Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 259

With “I Love You, America” and “The Rundown,” two women join the comedy talk show fray

"The Rundown;" "I Love You, America" (Credit: BET/Hulu)

Johnny Carson’s tenure as host of “The Tonight Show” marks the last time American audiences united around a single late-night talk series. The late entertainer stands as a legend among late night hosts but the major reason for his reign is that he had no competition. Joan Rivers, Carson’s designated guest host for three years, attempted to launch her own talker at Fox, but that quickly crashed and burned. A deeply insulted Carson instituted a ban on Rivers that lasted past his 1992 retirement, through the tenure of two his successors Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien.

Many more male hosts staked out territory in late night after Carson — David Letterman, most significantly, then Jimmy Kimmel, Jon Stewart, Jimmy Fallon, Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert among them. And in a real sense, the Carson ban on Rivers impacted all female comedians with late night aspirations. Whoopi Goldberg hosted a late-night talk show from 1992 to 1993, but that aired in syndication. Wanda Sykes scored a short-lived Saturday night show on Fox, but that didn’t happen until in 2009, the same year Mo’Nique scored a deal for her own BET talker.

Cut to 2017: Enter Robin Thede and Sarah Silverman.

Thede, who previously served as head writer and a correspondent for Comedy Central’s gone-too-soon “The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore,” hosts BET’s recently launched late night talker “The Rundown with Robin Thede,” airing at 11 p.m. on Thursday. Silverman’s Hulu series “I Love You, America,” which also debuts new episodes on Thursdays, isn’t a night-time talker per se, though it follows that format to the letter.

In launching their latenight series both performers are bucking the presumed trend for women in comedy, whose best chance for helming a talk show tends to be in a daytime deals. Mind you, that’s has worked out fine for the likes of Ellen DeGeneres and “The Talk” co-host Aisha Tyler.

Post-prime-time, however, the gender omission has been noticeable. Even when former “Daily Show” Samantha Bee launched her own show on TBS in February 2016, Vanity Fair left her out of a 2015 photo shoot that alleged to have featured “all the titans of late-night television.”

Bee and her writing staff have since gone on to win an Emmy for the “Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” as well as score several more nominations and enjoy heaps of critical praise. In success, Bee has opened the door to more women. But she’s also underscored that a timid approach simply won’t cut it in this territory.

Silverman acknowledges that with an ongoing gag in the form of her sort-sidekick Mather Zickel, always hovering nearby. Zickel, who goes by Mather in the show, is “just your average, run of the mill late night talk show host” Silverman explains to viewers, the un-offensive ur-host archetype the camera cuts to when Silverman gets the sense that the viewers may be getting too uncomfortable, an idea she tests by having the camera linger on naked guests in the audience, specifically close-up shots of their genitalia.

Thede’s approach is much more familiar, a hybrid of the desk-free comedy news show and a pointed sketch series resembling “Chappelle’s Show.” There are pre-taped sketches, with the first two mining comedy from viewing the black experience in white spaces. For example, in the second episode Thede is the only black woman in a spinning class where the instructor invites participants to empower themselves by singing along to a ditty that includes the n-word. To her horror, everyone does.

The viewpoint of “The Rundown” purports to accommodates a black perspective, which it does insofar as Thede spends more time riffing on topics that are most relevant to people of color. But that means just about every top headline these days qualifies as ripe for Thede to pick, enabling her to cover a lot of ground quickly without belaboring the point. The assumption is that the audience knows the heart of the story because it lives with their various stakes in every moment. Adding to its upbeat pacing is a vertical headline scroller “The Rundown” employs in the style of other news series, informing viewers which topics are in the barrel.

Thede’s humor absolutely has teeth, though with less of the aggravated snarl of her fellow Comedy Central alumni. She cuts deeply into deserving targets, but does so with the sparkle and grin of some that’s fully aware that everything is a part of the larger cosmic joke she and her viewers have been born into. She lands a punchline referring to the jeweled sword Gucci Mane used to cut his wedding cake with blasé confidence, and utters the words “President” and “Trump” with the casual disdain of someone who might as well refer to him as “that fool.” Neither need explaining, and in the case of one of those figures, “The Rundown” probably is the only late-night talk show where he’d even be in the mix.

Respect is reserved for the oppressed under the headlines and the fatigued people in an audience she strives to uplift by keeping her delivery style puckish and light. And in case that’s not enough, she employs “pop-up concert” segments, with the first week surprising customers (or extras) in a bodega with a performance by Duckwrth.

As a whole, Thede’s approach ensures that “The Rundown” refrains from being exclusive and, indeed, welcomes all members of the huddled masses yearning to breathe a little more freely. And she does it in a means that’s feels fresh and necessary.

“I Love You, America” doesn’t quite achieve that level of vitality in part because Silverman is striving greatly to be safe, nudity notwithstanding. She has a steeper hill to climb due to her platform: No streaming talk series has taken off. Perhaps Chelsea Handler’s recently ending her Netflix talk show is a tacit acknowledgment of this, but the larger challenge is in the format’s value as a filter for current events. Even weekly shows display awareness of this by digging deeply into top-of-mind issues while speaking to the hot-button happening of the last seven days.

“I Love You, America” feels like it could have been done at any time by anybody. Silverman merely happens to be famous target of the right for being an outspoken liberal as well as a proud purveyor of dirty humor.  She’s also established herself as an acquired taste among many people, putting her in a different position than Thede from the outset.

In her Hulu series, Silverman’s goal is to “find common ground,” which she does by traveling to small towns dominated by Trump voters. The series debut takes her to a working-class suburb of New Orleans to speak with a family whose matriarch opines that Barack Obama “took what it means to be an American out of America,” implying that Obama made handouts the new normal.

Barely an inhale and exhale later, Silverman finds out that the entire family benefits from government subsidized healthcare – even the head of household, a full-time student.

Episode 2 travels to Texas, where Silverman chats with Trump voters who are immediately on the defensive, until she asks them to tell a story about a time they defecated in their pants. Turns out everyone has one! And everybody laughs, because everybody poops.

Silverman explains in her series debut that sometimes “I Love You, America” will be aggressively fun and silly and sometimes it’ll be totally earnest. “Manage your expectations,” she urges the audience. But shouldn’t we have minimum expectations that the show can minimally fulfill its implied mandate by inspiring viewers to truly find common ground beyond a shared affection for scatological humor.

It is early days for both shows, in a landscape that has many, many late night talk shows (or talk shows resembling nighttime talkers) vying for viewership. This is an indication of need, especially these days, to process the unthinkable through satire and humor if only to keep us from going crazy. “I Love You, America” may settle on this idea as Silverman becomes more assured in her approach to bridge-building.  But until that happens it’s good to know that Thede clearly gets it, evident in her sign-off.

“No matter what color you are,” she says, “stay black.”

Trump’s opioid declaration doesn’t include a request for more funding

President Donald Trump declared the opioid crisis to be a “nationwide public health emergency” on Thursday afternoon, but as with much of the president’s rhetoric, it rung hollow for many.

NEW: Pres. Trump officially declares “the opioid crisis a national public health emergency under federal law”

— CBS News (@CBSNews) October 26, 2017

For weeks, the Trump administration has said it would declare the opioid crisis to be a national emergency. But a public health emergency differs in that it has to be renewed every 90 days and “is narrower than what his own opioid commission had recommended,” which doesn’t provide new funds for suffering communities, Politico reported.

The opioid epidemic is now claiming 50,000 lives annually in America, which is 10,000 more lives than the HIV/AIDS epidemic at its height. Drug overdoses, primarily because of the substantial increase in opioid-related overdoses, are now the number one cause of death for Americans under 50 years old.

“Everything that was mentioned today sounds helpful, but mentioning a few helpful items is not a plan,” Andrew Kolodny, MD, co-director of the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management, told TIME magazine.

Kolodny hoped Trump would announce an appropriation of $60 billion over the next decade. But that never happened, and state and public health experts grew disappointed.

“We are disappointed that [the] President took two months to act after acknowledging the opioid epidemic is one of the most serious public health crisis of a generation, but we are hopeful that today’s declaration is finally a sign of positive momentum,” CEO of the National League of Cities, Clarence Anthony, said in a statement on Thursday. “We have long believed that the increasing number of people addicted to heroin, painkillers and other opioid derivatives has warranted the declaration of a national emergency.”

