President Donald Trump has indicated he is considering cutting funding to entitlement programs such as Medicare within the next year. In an interview at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Trump said social programs would be targeted to reduce the federal deficit.
A CNBC interviewer asked Trump whether cuts to entitlements would ever be on his agenda. He replied, “[A]t some point they will be.” When the interviewer pointed out that Trump’s statement directly contradicted his 2016 campaign promises not to touch these programs, Trump pointed to recent economic growth.
“We also have assets that we’ve never had. I mean we’ve never had growth like this. We never had a consumer that was taking in, through different means, over $10,000 a family. … Look, our country is the hottest in the world. We have the hottest economy in the world. We have the best unemployment numbers we’ve ever had. African American, Asian American. Hispanics are doing so incredibly. Best they’ve ever done.”
Trump’s threatened cuts to Medicare would represent a huge assault on the program that has paid for health care for seniors and disabled individuals for over 50 years. According to the 2019 Medicare Trustees Report, Medicare provides health insurance for more than 60 million people. An increasing number of doctors refuse to accept Medicare, deeming the reimbursement too low, and there are considerable gaps in coverage, such as vision and dental, but the program is the main health care lifeline for older Americans.
In addition to cuts to Medicare, the Trump administration wants to grant states waivers allowing them to convert Medicaid funding to block grants. Medicaid is the primary source of health care for the poorest Americans, providing one in five low-income individuals with coverage. The program provides free health coverage for more than 74 million people, or 23 percent of the US population.
Currently, the program is jointly administered by the federal and state governments, and the federal and state governments share the cost, with the bulk of the money coming from Washington. Under a block grant system, states would be given a flat sum of money to spend on health care. As health care costs rise, state governments would respond by tightening eligibility requirements, imposing work requirements, and cutting coverage. Block grants would dismantle Medicaid as a guaranteed entitlement, inevitably leaving millions without health insurance.
Trump’s aggressive attacks on social programs take place against the backdrop of the impeachment trial. The Democratic Party is not seeking to remove Trump from office due to his assault on the basic rights of the working class—attacks on social programs, immigrants and basic democratic rights. Instead, the president has lost the confidence of the Democratic Party, the military and intelligence agencies to carry out the aims of American imperialism. In their obsession with “national security” and Russia, the Democrats are complicit in the social counterrevolution being waged against the working class.
The attacks on social programs are in fact a bipartisan policy. The massive cuts to social programs began in the Obama administration, which proposed billions in cuts to Medicare reimbursements to finance the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This law required workers without health insurance from their employer and ineligible for Medicaid to purchase health coverage from a private insurer. The ACA offered plans with high premiums and deductibles that left workers and their families nominally “insured,” but often with substandard coverage and care.
These policies, combined with Trump’s proposed cuts, affect the most vulnerable layers of the population. Trump’s recent proposed changes to eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) would rob half a million children of free school meals. Furthermore, a rule change will go into effect this April which will deprive nearly 700,000 people of food stamp assistance through SNAP.
The human impact of the coordinated assault against the working class is laid bare by multiple social indicators. A 2019 study published by the Commonwealth Fund found that the decline in US life expectancy from 2015 to 2017 was tied to a sharp increase of “deaths of despair.” It also showed that the rise in deaths from drug overdose, alcohol abuse and suicide are tied to the lack of access to health care. Moves to slash funding to Medicare and Medicaid will only exacerbate this situation.
All of this data points to an unprecedented health crisis. However, the crisis is not a natural phenomenon. It is a product of the greed and indifference of the American ruling class. Workers are told there is no money for social benefits, yet each year billions more dollars are allocated for the enrichment of the financial elite and the US war machine.
Trump’s threat to attack Medicare and other social programs raises the necessity for the working class to organize a struggle in defense of these social rights independently of the two big business parties. Workers and youth should not be hoodwinked by the pledges of Democratic presidential candidates Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren that they will enact “Medicare for All,” or any progressive changes to the US health care system, should they take the White House. These promises are made in full knowledge that both capitalist parties, the Democrats as much as the Republicans, defend for-profit health care and will oppose the implementation of any measures that threaten the profits of the drug companies, hospital chains and other corporate interests.
There is no way that the insurance and health care profiteers will peacefully relinquish their control over the health care delivery system in America. Workers must adopt an independent policy to fight for the interests of the working class that rejects the for-profit health care system and fights for the expropriation of the health care industry and its reorganization in the interests of the working class under the control of a workers’ government.
The financial oligarchy go into the New Year
celebrating their massive accumulation of
wealth and the so-called mainstream media
will continue to maintain the fiction that the
US and, by extension, the global economy,
remain sound. But the reality is that the seeds
of another financial catastrophe have not
only been planted but are rapidly germinating.
Mike Bloomberg: Don’t Believe Trump – Our Economy Is Broken
By
Michael R. Bloomberg
Democratic Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg addresses a crowd in North Carolina. Photograph by Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images
This article originally appeared on MarketWatch, a sister publication of Barron’s.
President Donald Trump says our economy is “the best it has ever been,” and he is planning to ride that false claim to a second term.
I won’t let him get away with it. I have the track record—in business and government—to show America what real economic leadership looks like.
Sure, the stock market is at an all-time high. But almost half the country doesn’t own any stocks. And yes, the unemployment rate is low. But nearly half of all workers are in jobs that earn $18,000 at the median. In fact, the share of national income going to workers—rather than investors—is near an all-time low.
Too much wealth is in too few hands. And while a handful of big cities are doing well, a lot of the country is struggling; our middle class is being hollowed out; and working Americans are being squeezed by higher prices on everything from health care to housing.
As a candidate, Trump promised to take on these issues. As president, he has been in the pockets of the special interests that dominate Washington.
Remember when candidate Trump promised to deliver for regular people—the forgotten Americans?
Well, President Trump pushed through the
biggest tax cut for the wealthy in history, and
nearly all the money goes to people like me,
who don’t need it.
Remember when candidate Trump stood in front of the GM factory in Lordstown, Ohio and promised to keep it open?
In 2018, that plant closed down.
Remember when candidate Trump promised to “protect the farmers”?
Last year, farmers lost billions of dollars, and many lost their farms, as a direct result of his tariffs and trade wars.
Again and again, candidate Trump made economic promises to working people that he had no intention of keeping. And sure enough, he has broken all of them.
In fairness, we faced serious economic problems before President Trump took office. That’s one of the reasons he won. He promised to fix them.
Instead, he has made them worse.
We need to elect a leader who can actually deliver real change—not just talk about it—and create more good jobs, with good salaries, all across America.
And I know I can do that, because I’ve done it.
Coming from a middle-class home, where my father never made more than $6,000 in a year, I was lucky to get a good education and work my way up from an entry-level job. When I got laid off, I started a company from scratch that now employs 20,000 people. We pay good salaries and provide the best health benefits money can buy, including six months of parental leave—at full pay.
As mayor of New York, I helped create nearly 500,000 new jobs, most of them outside of Manhattan.
When I was first elected shortly after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the question everyone asked us was: Can you rebuild Lower Manhattan?
Our answer was: Yes, but that’s not enough.
We set out to rebuild every area of the city, starting with those outside Manhattan that had faced decades of industrial abandonment and decay. We spread good jobs with good salaries to those communities. I know we can bring about that kind of progress all across America.
This week on the South Side of Chicago, I announced some of the core elements of the strategy I’ll take to create millions of good jobs where they are needed most, by investing in areas of the country that have been hurt by globalization and automation, and have been ignored by the federal government for too long.
To start, I will dramatically increase spending on research and development, by over $100 billion. Rather than sending that money to only a few places that already have massive research budgets, like Harvard and Stanford, we’ll spread it to places like Akron, Ohio, where I was today.
The way we’ll do it is by funding new “job factories” in Akron and around the country, with the goal of bringing opportunity to places that don’t have enough of it. We call them job factories because that’s what they’ll produce: jobs. They’ll do it by generating scientific breakthroughs in a wide variety of areas, which will generate millions of good jobs in everything from green energy and sustainable agriculture to advanced manufacturing and public health.
We’ll also make sure Americans have the skills they need to do the work—supporting community colleges, apprenticeships, and job-training programs all across our country.
In addition to preparing people for good jobs, we will modernize the social contract between employee and employer—so laborers are protected, no matter where they work.
We will do that by working to guarantee paid sick leave and paid family leave for all workers—just as we do at my company. We will support the right of all workers to organize and bargain collectively—including gig, contract, and franchise employees, many of whom have to work two or three jobs to put food on the table.
I know a lot of candidates say they’re going to create good jobs. But for me, creating good jobs is not something I just talk about. It’s what I’ve spent my whole career doing.
That’s a key part of the message we need to beat Trump. I’m ready to take it directly to him.
Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, is the founder of Bloomberg LP.
Share market boom masks another financial crisis in the making
Wall Street stock market indexes are set to finish the year at or near record highs in marked contrast to the end of 2018 when they experienced their worst December since 1931 in the midst of the Great Depression.
The rise and rise of stock prices over the course of the year—the S&P 500 is up by more than 29 percent—has been the principal factor in the further escalation of the wealth of the ultra-rich with Bloomberg reporting that their net worth has risen by $1.25 trillion, or 25 percent.
The escalation of the financial markets,
however, is not an expression of economic
health. Rather, the social disease of ever-
rising inequality, coupled with worsening
wages and living standards for millions, is the
contradictory expression of a gathering crisis
located at the very heart of the financial
system itself.
The year 2019 will go down in economic history as the great turnaround when the world’s major central banks gave up on their attempt to return to “normal” monetary policy after pumping trillions of dollars into the global financial system in response to the crisis of 2008–9.
These extraordinary actions, rewarding the very banks and financial institutions whose speculative and in some cases outright criminal activities had sparked the crisis, were justified on the basis that they were necessary to save the entire system. When the crisis passed, it was maintained, such “unconventional” monetary policies would cease and there would be a return to “normal.”
But it has become clear over the course of the past decade that this day will never come because, like a drug addict, the entire global financial system has become completely dependent on the supply of ultra-cheap money for the accumulation of profit.
To give the US Federal Reserve its due it did make an attempt to at least restrict the supply. It carried out four interest rates rises in 2018, on the back of a slight upturn in the US and global economy and foreshadowed more of the same in 2019. It even committed itself to start winding down its massive holdings of financial assets which, as a result of quantitative easing, had expanded to more than $4 trillion from $800 billion in 2007.
The violent reaction of Wall Street to these measures at the end of 2018, amid denunciations of the Fed by President Trump, meant that even these limited measures were shelved. The underlying weakness of the US economy and the fragility of the financial system, where corporate debt has risen close to a record $10 trillion (equivalent to 47 percent of the total economy) and some 50 percent of corporate bonds are rated at BBB (just above junk status), meant it could not sustain a base interest rate above the historically low rate of 2.5 percent.
Fed chairman Powell started the year by making clear there would be no rates rises and in July made the first of what were to be three interest rate cuts for the year. The winding down of asset holdings was halted. These actions have been duplicated by the European Central Bank which has further cut its base interest this year and resumed its asset purchases, adding to the €2.6 trillion stock it already holds, while the Bank of Japan continues its quantitative easing program.
The Fed has not officially resumed quantitative easing but it has intervened aggressively in the short-term financial market following a spike in the overnight repo rate last September. The repo market is crucial to the day-to-day functioning of the financial system as financial institutions borrow money overnight to close their books at the end of the trading day. Under normal conditions, the repo interest rate tracks the Fed’s base rate. But in mid-September it spiked to as high as 10 percent.
Since then the Fed has intervened to the
tune of hundreds of billions of dollars and
reversed more than half the previous
reduction of its asset portfolio.
One of the most significant effects of central bank policy has been in the market for government bonds. It has been said that 2019 was the year when bond market logic was turned on its head. Bond markets have traditionally functioned as an arena for virtually risk-free investment at a relatively low rate of return. Their operations have formed the basis for investments by pension funds and insurance companies that have to balance their long-term liabilities with secure assets.
