The Saudi Connection

THE ABSURD TIMES

The Saudi Connection

More on what's really going on.

Trump and his followers with the retweets and other hate speech examples pose a real danger of making ISIS seem a rational response.  It isn't, of course, but things are relative.

Trump has now caused a massive shift in attitude in Iran away from the moderates towards the religious right.  We are seeing signs of a return to the early days of the overthrow of the Shah and Savak.  Anybody remember Shapur Baktiar?  I didn't think so.

Now that Gaddafi is gone, we see slave auctions in Libya. 

We get response from Al Jazeera's Mehdi Hasan to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's recent controversial column, "Saudi Arabia's Arab Spring, at Last." Hasan argues the piece is absurdly sympathetic to Saudi Arabia, and that Trump's friendly relations with the country mean he "is not just a liar and a conspiracy theorist, he's a hypocrite. He goes on about 'radical islamic terrorism' but cozies up to Saudi Arabia, which many would argue has done more to promote ideologically and financially radical Islamic terrorism than any other country on earth."

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Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to go to another issue, which is related to what we've just been covering. A recent opinion piece by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman titled "Saudi Arabia's Arab Spring, at Last." Friedman writes in this piece, quote, "Though I came here at the start of Saudi winter, I found the country going through its own Arab Spring, Saudi-style. Unlike the other Arab Springs—all of which emerged bottom up and failed miserably, except in Tunisia—this one is led from the top down by the country's 32-year-old crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman, and, if it succeeds, it will not only change the character of Saudi Arabia but the tone and tenor of Islam across the globe."

Friedman then goes on to say that Mohammad bin Salman is not only leading an anticorruption drive in the kingdom, but is also bringing Saudi Islam "back to its more open and modern orientation." To what MBS described as, quote, "A moderate, balanced Islam that is open to the world and to all religions and all traditions and peoples."

Now Mehdi Hasan, in an article for The Intercept headlined The Reverse Midas Touch of Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince is Turning the Middle East to Dust, you have presented a completely different perspective on the kingdom. So could you respond to Friedman's piece, and then also the fact that as Trump vocally criticizes practically everything to do with Islam, he chose to make his first state visit to Saudi Arabia?

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah. Let's just deal with Friedman, first. A nauseating piece, as a lot of people have pointed out in recent days. An embarrassment of a piece. I mean, if the Saudi Arabian government were to set up a Ministry of Truth and Propaganda, they could offer the job of minister to Tom Friedman. He did a great job for free, for them, on that visit to Saudi Arabia. I mean, it was absurd on every level.

Let me just start with the most offensive part of the piece, Nermeen, and you guys on Democracy Now! have covered the conflict in Yemen. It's the world's worst humanitarian catastrophe. Mohammad bin Salman is at the heart of that catastrophe. It's a war he started as defense minister, pushed for, defended, promoted, escalated. Is continuing to do so, as Crown Prince. And Friedman gives it one passing reference, one passing paragraph, in the piece, as if that's not—you know, "Oh, here's a moderate modernizer, who by the way is bombing the Middle East's poorest country and starving them into submission, or trying and failing to starve them into submission."

As for this nonsense about returning Saudi Arabia to moderate Islam, Saudi Arabia has never been the home of moderate Islam. This idea that MBS, Mohammad bin Salman, is pushing, and that journalists like Tom Friedman in the West credulously just repeat and regurgitate, that pre-1979 Saudi Arabia was some kind of moderate bastion of liberalism and pluralism, a multi-faith utopia, is absurd. As long as the Saud family have been in charge of that country and imposing their brand of very intolerant, very reactionary Salafi Islam, it has not been moderate in any shape or form.

The Saudi Arabians have been exporting their particularly puritanical, intolerant brand of Islam to the rest of the Muslim-majority world since 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. So this nonsensical argument from the Crown Prince that "Oh, if we could just go back to pre-1979, pre the Iranian Revolution, pre the attack on Mecca by extremists, we would all be moderate again" is absurd.

Yes, it is very easy to say we will give women drivers the right to drive. You know, something—the only country in the world that didn't do that to begin with. Great, we all applaud that. But there is much more that this Crown Prince has to be done before he can even begin to talk about a moderate Islam coming out of Saudi.

