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FOCUS: Pete Buttigieg's Willful Illusion |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=49678"><span class="small">Zak Cheney-Rice, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Wednesday, 04 December 2019 11:58 |
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Cheney-Rice writes: "The topic of racism and education in America seems to have confounded Pete Buttigieg's campaign over the past week."
Pete Buttigieg. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Pete Buttigieg's Willful Illusion
By Zak Cheney-Rice, New York Magazine
04 December 19
 he topic of racism and education in America seems to have confounded Pete Buttigieg’s campaign over the past week. Shortly before Thanksgiving, The Root writer Michael Harriot called the South Bend, Indiana, mayor a “lying motherfucker” based on comments he made in 2011 about educational achievement gaps between black and white children in his city. “There are a lot of kids — especially [in] the lower-income, minority neighborhoods, who literally just haven’t seen [education] work,” said the Democratic presidential candidate. “There isn’t someone who they know personally who testifies to the value of education.” Harriot objected: Not only was Buttigieg wrong about the gap’s origins, the writer argued, he was wrong by choice, indulging a false narrative about “black lethargy” and “esoteric lack of support” from black communities despite knowing better.
Harriot’s article prompted a viral news cycle and, later the same day, a conciliatory phone call from Buttigieg himself. But even after the follow-up, it remained hard to discern whether the mayor was actually claiming that black communities don’t support their children, or remarking on the American education system’s failure to afford their kids the same opportunities as white kids. His comments, I think, could fairly be read either way, but that kind of murkiness has become a theme: With each new comment he makes about racism and education in South Bend comes renewed confusion regarding what he actually believes about either one.
A philosophical question that’s hangs over much of Buttigieg’s campaign: Why choose between ignorance of the issue and cynicism over how it plays when you can have both? It’s less apparent by the day whether the mayor’s muddled answers stem primarily from having had few substantive conversations with black people in his city, or from the same opportunism that underlies his opposition to tuition-free college and his rightward turn against Medicare for All. Sunday provided even more fuel for debate: During a campaign stop in Goldsboro, North Carolina, Buttigieg admitted to Reverend William Barber that he’d underestimated how badly segregated schools still were in South Bend. “I have to confess that I was slow to realize — I worked for years under the illusion that our schools in my city were integrated,” Buttigieg said. “Because they had to be, because of a court order.”
The court order to which the mayor referred is almost certainly the consent decree that the South Bend Community School Corporation entered with the Justice Department in 1981. Under the decree, the corporation’s board — which governs the city’s schools and is comprised of publicly elected members — tacitly recognized its segregation problem, committed to reversing it, and was required to enroll a share of black students in each school that fell within 15 percentage points of their share of the district population. The corporation’s struggles to fulfill this commitment have been well documented: As of 2018, it was still under the decree, and at least one of its high schools and five primary schools were out of compliance. For Buttigieg, knowing that segregation was still a problem wasn’t just a matter of easily-ascertainable testimony provided in local newspapers and by any black parent whose child attended a local school. It was the subject of one of the city’s longest-running civil-rights mandates, and thus an odd thing for its mayor to be unaware of, even if the schools weren’t under his immediate purview.
This is besides the striking naiveté required to presume that desegregation was successful simply because a court ordered it. Defying court orders to integrate schools is practically a national pastime, having fueled hostilities and violent conflict in cities from New Orleans to St. Louis to Boston. Even where protests and lawsuits brought by outraged white residents failed to halt efforts like mandatory busing in the short term, their subsequent exodus from cities to suburbs — known colloquially as “white flight” — did not. Nor has South Bend been immune to the consequences: The city lost nearly 10,000 white residents between 2010 and 2017 despite experiencing overall population growth during the same period.
