Trump Will End Up Missing Mueller

Trump has a war of his own (see Bill Van Auken's "Tensions rise between US, Russia and China over Venezuelan coup"). Add to that his decision to join the court case to abolish Obamacare, and one can safely predict his defeat in 2020. Any Democrat, even Hillary, should be able to romp. With the ludicrous Mueller out of the picture, Trump will own his own narrative; it will be a litany of missteps and pratfalls. Mueller will have turned out to be Trump's best friend, and he will miss him dearly.

Graham-Cassidy: One More Attempt to Gut Medicaid

UPDATE: There has been a lot of good reporting on the impact of Graham-Cassidy. "How the Latest Obamacare Repeal Plan Would Work" by Reed Abelson and Margot Sanger-Katz explains how Medicaid would be fundamentally altered:

Like several earlier Republican health bills, this one would also change the structure of the 52-year-old Medicaid program, which even before Obamacare’s expansion to poor adults in many states covered tens of millions of vulnerable Americans, including poor children, older Americans in nursing homes, adults with disabilities, and many pregnant women. The program currently pays for 49 percent of all births and 64 percent of all nursing home residents’ bills.

The Graham-Cassidy bill moves funding for the Medicaid expansion population into the state block grant. It would also convert the rest of the program from an open-ended commitment of paying a share of those people’s medical bills to a capped allotment for each person every year, set to grow by a fixed amount. Independent analysts have said that the change would cause substantial shifts in financial responsibility to states, ultimately leading to reductions in benefits or in the number of Americans covered by Medicaid over time.

That was published Wednesday. Yesterday there was "Latest Obamacare Repeal Effort Is Most Far-Reaching" by Kate Zernike, Abelson and Abby Goodnough:

For decades, Republicans have dreamed of taking some of the vast sums the federal government spends on health care entitlements and handing the money over to states to use as they saw best.

Now, in an 11th-hour effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the party has come up with a way to repackage the funding for the law it loathes into a trillion-dollar pot of state grants.

The plan is at the core of the bill that Senate Republican leaders have vowed to bring to a vote next week. It was initially seen as a long-shot effort by Senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy. But for all its ad hoc, last-minute feel, it has evolved into the most far-reaching repeal proposal of all.

It dismantles the Medicaid expansion and the system of subsidies to help people afford insurance. It gives the states the right to waive many of the consumer protections under President Obama’s landmark health law. And it removes the guaranteed safety net that has insured the country’s poorest citizens for more than half a century.

“This is by far the most radical of any of the Republican health care bills that have been debated this year,” said Larry Levitt, a senior vice president with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. “And the reason for that is that this would be the biggest devolution of federal money and responsibility to the states for anything, ever.”

 ****

The reanimation of Trumpcare in the form of the Graham-Cassidy bill is one last attempt to gut Medicaid before the rule allowing heath-care legislation to pass by simple majority expires at the end of next week. Graham-Cassidy would take the Obamacare money and block grant it back to the states; it would also block grant Medicaid, at the same time it ends the Obamacare expansion of the program. According to Robert Pear and Thomas Kaplan in "Republican Leaders Defy Bipartisan Opposition to Health Law Repeal":

Besides creating block grants, the Graham-Cassidy bill would make deep cuts in Medicaid. It would end the expansion of eligibility under the Affordable Care Act, which has provided Medicaid coverage to 13 million people. And it would put the entire program, which serves more than 70 million people, on a budget, ending the open-ended entitlement that exists. States would instead receive a per-beneficiary allotment of federal money.

[snip] 

Republicans were trying desperately to round up votes for the Graham-Cassidy bill before the end of next week, when the measure will lose the procedural protection that allows it to pass with a simple majority, rather than the 60 votes that would otherwise be required.

While Republicans like the idea of federalism and block grants, many wanted to know how their states would be affected. Under the legislation, states with high health care costs — especially if they expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act — would generally lose money, while low-cost states that did not expand Medicaid would gain.

[snip]

The Republican governors who signed the letter opposing the latest Republican repeal plan were John R. Kasich of Ohio, Brian Sandoval of Nevada, Charlie Baker of Massachusetts and Phil Scott of Vermont.

Two other Republican governors, Mr. Sununu and Larry Hogan of Maryland, expressed similar concerns in separate statements.

“The Graham-Cassidy bill is not a solution that works for Maryland,” Mr. Hogan said. “It will cost our state over $2 billion annually while directly jeopardizing the health care of our citizens.”

Mr. Graham and Mr. Cassidy have cited Maryland as a state that, in their view, has been receiving more than its fair share of money under the Affordable Care Act.

Mr. Sununu said he could not support the Graham-Cassidy proposal because “New Hampshire could possibly lose over $1 billion in Medicaid funding between 2020 and 2026.” He said such a cost shift would be a particular problem for his state because “New Hampshire is proud of its tradition of not having an income tax or sales tax.”

Rand Paul and Susan Collins have already signaled "No" votes. This means that it is up to Lisa Murkowski to scuttle the bill, which shouldn't be a problem for a politician who won a general election to the U.S. Senate as a write-in.

Can there be a bigger whore than Lindsey Graham? In criticizing Trumpcare, he postured and preened as a defender of moderation and fairness, only to end up voting for it in a losing effort. Now he is actually sponsoring a new version of Trumpcare. That bitch Graham will do anything for a buck.

"Skinny" Bill is GOP Plan 'X'

UPDATE: "Repeal Only" is dead. The senate vote was 45-55. The GOP "nays" included Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Susan Collins of Maine, Dean Heller of Nevada, John McCain of Arizona, Rob Portman of Ohio, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. The "skinny" bill is still alive. It could be that Republicans are only able to repeal the medical-device-tax portion of Obamacare, solely in order to have something to conference with the House and thereby make mischief another day.

****

The sanctions bill that cleared the House yesterday 419-3 did nothing to address European concerns over its impact on oil and gas projects like Nord Stream 2 and Blue Stream, Yves Smith writes this morning in "Are the Latest Russia Sanctions Really About Forcing US LNG on Europe?"

The Senate passed a procedural vote to open debate on repeal of the Affordable Care Act with a Pence tie-breaker, but later in the evening could only muster 43 votes for its version of Trumpcare. This bodes ill for GOP hopes to repeal Obamacare. But the new plan appears to be to pass a "skinny" bill, something like a repeal Obamacare's tax penalties on people who don't carry health insurance, and then deal with everything else during the House-Senate reconciliation process.

The news this morning of Trump attacking Lisa Murkowski on Twitter for her No vote on opening debate is a message to flip-flopper Shelley Moore Capito to hold the line and vote for repeal when the time comes.

Two Big Votes in Congress Today + The Demography of Tech Feudalism

Two big votes are scheduled in Congress today. In the Senate, repeal of Obamacare; in the House, sanctions on Russia, Iran and North Korea. The Senate vote is being criticized as a Star Chamber. No one knows what is being voted on other than a motion to begin debate. McConnell has to proceed under a cloak of darkness because enough senators have said that they will vote No on a motion to open debate if what is going to be proposed is repeal without a replacement.