And yes, you mentioned, Nermeen, Donald Trump, after accusing Saudi Arabia of being behind 9/11 during the election campaign, President Trump decided to make his first trip in the world not to Mexico or Canada, as previous U.S. presidents, but to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where he danced with swords and received lovely gifts and endorsed every Saudi geopolitical plan in the region from blockading Qatar—full disclosure, I work for Al Jazeera, owned by Qatar—to bombing Yemen, to escalating a conflict of a war of words which could become a hot war with Iran.

So Trump, shock horror, he is not just a liar and a conspiracy theorist, he's a hypocrite. He goes on about 'radical Islamic terrorism' but cozies up to Saudi Arabia, which many would argue has done more to promote ideologically and financially, radical Islamic terrorism, than any other country on earth.

Oral arguments are scheduled for next week in both federal appeals court cases of President Trump's proposed travel ban, which blocks various people from eight countries, six of them with Muslim majorities, from entering the United States. Mehdi Hasan, award-winning British journalist and broadcaster at Al Jazeera English, discusses the impact Trump's recent retweets of Islamophobic messages and videos could have on the cases and notes, "This is the way he's always been."

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Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Mehdi Hasan, we wanted to turn to the issue of Trump's proposed travel ban, which blocks various people from eight countries, six of them with Muslim majorities, from entering the United States. But federal judges in Maryland and Hawaii have partially blocked its implementation. Oral arguments are scheduled for next week in both federal appeals court cases.

Neal Katyal, a lawyer on the Hawaii travel ban case, posted a link to news coverage Wednesday of the president's tweets, writing, "Thanks! See you in court next week." What impact do you think Trump's retweets of these videos that have been so widely condemned across the political spectrum will have on his attempt to enforce this third iteration of a travel ban? What many call a Muslim ban.

MEHDI HASAN: It is a very good point, Amy. And every judge who has looked at this since January, when the first version of the Muslim ban came out, has actually referred to Trump's tweets, Trump's statements during the campaign, to point out that when the Trump administration says this has nothing to do with religion or Islam, hold on, the president of the United States himself said either in office, on Twitter, or on the campaign trail, that it is to do with Islam. It is to do with Muslims.

And interestingly, it is not just Neal Katyal, the lawyer, pointing to the tweets. Yesterday, Amy, the Deputy White House Press Secretary on board Air Force One, Raj Shah, when asked by journalists is the president hostile toward Muslims, does he have a problem with Muslims given these tweets, what did the White House Deputy Press Secretary say? He said, "Well, I think the president has addressed that with his travel order."

So the White House Deputy Press Secretary himself referred to the travel order as being about Muslims. So when the White House next lies and says it has nothing to do with Muslims, their own administration keeps undermining them by keep—you know, occasionally, accidentally, the most dishonest administration in modern history tells the truth.

AMY GOODMAN: The terms "unhinged," "unbound," "untethered," "losing it," "unstable." The New York Times writing a major piece about what is going on in the White House right now with Trump tweeting out conspiracy theories, once again talking about President Obama being illegitimate, that he wasn't born in the United States. Saying that perhaps the "Access Hollywood" video in fact wasn't real, wasn't his voice, even though he acknowledged it and apologized for it. And then last night, when talking about the tax plan, reading script that said something like rocket fuel for the economy, got inspired to say, oh by the way, rocket fuel, rocket man, and then called the North Korean leader "a sick puppy." All of this is happening in the midst of this major escalation with North Korea that could lead to a nuclear war, as he attacks his closest ally, the British Prime Minister, Theresa May, who he might need in this case. What about this? This most unstable time?

MEHDI HASAN: I think the main way to deal with Trump, to try and respond to Trump, is to stop being surprised. We have to—I know it is hard for us to stop being shocked, because he is so good at shocking us, but I think we have to try and stop being shocked if we are going to tackle the menace that he poses to global stability and peace.

Because look, he said he was a conspiracy theorist during his campaign. He went on Infowars and thanked Alex Jones. He told us he was a conspiracy theorist. We shouldn't be shocked when he is a conspiracy theorist in office. He told us he was a white nationalist on the campaign trail. He retweeted accounts like White Genocide when he was a candidate. So we shouldn't be shocked when he becomes president and starts promoting white nationalists on Twitter.

