This Church Banner Perfectly Captures How Progressive Christians Feel Right Now

HuffPost

This Church Banner Perfectly Captures How Progressive Christians Feel Right Now

Carol Kuruvilla, HuffPost December 7, 2017

An Episcopal church is causing a stir in Washington, D.C., after putting up banners that attempt to capture the mood of many progressive Christians in the nation’s capital.

The signs from St. Thomas’ Parish express frustration over some of the political positions taken by conservative Christians on topics such as gun rights and science. The banners feature an image of Jesus holding a hand to his face, a gesture that some are calling “faithpalming.”

One sign, which went viral on Twitter last week, illustrates the congregation’s feelings about President Donald Trump. Trump is a Presbyterian (though faith doesn’t appear to play a large role in his life), and has continued to enjoy the support of many conservative Christians in the country.

The Rev. Alex Dyer, the priest in charge of the 126-year-old parish, is the one who designed the banner campaign. He told HuffPost that his congregation saw the signs as an “opportunity to give voice to a side of Christianity that many people may not associate with Christianity.”

“There are many people who think Christians are close-minded, judgmental, and oppose science,” he said. “This is not the people in the congregation or many congregations around the country.”

He believes the signs capture the feelings of a lot of people in D.C. about the state of American politics.

“We are a very progressive church in a very progressive city,” he said. (The District of Columbia has voted Democratic in every presidential election it’s participated in, and went overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.)

The signs were placed around the construction site of St. Thomas’ Parish new church building in the city’s Dupont Circle neighborhood.

Dyer said his congregation has been troubled by what he called a “constant attack” on their core Christian values.

He described his church as a spiritual home for people who’ve had bad experiences with other churches, or have been discriminated against based on gender, sexuality or race. The church has a long history of welcoming queer Christians. In the past, it’s also expressed support for refugees and immigrants.

“Jesus reached out to those on the margins of society,” Dyer said. “He did not build walls. Rather, he broke down the walls that divide us as people.”

In response to the president’s policies targeting marginalized groups, Dyer said his congregation has participated in marches, protests and vigils.

Avoiding politics is not really an option for a progressive Christian church in Washington, D.C., he said.

“The hope is that people will walk by and think about things a little differently,” Dyer said of his banners. “It will remind people of a God who loves them and feels their frustration.”

A union body blow in what was once an organized-labor bastion

The Seattle Times

A union body blow in what was once an organized-labor bastion

Cho Tak Wong, chairman of the Fuyao Group, speaks during the grand opening of the Fuyao Glass America plant, Friday, Oct. 7, 2016, in Moraine, Ohio. The Chinese company’s completed automotive glass-making plant serves as its North American hub for recycled glass manufacturing. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

A critical loss for organized labor shows the economic angst of the Heartland is more complicated.

By Jon Talton, Special to The Seatle Times December 7, 2017

One of the tropes of the 2016 election was that the white working class felt slighted by globalization and voted heavily for the “populism” of Donald Trump. And perhaps that — instead of white-identity and culture-war issues — drove at least some. But in the Heartland, where Trumpism gained heavily, the messages are mixed.

Last month, employees at Fuyao Glass America in suburban Dayton, Ohio, voted by a wide margin to reject joining the United Auto Workers. The factory, which makes auto glass, is located in the shell of the former General Motors Moraine Assembly (and the reader should know I was the business editor at the Dayton Daily News from 1986-1990). The “no” vote represents a stunning turnaround for organized labor.

From 1951 to 1979, this factory made appliances for Frigidaire, a GM subsidiary. When the appliance manufacturing operation was shut down, the plant was saved by a collaboration among state and local government, GM, and the union. With big tax breaks and an adaptable local union, it was transformed into an auto assembly plant, turning out the popular small S-10 Blazer SUV. It was the only GM assembly represented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, a holdover from Frigidaire days.

This is part of the Rust Belt story that’s rarely told: How the region reinvented itself after catastrophic losses in the late 1970s and early 1980. Dayton was no stranger to this: When NCR ended manufacturing of mechanical cash registers, it cost some 30,000 good local jobs and left a swath south of downtown empty as former factories were torn down. But often places were able to adapt, even with the headwinds of ’80s-style vulture capitalism.

Moraine was one of the success stories. And the union was essential. Often its members had the best ideas to improve productivity and innovation — the bottleneck was then-CEO Roger Smith’s bureaucracy. Unions were still popular — people understood that, even with their flaws, they had been essential to building the middle class and spreading benefits across workplaces everywhere. In 1989, more than 21 percent of Ohio workers were union members. By 2016, it was 12.4 percent. Nationally, only 6.4 percent of the private-sector workforce was unionized last year, compared to more than one-third in the 1950s.

The Moraine Assembly was shut down by GM in 2008. Automation, moves to non-union plants in the South, and China’s rise in the world economy have cost Ohio 376,000 manufacturing jobs since 1990. Fuyao, paradoxically, is a Chinese company, one of a small number that have opened factories in the United States. In the New York Times, Cao Dewang, the company’s founder, blamed “excessive union power for American industrial decline” and said, “To be brutally honest, up to this moment, my investment in the U.S. has brought no good to Fuyao.”

Don’t be a sore winner.

In reality, the decline of unions goes far beyond their sometime corruption or overreaching (and that never happens with businesses, right?). Blame the savaging of key industries by decades of “rip, strip and flip” capitalism, weak antitrust enforcement, deregulation and anti-worker bias on the National Labor Relations Board and elsewhere in the federal government. Globalization played a role, but unions are strong in Germany. America’s story is more complicated.

