protected and adults are expected to be responsible and independent corresponds to our developmental needs as primates with a long maturation process for our progeny.

In addition, open attitudes about sex, sexuality and sexual identity lead to healthier individuals and a healthier society. But while our advances towards a society accepting of everyone’s sexuality is positive, the market-driven sexualization of young girls is not. It forces young girls to be overly concerned with their bodies at a time of life when the body is rapidly changing and before their brains have developed enough to address the multiple sophistications of sexual relations in our complex society.

Additionally, we are seeing the lines between childhood and adulthood blurring over the past twenty years. Instead of adulthood being thrust prematurely on adolescence as in pre-industrial times, youth and adolescence have been extended into the twenties and the thirties, as more and more adults retain their entertainments and predilections of childhood. I’ve recited the litany of adult infantilization many times over the past few years, most recently a few weeks back.

Every year, more adults read Harry Potter and other adult fiction, watch movies about super heroes and fantasy worlds or about adult men—and now women—remaining adolescents, wear Halloween costumes to work, collect My Little Ponies and Legos, enjoy cosplay and participate in sleepovers in museums. Every year, more children remain at home or move back to live with their parents, often for economic reasons, but often also a sign of immaturity. All of these and many other cultural phenomena suggest that adults are thinking and acting more like children and that childhood is expanding to engulf part if not all an individual’s adult life.

The most telling sign that American society is becoming infantilized is that enough Americans voted for a 70-year-old infant with a child’s emotions, emotional needs, thought processes and level of education that a majority of Electoral College members could feel free to vote for him. Again, the dictates of consumer capitalism are to blame: it’s easier to convince a child to buy some shiny new, but useless, bauble than it is to convince an adult.

To be sure, our society has advanced to the point that victims feel they can come forward and identify their abusers. Coming forward of course discourages these creeps because they know in their hearts what they are doing is wrong and that, if made public, their actions will ruin their careers. Coming forward also prevents predators from becoming repeat offenders. The fall of Harvey Weinstein, Roy Moore, Kevin Spacey and all the other recently-outed prominent dirtbags gives us hope that we will soon have a society that is both non-sexist and non-sexually exploitive. That it came so soon after the election of an avowed sexual harasser and abuser only shows how much Americans were shaken by the results of the 2016 presidential election. All good.

But at the end of the day, the advances we have made in our mores through creating certain barriers between childhood and adulthood, having a more open society in sexual matters and now openly confronting sexual predators are corrupted and partial offset by our consumer-driven economy of conspicuous consumption that reduces all human experience to the buying of goods and services.

I can’t imagine that the New York Times editorial staff and news department ever talk to each other. They might not even read each other’s work. If they did, the Times might have to split into two publications or engage in a civil war as fiercely fought as the one between the rapidly-industrializing northern states and the traitorous slave-owning south 150 some odd years ago.

The Times editorial staff is reliably left-leaning, taking the Democrat’s side on environmental, immigration, healthcare, foreign policy, taxation, infrastructure, consumer protection, global warming and other key issues. It typically endorses Democratic candidates. The people writing the Times editorials tend to recognize and put a good deal of credence into legitimate research, which drives them further into the arms of left-leaners, since on virtually all issues, the facts speak loudly against rightwing positions.

The news department, however, displays a Republican bias that goes back at least to the 2010 midyear election, if not years earlier. In 2010, remember, the Times covered many Republican primaries but very few Democratic ones; printed exaggerated totals for the Tea Party March on Washington and underplayed the two left-leaning marches that drew about as many people each as the Tea Party did; and totally botched the job of explaining how those currently with health insurance would benefit from the Affordable Care Act.

The Times news staff usually doesn’t lie—that would be against journalistic ethics. Well maybe Judith Miller did stretch the truth in 2003 beyond recognition when she published as facts Bush II propaganda about Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction.