Instead, Trump suggested there be “really tough, really big, really great advertising so we get to people before they start.” He added, “If we can teach young people not to take drugs . . . it’s really, really easy not to take them.”

So what does the announcement actually do? Well, the president’s declaration “will allow public health agencies to swiftly redirect existing health resources to the crisis, but won’t add fresh funds,” Politico reported. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will also have the option to waive regulations.

It also provides rural-area patients access to telemedicine, which is often used to help treat substance addiction. It also gives “states the freedom to hire more substance abuse counselors and it allows for existing funding for displaced workers and those with HIV/AIDS to be shifted to help the addicted.”

Refilling the HHS public health fund’s bank account — which currently has an estimated $57,000 — has largely been left up to Congress.

Dr. Richard D. Blondell, professor and vice chair for addiction medicine at the University of Buffalo’s Department of Family Medicine called Trump’s speech “probably a good photo-op,” according to TIME. “It’s like a bunch of kids drowning in a river — we need to go upstream and find out why they’re drowning in the first place. We need to do something so that doctors stop prescribing people into addiction.”

The rare prison-reform documentary that listens to the jailers as well as the jailed

The United States’ prison population has surpassed 2 million. One in three black men are expected to go to prison in their lifetime, compared to one in 17 white men. One out of every 115 adults, black, white and otherwise, is incarcerated.

The statistics are harrowing, frightening even. But lost in those numbers is the more human notion that America’s enormous and expensive prison system is populated and operated by individual, thinking, caring people.

That is what a new film series released today, called “We Are Witnesses,” wants viewers to remember. Created by the criminal-justice platform The Marshall Project, in partnership with Participant Media, The New Yorker and Condé Nast Entertainment, “We Are Witnesses” features 18 individuals telling 18 different stories of their experiences with the criminal-justice system.

Marhsall Project founder and “We Are Witnesses” executive producer, Neil Barsky, told Salon that by diving into a series of intimate interviews, the project attempts to “convey the enormity and the tragedy of the criminal justice ecosystem.” He calls it “a 360 degree look at the millions and millions of people whose lives are impacted by our system of crime and punishment.” 

Yes, that means getting face to face with the prisoners in the system and those who have made their way out of it. But that also means listening to often-unheard voices, ones that may be disquieting to prison reform advocates.

There’s the Rikers corrections officer, who relays how terrifying it is to walk the prison’s halls, the victims of crime, the retired federal judge overwhelmed by his caseload, and a retired police officer. “I wanted to show that while a system could be corrupt and corrupting, the people involved can be noble,” Barsky says. “I don’t see this as a good versus evil institution — mass incarceration — I see it as a perversion of justice.”

Some of the stories are more familiar. There’s Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner, who was killed by a police officer in 2014 when he was put in a chokehold. There’s the late Venida Browder, the mother of Kalief Browder who committed suicide after he was held in Rikers Island under abominable conditions for three years without trial for allegedly stealing a backpack. There’s Yusef Salaam, a member of the wrongfully convicted Central Park Five, innocent teenagers President Donald Trump notoriously wanted put to death.

But then there’s also Steve Osborne, a retired NYPD police officer, who tries to convey what it means to be a cop. “There’s no room for error,” he tells the camera. “Nobody wants to hear that you made a mistake.” He counters Erica Garner’s viewing of the video of her father’s death, defending the officer responsible.

And this happens throughout the films: while many of the stories overlap when it comes to trauma and severity of punishment, others contradict them. “The idea of this, is let the viewer decide,” Barsky says. “I still believe that showing all perspectives is a much more powerful way of changing minds.”

“We Are Witnesses” isn’t trying to draw conclusions for you, but it is urgent to make people understand the personal and national costs of such an ineffective, often inhumane system. “The criminal justice system, by its very nature, isolates and demonizes those behind bars and those guarding them,” Barsky says. Nonetheless, he says “I think across the board there’s a growing awareness that mass incarceration should be seen as a crisis, but because it’s been going on for so long, it’s seen as the status quo. ‘We Are Witnesses’ is one way to address that.”

See the trailer below and experience “We Are Witnesses” here.

Trump pick for NASA chief doesn’t understand science

Jim Bridenstine (Credit: United States Congress/Getty/jamesbenet)

Say what you will about President Trump, but when it comes to his federal nominees, the man is remarkably consistent: He has a secretary of education who detests public education, a secretary of the interior who hates public lands, a housing and urban development secretary who despises public housing, and a labor secretary who “has a lifetime of anti-union and anti-worker positions,” according to professor Eric Loomis. Not a man to break a streak, the president has nominated Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R.-Okla) for National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) chief, despite Bridenstine’s misunderstanding of the fundamental premises of science; in particular, climate science, the study of which is one of NASA’s main functions.

When discussing climate change, Bridenstine uses a tactic perfected by the tobacco industry; specifically, the sowing of doubt to obscure science. The tobacco industry internally adopted the slogan “doubt is our greatest ally” in its efforts to hide that its products were killing thousands, which it achieved through sloganeering and PR statements honed to suggest it was unclear if the science was conclusive about tobacco’s effects. In the same vein, Bridenstine once said that the climate “has always changed,” and noted “periods of time long before the internal combustion engine when the Earth was much warmer than it is today.”

“Bridenstine sparked controversy when he demanded during a House floor speech that Obama apologize for spending more on climate-change research than weather forecasting,” wrote Christian Davenport in the Washington Post. “He also said that global temperatures ‘stopped rising 10 years ago,’ which isn’t true,” Davenport added. Indeed, Bridenstine has a long history of misconstruing, denying, or misrepresenting climate science. As with many die-hard conservative climate change deniers, it is hard to tell whether he truly believes what he says, or if the cognitive dissonance — from the knowledge that industrial production in a free market economy is slowly making Earth uninhabitable  — is too much for his dogmatic synapses to bear.

Today, Senator Patty Murray (D.-Wash.) delivered a letter to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation expressing her deep reservations about Bridenstine as a candidate for NASA chief. “Given that NASA’s fiscal year 2018 budget requested 1.8 billion for Earth-observing and climate science missions, Rep. Bridenstine’s failure to accept fundamental scientific truths about Earth’s climate make him an ill-suited and dangerous choice to lead the agency,” she wrote. Sen. Murray also noted Bridenstine’s extensive courting of anti-LGBTQ groups and his “history of supporting anti-Muslim groups” as further evidence that he was unfit for the role. “Rep. Bridenstine’s denial of fundamental scientific facts and long record of bigoted and hateful statements run counter to [NASA’s] legacy” of inspiration and curiosity, she wrote, urging the committee to oppose his nomination.

It is not merely Democrats who have expressed doubts over Bridenstine’s ability to lead NASA. Some Republicans — notably Sen. Marco Rubio (R.-Fl.) — have expressed their own reservations. “I just think [Bridenstine’s appointment] could be devastating for the space program,” Rubio told Politico. “Obviously, being from Florida, I’m very sensitive to anything that slows up NASA and its mission… It’s the one federal mission which has largely been free of politics and it’s at a critical juncture in its history,” Rubio added.

In general, the way in which the far-right has successfully sown doubt about climate change depends on certain rhetorical tactics that have redefined the way that we talk about climate change. In a July 2017 interview with Salon, outspoken writer and environmentalist Paul Hawken noted how the word “belief” had entered the popular rhetoric around climate change, despite that science was not a belief system. “People who listen to me are very involved with climate, and I’ll ask them, ‘How many people here don’t believe in global warming and climate science, raise your hand?’ And nobody will raise their hand,” Hawken told Salon. “And what I say is you all should have raised your hand, because science is not a belief system, it’s evidentiary.”

Hawken continued:

[T]hat question “do you believe?” is planted by the Republicans, so it made people who were literate in the science look like believers, and it made Republican deniers look like [the] objective people in the room. Like, “We’re not into belief, we’re objective people. We just don’t think the science is adequate.”

Deniers believe that the Holocene period of climatic stability for the last 10,000 years will persist indefinitely, and there’s not one scientific, peer-reviewed paper to support that belief, because it’s not true. We shouldn’t use the word “believe.” It’s a lack of awareness. I feel like when you know the science, you know where you stand, and that’s a good thing.