One of the chapters is about workers voting against their self-interest. How many at Fuyao voted for Trump? They got the wealthiest cabinet in history, more deregulation and hostility to workers, and soon tax legislation that will cause lasting damage to the middle class. “Great Again,” in the minds of Trump voters, was the Nifty Fifties. But apparently without the strong unions.

Will tax cuts spur the American economy? Maybe with a time machine.

Yahoo News

Will tax cuts spur the American economy? Maybe with a time machine.

Matt Bai, National Political Columnist December 7, 2017

Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Getty Images (2), AP

Matt Bai’s Political World

Finally, Americans are going to get that massive corporate tax cut they’ve been clamoring for.

OK, not really — voters don’t put taxes high on the list of issues that keep them up at night, and the bill now careening through Congress is even less popular than the president, which is saying something. But Republicans are finally going to get the elusive legislative victory they can talk about in their districts over the winter break, and that’s why they’re hurrying to pass a bill they’ve barely had time to read.

A lot’s been said about this tax bill and the motives that underlay it. Critics charge that it’s really just payback for the corporations and contributors who have invested so heavily in Republican campaigns. They say Republicans who voted for the plan know full well that their economic program won’t magically pay for itself, and that the bill is a political weapon, designed to punish urban states.

My experience, though, has been that most politicians who espouse an economic philosophy actually believe in it, or think they do. So let’s just dispense for the moment with all the talk about Republican corruption and subterfuge, and let’s instead take the bill — and its backers — at face value.

Because it seems to me that if you’re looking to understand where we are as a country right now, the substantive theory behind this bill may tell you more than the political chicanery surrounding it.

For the last four decades or so, going back to Ronald Reagan, Republicans have been guided by a single tenet when it comes to growth: the alluring conceit of “supply-side” economics. What this means, essentially, is that lowering taxes puts more money into the hands of businesses and affluent consumers, which leads to more capital investment and spending, which leads to accelerated growth and ultimately higher revenues.

And, the theory holds, since businesses are the ones who hire working-class Americans and pay their wages, and since wealthy consumers are the ones who buy the most stuff, the additional wealth created by tax cuts inevitably “trickles down” to everyone else.

Liberals have always derided this entire theory (as did no less a Republican than George H.W. Bush, who called it “voodoo economics” when he ran for president in 1980). But all these many years and multiple tax cuts later, we should at least put Reagan’s program into some kind of larger context.

When Reagan came into office, at the height of a brutal recession, the top marginal tax rate was a whopping 70 percent; he immediately cut it to 50 percent. In 1986, Reagan and the Democratic majorities in Congress agreed to slash those taxes again, but they also raised the rate on capital gains. (That’s what actual tax reform looks like, by the way — some rates go down while others go up.)

You can certainly argue about how much of the economic recovery during the 1980s (and the recession that followed) can be attributed to Reagan’s policies. But it’s reasonable to assume that Reagan’s supply-side program had both positive and negative effects.

Putting all that money back into the pockets of business and the affluent probably did help spur some investment and hiring. But the tax cuts didn’t pay for themselves with added revenues, and even as Reagan agreed to raise other taxes a few dozen times during his presidency, the federal debt continued to grow.

A few decades after Reagan first cut taxes, George W. Bush pursued his own version of the same program, pushing through two huge tax cuts totaling about $1.5 trillion — or about as much as the Republicans’ current proposal. Again, those cuts (like all tax cuts, by definition) mostly accrued to the wealthy, on the theory that more money for job creators would ultimately trickle down, as Reagan promised.

But here’s the thing: A lot had begun to change in the structure of the economy — and in the structure of the entire society, really — in the years between Reagan and the second Bush. And that change has accelerated rapidly in the last decade or so, to the point where a theory that seemed at least plausible in 1980 should now be viewed as recklessly out of date.

Corporations today, as you might have heard, are doing business in a global marketplace that barely existed in 1980. They’re judged almost entirely by their stock prices from one quarter to the next, which means their imperative is to cut costs today, rather than invest for the next decade.

American capital drifts overseas, where labor is cheap. And manufacturers who do invest here are taking full advantage of a revolution in automation; go to any auto or steel plant, and what you will see are acres of robots, with a fraction of the workers who would have been needed in Reagan’s day.

That trend is about to remake the job landscape again. According to a nice roundup of the current research in last week’s New York Times, artificial intelligence will likely displace tens of millions of jobs in the next few decades, although new career paths may arise, too. The imminent takeover by automated cars could, by itself, overturn entire industries.

What this means, practically speaking, is that however hopeful the “trickle-down” idea may have been in the 1980s, it’s just specious now. The critical link between the fortunes of big employers and the American workforce has been all but severed; what’s good for the stock price (and stocks have been soaring these last few weeks) is no longer an especially useful indicator of what’s good for you.

And, yes, the additional trillion bucks in federal debt that will pile up as a result of this bill will add even more pressure, inevitably, to cut social programs that primarily benefit lower-income Americans. In effect, they’ll lose twice: once when the tax cut fails to create all kinds of new jobs or thriving communities, and again when the programs on which they rely turn out to be unsustainable.

All of which may add to a feeling of moral superiority among the president’s critics — but it shouldn’t, really, and this gets to my larger point about the generational failure that pervades Washington.