The sanctions bill is being sold as a defense of Western democracy. According to David Sanger in "For Trump and Putin, Sanctions Are a Setback Both Sought to Avoid":

Last week at the Aspen Security Forum, four of his top intelligence and national security officials — including Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director — said they were absolutely convinced that the Russians were behind the effort to influence the election.

“There is no dissent,” Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, said on Friday at the Aspen conference. The Russians, he said, “caught us just a little bit asleep in terms of capabilities” the Kremlin could bring to bear to influence elections here, in France and Germany. The Russians’ goal was clear, he said: “They are trying to undermine Western democracy.”

The wording of the legislation agreed to by House and Senate conferees over the weekend indicates that many Republicans agree with the intelligence assessment: For the first time, it imposes penalties, though not very onerous ones, on anyone determined by the United States government to have participated in the election hacking.

But the latest from the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) argues that

Forensic studies of “Russian hacking” into Democratic National Committee computers last year reveal that on July 5, 2016, data was leaked (not hacked) by a person with physical access to DNC computers, and then doctored to incriminate Russia.

Though Sanger soft-peddles the impact of the sanctions bill, if Congress goes ahead with it, and Trump signs it, Europe is ready to retaliate. Apparently the Europeans feel that it weakens their energy sector. From Patrick Martin's "US sanctions bill against Russia set for passage with bipartisan support":

Besides opposition from the White House—largely behind closed doors—there has been public criticism by the European Union of at least one provision in the sanctions bill, which bars companies from doing deals with Russian partners where the Russian company owns more than a one-third interest in the venture. This could potentially threaten the Nord Stream II pipeline between Russia and Germany, financed by several Western companies but owned by Russia’s Gazprom.

Is Congress worse than Trump? When it comes to war and peace the answer appears to be "Yes." Outside of the U.K., I don't see much left of "Western Democracy" to undermine.

A foul opinion piece over the weekend by American Enterprise Institute president Arthur C. Brooks is a fine example of what the elite excel at -- blaming the victim. Brooks blames young people "for an increasing paranoia about taking big leaps" like starting a business or a family or moving out of town for a new job. He states the obvious, that there are economic reasons for this risk-averse behavior, but he doesn't let that stop him from lacing into youth for spinelessness:

Here’s what all this means: Our sin tends to be timidity, not rashness. On average, we say “no” too much when faced with an opportunity or dilemma.

Once you start looking for this imprudently risk-averse behavior, you see it everywhere, particularly among young people. According to data from the General Social Survey collected by NORC at the University of Chicago, people under age 30 today are almost a third less willing than under-30s in 1996 to relocate for their careers. And as the economist Tyler Cowen observes in his new book “The Complacent Class,” the fraction of people in this age group who own their own businesses has plummeted by about 65 percent since the 1980s.

Economic changes have contributed to both trends, to be sure. But there is another culprit: a diminishing frontier spirit and an increasing paranoia about taking big leaps.

Family formation, perhaps the ultimate personal leap of faith, looks to be another victim of this imprudent hesitation. Census Bureau demographers recently reported that while only a quarter of 24- to 29-year-olds were unmarried in the 1980s, almost half of that age group is unmarried today. And delaying the jump to adulthood has real social consequences. Last August, the Centers for Disease Control announced that the United States fertility rate had fallen to its lowest point since they began calculating it in 1909.

I think this is proof of the eminent rationality of young people, as well as the constricting, plutocratic spirit of our times. We are experiencing an age of tech feudalism. I fear it will only end when things fall apart. There are plenty of signs that the collapse is beginning.

What Difference Does It Make that Ossoff Lost?

UPDATE II: For another pitiless skewering of the Democrats, consult "Democrats Seethe After Georgia Loss: ‘Our Brand Is Worse Than Trump,’" by Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin:

Others in the party were far more caustic, calling Mr. Ossoff’s defeat a warning to Democrats who see red-tinged suburban districts as the keys to winning power, and saying that Ms. Pelosi would undermine the party’s candidates for as long as she holds her post.

I agree. Pelosi became Speaker after the Democrats took control of the House following the 2006 midterms. She brought the Dems back, the story went, because she ran Blue Dogs in the suburbs. Well, Ossoff is basically a Blue Dog, and he didn't win. Maybe if he had been an ex-football star the outcome would have been different.

In any event, even if the Dems can Blue Dog their way back to a majority in 2018, the base is hankering for new leadership right now. After decades of centrist messaging and the steady drift rightward into the suffocating embrace of Goldman Sachs, the Democratic rank'n'file is not going to achieve any climax until there is a Momentum-like purge of DNC apparatchiks.

Problem is there is really no way to accomplish this. So expect business as usual: more hearings about Russia, more unchallenged troop deployments abroad to an ever-expanding list of conflict zones and possibly the end of Medicaid.

It is going to take another Bernie run, and then Bernie being blocked again by the DNC, for the party of Jackson to finally, thankfully, come to an end.

**** 

UPDATE: An accurate yet scathing mainstream indictment of the Democrats post-Ossoff can be found in Rick Klein's "Democrats face disarray after going bust in Georgia":

Nancy Pelosi emerged as a more effective messaging foil for Republicans than Donald Trump was for Democrats. The Republican establishment effectively rallied behind its candidates despite Trump’s polarizing presidency and the continued concerns over his leadership from inside that establishment.

Democrats don’t have a cohesive message or a road map for arriving at one. They surely haven’t proved that the House will be in play in 2018 — though it may well be — and Trump and his GOP brethren now feel emboldened for their governing agenda in 2017.

“Race better be a wake up call for Democrats -- business as usual isn't working. Time to stop rehashing 2016 and talk about the future,” Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., tweeted Tuesday night, in a widely noted piece of commentary. “We need a genuinely new message, a serious jobs plan that reaches all Americans, and a bigger tent not a smaller one.”

**** 

I work with a young guy. I think he has Asperger's. From what I can tell he stays somewhat informed of current events. Yesterday as we were getting ready to close the office I asked him if he had an opinion on the Ossoff race in Georgia's 6th CD. He said no. I was reminded of a laconic query he put to me last winter when it looked as if Marine Le Pen was a shoe-in to win the French presidency, prompting a spiel on my part about France leaving the EU. "What difference does it make?" he asked.

What difference does it make that Ossoff lost yesterday? For starters I think the chances of Trumpcare clearing the Senate improved exponentially. Republicans are going to stay firmly planted on Trump island as long as he continues to win. He inserted himself directly in Georgia's 6th CD, something he did in the primary as well, the race was a referendum on Trump, and the Republican Karen Handel won.

How bad Trumpcare will be is yet to be decided. We won't know, assuming McConnell gets something through the Senate, until the House-Senate conference reconciles the two versions. It will be bad, but maybe Medicaid will only be pared back and not turned into a block grant. If it is block-granted, it will pull down one of the pillars of the Great Society.

The GOP is probably smart enough to phase out Obamacare's Medicaid increases over a long period rather than taking a meat ax to the program immediately. The latter route guarantees Democratic takeover of Congress even if the Democrats are feckless.

