I have a new meme running through my mind this morning: President Donald John Trump’s handlers have awakened a sleeping giant of progressives. Events this weekend in Washington and Atlanta are just two examples.

Jamiles Lartey, writing in Atlanta protest takes on importance after Trump insults civil rights leader for The Guardian, explains:

In the shadow of the Equitable building at Woodruff park in the heart of Atlanta, a crowd of dozens swelled to hundreds in the late morning as Donald Trump prepared to take the oath of the presidency in Washington DC on Friday. With signs, T-shirts, literature and a giant papier-mache rendering of the incoming president, a coalition led by local immigrant rights organization Not One More Deportation set off for Atlanta’s city hall.

The protest, in one of America’s largest and most diverse cities took on additional importance after comments Trump directed at one of its most popular lawmakers and public figures last week. After Congressman John Lewis, who represents about 75% of the predominantly black city, questioned Trump’s electoral legitimacy in an interview, Trump fired back, blasting Lewis’ district as “crime-infested” and calling the civil rights legend, whose skull was fractured by Alabama state troopers in Selma in 1965 “all talk … no action.”

The coalition was as diverse in its politics as it was in its participants, with over 25 different progressive organizations participating. Chants during the march attacked Trump specifically, as well as police brutality, islamophobia, transphobia and deportations. Many chants were delivered in English and Spanish.

For a time, near the front of the march one group of protesters chanted “not my president”, while towards the back, members of the Industrial Workers of the World, complete with a red and gold hammer and sickle flag, chanted “no more presidents” instead.

A besieged White House staff is attempting to raise barricades of alternate facts.

Good luck with that.

Sad.

Remember all those artists who didn’t agree to celebrate the inauguration of President Donald John Trump over the weekend? Bruce Sprinsteen (idol of the B Street Band that declined to perform) took the opportunity last night in Perth, Australia, took the opportunity to declare his intentions. Andrew Stafford, writing in Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band review—there’s no stopping the juggernaut for The Guardian explains:

On page 209 of his autobiography, Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen describes the effect of growing up as a child of Vietnam-era America, and of the Kennedy, King and Malcolm X assassinations. “Dread—the sense that things might not work out, that the moral high ground had been swept out from underneath us, that the dream we had of ourselves had somehow been tainted and the future would forever be uninsured—was in the air,” he writes.

With that dread in the air again, clearly the Boss feels it his duty—the artist’s duty—to respond. On Sunday night, in Perth for the first leg of his third Australian tour in four years, Springsteen laid his cards on the table early. “Our hearts and minds are with the hundreds of thousands of women and men that marched yesterday who rallied against hate, and division, and in support of tolerance [and] inclusion,” he said. “On E Street, we stand with you. We are the new American resistance.”

If such sentiments sound absurd coming from the now 67-year-old Springsteen, it’s worth bearing in mind that there are many in his home country right now who would damn him as nothing less than an American traitor. Springsteen isn’t usually quite so politically direct: he knows full well that many of his fans back home voted for Donald Trump. They are the same economically downtrodden folk he has written so sympathetically about for more than 40 years.

The ghost of Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto may be haunting the White House, whispering in President Trump’s ear: I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.

Every Monday morning I receive an email from Tom Peters’ organization with a quote from Tom. This morning’s message drives right to the heart of events over the past weekend and, I think, is directed at the 45th president of The United States.

Tom loses the new president, of course, at moral.

Sad.

One of the secondary reasons that I voted for Bernie Sanders in the Ohio primary and then for Jill Stein in the general election is that I knew that a second President Clinton would mean continued business as usual which meant a continued erosion of progressive gains made in my lifetime and further empowerment of our growing oligarchy. The election of President Donald John Trump would be a galvanizing event snapping progressives out of their slumber.

That is exactly what has come to pass.

Owen Jones, writing in The American left will be reborn under President Trump for The Guardian, begins:

Donald Trump is now the most powerful man on Earth. You would expect the American left to be despondent; it’s not. The left is stronger than it has been for decades. They are up against a president who lost the popular vote, who assumes office with the lowest approval rating on record, and whose party is riven by divisions. In November, Clintonian-centrism—whose compelling selling point was the ability to win—was defeated, plunging the American republic into its gravest crisis since the war.