The populist left’s alternative answer to the transforming economy — to create all kinds of new federal giveaways while punishing the rich with pre-Reagan tax rates — seems just as nostalgic and futile as the one we’re about to see enacted. Neither approach gets to the core challenge we face, which is how to reconnect the fortunes of businesses and workers, so that the success of one doesn’t have to come at the expense of the other.

There are some promising ideas along these lines, though you probably haven’t heard much about them. Mark Warner, the Virginia senator and a tech millionaire himself, has been pushing, among other things, tax incentives that would reward corporate investment and a series of metrics to judge companies on their commitment to workers.

The think tank Third Way, which occupies the lonely center in the Democratic Party, has a couple of intriguing proposals. These include a guaranteed private retirement account for every worker on top of their Social Security, funded in part by employers, and the elimination of all payroll taxes for the poorest workers, which ought to have bipartisan appeal.

But there’s no real constituency in Washington for modernizing government. There are only constituencies for going back and doing what we did in one or another golden age when the economy looked completely different.

The main failing of this tax bill isn’t the crazy, one-sided process, or the little provisions dropped in for contributors, or the contempt for blue state voters — although all of these are flat-out disgraceful. The main failing is that the entire policy is based on a played-out intellectual theory, aimed squarely at the problems of an America we hold in our memories.

The supply of outdated ideas is endless, but our moment demands something better.

The Russians risking all to oppose Vladimir Putin.

Trump voters must ask themselves: is this the “Great America” they had in mind, when they elected a Putin wannabe bent on dismantling America’s democratic institutions and installing an autocratic kleptocracy, run by oligarchs parading as crony capitalists? I hope not! John Hanno

The Guardian

Navalny’s army: The Russians risking all to oppose Vladimir Putin.

Opposition politician’s campaign gathers steam ahead of 2018 election, but his supporters face threats and intimidation.

Alexei Navalny holds a rally in Izhevsk. His supporters are mainly young Russians who have known only a Putin presidency. Photograph: Yegor Aleyev/TASS

Shaun Walker in Kemerovo December 7, 2017

It has been a rough couple of months for Ksenia Pakhomova, a bright-eyed, garrulous 23-year-old from the Siberian mining town of Kemerovo. Her boyfriend was kicked out of university, her mother was fired from her teaching job at an arts school, and her grandmother was threatened with dismissal from her job at a gallery.

To top it off, someone plastered notices with her photograph in public places near her home, complete with her mobile number and an offer of sexual services.

All of this appears to be linked to Pakhomova’s job: she is the regional coordinator for the presidential campaign of Alexei Navalny, an opposition politician who wants to challenge Vladimir Putin for the Russian presidency in elections next March.

Putin finally declared his candidacy on Wednesday in a long-expected announcement, and is likely to win comfortably. Standing against him are a familiar cast of political has-beens and a few spoiler candidates whom few Russians are taking seriously.

Navalny will most likely be barred from standing due to a criminal conviction in a case that was widely seen as politically motivated, but the 41-year-old anti-corruption campaigner is ignoring this. Instead, he has chosen to engage in the kind of enthusiastic, grassroots campaigning that has been absent from Russia in recent years: real politics, in short. He has embarked on a marathon of trips across the country’s vast expanse, holding rallies and setting up campaign headquarters.

The liberal opposition has traditionally made few inroads in places like Kemerovo, a tough, working-class region four hours by plane from Moscow. Here, Navalny is attracting the support of a different kind of Russian from the chattering, Moscow intellectual class that many see as the natural supporters of the democratic opposition.

Navalny’s supporters are mainly young Russians who have known little in their lifetimes except a Putin presidency.

Pakhomova, who studied law at university, said she was not particularly political until earlier this year, when she started watching Navalny’s videos. She was particularly horrified by a video alleging staggering corruption on the part of the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, which led to major protests in Moscow and other cities earlier this year. In Kemerovo, she began volunteering for the local Navalny campaign, and in time, she was appointed head of the local office.

“Everyone in Russia knows that officials are corrupt, but when you see the details, how openly they think they can do it, it’s shocking,” she said.

Ksenia Pakhomova, head of the Navalny campaign in Kemerovo. Photograph: Shaun Walker

Ksenia’s mother, 46-year-old Natalia Pakhomova, said she was warned in September that she should prevent her daughter from working for Navalny, but refused. At the end of October, she was removed from her job, on the pretext that anonymous parents had called the local administration and complained that teachers at her school were soliciting bribes. She had worked at the school for 26 years, and in April had received a medal from the local governor for her service.

Natalia’s 67-year-old mother, who works as a gallery attendant in the local art museum, was asked by her boss to talk her granddaughter out of working for Navalny and was also threatened with dismissal. She is on sick leave, which Natalia said was due to frayed nerves from the incident. Ksenia’s boyfriend was kicked out of university, though he has since been reinstated after an online campaign.

Navalny has said if he is not allowed on to the ballot, he will call for an “active boycott” of the elections.

“No other candidate has opened regional offices, no other candidate is properly campaigning,” he said in an interview in Moscow. “How can you have real elections without the only candidate who is campaigning?”

Navalny said that since the beginning of the year campaign staff had between them spent more than 2,000 days in jail and been fined more than 10m roubles (£129,000).

“What’s happening in Kemerovo is extreme, but it’s a pattern across Russia and it’s clearly directed from the top,” he said.

In almost every region, activists have found it hard to rent office space from which to run the campaign. In Kemerovo, Pakhomova’s team is looking to move office after its landlord said the local administration called him and warned him not to rent to the Navalny campaign.