But in the middle of this year the mass of bonds yielding negative yields reached $17 trillion. Since then the amount of bonds with negative yields has fallen to $12 trillion, but this is still far beyond anything that has occurred in the past.
A negative yield occurs when the price of a bond in the market has gone so high that if an investor purchased it and held it to maturity they would make a loss. Of course, under those conditions investors do not buy bonds in order to hold them to maturity. They do so in anticipation that prices will rise even further and they will be able to sell them and make a capital gain. And the converse applies. If interest rates rise and the price of the bond falls (the two move in the opposite direction) the investors will make a loss.
The emergence of negative yields in bond markets as a result of central bank monetary policies is the expression of a financial bubble in an area of the market that had previously provided some stability.
In a recent comment on Bloomberg entitled “When the ultimate refuge turns risky,” financial analyst Satyaijit Das noted: “Until the financial crisis of 2008, government bonds were the traditional haven for investors. More than a decade on, their nature has fundamentally changed. In any future crisis, sovereign debt will be a propagator of risk rather than a refuge.”
He warned that despite record low interest rates and low inflation the risk on these supposedly safe assets was increasing. Once they provided risk-free returns. Now, with yields at record lows, they provide only return-free risks.
The danger is that problems in the credit worthiness of government bonds of any country can rapidly be transmitted throughout the financial system as losses on bond holdings create selling pressure leading to rising debt costs. In a recent report, the World Bank pointed to a “global debt wave” that had led to the growth of debt in emerging market economies to a “towering” $55 trillion—the largest in history. Emerging markets are not the only source of potential instability. In the advanced economies government debt has risen to more than 100 percent of gross domestic product compared to 70 percent in 2007.
The significance of the debt bubble in government bonds emerges in clearer focus when it is viewed in the context of the financial crises of the past three decades. The stock market crash of October 1987, when Wall Street experienced its largest one day fall in history, was the result of a share price bubble. Then came the Asian crisis of 1997–98, set off by an emerging market bubble. It was followed by the collapse of the tech bubble in the early 2000s and then the financial crash of 2008–9, sparked by a bubble in the housing market which resulted in a crisis with the onset of recessionary trends at the end of 2007.
Now there is a bubble in the market for government bonds, which in previous periods has functioned as the bedrock of the financial system. Moreover, the world’s major central banks are directly involved because of their purchases of government bonds over the past decade. As Das noted: “It is ironic that actions taken to preserve the system and a key instrument—government bonds—now pose a key threat to financial stability.”
The financial oligarchy go into the New Year
celebrating their massive accumulation of
wealth and the so-called mainstream media
will continue to maintain the fiction that the
US and, by extension, the global economy,
remain sound. But the reality is that the seeds
of another financial catastrophe have not
only been planted but are rapidly germinating.
TRUMPERNOMICS:
Billionaires’ wealth surged in 2019
28 December 2019
As the second decade of the 21st century comes to a close, its most salient feature—the plundering of humanity by a global financial oligarchy—continues unabated.
Amidst trade war and the growth of militarism and authoritarianism on the one side, and an eruption of international strikes and protests by the working class against social inequality on the other, the stock market is hitting record highs and the fortunes of the world’s billionaires are continuing to surge.
On Friday, one day after all three major US stock indexes set new records, Bloomberg issued its end-of-year survey of the world’s 500 richest people. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index reported that the oligarchs’ fortunes increased by a combined total of $1.2 trillion, a 25 percent rise over 2018. Their collective net worth now comes to $5.9 trillion.
To place this figure in some perspective, these 500 individuals control more wealth than the gross domestic product of the United States at the end of the third quarter of 2019, which was $5.4 trillion.
The year’s biggest gains went to France’s Bernard Arnault, who added $36.5 billion to his fortune, bringing it above the rarified $100 billion level to $105 billion. He knocked speculator Warren Buffett, at $89.3 billion, down to fourth place. Amazon boss Jeff Bezos lost nearly $9 billion due to a divorce settlement, but maintained the top position, with a net worth of $116 billion. Microsoft founder Bill Gates gained $22.7 billion for the year and held on to second place at $113 billion.
The 172 American billionaires on the Bloomberg list added $500 billion, with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recording the year’s biggest US gain at $27.3 billion, placing him in fifth place worldwide with a net worth of $79.3 billion.
It is difficult to comprehend the true significance of such stratospheric sums. In his 2016 book Global Inequality, economist Branko Milanovic wrote:
"A billion dollars is so far outside the usual experience of practically everyone on earth that the very quantity it implies is not easily understood… Suppose now that you inherited either $1 million or $1 billion, and that you spent $1,000 every day. It would take you less than three years to run through your inheritance in the first case, and more than 2,700 years (that is, the time that separates us from Homer’s Iliad) to blow your inheritance in the second case."
The vast redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top of society is the outcome of a decades-long process, which was accelerated following the 2008 Wall Street crash. It is not the result of impersonal and simply self-activating processes. Rather, the policies of capitalist governments and parties around the world, nominally “left” as well as right, have been dedicated to the ever greater impoverishment of the working class and enrichment of the ruling elite.
In the US, the top one percent has captured all of the increase in national income over the past two decades, and all of the increase in national wealth since the 2008 crash.
The main mechanism for this transfer of wealth has been the stock market, and the policies of the US Federal Reserve and central banks internationally have been geared to providing cheap money to drive up stock prices. The cost of this massive subsidy to the financial markets and the oligarchs has been paid by the working class, in the form of social cuts, mass layoffs, the destruction of pensions and health benefits, and the replacement of relatively secure and decent-paying jobs with part-time, temporary and contingent “gig” positions.
Since Trump was inaugurated in January of 2017, pledging to slash corporate taxes, lift regulations on big business and dramatically increase the military budget, the Dow has surged by 9,000 points. This year, Trump and the financial markets applied massive pressure on the Fed to reverse its efforts to “normalize” interest rates. The Fed complied, carrying out three rate cuts and repeatedly assuring the markets it had no plans to raise rates in 2020.
This windfall for the banks and hedge funds was supported by the Democrats no less than the Republicans. In fact, Trump’s economic policy has been given de facto support by the Democratic Party all down the line—from his tax cuts for corporations and the rich to his attack on virtually all regulations on business. Even in the midst of impeachment—carried out entirely on the grounds of “national security” and Trump’s supposed “softness” toward Russia—the Democrats have voted by wide margins for Trump’s budget, his anti-Chinese US-Mexico-Canada trade pact and his record $738 billion Pentagon war budget.
This has included giving Trump all the money he wants to build his border wall and carry out the mass incarceration and persecution of immigrants.
Trump’s pro-corporate policies are an extension and expansion of those pursued by the Obama administration. It allocated trillions in taxpayer money to bail out the banks and flooded the financial markets with cheap credit, driving up stock prices, while imposing a 50 percent across-the-board cut in pay for newly hired autoworkers in its bailout of General Motors and Chrysler. Obama oversaw the closure of thousands of schools and the layoff of hundreds of thousands of teachers, and enacted austerity budgets that slashed social programs.
Two of those running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination are billionaires—Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg. The latter, with a net worth of $56 billion, is the ninth richest person in the US. He entered the race as the spokesman for oligarchs outraged over talk from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren of token tax increases on the super-rich.
The oligarchs are not frightened by Sanders and Warren—two longstanding defenders of the American ruling class, who seek to mask their subservience to capital with talk of making the oligarchs pay “their fair share,” a euphemism for defending their right to pillage the population. The billionaires are frightened by the growth of mass opposition to capitalism that finds a distorted expression in support for the phony “progressives” in the Democratic fold.
Between them, Bloomberg and Steyer have already spent $200 million of their own money in an effort to buy the election outright.
The impact of the policy of social plunder is seen in the deepening of a malignant social crisis in country after country. In the US, society is marching backwards, as the crying need for schools, hospitals, affordable housing, pensions, the rebuilding of decrepit roads, bridges, transportation, flood control, water and sewage, fire control and electricity grids is met with the official response: “There is no money.”
The result? Three straight years of declining life expectancy, record addiction and suicide rates, devastating wildfires and floods, electricity cut-offs by profiteering utility companies. And a climate crisis that cannot be addressed within the framework of a system dominated by a money-mad plutocracy.
Not a single serious social problem can be addressed under conditions where the ruling elite—through its bribed parties and politicians, aided by its pro-capitalist trade unions and backed up by its courts, police and troops—diverts resources from society to the accumulation of ever more luxurious yachts, mansions, private islands and personal jets.
The watchword must be—in opposition to the Corbyns, the Sanders, the Tsiprases and their pseudo-left promoters—“Expropriate the super-rich!”
Bloomberg: 2019 a Good Year for Wealthy; Jeff Bezos Remains on Top Despite $9 Billion Loss in Divorce
For the already wealthy and those who struck gold for the first time, 2019 was a good year for the rich.
Bloomberg News’ billionaire index is reporting on the money made this past year, including Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos remaining on the top of the heap despite a divorce settlement with his ex-wife that led to a $9 billion decrease in his portfolio:
The leveraging of a giant social-media presence, a catchy tune about a family of sharks and a burgeoning collection of junkyards are just a few of the curious ways that helped make 2019 a fertile year for fortunes to blossom around the world.
Kylie Jenner became the youngest self-made billionaire this year after her company, Kylie Cosmetics, signed an exclusive partnership with Ulta Beauty Inc. She then sold a 51% stake for $600 million.
It has been almost two months since the Washington Nationals captured their first World Series championship, but people around the world are still singing along to the baseball team’s adopted rallying cry: “Baby Shark, doo-doo doo-doo doo-doo.” The Korean family that helped popularize the viral earworm are now worth about $125 million.
The new wealthy includes Willis Johnson of Oklahoma who has amassed a $1.9 billion fortune from building a network of junkyards that sell damaged automobiles, according to Bloomberg News.
Bloomberg reported that the 500 wealthiest people around the world added $1.2 trillion to their wealth, “boosting their collective net worth 25 percent to $5.9 trillion.”
“Leading the 2019 gains was France’s Bernard Arnault, who added $36.5 billion as he rose on the Bloomberg index to become the world’s third-richest person and one of three centibillionaires — those with a net worth of at least $100 billion,” Bloomberg reported.
Ironically, Bezos was one of 52 people who had a decline in their fortune, in his case because of a divorce settlement with MacKenzie Bezos who is now on the billionaires list ranking No. 25 with a net worth of $27.5 billion.
Bloomberg reported on the winners:
- The 172 American billionaires on the Bloomberg ranking added $500 billion, with Facebook Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg up $27.3 billion and Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates up $22.7 billion.
- Representation from China continued to grow, with the nation’s contingent rising to 54, second only to the U.S. He Xiangjian, founder of China’s biggest air-conditioner exporter, was the standout performer as his wealth surged 79 percent to $23.3 billion.
- Russia’s richest added $51 billion, a collective increase of 21 percent, as emerging-market assets from currencies to stocks and bonds rebounded in 2019 after posting big losses a year earlier.
And “losers”:
- Rupert Murdoch’s personal fortune dropped by about $10 billion after proceeds from Walt Disney Co.’s purchase of Fox assets were distributed to his six children, making them billionaires in their own right.
- Interactive Brokers Group Inc.’s Thomas Peterffy saw his wealth slump by $2.1 billion as investors weighed a reshaped competitive landscape for brokerage businesses after rival Charles Schwab Corp. eliminated commissions and agreed to buy TD Ameritrade Holding Corp.
- WeWork’s Adam Neumann saw his fortune implode — at least on paper — as the struggling office-sharing company’s valuation dropped to $8 billion in October from an estimated $47 billion at the start of the year. Still, SoftBank Group Corp.’s rescue package left Neumann’s status as a billionaire intact.