Democrats in the Senate now will be under even more pressure to do whatever they can to block Trump given that Republicans are not going to abandon him anytime soon. There should be a complete change in messaging. Clearly the neo-McCarthyism has been a total failure. It is an enervating distraction that signifies nothing; enervating because the Democratic Party effectively no longer has a peace wing. What gave the party a competitive advantage in the past, going all the way back to '64 when LBJ disingenuously ran against Goldwater by saying he would keep the country out of war, is that it was the peace party; that, and it was the party of working class. Now it is neither.

As a commentator wrote on The New York Times website this morning:

The Democrat[s] didn't have a prayer. In the end, Americans want Trump, tax cuts for the wealthy and their Heath insurance rates to go up or...

The Real Goal of Trumpcare: End Medicaid as We Know It

The purpose of Trumpcare is not only to repeal Obamacare, and with it Obamacare's substantial expansion in Medicaid coverage, but to end Medicaid as we know it by turning it into a block grant program run by the states.

Thomas Kaplan and Robert Pear address the former in "With $8 Billion Deal on Health Bill, House G.O.P. Leader Says ‘We Have Enough Votes’":

But the fight over pre-existing conditions overshadowed a major reason the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the original bill would leave 24 million more Americans without health insurance after a decade: a rollback of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion in states that adopted it. The House plans to vote for the latest version before the budget office can finish a fresh assessment of its cost and impact.

Erica Green deals with the latter in "A Little-Noticed Target in the House Health Bill: Special Education":

With all the sweeping changes the Republican bill would impose, little attention has been paid to its potential impact on education. School districts rely on Medicaid, the federal health care program for the poor, to provide costly services to millions of students with disabilities across the country. For nearly 30 years, Medicaid has helped school systems cover costs for special education services and equipment, from physical therapists to feeding tubes. The money is also used to provide preventive care, such as vision and hearing screenings, for other Medicaid-eligible children.

[snip] 

The new law would cut Medicaid by $880 billion, or 25 percent, over 10 years and impose a “per-capita cap” on funding for certain groups of people, such as children and the elderly — a dramatic change that would convert Medicaid from an entitlement designed to cover any costs incurred to a more limited program.

Capping children and the elderly, curtailing school-based Medicaid programs and assisted living for the aged, basically takes an ax to Medicaid. The principle foundation of social democracy in the U.S. after 30 years of neoliberalism remains Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. With Trumpcare Medicaid becomes more like unemployment insurance -- at the whim of the individual state.

The whip count for this afternoon's vote is 16 Republican No votes with 35 undeclared. Twenty-three GOP No votes sinks Trumpcare. Let's hope for seven more Republican "nays" in the next six hours.

Trumpcare 2.0 Sign of Political Weakness

Trump is being ridiculed for a second rushed attempt to repeal Obamacare. The accepted point of view is that he is taking a stab at Trumpcare 2.0 in order to have a legislative achievement to celebrate his 100 days in office, which occurs this weekend (Saturday). But more importantly I think Trump knows how to read his base. His flipflopping on almost every single campaign promise has left him vulnerable, even if his (poor) poll numbers show that his stalwart backers are not abandoning him (for now).

If there is one issue on which the Trump True Believer can't abide a flipflop, it is the repeal of Obamacare. The fact that Trump can't wrangle it through the House is proof of his political weakness.

Trumpcare 2.0 brought on board the assassins, the Freedom Caucus, of Trumpcare 1.0 by allowing states to seek waivers from the federal government in order to dispense with basic features of Obamacare -- providing essential benefits, as well as the restriction on charging more to those with preexisting conditions. But Trumpcare 2.0 apparently lost moderate Republicans afraid of voter wrath for taking coverage away from sick people. As Thomas Kaplan and Robert Pear explain in "Health Law Repeal Will Miss Trump’s 100-Day Target Date":

The latest House plan to repeal and replace the health law would include an amendment drafted by Representative Tom MacArthur, Republican of New Jersey and a leader of a centrist bloc of lawmakers called the Tuesday Group.

Mr. MacArthur’s amendment would allow states to opt out of certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act, including one that requires insurers to provide a minimum set of health benefits and another that prohibits insurers from charging higher premiums based on a person’s health status.

Republicans say the federal mandates drive up costs, but Democrats say they provide important protections for consumers.

Under Mr. MacArthur’s amendment, states could obtain waivers letting them redefine the “essential health benefits,” which now include maternity care, emergency services, mental health care and drug addiction treatment.

Republicans say their bill maintains protections for people with pre-existing conditions. But Democrats say the waivers would severely weaken these protections because insurers could charge higher premiums to sick people who wanted to buy insurance after a gap in coverage.

Republicans say their bill offers billions of dollars that states could use to operate high-risk pools or other programs to provide or subsidize insurance for people with pre-existing conditions.

The American Medical Association and AARP, the lobby for older Americans, oppose the latest version of the Republicans’ health care bill.

“Although the MacArthur amendment states that the ban on pre-existing conditions remains intact, this assurance may be illusory, as status underwriting could effectively make coverage completely unaffordable to people with pre-existing conditions,” said Dr. James L. Madara, the chief executive of the American Medical Association.

Mr. MacArthur said Thursday that his amendment had won over some of his Republican colleagues, though not enough to pass the bill. “But we are closer today than we’ve ever been,” he said. “We’re getting there.”

At the same time, his amendment highlighted the gulf between hard-line conservatives and more moderate Republicans when it comes to how to go about repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act.

For the Freedom Caucus, which shouldered much of the blame for the House bill’s failure last month, the amendment functioned as a way to shift any finger-pointing to a different bloc of members.

But the latest version of the House bill seemed to offer little that would entice anyone with reservations other than the hard-line conservatives.

“The proposed changes to this bill would leave too many of my constituents with pre-existing conditions paying more for health insurance coverage, and too many of them will even be left without any coverage at all,” Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Republican of Florida, said Thursday.

[snip]

The Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, argued on Thursday that the core of Mr. MacArthur’s amendment would violate the budget rules that Republicans must follow in order to sidestep a Democratic filibuster.

Trump Flirts with Lame Duck but Obamacare Still in Trouble

Trump's failure to even hold a vote Friday on the Republican overhaul of the Affordable Care Act is a colossal defeat for his two-month-old administration. It might not be an overstatement to call him a lame duck with almost his entire term still ahead.

Trump and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said they had the votes, when in reality they had nowhere near enough. Trump got rolled, plain and simple (Maureen Dowd's "Donald, This I Will Tell You" makes this point well). The Freedom Caucus, backed by the Koch's constellation of Birchite pressure groups, demanded "poison pill" rewrites of Trumpcare; and when they got those, they demanded more. Trump was exposed not as a consummate artist of the deal, but as a clown, a buffoon huckster.

The silver lining here is that knives are being sharpened in the West Wing. Bannon and company wanted to hold the vote and then start taking the scalps of those Republicans who strayed off the reservation. Ryan carried the day here with his counsel that the fractured caucus needed cover in order to pass Trump's tax reform plan. So no vote on Trumpcare was held.