Whenever Navalny travels, authorities also create problems, and he has been jailed or assaulted on numerous occasions this year. When he visited Kemerovo earlier this autumn, local authorities cancelled public transport to the area on the outskirts of town where they had given Navalny permission to speak.

Despite all this, more than 2,000 people attended the rally, making it one of the biggest demonstrations in Kemerovo since the miners’ strikes in the late 1980s and early 90s that heralded the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Views on how much damage Navalny can cause with his message that Putin’s inner circle are “crooks and thieves” vary. In Kemerovo, many people have still not heard of Navalny, and among those who have, views are mixed.

Boris Pavlov, the deputy head of the Kemerovo Navalny campaign, holds frequent one-man pickets (gatherings of more than one person require permission) with a Navalny sign in the centre of Kemerovo. “Sometimes people come to shake my hand, but other times I’ve had people spit at me and call me a traitor,” he said.

State television has long denied Navalny access to the airwaves, and claimed the opposition is working to promote foreign interests in Russia. Kremlin insiders portray him as a marginal figure who poses no serious electoral threat.

“His limit would be 5-10% in big cities and 2-3% overall,” said one source close to the Kremlin, who added that the only reason to keep him off the ballot was to prevent “negative vibes” around the election. “He’d have three months of telling everyone that the government is lying and corrupt, and nobody wants to listen to that.”

Russian police officers take into custody a protester during an unauthorized opposition rally in Moscow in June last year. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

But there are signs that Navalny’s message could potentially resonate among a new audience, in a country where up to now Putin has managed to remain above widespread anger at corruption.

Natalia, Ksenia’s mother, was always a Putin fan. She voted for him at the last election in 2012, and even bought Ksenia a Putin-themed calendar as a present that year, because her daughter was too young to vote, with the election falling a few days before her eighteenth birthday. But recent events have led to a recalibration of her views.

“Ksenia made me listen to the Navalny videos, and I’ll be honest, I’ve realised he’s really saying the right things. It has completely changed my views on politics,” she said.

Hers is not the only case of children changing the minds of their parents. At a training session run by Ksenia on how to deal with police last week, all but one of the eight attendees was under 18.

Dima, 14, was initially scolded by his mother for attending Navalny-backed protests in Kemerovo earlier this year, after the child support agency showed up at his house to complain. However, she is now helping to collect signatures for the campaign, and proudly took a selfie with Navalny when he came to Kemerovo.

“My mother had some problems with her politics,” said Dima, with the tone of a parent indulging an errant child, rather than vice-versa. “But afterwards she started watching Navalny’s videos and her political understanding is now more developed.”

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VA cuts program for homeless vets after touting Trump’s commitment

Politico

VA cuts program for homeless vets after touting Trump’s commitment

The VA says it is essentially ending a special $460 million program that has dramatically reduced homelessness among chronically sick and vulnerable veterans. VA Secretary David Shulkin is pictured. | Alex Brandon/AP Photo

By Arthur Allen and Lorraine Woellert December 6, 2017

Four days after Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin held a big Washington event to tout the Trump administration’s promise to house all homeless vets, the agency did an about-face, telling advocates it was pulling resources from a major housing program.

The VA said it was essentially ending a special $460 million program that has dramatically reduced homelessness among chronically sick and vulnerable veterans. Instead, the money would go to local VA hospitals that can use it as they like, as long as they show evidence of dealing with homelessness.

Anger exploded on a Dec. 1 call that was arranged by Shulkin’s Advisory Committee on Homeless Veterans to explain the move. Advocates for veterans, state officials and even officials from HUD, which co-sponsors the program, attacked the decision, according to five people who were on the call.

“I don’t understand why you are pulling the rug out,” Elisha Harig-Blaine, a National League of Cities housing official who was on the call, said in an interview afterward. “You’re putting at risk the lives of men and women who’ve served this country.”

“The VA is taking its foot off the pedal,” said Leon Winston, an executive at Swords to Plowshares, which helps homeless vets in San Francisco, where he said the VA decision is already having an impact. HUD recently put up 100 housing vouchers for veterans in the program, but the local VA hospital said it could only provide support for 50.

The agency’s move came as HUD on Wednesday released its annual survey showing a 1.5 percent increase in veteran homelessness over 2016 — the first rise since 2010. Most of the jump occurred in Los Angeles, where housing costs are skyrocketing.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who sits on a veterans’ affairs subcommittee, called the VA decision “a new low” for the Trump administration that was “especially callous and perplexing” in view of the latest data on homelessness.

In a statement late Wednesday, Shulkin insisted that overall funding for veteran homelessness was not being cut, and seemed to suggest he might reverse the decision. He promised to get input from local VA leaders and others “on how best to target our funding to the geographical areas that need it most.”

HUD data show there were nearly 40,000 homeless veterans in 2016, and even those with housing still need assistance. The program has reduced the number of displaced service members, serving 138,000 since 2010 and cut the number without housing on a given day by almost half. More than half the veterans housed are chronically ill, mentally ill or have substance abuse problems.

They can easily lose their housing again and need VA case managers to mediate with landlords, pay bills, and help them access the agency’s services and jobs, said Matt Leslie, who runs the housing program for the Virginia Department of Veterans Services.

“The people in this program are the most vulnerable individuals,” Leslie said. “If someone’s going to die on the streets, they are the ones.”

VA officials briefed congressional staff on Tuesday about the decision — which was buried in a September circular without prior consultation with HUD or veterans’ groups, according to advocates.