But, really, outside of wartime, the Times reporters don’t lie. They don’t have to. There are so many insidiously hidden ways to support Republicans and their untenable rightwing positions. Some examples:

• Give much more coverage to Republican candidates and primaries than to Democratic ones. It’s happened every election cycle since I started counting in 2010.
• View all issues through the prism of the right’s ideology, like focusing on deficits instead of job creation or the amelioration of suffering during the recent Great Recession. Until quite recently the Times accepted the GOP argument that tax cuts would create jobs; only when it became obvious to everyone that the purpose of the current cuts is to reward wealthy donors has the Times switch gears and focused news coverage on the great inequities that the Trump GOP plan would create or exacerbate.
• Doing positive and sympathetic features on people representing miniscule populations but with rightwing views, like the recent feature on mothers who believe their boys were incorrectly accused of sexual harassment on college campuses or the feature on people who believe that the Affordable Care Act hurt them.
• Focus heavily on rightwing protests, whiles ignoring leftwing protests or trying to normalize or perverting them through isolation. For example, the Times normalized the fact that so many women participated in protests after a serial harasser/molester was awarded a majority of the votes in the Electoral College in 2016 by focusing not on the issues, but on the large number of women mobilized. We can see perversion in the Times joining the rest of the mainstream news media in focusing on the very small number of weird, homeless and incendiary individuals participating in the Occupy occupations, trying to isolate the Occupy movement from the mainstream.
• Keeping in the news controversies that have been decided in favor of the left-center view years, and sometimes decades earlier, as the Times news department did with climate change and the vaccine controversy, and still does with the economic benefit of lowering taxes on the wealthy.
• Cherry-picking the research it publicizes to over-represent studies supporting positions on the right, which often entails misinterpretation of results or publication of bogus research. For example, the Times put a Koch-sponsored George Mason survey of the attitudes of weather personalities regarding global warming on the front page, while completely ignoring a Stanford University study that demonstrated that we could use wind power to supply all the world’s electrical needs with minimal impact on the environment. The Times report on a study of women’s lives a few years ago buried the fact that 62% of all American women now cohabitate without the benefit of marriage sometime in their lives and instead led and featured the meaningless trivia that women who cohabitate may be slightly more likely to get divorced if they later marry. One Times business writer recently explicated Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart’s elaborate theory that a nation’s economic growth stalls when it has too much debt but forgot to mention that Professors R & R made some basic math mistakes which, when corrected, produce numbers disproving their theory.
• Presenting an equal number of experts for both sides of an issue, e.g., quoting two scientists on each side of the global warming issue, when in fact, 95+% of all scientists concur that global warming is occurring and is caused primarily by human activity; or presenting the opinion of a woman who hasn’t vaccinated her children against that of an public health expert.

This weekend, the Times used one its favorite techniques: floating trial balloons for right wing nonsense. These article are always heavy on conjecture and light on facts. They quote unknown sources, accept speculation as the basis for further speculation and make hypothetical conclusions. These articles are often mystery-shrouded incantation of experts, elected officials and organizations considering, debating, analyzing, researching or developing, in other words, a chopped liver of supposition and conjecture.

Over the past few years, the Times has run front-page stories floating the following rightwing ideas: states filing for bankruptcy so they can renegotiate retiree pensions; spending billions updating and expanding our nuclear arsenal; cutting Social Security benefits as part of a plan to reduce the deficit; both Bush II and Obama proposals to increase troops in Iraq on a temporary basis. In some but not all of these examples, the Times is performing its function as “newspaper of record” by floating controversial Administration proposals so that, if met with opposition, the Administration can deny considering them. But in every case, the ideas about which the Times are decidedly rightwing.

This week’s trial balloon is not so much in favor of a rightwing idea and more in support of a discredited rightwing foreign policy apparatus, to wit, Donald Trump’s. The article claims that a team led by soon-to-be-indicted Jared Kushner is putting together a proposal to bring peace to Israel and then Palestinians, one that the Administration thinks has a high degree of success because, as one expert puts it, “the stars are in alignment.” The article details what may or may not be in the proposal, what concessions the Israelis, Palestinians and others may or may not be asked to make, while discussing reasons why all sides may or may not want to or be in a position to accept this as yet undefined “ultimate deal.”