“Slimy and weaselly”: Harvard students describe learning with Sean Spicer

Sean Spicer (Credit: Getty/Alex Wong)

Sean Spicer has been on a rebranding tour since he left the White House in an effort to make us forget all the hard work he did spreading the contagion of this administration’s dangerous lies. Aiding him in this undertaking is Harvard University, which gifted Spicer with a fellowship from its Kennedy School of Government for the fall semester. (Perhaps concerned that one Trump propagandist wouldn’t cut it, Harvard also recruited former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, while Chelsea Manning, incredibly, was disinvited.) According to a press release, Spicer is a “distinguished veteran of public life” selected to “fulfill the Institute’s mission of engaging students in discourse on topical issues of today.” The announcement did not mention whether he’ll be instructing young scholars on the art lying through your teeth about nonexistent voter fraud, inauguration crowd sizes, Hitler’s unheralded scrupulousness and the encrypted brilliance of “covfefe.”

The Huffington Post spoke with students who have taken part in Spicer’s Q&A sessions to see how things are going, and the short answer is, not so great! One of the most unenthused reviews came from a student who bemoaned the difficulties of keeping any kind of record of Spicer’s lessons, stating, “He’s incredibly inarticulate, so it was really difficult to take any sort of notes.”

Another noted, “The entire thing was just a defense of every waking moment he served.”

Spicer’s sessions aren’t for public consumption, so no transcripts or recordings have been circulated. But according to students HuffPo interviewed, the cushy assignment is mostly filled with with softball queries. “No questions were pre-screened, but the sessions’ moderators had full control over who was able to get in a question,” the outlet notes. “Spicer, for his part, had his talking points ready” and “regardless of the question…tended to circle back to a few familiar themes. Benghazi, for instance.”

A key to Spicer’s on-campus discussions is his admission that he’s still in the tank for this lousy administration. He told a student group that his general, overarching plan for the future is to “continue to support the Trump agenda.” So it’s unsurprising that the defensiveness and obfuscation that defined his time as press secretary are still obvious in statements students recalled for HuffPo. When challenged on why he propagated the Trump administration’s lies, he basically told students lying was what he was paid to do. “I’m a spokesperson for the president,” Spicer reportedly told the group, “and my job is to say what he wants me to say.”

Though Spicer essentially admitted that his whopper about Trump’s inauguration crowd size kicked off his six-month White House tenure, he appeared to rededicate himself to defending the lie again while speaking at Harvard. “I said in the first press conference that the inauguration was witnessed by the most people ever,” he told students “so I was also talking about social media and online reporting of the inauguration, not just crowd sizes, which are obviously hard to calculate.”

Spicer also tried to blame the press for the Trump administration’s notorious lack of transparency, which includes prohibiting press from recording briefings in any form. Instead, Spicer tried to depict himself as a super chill flack who maintained an open-door environment, allowing anyone with a press pass to randomly swing by and get the information they needed.

“Reporters had the chance to go and knock on my door and see me anytime,” students recall Spicer saying, “but they would only ask questions during the White House press briefing so they could be on camera. They could have asked me at any other time of the day.”

In response, numerous White House reporters tweeted pictures of long lines of press waiting at the door to Spicer’s office on multiple occasions. As if we needed evidence, other than the fact that his lips were moving, that Spicer isn’t telling the truth.

Possibly recognizing that it would be a bridge too far to attempt to spin anything the Trump team has done as beneficial for the country, Spicer was at least realistic about the high points of his job. “My proudest moment as press secretary was getting the opportunity to give people tours of the White House,” he reportedly stated.

And presumably in response to a question about what he was sorry for, Spicer told students he “regret[s] a lot of things. I regret things every day of my life, and I apologize.”

Yeah, we’re gonna need a bigger apology.

In any case, students report that Spicer seems neither unfairly maligned nor misjudged for his work as town crier for the lying liar in the Executive Office.

“I learned that the media was not misrepresenting him in how they were talking about him six months ago,” a Harvard Kennedy School student told HuffPo. “I was kind of expecting him to be better than how he was portrayed through the press, but he was pretty much just as slimy and weaselly as I’d thought he was.”

The crack-up: The disuniting of America

(Credit: Cherick via Shutterstock/Salon)

When the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., published his bestseller “The Disuniting of America” in 1991, he didn’t seriously entertain the worst-case scenario suggested by the title. At the time, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were imploding, while separatist movements in Quebec, East Timor, Spain’s Basque country, and elsewhere were already clamoring for their own states. But when it came to the United States, Schlesinger’s worries were principally focused on the far smaller battlefield of the American classroom and what he saw as multiculturalism’s threat to the mythic “melting pot.” Although he took those teacup tempests seriously, the worst future Schlesinger could imagine was what he called the “tribalization of American life.” He didn’t contemplate the actual dismemberment of the country.

Today, controversies over hate speech and gender politics continue to roil American campuses. These, however, are probably the least important conflicts in the country right now, considering the almost daily evidence of disintegrative pressures of every sort: demonstrations by white supremacists, mass shootings and police killings, and the current dismantling of the federal government, not to speak of the way cities and states are defying Washington’s dictates on immigration, the environment, and health care. The nation’s motto of e pluribus unum (out of many, one) is in serious danger of being turned inside out.

A country that hasn’t had a civil war in more than 150 years, where secessionist movements from Texas to Vermont have generally caused merriment not concern, now faces divisions so serious, and a civilian arsenal of weapons so huge, that the possibility of national disintegration has become part of mainstream conversation. Indeed, after the 2016 elections, predicting a second civil war in the United States – a real, bloody, no-holds-barred military conflict – has become all the rage among journalists, historians, and foreign policy pundits across the political spectrum.

Particularly after Charlottesville, the left is convinced that President Trump and his extremist allies are intent on inciting the “alt-right” toward violence against a broad swath of his administration’s opponents. The right is convinced, particularly after the shooting of Louisiana Republican Congressman Steve Scalise, that the “alt-left” is armed and ready to revolt alongside “Mexican murderers and rapists.” Foreign Policy columnist Thomas Ricks has been taking the temperature of national security analysts on the likelihood of a future civil war.  In March, their responses averaged out to a 35% chance – and that number’s been climbing ever since. A sign of the times: Omar El Akkad’s “American War,” a novel about a second civil war, has been widely reviewed and has sold well, though whether readers are taking it as a warning or a how-to manual is not yet clear.

Sure, most Americans don’t yet fall into irreconcilable factions. But if you consider the transformation of Yugoslavia from vacation spot to killing field in two short years after 1989, it’s easier to imagine how a few demagogues, with their militant supporters, could use minority passions in this country to neutralize majority sentiments. All of which suggests why the “American carnage” that Trump invoked in his inaugural address could turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Of course, it’s not just Donald Trump. Globally speaking, the fledgling American president is more symptom than cause. The United States is just now catching up to much of the rest of the world as President Trump, from his bullying pulpit, does whatever he can to make America first in fractiousness.

When it comes to demagogues and divisiveness, however, he has plenty of competition – in Europe, in the Middle East, indeed all over our splintering planet.

The Multiplication of Division

The recent referendum on independence in Catalonia is a reminder that a single well-timed blow can break apart the unitary states of Europe as if they were nothing but poorly made piñatas. True, it’s not clear how many Catalans genuinely want independence from Spain.  Those who participated in the referendum there opted overwhelmingly in favor of secession, but only 42% of voters even bothered to register their preference. In addition, the announced relocation of 531 companies to other parts of the country is a sobering reminder of the potential economic consequences of secession. However the standoff may be resolved, though, separatist sentiments are not about to vanish in Catalonia, particularly given the Spanish government’s heavy-handed attempts to stop the vote or the voters.

Such splittism is potentially contagious. After Britons narrowly supported Brexiting the European Union (EU) in a referendum in 2016, the Scots again began talking about independence – about, that is, separating from their southern cousins while remaining within the EU. Catalans have a different dilemma. A declaration of independence would promptly sever the new country from the European Union, even as the move might spread independence fever to other groups in Spain, particularly the Basques.

The British and the Catalans have delivered something like a prolonged one-two punch to the EU, which until recently had been in continuous expansion: from six member states in 1957 to 28 today. Losing both Great Britain and Catalonia would mean kissing goodbye to more than one-fifth of that organization’s economic output. (According to 2016 numbers, the United Kingdom contributes 2.7 trillion euros and Catalonia 223 billion euros to the EU’s 14.8 trillion euro gross domestic product.) That’s the economic equivalent of California and Florida peeling off from the United States.

The question is whether the British and Catalan votes are the culmination of a mini-trend or the beginning of the end. Although Brexit actually gave a boost to the EU’s popularity across its member states (including England), Brussels continues to experience pushback from those states on immigration, financial bailouts, and the process of decision-making.

