=By= Michael Roberts

Image from Twitter via Calle Johansson

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hat the mainstream media helped to create the political monster (and disaster) that today is Donald J. Trump is not in dispute. And, aided and abetted by its willing lackeys in the neo-conservative television and radio movements, they helped to over-inflate his insatiable mega-sized ego that told him he could win the ultimate prize — the presidency of the United States.

Indeed, Republican hatred of President Barack Obama and his policies, and their spineless prevaricating cowardice to privately embrace what Trump is saying and vocalizing in public, allowed a loud mouth and blowhard mediocre businessman to hijack the Republican Party from its conservative moorings.

Obama by Latuff

They both conspired and fornicated with each other to produce this bastard political horn-child now genuflecting to his every whim and outrageous pouting all in the interest of the continued cancerous metastasizing hating Barack Obama. Embraced by the most rabid sections of the Republican Party, the Tea Party zealots, traditional GOP establishment leaders were powerless to stop the rise of this ultra-Right Wing faction within the party that see Trump as “speaking their language” and identified with his particular odious brand of extremism and xenophobia.

They are ALL complicit in the rise of the GOP’s Political Pretender. Establishment Republicans should have seen the writing on the wall when Eric Cantor, then the party’s majority leader in the House, was defeated in his bid for re-election in June 2014 by Dave Brat, an unknown Tea Party member. They should have known that the extreme wing of the party was now calling the shots when a freshman senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, one year before Cantor’s defeat, was able to orchestrate a temporary shut down of the Federal Government in October 2013. And they should have been put on the alert when the 40 or so Tea Party members in the House successfully hounded Speaker John Boehner out of office on October 31, 2015.

Trump Everywhere by Rowan Wolf

But even with all that these signs and developments Republican leaders still so hung up on hatred from Barack Obama did absolutely nothing. They continued to be an obstructionist force and rejected any and all compromise. Talk about unintended consequences! Now they have laughingly launched a “Stop Trump” movement to deny the party’s present front runner the presidential nomination. The party’s conservative wing, joined by a whorish mainstream media, and sundry political pundits and talk show hosts, are desperately seeking ways and means to stop Trump up to and including a controversial “brokered convention” — not that they are calling it that.

If no GOP candidate — Trump, Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich — reaches the magical number of 1,237 delegates the party’s national convention in July would be the last place where Trump can be stopped. But it will be very, very messy and unpopular with the Republican Party’s base, especially its Tea Party section. It that happens, the political civil war will be waged between the white collar sections of the party and its ruling class elements pushing proxy candidates like Florida’s former governor Jeb Bush, and, perhaps Senator Marco Rubio. What this will boil down to is a party willing to deny and reject the will of the vast majority of Republican voters, no matter how misplaced, in favor of a hand-picked, anointed, party establishment candidate.

The split, already evident, will be between white collar Republicans and their angry blue-collar brethren from where the Trump and the Tea Party draw its members and support. The ultra-Right Ted Cruz is now attempting to position himself as the Trump alternative and the “stop Trump” candidate. However, it appears increasingly that the GOP leadership and its establishment wing is in favor of a so-called “contested convention.”

So what exactly is a contested convention?

Well, for starters, during the early days of American politics there was no need for the present system of primaries across the states. There was no 24-hour news cycle that hung on the every word of posturing, bombastic candidates and their surrogates. So for decades both parties — the Democratic and Republican Parties — chose candidates in large convention halls and negotiated, horse-traded, in smoke-filled hotel rooms near and around the main convention center.

Ultimately, these systems became corrupt and were simply mechanisms for protecting party favorites. They were ultimately replaced by primaries where delegates were selected and apportioned based on who won (or lost). This process was accelerated in the 1970s that literally did away with brokered party conventions. The last Democratic political convention to go more than one ballot round was in 1952. On the Republican side their last brokered convention was in 1976 when Ronald Reagan forced Gerald Ford into a primary contest. Reagan was unsuccessful and had to wait until 1980 before becoming the GOP’s candidate and win the presidency for two terms.

Contested or brokered conventions are very messy things. There are still many arcane and obscure rules and procedures that govern delegate behavior depending on the state they come from. For example, there are rules instituted by party organizations in, say, Ohio, that may compel its delegates to behave in a particular way in the first round of balloting in a contested convention and if there are no clear results may or may not apply to them in future rounds.

