a cut of taxes that are painless to the small percentage of people who have to pay them — a 0.9 percent Medicare surtax, and 3.8 percent tax on net invested income for couples earning more than $250,000 a year.
.. And it’s not as if there’s been a great hue and cry to repeal those tax increases. “My wealthy clients barely noticed the taxes resulting from the Affordable Care Act and have not needed to make lifestyle adjustments,” wrote the Forbes contributor Carolyn McClanahan, a financial planner.
I bet if you asked rich people if they wanted to cut off health care for millions of their fellow citizens in exchange for a bit more money at the end of the year, most of them would say no, that’s crazy. Taxes don’t register among the top concerns of people, in poll after poll.
Why such a cruel bill, then?
.. “We’re talking about a great, great form of health care,” President Trump said at midweek, with all the conviction of someone peddling the fraud of Trump University.
And you have a Congress that was largely paid for by influential groups for whom tax cuts are the only reason to get out of bed in the morning. Still, we have a moment of rare consensus in this country: An overwhelming majority hates the Republican overhaul. No state in the union has voiced majority support.
Understanding Republican Cruelty
The basics of Republican health legislation, which haven’t changed much in different iterations of Trumpcare, are easy to describe: Take health insurance away from tens of millions, make it much worse and far more expensive for millions more, and use the money thus saved to cut taxes on the wealthy.
.. Meanwhile, taxes that fall mainly on a tiny, wealthy minority would be reduced or eliminated. These cuts would be big in dollar terms, but because the rich are already so rich, the savings would make very little difference to their lives.
More than 40 percent of the Senate bill’s tax cuts would go to people with annual incomes over $1 million — but even these lucky few would see their after-tax income rise only by a barely noticeable 2 percent.
.. So it’s vast suffering — including, according to the best estimates, around 200,000 preventable deaths — imposed on many of our fellow citizens in order to give a handful of wealthy people what amounts to some extra pocket change.
.. I think there are two big drivers — actually, two big lies — behind Republican cruelty on health care and beyond.
First, the evils of the G.O.P. plan are the flip side of the virtues of Obamacare. Because Republicans spent almost the entire Obama administration railing against the imaginary horrors of the Affordable Care Act — death panels! — repealing Obamacare was bound to be their first priority.
.. Republicans, through their political opportunism and dishonesty, boxed themselves into a position that makes them seem cruel and immoral — because they are.
.. this story began with a politically convenient lie — the pretense, going all the way back to Ronald Reagan, that social safety net programs just reward lazy people who don’t want to work. And we all know which people in particular were supposed to be on the take.
.. What it does — punish the poor and working class, cut taxes on the rich — is what every major G.O.P. policy proposal does. The only difference is that this time it’s all out in the open.
.. remember this moment. For this is what modern Republicans do; this is who they are.
Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber
On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn’t. He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn’t help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR.
.. I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man’s first offense, and that they wouldn’t feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to.
.. Upper management told me that he “was a high performer” (i.e. had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn’t feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part.
.. I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came around, and there was nothing they could do about that.
.. One HR rep even explicitly told me that it wouldn’t be retaliation if I received a negative review later because I had been “given an option”.
.. As I got to know them, and heard their stories, I was surprised that some of them had stories similar to my own. Some of the women even had stories about reporting the exact same manager I had reported, and had reported inappropriate interactions with him long before I had even joined the company. It became obvious that both HR and management had been lying about this being “his first offense”, and it certainly wasn’t his last. Within a few months, he was reported once again for inappropriate behavior, and those who reported him were told it was still his “first offense”. The situation was escalated as far up the chain as it could be escalated, and still nothing was done.
.. Myself and a few of the women who had reported him in the past decided to all schedule meetings with HR to insist that something be done. In my meeting, the rep I spoke with told me that he had never been reported before, he had only ever committed one offense (in his chats with me), and that none of the other women who they met with had anything bad to say about him, so no further action could or would be taken. It was such a blatant lie that there was really nothing I could do.
.. It seemed like every manager was fighting their peers and attempting to undermine their direct supervisor so that they could have their direct supervisor’s job.
.. We all lived under fear that our teams would be dissolved, there would be another re-org, and we’d have to start on yet another new project with an impossible deadline. It was an organization in complete, unrelenting chaos.
.. According to my manager, his manager, and the director, my transfer was being blocked because I had undocumented performance problems.