Euroskeptic movements like the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany and the Freedom Party in Austria have met with growing success and rising voter support, even in Euro-friendly countries. In that continent’s future lie: a possible Czexit as a right-wing billionaire takes over as prime minister of the Czech Republic and looks to create a governing coalition with a vehemently anti-immigrant and anti-EU partner; a Nexit if Euroskeptic Geert Wilders succeeds in expanding his political base further in the Netherlands; and even an Italexit as voters there have bucked the “Brexit effect,” with 57% now favoring a referendum on membership.

Outside actors, too, have been hard at work. The Kremlin under Vladimir Putin relishes a weaker EU, if only so that its own immediate neighbors – Ukraine and Georgia – will stop leaning westward. Donald Trump has similarly embraced the Euroskeptics in a bid to spread what former top adviser Steve Bannon has termed the “deconstruction of the administrative state” to Europe.

Those who might enjoy an EU-style frisson of schadenfreude look at Europe’s ills as a case of the chickens coming home to roost. Many European governments supported the American-led conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria that have shattered the Greater Middle East, sending refugees by the hundreds of thousands toward the EU. One crucial result: anti-immigrant sentiment and Islamophobia have fueled far-right “populist” parties across Europe.  In the process, the continent is threatened with being torn apart at the seams in an echo of the developments in the countries from which the refugees are streaming.  Think of it as the war on terror transposed to a different key.

This parallel could be seen in a particularly poignant fashion in the independence referendum in Kurdistan that was held just before the Catalan vote. Iraq has been at risk of disintegration ever since the United States invaded in 2003 and removed the tyrannical but unifying hand of Saddam Hussein from the tiller of state. Proposals to divide the country into three autonomous parts presided over by Kurds, Sunnis, and Shia began circulating in Washington within years of the invasion, then-Senator Joe Biden’s “soft-partition plan” being perhaps the best known of them.

The Kurds made Biden’s proposal a reality by carving out their own autonomous region in the northern part of Iraq. Now, after a referendum that secured overwhelming support (with a turnout of more than 70%), the Kurds, with their peshmerga forces, are trying to make the divorce official. The Iraqi military has been on the move to stop them and now two American-trained and armed militaries face off against each other in that explosive region.

The Turks and Iranians similarly eye the effort to secede with considerable wariness in light of Kurdish autonomy movements in their own countries. Syria too, despite the recent military victories of the Russian-backed government in Damascus, remains divided with a de facto Kurdish state of Rojava in its north. And it’s not just the Kurds. Libya is in the midst of a civil war. In devastated Yemen, various conflicts continue, all aggravated by an intervention and brutal air campaign sponsored by the Saudis and other Gulf States with the assistance of Washington. And Saudi Arabia and Bahrain face significant Shia challenges within their borders.

Elsewhere in the world, too, the center is anything but holding, as things threaten to fall apart. Around Russia, frozen conflicts – in Ukraine and Georgia – have paralyzed states that otherwise might make a bid to join the EU or NATO. In China, separatist movements burn on a low flame in Xinjiang and Tibet. The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya is just one of many problems of fragmentation in Myanmar. Secessionist movements are gaining momentum in Cameroon and Nigeria. In Brazil, three southern states are mobilizing to secede from the rest of the country.  In the Philippines, a Muslim terror insurgency in southern Mindanao took and held much of a major city for months on end.

In the past, secession was all about creating new, smaller nation-states. The most recent wave of division, however, may not stop with the breakdown of states into smaller pieces.

Three Great Shatterings

Nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon. Prior to the consolidation of the French nation in the nineteenth century, for instance, the inhabitants of the country thought of themselves as Bretons, Provençals, Parisians, and the like. Contrary to various founding myths, the nation didn’t exist from time immemorial. It had to be conjured into existence – and for a reason.

The nineteenth century witnessed the first great modern shattering as people weaponized the new concept of “nation” and companion notions of ethnic solidarity and popular sovereignty in their struggles against empires. The revolutions of 1825 in Greece and Russia, the 1848 “spring of nations” throughout Europe, the subsequent unification of Germany and Italy – all were blows against the empires presided over by the Habsburgs, the Romanovs, and the Ottoman sultans.

World War I then dispatched those weakened empires to their graves in one huge conflagration. After the war ended, a Middle East of heterogeneous nation-states and a new group of independent Balkan countries emerged from the defunct Ottoman Empire. Imperial Russia briefly fragmented into dozens of smaller states until the Soviet Union glued them back together by force. The house of the Habsburgs fell and the Central European countries of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary crawled out from under the wreckage.

The second great shattering, which stretched across the middle span of the twentieth century, accompanied the collapse of the colonial empires. The British, French, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, and German overseas colonies all achieved independence, and a new global map of nation-states emerged in Africa, Asia, and to a lesser extent Latin America where decolonization had largely occurred a century earlier.

The end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism in Europe in the early 1990s precipitated the third great shattering. Gone suddenly was the subordination of national priorities to larger ideological structures. The countries of Eastern Europe voted their way out of the Soviet bloc. The Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia all collapsed with varying degrees of violence and suffering, producing more than 20 new U.N. members. Further afield, Eritrea, East Timor, and South Sudan were able to secure their independence in part because the end of the Cold War meant that the international community could permit a freer exercise of self-determination. (During the nearly half-century of the Cold War, the only new splinter state welcomed into the United Nations was Bangladesh.)

The end of empire, of colonialism, and of the Cold War thrice shattered and remade the map of the world. You could certainly argue that the fracturing taking place today is nothing but the continuation of those three transformations. The Cold War demanded the unity of Europe (and the unity of its component parts), so only in the post-Cold War era could Catalans and Scots explore the option of independence with any hope of success. The emergence of Kurdistan had been made possible by the breakdown of the arbitrary Middle East borders created in the aftermath of World War I, and so on.

Historical change isn’t ever going to wash over the world in one even wave. That’s a hard reality to which North Koreans, who still live in a semi-feudal, putatively Communist, and fiercely nationalist state, can attest.

The Fourth Great Shattering

Yet the most recent events undoubtedly represent not just a fourth great shattering, but one that falls into a new category entirely. The current divisions in the United States have nothing to do with empires or colonialism or possibly even the Cold War. The debates over the EU’s viability center on the obligations Europeans have to each other and to those arriving as refugees from distant conflicts. The forces threatening to tear apart nation-states elsewhere suggest that this elemental unit of the international system may be nearing the end of its shelf life.

Consider, for instance, the impact of economic globalization. The expansion of trade, investment, and corporate activity has long had the effect of drawing nations together – into cartels like OPEC, trade communities like the European Union, and international institutions like the International Monetary Fund. By the 1970s, however, economic globalization was eating away at the exclusive prerogative of the nation-state to control trade or national currencies or implement policies regulating the environment, health and safety, and labor.

At the same time, particularly in industrialized countries like the United Kingdom and the United States, income inequality increased dramatically. The wealth gap is now worse in the United States than in Iran or the Philippines. Among the top industrialized countries, according to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the gap between the richest 10% of the population and the poorest 10% has grown appreciably larger.

Even among countries where inequality has dropped because of government efforts to redistribute income, the perception has grown that globalization favors the rich, not the poor. Fewer than half of French respondents to a 2016 YouGov poll believed that globalization was a force for good – even though income inequality has fallen in that country since the 1970s. Having once reduced tensions among countries and strengthened the nation-state, economic globalization increasingly pits peoples against one another within countries and among countries.

Other forms of globalization have had a similar effect. Facebook and Twitter, for instance, have connected people in unprecedented ways and provided a mechanism to mobilize against a variety of societal ills, including dictators, trigger-happy police, and sexual harassers.  But the other side of the ability to focus organizing efforts within digital affinity groups is the way such platforms Balkanize their users, not by ethnicity as much as by political perspective.  Information or opinions challenging one’s worldview that once appeared in the newspaper or occasionally on the evening news get weeded out in the Facebook newsfeed or the Twitter stream of one’s favorite amplifiers. Ethnic cleansing by decree has been largely overtaken by ideological cleansing by consent. What’s the point of making the necessary compromises to function in a diverse nation-state when you can effectively secede from society and hang with your homies in a virtual community?

Given the polarizing impact of economic and technological globalization, it’s no surprise that the politics of the middle has either disappeared or, because of a weak left, drifted further to the right. Donald Trump is the supreme expression of this stunning loss of faith in centrist politicians as well as such pillars of the institutional center as the mainstream media.