Delegates may be “bound” to a frontrunner candidate in the first round of balloting and “freed” in the second round if no winner emerges. If they are “freed or unencumbered” then they can pretty much vote for who they choose. Here is where “politricks” and corruption sets in: candidates can woo delegates with promises that will materialize after they win the nomination. That’s called bribery but its quite legal in BOTH parties since its called “negotiating and advocacy.” It’s “horse-trading” at its best.

When you add the anger that now permeates BOTH the Republican and Democratic parties and the growing distrust of the American electorate then the recipe for political chaos looms very large are is a very real possibility. For the Republican Party this convention is about the battle for the heart and soul of the par

On the Democratic side of things are different, but there is an important fight. The party is fighting to redefine its very identity having been caught in a socio-political crisis for more than a decade. In 2016 the party that once identified with poor and working class Americans is no more. That is why Democratic party establishment figures and leaders cannot understand or come to grips with the anger and dissatisfaction that has been the meteoric rise of Senator Bernie Sanders on the Left pitted against the establishment candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton on the Right.

Today, the Democratic Party is the party of the hyper-educated elite and the so-called “professional class,” a veritable meritocracy that is status driven and not welcoming of dissenting voices, especially from its blue-collar wing. It is a party that has and is now identified more with Wall Street than with Main Street. In many ways the political dialectics that drove the rise of Donald Trump are partly due to the unbelievable shortsightedness of policy decisions made by Democrats in government and on Wall Street.

For example, many Southern conservative Democrats in Congress did nothing when their Republican colleagues were excoriating and attacking President Barack Obama left, right and center. They stood by and twiddled their thumbs or abandoned the party’s position and sided with Republicans. Their dislike of their own president (I’m loath to use the word “hatred”) helped to legitimize people like Trump. They never condemned a member of Congress, Joe Wilson for South Carolina, who called the president a liar during a September 2009 speech. And they have done very little to help push the president’s domestic and foreign policy agendas.

Such party abandonment has drawn the ire of blue collar Democrats and young voters who saw this as a betrayal of their contract with President Obama starting in 2008. This anger and disenchantment would morph into the “Occupy and Black Lives Matter Movements” that Hillary Clinton cannot impress or attract to her campaign. In fact, were it not for the African American community and voters in the Democratic Party Ms. Clinton could not win the party’s nomination or the presidency.

Here I have a word of caution for her: Just because young Democrats and white blue collar workers are flocking to Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign does not translate to her winning these voters over if he loses the nomination as expected. She’ll have to do a hell of a lot more to win over these angry and frustrated voters then she’s presently doing. Her political dilemma is that she has to be the standard bearer of a new Democratic Party — a class party. And it’s not a blue-collar working class party or even a middle class party but a party of the professional elite classes.

So what’s the difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties in the context of this new socio-economic and political dispensation?

Well, there are now just only two hierarchal structures in the United States t that at the core definition and character of bot the Republican and Democratic parties. The first is that of the dominance of corporate big business interests and the obscene amounts of money of the one percent as evidenced by the concentration of wealth in the hands of 540 American billionaires with a combined net worth f $2.4 trillion.

The second is the rise and now control of the professional class that are also at the very zenith of this moneyed and wealth hierarchy. They are in a now symbiotic relationship and share the same assumptions and attitudes to the world. However, they differ in significant ways even as they share some similarities.

On the Republican side these professionals are ultra and neo-conservative when it comes to finance, business policies, cultural issues, and class challenges. By contrast, professionals on the Democratic side tend to be very liberal on most issues except the economy where they are just as conservative as their Republican counterparts. They also share on essential and fundamental similarity: both are hostile to labor and contemptuous of the American working class.

Do I have contempt for higher education and college degrees?

Certainly not. But I do have a problem with a kind of arrogant orthodoxy that comes with that class. When meritocracy becomes the dominant ideology of the professional class it creates a certain world outlook that says that you’re at the top of your profession because you deserve to be there and you’re the smartest and the best in whatever you do. You see this in the Democratic Party when Hillary Clinton seeks to dismiss income inequality as a “one issue” and universal healthcare as impractical and unattainable. You see this in the orthodoxy of President Barack Obama whose cabinet picks all come from Harvard. What happens here is that you get a group of people who do not listen to other voices and ideas from those outside of their narrow social groupings and treats those differences with total contempt.