All this does is kick the can down the road and place the GOP under even more pressure. Revising the tax code is no easy thing. Failure here will deliver an enormous blow not just to Trump but to the GOP and the political system at large. How can a party control all three branches of government and be paralyzed?

Democrats will try to take credit for their defense of Obamacare, but they had little to do with it. It was the Tea Party, the paranoid, Bircher reboot of the Republican Party made possible by the Affordable Care Act, that saved Obamacare and prevented the gutting of Medicaid. What an irony.

Trump is right about one thing though. Obamacare is still in plenty of trouble, and Trump is at the control switch. As Margot Sanger-Katz outlined on Friday in "Trump’s Choice on Obamacare: Sabotage or Co-opt?":

Mr. Trump will need to decide, quickly, whether his goal is to knock over the still-functioning markets, or help prop them up. [Is that even in question? He has publicly stated his strategy going forward: He is waiting for Obamacare to collapse to get another chance to "make a deal."] If he decides to topple them, next year could be very messy.

Insurers are making their decisions right now about whether to enter the markets for next year and about how much to charge their customers. Signals from the administration in the next few weeks about whether he will help or hurt them will almost certainly guide insurers’ choices.

Fight a court case on subsidies? 

The biggest immediate decision concerns a court dispute between the House and the administration over subsidies to help low-income insurance buyers pay their deductibles and co-payments. The House has argued that the money for those subsidies was not properly authorized. The Obama White House fought the case. It is not clear whether Mr. Trump’s lawyers will do the same. The availability of those subsidies, used by a majority of Obamacare customers, is critical for insurers in the markets.

Without the subsidies, all the insurers will lose some money, and many smaller carriers will face bankruptcy. If Mr. Trump does not fight the court case, the Obamacare markets in most states will unravel quickly, leaving millions without insurance options on his watch. Many of the beneficiaries are Trump voters.

Encourage insurance companies in wobbly markets?

There are smaller decisions ahead, too, about how to administer programs, whether to enforce the law’s individual mandate, and whether to recruit insurers to participate in markets where competition is thin.

So far, Mr. Trump’s secretary for health and human services, Tom Price, has taken every opportunity to gloat about the health law’s setbacks, even as he is administering its programs.

Mr. Price, perhaps more than Mr. Trump, has long been committed to the Affordable Care Act’s demise. But now he will have to manage the law’s many programs. Obama administration officials called insurers, cajoling and reassuring them. If Mr. Trump wants the markets to be vigorous, he could use his self-described deal-making skills to woo insurance companies into the stabilizing markets.

Make the system more conservative? 

If Mr. Trump and Mr. Price can make peace with the health law, there are opportunities to steer it in a more conservative direction. The law gives broad authority to the executive branch to shape health care policy. So far, the health law has been driven by Obama administration priorities, but that could change.

A few early regulatory changes have begun that process. The Trump administration plans to make it harder for people to sign up for plans midyear. It has given insurers more wiggle room to raise their deductibles. It may be able to make alterations that loosen up benefit requirements — though it won’t be able to completely eliminate them, as Republicans sought to do at the last minute in the failed bill.

Offer states maximum flexibility? 

The administration will also have enormous power to allow states to reshape their Medicaid programs — and even their local insurance markets — through waivers to existing law. Seema Verma, the just-confirmed administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, was a consultant who helped states write pathbreaking conservative proposals for their Medicaid programs. She is ideally positioned to approve many more such waivers from Republican-led states, allowing them to impose premiums, cost-sharing and even work requirements for Medicaid beneficiaries. 

A new Obamacare waiver program has just gone into effect: It would allow states to overhaul their entire health insurance markets if they can show that their revised plans would cover as many people. That process could allow Ms. Verma and Mr. Price to approve state plans that hew more closely to the Republican vision for health care.

Change Medicare policy?

New powers granted under the Affordable Care Act allow the Department of Health and Human Services to make major changes to the Medicare program, through demonstration projects meant to lower costs and improve patient care. The Obama administration set a precedent of imposing “mandatory” projects on large portions of the country to test policy ideas. So far, Mr. Price has looked askance at such efforts. But the provision could give him power to reshape what Medicare pays for and how seniors receive their care.

Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan, has criticized the Obama administration for stretching its legal authority with some of its Obamacare choices. But those choices have created a precedent for the Trump administration to stretch the health law in its own direction. “If you think Congress is done, and you don’t want to provoke a reaction anymore, then you own this,” he said. “You will be judged as an executive on the performance of Obamacare.”

For years, opposing Obamacare has been a rallying cry for Republicans. But if Republicans can’t repeal Obamacare, they could instead co-opt it. There are opportunities for Trumpcare yet.

Trumpcare Triumphant?

Republican leadership and Trump say that they have the votes to pass the American Health Care Act (AHCA), a.k.a., Trumpcare, the oft-promised repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a.k.a., Obamacare. The House vote is today. But no one knows for sure if it will pass.

The House Freedom Caucus is driving the vote. Backed by a formidable array of uber-conservative organizations -- Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, Heritage Action for America and the Club for Growth -- the Freedom Caucus rallying cry is one of sadism: "Essential Health Benefits," the part of Obamacare that "requires insurers to cover a base set of benefits, like maternity care, preventive services, wellness checkups and rehabilitative services," currently part of Trumpcare, must be stripped out (see "House Republicans Search for Votes to Repeal Obamacare" by Thomas Kaplan and Robert Pear) in order to lower premiums.

The problem for Trump and Ryan is that the more they move in the direction of the Freedom Caucus the more Trumpcare becomes radioactive for other Republicans. Even without the repeal of the Essential Health Benefits requirement, Trumpcare's chances of passing the Senate are remote.

The House vote is basically a charade that is conjuring up memories of the 2003 Medicare prescription drug benefit vote when clocks froze for hours as Billy Tauzin bribed his way to 216 votes.

I think we are in that territory today. It is accepted that if Trump can't get Trumpcare out of the House, the rest of his legislative agenda, what of it that there is (more tax cuts?), is cooked. That's why I expect that the American Health Care Act, in some monstrous form, will find its way to the Senate.

GOP Got What it Needed from the CBO

The GOP got the score it wanted from the CBO. Not the 24 million people without health insurance by 2026, but the $337 billion reduction in the federal deficit over ten years. Now the Freedom Caucus, who has been calling the House plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act, "Obamacare-lite," can more easily support the bill.

I don't have a clear sense if the Republicans can whip this out of the House. If they are able to, it will be an enormous defeat for the post-election Democratic reboot and campaigns like #ResistanceRecess.

What appears to be happening is that there is a lot of legitimate grassroots organizing going on, but it is having difficulty projecting its power because it is either aligned with or butting up against the established institution of the Democratic Party.

We'll have a front-row seat for this conflict in my city when a progressive coalition that goes by the name "Trump Proof Seattle" attempts to push a citywide wealth tax through the city council of 1.5% on every dollar over $250,000 of annual income. The coalition will soon realize that politicians, even at the district level of a smallish large city like Seattle, are captive to an elite donor class.

What then for the "Resistance"? A mass movement to anarchism? That would be nice. Greater though are the odds that activism will go the way of the anti-war movement of the last decade, receding into a cyber-Panglossian tending of one's own garden.