.. I pointed out that I had a perfect performance score, and that there had never been any complaints about my performance. I had completed all OKRs on schedule, never missed a deadline even in the insane organizational chaos, and that I had managers waiting for me to join their team. I asked what my performance problem was, and they didn’t give me an answer.
.. finally I was told that “performance problems aren’t always something that has to do with work, but sometimes can be about things outside of work or your personal life.”
.. It turned out that keeping me on the team made my manager look good, and I overheard him boasting to the rest of the team that even though the rest of the teams were losing their women engineers left and right, he still had some on his team.
.. He said that because there were so many men in the org, they had gotten a significant discount on the men’s jackets but not on the women’s jackets, and it wouldn’t be equal or fair, he argued, to give the women leather jackets that cost a little more than the men’s jackets. We were told that if we wanted leather jackets, we women needed to find jackets that were the same price as the bulk-order price of the men’s jackets.
.. The HR rep began the meeting by asking me if I had noticed that *I* was the common theme in all of the reports I had been making, and that if I had ever considered that I might be the problem.
.. I pointed out that everything I had reported came with extensive documentation and I clearly wasn’t the instigator (or even a main character) in the majority of them – she countered by saying that there was absolutely no record in HR of any of the incidents I was claiming I had reported (which, of course, was a lie, and I reminded her I had email and chat records to prove it was a lie).
.. When I pointed out how few women were in SRE, she recounted with a story about how sometimes certain people of certain genders and ethnic backgrounds were better suited for some jobs than others, so I shouldn’t be surprised by the gender ratios in engineering. Our meeting ended with her berating me about keeping email records of things, and told me it was unprofessional to report things via email to HR.
.. Less than a week after this absurd meeting, my manager scheduled a 1:1 with me, and told me we needed to have a difficult conversation. He told me I was on very thin ice for reporting his manager to HR. California is an at-will employment state, he said, which means we can fire you if you ever do this again. I told him that was illegal, and he replied that he had been a manager for a long time, he knew what was illegal, and threatening to fire me for reporting things to HR was not illegal. I reported his threat immediately after the meeting to both HR and to the CTO: they both admitted that this was illegal, but none of them did anything. (I was told much later that they didn’t do anything because the manager who threatened me “was a high performer”).
Tony Norman: The gospel according to Donald Trump
On Thursday, former FBI Director James Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee and said out loud what a majority of Americans concluded a long time ago — that President Donald J. Trump is a liar.
Mr. Comey did not resort to euphemisms when he accused the president of defaming him and the bureau he once led. At that moment, Mr. Trump was at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference across town, basking in applause.
“We will always support our evangelical community and defend your right and the right of all Americans to follow and to live by their teachings of their faith,”
.. It was a fascinating morning of contrasts. While Mr. Trump swore to protect American Christendom from the forces of secularism (i.e, the Democrats), Mr. Comey told a riveted audience on Capitol Hill about Mr. Trump’s attempts to extract a loyalty oath over dinner at the White House.
.. a figure of either utter mendacity or incompetence, depending on one’s ideological bias.
But across town, the righteous surrounded Mr. Trump with a cloud of hosannas and affirmation. “In my first 100 days,” Mr. Trump told the adoring audience, “I don’t think anybody has ever done more or certainly not much more [as president].”
.. Donald Trump learned a long time ago that he can get away with saying demonstrably false things to his core supporters with little fear of paying a price. As the cliche goes, his people take him seriously — not literally. He may be a liar, but he’s their liar.
.. In the universe that I come from, Christians would rather have been fed to the lions than to have been allied with a vulgarian like Donald Trump. In this simulated universe, the American faction of Christianity appears to worship a Jesus that has contempt for the poor, hates refugees and embraces militarism. Here, Jesus blesses wealth and power and those who seek it relentlessly.
.. In the universe I originally came from, evangelicals would’ve gone nuts at the sight of Donald Trump and several Arab despots meeting in Saudi Arabia a few weeks ago, putting their hands on a mystical orb in a darkened room as if sealing an Antichrist-level deal to divvy up the world.
..
In this universe, Christians are the opposite of the weak and sentimental fools Friedrich Nietzsche complained about. Here, Nietzsche’s “will to power” is exemplified by America’s dominant religion. The beatitudes have been turned upside down and inside out to accommodate the new American spirit — the gospel according to Donald Trump.