Agency spokesman Curtis Cashour said the move gives VA medical centers more flexibility. “VA has a responsibility to ensure resources go where they best align with veterans’ needs,” he said. “This move gives control and management of resources to local VA facilities, [which] know their communities and the veterans they serve better than anyone else.”

The decision affects $265 million immediately and would divert $195 million more under the VA’s 2018 budget. Under the program, HUD offers housing vouchers for veterans, and the VA provides case management — finding them apartments and making sure they stay there. Officials said it was possible that some of the vouchers could still be assigned, with the help of city or federal housing officials.

Carolyn Clancy, acting undersecretary for health, said the VA was moving forward to distribute money from the program to medical centers.

The Dec. 1 call came four days after Shulkin, appearing at a Washington shelter with HUD Secretary Ben Carson, announced that President Donald Trump was committed to continued reductions in veterans’ homelessness and was increasing funding in the area.

Shulkin and Carson promised to help every veteran find a home.

When asked about the administration’s budget, which includes no additional vouchers for the hard-case veterans, Carson said HUD had “excess vouchers. When we use those, we’ll look for more,” he said.

“The old paradigm of dumping money on problems doesn’t work,” Carson added.

Some communities have excess vouchers, but many more don’t have enough, said Harig-Blaine, who is also a member of Shulkin’s advisory committee. Even in cities where there are excess vouchers, they exist only because the voucher community can’t compete with private market rents, he said — not because there aren’t homeless veterans there.

All 14 members of the Senate Appropriations Military Construction-VA Subcommittee, including Murray, asked the VA to reconsider its decision, but apparently the letter had no effect.

“It will take a congressional fix at this point,” Harig-Blaine said.

Advocates said cuts to the program were doubly foolish because the chronically homeless veterans it serves typically cost cities and the health care system hundreds of thousands of dollars for emergency room visits, ambulance runs and jailings that could be avoided if the veterans were reasonably sheltered.

“These are the kinds of veterans it deals with,” said Kathryn Monet, CEO of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.

Renuka Rayasam contributed to this report.

These Happy Golden Years (Laura Ingalls Wilder)

The Slate Book Review: Reading Between The Lines

These Happy Golden Years (Laura Ingalls Wilder)

A new biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder untangles her story from the American myths her novels helped create.

By Laura Miller December 7, 2017

Laura Miller is a books and culture columnist for Slate and the author of The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia.

Photo illustration by Slate. Image by Thinkstock.

The word dreams in the subtitle of Caroline Fraser’s new book, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, is plural for a reason. Laura’s Little House novels, based on her childhood experiences living on homesteads around the Midwest in the late 1800s, braid two dreams together into a single thread, fused by, as Fraser puts it, the “purity” of Laura’s voice, the way her longing for the past and its ordinary pleasures sings through all of the books. The first dream, and the most powerful, is the memory of a childhood made happy by the warm, steady, joyful love of Laura’s parents for their children and for each other. The second is the fantasy of pioneer life, of self-sufficient family farms wrested from the wilderness by sheer hard work and gumption. This dream takes the form of a story that begins in a covered wagon and ends, if not in outright prosperity, then at least in comfort and—above all—independence.

As tightly bound as these two dreams are, the first is true, and the second is not. In Prairie Fires, Fraser carefully untangles them, honoring the pristine beauty of Laura’s fiction while sternly dismantling the frontier mythos her books shored up for generations. This is not an easy task: Not only are Laura’s novels fervently beloved by children and former children around the world—Prairie Fires includes the story of how the Little House books became a phenomenon in postwar Japan—but they are deeply intertwined with America’s image of itself. Scores of books have been written about Laura, her family, and the places they lived as her father moved them around, always searching for a spot where he wouldn’t be hemmed in by too many neighbors; millions of people watched the 1970s television series based (very loosely) on Laura’s stories. Fraser aims to address both the particulars of the Ingalls’ lives and the way Laura spun the humble facts into a narrative that feels so central to a certain strain of American identity. Her books, Fraser writes of Laura, have made her “the emblematic figure of pioneer history” as well as “a treasured incarnation of American tenacity.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter and collaborator, Rose Wilder Lane, stoutly maintained that the Little House books were true in nearly every respect, although Wilder scholars and fans have long known that this is not the case. For instance, crop failures in Minnesota, the setting for On the Banks of Plum Creek, forced the family to sell their land and, in 1876, move to Burr Oak, Iowa, where they were partners in the management of a hotel that still bore the bullet holes from an incident in which the former owner’s wastrel son had fired a pistol at his wife. This lively but sordid interlude was entirely omitted from the bucolic Little House books. Also unremarked is the fact that from the age of 9 onward, Laura would spend much of her time working outside the home, often as a seamstress, to help support her family. Even more troubling, Laura’s fans have had to reckon with the revelation that the family’s iconic Kansas house was illegally built on land belonging to the Osage American Indians.

None of this is news, but in Prairie Fires, Fraser places Laura’s choices as a writer within the larger context of Americans’ self-deception when it comes to the pioneer life and its legacy. This she manages to do without diminishing Laura herself, a woman Fraser clearly admires. It needs to be done all the same, because the books’ legacy has been muddied by Rose Wilder Lane and her acolytes, who have enlisted them as propaganda.

The author of best-selling potboilers, magazine fiction, and, in her later years, political screeds, Rose practically muscles her mother off the pages of Prairie Fire. Fraser’s attention to Rose (a choice likely to annoy many of Laura’s fans) is understandable. After marrying Almanzo Wilder in 1885, Laura endured several harsh years with him trying to get a farm going in South Dakota until finally the couple moved to Mansfield, Missouri, in the Ozarks, where they quietly settled for a comfortable but not-that-exciting life. Rose, by contrast, was an impossible, moody, imperious globe-trotter, a libertarian crank, part of a troika of prominent female writers that included Ayn Rand.