Obamacare Repeal to be Scored by CBO this Week

Despite all the news last week about division in Republican ranks over their plan to repeal Obamacare, I wouldn't bet against it passing out of the House. The Senate is another story. The Republicans only have a slim majority, 52-48, there.

The House Republican plan to repeal Obamacare, for all its shortcomings, achieves two fundamental GOP goals: it redistributes wealth back up to the 1%, and it block-grants Medicaid.

Jessie Drucker reports in "Wealthy Would Get Billions in Tax Cuts Under Obamacare Repeal Plan" that "Two of the biggest tax cuts in Republican proposals to repeal the Affordable Care Act would deliver roughly $157 billion over the coming decade to those with incomes of $1 million or more, according to a congressional analysis."

Thad Kouusser wrote in The Hill recently, "GOP's Medicaid block grant plan should trump other concerns" --

Medicaid block grants seem at first glance like an obscure debate for the few policy wonks who care about federal funding formulas. But the outcome of this particular fight in D.C. will reverberate across all 50 states for decades to come.

Shifting from “matching rates” to a block grant for Medicaid is not a new demand from the insurgent populist Trump, but the recycling of an idea that has been proposed by small-government advocates from Newt Gingrich to George W. Bush to Paul Ryan. In January, Kellyanne Conway made it clear that they will form a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s health care policy, and they have appeared in what Trump called on Twitter “Our wonderful new Healthcare Bill.”

Though they have garnered little attention in the campaign or even today, block grants would allow Trump to unwind the biggest gains that ObamaCare made for our most vulnerable citizens, radically reduce government investment in healthcare over time, force states to make even deeper cuts when the next recession comes along, but leave no political fingerprints.

A lot is riding on the CBO scoring of the House bill. According to Kevin Quealy and Margo Sanger Katz in "The Five Big Numbers to Look For in the C.B.O. Report on Health Care Reform":

The Republican plan to replace the Affordable Care Act was released early last week, and it has already marched through consideration in two important committees. Yet members of Congress debated the policy details without essential information: The bill had not yet been “scored” by the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan group of budget analysts and economists whose job is to forecast the bill’s consequences over the next decade or so.

That score is expected this week, and its estimates could make or break the Republicans’ plan. (The White House has pre-emptively cast doubt on the C.B.O. report.)

We'll see how politicized the CBO is. The big number for political purposes will be the increase in the federal deficit over ten years. If it is large, it will be hard for the Tea Party wing of the GOP to back it.

Warning Signs in the Base: Trump Transitions to W

What looked like a certainty in January, that Obamacare would be repealed within weeks, is now anything but certain. Tea Party activists are mau-mauing Republicans in Congress just as they did Democrats in Obamatime. (See the delightful "From ‘Repeal’ to ‘Repair’: Campaign Talk on Health Law Meets Reality" by Michael Shear and Robert Pear.)

The GOP is at the inflection point promised by Trump on the campaign trail -- to scrap the Affordable Care Act and cancel health coverage for tens of millions -- and it finds itself wanting to think things over for a little while. Trump is now talking about years instead of weeks:

In a brief aside in an interview with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News broadcast before the Super Bowl on Sunday, Mr. Trump went further than he ever has in acknowledging the reality that any hope of quickly replacing the Affordable Care Act has been dashed. 

“Yes, I would like to say by the end of the year, at least the rudiments, but we should have something within the year and the following year,” the president said.

Buyer's remorse is bound to settle in with the Trumpian base. Tomahawking Obamacare was litmus test number one.

Realignment in foreign policy was also right up there. There has to be buyer's remorse there too as Trump bends over backwards to satisfy the Gulf Arab monarchies. Trump's decision to list the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization is driven by the Saudis et al. According to Peter Baker in "White House Weighs Terrorist Designation for Muslim Brotherhood":

In his short time in office, Mr. Trump has already come under pressure from Arab allies eager for such a designation. He had phone conversations with Mr. Sisi; Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi; and King Salman of Saudi Arabia. But he also spoke with Mr. Erdogan on Tuesday.

A top Arab official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity according to diplomatic protocol, declined to discuss what was said on the calls, but added, “It’s safe to assume since U.A.E., Saudi and Egypt have all designated the M.B. as a terrorist organization, that decision would be welcome by those countries and several others in the region.”

Soon it will become apparent to white rural America that Trump is really no change agent; rather, he is the Second Coming of George W. Bush. And George W. Bush was extremely unpopular.

The approval of the Dakota Access Pipeline is also a litmus test, but one that is a huge opportunity for the left to counterattack. If the left proves supine and easily rolled, Trump will be able to make his transition to a W.-like presidency of incoherence and ineffectiveness, settling in for four years of more of the same. But if the left's counterattack is robust and victorious, that's more alienation for the Trumpian base.

Hatred of the Poor + Erdogan is Correct about the CIA

By month's end Obamacare should be finished. Never a fan of the Affordable Care Act -- because it makes a real problem, for-profit health care, even bigger -- at least it did significantly expand Medicaid. It is clear from reading Robert Pear's "Republicans’ 4-Step Plan to Repeal the Affordable Care Act" that the linchpin is "Eliminat[ing] tens of billions of dollars provided each year to states that have expanded eligibility for Medicaid."

Tens of millions of people are going to lose coverage. It is going to be hard to cloak the political reality of what is happening here -- crass class war. This is hatred for the poor with a heavy dose of negrophobia stirred in. The GOP, whose popular foundation is erected on white resentment and hatred, will now have to manage the consequences. To stay in power they're going to need a ready supply of "enemies" easy to grasp.

Tim Arango's "In Turkey, U.S. Hand Is Seen in Nearly Every Crisis" is an interesting story on how alienated Turks are from the United States. Each day top Turkish government officials blame the CIA for the many terrorist bombings convulsing the nation and those condemnations are dutifully reported in the Turkish media. As Arango writes,

Mr. Erdogan, who spoke this week with President Obama in a condolence call, also told his audience what he believed Turkey, in facing so many terrorist attacks, was really up against: a plot by the West.

Invoking the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the subsequent Turkish war against Western armies and their proxies, he said, “Today Turkey is in a new struggle for independence.”

Erdogan is right. One of the casualties of the U.S.-led jihadi war in Syria is Langley's alliance with Ankara. Turkey has always been a second home for the CIA. But contradictions spawned by the U.S. regime-change project, such as the de facto state of Rojava with its progressive constitution in the same vicinity of aWahhabite caliphate with its harsh interpretation of sharia, have poisoned the relationship. Who can deny that the CIA had a hand in the July coup attempt?

Erdogan waits for a new day to dawn with Trump. His patience might just be rewarded. According to this morning's Foreign Policy Situation Report:

CIA shakeup. The CIA might be in for a major overhaul if President-elect Donald Trump and his administration get their way. The Wall Street Journal has discovered that Team Trump is working on a plan “to restructure the Central Intelligence Agency, cutting back on staffing at its Virginia headquarters and pushing more people out into field posts around the world,” Damian Paletta and Julian Barnes report.