Waleed Shahid is 25 years old, from Arlington, Virginia. At the inauguration I met him in a Washington fast-food restaurant with his fellow activist, Max Berger, a 31-year-old Jewish American from “a town of 15,000 people and four Dunkin’ Donuts” in central Massachusetts. Both are involved in All Of Us, one of the many new progressive organisations [Both links are mine, JH] committed to taking on the Trump ascendancy.

Jones continues:

Shahid’s father moved to the US from Pakistan four decades ago. “He’s literally been working in the same parking garage since 1973.” There were four books in his home growing up: the Qur’an, a collection of Punjabi poetry and two biographies: one of ex-Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, the other of Hillary Clinton.

Obama had politically inspired both his parents for the first time, but their lives have not got any better. “My father had his wages and hours cut since 2008,” Shahid tells me, “and my mother’s healthcare has gone up even though Obama campaigned on this stuff.”

Both were part of the Bernie Sanders surge – and both are preparing to mobilise and fight. “We have to oppose normalisation,” says Shahid. “That won’t happen by the Democratic party alone. They need a countervailing political force to hold the Democratic party accountable to their voters, who are largely working-class people, and immigrants and people of colour.” For Shahid and Berger that means taking on the Democratic establishment.

“It includes change through elections if the Democratic party leadership aren’t going to stand for us and bring new leadership in.” For Berger, Trump’s victory cannot only be explained by a racial backlash on the part of a significant chunk of white working-class Americans. “Look at Trump’s last ad and what he articulates: there’s a global power structure, a global elite that has trillions of dollars at stake in this election.”

Sounds to me like Berger and Shahid are candidates for Our Revolution.

I knew I was.

The image above shows the turnout for the 2009 inauguration of President Barack Hussein Obama. Mouse over the image to see what the turnout for the 2017 inauguration of President Donald John Trump looked like. To steal a favorite tweet word from President Trump: sad.

So, President Donald John Trump is not happy. People just don’t love him in reality the way they do in his fantasies. (This might be because Trump thinks that the word reality in reality television is actually, you know, reality.) Not only is he not a majority president—he managed to only win a minority 46.1 percent of the 60 (58.99) percent (136,600,912 of the 231,556,622 eligible voters), he fell short of besting Hillary Clinton in the popular vote by 2,865,075 votes.

Sad—I’m starting to really like that word—especially in light of his historically low approval rating as he takes the oath of office.

Then there’s the matter of the numbers who turned up in Washington to watch the inauguration. David Smith, writing in Women’s March on Washington overshadows Trump’s first full day in office for The Guardian, provides the details:

Hundreds of thousands of women turned Washington’s National Mall into a sea of pink on Saturday, sending the first concerted message of grassroots opposition to Donald Trump since he moved into the White House.

“Minority president”, “Women roar” and “I’m afraid” were among the signs waved by a crowd which was made up mostly of women but also comprised some men and which far exceeded turnout for Friday’s inauguration. Many wore pink handknit “pussy hats” – a rebuke to the billionaire businessman once caught on tape bragging about his ability to “grab” women “by the pussy”. Organisers estimated that more than a million people attended.

Later, in a blistering press room debut, Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer accused the press of “minimising the enormous support” that had turned out for Trump the day before.

He first accused some media of “deliberately false reporting”, citing a “particularly egregious example” of a reporter tweeting that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr had been removed from the Oval Office. “This was irresponsible and reckless,” he said. The night before, he had tweeted “apology accepted” to the reporter, who had apologised for the mistake.

On Saturday Spicer went on to say that photographs of the inauguration “were intentionally framed in a way in one particular tweet to minimise the enormous support that gathered on the National Mall.”

Almost shouting, Spicer continued: “Inaccurate numbers involving crowd size were also tweeted. No one had numbers because the National Park Service, which controls the National Mall, does not put any out. By the way, this applies to any attempt to count the number of protesters today in the same fashion.”

Poor, poor Spicer, I think he’s discovering how hard his job will be. The president wanted Chicago; he got Floyd County, Georgia.