And the new billionaires:
- White Claw, the “hard seltzer” that was the hit of the summer among U.S. millennials, helped boost Anthony von Mandl’s net worth to $3.6 billion.
- Mastering the art of fast-food deliveries proved rewarding for Jitse Groen, whose soaring Takeaway.com NV lifted his wealth to $1.5 billion.
- The popularity of soy milk gave eight members of Hong Kong’s Lo family a combined $1.5 billion.
A new Gilded Age has emerged in America — a 21st century version.
The wealth of the top 1% of Americans has grown dramatically in the past four decades, squeezing both the middle class and the poor. This is in sharp contrast to Europe and Asia, where the wealth of the 1% has grown at a more constrained pace.
The Lessons of Theodore Roosevelt
To get out of our Second Gilded Age, look no further than how we got out of the first one.
We’ve been rocked by scandals over the past year involving the nation’s most wealthy and powerful. We’ve learned that a twisted multimillionaire allegedly procured and raped girls in his Manhattan mansion and on his private Caribbean Island; entitled celebrities and corporate plutocrats paid millions of dollars in bribes to get their kids into elite universities; pillars of the Hollywood and media establishments have used their stature to sexually prey upon underlings; and, yes, our president was caught lying about possibly violating campaign finance laws with hush money payoffs to a porn star and Playboy bunny.
This moral corruption is accompanied by the regressive government policies of a scandal-stained administration. President Donald Trump is rolling back programs that protect consumers, voting rights, the environment, and competitive commerce faster than Congress can issue subpoenas. His cabinet includes 17 millionaires, two centimillionaires, and one billionaire with a combined worth of $3.2 billion, according to Forbes. He presides over the most corrupt administration in American history, one marked by nepotism and self-dealing. His so-called “A Team” of senior officials has undergone a record 75 percent turnover since he took office—most of whom resigned under pressure, often caught up in scandal.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, whose net worth is estimated at $600 million, reflected the arrogance and empathy deficit that typifies the Trump White House during last winter’s record-long government shutdown. He suggested that federal workers just take out loans until they got paid.
But nobody tops the swamp king, Trump himself. Forget the sleaze, forget the obstruction of justice, forget the constant dissing of Congress. His defying the Constitution’s emoluments clause alone would, in a normally functioning American democracy, make him the subject of impeachment. Instead, he flouts the rules as if they don’t apply to him. If he gets his way and hosts next year’s G-7 summit at Mar-a-Lago, we may as well send the Constitution to the shredder. And yet, as more recent controversies have shown us, including the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal and Jeffery Epstein’s sex trafficking racket, this kind of indifference to moral values is not confined to government grandees.
So, what gives? Is America drowning in a marsh of unchecked corruption and entitlement brought on by latter-day Louis XVI’s and Marie Antoinettes? Are the uber-wealthy out of control? There’s something rotten in America and, if we don’t fix it soon, we invite a new wave of national decline and social disintegration.
The good news is that we have faced similar challenges before. Some prescriptions from a previous era may provide a lodestar for a future Democratic president to steer the country in the right direction. As Mark Twain, who coined the term “the Gilded Age,” once said, “The external glitter of wealth conceals a corrupt political core that reflects the growing gap between the very few rich and the very many poor.” He was talking about the original Gilded Age, but that diagnosis could just as easily apply to our current American condition.
The first Gilded Age was marked by rapid economic growth, massive immigration, political corruption, and a high concentration of wealth in which the richest one percent owned 51 percent of property, while the bottom 44 percent had a mere one percent. The oligarchs at the top were popularly known as “robber barons.”
Theodore Roosevelt, who was president at the time, understood that economic inequality itself becomes a driver of a dysfunctional political system that benefits the wealthy but few others. As he once famously warned, “There can be no real political democracy unless there is something approaching economic democracy.”
His response to the inequities of his times, which came to define the Progressive Era, have much to teach us now about how to sensibly tackle economic inequality. It’s worthwhile to closely examine the Rooseveltian playbook. For instance, his “Square Deal” made bold changes in the American workplace, government regulation of industry, and consumer protection. These reforms included mandating safer conditions for miners and eliminating the spoils system in federal hiring; bringing forty-four antitrust suits against big business, resulting in the breakup of the largest railroad monopoly, and regulation of the nation’s largest oil company; and passing the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act, which created the FDA. He prosecuted more than twice as many antitrust suits against monopolistic businesses than his three predecessors combined, curbing the robber barons’ power. And he relentlessly cleaned up corruption in the federal government. One-hundred-forty-six indictments were brought against a bribery ring involving public timberlands, culminating in the conviction and imprisonment of a U.S. senator, and forty-four Postal Department employees were charged with fraud and bribery.
Now, we are in a Second Gilded Age, facing many of the same problems, and, in some ways, to an even greater degree. The gap between the rich and everyone else is even greater than it was during the late 19th Century, when the richest two percent of Americans owned more than a third of the nation’s wealth. Today, the top one percent owns almost 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, or more than the bottom 90 percent combined, according to the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research. The first Gilded Age saw the rise of hyper-rich dynastic families, such as the Rockefellers, Mellons, Carnegies, and DuPonts. Today, three individuals—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett—own more wealth than the bottom half of the country combined. And three families—the Waltons, the Kochs, and the Mars—have enjoyed a nearly 6,000 percent rise in wealth since Ronald Reagan took the oath as president, while median U.S. household wealth over the same period has declined by three percent.
The consequences of this wealth gap are dire. Steve Brill explains in his book Tailspin that, by manipulating the tax and legal systems to their benefit, America’s most educated elite, the so-called meritocracy, have built a moat that excludes the working poor, limiting their upward mobility and increasing their sense of alienation, which then gives rise to the populist streak that allowed politicians like Trump to captivate enough of the American electorate.
Similarly, psychologist Dacher Keltner’s research shows that power in and of itself is a corrupting force. As he documents in The Power Paradox, powerful people lie more, drive more aggressively, are more likely to cheat on their spouses, act abusively toward subordinates, and even take candy from children. Too often, they simply do not respect the rules.
For example, in monitoring an urban traffic intersection, Keltner found that drivers of the least expensive vehicles virtually always yielded to pedestrians, whereas drivers of luxury cars yielded only about half of the time. He cites surveys covering 27 countries that show that rich people are more likely to admit that it’s acceptable to engage in unethical behavior, such as accepting bribes or cheating on taxes.“The experience of power might be thought of as having someone open up your skull and take out that part of your brain so critical to empathy and socially appropriate behavior,” says Keltner.
That’s why we need to reform our political system if we are to survive the rampant amorality and lawlessness of the Second Gilded Age. Simply put, so very few should not wield so much sway over so many.
One of the first priorities of an incoming administration should be to narrow the wealth and income gap. French economist Thomas Picketty favors a progressive annual wealth tax of up to two percent, along with a progressive income tax as high as 80 percent on the biggest earners to reduce inequality and avoid reverting to “patrimonial capitalism” in which inherited wealth controls much of the economy and could lead essentially to oligarchy.
The leading 2020 Democratic candidates favor raising taxes, as well. Elizabeth Warren has proposed something commensurate to Picketty’s two percent wealth tax for those worth more than $50 million, and a three percent annual tax on individuals with a net worth higher than $1 billion. She has also proposed closing corporate tax loopholes. Joe Biden wants to restore the top individual income tax rate to a pre-Trump 39.6 percent and raise capital gains taxes. Bernie Sanders has proposed an estate tax on the wealth of the top 0.2 percent of Americans.
Following Theodore Roosevelt’s example, we need to aggressively root out the tangle of corruption brought on by Trump and his minions. This has already begun with multiple and expanding investigations led by House Democrats into the metastasizing malfeasance within the Trump administration. Trump’s successor, however, should work with Congress to appoint a bipartisan anti-corruption task force to oversee prosecutions and draw up reform legislation to prevent future abuses.
“Of all forms of tyranny, the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy,” Roosevelt once warned. The free market has made America the great success it is today. But history has shown that unconstrained capitalism and a growing wealth gap leads to an unhealthy concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. When the gap between the haves and the have-nots goes unchecked, populism takes hold, leading to the election of dangerous demagogues like Trump, and the disastrous politics they bring with them. It is not too late to reverse course. But first, we need to re-learn the lessons from our first Gilded Age if we are going to get out of the current one.
Economists: America’s Elite Pay Lower Tax Rate Than All Other Americans
The wealthiest Americans are paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans, groundbreaking analysis from a pair of economists reveals.
For the first time on record, the wealthiest 400 Americans in 2018 paid a lower tax rate than all of the income groups in the United States, research highlighted by the New York Times from University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman finds.
The analysis concludes that the country’s top economic elite are paying lower federal, state, and local tax rates than the nation’s working and middle class. Overall, these top 400 wealthy Americans paid just a 23 percent tax rate, which the Times‘ op-ed columnist David Leonhardt notes is a combined tax payment of “less than one-quarter of their total income.”
This 23 percent tax rate for the rich means their rate has been slashed by 47 percentage points since 1950 when their tax rate was 70 percent.
(Screenshot via the New York Times)
The analysis finds that the 23 percent tax rate for the wealthiest Americans is less than every other income group in the U.S. — including those earning working and middle-class incomes, as a Times graphic shows.
Leonhardt writes:
For middle-class and poor families, the picture is different. Federal income taxes have also declined modestly for these families, but they haven’t benefited much if at all from the decline in the corporate tax or estate tax. And they now pay more in payroll taxes (which finance Medicare and Social Security) than in the past. Over all, their taxes have remained fairly flat. [Emphasis added]
The report comes as Americans increasingly see a growing divide between the rich and working class, as the Pew Research Center has found.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), the leading economic nationalist in the Senate, has warned against the Left-Right coalition’s consensus on open trade, open markets, and open borders, a plan that he has called an economy that works solely for the elite.
“The same consensus says that we need to pursue and embrace economic globalization and economic integration at all costs — open markets, open borders, open trade, open everything no matter whether it’s actually good for American national security or for American workers or for American families or for American principles … this is the elite consensus that has governed our politics for too long and what it has produced is a politics of elite ambition,” Hawley said in an August speech in the Senate.
That increasing worry of rapid income inequality is only further justified by economic research showing a rise in servant-class jobs, strong economic recovery for elite zip codes but not for working-class regions, and skyrocketing wage growth for the billionaire class at 15 times the rate of other Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Census Says U.S. Income Inequality Grew ‘Significantly’ in 2018
(Bloomberg) -- Income inequality in America widened “significantly” last year, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report published Thursday.
A measure of inequality known as the Gini index rose to 0.485 from 0.482 in 2017, according to the bureau’s survey of household finances. The measure compares incomes at the top and bottom of the distribution, and a score of 0 is perfect equality.
The 2018 reading is the first to incorporate the impact of President Donald Trump’s end-2017 tax bill, which was reckoned by many economists to be skewed in favor of the wealthy.
But the distribution of income and wealth in the U.S. has been worsening for decades, making America the most unequal country in the developed world. The trend, which has persisted through recessions and recoveries, and under administrations of both parties, has put inequality at the center of U.S. politics.
Leading candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, including senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, are promising to rectify the tilt toward the rich with measures such as taxes on wealth or financial transactions.
Just five states -- California, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana and New York, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico -- had Gini indexes higher than the national level, while the reading was lower in 36 states.
The Democrats’ opposition to Trump is not based on his imposition of austerity measures, or his vicious assault on immigrants. While they will not mount a serious challenge to a proposal that will literally take food out of the mouths of school children, they were complicit in passing the Republicans’ $1.3 trillion tax cuts in 2017 and the record $738 billion defense budget agreed to earlier this year.
Trump proposal denies free school meals to half a million children
The Trump administration has provided a new analysis of how proposed changes to eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps, will impact children who participate in the National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs. By the White House’s own admission, these changes mean that about a half-million children would become ineligible for free school meals.
Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue has described the changes as a tightening up of “loopholes” in the SNAP system. But those affected by the changes are not corporate crooks or billionaires, but hundreds of thousands of children who stand to lose access to free meals. For many American children, free school breakfasts and lunches make up the bulk of their nutritional intake, and they stand to suffer permanent physical and psychological damage as a result of the cuts.
Children receive a free lunch at the Phoenix Day Central Park Youth Program in downtown Phoenix. (AP Photo Matt York)
The sheer vindictiveness of the proposed rule change is shown by the minimal savings that would result—about $90 million a year beginning in fiscal year 2021, or a mere 0.012 percent of the estimated $74 billion annual SNAP budget. Put another way, the savings would amount to two-thousandths of a percent of the $4.4 trillion federal budget. But while this $90 million might appear as small change to the oligarchs running and supporting the government, it will be directly felt as hunger in the bellies of America’s poorest children.
SNAP provided benefits to roughly 40 million Americans in 2018 and is the largest nutrition program of the 15 administered by the federal Food and Nutrition Service. Along with programs such as the Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children and school breakfast and lunch programs, SNAP has been a major factor in making a dent in the hunger of working-class families. But despite these programs’ successes, the Trump administration is seeking to claw them back, with the ultimate aim of doing away with them altogether.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which administers the food stamp and school meal programs, says that the new analysis presented last week is a more precise estimate of the impact of rule changes in SNAP the USDA first announced in July. The main component of the rule change is an end to “broad-based categorical eligibility” for the food stamp program. Food stamps are cut off for households whose incomes exceed 130 percent of the federal poverty line, or $33,475 per year for a family of four, calculated after exemptions for certain expenses.
Under “broad-based categorical eligibility,” which is currently used by over 40 states, households can be eligible for food stamps based on their receiving assistance from other anti-poverty programs, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Under this rule, which has been in effect for about 20 years, states are allowed to raise income eligibility and asset limits to promote SNAP eligibility. This prevents many households from falling over the “benefit cliff,” which happens when a small increase in income results in a complete cutoff of benefits, leaving a family worse off than before the rise in income.
According to the USDA, the rule change on broad-based eligibility would throw more than 680,000 households with children off SNAP. About 80 percent of these households have school-age children, amounting to about 982,000 children. Of those, 55 percent, or about 540,000, would no longer be eligible for free school meals, although most would be eligible for reduced-price meals. About 40,000 would be required to pay the full meal rate.
However, this does not paint the full picture. Households thrown off SNAP would be required to apply separately for access to free or reduced-price school meals. The USDA admits that its cost estimates “do not account for potential state and local administrative costs incurred due to collecting and processing household applications … and also do not account for any increased responsibility placed on the households to complete and submit a school meals application.”
While the Trump administration claims that the proposed changes to SNAP eligibility are aimed at closing up “loopholes” and stopping people from claiming benefits they’re not entitled to, the reality is that there is no evidence that broad-based eligibility has allowed significant numbers of people to supposedly “game the system.” A 2012 Government Accountability Office investigation found that only 473,000 recipients, or just 2.6 percent of beneficiaries, received benefits they would not have received without the broad-based eligibility offered by many states.
There is consistent evidence that SNAP contributes to a decrease in food insecurity, a condition defined by the USDA as limited or uncertain access to adequate food. By one estimate, SNAP benefits reduce the likelihood of food insecurity by about 30 percent and the likelihood of being very food insecure by 20 percent. Census data has shown that SNAP also plays a critical role in reducing poverty, with about 3.6 million Americans, including 1.5 million children, being lifted out of poverty in 2016 as a result of the program.
The EconoFact Network reports that SNAP has improved birth outcomes and infant health. When an expectant mother has access to SNAP during pregnancy, particularly in the third trimester, it decreases the likelihood that her baby will be born with low birth weight. There is also evidence that the benefits of nutrition support can persist well into adulthood when access to SNAP is provided before birth and during early childhood. This can have a long-term impact on an individual’s earnings, health and life expectancy. Conversely, food insecurity in childhood correlates with greater risk of developing high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease later in life.
The proposed threat to school lunches for half a million children has elicited little response from Democrats in Congress, who are obsessively focused on the Trump impeachment inquiry. Critical issues such as the health and nutrition of school children are of little consequence to the Democratic Party, which instead gives voice to those sections of the military intelligence apparatus that sees Trump’s actions, particularly his sudden pullout from Syria, as endangering the global interests of American imperialism.
The Democrats’ opposition to Trump is not based on his imposition of austerity measures, or his vicious assault on immigrants. While they will not mount a serious challenge to a proposal that will literally take food out of the mouths of school children, they were complicit in passing the Republicans’ $1.3 trillion tax cuts in 2017 and the record $738 billion defense budget agreed to earlier this year. At $94.6 million, the cost of one of the US Air Force’s newest and most technologically advanced fighter jets, the F-35A, would cover the $90 annual savings from depriving half a million US schoolchildren of free meals.
The Democrats’ opposition to Trump is not based on his imposition of austerity measures, or his vicious assault on immigrants. While they will not mount a serious challenge to a proposal that will literally take food out of the mouths of school children, they were complicit in passing the Republicans’ $1.3 trillion tax cuts in 2017 and the record $738 billion defense budget agreed to earlier this year.
The Lessons of Theodore Roosevelt
To get out of our Second Gilded Age, look no
further than how we got out of the first one.
September 6, 2019
We’ve been rocked by scandals over the past year involving the
nation’s most wealthy and powerful. We’ve learned that a twisted
multimillionaire allegedly procured and raped girls in his Manhattan mansion
and on his private Caribbean Island; entitled celebrities and corporate
plutocrats paid millions of dollars in bribes to get their kids into elite
universities; pillars of the Hollywood and media establishments have used their
stature to sexually prey upon underlings; and, yes, our president was caught
lying about possibly violating campaign finance laws with hush money payoffs to
a porn star and Playboy bunny.
This moral corruption
is accompanied by the regressive government policies of a scandal-stained
administration. President Donald Trump is rolling back programs that protect
consumers, voting rights, the environment, and competitive commerce faster than
Congress can issue subpoenas. His cabinet includes 17 millionaires, two
centimillionaires, and one billionaire with a combined worth of $3.2
billion, according to Forbes. He
presides over the most corrupt administration in American history, one marked
by nepotism and self-dealing. His so-called “A Team” of senior officials has
undergone a record 75 percent turnover since he took
office—most of whom resigned under pressure, often caught up in
scandal.
Commerce Secretary
Wilbur Ross, whose net worth is estimated at $600 million,
reflected the arrogance and empathy deficit that typifies the Trump White House
during last winter’s record-long government shutdown. He suggested that federal
workers just take out loans until they got paid.
But nobody tops the
swamp king, Trump himself. Forget the sleaze, forget the obstruction of
justice, forget the constant dissing of Congress. His defying the
Constitution’s emoluments clause alone would, in a normally functioning
American democracy, make him the subject of impeachment. Instead, he flouts the
rules as if they don’t apply to him. If he gets his way and hosts next year’s
G-7 summit at Mar-a-Lago, we may as well send the Constitution to the shredder.
And yet, as more recent controversies have shown us, including the Varsity
Blues college admissions scandal and Jeffery Epstein’s sex trafficking racket,
this kind of indifference to moral values is not confined to government
grandees.
So, what gives? Is
America drowning in a marsh of unchecked corruption and entitlement brought on
by latter-day Louis XVI’s and Marie Antoinettes? Are the uber-wealthy out of
control? There’s something rotten in America and, if we don’t fix it soon, we
invite a new wave of national decline and social disintegration.
The good news is that
we have faced similar challenges before. Some prescriptions from a previous era
may provide a lodestar for a future Democratic president to steer the country
in the right direction. As Mark Twain, who coined the term “the Gilded Age,”
once said, “The external glitter of wealth conceals a corrupt political core
that reflects the growing gap between the very few rich and the very many
poor.” He was talking about the original Gilded Age, but that diagnosis could
just as easily apply to our current American condition.
The first Gilded Age
was marked by rapid economic growth, massive immigration, political corruption,
and a high concentration of wealth in which the richest one percent owned 51 percent of
property, while the bottom 44 percent had a mere one percent. The oligarchs at
the top were popularly known as “robber barons.”
Theodore Roosevelt, who
was president at the time, understood that economic inequality itself becomes a
driver of a dysfunctional political system that benefits the wealthy but few
others. As he once famously warned, “There can be no real
political democracy unless there is something approaching economic democracy.”
His response to the
inequities of his times, which came to define the Progressive Era, have much to
teach us now about how to sensibly tackle economic inequality. It’s worthwhile
to closely examine the Rooseveltian playbook. For instance, his “Square Deal”
made bold changes in the American workplace, government regulation of industry,
and consumer protection. These reforms included mandating safer conditions for
miners and eliminating the spoils system in federal hiring; bringing forty-four
antitrust suits against big business, resulting in the breakup of the largest
railroad monopoly, and regulation of the nation’s largest oil company; and
passing the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act, which created the
FDA. He prosecuted more than twice
as many antitrust suits against monopolistic businesses than his three
predecessors combined, curbing the robber barons’ power. And he relentlessly
cleaned up corruption in the federal government. One-hundred-forty-six
indictments were brought against a bribery ring involving public timberlands,
culminating in the conviction and imprisonment of a U.S. senator, and
forty-four Postal Department employees were charged with fraud and bribery.
Now, we are in a Second
Gilded Age, facing many of the same problems, and, in some ways, to an even
greater degree. The gap between the rich and everyone else is even greater than
it was during the late 19th Century, when the richest two percent of Americans
owned more than a third of the nation’s wealth. Today, the top one percent owns
almost 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, or more than the bottom 90 percent
combined, according to the
nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research. The first Gilded Age saw the
rise of hyper-rich dynastic families, such as the Rockefellers, Mellons,
Carnegies, and DuPonts. Today, three individuals—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and
Warren Buffett—own more wealth than the bottom half of the country combined.
And three families—the Waltons, the Kochs, and the Mars—have enjoyed a nearly
6,000 percent rise in wealth since Ronald Reagan took the oath as president,
while median U.S. household wealth over the same period has declined by three percent.
The consequences of
this wealth gap are dire. Steve Brill explains in his book Tailspin that,
by manipulating the tax and legal systems to their benefit, America’s most
educated elite, the so-called meritocracy, have built a moat that excludes the
working poor, limiting their upward mobility and increasing their sense of
alienation, which then gives rise to the populist streak that allowed
politicians like Trump to captivate enough of the American electorate.
Similarly, psychologist
Dacher Keltner’s research shows that power in and of itself is a corrupting
force. As he documents in The
Power Paradox, powerful people lie more, drive more aggressively, are more
likely to cheat on their spouses, act abusively toward subordinates, and even
take candy from children. Too often, they simply do not respect the rules.
For example, in
monitoring an urban traffic intersection, Keltner found that drivers of the
least expensive vehicles virtually always yielded to
pedestrians, whereas drivers of luxury cars yielded only about half of the
time. He cites surveys covering 27
countries that show that rich people are more likely to admit that it’s
acceptable to engage in unethical behavior, such as accepting bribes or
cheating on taxes.“The experience of power might be thought of as having
someone open up your skull and take out that part of your brain so critical to empathy
and socially appropriate behavior,” says Keltner.
That’s why we need to
reform our political system if we are to survive the rampant amorality and
lawlessness of the Second Gilded Age. Simply put, so very few should not wield
so much sway over so many.
One of the first
priorities of an incoming administration should be to narrow the wealth and
income gap. French economist Thomas Picketty favors a progressive annual wealth
tax of up to two percent, along with a progressive income tax as high as 80
percent on the biggest earners to reduce inequality and avoid reverting to “patrimonial capitalism” in which inherited
wealth controls much of the economy and could lead essentially to oligarchy.