The proposal sounds quite a bit like what Michael Flynn -- Trump’s national security advisor -- wanted to do while director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Flynn and Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.), whom Trump named as his nominee to be the next CIA director, are reportedly pushing the planning. Flynn and Pompeo, according to the WSJ “share Mr. Trump’s view that the intelligence community’s position—that Russia tried to help his campaign—is an attempt to undermine his victory or say he didn’t win, the official close to the transition said.”

Will the Deep State allow itself to be pruned?  It won't --

On the Hill. Speaking of Russian influence on the U.S. presidential election, senior U.S. intelligence officials are heading to Capitol Hill Thursday to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee on that very subject. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Marcel Lettre are expected to appear before the panel at 9:30 a.m., which is chaired by Republican John McCain, a noted critic of Putin. Livestream here. 

The End of Obamacare

To read Robert Pear, longtime health-care policy reporter for The New York Times, over the last year is to know that Obama's signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, is in real trouble. I'm not sure if the Gray Lady's shift from booster to skeptic happened last year or the year before, but the conversion is now fully upon us. Paul Krugman, who for many years would devote at least one column per week to the wonders of Obamacare, has largely gone silent on the issue.

For a good overview of why the ACA is headed for the dustbin read "Obamacare: The Neoliberal Model Comes Home to Roost in the United States—If We Let It," by Howard Waitzkin and Ida Hellander, which appeared in the May issue of Monthly Review. In a nutshell, the Affordable Care Act is not affordable. There is no way to control costs. Premiums, deductibles and co-pays are all on the rise, and the increases in costs are not sustainable.

Pear's story in yesterday's paper, "Obama Offers Ways to Improve His Health Care Law," dealt with the lengthy, academic apologia for the ACA penned by Obama and which appears online in the Journal of the American Medical Association. "United States Health Care Reform: Progress to Date and Next Steps," was too long for me to ingest. But the conclusion from the abstract reads as follows:

Conclusions and Relevance Policy makers should build on progress made by the Affordable Care Act by continuing to implement the Health Insurance Marketplaces and delivery system reform, increasing federal financial assistance for Marketplace enrollees, introducing a public plan option in areas lacking individual market competition, and taking actions to reduce prescription drug costs. Although partisanship and special interest opposition remain, experience with the Affordable Care Act demonstrates that positive change is achievable on some of the nation’s most complex challenges.

My coworker asked me incredulously yesterday after seeing the story online, "Can you believe Obama is backing public option now?" Pear shares her incredulity:

White House officials said that Mr. Obama’s purpose in writing the article was to start a discussion and suggest a direction for elected officials and future policy makers, but that he would not be offering detailed new legislative proposals to carry out his ideas. 

Based on his experience in the last few years, Mr. Obama said, Congress should establish “a public plan to compete alongside private insurers in areas of the country where competition is limited.” 

Most of the country has benefited from competition in the marketplaces, and 88 percent of the people who have enrolled live in counties where at least three insurers offer plans, Mr. Obama said. But, he said, the remaining 12 percent are in areas with only one or two insurers. 

Jason Furman, the chairman of Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said, “A public option would be one way to make sure that there was competition everywhere.” 

In the debate on health care in 2009 and 2010, Mr. Obama said he supported the idea of a public option, but he did not always insist on it, and the administration sent mixed signals about how important it was.

Besides the expansion of Medicaid, the key component of Obamacare is the provision of federal subsidies for people to purchase insurance in the online marketplaces:

The online exchanges will be a viable source of coverage “for decades to come,” Mr. Obama said, but “further adjustments and recalibrations will likely be needed.” 

Of the 11 million people with marketplace coverage, 85 percent receive tax credits that, on average, cover nearly three-fourths of their premium costs. But for some, said Kristie Canegallo, a deputy chief of staff at the White House, the “tax credits aren’t big enough.”

Obama is whistling past the graveyard on this one, as Carl Hulse reports in "How an Arcane Spending Fight Could Alter the Federal Balance of Power." The Obama administration has been funding the health insurance subsidies without Congressional authorization: "The final word may come in federal court, where a district judge has already found the spending to be unconstitutional. The administration is appealing that decision."

The administration is likely to lose. Even with the premium subsidies, health insurance is too expensive for most because of the high deductibles and co-insurance. Without the subsidies the online marketplace collapses. All that will remain of Obamacare is the Medicaid expansion for those states that opted in.

More Signs of the End

The debate -- six years or six decades? -- is one worth having. The guy who works on the same floor of the building where I work still insists that six decades is the safer bet when it comes to the longevity of the status quo. My position is six years. Violence is now ever present. The state, with all the wonders of technology at its disposal, is unable to guarantee peace. Going back to Hobbes' Leviathan (1651), the primary rationale for the state is security. Security breaks down, and we are allowed to declare the state a failure and withhold our allegiance.

There are many kinds of security other than protection from physical violence. Affordable housing and medical care, meaningful, remunerative employment -- these are as important to the security of a state as safe streets. In no way are we more secure now than a decade ago.

I read something yesterday that under Obamacare,  "A conservative projection shows that premiums and out-of-pocket expenditures for the average family will equal half of the average family income by 2019 and the full average family income itself by 2029." A perfect example of the unsustainable nature of the status quo (though in this gauge, the sustainability of Obamacare, 13 years, not six, is the estimate).

War rages in the Middle East. Eventually the Israel/GCC/U.S. axis is going to tilt at Iran.

It is all coming apart before our eyes and we don't have the ability to knit it back together.

The Saudis Favor Hillary: The Erasure of Obama's Legacy and the Coming Expansion of War in the Greater Middle East

Obama has three "legacy" achievements: 1) the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a.k.a., Obamacare; 2) ending the U.S. occupation of Iraq; and 3) the deal with Iran to curtail its nuclear program.

With SecDef Ash Carter in Baghdad today promising Iraqi prime minister Abadi even more of a military commitment in the run up to the assault on ISIS-held Mosul, legacy #2 can be erased from Obama's list of accomplishments. At this point there is little doubt that the U.S. is positioning itself to take the lead on the recapture of Mosul so as to be better able to dictate terms on Iraq and Syria in a world after Sykes-Picot. In a Reuters story this morning, "U.S. Defence Chief Offers Iraq More Help, Possibly Troops-Officials," an unnamed Pentagon official pretty well sums up the Obama administration "all in" position with regards to Mosul:

"The fight of Iraq is the fight for Mosul. Mosul is the end game in Iraq," a senior U.S. defence official said, on condition of anonymity. "It’s a very large urban scenario ... We are going to need to be more aggressive, the Iraqis are asking us to be more aggressive.”

The caveat here is the fight for U.S. hegemony in the region is the fight for Mosul. A tidy U.S.-led victory, a la what Russia has achieved next door in Syria in Aleppo Province and Palmyra, will translate into a long-term military presence; a messy campaign where Iranian-backed militias do most of the fighting and the city is largely destroyed like Ramadi complicates things somewhat, not the least of which is an increase in refugees to an already post-Schengen Europe. Either way the United States will occupy Iraq for some time.