This is who he has always been. Dangerous, unstable, a white nationalist, a conspiracy theorist. It's who he has always been over the decades. So I'm not sure why so many journalists, especially people who go to the White House and ask these questions every day of Sarah Huckabee Sanders—you know, start from the premise that he is who he says he is. He is a white nationalist. He is a conspiracy theorist. He is unstable. Some of America's leading psychiatrists have put together a book pointing out that he is a danger to us all because he is so unstable. And therefore we have to start recognizing what's in front of us, and stop pretending that this is any kind of normal president. He is not.

AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi Hasan, we want to thank you for being with us. Award-winning British journalist, broadcaster at Al Jazeera English, host of Al-Jazeera program "UpFront," columnist for The Intercept. We will link to your piece on the criticism of Thomas Friedman's piece in The New York Times. Also contributing editor to the New Statesman magazine in the U.K. This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we will be speaking with the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. Stay with us.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

[The Absurd Times] Grinch Trump

THE ABSURD TIMES

The baseness of Trump's base is simply too low to fathom.

This new "Tax Reform" is being sold as a wonderful "Christmas Present for the Common Man," (or words less eloquent than that).

His supporters will believe it because he uses the word "Christmas" in it, conjuring up all sorts of religious acrimony that had passed for a while.  Now it resurfaces, along with his retweeting of neo-nazi anti-Semitic (just the Semites are Moslem, that's all) propaganda. 

The facts are more onerous: if you earn $75,000 per year or less, this bill will cost you.  If you earn less than $30, it will cost you even more.  If you make over a million, it is bound to reduce your taxes.  There is more to it than that, but that is a good start in understanding the Christian spirit of Trump.  [Christianity will survive this defilement just as all prophets have survived the distortion of their messages, but the damage in the meantime will be costly to you.]  If you get a tuition waiver in college, that will now be taxable income.  It could cost greatly these days with the cost of tuition, but it is an effective way to reduce the educational level of the populace and thus help the Republican Party in the future.

Republicans are rapidly pushing forward with their efforts to pass President Donald Trump's tax plan, which would overhaul the tax code in order to shower billions of dollars in tax cuts upon the richest Americans, including Trump's own family. On Tuesday, the Senate Budget Committee passed the Senate version of the plan, with all Republicans on the panel voting for it and all Democrats voting against. Protesters disrupted the committee hearing Tuesday with chants of "Kill the bill, don't kill us." The plan will now go to the full Senate for a vote as early as Thursday. The Senate bill slashes the corporate tax rate and gives further tax cuts to wealthy business owners. It would also repeal a key provision of the Affordable Care Act, the requirement that most Americans have health insurance. Experts say revoking this provision, known as the individual mandate, would cause the cost of health insurance to skyrocket. We speak with Heather McGhee, president of Demos and Demos Action.

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Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, on to the tax bill.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Republicans are rapidly pushing forward with their efforts to pass President Trump's tax plan, which would overhaul the code in order to shower billions of dollars in tax cuts upon the richest Americans, including President Trump's own family. On Tuesday the Senate Budget Committee passed a Senate version of the plan with all Republicans on the panel voting for it, and all Democrats voting against.

Protesters disrupted the committee hearing Tuesday with chants of "Kill the bill, don't kill us." Several were arrested. The plan will now go to the full Senate for a vote as early as Thursday. The Senate bill slashes the corporate tax rate and gives further tax cuts to wealthy business owners. It would also repeal a key provision of the Affordable Care Act, the requirement that most Americans have health insurance. Experts say recalling this provision, known as the individual mandate, would cause the cost of health insurance to skyrocket.

The vote came after President Trump met with Senate Republicans on Capitol Hill. He later told reporters he thinks the Republican tax bill will be, quote, "very popular."

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We are in a very good position in terms of the meeting we just had over at the Capitol with the Republican senators. It was outstanding. I think we have tremendous support. I was just informed by Rich that we had a unanimous vote from the Republican side, at least. We had a unanimous vote on the tax bill. And it goes now the next step, and I think we are going to get it passed. I think it's going to pass and it's going to be very popular. It's going to have lots of adjustments before it ends. But the end result would be a very, very massive—the largest in the history of our country—tax cut.

