|
|
 |
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=38755"><span class="small">Eric Levitz, New York Magazine</span></a>
|
|
Saturday, 04 May 2019 11:02 |
|
Sanders writes: "Joe Biden is campaigning as an old-school labor liberal — one who’s uniquely qualified to win back disaffected Obama-to-Trump voters in the Midwest."
Bernie Sanders. (photo: Antonella Crescimbeni)
Can Bernie Sanders Make Joe Biden’s Anti-Labor Trade Record Matter?
By Eric Levitz, New York Magazine
04 May 19
 oe Biden is campaigning as an old-school labor liberal — one who’s uniquely qualified to win back disaffected Obama-to-Trump voters in the Midwest. Since launching his candidacy last week, the Democratic front-runner has collected endorsements from major unions and seen a bump in the polls — one fueled, in no small part, by Democratic voters’ faith in his “electability.”
Biden is also a longtime champion of NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and China’s admission into the World Trade Organization. The Democratic Party pursued all three of those trade policies over the near-unanimous opposition of organized labor — a point that Donald Trump took pains to emphasize when campaigning against Clintonism in 2016. In fact, the Republican nominee effectively used NAFTA as shorthand for the Democrats’ purported betrayal of its traditional working-class base. And those attacks, combined with his demagogic messaging on immigration, helped to reduce the salience of class resentment in the 2016 election, and send a critical mass of midwestern Obama voters into the GOP coalition.
Thus, it makes sense that Bernie Sanders is already focusing his fire on Biden’s “fair trade” bona fides. Casting the Democratic front-runner as a serial betrayer of industrial workers doesn’t just undermine Biden’s standing with a key interest group in the primary, but also challenges his claim to electability — which, polls show, is the No. 1 quality that Democratic voters are seeking in their standard-bearer this cycle.
Shortly after Biden launched his campaign at a union hall in Western Pennsylvania this week, Sanders went on CNN and assailed his rival’s views on trade. “When people take a look at my record versus Vice-President Biden’s record, I helped lead the fight against NAFTA; he voted for NAFTA,” Sanders said. “I helped lead the fight against [permanent normal trade relations] with China; he voted for it. I strongly opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership; he supported it.” The Vermont senator proceeded to release a video spotlighting this point, and a news release calling on his fellow Democratic candidates to embrace his trade agenda. When Biden suggested Wednesday that China was not a serious competitor to the United States, economically or geopolitically, Sanders immediately fired back, tweeting, “Since the China trade deal I voted against, America has lost over 3 million manufacturing jobs. It’s wrong to pretend that China isn’t one of our major economic competitors. When we are in the White House we will win that competition by fixing our trade policies.”
Sanders is hardly alone in seeing trade as Biden’s Achilles’ heel. As Politico notes, a wide variety of progressive activists and organizations, including some aligned with Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, are mounting a similar line of attack.
“There are many reasons Joe Biden is the least electable Democrat our side could possibly nominate,” said Adam Green, the co-founder of Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which supports Elizabeth Warren. “Being seen as cozy with big corporations and loving to cut backroom deals with political insiders are two of those reasons — and they are exactly what trade deals like the TPP represent. That’s the opposite of the outsider zeitgeist Trump tapped into in 2016 and will try to repeat in 2020.”
This argument appears sound enough on the merits. In current polling, Biden does look like the strongest Democratic candidate against Trump, not least because of his relatively high support among whites without college degrees. But it is true that he boasts the very same trade record — and cozy relations with financial-industry titans — that Trump used to mitigate the Democrats’ advantage among economically liberal, working-class voters.
What’s more, if history is any guide, no one wants to run as a champion of the existing trade system in a Democratic presidential primary, especially those who support said system. In 2008, Obama assailed NAFTA as “devastating” and a “big mistake.” In 2016, Hillary Clinton disavowed Obama’s TPP, a trade deal she had previously hailed as “the gold standard in trade agreements.” Ostensibly, Clinton and Obama did not adopt these positions for kicks, but rather, for electoral advantage.
But this time might be different. As the Republican Party’s standard-bearer has claimed the mantle of protectionism, negative partisanship has led a significant number of Democrats to embrace the opposite view. In 2009, 34 percent of Democratic voters told Pew Research that free-trade agreements had “generally been a bad thing for this country”; last year, that figure fell to 19 percent.
Meanwhile, Trump’s tariffs have spurred a backlash in several midwestern states, where agricultural interests have lost more from the president’s policies than industrial workers have gained. It’s possible that these trends will reduce the potency of anti-NAFTA arguments in the Democratic primary, while the same Obama nostalgia that’s propelling Biden’s candidacy will take the bite out of attacks on the TPP.