The leading 2020
Democratic candidates favor raising taxes, as well. Elizabeth Warren has
proposed something commensurate to Picketty’s two percent wealth tax for those
worth more than $50 million, and a three percent annual tax on individuals with
a net worth higher than $1 billion. She has also proposed closing corporate tax
loopholes. Joe Biden wants to restore the top individual income tax rate to a
pre-Trump 39.6 percent and raise capital gains taxes. Bernie Sanders has
proposed an estate tax on the wealth of the top 0.2 percent of Americans.
Following Theodore
Roosevelt’s example, we need to aggressively root out the tangle of corruption
brought on by Trump and his minions. This has already begun with multiple and
expanding investigations led by House Democrats into the metastasizing
malfeasance within the Trump administration. Trump’s successor, however, should
work with Congress to appoint a bipartisan anti-corruption task force to
oversee prosecutions and draw up reform legislation to prevent future abuses.
“Of all forms of tyranny, the least attractive and the most
vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy,” Roosevelt once
warned. The free market has made America the great success it is today. But
history has shown that unconstrained capitalism and a growing wealth gap leads
to an unhealthy concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. When the gap
between the haves and the have-nots goes unchecked, populism takes hold,
leading to the election of dangerous demagogues like Trump, and the disastrous
politics they bring with them. It is not too late to reverse course. But first,
we need to re-learn the lessons from our first Gilded Age if we are going to
get out of the current one.
This Is No Ordinary Impeachment
By Andrew Sullivan
This is
not just an impeachment. It’s the endgame for Trump’s relentless assault
on the institutions, norms, and practices of America’s liberal democracy for
the past three years. It’s also a deeper reckoning. It’s about whether the
legitimacy of our entire system can last much longer without this man being
removed from office.
I’m
talking about what political scientists call “regime cleavage” — a decline in
democratic life so severe the country’s very institutions could lose legitimacy
as a result of it. It is described by one political scientist as follows: “a
division within the population marked by conflict about the foundations of the
governing system itself — in the American case, our constitutional democracy.
In societies facing a regime cleavage, a growing number of citizens and
officials believe that norms, institutions, and laws may be ignored, subverted,
or replaced.” A full-on regime cleavage is, indeed, an extinction-level event
for our liberal democratic system. And it is one precipitated by the man who is
supposed to be the guardian of that system, the president.
Let us
count the ways in which Trump has attacked and undermined the core legitimacy
of our democracy. He is the only candidate in American history who refused to
say that he would abide by the results of the vote. Even after winning the 2016
election, he still claimed that “millions” of voters — undocumented aliens —
perpetrated massive electoral fraud in the last election, and voted for his
opponent. He has repeatedly and publicly toyed with the idea that he could
violate the 22nd Amendment, and get elected for three terms, or more.
He
consistently described a perfectly defensible inquiry into Russia’s role in the
2016 election as a “witch hunt” and a “hoax,” demonizing Robert Mueller, even
as Mueller, in the end, couldn’t find evidence to support the idea of a
conspiracy with Russia (perhaps in part because Trump ordered no cooperation,
and refused to testify under oath). Trump then withheld release of the full
report, while his pliant attorney general distorted its content and wrongly
proclaimed that Trump had been entirely exonerated.
In
the current scandal over Ukraine, Trump is insisting that he did “nothing
wrong” in demanding that Ukraine announce investigations into Joe and Hunter
Biden, or forfeit desperately needed military aid. If that is the president’s
position — that he can constitutionally ask any other country to intervene on
his behalf in a U.S. election — it represents a view of executive power that is
the equivalent of a mob boss’s. It is best summed up in Trump’s own words:
Article 2 of the Constitution permits him to do “anything I want.”
We have become
so used to these attacks on our constitutional order that we fail to be shocked
by Trump’s insistence that a constitutional impeachment inquiry is a “coup.” By
any measure, this is an extraordinary statement, and itself an impeachable
offense as a form of “contempt for Congress.” We barely blink anymore when a
president refuses to cooperate in any way, demands his underlings refuse to
testify and break the law by flouting subpoenas, threatens to out the first
whistle-blower’s identity (in violation of the law), or assaults and tries to
intimidate witnesses, like Colonel Alexander Vindman.
He seems
to think in the Ukraine context that “l’état c’est moi” is the core American
truth, rather than a French monarch’s claims to absolute power. He believes in
the kind of executive power the Founders designed the U.S. Constitution to
prevent. It therefore did not occur to Trump that blackmailing a foreign
country to investigate his political opponents is a classic abuse of power,
because he is incapable of viewing his own interests and the interests of the
United States as in any way distinct. But it is a core premise of our liberal
democracy that the powers of the presidency are merely on loan, and that using
them to advance a personal interest is a definition of an abuse of power.
There
are valid criticisms and defenses of Trump’s policy choices, but his policies
are irrelevant for an impeachment. I actually support a humane crackdown on
undocumented immigration, a tougher trade stance toward China, and an attempt,
at least, to end America’s endless wars. But what matters, and what makes this
such a vital moment in American history, is that it has nothing to do with
policy. This is simply about Trump’s abuse of power.
He
lies and misleads the American public constantly, in an outright attempt to so
confuse Americans that they forget or reject the concept of truth altogether.
Lies are part of politics, but we have never before seen such a fire hose of
often contradictory or inflammatory bald-faced lies from the Oval Office. He
has obstructed justice countless times, by witness tampering, forbidding his
subordinates from complying with legal subpoenas, and by “using the powers of
his high office, engaged personally and through his close subordinates and agents,
in a course of conduct or plan designed to delay, impede, and obstruct” both
the Mueller and now the Ukraine investigations. (I quote from Article 1 of
Nixon’s impeachment.) Trump has also “failed without lawful cause or excuse to
produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas issued by
the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives … and willfully
disobeyed such subpoenas.” (I quote from Article III of Nixon’s impeachment.)
He has declared legal processes illegitimate if they interfere with or
constrain his whims and impulses.
This
is not just another kind of presidency; it is a rolling and potentially
irreversible assault on the legitimacy of the American regime. If the CIA finds
something that could reflect poorly on him, then the CIA is part of the “deep
state coup.” Ditto the FBI and the State Department. These are not
old-fashioned battles with a bureaucracy over policy; that’s fine. They are
assaults on the legitimacy of the bureaucracy, and the laws they are required
to uphold. These are definitional impeachable offenses, and they are part and
parcel of Trump’s abuse of power from the day he was elected.
And
most important of all, Trump has turned the GOP — one of our two major parties
with a long and distinguished history — into an accomplice in his crimes.
Senator Lindsey Graham, perhaps the most contemptible figure of the last couple
of years, even says he will not read witness transcripts or follow the
proceedings in the House or consider the evidence in a legal impeachment
inquiry, because he regards the whole impeachment process as “BS” and a “sham.”
This is a senator calling the constitutional right of the House of
Representatives to impeach a president illegitimate.
And the
GOP as a whole has consistently backed Trump rather than the Constitution.
Sixty-two percent of Republican supporters have said that there is nothing
Trump could do, no crime or war crime, no high crime or misdemeanor, that would
lead them to vote against him in 2020. There is only one way to describe this,
and that is a cult, completely resistant to reason or debate. The tribalism is
so deep that Trump seems incapable of dropping below 40 percent in the national
polls, and is competitive in many swing states. The cult is so strong that
Trump feels invulnerable. If Trump survives impeachment, and loses the 2020
election, he may declare it another coup, rigged, and illegitimate. He may
refuse to concede. And it is possible the GOP will follow his lead. That this
is even thinkable reveals the full extent of our constitutional rot.
Trump
has fast-forwarded “regime cleavage.” He is appealing to the people to render
him immune from constitutional constraints imposed by the representatives of
the people. He has opened up not a divide between right and left so much as a
divide over whether the American system of government is legitimate or
illegitimate. And that is why I don’t want to defeat Trump in an election,
because that would suggest that his assault on the truth, on the Constitution,
and on the rule of law is just a set of policy decisions that we can, in time,
reject. It creates a precedent for future presidents to assault the legitimacy
of the American government, constrained only by their ability to win the next
election. In fact, the only proper constitutional response to this abuse of
executive power is impeachment. I know I’ve said this before. But on the eve of
public hearings, it is vital to remember it.
None
of this presidential behavior is tolerable. If the Senate exonerates Trump, it
will not just enable the most lawless president in our history to even greater
abuses. It will deepen the regime cleavage even further. It will cast into
doubt the fairness of the upcoming election. It will foment the conspiracy
theory that our current laws and institutions are manifestations of a “deep
state” engineering a “coup.” It will prove that a president can indeed abuse
his power for his personal advantage without consequence; and it will set a
precedent that fundamentally changes the American system from a liberal
democracy to a form of elected monarchy, above the other two branches of
government.
I wish
there were another way forward. But there isn’t. And this, though a moment of
great danger, also contains the glimmers of renewal. Removing this petty,
shabby tyrant from office goes a long way to restoring and resetting the
Constitution as a limit on power and a guarantee against its wanton future
abuse. It must be done. With speed, with vigor, and with determination.
Is Trump the Worst President in History?
by Richard Striner
As the
chance of getting rid of Donald Trump — through impeachment or by voting him
out — continues to dominate the headlines, the historical challenge
is compelling. No president has been a greater threat to the
qualities that make the United States of America worthy (at its best) of our
allegiance.
The rise of
Trump and his movement was so freakish that historians will analyze its nature
for a long time. From his origins as a real estate hustler, this
exhibitionist sought attention as a TV vulgarian. Susceptible
television viewers found his coarse behavior amusing. Then he announced that he
was running for the presidency and it looked for a while like just another
cheap publicity stunt.
But
his name-calling tactics struck a chord with a certain group of
voters. Our American scene began to darken. Before
long, he was hurling such vicious abuse that it ushered in a politics of
rage. As his egomania developed into full megalomania, the “alt-right”
gravitated toward him.
The
“movement” had started.
More
and more, to the horror of everyone with power to see and understand, he showed
a proto-fascist mentality. So alarms began to spread: mental health
professionals warned that he exemplifies “malignant narcissism.”
Never
before in American history has the presidential office passed into the hands of
a seditionist. And the use of this term is
appropriate. With no conception of principles or limits — “I want”
is his political creed —he mocks the rule of law at every turn.
At a
police convention in 2017, he urged the officers in attendance to ignore their
own regulations and brutalize the people they arrest. He pardoned
ex-Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of criminal contempt of
court. He appointed Scott Pruitt to head the EPA so he could wreck
the agency and let polluters have the spree of their lives.
Trump
is fascinated by powerful dictators with little regard to human rights or
democracy. He compliments Vladimir Putin and hopes to invite that murderer
to stay in the White House. He likes Rodrigo Duterte of the
Philippines, a tyrant who subverts that nation’s democracy.
So,
Trump certainly has the personality of a fascist. But he is not
quite as dangerous as other authoritarians in history.
In the
first place, he lacks the fanatical vision that drove the great tyrants like
Hitler and Stalin to pursue their sick versions of utopia. He is
nothing but a grubby opportunist. He has no ideas, only
appetites. The themes that pass for ideas in the mind of
Donald Trump begin as prompts that are fed to him by others — Stephen Miller,
Sean Hannity, and (once upon a time) Steve Bannon. To be sure, he would fit
right in among the despots who tyrannize banana-republics. But that
sort of a political outcome in America is hard to envision at the moment.
Second, American
traditions — though our current crisis shows some very deep flaws in our
constitutional system — are strong enough to place a limit on the damage Trump
can do. If he ordered troops to occupy the Capitol, disperse the
members of Congress, and impose martial law, the chance that commanders or
troops would carry out such orders is nil.
Third,
Americans have faced challenges before. Many say he is our very worst
president — bar none. And how tempting it is to
agree. But a short while ago, people said the same thing about
George W. Bush, who of course looks exemplary now when compared to our presidential
incumbent.
The
“worst president.”