AMY GOODMAN: Democrats have had nearly no say in crafting the tax plan. House and Senate Majority Leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer boycotted a meeting on Tuesday with Trump and Republican lawmakers after he appeared to refuse to negotiate on key issues like spending, health care and immigration. Trump then held a news conference between two empty chairs with signs for Pelosi and Schumer on them.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think they want tax increases and we want major tax decreases. So they decided not to show up. They have been all talk and they've been no action. And now it is even worse. Now it is not even talk. So they're not showing up for the meeting.

AMY GOODMAN: The image of President Trump surrounded by two empty chairs has appeared to backfire against him and has become a meme. Meanwhile, the House Democratic Leader Pelosi responded on Twitter saying, "@realDonaldTrump now knows that his verbal abuse will no longer be tolerated. His empty chair photo opp showed he's more interested in stunts than in addressing the needs of the American people. Poor Ryan and McConnell relegated to props. Sad!"

This comes as a House version of the tax bill passed earlier this month would cut the corporate tax rates from 35 percent to 20 percent. As the year winds down with no legislative achievements since Trump became president, Republicans say they are determined to pass tax reform by the end of the year.

Well, for more, we are joined by Heather McGhee, President of Demos and Demos Action. Heather, wow, a lot has happened in these last 24 hours. Talk about this tax bill that was passed and what the House is also considering.

HEATHER MCGHEE: This tax bill is an outrage. At a time of record economic inequality, when half of American families couldn't pay a $400 bill without going into debt or selling something, this bill would give hundreds of billions of dollars to the wealthiest one percent. It is a sop, not actually to the Republican base, because this is an enormously unpopular bill. If there's one silver lining, it's that the American people are not falling for the Republican tax scam. They understand that it's just going to the wealthy and big corporations that they think are already running away with the store.

And so, you've got a bill that is historically unpopular. The only bill in polling history that has been more unpopular has actually been the Republican repeal of Obamacare. And yet they on the Hill think that this is a political imperative. Why is that? And they have been willing to say it—because their donors, some of the wealthiest people in this country, are saying, "We will turn off the spigot if you do not pass this tax cut for me, my businesses and my heirs."

It is disgusting. It's immoral. It's going to make it harder for working-class and middle-class families to buy a house, to pay down student debt and go to college. And the CBOrecently said that it's going to raise taxes. This massive Trump tax cut is going to cut his taxes and those of his children, but it's going to raise taxes on people making under $30,000 almost immediately.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And even those folks in the middle class who supposedly will get tax cuts, those tax cuts, many of them will expire after 10 years whereas those tax cuts for the wealthy and for the corporations are permanent tax cuts?

HEATHER MCGHEE: That's right. That's exactly right, Juan. So within 10 years, families making under $75,000 a year will definitely see a tax increase. We're also very aware people who live in states where their state and local governments actually invest in their communities and have higher property and income taxes, mostly blue states, are going to not be able to deduct as much of that tax that they pay, and so it is going to put pressure on state and local governments to cut taxes as well.

We are seeing a hollowing out of our national treasure. We are seeing nearly $2 trillion added to the deficit and the debt. And honestly, the big concern for us on that is think about all of the missed opportunities, the way that we could be investing in our infrastructure, to stop poisoning our families. The way we could be transitioning to a clean energy economy, creating free college, affordable childcare and healthcare. We could really do so much with these funds, and instead, we are giving it to corporations and people who have never been richer and never been more profitable.

AMY GOODMAN: Let's go to Senator Bernie Sanders at a hearing talking about the tax bill's impact on the federal budget.

SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS: How many hours have I sat here and have you sat there and we have seen all of the charts and all of the discussions about how terrible the deficit is, what it means leaving this burden to our kids and our grandchildren. We heard all of that rhetoric year after year, and now we have a bill that raises the deficit by $1.4 trillion.

AMY GOODMAN: So $1.4 trillion, it raises the deficit. And then talk about the individual mandate and affordable healthcare—what this is going to mean for that?

HEATHER MCGHEE: Well, those of us who follow this closely never believed the Republican sort of chicken hawking about the deficit. We knew it was always about an ideological desire to shrink government so that they could cut taxes. And so what they're doing is cutting taxes and shrinking government, and it doesn't matter.