Since these figures and institutions delivered an economics of inequality and a foreign policy of war over the last three decades, the flight from the center is certainly understandable. What’s new, however, is the way Trump and other right-wing populists have stretched this disaffection, which might ordinarily have powered a new left, to encompass what might be called the three angers: over immigration, the expansion of civil rights, and middle-class entitlement programs. Fueled by a revulsion for the center, Trump is not simply interested in undermining his political opponents and America’s adversaries. He has a twin project, promoted for decades by the extreme right, of destroying the federal government and the international community.

That’s why the fourth great shattering is different. In the past, people opposed empires, colonial powers, and the ideological requirements of the Cold War by banding together in more compact nation-states. They were still willing to sacrifice on behalf of their unknown compatriots – to redistribute tax revenues or follow rules and regulations – just on a smaller scale.

Nationalism hasn’t gone away. Those who want to preserve a unitary state (Spain) as well as those who want out of the same state (Catalonia) appeal to similarly nationalist sentiments. But today, the very notion of acting in solidarity with people in a territorial unit presided over by a state is fast becoming passé. Citizens are in flight from taxes, multiculturalism, public education, and even the guarantee of basic human rights for all. The fourth great shattering seems to be affecting the very bonds that constitute the nation-state, any nation-state, no matter how big or small.

The Future of Dystopia

In 2015, before the Brexit vote and before Donald Trump emerged as the frontrunner in the Republican Party primary, I published an “essay” at TomDispatch in which a geo-paleontologist (a field I made up) looked backward from 2050 at the splintering of the international community.

“The movements that came to the fore in 2015 championed a historic turn inward: the erection of walls, the enforcement of homogeneity, and the trumpeting of exclusively national virtues,” he observed with the benefit of history I hadn’t yet experienced. “The fracturing of the so-called international community did not happen with one momentous crack. Rather, it proceeded much like the calving of Arctic ice masses under the pressure of global warming, leaving behind only a herd of modest ice floes.”

That piece later became my dystopian novel, “Splinterlands,” which spelled out in more detail how I imagined those fracture lines would widen over time until geopolitics became micro-politics and only the very smallest units of community were able to weather the global storm (including, of course, the literal storm of climate change). Dystopian novels are supposed to be warnings, but let me assure you of this: dystopian novelists rarely want their predictions to come true. I’ve watched, horrified, as the words of Splinterlands seemed to leap off my pages and into the world in 2017.

I’m no Cassandra. I don’t believe that this fourth great shattering is inevitable. Empires, colonialism, and the Cold War are largely things of the past. But the fracturing of that hitherto indivisible unit of the world community – the nation-state – could still be arrested.

It’s not particularly popular to defend the state these days in the United States. Even before Trump came to power, the American state was radically expanding its surveillance capabilities, its war-making capacities, and – among other grim developments – its punitive policies toward the poor. No surprise then that Trump’s promise to deconstruct the federal government struck such a chord among voters, even some on the left.

But the alternative to the current state should not be the non-state. The real alternative is a different state, one that is more democratic, more economically just and sustainable, and less aggressive. For all of its institutional violence and bureaucratic flaws, the state is still the best bet we have for protecting the environment, stretching out a safety net for all, and providing equitable education opportunities to everyone, not to mention its ability to band together with other states to tackle global problems like climate change and pandemics.

French king Louis XIV famously said, “L’etat, c’est moi.” Today, thanks to the first three shatterings, across much of the globe the state is no longer Louis XIV or a colonial administration or a superpower overlord. The state is – or at least should be – us. If we lose the state in a fourth great shattering, we will lose an important part of ourselves as well: our very humanity.

John Feffer is the author of the dystopian novel “Splinterlands” (a Dispatch Books original with Haymarket Books), which Publishers Weekly hails as “a chilling, thoughtful, and intuitive warning.” He is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and a TomDispatch regular.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy’s “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power,” as well as John Dower’s “The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II,” John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s “Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead,” and Tom Engelhardt’s “Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.”

New investigative website fights rich and powerful “who call the shots”

(Credit: AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

EDITOR’S NOTE: In 2009, he came to us at Bill Moyers Journal because he wanted to tell the truth and needed someone to hear him. As Wendell Potter told his story, we listened — and what we heard was sickening: a story of corruption in the health insurance industry that not only raised the cost of coverage to consumers but put lives at risk.

Potter had seen it up close, as head of corporate public relations pulling down a six-figure salary for one of the country’s biggest insurers. He had watched in disbelief as he saw how Wall Street’s hunger to force up quarterly profits gave insurers every incentive to deny coverage, as every dollar not paid out to a claim added to profits and to the soaring paychecks and bonuses of CEOs. Under these conditions, Potter told us, you don’t think about individuals, “you think about the numbers, and whether or not you’re going to meet Wall Street’s expectations.”

One day, back home in Tennessee, where he had begun his career as a journalist, Potter happened upon a makeshift health clinic set up at a rural fairgrounds for people who couldn’t afford to visit a doctor, fill a prescription or go to a hospital. He told us, “When I walked through the fairground gates, I saw hundreds of people lined up, in the rain, waiting to get care in animal stalls. Animal stalls!”

Potter blew the whistle, becoming management’s “worst nightmare,” revealing how public opinion was manipulated with deceitful corporate propaganda. His testimony before Congress rocked the industry. His revelations during our hour-long interview — his first on television — reverberated far and wide. He expected to be vilified and was. The first requirement for a whistleblower is credibility; the second is courage; the third, a thick hide. Potter never flinched. The journalist-turned-executive-turned-whistleblower has became a reformer, working with reporters and activists to track the abuses of an industry with extraordinary power over our lives, our economy and our politics.

Now Wendell Potter returns to journalism. Today, he launches a new organization for investigative reporting called Tarbell — a watchdog we’ll wager can bite as well as bark.  He’s named it for — well, that’s what you will find out from this conversation between Potter and our senior writer, Michael Winship.

— Bill Moyers

 

Michael Winship: Wendell, welcome. To begin, why have you decided to call your website Tarbell?

Wendell Potter: I think a lot of people don’t recognize the name, but Ida Tarbell was one of America’s most important journalists. She was a journalist in the early part of the 20thcentury, the early 1900s, and her muckraking really led to some very important legislation, antitrust and campaign finance laws during the Teddy Roosevelt administration, largely as a report of her dogged reporting and investigating of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, which was a huge monopoly and conglomerate. Over a series of six reports that were published in McClure’s Magazine, she really exposed what the consequences of that monopoly were on American society.

So she is our guiding spirit. We hope to shine a light on corporations and other special interests that have really rigged the system against regular folks.

MW: Why did you decide to start a website?

WP: You know, it was largely because of what I learned when I was in corporate America. I headed corporate communications for two big health insurance companies at different times, Humana and Cigna, and toward the end of my career, I saw that there were fewer and fewer reporters who were interested or able to really take a close look at how corporations do business and what the consequences of their practices are. And that’s why I testified before Congress after I left my old job and tried to pull the curtain back so people could understand more how corporations and special interests manipulate public opinion.

I wrote a book called Deadly Spin after that. More recently, I also wrote, with Nick Penniman, a book called Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupted Democracy and What We Can Do About It, and that focused on how those special interests, those moneyed interests, spend money to manipulate public policy, influence elections and what the consequences are to the rest of us.

Not enough people read books or hear congressional testimony, so I decided to go the extra step and try to reach a much broader audience. I think few people are really aware of just how much our system of government has shifted from the democratic republic envisioned by our founders to one that is largely an oligarchy and I want to expose that.

Our journalists will take that on and over a period of time make the case that we need to really get involved to change the system and how it can be changed. So we’re also going to be focusing on solutions, not just investigating the problem, but what can we do about it? How can we, for example, improve the health care system in ways that we haven’t seen our policymakers attempt yet? And what can we do to enact meaningful reforms that clean up the corruption that is so prevalent in governments at all levels?

MW: You’ve said that Tarbell’s mission is to report stories essential to our democracy and our lives. Besides health care, what would be some examples of that?

WP: The financial services industry, the chemical industry, the fossil fuel industry. We have a situation obviously in which the planet is warming and we’ve got to take action but there are big fossil fuel companies that are able to call the shots in Washington and state capitals around the country that prevent the action we need to make sure that we’re not continuing on this path toward an uninhabitable planet.