MICHAEL D. ROBERTS is a top Political Strategist and Business, Management and Communications Specialist in New York City’s Black community. He is an experienced writer whose specialty is socio-political and economic analysis and local community relations. He has covered the United Nations, the Caribbean and Africa in a career that spans over 32 years in journalism. As Editor of New York CARIB NEWS, a position that he’s held since 1990, he is in a unique position to have his hands on the pulse of the over 800,000 Caribbean-American community in Brooklyn, and the over 2.5 million members resident in the wider New York State community.

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience.

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

OpEds

Elections have little meaning in the US system, allowing almost complete freedom to the plutocratic shills in Congress and the White House to do as they please. The passing of retrograde legislation is therefore the norm, not the exception.

By Kate Randall

[dropcap]US[/dropcap] President Barack Obama and his signature health care legislation have come under fire in recent days over the comments of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Jonathan Gruber, a key adviser to the president on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare.

At issue are several videos that have been widely viewed on the Internet showing Gruber discussing the ACA and speaking of the “stupidity” of the American public. What is noticeably absent from the media commentary on these video clips, however, is what they expose about the real character of the health care law.

The first video to surface is from a November 2013 health care panel at the University of Pennsylvania at which Gruber states: “If you had a law that… makes explicit that healthy people are going to pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed… Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And, basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever, but basically that was really critical to getting the thing to pass.”

If we can be allowed to translate, Gruber is basically saying: “Under the ACA, people are required by law to purchase health care coverage from insurance companies. In order for these private insurers to make a profit, a sufficient number of healthy people need to sign up for coverage to make it profitable for the insurers. In order to get the bill passed, we needed to obscure this reality from the public.”

Gruber (left) may never have been technically on Obama’s staff, but the MIT professor of economics was hired by the White House in 2009 and paid close to $400,000 as a technical consultant on health care policy. He was sought out for his “proprietary statistically sophisticated micro-simulation model,” which could “ascertain the distribution of changes in health care spending and public and private health care costs,” according the Department of Health and Human Services.

Gruber was a key architect of the Massachusetts health care reform bill under then-Governor Mitt Romney, a Republican, which served as a modelfor the ACA. In fact, Gruber was referred to as “Mr. Mandate” in a March 2012 article in the Times for championing the individual mandate—the legal requirement that people purchase private health insurance, backed by financial penalties for failing to do so. This boon to the insurance industry is a pillar of Obamacare.

It was Gruber’s research that convinced the Obama administration that the health care overhaul would not be viable without forcing people to purchase insurance under threat of a tax penalty. This mandate is now in force and individuals who do not obtain insurance will be fined $325 or 2 percent of their income, whichever is more, in 2015.

Suffice it to say that Dr. Gruber and his policies are not unknown to the president, but were instrumental in crafting Obama’s health care bill.

Other videos stirring up controversy feature Gruber’s comments on the tax on so-called “Cadillac” heath care policies included as part of the ACA. Set to take effect in 2018, a 40 percent excise tax will be levied on health care plans exceeding $27,000 annually for family coverage and $10,200 for individuals. The aim is to attack the health care plans held by 20 percent of workers with employer-provided health care that are considered too “lavish,” i.e., those that provide decent coverage.

In remarks at Harvard Medical School in 2011, Gruber explained that the only way to get rid of “an inefficient and expensive tax subsidy provided for employer-provided health insurance” was by “calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people, when we all know it’s a tax on people who hold those insurance plans.”

Speaking at Washington University in St. Louis in October 2013, Gruber said companies would rarely pay the tax, but would instead cut back on employee benefits. He said the Cadillac tax was pushed through “because the American people are too stupid to understand the difference” between capping subsidies and taxing insurance firms.

Gruber is one of a number of Obama advisers who have helped design the pro-corporate overhaul of the health care system. Central to Obamacare are the individual mandate and a shift away from employer-sponsored health care coverage.

Ezekiel Emanuel, who served from 2009 to 2011 as a special adviser on health care “reform” to the White House, writes in his book Reinventing American Health Care, “By 2025, few private-sector employers will still be providing health insurance,” predicting this system will be replaced by defined contributions to employees to purchase coverage on private exchanges—basically vouchers—or the elimination of coverage altogether.