“Worst,”
of course, is a value judgment that is totally dependent on our standards for
determining “badness.” And any number of our presidents were very
bad indeed — or so it could be argued.
Take
Andrew Jackson, with his belligerence, his simple-mindedness, his racism as
reflected in the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Take all the
pro-slavery presidents before the Civil War who tried to make the enslavement
of American blacks perpetual: John Tyler, Franklin Pierce, James
Buchanan. Take James K. Polk and his squalid war of aggression against
Mexico. Take Andrew Johnson, who did everything he could to ruin the
lives of the newly-freed blacks after Lincoln’s murder.
The
list could go on indefinitely, depending on our individual standards for
identifying “badness.” Shall we continue? Consider
Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding, so clueless in regard to the
comparatively easy challenge of preventing corruption among their
associates. Or consider Grover Cleveland and Herbert Hoover, who blinded
themselves to the desperation of millions in economic
depressions. And Richard Nixon, the only president to date who has
resigned the office in disgrace.
Which
brings us to Trump.
However
incompetent or even malevolent some previous American presidents were, this one
is unique. The Trump presidency is a singular aberration, a defacement of norms
and ideals without precedent. However bad some other presidents were
all of them felt a certain basic obligation to maintain at least a semblance of
dignity and propriety in their actions.
Not
Trump.
Foul
beyond words, he lurches from one brutal whim to another, seeking gratification
in his never-ending quest to humiliate others. He spews insults in every
direction all day. He makes fun of the handicapped. He
discredits journalists in order to boost the credibility of crackpots and
psychopathic bigots. He accuses reporters of creating “fake news” so
he can generate fake news himself: spew a daily torrent of hallucinatory
lies to his gullible followers.
He
amuses himself — with the help of his money and the shyster lawyers that it
pays for — in getting away with a lifetime’s worth of compulsive frauds that
might very well lead to prosecutions (later) if the evidence has not been
destroyed and if the statute of limitations has not expired.
So
far, however, he is always too brazen to get what he deserves, too slippery for
anyone to foil.
Anyone
with half of ounce of decency can see this wretched man for what he
is. They know what’s going on, and yet there’s nothing they can do
to make it stop. And that adds to Trump’s dirty
satisfaction. Any chance to out-maneuver the decent — to infuriate them —
quickens his glee. It makes his victory all the more rotten, incites
him to keep on taunting his victims.
It’s
all a big joke to Donald Trump, and he can never, ever, get enough of
it.
The
question must be asked: when in our lifetimes — when in all the
years that our once-inspiring Republic has existed — have American institutions
been subjected to such treatment? How long can American morale and
cohesion survive this?
Nancy
Pelosi has said that in preference to seeing Trump impeached, she would like to
see him in jail. Current Justice Department policy — which forbids
the indictment of presidents — makes it possible for Trump to break our
nation’s laws with impunity. Impeachment is useless if the Senate’s
Republicans, united in their ruthlessness and denial, take the coward’s way
out.
So the
prospect of locking him up may have to wait. But the day of
reckoning for this fake — this imposter who will never have a glimmer of clue
as to how to measure up to his office — may come in due time. Then
the presidential fake who accuses his victims of fakery will live with some
things that are real: stone walls, iron bars, a nice prison haircut,
and the consequences of his actions.
Field of
Anonymous Trump Donors Getting Crowded
|
WASHINGTON
-- Last year, when a "senior administration official" wrote an
anonymous New York Times opinion piece -- "I Am Part of the Resistance
Inside the Trump Administration" -- the unknown author's essay prompted
praise and approbation.
Now, we
learn, it has spawned a book.
"The
dilemma -- which (Trump) does not fully grasp," Anonymous wrote in
September 2018, "is that many of the senior officials in his own
administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his
agenda and his worst inclinations. I would know. I am one of them."
Critics
on the right called the author a coward for penning a piece under the cloak of
anonymity. Critics on the left pounced on the author's failure to openly
denounce Trump -- the only act that they would consider courageous.
Trump
branded the piece "TREASON" and urged then-Attorney General Jeff
Sessions to find the dirty rat.
Journalists
did not miss the irony in the author's identification as a "senior
administration official." The Trump White House was indignant, even though
the press office routinely conducts briefings after directing reporters to
identify the briefers as "senior administration officials." Then Team
Trump denounced the press for relying on unnamed sources.
I saw
the piece as confirmation that good people worked in the administration out of
a sense of public service -- and that some stayed because they felt a duty to
curb Trump's worst instincts. The book deal, alas, suggests the unknown civil servant has
a hunger for self-promotion, as well as a poor sense of timing.
For one
thing, the Mueller report tells voters everything they need to know about
Trump. To wit: There was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. And
Trump frequently pushed those around him to do his dirty work, and they often
failed to do his bidding.
Former
campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, for example, chose not to tell Sessions to
"unrecuse" himself from the Russian probe, lest Trump fire him.
Instead, Lewandowski passed on the assignment to a White House aide, who also
chose not to act.
In
words that echoed the New York Times piece, special counsel Robert Mueller
wrote, "The president's efforts to influence the investigation were mostly
unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the
president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests."
Trump
voters don't care. They believe the Russian probe was a witch hunt. Who can
blame them? Mueller allowed the investigation to slog on long past any
reasonable suspicion that Moscow was pulling Trump's strings. Federal officials
throwing everything they've got at Trump isn't really a good look right now.
The field
of anonymous Trump accusers is getting crowded. In August, an identity-shielded
whistleblower came forward with a complaint that "the president of the
United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a
foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election." It was in reference to a July
25 phone call during which Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky
to look for political dirt that could be used in next year's presidential race.
The
unidentified whistleblower's lawyer said he represents another unidentified
whistleblower. Democrats argue these individuals must be shielded for their own
protection, but everyone knows they'll be feted as heroes when their identities
-- predictably -- are revealed.
Book
deals? You know it.
Perhaps
the anonymous New York Times author decided to cut a deal to beat the pack of
Ukraine scolds.
House
Democrats have even been holding impeachment hearings behind closed doors to
question known individuals. After releasing damning tidbits, they've yet to
release full testimony. In contrast, Trump made public a rough transcript of
the July 25 conversation.
If
there's something voters don't know that Anonymous thinks they need to, he or
she could pen another op-ed, not a bestseller -- or better yet, with an
election a year away, come forward and face the wrath of the right in the light
of day.
Of
course, Anonymous has an agent. Matt Latimer told CNN that the author of the 272-page
"A Warning," published by Twelve, a division of Hachette,
"refused the chance at a seven-figure advance and intends to donate a
substantial amount of any royalties to the White House Correspondents
Association and other organizations that fight for a press that seeks the
truth."
As a
member of the association, I suppose I should be grateful and not at all
curious about how much of the proceeds will go to worthy causes. If only I knew
whom to thank.
Contact
Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com or 202-662-7391. Follow
@DebraJSaunders on Twitter.
The Kitchen-Table Case for Impeaching Trump
The president’s abuses of power are
materially hurting regular people.
After months of waiting,
the House Judiciary Committee has finally voted to open an impeachment inquiry
into President Donald Trump. With that tedious “will-they-or-won’t-they”
question out of the way, the logical next question is: can impeachment succeed?
The answer is a resounding yes. But getting there will require a strategic
reorientation away from a sluggish and legalistic examination of Trump’s
offenses via recalcitrant witnesses and toward a broader consideration of how
his systemic abuses of power have materially hurt regular people.
The
continued reticence of so many Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to
support impeachment is based on two premises. The first is that impeachment is
modestly unpopular, which is true, so far as it goes. The second is the conventional wisdom that
impeaching President Clinton backfired on House Republicans.
Look
a little closer at the second contention, however, and it quickly falls apart.
The case against Trump is vastly stronger than that against Clinton. While Clinton’s alleged crimes were largely
committed in the interest of avoiding embarrassment, Trump’s represent clear
abuses of power with malignant implications. The second flank of the
argument—that impeaching Clinton “backfired” on Republicans—is more myth than reality.
Republicans may have lost the House in the next election cycle, but Clinton’s
impeachment was a nontrivial factor in Al Gore’s 2000 loss. Therefore, we join
other observers in choosing to view this “example” as evidence in
support of impeaching Trump.
But
the polling argument is particularly short-sighted. Voters take cues from
political leaders about how to react to political events. For months, the
overwhelming cue on impeachment from Democratic leaders like Pelosi, Chuck
Schumer, and Joe Biden has been to stand down. This inhibition has created a negative
feedback loop in which impeachment-phobic lawmakers convince voters not to
support impeachment, and then point to lukewarm public support to justify their
passivity. Rinse and repeat.
Five
months after the release of the Mueller report, this message has pretty well
stuck. After all, if the special counsel’s findings were so serious, they
should have been acted on immediately, right? Much as a gourmet meal is never
as good reheated, Democrats cannot expect to ignore evidence of impeachable
conduct in the spring and have it be as fresh and tasty when zapped in the
autumn. Just take a gander at this week’s House Judiciary hearing with Corey
Lewandowski to see how unappetizing this fare has become.
While
the Mueller report surely provided enough evidence to justify impeaching Trump
on substantive grounds, hesitant lawmakers have largely drained it of much of
its political force (and impeachment is an inherently political process).
To
overcome this damage, impeachment backers will have to make opposition to
impeachment untenable with voters, thereby short-circuiting the aforementioned
negative feedback loop. That means focusing on the ways in which Trump’s
corruption has made life harder and more dangerous for millions of Americans.
In other words, impeachment should focus above all on his failure to carry out
his constitutional duty under Article II,
Section 1 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully
executed.” By emphasizing how impeachment is relevant to the “kitchen-table”
issues that keep regular people up at night—like low wages or exorbitant
healthcare premiums—the House Judiciary Committee can inspire a swell of
grassroots pressure that will give reluctant legislators no choice but to back
the effort.
The issues tackled in
Mueller’s report, like obstruction of justice, are removed from people’s
day-to-day lives. Of course, there is nothing inherently insufficient with such
a basis for impeachment; were it not for the Democratic leadership’s
opposition, impeachment proceedings would have begun in April. Still, more
Americans agonize over how to pay back their student loans, or whether to incur
the costs of seeing a doctor when uninsured, than discuss “the role of law.”
The Mueller report, therefore. likely strikes most Americans as “political” and
is less likely to inspire new broad-based support for
impeachment.
The
same goes for the proposed lines of inquiry in Judiciary’s newly expanded investigations. The committee will reportedly examine
Trump’s alleged abuse of presidential pardons, hush-money payments, and use of
office for personal enrichment. While these scandals are undoubtedly important,
they don’t penetrate the lives of ordinary people.
That
doesn’t mean that Democrats should not pursue any of these alleged crimes; the
public deserves to know as much as possible about any president’s corruption,
and Congress is best suited to furnish those answers. But these matters should
not sit alone at the center of the Democrats’ case for impeachment. An
impeachment inquiry is a way to control the national conversation. While bills
passed by House Democrats predictably get little attention from most of the
media, an impeachment hearing is guaranteed to achieve the scarcest political
resource in 2019—the attention of voters.
Given
that platform, lawmakers have a lot to choose from. In light of recent
revelations that the number of uninsured people has risen for the first
time since 2009, lawmakers might want to start by investigating how
Trump has undermined the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
You
might say that Trump’s health care moves are reprehensible, but are they really
impeachable? Ask Thaddeus Stevens, the Pennsylvania representative who was the
catalyst behind Andrew Johnson’s impeachment and the author of an article of impeachment accusing Johnson of failing
to “take care” that the Tenure of Office Act be faithfully executed. Other
articles accused Johnson of offenses including insulting Congress and
unlawfully firing his Secretary of War, but this one got at his most serious
transgression: failing to honor and enforce the laws as Congress had
intended.