All of this makes Buttigieg’s followup claim that South Bend’s schools actually were desegregated within the district’s boundaries — and that it was the surrounding county that remained divided — even more confounding. “[What] I slowly realized is that, while that was true [that schools had been integrated] within the limits of the South Bend community school district, as they were drawn, if you looked at the county, almost all of the diversity of our youths was in a single school district,” he told Barber in North Carolina. This seems to directly contradict the reality that several schools within the district’s bounds — including Hamilton Traditional, Coquillard Elementary, and Washington High — remain out of compliance with the consent decree to this day. This is an improvement over previous years, when more schools were out of compliance. But it remains apparent that desegregation has been an active and unrealized goal in South Bend throughout Buttigieg’s mayorship.
It’s far from unique that a man of Buttigieg’s social and educational pedigree should be only marginally concerned with what his black neighbors endure, to the point that even as mayor of a segregated city with schools to match he could govern for years without recognizing it. But as he spins his proclaimed ignorance into a self-deprecating campaign-trail story about personal growth, he’s mystified the issue further by locating the problem far afield — in segregation patterns in the surrounding county; in desegregation processes he didn’t realize were ongoing, despite their decades of continuous implementation. It’s hard to avoid concluding that Buttigieg’s “illusion” about desegregation is the same willful sort indulged by white people the nation over. It’s the sort that lets him remark off-handedly that achievement gaps stem from a lack of evidence that education pays dividends for black children, then admit years later to knowing little about the actual problem until long after being entrusted with fixing it.
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America's Red State Death Trip |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51503"><span class="small">Paul Krugman, The New York Times</span></a>
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Wednesday, 04 December 2019 09:33 |
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Krugman writes: "We share a common language; the unrestricted movement of goods, services and people is guaranteed by the Constitution. Shouldn't this lead to convergence in the way we live and think?"
Economist Paul Krugman. (photo: Getty Images)
America's Red State Death Trip
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
04 December 19
Why does falling life expectancy track political orientation?
  pluribus unum” — out of many, one — is one of America’s traditional mottos. And you might think it would be reflected in reality. We aren’t, after all, just united politically. We share a common language; the unrestricted movement of goods, services and people is guaranteed by the Constitution. Shouldn’t this lead to convergence in the way we live and think?
In fact, however, the past few decades have been marked by growing divergence among regions along several dimensions, all closely correlated. In particular, the political divide is also, increasingly, an economic divide. As The Times’s Tom Edsall put it in a recent article, “red and blue voters live in different economies.”
What Edsall didn’t point out is that red and blue voters don’t just live differently, they also die differently.
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What Happened to Recession Fears? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52433"><span class="small">Josh Barro, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Wednesday, 04 December 2019 09:33 |
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Barro writes: "Monday was the worst day for stocks in almost two months, with the major indices down nearly a percentage point, following yet another bad monthly report on U.S. manufacturing activity."
Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman, is walking a tightrope as he tries to steer the economy while President Trump attacks the Fed's moves. (photo: Samuel Corum/NYT)
What Happened to Recession Fears?
By Josh Barro, New York Magazine
04 December 19
 onday was the worst day for stocks in almost two months, with the major indices down nearly a percentage point, following yet another bad monthly report on U.S. manufacturing activity. Still, if you zoom out a little, the picture looks very good. After the drop, the S&P 500 Index remains up
24 percent since the start of the year. Markets are a little worried about manufacturing and about signals the trade war might be intensifying, but they’re not that worried.
We’re a long way from where we were last December, when the S&P 500 lost over 15 percent between the start of the month and Christmas. (That’s one reason stocks are up so much this year: They rebounded from a terrible performance in the last month of last year.) At the time, I wrote about what was worrying investors, and I’ve followed up every so often on the waxing and waning of recession fears.
There has been more waning than waxing, and for good reason: Economic indicators that looked scary a year ago just don’t look as scary now. Let’s take a look at what we were worried about a year ago and why we’re less worried about it now.