Rose Wilder Lane practically muscles her mother off the pages of Prairie Fire.

Rose often invoked the bootstrapping spirit of her pioneer grandparents, inveighing in her own work against government handouts, regulatory intrusions, and taxes, which were, she maintained, poised to bring about “the swift and violent death … of democracy.” Laura often agreed with her daughter, particularly as she got older; both women reviled FDR and the New Deal. But Laura at least had some claim to thrifty pioneer ways. Rose, by contrast, preached personal responsibility while spending money she didn’t have, lavishing gifts on a series of young male protégés she referred to as her “sons.” She had a passion for designing and remodeling houses in the latest fashions, even as she boasted of having a mother who once lived “in a creek-bank in Minnesota.” A tempestuous daddy’s girl, Rose also often maligned her mother for her parsimony and provincialism.

Some Rose partisans felt obliged to take her side in assessing the complicated dynamic between mother and daughter. Her heir, Roger MacBride (who referred to Rose as his grandmother), sold the television rights to the company responsible for the schmaltzy and popular series titled after Laura’s second book. (Fraser is very funny on the opportunity the show provided star Michael Landon to make his “clean-shaven and well-oiled” chest “a primary visual motif.”) MacBride used the profits to run as the Libertarian Party candidate for president in 1976, receiving press coverage that called him, bizarrely, a “self-made millionaire” as a result of the TV series.

Caroline Fraser. Hal Espen

Another admirer of Rose’s, William Holtz, published a biography of her in the 1990s, claiming that Rose had effectively written all of the Little House books, using the raw material of an early memoir by Laura, Pioneer Girl. Fraser briskly dismisses this calumny while acknowledging that Rose, a talented editor, contributed a great deal to the books. “To some extent,” Fraser writes, “Wilder saw writing as a cottage industry: books were the work of many hands, like quilts at a sewing bee.” Rose—who began her career as a journalist, then wrote a fake, quickie unauthorized “autobiography” of Charlie Chaplin that was full of inaccuracies and outright lies—could not produce fiction with the limpid simplicity of the Little House books. When she tried, attempting to depict the same events her mother recounted in her books, the result was what Fraser calls a “homesteading soap opera” without the “powerful emotional undercurrent” of her mother’s work.

Laura Ingalls Wilder adored her parents and pined for the togetherness of her childhood. In trying to communicate the wonders of that time—and also because she did not think books for children should include too much upsetting material—she often elided or altered the grimness of the Ingalls’ condition, which often amounted to desperate and terrifying poverty. By the time she finished the last book in the series, These Happy Golden Years, an account of the early days of her marriage, “she had put everything to right that once felt wrong,” Fraser writes. She recreated the parents of her most cherished memories and in doing so “built the illusion—the ideal—of the yeoman farmer, able to sustain a family on the homestead, raising something from nothing.” She insisted that her father never accepted public assistance or left a debt unpaid, both claims untrue. Charles Ingalls never succeeded as a farmer, and, as Fraser points out, he “never seemed to realize that his ambition for a profitable farm was irreconcilable with a love of untrammeled and unpopulated wilderness.”

The first known photograph of the three eldest Ingalls sisters, Carrie, Mary, and Laura, taken around 1879 or 1880. Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum, Mansfield, Missouri

“Glimpses of historical events can be seen in offhand references in Wilder’s memoir, like blurry figures in the background of a photograph,” Fraser observes of Pioneer Girl. That’s only natural, given that Laura presents a child’s view of the times. Prairie Fires places the Little Housebooks in their larger historical context. The parallels between the delusional political rhetoric of Laura’s time and our own pretty much draw themselves. The Homestead Act of 1862, the law that enabled pioneers like Charles to lay claim to land (itself mostly stolen from American Indians), was “one of the largest federal handouts in American history.” Fraser details the dishonest promotion of the Great Plains as excellent farmland by both government and big business, the catastrophic effect that settlers had on the delicate ecosystem of the seemingly empty prairie, and the crushing droughts, apocalyptic fires, and biblical-grade locust visitations that resulted from these and other human-caused traumas to the environment. The periodic depressions and market crashes that bankrupted countless family farms proved over and over again that the fate of even the most rugged individualist could not be detached from the larger world.

So much of the allure of the Little House books has to do with the exclusion of that larger world, with the dream of a return to that small circle of family that makes up a child’s horizons. It’s also the dream that the material things in our lives might regain some of their magic if they weren’t so plentiful and easy to get. In her perfectly charming memoir, The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie, the children’s book editor Wendy McClure writes of her lifelong fascination with Laura’s novels. “I wanted to live in one room with my whole family and have a pathetic corncob doll all my own,” she confesses, knowing how ridiculous it sounds. There are undoubtedly 8-year-olds today who harbor the same dream—while also nagging their parents for smartphones. Just as I, under the influence of Laura’s books, pestered my mother to let me try to churn butter while I watched TV. In our absurdity, it helps to remember that not even Laura could regain the past she wrote about so beautifully. Perhaps that’s because it never really existed, except, for a few brief years, in the eyes of a little girl.

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser. Metropolitan Books. Read the rest of the pieces in the Slate Book Review.

Dramatic footage shows massive wildfires raging near Interstate 405 in California.