That said, it’s quite possible that Democratic voters will be responsive to a critique of Biden’s trade record on electability grounds, even if they aren’t on substantive ones. Surveys suggest a large majority of Democrats are looking for the candidate who’d be most likely to defeat Trump, not the one who best represents their own views. If Sanders can convince these voters that Biden’s support of NAFTA makes him a less-than-ideal general-election candidate, then they may start viewing Uncle Joe’s other betrayals of core Democratic constituencies — from consumers to African-Americans to feminists to retirees — in a less forgiving light.
 |
|
FOCUS: Is This Why Trump Is So Scared of the Deutsche Bank Investigation? |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=44994"><span class="small">Bess Levin, Vanity Fair</span></a>
|
|
Saturday, 04 May 2019 10:59 |
|
Levin writes: "Of all the investigations into his dubious behavior, the one that most sets Donald Trump’s hair on fire involves Deutsche Bank."
'The German lender is famous for being the only institution that would loan the ex-real-estate developer money while everyone else treated him like the pariah he was.' (photo: Krisztian Bocsi/Getty Images)
Is This Why Trump Is So Scared of the Deutsche Bank Investigation?
By Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
04 May 19
Some at the firm have reportedly seen the president’s holiest of holies: his elusive tax returns.
 f all the investigations into his dubious behavior, the one that most sets Donald Trump’s hair on fire involves Deutsche Bank. The German lender is famous for being the only institution that would loan the ex-real-estate developer money while everyone else treated him like the pariah he was, and presumably knows more about his finances than anyone outside the Trump Organization. Earlier this week, the president, his company, and his three eldest children sued Deutsche (and Capital One) in an effort to stop the banks from responding to congressional subpoenas, and a new report from Bloomberg hints at why Trump seems particularly antsy about the idea of Germans telling Democrats everything they know: in addition to decades’ worth of information concerning his financial transactions, some people inside the firm have actually seen his elusive tax returns.
Per Bloomberg, in 2012, the Trump Organization was trying to obtain loans from the bank for the Trump National Doral Golf Club in Florida and the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago. In the wake of the financial crisis, Trump had defaulted on a loan from the bank for the Chicago property, and in an absurd move even for him, filed a lawsuit against Deutsche, claiming it had caused the global financial crisis and “engaged in predatory lending against him.” (The bank promptly countersued, and the case was eventually settled.) Having been burned by the bankruptcy king in the past, Deutsche initially balked at the idea of lending the Trump Organization its requested $100 million, at which point Ivanka Trump, the point person on the discussions, suggested her father would guarantee the loans with his personal assets.
That got Deutsche listening, but it insisted on performing due diligence first. And because Trump’s tax returns apparently contain information on par with the Pentagon Papers, their appraisal was carried out in a slightly unorthodox fashion. According to Bloomberg, the bank sent a team to the office of the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, who “allowed the bankers to see relevant parts of Trump’s tax returns and take notes.” However, the bankers “weren’t allowed to make copies” of any of the records to take with them. It’s almost as though the returns contain information that might make Trump look bad!
While Democrats have requested that the Internal Revenue Service turn over the president’s filings, thus far their efforts have been rebuffed by loyal stooge Steven Mnuchin, who appears prepared to swallow six years’ worth of tax documents before letting lawmakers get their hands on them. As Bloomberg notes, “even if the I.R.S. is not forthcoming with the presidential tax returns, House Democrats might get key information from bankers’ notes if their subpoena of Deutsche Bank is ultimately successful.”
Last month, a lengthy story by reporter David Enrich shed some light on the long, occasionally fraught relationship between Trump and the German bank, whose “ravenous appetite for risk” translated to happily lending money to the former real-estate developer when no one else on Wall Street would, and going along with his vast financial lies. For instance, in 2004, Trump asked the bank’s commercial real-estate group to lend him more than $500 million to build his 92-story skyscraper in Chicago; it did, but not before employees concluded he was majorly inflating his net worth, and were told he’d “worked with people in the construction industry connected to organized crime.” Ten years later, when Trump was trying to buy the Buffalo Bills and needed to prove he could pull off a transaction that could exceed $1 billion, the bank agreed to vouch that his net worth was $8.7 billion—a number his former fixer, Michael Cohen, told lawmakers was a wild exaggeration.
On Thursday, congressional Democrats agreed to postpone their deadline for Deutsche and Capital One to respond with the requested information until after Judge Edgardo Ramos rules on Trump’s suit. The hearing is set for May 22, so expect plenty of unhinged ravings between now and then!
Travis Kalanick will not be ringing the opening bell when the company he co-founded goes public
No hard feelings, it’s just that management doesn’t want people thinking of discrimination, sexual harassment, fights with drivers, verbal abuse, and software tools to evade law enforcement when they think of Uber:
As a former C.E.O. and current board member, Mr. Kalanick had asked to take part in the hallowed New York Stock Exchange tradition of ringing the opening bell on May 10, the day Uber shares are slated to begin trading. He also wanted to bring his father, Donald Kalanick. It would be close to the second anniversary of the accidental death of Travis Kalanick’s mother, and of the dramatic boardroom coup that ousted him as boss. His presence on the exchange’s iconic balcony could make both Mr. Kalanick and the corporation appear resilient.