Another erasure from Obama's legacy list is the ACA. For an excellent primer on why Obamacare is headed for the dump, read "News About Obamacare Has Been Bad Lately. How Bad?," an interview with reporters Reed Abelson and Margot Sanger-Katz. UnitedHealth, an enormous insurer, decided to pull out of Obamacare markets in two states. Insurers are losing money. Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is grumbling. Premiums are bound to increase, pricing many who don't qualify for subsidies out of the market:

Margot: . . .Every time I write a story about the health law, I get comments and emails from people just above the income cutoff for subsidies. These are the people who have been most hurt by the health law. Plans on the exchanges are just really expensive for them, and often come with big deductibles, too. And if premiums keep rising, they’ll keep getting squeezed. Analysts from the Urban Institute have done the math and found that some of them are paying more than 25 percent of their income on health care now. Still, it is awfully hard to imagine Congress approving massive new spending to make Obamacare more generous. Hillary Clinton has some proposals about affordability, but they don’t include expanding subsidies.

It turns out the free market model for health insurance doesn't really work:

Margot: Yes, I think this is one of the contradictions of the Affordable Care Act’s design. The whole idea was that competition between the insurance companies would help to hold down prices, the way it does for, say, electronics or groceries. In order for that system to work, you need people to actually switch plans if their plan starts charging more than the competition. The fact that people are actually switching seems like a sign that this market is functioning as it was designed. But as you point out, all that churn sure makes it hard for an insurer to make money by investing in its customers’ long-term health. But the individual market, pre-Obamacare, also had a lot of churn.

Reed: Yes, there’s always been churn, but the insurers got pretty good at figuring out which people they wanted to insure by turning away the people who were most likely to cost them the most money. They definitely figured out how to make money.

It’s easier to smooth all of this out if you insure more people. Do you think there’s opportunity to see the market increase in size? I know insurers in the early years suffered when some states allowed people to keep their existing plans. Those plans that were grandmothered, as it is called.

Margot: My sense from talking to folks in the industry is that the grandmothered plans really wrecked their early calculations. The Obama administration, responding to a political freakout about people whose plans were getting canceled in 2014, let states keep them for a few more years. The result was that healthy people tended to hold onto their old, cheaper plans, while sick people went to the exchanges. You can see how that might make the exchange market unprofitable for new entrants.

I do think the market size is a bit of a chicken-or-egg question. Your story last week on stability in the employer market did such a good job of laying this out. Everyone (including the Congressional Budget Office) expected that employers would start dropping coverage once the marketplaces were up and running. That didn’t happen. It means that Obamacare has been much less disruptive to the status quo than many people thought. But it also means that the exchange markets are smaller and probably more expensive than people thought, too. If prices keep going up, maybe they’ll never grow much. It certainly seems like everyone is cutting down their long-term estimates for exchange enrollment.

The last item of Obama's legacy list is the Iran deal. This is what Obama has bent over backwards -- aiding in the jihadist destruction of Syria and Iraq; actively collaborating with the Saudis in war crimes in Yemen -- to try to protect. But the Saudis are not cooperating. So over the last couple months an information war and diplomatic struggle between Obama and al-Saud has unfolded. Jeffrey Goldberg's long Atlantic Monthly piece was a major Obama salvo.

Another appeared Saturday, Mark Mazzetti's "Saudi Arabia Warns of Economic Fallout if Congress Passes 9/11 Bill." The decade-plus case brought against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by big insurers and family members impacted by 9/11 hit a snag last September when a federal district court judge dropped the kingdom as a defendant. The bill before Congress would address the concerns of the judge, allowing the case against the Saudis to proceed. But the Obama administration is fighting it tooth and nail.

This suit against the Saudis hardly ever gets any ink. The fact that it does now when Obama is on his way to Riyadh, where he will be on Wednesday, is not a coincidence. It is part of the info war.

Michael Shear writes in "An Old Alliance Faces New Pressures as Obama Heads to Saudi Arabia" that the Saudis have washed their hands of Obama. They're waiting for Hillary:

If the Saudis are ready to turn the page on the Obama presidency, they are also anxious about what comes next, especially if Donald J. Trump or Senator Ted Cruz of Texas becomes the next president. 

Mr. Trump has railed against Saudi Arabia, telling The New York Times last month that he might halt all purchases of oil unless the Saudis show more effort in the fight against the Islamic State. “If Saudi Arabia was without the cloak of American protection,” Mr. Trump has said, “I don’t think it would be around.” 

Mr. Cruz said during a presidential debate in February that the United States should “hold our friends to account, that friends do not fund jihadists that are seeking to murder us. And when it comes to Saudi Arabia, we need to have real scrutiny and real pressure.” 

From the Saudi perspective, Hillary Rodham Clinton might represent a return to the kind of foreign policy they remember when her husband was president. But nothing is certain in this political season, and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the other candidate for the Democratic nomination, is an unknown to the Saudis. 

“Like everybody, they have no idea what to think about Trump,” Professor Gause said. “Who knows what to make of Senator Cruz on this? The Saudis don’t know him,” he added. “I think they would be perfectly comfortable with Hillary.”

During the Bush years there was a handy shortcut one could take when it came to any of his administration's initiatives. Everything he touched turned to shit. It might look like a winner for a while but eventually you could bank it would fall apart. That appears to be the case with Obama too, which would seem to argue for a larger regional war in the Greater Middle East and the almost certain demise of the European Union.

Hard Times in U.S. Aborning: Putin and Trump on 60 Minutes

There is an ample amount of handwringing and "Oh, woeisme"ing among the political class and power brokers on the Potomac following Friday's surprise announcement by Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner that he plans on resigning effective October 30. Take this delightful passage from "John Boehner’s Move Deepens a Republican Chasm" by David Herszenhorn and Jonathan Martin:

The hard-liners seem poised to attack a likely deal this week between Mr. Boehner and Democrats to avoid a government shutdown as yet another example of collusion between establishment Republican leaders and the Obama White House. 

And the legislative stakes will become greater. Congress will most likely have to vote this fall on whether to raise the federal debt ceiling as well as deal with the imminent expiration of many highway programs, a continuing debate over reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank and the need for a longer-term spending bill with an expected deadline of Dec. 11. 

Standing in the Speaker’s Lobby just off the House floor, Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, predicted that Mr. Boehner’s departure would make things harder rather than easier. “November and December are going to be like Dante’s ‘Inferno’ around here,” he said.

Things are indeed headed for the cliff. And not just the kind of "fiscal cliff" that Congress and Obama faced after his landslide victory over Richie Rich Romney at the end of 2012. This cliff might be more akin to a helicopter taking off from a besieged Saigon embassy with panicked asylum-seekers clutching for dear life to the skids.

A complete collapse of belief in the official state is underway in the Western world. Whether people position themselves on the left or the right of the ideological spectrum, all agree that the status quo is a fucked up place and elected leadership is not representing the interests of "We the people."

I watched 60 Minutes last night probably for only the second or third time since NBC began televising Sunday Night Foot in the same slot ten years ago. A Charlie Rose interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, "All eyes on Putin," kicked the show off.