Oliver Burkeman, writing in How to get stuff done (and maybe change the world, too) for The Guardian, suggests:

In the context of great battles over politics, or the fate of societies, this talk of inboxes and apps may seem soul-crushingly mundane. But that’s the point: however world-changing your aims, it’s only through mundane actions that you’ll ever get from knowing to doing. I recall a banner outside a Quaker meeting house in Washington DC, some time around 2004, that read, “What have you done today to remove the causes of war?” Some exemplary citizen with a marker pen had crossed out “the causes of war” and written “Bush”. Today it would be “Trump”. But the message, in all three versions, is the same: you have to find a way to actually do the thing—to build some kind of rope bridge, no matter how makeshift, across the knowing-doing gap.

If you live in Cuyahoga County, please give serious consideration to joining the Cuyaghoga Country Progressive Caucus.

Well, this didn’t take long. I thought we’d have until Tuesday morning to start tearing our hair out, but President Donald John Trump has hit the ground running. Don’t blink or you might not see the bus roaring your way.

Nicola Slawson, writing in Trump era begins with Obamacare rollback and missile defence orders for The Guardian, delivers the bad news:

Donald Trump has begun his presidency with a series of seismic policy interventions starting the repeal of former president Barack Obama’s healthcare policies, initiating a new US missile defence system and ushering in a new period of American protectionism.

The 45th president of the United States, who was sworn into office on Friday, began his four-year term of office with a series of executive orders that would set the tone for his government. It was, he said, a government that would “put only America first”.

Before attending a series of inaugural balls around Washington DC, the Republican sat down to sign an executive order aimed at undermining Obama’s signature healthcare law, known as Obamacare.

The order notes that Trump plans to seek the “prompt repeal” of the law. In the meantime, it allows the Health and Human Services Department and other federal agencies to delay implementing any piece of the law that might impose any economic cost.

Using similar orders, the new president also signed into law a new national day of patriotism and signalled plans to build a new missile defence system to protect against perceived threats from Iran and North Korea.

The Trump White House also stripped the official website of all mention of Obama’s key policy agendas, including climate change and LGBT rights along with the civil rights history section.

The various subsections of the White House website were replaced with just six; energy, foreign policy, jobs and growth, military, law enforcement and trade deals.

In his inaugural speech, the new president put forward a nationalistic vision for the country. “The American carnage stops right here, right now,” he said. “From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first. America first.”

A national day of Patriotism? What does President Trump think the 4th of July, Veterans Day, Pearl Harbor Day, Memorial Day and Flag Day are?

And Star Wars? Really?

Douglas Adams was wrong…. I’m never leaving home without my towel again.

Is Cleveland ready for a change election?

Certainly, it is in dire need of a transformation in leadership in the mayor’s office and administration.

We’ve had major change elections in the past when mayors and their administrations have shown cracks in ruling that could not be ignored.

This is a comparable time, I’d say.

Poor leadership. Serious problems. Few solutions.

This is a description of the leadership of Mayor Frank Jackson and the decomposed Cleveland City Council.

What do I mean when a say “Change election.”

Fifty years ago, under Mayor Ralph Locher, Cleveland voters demanded change.

It resulted in the election of Carl B. Stokes as the first black mayor of a major American city.

Forty years ago, Cleveland, led by Republican Ralph Perk, yearned again for change.

A former backer, Dennis Kucinich, stepped forward.

In each of those instances the reigning mayor of Cleveland was dismissed in the primary, never reaching the final race for mayor. Thus leaving the position open to a new person.

That should be the case in 2017. Jackson’s time should have run out.

Stokes defeated Locher in 1967 after almost winning election in a three-person race in 1965. Stokes ran in 1965 as an independent but in 1967 as a Democrat. He Continue Reading »

From the staff of Policy.Mic:

Mic’s Storm the Swamp 2017 map illustrates where and when key protests, disruptions and demonstrations for and against the Trump administration will take place in Washington, D.C., the week of Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20. The map includes information about who is organizing them, what issues are at stake and more. Mic’s reporters will update the map, made with Google’s Fusion Tables, throughout the weekend, including on-the-ground updates as events unfold. By clicking on each pin, you’ll be able to learn about each event and see photos and live video as they become available. Using the drop-down menu, you can select and sort by the causes that are most important to you.