Trump
has made no secret of his disdain for Obama’s healthcare law, but whether he
likes it or not, it’s his duty to administer it unless and until Congress
passes a new one or repeals it. Rather than faithfully carrying out that
responsibility, Trump has sought to destroy the law. On his first day in
office, he signed an executive order directing
agencies to use all of the tools at their disposal to undermine the statute—and
they have faithfully complied. His administration also shortened the open enrollment period, cut ACA’s advertising budget, and slashed tax credits for enrollees. Trump is not coy about his
intentions. “I have just about ended Obamacare,” he once said. Congress should demonstrate its commitment
to improving Americans’ health care access by nailing Trump for his
considerable efforts to “end” a lawful program by executive action that he
could not repeal legislatively.
There
are other matters that need a deeper probe. Lawmakers should investigate
whether Trump’s administration has intentionally slowed the allocation of aid
to Puerto Rico. Last week, as Puerto Ricans braced for Hurricane Dorian’s
potential landfall, many did so without a proper
roof over
their heads, surrounded by many other reminders of Hurricane
Maria’s destruction. This hardly seems like an accident: two years after Maria,
the scandal-riddled Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA) has only approved funding for nine projects out of 10,000 applications.
Meanwhile, in an unprecedented move, the executive branch is holding up a
Community Development Block Grant for Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) headed for
the U.S. territory. The administration’s refusal to effectively administer this
recovery aid is not some distant problem. Puerto Ricans (including the diaspora
living in Florida and elsewhere on the U.S. mainland) feel it every day in the
way of destroyed roads, damaged schools, the lack of a proper roof over many of
their heads, or having been forced to leave the island altogether.
It
seems impossible to imagine that Trump’s failure “to take care” is unrelated to the animus he has
shown toward Latinx communities since the day he announced his presidential campaign. More broadly, it is even
harder to argue that a president can faithfully execute the law under our
Constitution when he openly views the government’s obligations to people as
dependent on their race or religion—as his “Muslim ban” makes evidently clear.
Lawmakers
should also look into Trump’s decision to allow three unconfirmed, unqualified,
Mar-a-Lago members to essentially run the Department of Veterans’ Affairs from the resort. Has
Trump’s reliance on his paying customers to run the VA in any way hurt the
millions of veterans who rely on the department’s services each year? The
public has a right to know. The House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs opened an investigation into these puppeteers last winter, but
the administration’s stonewalling appears to have hindered meaningful progress.
Trump’s
appointees have harmed regular people in myriad other ways. Take, for example,
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ failure to administer loan forgiveness
programs, even after having been ordered by a court to do so. That has left thousands of people suffering
under the crushing yoke of student loans they were promised would be
discharged. At the same time, her department’s laughable oversight of loan servicers is delaying forgiveness for hundreds of thousands more. Given her
absolute disregard for her responsibilities as Education Secretary, why has she
not been removed? Quite clearly, Trump feels no compunction about running afoul
of his obligation to “take care” to execute the law, even if that means flat
out ignoring court orders.
House members must not
only persuade voters to embrace impeachment with the righteousness of their
case, but also with the urgency of their actions. That means issuing subpoenas
far more liberally—and suing when necessary to enforce them without delay.
Indeed, the fact that Trump admits “we are fighting all the subpoenas” reflects
acknowledgement that he is undermining Congressional oversight, which was
itself a key element of the third article of impeachment
against Richard Nixon.
Basic
political horse sense suggests that investigating how Trump’s team is hiding
evidence of their alleged lawlessness would help generate attention to the
actions they are covering up. If pursued effectively, such a probe can impose a
steep political cost.
Ultimately,
Congress should view its investigatory scope broadly. It should vigorously
examine as many instances of Trump’s corruption as possible. But his crimes
against the American people should sit at the center of their effort.
To
treat them as secondary, as lawmakers have done thus far, misses the larger
point. The intentional harm Trump has inflicted on Americans, whom he is tasked
with protecting, represents by far his most egregious violation of his
Constitutional oath of office. Lawmakers should respond accordingly.
The (Full) Case for
Impeachment
A menu of high crimes and misdemeanors.
The crimes for which impeachment is the prescribed punishment are notoriously undefined. And
that’s for a reason: Presidential powers are vast, and it’s impossible to
design laws to cover every possible abuse of the office’s authority. House
Democrats have calculated that an impeachment focused narrowly on the Ukraine
scandal will make the strongest legal case against President Trump. But that’s
not Trump’s only impeachable offense. A full accounting would include a wide
array of dangerous and authoritarian acts — 82, to be precise. His violations
fall into seven broad categories of potentially impeachable misconduct that
should be weighed, if not by the House, then at least by history.
I. Abusing Power for
Political Gain
Explanation: The single most
dangerous threat to any democratic system is that the ruling party will use its
governing powers to entrench itself illegitimately.
Evidence: (1) The Ukraine scandal is fundamentally about the president abusing his authority
by wielding his power over foreign policy as a cudgel against his domestic opponents.
The president is both implicitly and explicitly trading the U.S. government’s
favor for investigations intended to create adverse publicity for Americans
whom Trump wishes to discredit. (2) During
his campaign, he threatened to impose policies harmful to Amazon in retribution
for critical coverage in the Washington Post. (“If I become president, oh do they have problems.”) He has
since pushed the postmaster general to double rates on Amazon, and the Defense Department held up
a $10 billion contract with Amazon, almost certainly at
his behest. (3) He
has ordered his officials to block the AT&T–Time Warner
merger as punishment for CNN’s coverage of
him. (4) He
encouraged the NFL to blacklist Colin Kaepernick.
II. Mishandling
Classified Information
Explanation: As he does with
many other laws, the president enjoys broad immunity from regulations on the
proper handling of classified information, allowing him to take action that
would result in felony convictions for other federal employees. President
Trump’s mishandling of classified information is not merely careless but a
danger to national security.
Evidence: (5) Trump has habitually
communicated on a smartphone highly vulnerable to foreign espionage. (6–30) He has reversed 25 security-clearance
denials (including for his son-in-law, who has
conducted potentially compromising business with foreign interests). (31) He has turned
Mar-a-Lago into an unsecured second White House and even once handled news of North Korea’s
missile launch in public view. (32) He gave
Russian officials sensitive Israeli intelligence that blew “the most valuable
source of information on external plotting by [the] Islamic State,” the Wall Street Journal reported. (33) He tweeted a
high-resolution satellite image of an Iranian launch site for the sake of
boasting.
III. Undermining Duly
Enacted Federal Law
Explanation: President Trump has abused his authority either by distorting the
intent of laws passed by Congress or by flouting them. He has directly ordered
subordinates to violate the law and has promised pardons in advance, enabling
him and his staff to operate with impunity. In these actions, he has undermined
Congress’s constitutional authority to make laws.
Evidence: (34) Having failed to
secure funding authority for a border wall, President Trump unilaterally ordered funds to be moved from other budget accounts. (35) He has undermined regulations on
health insurance under the Affordable Care Act
preventing insurers from charging higher rates to customers with more expensive
risk profiles. (36) He
has abused emergency powers to impose tariffs, intended to protect the supply chain in case of war, to seize
from Congress its authority to negotiate international trade agreements. (37–38) He has ordered
border agents to illegally block asylum seekers from
entering the country and has ordered other aides to
violate eminent-domain laws and
contracting procedures in building the border wall, (39–40) both times
promising immunity from lawbreaking through presidential pardons.
IV. Obstruction of
Congress
Explanation: The executive branch
and Congress are co-equal, each intended to guard against usurpation of
authority by the other. Trump has refused to acknowledge any legitimate
oversight function of Congress, insisting that because Congress has political
motivations, it is disqualified from it. His actions and rationale strike at
the Constitution’s design of using the political ambitions of the elected
branches to check one another.
Evidence: (41) Trump has refused to abide by a
congressional demand to release his tax returns, despite an unambiguous law granting the House this authority.
His lawyers have flouted the law on the spurious grounds that subpoenas for his
tax returns “were issued to harass President Donald J. Trump, to rummage
through every aspect of his personal finances, his businesses and the private
information of the president and his family, and to ferret about for any
material that might be used to cause him political damage.” Trump’s lawyers have
argued that Congress cannot investigate potentially illegal behavior by the
president because the authority to do so belongs to prosecutors. In other
litigation, those lawyers have argued that prosecutors cannot investigate the
president. These contradictory positions support an underlying stance that no
authority can investigate his misconduct. (42) He has defended his refusal to
accept oversight on the grounds that members of Congress “aren’t, like,
impartial people. The Democrats are trying to win 2020.” (43) The president has
also declared that impeachment is
illegal and should be stopped in the courts (though,
unlike with his other obstructive acts, he has not yet taken any legal action
toward this end).
V. Obstruction of Justice
Explanation: By virtue of his control over the federal government’s
investigative apparatus, the president (along with the attorney general) is
uniquely well positioned to cover up his own misconduct. Impeachment is the
sole available remedy for a president who uses his powers of office to hold
himself immune from legal accountability. In particular, the pardon power gives
the president almost unlimited authority to obstruct investigations by
providing him with a means to induce the silence of co-conspirators.
Evidence: (44–53) The Mueller report contains ten instances of President Trump engaging in
obstructive acts. While none of those succeeded in stopping the probe, Trump
dangled pardons and induced his co-conspirators to lie or withhold evidence
from investigators. Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified to
Congress that Trump had directed him to lie to it
about his negotiations with the Russian government during the campaign to
secure a lucrative building contract in Moscow. And when Cohen stated his
willingness to lie, Robert Costello, an attorney who had worked with Rudy
Giuliani, emailed Cohen assuring him he could “sleep well tonight” because he
had “friends in high places.” Trump has publicly praised witnesses in the
Russia investigation for refusing to cooperate, and he sent a private message
to former national-security adviser Michael Flynn urging him to “stay strong.”
He has reinforced this signal by repeatedly denouncing witnesses who cooperate
with investigators as “flippers.” (54–61) He
has exercised his pardon power for a series of Republican loyalists, sending a
message that at least some of his co-conspirators have received. The
president’s pardon of conservative pundit
Dinesh D’Souza “has to be a signal to Mike
Flynn and Paul Manafort and even Robert S. Mueller III: Indict people for
crimes that don’t pertain to Russian collusion and this is what could happen,”
Roger Stone told the Washington Post. “The special counsel has awesome powers, as you know, but the
president has even more awesome powers.”
VI. Profiting From Office
Explanation: Federal
employees must follow strict rules to prevent them from being influenced by any
financial conflict. Conflict-of-interest rules are less clear for a sitting
president because all presidential misconduct will be resolved by either
reelection or impeachment. If Trump held any position in the federal government
below the presidency, he would have been fired for his obvious conflicts. His violations are so gross and
blatant they merit impeachment.
Evidence: (62) He has
maintained a private business while holding office, (63) made decisions
that influence that business, (64) and
accepted payments from parties both domestic and foreign who have an interest
in his policies. (65) He
has openly signaled that these parties can gain his favor by doing so. (66) He has refused
even to disclose his interests, which would at least make public which parties
are paying him.
VII. Fomenting Violence
Explanation: One of the
unspoken roles of the president is to serve as a symbolic head of state.
Presidents have very wide latitude for their political rhetoric, but Trump has
violated its bounds, exceeding in his viciousness the rhetoric of Andrew
Johnson (who was impeached in part for
the same offense).
Evidence: (67) Trump called for
locking up his 2016 opponent after the election. (68–71) He has clamored for the deportation of
four women of color who are congressional
representatives of the opposite party. (72) He has described a wide array of
domestic political opponents as treasonous, including the news media. (73–80) On at least
eight occasions, he has encouraged his supporters — including members of the
armed forces — to attack his political opponents. (“I have the support of the
police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump — I
have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough until they go to a certain
point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”) (81) He has threatened
journalists with violence if they fail to produce positive coverage. (“If the
media would write correctly and write accurately and write fairly, you’d have a
lot less violence in the country.”) (82) There
have been 36 criminal cases nationwide in which the defendant invoked Trump’s
name in connection with violence; 29 of these cited him as the inspiration for
an attack.