Two of the better exchanges had to do with the principal canard peddled by the United States and dutifully repeated by European leaders; this is the propaganda that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad is attacking his own people, and that if only Assad would leave everything would start to improve right away.

Charlie Rose: President Assad, you support him. Do you support what he is doing in Syria and what is happening to those Syrian people, those many millions of refugees and the hundreds of thousands of people that have been killed, many by his own force? 

President Putin: Well, tell me, what do you think about those who support the opposition and mainly the terrorist organizations only in order to oust Assad without thinking about what will happen to the country after all the government institutions have been demolished? Today, you have repeatedly said that Assad is fighting against his own population. But look at those who are in control of 60 percent of the territory in Syria. It's controlled by either ISIS or by others-- 

Charlie Rose: Al-Nusra? 

President Putin: --such as al-Nusra and other terrorist organizations. They are recognized as terrorist organizations by the United States, by other states and by the United Nations.

And a little later, this exchange:

Charlie Rose: I come back to the problem that many people look at. And they believe that Assad helps ISIS. That his reprehensible conduct against the Syrian people using barrel bombs and worse is a recruiting tool for ISIS and that if he was removed, transitioned, at some point, it would be better in the fight against ISIS, al-Nusra and others. 

President Putin: Well, speaking in a professional language of intelligence services I can tell you that this kind of assessment is an "active measure" by enemies of Assad. It is anti-Syrian propaganda.

The U.S. game in Iraq and Syria is rapidly unraveling thanks to Russian efforts. The kabuki of the U.S. military combating the Salafist jihadis while those jihadis continue to gain territory and destabilize the region has been exposed by recent Russian moves, such as yesterday's announcement of an intelligence-sharing agreement between Russia, Iran, Iraq and Syria. The U.S. complains about Iraq's participation but there is nothing it can do. The Obama administration has very little credibility on the issue, particularly given the refugee crisis in Europe (not to mention its support for the war crimes against Yemen).

After the Charlie Rose interview of Putin, the next segment was Scott Pelley's interrogation, "Trump gets down to business on 60 Minutes," of the man who is likely the next POTUS, billionaire blowhard Donald Trump.

If you want an introduction to Trump, this interview is an excellent primer. The man is mesmerizing. Listening to him is like riding a roller coaster. The fact some of what he is saying is gibberish will not bother most American voters.

Here is the gibberish passage. He is going to implement a national health-care system that provides universal coverage but that is privately run but is not Obamacare:

Scott Pelley: What's your plan for Obamacare? 

Donald Trump: Obamacare's going to be repealed and replaced. Obamacare is a disaster if you look at what's going on with premiums where they're up 40, 50, 55 percent.
Scott Pelley: How do you fix it?

Donald Trump: There's many different ways, by the way. Everybody's got to be covered. This is an un-Republican thing for me to say because a lot of times they say, "No, no, the lower 25 percent that can't afford private. But--"

Scott Pelley: Universal health care.

Donald Trump: I am going to take care of everybody. I don't care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody's going to be taken care of much better than they're taken care of now.

Scott Pelley: The uninsured person is going to be taken care of. How? How?

Donald Trump: They're going to be taken care of. I would make a deal with existing hospitals to take care of people. And, you know what, if this is probably--

Scott Pelley: Make a deal? Who pays for it?

Donald Trump: --the government's gonna pay for it. But we're going to save so much money on the other side. But for the most it's going to be a private plan and people are going to be able to go out and negotiate great plans with lots of different competition with lots of competitors with great companies and they can have their doctors, they can have plans, they can have everything.

Trump sounded jejune when he weighed in on Iraq and Syria, but almost like Ralph Nader when he talked about the offshoring of U.S. jobs:

Scott Pelley: How do you keep them from exporting American jobs to Mexico?

Donald Trump: Let's say Ford-- let's say Ford moves to Mexico. If they want to sell that car in the United States they pay a tax. Here's what's gonna happen, they're not going to build their plant there. They're going to build it in the United States.

Scott Pelley: But there is a North American Free Trade Agreement.

Donald Trump: And there shouldn't be. It's a disaster.

Scott Pelley: But it is there.

Donald Trump: OK, yeah, but--

Scott Pelley: If you're president, you're going to have to live with it.

Donald Trump: Excuse me, we will either renegotiate it or we will break it. Because, you know, every agreement has an end.

Scott Pelley: You can't just break the law.

Donald Trump: Excuse me, every agreement has an end. Every agreement has to be fair. Every agreement has a defraud clause. We're being defrauded by all these countries.

Scott Pelley: It's called free trade--

Donald Trump: No it's not.

Scott Pelley: --and it is a plank--

Donald Trump: It's not the--

Scott Pelley: --of the Republican platform.

Donald Trump: Scott we need fair trade. Not free trade. We need fair trade. It's gotta be fair.

It is going to be hard to beat Trump.

Hippies vs. Punks: Matthew Shipp's Piano Sutras (2013)

About a month ago I read some very positive comments about Matthew Shipp's Piano Sutras (2013) on the digital bulletin board of my public library. So I placed a hold on the record; it arrived at the end of last week; and I've been playing it ever since.

A solo piano recital (for an excellent review, see Will Layman's PopMatters piece) Piano Sutras sounds remarkably fresh, even after listening to the album 15 times in a row. Why is that? My guess is that it is because Piano Sutras manages to aurally picture our present history.

Two-thousand-thirteen in many ways is the jumping off point for our present history, a.k.a., the Zeitgeist. Obama's landslide reelection, rather than heralding a renewed progressive national government, turned out to be nothing more than business as usual.

The year began with the Democratic administration basically throwing in the towel on the fiscal cliff and sequestration negotiations, leaving the GOP to continue to dictate the agenda. Then in May Snowden flew to Hong Kong and revealed that Obama's government was spying on everyone globally. This was followed in July by the Sisi coup in Egypt, rolling back the Arab Spring, and then the Ghouta sarin attack in August, which prompted the Nobel Peace Prize winning president to illegally threaten to bomb a sovereign nation.

In other words. by the end of summer 2013, the idea that Obama represented something other than the maintenance of a rancid, war-based status quo could no longer be maintained rationally. The botched roll out of his signature legislative initiative, Obamacare, in the fall of 2013 reinforced the assessment that, according to Donald Trump's current mantra, "Our politicians are stupid."

Recorded in Brooklyn in February of 2013, Piano Sutras is pregnant with complex dark tones sprinkled with shards of light, the perfect soundtrack for the Zeitgeist of mass opt-out. Our politicians have failed; rather, our politicians are not our own but the employees of the super-rich. Things will continue to grow worse whether we try to catapult backwards to a more honest age (Bernie Sanders) or blow the whole fucking mess apart by launching a Latino pogrom (Donald Trump). Our present history demands enormous, dislocating alterations. Much pain is bubbling down the Zeit-sluice our way.

Bookmakers earn their living by accurately interpreting the Zeitgeist. Matthew Shipp is a master bookie. Do yourself a favor. Prepare yourself for what is coming. Listen to Piano Sutras. You will be stronger for it.