Another is why is higher education so expensive? Why are our young people now saddled with so much student debt that many of them will probably never pay it off? Why are so few chemicals that are in everyday products not regulated and not even tested?

MW: Is the overarching story then money in politics?

WP: Money in politics is a very, very big part of it because money has become so much a part of our political system that members of Congress don’t spend nearly as much time in their offices on the people’s business, they have to constantly be raising money for re-election. They spend on average half of their day dialing for dollars. They leave their offices and go to Democratic and Republican offices to be telemarketers trying to raise money for re-election. And then in the evenings they go to fundraisers that are hosted by lobbyists.

So we’ve got a situation that really has facilitated this shift from a democratic republic to an oligarchy. The rich and powerful really call the shots and we want to address that. It is pervasive. In addition, we want to show just how some business practices, even if they’re not influencing public policy, affect our lives in ways that we need to know about.

There are a lot of different areas that we want to take on but we also want to have our readers help us determine some of the topics that we cover. This is going to be participatory journalism in a very real sense. We want to get story ideas from our readers, we want to have them suggest not just topics but to engage in online conversations with our journalists as they’re working on stories.

MW: So you think that that kind of interactivity is what will set Tarbell apart from some of the other investigative journalism sites?

WP: It’s essential for citizens to be involved and I see no reason why they shouldn’t be involved in journalism. And I think we would even publish some pieces that are submitted by readers. We want to build a community of readers. We’re nonprofit, so we’re going to be relying on donations but we will not have a paywall. We want everyone to be able to see the work that we produce.

We also want to help people understand how they can actually become part of the solution, what some of the tools and information are that they need to be more involved. The solutions journalism part of what we’re doing will help them understand what some of the options are to improve our government and society and will give them information on how they can affiliate with groups that are engaged in an issue.

MW: There’s been such a drumbeat from Donald Trump and the White House about fake news. How do you see Tarbell combatting that accusation?

WP: Donald Trump has kind of defined fake news in his own terms. Originally, it was a term that was applied to information that was not true, that was being disseminated by people who were trying to influence the elections by spreading false information. He usurped the term and uses it to try to delegitimize the media, which I think is something he’s doing quite effectively with some segments of the population.

But that said, to a certain extent I think that Americans have lost trust in the fourth estate. One reason is that there are far fewer reporters doing the investigative work that we hope to do. And so much of what you see in the media these days — the talking head, political TV shows; people shouting at each other or the he said/she said kind of stuff — that is about all we get. We want to go more in depth. We want to help people understand an issue more deeply — not just what politicians are saying about an issue, [but] how they’re affected and what they can do about it. So one of our objectives is to try to bring back public confidence in the media.

MW: How hard is it to begin a startup these days? What surprised you along the way that you didn’t expect?

WP: It surprised me that it takes longer than I would like it to have and it takes money. We would like to have been publishing six months ago but it takes a while to do all that needs to be done from being designated a nonprofit organization, which we have, we got our determination letter from the IRS that we are a 501(c)(3).

The name of the nonprofit that will publish Tarbell is “To Be Fair,” and that name has some significance. We wanted to signify that whatever we do will be fair, fair reporting, but also aim to help achieve a more just and fair society through journalism. I think that journalism has shown itself over decades and centuries to be essential to democracy and to help drive important change. We want to be a part of that, to make sure that the watchdog role of the press continues.

We’re tenacious and determined and so grateful that we are at this point and can soon start publishing the journalism that we’ve been telling people we plan to do.

MW: How have you staffed this?

WP: I’ve got a small team of people who are helping us to build this, journalists and tech experts. We’ve got a terrific board of directors and board of advisers.

We’ve had so many emails and calls from reporters around the country who are interested and would like to work for us. Ultimately, what we want to do is to build a paid staff of 10 to 12 people. We also will work with freelance reporters around the country. Hopefully, we will have an ample freelance budget.

We really want to have news and information from all across the country. We will not be based in Washington or New York. We want to be away from those media centers for various reasons. We’re going to be based in Philadelphia, where our country began. Our core staff will be based there but even some of the paid staff will be working virtually from wherever they might be.

MW: We mentioned that the scope of your interests is vast but your focus for a long time was the health care insurance industry, as an executive within it and then as an advocate for reform, and we know that health care constitutes a sixth of the American economy. How much of Tarbell’s focus will be on it?

WP: A significant amount of our emphasis will be on health care, certainly to start. It’s one of the most topical issues clearly and our health care system once again is under threat. What the president is doing now despite what he says is really undermining the Affordable Care Act, trying to make it collapse if he possibly can. And whether or not he goes forward or is able to achieve what he’s trying to achieve, we need to do much more than what we have done even with the Affordable Care Act.

I said during that debate that the Affordable Care Act did good things but it was just the end of the beginning of reform. There are a lot of things that we need to do to improve our health care system. The Affordable Care Act brought a lot of people into coverage but there are still 30 million of us who don’t have it and health care costs continue to go up.

As part of solutions journalism, we want to help people understand what Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All legislation is all about and other proposals as well. And we want to help people to get the truth about how other systems around the world operate, on how the Canadian health care system operates and is different from ours and how other systems around the world have been able to achieve universal coverage and much better cost control than we have and while doing all that have much better outcomes.

It can be done. We won’t be advocating for the adoption of any particular system but we want people to really understand what the possibilities are. One of my jobs in my old career was to scare people away from any kind of system that wasn’t like the one we have now because it benefits the insurance industry and the other influential special interests — they make a lot of money off of this system. And to a certain extent, I’m making amends for the deception, the misleading information that I was part of disseminating for many years in my old job.

MW: You mentioned the president and health care, what are your thoughts on these most recent developments, the executive actions to undercut the ACA and his declaration on Monday that Obamacare is dead? And what do you make of the attempt by Sens. Patty Murray and Lamar Alexander to come up with a temporary bipartisan compromise?

WP: If his executive orders do go forward, there’s no doubt that what we had referred to or known as Obamacare is no more. In fact, I think it probably is time to start calling what we have Trumpcare.

The executive orders would really be such a disadvantage to people who really need insurance. A lot of people will be once again priced out of the market and won’t be able to afford coverage. One of the executive orders creates what’s referred to as association health plans that will enable small employers in particular to circumvent state law and even federal law so that they can sell skimpy insurance, junk insurance if you will, to people, which will undoubtedly attract a lot of young and healthy people because the premiums will be cheaper but the value of what they’re buying is so much less, to the point that many of those policies will indeed be junk insurance. So it’s tragic what would happen if that executive order goes forward.

Now he’s directed the Department of Health and Human Services and other departments to write the regulations for the implementation of this order. That will take time and there has to be a period of public comment. So it’s not going to happen tomorrow. It may be months down the road but it could happen. And it will be devastating. And even during that time it creates more uncertainty in the health insurance marketplace. And that undoubtedly will also lead to more health insurers leaving the Obamacare exchanges or if they stay increasing their premiums because of the uncertainty of knowing whether or not there will be any money to help cover the out of pocket expenses for example of the people enrolled in those plans.

Another part of the executive order is to cut off the payments that have gone to or through insurance companies to help people afford to get the care that they need, to help offset their out of pocket expenses, which is so important for a lot of low and middle income people. So it could be really quite devastating.

That’s why I’m delighted Sens. Alexander and Murray were able to land on a bipartisan short-term proposal to preserve the subsidies many low- and middle-income Americans are getting to help them cover those out of pocket medical expenses. Without the subsidies, a lot of folks wouldn’t be able to pay for the care they need. What’s not good is letting states permit the sale of policies that are nowhere close to adequate. Many people who enroll in those so-called catastrophic plans find out when it’s too late that they have to pay far more than they’re able to pay for expensive medical care. It would lead to more people filing for bankruptcy because of medical debt.

Senate Democrats seem to be on board with what Alexander and Murray have come up with, but 60 votes will be needed for it to pass the Senate. And in the House, the odds are even slimmer. Paul Ryan has already said he’s against anything that doesn’t repeal and replace Obamacare. And it’s anybody’s guess where the president will land. One minute he likes it, the next minute he hates it. I wouldn’t give it much chance of going anywhere.

MW: Also, with the new ACA enrollment period about to start, all these efforts to cut back on promoting new enrollments and then just the very fact of his declaring Obamacare dead would seem to be either a conscious or unconscious way to quash enrollments.