Yes, the Times really uses—and in fact builds the article—the expression “Ultimate deal,” which sounds like standard Donald Trump puffery. It’s the largest, the oldest, the most expensive. The most luxurious, the most powerful, the most intelligent. The best. The ultimate deal.

Oh, and where are we in the process of forming and then getting all parties to accept this ultimate deal? “Mr. Trump’s team has collected “non-papers” exploring various issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and officials said they expected to address…”

In other words, a great big nothing burger.

The purpose of the article, thus is not to propose an obnoxious rightwing policy but to shore up an obnoxious rightwing regime. Even as the Times editorial excoriated Trump for trampling on the Constitution, the front page of the Times news section is puffing up a peace proposal before one even exists to make it look as if the Trump Administration is miraculously solving a problem that has plagued U.S. foreign policy for about 50 years.

Talk about a split personality. That’s Jekyll and Hyde.

When a mentally ill ISIS supporter plows a truck into bicyclists in New York, killing eight and injuring 15, Donald Trump calls for the ending of an immigration program that has given our country hundreds of thousands of highly productive and patriotic Americans over the years.

But when mentally ill gunmen perpetrate horror after horror, all Trump and the GOP can do is ask us to pray and blame it on mental illness. Not a word about making it harder for the mentally ill to purchase guns. Nothing about prohibiting automatic rifles, expanding the national no-gun registry, prohibiting perpetrators of domestic violence and people on the government’s terror list to buy or own a gun, extending gun waiting periods and making them apply to gun shows or making people take gun tests to own a gun license.

Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, Charleston, Orlando, San Bernardino, Sandy Hook. Those are some of the biggest shootings over the past few years. And so far in 2017, there have been 307 mass murders committed by firearms in the United States. Most of these were not acts of terrorism. All of them involved guns. Some of these mass murders could have been prevented by more restrictive gun laws. Others, like Las Vegas and Sandy Hook, would have been much less destructive if automatic weapons were prohibited.

Survey after survey shows that most people—and most gun owners—want greater restrictions on gun ownership. And yet, state legislatures and the Congress refuse to pass any law restricting gun ownership and in recent years sought to expand gun rights. As a group, legislators have displayed a craven disregard for life and a dismissive disrespect for voters. A persistent theme in news media coverage is the fear that candidates have of offending the voters. More often than not, however, and certainly in the case of gun control, candidates and legislators don’t care a gnat’s hindquarters about the voters’ wishes. What they care about is pleasing their corporate masters. The gun industry was one of the first industries to recognize the value of investing in the political process. It would be more accurate to write that politicians worry about what their constituencies think, and leave it to the insiders to understand that big money interests and not the voters are the constituencies being referenced.

The hard facts support gun control. While a federal law prevents federal dollars from supporting research into gun violence (yes, Congress did that!), enough research does exists to demonstrate without a doubt that the more guns in a society, the more deaths and injuries from gun violence will occur. The causes are various: self-inflicted, friendly fire, accidents, mass murders. But very few gun deaths and accidents occur in defense of life and property. The conclusion is obvious: the more we restrict guns, the fewer gun deaths and accidents we’ll have.

The facts disprove the main argument of the gun industry that owning a gun keeps you safe. You may feel safer with a gun in the house or strapped to your side, but you have actually put yourself at greater risk of injury or death.

Of course, gun ownership is not the only issue in which Trump and the GOP talk and act against the facts. On immigration, education, the environment and taxation, Trump and the GOP persist in spewing myths, lies and disproven theories.