The ruse they are using is saying that these tax cuts will grow the economy and therefore somehow pay for themselves. Forty-one out of 42 economists of all ideological stripes surveyed by the University of Chicago said that this massive tax cut would lead to no substantial economic growth. And CEOs are agreeing. They're saying, "If you give us a windfall without there being any change in the underlying dynamics, without more customers coming into our shops—because working and middle-class people just don't have enough money to be fueling this consumer economy—we're just going to give that money to our investors and our shareholders."

So it is going to be yet another aspect of the windfall. It's not going to create middle-class good jobs. Workers just don't have the bargaining power to make that kind of a windfall to corporations translate into their pockets.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I want to ask you about two other aspects of this tax reform. One is where the Senate version of the bill is actually worse in some ways than the House, because there were some Republican senators who were concerned about the so-called pass-throughs. If you could talk about that? These LLCs that are basically used by lawyers and real estate people, and that they want a better cut for those who use LLCs or limited liability companies. Can you talk about that?

HEATHER MCGHEE: That's right. So law firms, even hedge funds, lots of wealthy people who have business income that they get from various endeavors—

AMY GOODMAN: Trump has like 500 of them.

HEATHER MCGHEE: The entire Trump organization, the vast majority of it itself, is a pass-through. So that money comes in not into a separate business, but just comes straight through as personal income, and today is taxed at personal income. And because the vast majority of these people, these business owners, are in the one percent, they have the highest marginal tax rate. This would change it so that it would be that lower corporate tax rate that they are slashing. And so it would be a huge windfall to a lot of the people who constitute the Republican political donor base.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what has happened to—a pet beaver of mine has been what I call the amnesty for tax dodging corporations.

HEATHER MCGHEE: Oh yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: This repatriation of money from overseas where, basically, the plan that both many Democrats as well as Republicans supported was to retroactively lower the taxes that they haven't already paid so they can repatriate them to the United States. What has happened to that in the bill?

HEATHER MCGHEE: You put it exactly as it is. And then they're going to have a zero percent tax rate on foreign profits. So a lot of analysts are saying this will encourage even more companies to create operations overseas. So it would actually potentially make the job situation that we have even worse.

AMY GOODMAN: And the individual mandate?

HEATHER MCGHEE: Republicans are obsessed with undoing President Obama's legacy. So they want to go back at the incredibly unpopular attempt to repeal affordable healthcare in this country. So they want to get rid of the individual mandate. The effect of that will be to make health insurance premiums go up for everyone.

If you look at the different just bread and butter issues that American families are struggling with—student debt, being able to afford a home, childcare, healthcare—all of those things could go up considerably for working and middle-class families while rich families get even more money for just opening an envelope from their tax return.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you mentioned the effect on students.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

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Posted By Czar Donic to The Absurd Times at 11/29/2017 03:04:00 PM

Grinch Trump

THE ABSURD TIMES

The baseness of Trump's base is simply too low to fathom.

This new "Tax Reform" is being sold as a wonderful "Christmas Present for the Common Man," (or words less eloquent than that).

His supporters will believe it because he uses the word "Christmas" in it, conjuring up all sorts of religious acrimony that had passed for a while.  Now it resurfaces, along with his retweeting of neo-nazi anti-Semitic (just the Semites are Moslem, that's all) propaganda. 

The facts are more onerous: if you earn $75,000 per year or less, this bill will cost you.  If you earn less than $30, it will cost you even more.  If you make over a million, it is bound to reduce your taxes.  There is more to it than that, but that is a good start in understanding the Christian spirit of Trump.  [Christianity will survive this defilement just as all prophets have survived the distortion of their messages, but the damage in the meantime will be costly to you.]  If you get a tuition waiver in college, that will now be taxable income.  It could cost greatly these days with the cost of tuition, but it is an effective way to reduce the educational level of the populace and thus help the Republican Party in the future.

Republicans are rapidly pushing forward with their efforts to pass President Donald Trump's tax plan, which would overhaul the tax code in order to shower billions of dollars in tax cuts upon the richest Americans, including Trump's own family. On Tuesday, the Senate Budget Committee passed the Senate version of the plan, with all Republicans on the panel voting for it and all Democrats voting against. Protesters disrupted the committee hearing Tuesday with chants of "Kill the bill, don't kill us." The plan will now go to the full Senate for a vote as early as Thursday. The Senate bill slashes the corporate tax rate and gives further tax cuts to wealthy business owners. It would also repeal a key provision of the Affordable Care Act, the requirement that most Americans have health insurance. Experts say revoking this provision, known as the individual mandate, would cause the cost of health insurance to skyrocket. We speak with Heather McGhee, president of Demos and Demos Action.