WP: There’s no doubt that’s true. For a lot of people, in many cases, perception is reality. It’s the news that they get. And without advertising and other means of spreading the word about open enrollment, then we probably will see a lot of people not enrolling for coverage beginning next month for 2018. More than likely we will see a drop-off in people who sign up and premiums will be higher for a lot of people.

Once again, because of the uncertainty, the insurance companies that are still in the Obamacare exchanges didn’t know what the president or Congress might do. Some of them suspected that some of the payments that have been going through them to help low and middle income people might be cut off and so consequently they’ve raised premiums in many places. So people will find it in some cases more expensive to get coverage than it has been in the past.

MW: They’re projecting 20–25 percent increases in premiums over the next couple of years.

WP: That’s correct in many places, not in every place but that absolutely could happen and be more the average. It even could be higher than that. And it’s not just premiums that we’re talking about. It’s important to pay attention to where the premiums are, but it’s just as important and sometimes more important to know what your out of pocket obligations are.

One of the things that led me to leave my job was the industry strategy of moving more and more of us, all of us eventually, into high deductible plans. And I knew that those plans were not good for a lot of people who have a lot of medical expenses because of health status or pre-existing conditions and income. So that strategy has continued and what the president’s executive orders would do is make it even more challenging for people who really need insurance and need care.

MW: Wendell, as someone who’s been both a journalist and a corporate executive, what do you think you’re going to bring to this Tarbell endeavor that will make it different?

WP: First of all, I’m so grateful to be able to return to journalism. I realized during my corporate career — and it was a long corporate career — that I am really a journalist at heart. I sometimes joke that I spent 20 years inside the health insurance industry undercover. So what I can do is offer and provide some insights and help journalists understand where to go look for a story and how to get information and how to cover big business in a way that is not being done much anymore.

I’ve seen it from the inside, I know the tricks. I know how they go about doing what they do to manipulate public opinion and elections and public policy. And what I bring to this is an emphasis on bringing the watchdog press back with scrutiny on business and business practices and the way that big businesses and other moneyed interests like trade associations. We want to help people understand how they do what they do and how we are often so disadvantaged. They do what they do to enhance profits, to enhance shareholder value, to protect a profitable status quo. And we at Tarbell will explain how it is they go about doing this and why it’s important. We’ll be connecting the dots for people so that they can understand why they should care to the point of getting involved to help move us to solutions.

MW: Wendell, thank you and best of luck with Tarbell.

You don’t cut taxes with two wars and 240,000 troops overseas

(Credit: Getty/AP/Salon)

I’ve spent a lot of time recently trying to figure out when it was that Americans in large numbers began to take leave of their senses, and I think I know when it happened. It was on April 17, 2001, when the good citizens of the state of Mississippi voted in a special referendum on whether or not to replace the state flag, which included the “stars and bars” of the Confederate battle flag in about one third of its design. The referendum was preceded by a vigorous campaign by both sides, with the state’s business interests spending about $600,000 in favor of changing the flag, arguing that keeping the Confederate symbol would harm the state’s economic growth by deterring businesses from moving to the state.

I remember watching a story on one of the national evening news shows. The reporter was out in the Mississippi countryside, trying to get a sense of how the vote would go, when his news van passed a man standing by himself along the roadside holding aloft the state flag with the Confederate stars and bars. The reporter got out and asked him why he supported keeping the flag. It represented his heritage, he said. What about the symbol of the Confederacy on the flag, the reporter asked. Mercedes had announced it wouldn’t open a plant in Mississippi if they kept the current flag. What about all the jobs they would lose? The man said he’d rather have his flag than a job.

The vote was 64 percent to retain the flag, 36 percent against. Mercedes kept its pledge and stayed out of Mississippi. After South Carolina and Georgia removed the Confederate battle flag from their state flags, Mississippi became the only state in the nation to keep it.

A state took leave of its senses with that vote, and now we know what happens when a nation does the same thing: We get Trump for a president and a Republican majority congress that’s ready for a vote on a tax “plan” that is so fucked up it hardly bears discussion. To take only one example of many, it was recently revealed that Republicans in Congress are considering cutting the amount of money citizens can put aside for their retirement in 401(k) savings plans. This lovely little move would help “pay for” the more than $1.5 trillion tax cut for corporations and the wealthy that experts say could balloon the deficit by more than $2.2 billion over ten years.

When I first heard they were considering this madness, I thought, oh, they’re probably going to cut the 401(k) contributions in half. But no. They are planning on cutting them by more than 85 percent. Today, you can set aside up to $18,000 of your hard earned income in your 401(k). Under the Republican tax plan, that amount would be reduced to $2,400. The recent populist noises the president has made, insisting he doesn’t want retirement savings plans to be touched are about as reliable as his campaign promises that he wouldn’t touch Medicaid, Medicare or Social Security, and would provide affordable healthcare for everyone with his repeal of Obamacare.

We could pick apart the insanity of the Republican plan, and you’ll hear these arguments made as the Republicans move their plan forward. But what you won’t hear is this one: you just don’t cut taxes when you have troops fighting in two wars and more than 240,000 of them are stationed overseas, many of them in harm’s way. (There are also another 38,000 American soldiers assigned to secret missions around the world). Trump’s budget proposal for 2018 pushes defense spending above $600 billion and includes proposed increases of nearly half a trillion dollars over the next decade. Where is this money going to come from when you’re proposing to cut taxes by $1.5 trillion?

According to the Pentagon, we currently have 36,000 troops in Germany; 40,000 in Japan; 23,500 in South Korea; 3,500 in Poland; 10,000 in Italy (!); 8,200 in Great Britain; 1,300 in Turkey; and 250 in Ukraine. In the Middle East, we have 7,600 in Iraq and an unknown number fighting in Syria; 11,000 in Doha, Qatar; 15,000 in “staging areas” in Kuwait; 7,000 in Bahrain; 5,000 in United Arab Emirates; 1,500 in Jordan; 200 in Oman; an unknown number in Yemen; and 12,000 in Afghanistan. In Africa, according to AFRICOM, the command for all U.S. operations on the continent, we currently have 6,000 troops, including 4,000 in Djibouti, the tiny nation on the Horn of Africa that’s about the size of Vermont, and 2,000 scattered elsewhere, including about 1,000 in Niger, 400 in Somalia (where a recent terrorist attack killed more than 300 and injured another 200).

Who knows where the rest of our soldiers are serving in Africa? Hell, we didn’t know we had anybody in Niger until a few weeks ago when four U.S. Special Forces soldiers were killed in what is being called an ambush, apparently by ISIS fighters. We don’t know what our soldiers are doing in Yemen, where according to the U.N., 16,000 Yemenis have been killed over the last two years in a civil war. We don’t know what they’re doing in neighboring Oman, but maybe their extensive oil reserves have something to do with it. We don’t know why we’ve got 1,000 soldiers in Niger, although its 500 million barrel oil reserves and mines with an eighth of the world’s uranium reserves might have something to do with it.

Those 36,000 troops in Germany? They’re not sitting there waiting for the Russkis to attack like they were during the Cold War. These days they are “forward deployed,” closer to hotspots than they would be at Fort Bragg or Fort Hood, waiting to be sent elsewhere. Same with the troops in Japan, waiting for Kim Jung-un to hiccup. AFRICOM, the forces command for the entire African continent, is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany. For all we know, a couple of battalions out of Germany have already loaded onto C-141’s and C-17’s and are on their way to Niger.

We’ve got an entire armored brigade in Poland. What are they doing there? And with Poland’s proximity to Russia, whose side is Trump on? Hell, we don’t know what our troops are doing in the huge majority of the 172 countries they’re stationed in. The Pentagon doesn’t exactly volunteer that information, and Congress is so uninterested that neither of the Republican-led Armed Services committees knew anything about Niger until our soldiers were killed there. Now they’re madly organizing hearings and rushing to every microphone they can find on Capitol Hill to tell us how involved they are and how much oversight they’re going to exercise. That’s if they can keep enough of their members around long enough to do it. Bob Corker, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, has announced he won’t seek re-election. So has Arizona’s Jeff Flake, who just happens to be chairman of the Subcommittee on Africa on the Foreign Relations Committee. Then we’ve got John McCain, whose health isn’t looking real good, who’s chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and God only knows who else might decide that hanging around to watch Trump shred the Constitution and degrade our nation’s standing in the world to new all-time lows isn’t going to be too much fun, and decide to join them in the congressional lifeboat.