There is a second edge to the Trump and GOP hypocrisy, which the events of the past few weeks have sharpened. When a Muslim or immigrant commit a mass murder, it’s terrorism. But when a red-blooded American commits a mass murder, it’s the act of a lone looney. Make no mistake about it: this racialization of mass murder is another attempt to distract us from the real problems. Sowing resent against Muslims and immigrants helps to create an us-and-them world in which poor and middle class white Christians learn to hate and fear people of color instead of hating and fearing the group that is really hurting them—the rich folk who want to curtail social welfare, infrastructure, healthcare and education programs that help poor and middle class white Christians more than any other group.

When a mentally ill ISIS supporter plows a truck into bicyclists in New York, killing 8 and injuring 15, Donald Trump calls for the ending of an immigration program that has given our country hundreds of thousands of highly productive and patriotic Americans over the years.

But when mentally ill gunmen perpetrate horror after horror, all Trump and the GOP can do is ask us to pray and blame it on mental illness. Not a word about making it harder for the mentally ill to purchase guns. Nothing about prohibiting automatic rifles, expanding the national no- gun registry, prohibiting perpetrators of domestic violence and people on the governments terror list to buy or own a gun, extending gun waiting periods and making them apply to gun shows or making people take gun tests to own a gun license.

Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, Charleston, Orlando, San Bernardino, Sandy Hook. Those are some of the biggest shootings over the past few years. And so far in 2017, there have been 307 mass murders committed by firearms in the United States. Most of these were not acts of terrorism. All of them involved guns. Some of these mass murders could have been prevented by more restrictive gun laws. Others, like Las Vegas and Sandy Hook, would have been much less destructive if automatic weapons were prohibited.

Survey after survey shows that most people- and most gun owners- want greater restrictions on gun ownership. And yet, state legislatures, and Congress refuse to pass any law restricting gun ownership and in recent years sought to expand gun rights. As a group, legislatures have displayed a craven disregard for life and a dismissive disrespect for voters. A persistent theme in news media coverage is the fear that candidates have of offending the voters. More often than not, however, and certainly in the case of gun control, candidates and legislators don’t care a gnat’s hindquarters about the voters’ wishes. What they care about is pleasing their corporate masters. The gun industry was one of the first industries to recognize the value of investing in the political process. It would be more accurate to write that politicians worry about what their constituencies think, and leave it to the insiders to understand that big money interests and not the voters are the constituencies being referenced.

The hard facts support gun control. While a federal law prevents federal dollars from supporting research into gun violence (yes, Congress did that!), enough research does exist to demonstrate without a doubt that the more guns in a society, the more deaths and injuries from gun violence will occur. The causes are various: self-inflicted, friendly fire, accidents, mass murders. But very few fun deaths and accidents occur in defense of life and property. The conclusion is obvious: the more we restrict guns, the fewer gun deaths and accidents we’ll have.

The facts disprove the main argument of the gun industry that owning a gun keeps you safe. You may feel safer with a gun in the house or strapped to your side, but you have actually put yourself at greater risk of injury or death.

Of course, gun ownership is not the only issue in which Trump and the GOP talk and act against the facts. On immigration, education, the environment and taxation, Trump and the GOP persist in spewing myths, lies and disproved theories.

There is a second edge to the Trump and GOP hypocrisy, which the events of the past few weeks have sharpened. When a Muslim or immigrant commits a mass murder, it’s terrorism. But when a red-blooded American commits a mass murder, it’s the act of a lone looney. Make no mistake about it: this racialization of mass murder is another attempt to distract us from the real problems. Sowing resentment against Muslims and immigrants helps us to create an us-and-them world in which poor and middle class white Christians learn to hate and fear people of color instead of hating and fearing the group that is really hurting them-the rich folk who want to curtail social welfare, infrastructure, healthcare and education programs that help poor and middle class white Christians more than any other group.

In A Cold Welcome, Ohio State historian Sam White reminds us that the 21st century is not the first time that Europeans in North America have ignored the climate and thereby created human disasters.