What would you like to protest?

Ralph Nader writes:

Dear President-Elect Trump,

You’ve come a long way without my advice, but ascension to the White House invites listening to what this letter has to say.

During the primary campaign you said more than once that you had to speak and behave the way you did to get the mass media’s attention. But you also pledged that, once in the White House, you would be “so presidential you [all] will be so bored.”

Judging by your remarkably low national polls for an incoming president-elect, it is not just Meryl Streep and John Lewis who think that your transition to becoming “presidential” has not yet materialized. In the spirit of this transition, here are some pitfalls you will need to overcome in order to avoid embroiling your administration (and the nation) in a self-initiated avalanche of charges, disputes and scandals.

1. Your “Achilles heel” has thus far proven to be your easily bruised ego, which is put on display with every one of your furious, sometimes bullying tweets. When you are President, however, you have more ways to retaliate and more ways to get both yourself and our country in trouble if you do so in such a spasmodic manner. This is the Big Leagues. Adversaries abroad are keenly aware of how Continue Reading »

So, what does the Congressional Budget Office think of Republicans—like the 10th wealthiest* member of our House of Representatives and my own representative James B. Renacci (R-OH-16)—who want to repeal the Affordable Care Act? According to the report (How Repealing Portions of the Affordable Care Act Would Affect Health Insurance Coverage and Premiums published yesterday, not much.

In the executive summary, the non-partisan organization writes:

The CBO and [the Joint Committee on Taxation] estimate that enacting that legislation would affect insurance coverage and premiums primarily in these ways:

The number of people who are uninsured would increase by 18 million in the first new plan year following enactment of the bill. Later, after the elimination of the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid eligibility and of subsidies for insurance purchased through the ACA marketplaces, that number would increase to 27 million, and then to 32 million in 2026.

Premiums in the nongroup market (for individual policies purchased through the marketplaces or directly from insurers) would increase by 20 percent to 25 percent—relative to projections under current law—in the first new plan year following enactment. The increase would reach about 50 percent in the year following the elimination of the Medicaid expansion and the marketplace subsidies, and premiums would about double by 2026.

Renacci’s support and vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act would kick nearly 1,000,000 Ohioans, which must include an as yet unknown of constituents in his own district, to the healthcare curb

*Which make his paying much lower taxes if the Affordable Care Act is repealed likely.

Friday’s inauguration may turn out to be lamest, most boring in the history of such events.

Not the formal swearing in on the Capital steps, that promises to be contentious and vocal far surpassing that of President George Walker Bush in 2001 (though not the riot that James O’Keefe hoped to pay for), but rather the parties Friday evening.

In the past, both Republican and Democratic Presidents have attracted the very best entertainers that our nation has to offer. President Donald John Trump can’t even sign a cover band from New Jersey. Guardian Music, in Bruce Springsteen tribute act B-Street Band pull out of Trump inauguration gala, explains:

Bruce Springsteen tribute band the B Street Band have pulled out of playing a Donald Trump inauguration ball.

The group, who call themselves the “number one Bruce Springsteen tribute band” in the US, had been set to play the Garden State Gala at the Washington Court Hotel in DC the day before the president-elect’s inauguration on 20 January. Despite criticism from Springsteen fans and anti-Trump protesters, the band had claimed that the gala, which they have played twice before for President Obama, was a “non-partisan affair”.

However, the band have now relented to the pressure and pulled out. In a statement they said: “With deepest apologies to our fans and the New Jersey inaugural ball committee, the B Street Band is withdrawing from performing at this year’s inauguration gala.”

The band that respect for The Boss played a large roll in their decision, although there is no indication that Springsteen contacted the band.

Springsteen himself has been a vocal critic of Trump. In a recent Guardian interview he said: “In Trump’s case, the facade is easy to see through, and what you see is a bundle of anxiety, fragility and insecurity. It’s the thinnest possible mask of masculinity.”

It’s yet another headache for the Trump team who, despite claiming they don’t want celebrities appearing at the inauguration, are finding it increasingly hard to book anyone notable for the event

Sour grapes anyone?