One factor that sometimes worries the markets is economically relevant political dysfunction. “Economically relevant” is an important qualifier here: By any normal measure, Washington is dysfunctional, but many aspects of the Trump circus are unimportant for the consumption and investment decisions that drive economic output. I wrote a couple months back that the main reason investors might care about impeachment is a second-order concern: An angry Trump might lash out and do economically damaging things, like launch new trade wars. But since then, the trade situation with China has sat, on average, at a standstill, with the president failing to produce the “Phase One” deal he has promised but also not further escalating the dispute. Congress has not yet managed to ratify Trump’s revised NAFTA in the midst of impeachment, but he has not reacted rashly by, for example, withdrawing from the existing agreement. A repeat of last winter’s economically relevant disfunction — a government shutdown that lasted more than a month — looks unlikely. Overall, these political risks are lower than they were a year ago.
Another thing the markets care a lot about is monetary policy. Last December, an important disconnect emerged between market participants and the Federal Reserve. Investors were afraid the Fed was not taking recession risks seriously and that, even if an economic downturn started to materialize, the Fed might be unwilling to respond appropriately with interest-rate cuts. This seems to have been mostly a miscommunication, and in the last year, Fed chairman Jay Powell has endeavored to get on the same page with the markets, making clear first that the Fed would stop hiking rates and then that it would undertake a “mid-cycle adjustment” of rate cuts in response to worrying economic factors, especially the trade war. Even though the rate cuts have stopped, markets have heard the Fed’s communication and have less reason to worry the Fed will be stubbornly tight in the next downturn. Indeed, the Fed is even talking about beefing up its inflation target in a way that would communicate a stronger commitment to easy money when it’s needed to fight economic weakness. So the Fed is also much less of a source of worry than it was a year ago.
Not everything is great. Worries about economic growth in other regions of the world remain in place. And there are signs that the president’s tariffs — even though he has not escalated them as much as one might have feared a year ago — are harming U.S. manufacturing output.
Still, it’s not clear how big the harm is. The ISM Purchasing Managers Index says the U.S. manufacturing sector has been contracting for four months, but the competing IHS Markit PMI, which surveys a broader range of small and mid-size companies, says manufacturing output is growing. And a big worry from a year ago — that manufacturing troubles would be contagious into the service sector, which makes up the vast majority of the economy — has not materialized. Job-growth and wage-growth numbers also continue to look good, if not great.
I am on the record that this is not the most important focus, but I do know that one thing that interests a lot of people about economic performance is what it means for politics: Is the economy going to help Trump or hurt him? So I will note that in addition to everything I wrote above, Trump has one big reason to feel better about the economy today than he did a year ago: The clock. Every day that we haven’t entered an economic downturn is one less day that he faces the risk we will do so before he faces reelection.
Trump is so unpopular he may well lose even in an economy that would help most presidents cruise to reelection. But it does look increasingly likely to be an asset to him rather than a liability when voters decide whether to keep him for four more years.
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Think You've Seen Peak GOP Crazy? Watch This. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=5903"><span class="small">Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast</span></a>
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Tuesday, 03 December 2019 14:17 |
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Tomasky writes: "So you think we've seen peak Republican crazy? I mean, surely we have, right? Shit can't get any weirder than Devin Nunes. Honey, buckle up."
Rep. Doug Collins. (photo: Zach Gibson/Getty)
Think You've Seen Peak GOP Crazy? Watch This.
By Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast
03 December 19
Doug Collins is poised to make Devin Nunes look like Abraham Lincoln.
 o you think we’ve seen peak Republican crazy? I mean, surely we have, right? Shit can’t get any weirder than Devin Nunes.
Honey, buckle up.
The Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee, where the impeachment action moves this Wednesday, make their counterparts on Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee look like Churchill’s war cabinet.