In the century after the second European discovery of the New World by Columbus in 1492, several European nations founded a number of settlements in North America, yet any attempt to colonize north of Florida ended disastrously: crop failures, deaths from freezing, famine, cannibalism, retreat. Professor White lays much of the blame on the Little Ice Age, a global cold spell that lasted from the late Middle Ages through the end of the 19th century but peaked in the 16th century. The first wave of the Little Ice Age probably led to the decline of Viking colonies established on Greenland in the 9th century.

But White also documents how European arrogance and ignorance contributed to the many failed attempts of Europeans to settle what later became the United States and Canada in the 16th century, and to the extreme hardships endured by the first settlers in Jamestown, Santa Fe and Quebec. Following the Greeks and Romans, the European science of that time postulated that all geographic regions at every latitude would have the same weather. In other words, New York’s weather would be the same as Madrid’s, Quebec’s weather would be the same as Paris’ and the weather in the north of Canada would be the same as London and Berlin. In every case, of course, the weather was and is much colder and subject to weather extremes in the North American locale than in the European city at the same latitude. It was not until the 20th and 21st centuries that climatologists began fully to understand the subtle interplay of winds, heat, carbon monoxide levels, large bodies of water, the Earth’s position vis-à-vis the sun and humanity’s own actions that forms weather conditions around the world.

Europeans also arrogantly assumed that same crops and domesticated animals they cultivated in Europe would transfer readily to the New World and that they could grow the crops at the same time of year. Thus attempts by the Spanish to grow winter wheat and barley and raise goats and sheep in Florida ended in complete failure. Failing crops led to cannibalism during the “starving time” the English colony at Jamestown endured later in the century.

But Europeans learned the way humans have always learned: through observation of empirical phenomena and the accumulation of evidence. With an assist from the warming climate, Europeans applied the knowledge gained from observation and learned how to survive and thrive in North America, building permanent encampments from the beginning of the 17th century onward.

The contrast with today’s situation is stunning. We have the knowledge we need to tame an increasingly unhospitable land—made less livable by own machinations. In Europe, Africa and Asia, leaders are willing to do what it takes both to reduce the impact of human’s on climate and to address the extreme weather and its potential disastrous impact on human settlements that global warming has and will continue to cause. Everywhere, humans are rising to the challenge, if a bit more slowly than climate scientists and environmentalists want.

Everywhere, that is, except in North America, where Americans, primarily of European descent, want to ignore science and impose their own ignorant beliefs on MotherFather Nature. The agenda of Donald Trump and the GOP don’t just ignore science, but like a spoiled child who refuses to yield to reason, they give a mean-spirited raspberry to the pursuit of knowledge. Look at the anti-intellectual carnage wrought in less than a year since the Electoral College turned its back on its constitutional responsibility to make sure that a madman or tyrant is not inadvertently elected America’s leader (note that I continue to come up with clever ways to avoid using “Trump” in the same sentence as a certain word that begins with the letter “p”): walking away from the Paris Accord, rescinding Obama Administration environmental regulations, dismantling government website pages referring to climate change, censoring scientists and scientific reports and replacing scientists with industrial leaders.

Ignorance and false science stand at the heart of most Trump/GOP proposals. Scientists, social scientists and economists keep shouting many truths other than human-caused global warming at the right. Truths like:

• Lowering taxes on the wealthy does not lead to job growth, wage growth or economic growth.
• The number of gun fatalities in a population is a direct result of the number of guns owned by the population. The more guns, the less safe we are, and the fewer guns, the more same we are.
• When adjusted for poverty and disabilities, U.S. schools outperform most other industrialized countries and public school students do better than private schools students do.
• Immigrants, even illegal ones, lead to job and wage growth for those born in the country; immigrants also have lower crime rates than native-born Americans.

I could go on, but you get the point. A major political party is trying to impose its irrational, childish will on reality, and we know that never works. What’s worse is that right wingers have created a network of mass media outlets and privately-funded think tanks to spew out and publicize false research and theories.

The early European settlers didn’t know any better and so believed their garbage science. They soon learned better, though. It’s ironic and tragic that their ancestors who do or should know better are ignoring the much more developed and detailed science of our current age.