On 17 May will walk free from the United States military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Ed Pilkington, writing in Chelsea Manning’s prison sentence commuted by Barack Obama for The Guardian ledes:

Chelsea Manning, the US army soldier who became one of the most prominent whistleblowers of modern times when she exposed the nature of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who then went on to pay the price with a 35-year military prison sentence, is to be freed in May as a gift of outgoing president Barack Obama.

In the most audacious—and contentious—commutation decision to come from Obama yet, the sitting president used his constitutional power just three days before he leaves the White House to give Manning her freedom.

Predictably, Pilkington details the reactions of the cockroaches who wish to be free to do their nasty bits in darkness are outraged that the brave soldier who shone light on their crimes will rightly go free, but for all their blustering, they cannot point to a single harm to anyone but themselves and their oligarch masters.

Alex Emmons, posting in President Obama Commutes Prison Sentence For Chelsea Manning for The Intercept, writes:

Even with her sentence commuted, Manning will have spent more time in detention than anyone convicted of leaking to news organizations: Just over seven years. After being arrested in 2010, she endured 11 months of solitary confinement, and was repeatedly denied medical care for her gender dysphoria.

In September, Manning staged a five-day hunger strike, and ended it only after the Army allowed her to consult a surgeon to receive gender-affirming surgery. Later that month, the Army punished Manning in retaliation for a suicide attempt, and she spent a week in solitary confinement.

Human rights activists and lawyers for Manning celebrated the decision.

“I’m relieved and thankful that the president is doing the right thing and commuting Chelsea Manning’s sentence,” said Chase Strangio, an attorney with the ACLU representing Manning, in a statement. “Since she was first taken into custody, Chelsea has been subjected to long stretches of solitary confinement — including for attempting suicide — and has been denied access to medically necessary health care. This move could quite literally save Chelsea’s life, and we are all better off knowing that Chelsea Manning will walk out of prison a free woman, dedicated to making the world a better place and fighting for justice for so many.”

The move was quickly hailed by human rights groups. “Instead of punishing the messenger, the U.S. government can send a strong signal to the world that it is serious about investigating the human rights violations exposed by the leaks and bringing all those suspected of criminal responsible to justice in fair trials,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas Director at Amnesty International.

[Disclosure: First Look Media Works, Inc., publisher of The Intercept, made a $50,000 matching-fund donation to Chelsea Manning’s legal defense fund through its Press Freedom Litigation Fund, and Glenn Greenwald, a founding editor of The Intercept, donated $10,000.]

Good on you President Obama and thank you Chelsea Manning.

Dare we hope for Edward Snowden?

Back in September, in COULD I BE AS BRAVE AS ANDREW SULLIVAN…?, I noted Cal Newport’s analysis of Andrew Sullivan’s essay in New York Magazine: I Used to Be a Human Being. Yesterday, while filing a box of papers I came across my high-lighted copy of the article and want to share two passages that I found enlightening. The first reminds me of an observation I made years ago about how the first video camera in my extended family changed family events.

The first time the camera made an appearance—they were ghastly huge things in the ’80s—the family was fascinated and after the father of the birthday girl spent more than an hour videotaping the party, everyone rushed into the television room to watch the tape. I knew then that nothing good would come of this technology. Sullivan had a similar experience more recently.

Things that usually escaped me began to intrigue me. On a meditative walk through the forest on my second day, I began to notice not just the quality of the autumnal light through the leaves but the splotchy multicolors of the newly fallen, the texture of the lichen on the bark, the way in which tree roots had come to entangle and overcome old stone walls. The immediate impulse—to grab my phone and photograph it—was foiled by an empty pocket. So I simply looked. At one point, I got lost and had to rely on my sense of direction to find my way back. I heard birdsong for the first time in years. Well, of course, I had always heard it, but it had been so long since I listened.

My goal was to keep thought in its place. “Remember,” my friend Sam Harris, an atheist meditator, had told me before I left, “if you’re suffering, you’re thinking.” The task was not to silence everything within my addled brain, but to introduce it to quiet, to perspective, to the fallow spaces I had once known where the mind and soul replenish. [Emphasis mine, JH]

Sullivan, a Catholic whose roots run deep, comes back to his beliefs as he wrestles with what technology has done to him.