All In with Chris Hayes

December 5, 2017. WATCH: Dramatic footage shows massive wildfires raging near Interstate 405 in California.

Senate Republicans Made a $289 Billion Mistake in the Handwritten Tax Bill They Passed at 2 a.m. Go Figure.

Not surprising that Republi-cons botched their rushed, tossed together tax bill. They are neither capable nor interested in governing effectively or crafting legislation that solves financial crisis’ for America’s middle class. Their goal was simply payback to the rich and powerful. Even a quick glance at the winners in the bill, mirrors the list of donors to Trump Inc. and the congressional GOP, not America’s other 98% or beguiled Trump voters. John Hanno

Slate

Senate Republicans Made a $289 Billion Mistake in the Handwritten Tax Bill They Passed at 2 a.m. Go Figure.

By Jordan Weissmann December 6, 2017

“Derp a derp derp derp derp.” Alex Wong/Getty Images

It appears that Senate Republicans managed to make a $289 billion or so mistake while furiously hand-scribbling edits onto the tax bill they passed in the wee hours of Saturday morning. The problem involves the corporate alternative minimum tax, which the GOP initially planned to repeal, but tossed back into their stew at the last second in order to raise some desperately needed revenue. The AMT is basically a parallel tax code meant to prevent companies from zeroing out their IRS bills. It doesn’t allow businesses to take as many tax breaks but, in theory, is also supposed to have a lower rate.

Except not under the Senate bill. When Mitch McConnell & co. revived the AMT, they absentmindedly left it at its current rate of 20 percent, the same as the new, lower rate of the corporate income tax that the bill included. As a result, many companies won’t be able to use tax breaks that were supposed to be preserved in the legislation, including the extremely popular credit for research and development costs. Corporate accountants started freaking out about this over the weekend, but the situation reached high farce when a group of lawyers from Davis Polk pointed out that, by leaving the AMT intact, Republicans had essentially undermined their bill’s most important changes to the international tax code.

Without getting too stuck in the weeds, the GOP’s bill was supposed to take the U.S. from a “worldwide” system of taxation, where the IRS tries to take a cut of profits American companies earn anywhere on the globe, to a modified “territorial” system, where companies could bring back their profits either tax-free or at a much lower rate. With the AMT still kicking around at 20 percent, though, “the United States would continue to operate under a worldwide system of taxation,” the lawyers wrote.

Keeping the AMT was supposed to raise $40 billion, but that already appears to be a gross underestimate. (The figure came from Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation, whose analysts I can only assume were running on Red Bull and fumes while trying to provide the GOP with last-minute scores.) NYU Law professor and tax expert Lily Batchelder concludes that the AMT will actually cost companies at least $329 billion—good for limiting the blow to the deficit, bad for the corporations who are supposed to be stumping for this legislative Frankenstein—just based on the value of the R&D credits and international exemptions that have been rendered useless.

Lily Batchelder tweets:

Appears corporate AMT provision probably raises >$300B, not $40B JCT estimated under duress Fri night. This means Rs have to take Senate bill to conference and can’t just have House pass it, unless they want to *really* piss off bus community. 1/5

I’m getting >$300B from fact that provision appears to repeal R&D credit, which costs ~$113B, and participation exemption, which costs $216B. See JCT estimates at https://www.jct.gov/publications.html?func=startdown&id=4860 … and https://www.jct.gov/publications.html?func=startdown&id=5043 …. 2/5

And corporate AMT provision does a lot more than this, so even $300B is probably low-balling. 3/5

When I talked to Batchelder briefly on the phone Tuesday night, she pointed out that while the GOP’s AMT debacle would end up raising more money than expected, there are almost certainly other, undiscovered mistakes in the bill that would lose revenue. “I think this evidences what can go wrong when you try to pass massive tax reform this quickly,” she said.

On the bright side, this mammoth screw-up will make it harder for the House to simply pass the Senate’s bill if the GOP’s conference committee hits a wall. Republicans have to enact something that fixes this, lest they tick off the very donors this legislation was meant to appease.

One more thing

You depend on Slate for sharp, distinctive coverage of the latest developments in politics and culture. Now we need to ask for your support.

Our work is more urgent than ever and is reaching more readers—but online advertising revenues don’t fully cover our costs, and we don’t have print subscribers to help keep us afloat. So we need your help. If you think Slate’s work matters, become a Slate Plus member. You’ll get exclusive members-only content and a suite of great benefits—and you’ll help secure Slate’s future. Join Slate Plus

Jordan Weissmann is Slate’s senior business and economics

Sen. Susan Collins, caught in a tax bill lie, faces an enraged electorate back home

Daily Kos

Sen. Susan Collins, caught in a tax bill lie, faces an enraged electorate back home

By Joan McCarter December 5, 2017

WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 07: U.S. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), C, who defected and voted against the GOP majority, speaks to the media after the Senate voted to confirm Betsy DeVos as education secretary on Capitol Hill on February 7, 2017 in Washington, D.C. The historic 51-50 vote was decided by a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Mike Pence. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images) Susan Collins, tool of Trump and McConnell.

Maine Sen. Susan Collins was a critical single vote on the disastrous Republican tax bill. She pretended for days that she was holding out for promises from Mitch McConnell on legislation she had to see pass in return for her vote—promises she knew McConnell wasn’t in a position to make. Let any speculation about whether Collins was acting in good faith in these negotiations end now. She has proven that when it comes to tax cuts for the donor class, she’ll lie to America with the best of them.