---

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, on to the tax bill.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Republicans are rapidly pushing forward with their efforts to pass President Trump's tax plan, which would overhaul the code in order to shower billions of dollars in tax cuts upon the richest Americans, including President Trump's own family. On Tuesday the Senate Budget Committee passed a Senate version of the plan with all Republicans on the panel voting for it, and all Democrats voting against.

Protesters disrupted the committee hearing Tuesday with chants of "Kill the bill, don't kill us." Several were arrested. The plan will now go to the full Senate for a vote as early as Thursday. The Senate bill slashes the corporate tax rate and gives further tax cuts to wealthy business owners. It would also repeal a key provision of the Affordable Care Act, the requirement that most Americans have health insurance. Experts say recalling this provision, known as the individual mandate, would cause the cost of health insurance to skyrocket.

The vote came after President Trump met with Senate Republicans on Capitol Hill. He later told reporters he thinks the Republican tax bill will be, quote, "very popular."

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We are in a very good position in terms of the meeting we just had over at the Capitol with the Republican senators. It was outstanding. I think we have tremendous support. I was just informed by Rich that we had a unanimous vote from the Republican side, at least. We had a unanimous vote on the tax bill. And it goes now the next step, and I think we are going to get it passed. I think it's going to pass and it's going to be very popular. It's going to have lots of adjustments before it ends. But the end result would be a very, very massive—the largest in the history of our country—tax cut.

AMY GOODMAN: Democrats have had nearly no say in crafting the tax plan. House and Senate Majority Leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer boycotted a meeting on Tuesday with Trump and Republican lawmakers after he appeared to refuse to negotiate on key issues like spending, health care and immigration. Trump then held a news conference between two empty chairs with signs for Pelosi and Schumer on them.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think they want tax increases and we want major tax decreases. So they decided not to show up. They have been all talk and they've been no action. And now it is even worse. Now it is not even talk. So they're not showing up for the meeting.

AMY GOODMAN: The image of President Trump surrounded by two empty chairs has appeared to backfire against him and has become a meme. Meanwhile, the House Democratic Leader Pelosi responded on Twitter saying, "@realDonaldTrump now knows that his verbal abuse will no longer be tolerated. His empty chair photo opp showed he's more interested in stunts than in addressing the needs of the American people. Poor Ryan and McConnell relegated to props. Sad!"

This comes as a House version of the tax bill passed earlier this month would cut the corporate tax rates from 35 percent to 20 percent. As the year winds down with no legislative achievements since Trump became president, Republicans say they are determined to pass tax reform by the end of the year.

Well, for more, we are joined by Heather McGhee, President of Demos and Demos Action. Heather, wow, a lot has happened in these last 24 hours. Talk about this tax bill that was passed and what the House is also considering.

HEATHER MCGHEE: This tax bill is an outrage. At a time of record economic inequality, when half of American families couldn't pay a $400 bill without going into debt or selling something, this bill would give hundreds of billions of dollars to the wealthiest one percent. It is a sop, not actually to the Republican base, because this is an enormously unpopular bill. If there's one silver lining, it's that the American people are not falling for the Republican tax scam. They understand that it's just going to the wealthy and big corporations that they think are already running away with the store.

And so, you've got a bill that is historically unpopular. The only bill in polling history that has been more unpopular has actually been the Republican repeal of Obamacare. And yet they on the Hill think that this is a political imperative. Why is that? And they have been willing to say it—because their donors, some of the wealthiest people in this country, are saying, "We will turn off the spigot if you do not pass this tax cut for me, my businesses and my heirs."

It is disgusting. It's immoral. It's going to make it harder for working-class and middle-class families to buy a house, to pay down student debt and go to college. And the CBOrecently said that it's going to raise taxes. This massive Trump tax cut is going to cut his taxes and those of his children, but it's going to raise taxes on people making under $30,000 almost immediately.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And even those folks in the middle class who supposedly will get tax cuts, those tax cuts, many of them will expire after 10 years whereas those tax cuts for the wealthy and for the corporations are permanent tax cuts?