In his survey of how the modern West lost widespread religious practice, A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor used a term to describe the way we think of our societies. He called it a “social imaginary”—a set of interlocking beliefs and practices that can undermine or subtly marginalize other kinds of belief. We didn’t go from faith to secularism in one fell swoop, he argues. Certain ideas and practices made others not so much false as less vibrant or relevant. And so modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith is not because science has somehow disproved the unprovable, but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in which it might endure or be reborn [Emphasis, here and below, mine, JH].

The English Reformation began, one recalls, with an assault on the monasteries, and what silence the Protestants didn’t banish the philosophers of the Enlightenment mocked. Gibbon and Voltaire defined the Enlightenment’s posture toward the monkish: from condescension to outright contempt. The roar and disruption of the Industrial Revolution violated what quiet still remained until modern capitalism made business central to our culture and the ever-more efficient meeting of needs and wants our primary collective goal. We became a civilization of getting things done—with the development of America, in some ways, as its crowning achievement. Silence in modernity became, over the centuries, an anachronism, even a symbol of the useless superstitions we had left behind. The smartphone revolution of the past decade can be seen in some ways simply as the final twist of this ratchet, in which those few remaining redoubts of quiet — the tiny cracks of inactivity in our lives—are being methodically filled with more stimulus and noise.

Which Shakespeare noted more than four centuries ago, is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

House Resolution 5, The Regulatory Accountability Act of 2017—obfuscately described by sponsor Bob Goodlatte (R-VA-6) as a bill: To reform the process by which Federal agencies analyze and formulate new regulations and guidance documents, to clarify the nature of judicial review of agency interpretations, to ensure complete analysis of potential impacts on small entities of rules, and for other purposes (I love the and other purposes)—passed the House of Representatives last Tuesday with the help of my Congressional representative Jim Renacci, (R-OH-16). Renacci cast two votes in favor of Republican amendments to the resolution that passed (237/185 and 260/161) and against eight Democratic amendments that failed.

Renacci, of course, voted in favor of the final version of H.R. 5, which passed 238/183.)

Welcome to 2017.

Consumer Reports and Consumers Union (representing the 99 percent) had this to say:

Dear Representative:

Consumer Reports and its policy and mobilization arm, Consumers Union, urge you to vote no on H.R. 5, the Regulatory Accountability Act of 2017. This dangerous proposal would do severe damage to protections consumers depend on for health, safety, and honest treatment.

Congress has charged federal agencies with protecting the public from threats such as tainted food, hazardous products, dirty air and water, and predatory financial schemes. It established these agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, so that public protections could be overseen by professional civil servants with specific technical and scientific expertise. In developing regulations, agencies must act in accordance with the statute and with established rulemaking procedures that require transparency and full opportunity for public input, including input from the industry that will be subject to the regulation.

We agree that the regulatory process can certainly be improved. We stand ready to support constructive efforts to reduce delays and costs while preserving important protections.

However, rather than streamlining and improving the regulatory process, the Regulatory Accountability Act of 2017 would make current problems even worse. Under H.R. 5, agencies would be required to undertake numerous costly and unnecessary additional analyses for each rulemaking, which could grind proposed rules to a halt while wasting agencies’ resources. Collectively, these measures would create significant regulatory and legal uncertainty for businesses, increase costs to taxpayers and businesses alike, and prevent the executive branch from keeping regulations up to date with the rapidly changing modern economy.

One of the most damaging effects of H.R. 5 is that it would, with only limited exceptions, require federal agencies to identify and adopt the “least costly” alternative of a rule it is considering. Currently, landmark laws like the Clean Air Act, Consumer Product Safety Act, and Securities Exchange Act require implementing agencies to put top priority on the public interest. H.R. 5 would reverse this priority by requiring agencies to value the bottom-line profits of the regulated industry over their mission to protect consumers and a fair, well-functioning marketplace.

H.R. 5 also includes several other damaging measures that have not been included previously as part of the Regulatory Accountability Act. These measures would add unjustifiable costs and uncertainty to the rulemaking process, and greatly impair regulatory agencies’ work.