Gruber’s past comments on the individual mandate and the Cadillac tax are but one more exposure of the reactionary character of Obamacare. The ACA has nothing in common with a progressive reform, but is aimed at slashing costs for big business and the government while rationing health care for the vast majority of working people.

Gruber’s remarks about the “stupidity” of the American people demonstrate the hostility of this circle of “health care experts” toward the working class. Obama’s claim that he “completely disagrees with” Gruber’s opinions should be rejected with the contempt it deserves.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kate Randall is a senior political analysts with wsws.org.

NOTICE: YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONS (SIGNUPS TO OUR PERIODICAL BULLETIN) ARE COMPLETELY FREE, ALWAYS. AND WE DO NOT SELL OR RENT OUR EMAIL ADDRESS DATABASES.  

ANNOTATED NEWS

Preliminary Editorial Comment by Rick Staggenborg:
What a fantastic message Pope Francis has sent with his visit to Palestine!

Before any anti-Zionist takes exception to his call for a two-state solution that might recognize the legitimacy of the apartheid state of Israel, consider the effect that his carefully crafted message sends to the readers of the New York Times, a propaganda organ generally uncritical of Israel’s crimes.

Had he been bolder and more forthright about how Israel is impeding peace and institutionalizing injustice, this rare glimpse of the truth would never have seen the light of day in the most influential newspaper in the US.

I hope Bibi chokes on his bile reading it.

Rick Staggenborg, a physician, is also a dedicated citizen journalist and activist and a colleague of this site. He has founded and edits a number of important Facebook pages and groups,  including Soldiers for Peace International. 

•••

A dispatch from The New York Times
By JODI RUDOREN, JIM YARDLEY and ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — Pope Francis inserted himself directly into the collapsed Middle East peace process on Sunday, issuing an invitation to host the Israeli and Palestinian presidents for a prayer summit at his apartment in the Vatican, in an overture that has again underscored the broad ambitions of his papacy.

Francis took the unexpected step in Bethlehem, where he became the first pontiff ever to fly directly into the West Bank and to refer to the Israeli-occupied territory as the “State of Palestine.”

After decrying the overall situation between Israel and the Palestinians as “increasingly unacceptable,” the pope made a dramatic, unscheduled stop at Israel’s contentious concrete barrier separating Bethlehem from Jerusalem, where he prayed and touched his head against the graffiti-covered wall.

“There is a need to intensify efforts and initiatives aimed at creating the conditions for a stable peace based on justice, on the recognition of rights for every individual, and on mutual security,” Francis said. Peace “must resolutely be pursued, even if each side has to make certain sacrifices.”

While the meeting is likely to be more symbolic than substantive – Israel’s presidency is ceremonial and Mr. Peres leaves office soon – it could have atmospheric significance for a peace process that has all but completely stalled.

More broadly, Pope Francis’s actions on Sunday posed a dramatic example of how, barely a year into his papacy, he is seeking to reassert the Vatican’s ancient role as an arbiter of international diplomacy. He has already had some success.

Last September, an estimated 100,000 people took part in a four-hour peace vigil for Syria at St. Peter’s Square as the United States was contemplating military strikes against the Syrian regime – strikes that President Obama later called off to pursue negotiations.

The Pope also influenced the political debate in the United States and beyond with his outspoken denunciation of global inequality and his critique of global capitalism. During his visit to the Vatican in March, Mr. Obama lavished praise on the Pope as he sought to align his own political agenda on issues such as raising the minimum wage with that of Francis, whose global popularity, for the moment, seems to transcend religion.

“If you look around the world, there are very few political leaders who are relatively untainted,” said Philip Jenkins, a history professor who teaches at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. “People want to believe there is somebody good and charismatic, and a good authority figure, out there.”

But plunging into Mideast politics can be especially perilous. In a region where religious divisions overlay the political impasse, Francis’s prayer summit “is taking the negotiations to another level — a meeting before God,” said the Rev. Jamal Khadar, head of a West Bank seminary and a spokesman for the pope’s visit. The idea, he added, is to “make religion part of trying to find a solution instead of it being seen as a negative and a complication.”

Oded Ben Hur, a former Israeli ambassador to the Holy See, said by making a personal invitation for a prayer summit, Francis eschewed Vatican protocol and tradition while showing atypical boldness. Most pontiffs, he said, “don’t rock the boat.”