Let’s start with Nunes’ analogue here, ranking member Doug Collins of Georgia. You’ve seen him in action. A lanky fellow with a booming voice, he leans back in his chair and pronounces on the illegitimacy of anything and everything that presumes to challenge the king. He said this week that Donald Trump should not participate in this “sham” hearing. On Fox News Sunday, he said Schiff should be the first person called to testify. He also delivered this word salad: “Chris, [Trump] did nothing improper, there was nothing about a problematic giving aid to another country in which you're talking about corruption, which he’s required to do by law.” I’ve seen it reported that he sleeps on a cot in his office and showers in the House gym. No word on his diet, but it’s obviously heavy on the Kool-Aid.
If he hasn’t quite made the name for himself that Nunes has as a deep-state fabulist, it sure hasn’t been for want of trying. Back when the impeachment hearings were announced in October, Collins went on Fox to chirp out the usual talking points about the “real” scandal. “If we want to talk about the corrupt cabal in the Department of Justice, which the Democrats have all of a sudden put their head in the sand and forgotten,” he said. “The things that we have been talking about for two years actually were coming true. You want to see corruption? You want to see a corrupt cabal? Look at CNN contributor Mr. [Andrew] McCabe who now goes back and we see exactly what they were doing.”
And now, as fate would have it, events have conspired to make Collins really go for the gold here. Remember how Georgia GOP senator Johnny Isakson announced his retirement a while back? Well, the retirement is imminent, and Republican Governor Brian Kemp—the guy who narrowly beat Stacey Abrams last fall because he got to decide what votes counted—is about to appoint an interim successor. Kemp is leaning toward a financial services executive named Kelly Loeffler. But Collins has thrown his pith helmet in the ring, too.
Trump doesn’t like Loeffler (they apparently had a frosty meeting at the White House right before Thanksgiving). The right-to-lifers don’t like her because she was on the board of a hospital where abortions were once performed or something like that. Why Kemp’s so hot on her I’m not sure. Maybe partly that she can self-finance, and partly that he thinks she can broaden the party’s appeal and keep those Trump-wary Cobb County women from drifting into the socialists’ greedy little hands.
Whatever the reason, what it adds up to is this. Loeffler’s appointment is said to be imminent. This means that this week may be Collins’ last chance to impress Trump and ratchet up the pressure on Kemp to appoint him. So don’t be surprised if Collins ends up making Nunes look like Lincoln.
The rest of them? The usual gang of idiots, as Bill Gaines used to say. Jim Jordan’s on this committee, too. So we’ll see more of his theatrics. He may strip down to his bare chest by the time this round is over. John Ratcliffe will be there for his second shot at auditioning for a future Cabinet job should Trump manage to steal another election. Matt Gaetz, for God’s sakes. You think it doesn’t get worse than Gaetz? Think again; Louie Gohmert will be there. And Martha Roby, that woman Hillary took to the house so thoroughly during the Benghazi hearings. (But hey, she’s not the only woman—there’s actually a second one, Debbie Lesko of Arizona, a build-the-wall Trumpist; they’re surely plotting behind each other’s back to see which one of them will end up being this week’s Elise Stefanik.)
Judiciary is well known on the House side of Capitol Hill as a committee that attracts a certain type. You can’t fundraise off it because it has no jurisdiction over corporate interests, military contractors, all that. And while it covers lots of important stuff—civil rights, voting rights, numerous issues of constitutional import—it doesn’t have a ton of power. Certainly it’s nothing like the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has all that power over court nominations.
So it tends to draw two kinds of people. One, people serious about constitutional and legal issues. Two, showboats who know that once in a blue moon, Judiciary is, as it were, the hottest ticket in town. And it wouldn’t have been too hard for someone like Gaetz, elected to Congress the same night Trump won the presidency, to place a bet on the possibility that all this might one day come to pass.
So there we are, with the curtain about to rise on an assemblage of sycophants and bootlickers who undoubtedly have a few parliamentary tricks up their sleeve to try and turn everything into as big a circus as possible. Jerry Nadler has to be as emotionless as Schiff in not letting these clowns turn the hearings into a shitshow, which is the only way Trump can win. Jerry, the legislative gods gave you a gavel. Use it.
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