Contrary to its name, the “Separation of Powers Restoration Act” (Title II of H.R. 5) would disrupt the carefully developed constitutional balance between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Courts giving appropriate deference to reasonable agency interpretations of their own statutes, as reflected in Chevron U.S.A., Inc., v. NRDC, 467 U.S. 837 (1984), is a well-settled approach that promotes sound and efficient agency enforcement, with effective judicial review. Under the Chevron doctrine, courts retain full judicial power to review agency legal interpretations, but do not simply substitute their own judgment for an agency’s. Chevron recognizes that agencies accumulate uniquely valuable expertise in the laws they administer, which makes deference from reviewing courts—which do not have that expertise—appropriate.

Overturning this approach would lead to disaster. It would severely hamper effective regulatory agency enforcement of critical protections on which consumers depend. As the Supreme Court stated in City of Arlington, Tex. v. F.C.C., 133 S. Ct. 1863, 1874 (2013): “Thirteen Courts of Appeals applying a totality-of-the-circumstances test would render the binding effect of agency rules unpredictable and destroy the whole stabilizing purpose of Chevron. The excessive agency power that the dissent fears would be replaced by chaos.” Such a move also would needlessly force the courts to repeatedly second-guess agency decisions that the courts have already concluded the agency is in the best position to make.

The REVIEW Act and the ALERT Act (Titles IV and V of H.R. 5) would cause additional needless and damaging delays to public protections. The REVIEW Act—which would block “high-impact” rules until every industry legal challenge has run its full course—would tie up agencies in court indefinitely, potentially making it impossible to address pressing national problems. The ALERT Act would subject most new rules to a delay of at least six months, and require agencies to waste resources complying with repetitive reporting requirements.

Like the bill’s proponents, we believe regulations should be smart, clear, and cost-effective. However, H.R. 5 does not accomplish this objective. Instead of improving the regulatory process, the Regulatory Accountability Act of 2017 would make it dramatically slower, more costly to the nation, and far less effective at protecting health, safety, and other essential consumer priorities.

We strongly urge you to stand up for critical public protections and vote no on H.R. 5.

Sincerely,

Laura MacCleery
Vice President
Consumer Policy and Mobilization
Consumer Reports

George P. Slover
Senior Policy Counsel
Consumers Union

William C. Wallace
Policy Analyst
Consumers Union

In the first week back in office, Jim Renacci has acted to make the lives of the people living in Ohio’s 16th district more dangerous while helping to ensure that the oligarchs can keep more of their wealth at our expense.

Shame on you Renacci.

Over the last few days I found myself wondering just how much money you need to be on the list of the 400 wealthiest Americans. The number comes from Forbes which annually publishes the Forbes 400. The most recent list, 2016, puts Bill Gates at the top with $81 billion, $14 billion ahead of No. 2 Jeff Bezos.

Charles and David Koch, the psychopathic and Libertarian brothers largely responsible for the election of Donald John Trump on 8 November of last year, are at No. 7 with $42 billion and the family I love to hate, the descendants of Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, are at nos. 11, 12, 13, 37, 80, 87 and 124 with a combined $134 billion, making them the richest family in the United States.

Who’s at the bottom? Five people share that distinction—Carol Jenkins Barnett, Nicolas Berggruen, Timothy Boyle, Christopher Cline, Jen-Hsun Huang and Gail Miller—with with fortunes rated at a piddling $1.7 billion

So, where is president-elect Donald John Trump? He comes in at No. 156 in an 18-way tie with other billionaires in the single digit mark of 3.7 billion.

This will we will find our Oligarchs. Not everyone on the list has earned that title, but many have or aspire to do so. These are the people that Citizens United empowered to buy the American political system. I used to be fond of suggesting that the U.S. Senate was the most exclusive club in the world, but that club is now largely owned by the Club of 400.

Andrew Carnegie was fond of saying that his secret was to put all his eggs in one basket and then never take your eyes of that basket. The Forbes 400 contains all the eggs, some good but many bad, and we need, to steal a sentiment from Winston Churchill to Never, never, never, never, never, never take our eyes off that basket.