Bad things happen when people take leave of their senses. Whole states suffer economic setbacks. Whole countries suffer disgrace in the eyes of the world. But even though nothing can be done to stop our Twitterer in Chief from further debasing himself and the country, bodies like the Congress of the United States have real and consequential obligations when it comes to looking out for the soldiers who serve overseas, often at great risk to life and limb. You can’t take care of the troops by cutting taxes on rich people and wealthy corporations. It’s not a crime to lose your mind, but it is a crime to risk the lives of the 1 percent of our citizens who serve in the military, while you stuff the wallets of the other 1 percent of our citizens whose only risk to life would be if their Gulfstreams ran out of fuel and fell from the sky. You don’t cut taxes in time of war. You raise taxes and share the burden carried in our name by the soldiers, sailors and airmen serving overseas and fighting our wars.

Denis Leary: Fame killed the presidency

Denis Leary (Credit: Peter Cooper/Getty/lucky-photographer)

Fame has infiltrated the White House, but at this point, should celebrity actually be part of the strategy? Maybe, according to Denis Leary.

“It’s crazy how fame has sort of eaten alive the political system,” Leary said on “Salon Talks” with Jeremy Binckes. “I don’t want any more Clintons, we’re done with the Clintons. I don’t want any more Bushes, we’re done with the Bushes. God knows I don’t want one of the Trump boys to run after their dad’s done.”

The actor, singer and comedian discussed his new book, “Why We Don’t Suck: And How All of Us Need to Stop Being Such Partisan Little Bitches,” and the effect comedy is having on democracy.

“If we have to deal in fame and that’s how we’re going to elect people — Oprah,” he suggested. “I want a female president. I think we, as a democracy, we’re really lagging behind. Other democracies that we’ve helped create have female leaders and we’ve never had one so I think it’s time for that.”

Leary went on to discuss how people connect with politics through entertainment, specifically comedy, which he touted as “the ultimate form of democracy.”

“If it’s fucking funny and you’re doing it in front of a live audience, they vote with this fucking sound that comes out of their mouth, right?” he said. “Because they’re basically agreeing with the point of view.”

And he pointed out that, yes, certain comedy sketches aren’t meant to be funny to everyone, but that’s the point.

“Are you gonna offend some people sometimes? It’s part of the process!” he exclaimed.

Comedy was a way to highlight controversy and problems in society in a way that makes people aware, makes them care, but also makes them laugh, and Leary implied that if “you don’t like it,” maybe just don’t watch.

“It’s always people without a sense of humor, by the way, that are criticizing the comedians.”

Watch the full “Salon Talks” conversation with Leary on Facebook.

Tune into Salon’s live shows, “Salon Talks” and “Salon Stage,” daily at noon ET / 9 a.m. PT and 4 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. PT, streaming live on Salon and on Facebook.

“Stranger Things 2″: A nostalgic return to Hawkins, Indiana

Finn Wolfhard and Noah Schnapp in "Stranger Things" (Credit: Netflix)

Sequels lean heavily on a fan’s affection for the work being follow-up — more so, actually, than the second season of a TV series. Television writers have a sizable investment in maintaining the audience’s faith in their characters and stories, of course, but they do so with their eye on a longer-term relationship. The journeys of the fictional people in our favorite shows change them in fundamental ways steadily and slowly enough for devoted viewers to adopt them as if they were flesh and blood family members or friends.

Movie writers may not be tasked with such a heavy mandate in large part because of the compressed nature of their stories, relying instead stories populated by established archetypes. He may be one of pop culture’s best loved heroes, but how much do we know about the interior workings of Indiana Jones?

Probably as much as we know about Barb Holland. But Barb, a breakout secondary character in season 1 of “Stranger Things,” captured the audience’s imagination because we were allowed to impress our own experiences with young women like her upon the character. The same goes for everyone in the fictional Spielbergian town of Hawkins, Indiana, the creation of the Duffer Brothers — a pair that’s since become closely associated with ‘80s nostalgia and spot-on homages to its music, atmosphere and above all, its movies.

The promise of “Stranger Things 2” lies in its presentation as sequel to Netflix’s eight-episode first round. Technically it’s a second season as well, but one that employs a broader canvas and takes advantage of a healthier budget to expand its world beyond the limits of Hawkins and its connection to the Upside Down.

“Stranger Things 2” extends its story across nine episodes, making it the equivalent of a six hour-plus epic or, given its two-pronged plot arc, two movies taking up a little over three hours each. One film is far and away superior to the other, frankly, but even the flaws in one tale do nothing to diminish the overall fondness for the adventures navigated by best friends Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and their returned friend Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) — or for Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), a girl with telekinetic powers they accepted into their “party” on their quest to find will in season one.

A year has passed between the events that sucked Will into the murky extradimensional version of Hawkins, Indiana. Everyone is a year older, but nobody has changed much either. Fantasy escapism, informed by movies, video games and Dungeons & Dragons, still inform the boys’ worlds.

Will’s nervy mother Joyce (Winona Ryder) hovers closely to her son, and his older brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) remains devoted to his family’s protection. Mike’s older sister Nancy (Natalia Dyer), meanwhile, rolls her eyes and the nerdiness of her brother and his friends, and dates the high school hero Steve (Joe Keery).

Hawkins itself remains the Spielbergian version of the safe small-town clinging to the illusion that nothing much ever happens there.  An agreement in the first season forged between Joyce’s longtime friend and the town’s chief of police Jim Hopper (David Harbour) and the government officials overseeing experiments at Hawkins Laboratory maintains this mirage.

The only others who know the truth about Eleven, the Upside Down and its Demigorgons are a bunch of ostracized overly-imaginative nerds and a couple of popular kids high enough in the high school caste system to know that telling the truth would amount to social suicide, not to mention the possibility of their actual deaths, assisted by the feds.

But they can only pretend this other reality doesn’t exist for so long because, as you may recall, it bled into our dimension in a very real way in the first year finale.

This is more or less the extent of what I can reveal about this world’s expansion until the new episodes premiere at midnight on Friday — which is fine, right? Our collective joy for “Stranger Things” began in the discovery of it. Netflix sneaked it into its stream in the summer of 2016 and word of it spread from there.

As a side effect of the rampant popularity the show took on shortly afterward, with the meme-ability of Barb as part of that, “Stranger Things” sustained criticism for its sugared, nostalgic portrayal of the politically 1980s, the very quality that made it so widely beloved.

The Duffer Brothers only mildly address some of those criticisms in “Stranger Things 2” while pushing its cinematic reverence even more conspicuously before. Elements of these new episode actually leap beyond mere tribute into straight-up lifting lines and visual cues from the era’s best-known films. Sean Astin casting as Bob Newby — yep, that’s his name — winks at that factor, as does Paul Reiser’s role (Hope you like “Aliens,” kids).

There’s more to be written about in coming weeks with regard to Brown’s transformation this season and the expanded portrayal of Harbour, presented mainly as a skeptical lawman and resident hero with a gun in the first episodes. This season grants him something of a redemption story allowing him to heal his loss, affording him the opportunity to carry a significant share of narrative’s emotional weight and showcase the extent of his dramatic skills.

But as before, “Stranger Things” is at its strongest when it reminds the viewer that it is a child’s story. One with nightmarish extradimensional dreamscapes teeming with man-eating monsters but, yes, it’s a kid’s story. Although we meet more of the kids’ parents this time around, the sequel’s finest moments honor everything we know about the original band of brave kids as their relationship and rivalries shift, as do  their alliances depending on social setting; such is the way of the school society. Nerds rule, except when they don’t. And a newcomer named Max (Sadie Sink) adds another element to the foursome’s outcast dynamic.

Where “Stranger Things” may stumble is in its choice to keep Eleven and Brown apart from the larger group for most of the season, producing that feeling of watching two movies at the same time. The truth of El identity is one of story’s central puzzles, and by the end of “Stranger Things 2” we learn more about her than anyone else in the story, although that knowledge ultimately does little to heighten our estimation for the series as a whole.

None of the sequel’s missteps blemish the plot enough to prevent or slow a person’s binging of it — you probably will anyway, and moreover, you should. We’re in the season of confectionery indulgence and innocent scares, an awareness of which “Stranger Things 2” takes advantage. These new chapters gives us just enough of what we want, satisfyingly earning our continued endearment with all the title represents. It’s not perfect, but it is a good sequel and well worth the anticipation that preceded its release.