*This article appears in the October 14, 2019, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!
PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES DONALD TRUMP: pathological
liar, swindler, con man, huckster, golfing cheat, charity foundation fraudster,
tax evader, adulterer, porn whore chaser and servant of the Saudis dictators
THE TRUMP FAMILY FOUNDATION SLUSH FUND…. Will they see
jail?
VISUALIZE REVOLUTION!.... We know where they live!
“Underwood is a
Democrat and is seeking millions of dollars in penalties. She wants Trump and
his eldest children barred from running other charities.”
ANN COULTER
TRUMP’S PARASITIC
FAMILY
Jared’s BFF, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
(MBS), and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Muhammad bin Zayed (MBZ), refer to
Jared as “the clown prince.” Bone-cutter MBS assured those around him that he
had Jared “in my pocket.”
Following meetings at the White House
and also with the Kushners over their 666 Fifth Avenue property, former Qatari
Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim reported back to the emir that “the
people atop the new administration were heavily motivated by personal financial
interest.”
“Truthfully,
It Is Tough To Ignore Some Of The Gross Immoral Behavior By
The President” WASHINGTON
POST
Trump's sister
quits as a federal judge 10 days into formal probe of her possible role in
massive family tax scam that could have ended in her impeachment
·
Trump's older sister resigned as an appellate
court judge shortly after a probe opened into her involvement in a family
tax scheme
·
·
10 days ago an investigation into whether
Maryanne Trump Barry violated judicial conduct rules launched
·
·
The case was closed after Barry resigned
because retired judges are not subject to the rules
·
·
Barry had not heard a case in two years after
transitioning to inactive shortly after Trump's inauguration
·
·
The Trump siblings were probed after an
investigation found they were involved in a tax scheme related to the transfer
of their father's real estate empire
·
President Donald Trump’s older sister Maryanne Trump Barry, 82,
retired as a federal judge just days after an investigation opened into her
possible role in family tax fraud scheme.
Barry was a federal appellate judge in the
third district, which includes Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, and the
investigation could have led to her impeachment.
She had not presided over a case in more than
two years, but was still listed as an inactive senior judge in the third
district – usually the step taken before full retirement.
Barry did not give any reasons for her
retirement.
The probe into the Trumps was first opened
last fall, after a New York Times investigation found the Trump siblings
engaged in tax schemes in the 1990s, including fraud, that increased their
inherited wealth.
+4
Maryanne Trump Barry resigned as a federal
appellate judge 10 days into an investigation into whether she violated
judicial conduct rules
An investigation into the Trump siblings
opened after the New York Times reported that they transferred their father's
real estate assets improperly in the 1990s
The formal investigation into whether Barry
violated judicial conduct rules started ten days ago, but was closed after
Barry announced her retirement since retired judges are not subject to judicial
conduct rules.
These reviews could result in the censure or
reprimand of federal judges, but in some more extreme cases, the judge could be
referred to the House of Representatives for impeachment.
It appears Barry will receive somewhere
between $184,500 and $217,600 annually, the same salary she earned when she
last met certain workload requirements before changing her status to inactive.
The Times investigation into the Trump’s
alleged that Fred Trump transferred his real estate empire profits and
ownership to his four children, including the president, Barry, brother Robert
Trump, and their sister Elizabeth Trump Grau, in ways designed to dodge gift and
estate taxes.
+4
Barry, pictured above with sister Elizabeth
Trump Grau, was a senior inactive judge, which is the step taken usually before
full retirement, and had not heard a case in over two year.
Trump's lawyer Charles Hardner said that the
allegations made as a result of the Times' investigation is '100 per cent
false' and accused the newspaper of defamation
“The New York Times’s allegations of fraud
and tax evasion are 100 per cent false, and highly defamatory,” a lawyer for
Trump, Charles Hardner, said last October.
Barry was elevated to the United States Court
of Appeals for the Third Circuit by President Bill Clinton in 1999, and shortly
after Trump’s inauguration, in February 2017, she notified the court she would
stop hearing cases without citing a reason.
At this point she became a senior inactive
judge and gave up her staff and chambers.
ANN COULTER: WILL THE
GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY FOR BANKSTERS AND BILLIONAIRES DESTROY AMERICA?
I would also go to all of the working class that are in America,
construction workers in particular. Their salaries have not just
stagnated, they have gone down in the last 20 years. These are the least among us. We are the only ones not speaking
out of self-interest. …
Most of the people who are advocating for open borders …
they have a vested in interest in having either the cheap labor or the
Democratic voters. Their neighborhoods aren’t the ones being
overwhelmed. They get the cheap maids, the cheap nannies,
and then they strut around like they’re Martin Luther King.
No, you are talking in your
self-interest, Chamber of Commerce, and Koch brothers, and Nancy Pelosi, and
Chuck Schumer. It’s Donald Trump and our side who are actually
caring about our fellow Americans — the kids who are getting addicted to black
tar heroin. …
The heroin problem in this country is 100 percent a problem of not
having a wall on the border. And 70,000 Americans are dying every year. That’s
more that died in the entire Vietnam War. That is a national emergency.
ANN COULTER
ANN COULTER EXPOSES
TRUMP’S “WALL” HOAX
In fact,
Trump is steadily moving in the precise opposite direction of what he promised.
Illegal immigration is on track to hit the highest levels in
more than a decade, and Trump has willfully decided to keep amnesty advocates
Jared, Ivanka, Mick Mulvaney, Marc Short, and Mercedes Schlapp in the White
House. For all his talk about immigration, did he ever consider hiring people
who share his MAGA vision?
THE TRUMP FAMILY FOUNDATION SLUSH FUND…. Will they see jail?
VISUALIZE REVOLUTION!.... We know where they live!
“Underwood is a Democrat
and is seeking millions of dollars in penalties. She wants Trump and his eldest
children barred from running other charities.”
TRUMP’S
CRAP ON BORDERS AND HIS PRETEND WALL IS ONLY ONE MORE TRUMP HOAX!
Only a
complete fool would believe that Trump is any more for American Legal workers
than the Democrat Party for Billionaires and Banksters!
“Trump
Administration Betrays Low-Skilled American Workers.”
The
latest ad from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) asks Trump
to reject the mass illegal and legal immigration policies supported by Wall
Street, corporate executives, and most specifically, the GOP mega-donor Koch
brothers.
Efforts by the big business
lobby, Chamber of Commerce, Koch brothers, and George W. Bush Center include
increasing employment-based legal immigration that would likely crush the historic wage gains that Trump has delivered
for America’s blue collar and working class citizens.
Mark
Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley investors are uniting with the Koch network’s
consumer and industrial investors to demand a huge DACA amnesty
*
A handful of
Republican and Democrat lawmakers are continuing to tout a plan that gives
amnesty to nearly a million illegal aliens in exchange for some amount of
funding for President Trump’s proposed border wall along the U.S.-Mexico
border.
THE DEATH OF THE
AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS
THE ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN WORKER BY
PHONY POPULIST SWAMP KEEPER TRUMP
Companies say they often pay good
wages to their imported H-2B workers, often around $15 per hour. But that price
is below the wages sought by Americans for the seasonal work which leaves them
jobless in the off-season. The lower wages paid to H-2Bs also allows companies
to pay lower wages to their American supervisors. NEIL MUNRO
WHAT WILL TRUMP AND
HIS PARASITIC FAMILY DO FOR MONEY???
JUST ASK THE
SAUDIS!
JOHN DEAN: Not
so far. This has been right by the letter of the special counsel’s charter.
He’s released the document. What I’m looking for is relief and
understanding that there’s no witting or unwitting likelihood that the
President is an agent of Russia. That’s when I’ll feel comfortable, and no
evidence even hints at that. We don’t have that yet. We’re still in the process
of unfolding the report to look at it. And its, as I say, if [Attornery General
William Barr] honors his word, we’ll know more soon.
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and
Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with
third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by
its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER
ANN COULTER EXPOSES TRUMP’S “WALL” HOAX
In fact, Trump is steadily moving in the precise opposite
direction of what he promised.
Illegal immigration is on track to hit the highest levels in
more than a decade, and Trump has willfully decided to keep amnesty advocates
Jared, Ivanka, Mick Mulvaney, Marc Short, and Mercedes Schlapp in the White
House. For all his talk about immigration, did he ever consider hiring people
who share his MAGA vision?
TRUMP’S CATCH AND RELEASE… all the “cheap” labor climbing our
borders, jobs and welfare lines!
THE ENTIRE REASON TRUMP
NOMINATED KIRSTJEN NIELSEN WAS BECAUSE OF HER LONG HISTORY OF ADVOCATING OPEN
BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED!
In newly confirmed federal data from the Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) agency, Breitbart News has learned the massive scale and
scope of DHS’s ramped up Catch and Release policy.
For months, DHS officials have said privately that the Catch and
Release program has been taken to new heights, while ICE
union officials declared this week that the program was
in “overdrive” under the direction of DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. JOHN BINDER
TRUMP AND THE MURDERING 9-11 MUSLIM SAUDIS…
Why is the Swamp Keeper and his family of parasites up their
ar$es??
TRUMP’S TAX BILL:
A massive tax cut for his plundering Goldman Sachs infested
administration.
TRUMP’S SECRET AMNESTY, WIDER OPEN BORDERS DOCTRINE TO KEEP
WAGES DEPRESSED.
"During the same month that
Schlafly had backed Trump for his “America First”
agenda, Nielsen’s committee
released an ideologically-globalist report, promoting
the European migrant crisis
as a win for big business who would profit greatly
from a never-ending stream
of cheap, foreign
migrants."
TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE
RICH…. and his parasitic family!
Report:
Trump Says He Doesn't Care About the National Debt Because the Crisis Will Hit
After He's Gone
"Trump's
alleged comment is maddening and disheartening,
but at least he's being straightforward about his indefensible
and self-serving neglect. I'll leave you with this reminder of the scope of the problem, not that anyone in
power is going to do a damn thing about it."
TRUMPERNOMICS:
THE RICH APPLAUD TWITTER’S
TRUMP’S TAX CUTS FOR THE SUPER RICH!
"The tax overhaul would mean an unprecedented windfall for the
super-rich, on top
of the fact that virtually all income gains during the period of
the supposed
recovery from the financial crash of 2008 have gone to the top 1
percent income
bracket."
TRUMPS INFORMS NARCOMEX:
THE PACT BETWEEN MEXICO AND TRUMP… NO WALL, NO REAL
ENFORCEMENT.
Swamp Keeper Trump prepares
for the inevitable move to impeach him and ask for asylum in Scotland.
Fox News host Tucker
Carlson said in an interview Thursday that President Donald Trump has succeeded
as a conversation starter but has failed to keep his most important campaign
promises.
“His chief promises were
that he would build the wall, de-fund Planned Parenthood, and repeal Obamacare,
and he hasn’t done any of those things,” Carlson told Urs Gehriger of the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche.
TRUMP POSITIONS HIMSELF FOR IMPEACHMENT
MAY LEAVE THE COUNTRY FOR HIS GOLF COURSE IN
SCOTLAND
“Truthfully, It Is Tough To Ignore Some Of The Gross Immoral Behavior
By The President” WASHINGTON POST
“Mueller and the anti-Trump camp within the ruling elite know
very well that the billionaire New York real estate and gambling
speculator-turned president is mired in criminal activity, which is certain to
be reflected in the material seized from Cohen. They have Trump by the throat,
and Trump knows it.”
*
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican
alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world
hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.”
----Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER
*
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified before the House Oversight
Committee Wednesday that the “whole Trump family” was potentially
comprised by a foreign power ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
"Trump's alleged comment is
maddening and disheartening, but at least he's being straightforward
about his indefensible and self-serving neglect. I'll leave you
with this reminder of the
scope of the problem, not that anyone in power is going to do a damn thing
about it."
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