I voted for Barack Hussein Obama in 2008, but not in 2012. While I fully understand the emotional and symbolic importance of President Obama, he won election and re-election because he was the best in a really horrible field of candidates, and in the years following the historic 2008 election of President Obama, the disastrously failed Democratic National Committee covered its ears and made lalalala sounds while Republican National Committee offered up Mitt Romney as a sacrificial lamb in 2012 and allowed president-elect Donald John Trump stomped all over the occupants of the Republican clown car in 2016.

Gary Younge, writing in How Barack Obama paved the way for Donald Trump for The Guardian, makes his case:

As Obama passes the keys and the codes to Donald Trump at the end of this week, so many liberals mourn the passing of what has been, remain in a state of disbelief for what has happened, and express deep anxiety about what is to come. It is a steep cliff – politically, rhetorically and aesthetically – from the mocha-complexioned consensual intellectual to the permatanned, “pussy-grabbing” vulgarian.

But there is a connection between the “new normal” and the old that must be understood if resistance in the Trump era is going to amount to more than Twitter memes driven by impotent rage and fuelled by flawed nostalgia. This transition is not simply a matter of sequence – one bad president following a good one – but consequence: one horrendous agenda made possible by the failure of its predecessor.

As I’ve listened to and read reflections about the past eight years, I’m not hearing about how America is better for President Obama having been at the helm, but rather I see story after story about what I can only characterize as style. I don’t want style from the President of the United States, I want substance. I didn’t see that in the first four years and that was why I didn’t vote a second time for President Obama. (For the record, I’ve only voted twice for a single President: Jimmy Carter, who, despite the popular vilification, remains, in my estimation, the best American leader of my adult life.) Younge continues:

Racism’s role should not be underplayed, but its impact can arguably be overstated. While Trump evidently emboldened existing racists, it’s not obvious that he created new ones. He received the same proportion of the white vote as Mitt Romney in 2012 and George W Bush in 2004. It does not follow that because Trump’s racism was central to his meaning for liberals, it was necessarily central to his appeal for Republicans.

There is a deeper connection, however, between Trump’s rise and what Obama did—or rather didn’t do—economically. He entered the White House at a moment of economic crisis, with Democratic majorities in both Houses and bankers on the back foot. Faced with the choice of preserving the financial industry as it was or embracing far-reaching reforms that would have served the interests of those who voted for him, he chose the former.

For whatever reasons, Obama caved.

Just a couple of months into his first term he called a meeting of banking executives. “The president had us at a moment of real vulnerability,” one of them told Ron Suskind in his book Confidence Men. “At that point, he could have ordered us to do just about anything and we would have rolled over. But he didn’t – he mostly wanted to help us out, to quell the mob.” People lost their homes while bankers kept their bonuses and banks kept their profits.

In 2010 Damon Silvers of the independent congressional oversight panel told Treasury officials: “We can either have a rational resolution to the foreclosure crisis, or we can preserve the capital structure of the banks. We can’t do both.” They chose the latter. Not surprisingly, this was not popular. Three years into Obama’s first term 58 percent of the country—including an overwhelming majority of Democrats and independents—wanted the government to help stop foreclosures. His Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, did the opposite, setting up a programme that would “foam the runway” for the banks.

Did Obama know something that Younge, I and the rest of the world didn’t know? Possibly. I would think, however, that if that were the case, we would have heard about that before the 2016 election. The Obama legacy will not be the Affordable Care Act, his legacy will be the missed opportunity to end too-big-to-fail financial institutions. Younge concludes:

This time last year, fewer than four in 10 were happy with Obama’s economic policies. When asked last week to assess progress under Obama 56 percent of Americans said the country had lost ground or stood still on the economy, while 48% said it had lost ground on the gap between the rich and poor—against just 14% who said it gained ground. These were the Obama coalition – black and young and poor – who did not vote in November, making Trump’s victory possible. Those whose hopes are not being met: people more likely to go to the polls because they are inspired about a better future than because they fear a worse one.

Naturally, Trump’s cabinet of billionaires will do no better and will, in all likelihood, do far worse. And even as we protest about the legitimacy of the “new normal”, we should not pretend it is replacing something popular or effective. The old normal was not working. The premature nostalgia for the Obamas in the White House is not a yearning for Obama’s policies.

The horror of a Trump presidency may make us nostalgic for Obama, but Younge is right: we must remember how we got here.