HEATHER MCGHEE: That's right. That's exactly right, Juan. So within 10 years, families making under $75,000 a year will definitely see a tax increase. We're also very aware people who live in states where their state and local governments actually invest in their communities and have higher property and income taxes, mostly blue states, are going to not be able to deduct as much of that tax that they pay, and so it is going to put pressure on state and local governments to cut taxes as well.

We are seeing a hollowing out of our national treasure. We are seeing nearly $2 trillion added to the deficit and the debt. And honestly, the big concern for us on that is think about all of the missed opportunities, the way that we could be investing in our infrastructure, to stop poisoning our families. The way we could be transitioning to a clean energy economy, creating free college, affordable childcare and healthcare. We could really do so much with these funds, and instead, we are giving it to corporations and people who have never been richer and never been more profitable.

AMY GOODMAN: Let's go to Senator Bernie Sanders at a hearing talking about the tax bill's impact on the federal budget.

SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS: How many hours have I sat here and have you sat there and we have seen all of the charts and all of the discussions about how terrible the deficit is, what it means leaving this burden to our kids and our grandchildren. We heard all of that rhetoric year after year, and now we have a bill that raises the deficit by $1.4 trillion.

AMY GOODMAN: So $1.4 trillion, it raises the deficit. And then talk about the individual mandate and affordable healthcare—what this is going to mean for that?

HEATHER MCGHEE: Well, those of us who follow this closely never believed the Republican sort of chicken hawking about the deficit. We knew it was always about an ideological desire to shrink government so that they could cut taxes. And so what they're doing is cutting taxes and shrinking government, and it doesn't matter.

The ruse they are using is saying that these tax cuts will grow the economy and therefore somehow pay for themselves. Forty-one out of 42 economists of all ideological stripes surveyed by the University of Chicago said that this massive tax cut would lead to no substantial economic growth. And CEOs are agreeing. They're saying, "If you give us a windfall without there being any change in the underlying dynamics, without more customers coming into our shops—because working and middle-class people just don't have enough money to be fueling this consumer economy—we're just going to give that money to our investors and our shareholders."

So it is going to be yet another aspect of the windfall. It's not going to create middle-class good jobs. Workers just don't have the bargaining power to make that kind of a windfall to corporations translate into their pockets.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I want to ask you about two other aspects of this tax reform. One is where the Senate version of the bill is actually worse in some ways than the House, because there were some Republican senators who were concerned about the so-called pass-throughs. If you could talk about that? These LLCs that are basically used by lawyers and real estate people, and that they want a better cut for those who use LLCs or limited liability companies. Can you talk about that?

HEATHER MCGHEE: That's right. So law firms, even hedge funds, lots of wealthy people who have business income that they get from various endeavors—

AMY GOODMAN: Trump has like 500 of them.

HEATHER MCGHEE: The entire Trump organization, the vast majority of it itself, is a pass-through. So that money comes in not into a separate business, but just comes straight through as personal income, and today is taxed at personal income. And because the vast majority of these people, these business owners, are in the one percent, they have the highest marginal tax rate. This would change it so that it would be that lower corporate tax rate that they are slashing. And so it would be a huge windfall to a lot of the people who constitute the Republican political donor base.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what has happened to—a pet beaver of mine has been what I call the amnesty for tax dodging corporations.

HEATHER MCGHEE: Oh yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: This repatriation of money from overseas where, basically, the plan that both many Democrats as well as Republicans supported was to retroactively lower the taxes that they haven't already paid so they can repatriate them to the United States. What has happened to that in the bill?

HEATHER MCGHEE: You put it exactly as it is. And then they're going to have a zero percent tax rate on foreign profits. So a lot of analysts are saying this will encourage even more companies to create operations overseas. So it would actually potentially make the job situation that we have even worse.

AMY GOODMAN: And the individual mandate?

HEATHER MCGHEE: Republicans are obsessed with undoing President Obama's legacy. So they want to go back at the incredibly unpopular attempt to repeal affordable healthcare in this country. So they want to get rid of the individual mandate. The effect of that will be to make health insurance premiums go up for everyone.

If you look at the different just bread and butter issues that American families are struggling with—student debt, being able to afford a home, childcare, healthcare—all of those things could go up considerably for working and middle-class families while rich families get even more money for just opening an envelope from their tax return.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you mentioned the effect on students.

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