On Meet the Press Sunday, Chuck Todd asked Susan Collins how she could support a huge tax cut after having complained about excessive debt. “Economic growth produces more revenue and that will help to offset this tax cut and actually lower the debt,” she calmly replied. An incredulous Todd asked Collins how she could defend such a claim when every study has concluded the opposite. She cited Glenn Hubbard, Larry Lindsey, and Douglas Holtz-Eakin.

Jennifer Rubin got hold of two of the three, Hubbard and Holtz-Eakin. Both economists denied having ever claimed the Republican tax cuts would produce enough growth to recoup the lost revenue.

She’s now reaping the reward for her vote in Maine. When she returned back home after helping kill Trumpcare in the Senate, she was greeted as a hero at the airport. After this vote, she was greeted by protesters who stood with their backs to her. The protests are not letting up, as protesters basically took over her Bangor office, with an electrician, a nurse, a senior, and a veteran getting arrested when her staff complained to police. That’s not going to make for very good headlines for her back home. Since the protesters vow to continue their efforts until they secure her “no” vote when the bill goes back to the Senate after conference, those bad headlines are just going to continue.

Collins has made a total fool of herself and it gets worse for her every day.

House Speaker Paul Ryan is making sure everyone knows that he was not a party to any of McConnell’s negotiations with Collins and he wants no part of the promises supposedly made. He is making absolutely no commitment to bringing up the legislation stabilizing Obamacare that she conditioned her vote on.

Her only hope of redemption now will be not voting for this travesty when it comes back to the Senate. But she’s already forfeited any claim she’s had on being one of the principled Republicans.

THE FIGHT IS NOT OVER! Republicans must still pass a final version of the tax scam bill through both the House and the Senate. We can still stop this. Call your members AGAIN TODAY at (202) 224-3121.

Whistleblower: At inauguration, Flynn texted on nuclear plan

Associated Press

Whistleblower: At inauguration, Flynn texted on nuclear plan

Stephen Braun, Associated Press December 6, 2017

Trump did not answer questions about possible plans to pardon Michael Flynn.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A whistleblower has told House Democrats that during President Donald Trump’s inauguration speech, national security adviser Michael Flynn texted a former business associate to say a private nuclear reactor plan Flynn had lobbied for would also have his support in the White House.

As the whistleblower chatted with Flynn’s associate at an Inauguration Day celebration on Jan. 20, Flynn sent text messages saying the associate’s nuclear proposal was “good to go,” the whistleblower said. According to the whistleblower, Flynn also informed the associate that his business partners could move forward with their project, which aimed to construct a network of nuclear reactors across the Mideast with support from Russian and other international interests.

While Flynn’s agreement last week to plead guilty and cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation largely insulates the retired lieutenant general from further legal jeopardy, the whistleblower’s allegations raise new concerns about the extent to which Flynn may have blurred his private and public interests during his brief stint inside the White House. Trump fired Flynn in February, saying he had misled Vice President Mike Pence and others about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S.

Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said Wednesday that the whistleblower’s allegations raise concerns that Flynn improperly aided the nuclear project after joining the White House as one of Trump’s top national security officials. The project has yet to get off the ground.

Cummings detailed the whistleblower’s allegations in a letter to House Oversight chairman Trey Gowdy, R-South Carolina, and urged Gowdy to authorize subpoenas to Flynn and his business associates to learn more about his efforts to aid the proposal. Gowdy did not immediately respond to Associated Press requests for comment but previously has referred letters from House Democrats about Flynn to Mueller’s inquiry.

Flynn had been a paid consultant for the venture before he joined the Trump campaign last year. The plan, backed by a group of investors, nuclear power adherents and former U.S. military officers, was to construct dozens of nuclear reactors across the Mideast working with Russian and other international private interests.

House Democrats noted that a federal ethics law requires White House officials to refrain for a year from dealing with any outside interests they had previously worked with on private business matters.

“Our committee has credible allegations that President Trump’s national security adviser sought to manipulate the course of international nuclear policy for the financial gain of his former business partners,” Cummings said.

The whistleblower told House Democrats that while Trump spoke in January, Flynn texted from his seat on the Capitol steps to Alex Copson, the managing director of ACU Strategic Partners and the nuclear project’s main promoter. The whistleblower, whose identity was not revealed in Cummings’ letter, said during a conversation, Copson described his messages with Flynn and briefly flashed one of the texts, which appeared to have been sent 10 minutes after Trump began speaking.

“Mike has been putting everything in place for us,” Copson said, according to the whistleblower. Copson added that “this is going to make a lot of very wealthy people.” The whistleblower also said that Copson intimated that U.S. financial sanctions hobbling the nuclear project were going to be “ripped up.”

Attorneys for Flynn and Copson did not immediately return email and phone requests for comment.

In Flynn’s agreement last week to plead guilty to one count of making false statements, prosecutors said that Flynn lied to FBI agents about his discussions on sanctions against Russia with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition.

Copson had promoted a succession of nuclear projects designed to include Russian participation dating back to the 1990s. In an earlier note to the committee, Copson said his firm had provided Flynn with a $25,000 check — left uncashed — and paid for Flynn’s June 2015 trip to the Mideast as a security consultant for the project.

Flynn’s financial disclosure did not cite those payments, but he did report that until December 2016, he worked as an adviser to two other companies that partnered with Copson’s firm. That consortium, X-Co Dynamics Inc. and Iron Bridge Group, initially worked with ACU but later pushed a separate nuclear proposal for the Mideast.

Associated Press writer Chad Day contributed to this report.