“This is different,” he added. “It’s a balance, but the fact is, there is a move somewhere. He’s not conventional in that sense. When he thinks something, he expresses it.”

Sunday was the second of Francis’s three-day sojourn through the Holy Land, a trip with a carefully designed itinerary. In a delicate diplomatic dance, the pope helicoptered from Bethlehem to Tel Aviv for an official head-of-state welcome to Israel, then back to Jerusalem for an ecumenical dinner with the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople.

That meeting, marking the 50th anniversary of a historic Jerusalem handshake that was the first contact between the world’s two largest churches in 500 years, was the stated purpose of the trip. But it was overshadowed by the pope’s pointed wading into the fraught tensions between Israelis and Palestinians.

In Bethlehem, where Francis spent six hours, he met Mr. Abbas as a peer, giving the Palestinians the kind of high-profile boost they had been seeking, and spotlighting the Vatican’s support for the 2012 United Nations resolution that upgraded their status to observer-state.

He led a spirited Mass in a crowded Manger Square, which was bedecked with photomontages blending Christian iconography with images of Palestinians’ difficult daily reality. Then he had lunch with families suffering particular hardships under Israel’s occupation, and was serenaded by scores of children from the nearby Dheisheh Refugee Camp, home to some 12,000 people exiled from former family homes since the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

But perhaps the defining image of the trip was the pope’s surprise exit from his open-topped vehicle to pray at a section of the concrete barrier that snakes along and through the West Bank. Palestinians loathe the barrier – Mr. Abbas had earlier called it “monstrous” — and Israel insists it is essential to its security. Francis touched his forehead to the wall near where someone had spray-painted, “Pope, we need some 1 to speak about justice.”

Welcomed to Tel Aviv by President Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Francis reiterated his call for a “sovereign homeland” for Palestinians “with freedom of movement.”

“I implore those in positions of responsibility to leave no stone unturned in the search for equitable solutions to complex problems,” he said. “The path of dialogue, reconciliation and peace must constantly be taken up anew, courageously and tirelessly.”

Mr. Netanyahu said at the ceremony, “Our hand is outstretched in peace to whoever wants to live with us in peace,” but also referred to Jerusalem as Israel’s “eternal capital, the heart of our faith,” anathema to Palestinians’ aspirations to have East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.

The prime minister’s spokesman declined to say whether Mr. Netanyahu was aware of negotiations underway for the Vatican prayer summit, or whether he approved.

It is likely to take place before Israel’s June 10 election to replace Mr. Peres, and is an implicit indictment of international peacemaking efforts by the so-called Quartet and, most recently, Secretary of State John Kerry.

The State Department was not involved in arranging the prayer summit, but its spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, said on Sunday that Secretary Kerry “is a great admirer of Pope Francis’s leadership, and welcomes his spiritual initiative to promote Israeli-Palestinian peace through prayer and his call for courageous efforts to achieve a two-state solution.”

Several experts on the peace process agreed that the joint prayer could not substitute for political negotiations and would not prompt a breakthrough, but said it might change public perceptions in a conflict increasingly defined by deep mutual distrust.

Mr. Peres, a former prime minister who ends his presidential term in July, has been an outspoken advocate for peace. But while he is popular among Israelis and respected around the world, Mr. Peres has little influence on Israeli policy.

“The pope wants to play a constructive role, and maybe he thinks gathering them together he can do that, but he doesn’t know Peres doesn’t make political decisions at all,” said Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee. “Peres has been saying the same thing for years, and nobody listened. The political establishment is going one way and he just tries to give it a clean bill of health for public relations.”

Daniel Levy of the European Council on Foreign Relations said the meeting would “mean nothing in big-picture terms” but “in the margins” would belie the widely held Israeli belief that Mr. Abbas is not a willing peace partner and could “drive more of a wedge” between centrist and right-wing components of Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition.

David Horovitz, a longtime Israeli journalist who described himself as “cynical about everything,” said the summit could challenge many Israelis’ concern that “the Palestinian public has not come to terms with the legitimacy of a Jewish state.”

“It would be naïve to think that the site of Peres, Abbas, and the pope doing anything together is going to change the world,” said Mr. Horovitz, editor of the Times of Israel news site. “If you look at it in political terms, O.K., insignificant, but if you look at it as an effort to foster a different mindset among Israelis and Palestinians, psychologically, I think this is very positive.”