[Dara] Khosrowshahi wasn’t having it. The original plan was to fill the rafters with Uber’s earliest employees and longest-tenured drivers. Moreover, some people at the top of the company felt that Mr. Kalanick was still a toxic liability, and that Uber should keep him at maximum distance as it tried to convince constituents that employees truly abided by a new motto: “Do the right thing. Period.” Mr. Kalanick’s appearance would unavoidably rekindle public memories of just how much of a disaster his final year was.
Still, Kalanick will probably recover from the offense, or if not, will have a truckload of money to comfort him when he thinks about it and feels sad; according to The New York Times, he’s set to make $5.9 billion on paper when Uber goes public.
John Kelly finds new work
He’s parlayed the skills he honed as chief of staff into a more lucrative though equally evil gig. Per CBS News:
In April, protesters outside the nation’s largest facility for unaccompanied migrant children noticed a familiar face enter the massive, fenced site in Homestead, Florida: former White House chief of staff John Kelly. Soon after, a local television station recorded footage of him riding on the back of a golf cart as he toured the grounds. It wasn't clear why he was there, but Friday, Caliburn International confirmed to CBS News that Kelly had joined its board of directors. Caliburn is the parent company of Comprehensive Health Services, which operates Homestead and three other shelters for unaccompanied migrant children in Texas.
In the past year, Comprehensive Health Services, the only private company operating shelters, became one of the most dominant players in the industry. Last August, it secured three licenses for facilities in Texas, totaling 500 beds, and in December, the Homestead facility began expanding from a capacity of 1,250 beds to 3,200. Located on several acres of federal land adjacent to an Air Reserve Base, the facility is the nation’s only site not subject to routine inspections by state child-welfare experts. . . . Prior to joining the Trump administration in January 2017, Kelly had been on the board of advisers of DC Capital Partners, an investment firm that now owns Caliburn.
Perhaps free agent Kirstjen Nielsen can join him!
|
|
|
All of the Impeachable Offenses |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=50715"><span class="small">Quinta Jurecic, The Atlantic</span></a>
|
|
Saturday, 04 May 2019 08:30 |
|
Jurecic writes: "Ever since the release of the Mueller report, old-guard Democrats have held back on the question of impeachment."
Protesters demanding the impeachment of Donald Trump rally outside Trump Tower. (photo: Erik McGregor/Getty Images)
All of the Impeachable Offenses
By Quinta Jurecic, The Atlantic
04 May 19
 ver since the release of the Mueller report, old-guard Democrats have held back on the question of impeachment. Though House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer walked back his comments that impeachment was “not worthwhile,” he set the tone for his party’s skepticism of what, Democratic leaders warn, could be a politically risky move. Meanwhile, the president announced on Twitter, “Only high crimes and misdemeanors can lead to impeachment. There were no crimes by me (No Collusion, No Obstruction), so you can’t impeach.”
Unsurprisingly, Trump is wrong—and Democrats reluctant to impeach on the basis of the Mueller report alone should consider that the report only added to a preexisting pile of potential “high crimes and misdemeanors.” A large majority of scholars agree that impeachable offenses are not limited by the criminal code; the best definition of impeachable offense comes from the legal scholar Charles Black, who argued in 1974 that the president may be impeached for “offenses (1) which are extremely serious, (2) which in some way corrupt or subvert the political and governmental process, and (3) which are plainly wrong in themselves to a person of honor, or to a good citizen, regardless of words on the statute books.”
Even setting that aside, the Mueller report sets out substantial evidence that Trump criminally obstructed justice in at least some instances. The former Justice Department and FBI official Chuck Rosenberg has said that, in the absence of the Justice Department guidelines against the indictment of a sitting president, as a prosecutor, he would have brought an obstruction case against Trump. Former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates have made similar arguments. And while lawbreaking is not required for impeachment, it is notable both that all three serious efforts to impeach a president in U.S. history have involved allegations of legal violations and that two of those three instances—against Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton—concerned criminal behavior, specifically obstruction of justice.
But any discussion of impeachment that focuses on the Mueller report alone, much less the possible criminal conduct detailed in the report, risks leaving out the obvious. The potentially impeachable offenses committed by the president go far, far beyond the scope of what Mueller investigated. Any impeachment inquiry should consider that conduct as well.
For example, Benjamin Wittes and Jane Chong, my colleagues at Lawfare, argued way back in August 2017 that Trump’s pardon of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio merited consideration in an impeachment inquiry. Arpaio, remember, was convicted of criminal contempt for his refusal to cease detaining people only on the suspicion that they had flouted immigration law. According to The Washington Post, Trump first asked then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions whether the Justice Department could drop the prosecution of Arpaio, then decided to pardon him if Arpaio was convicted at trial. How else to describe this process but as abuse of power?
What about his recent instructions to Border Patrol officers, as reported by CNN, to disobey the courts in turning back asylum seekers? His repeated calls for the criminal prosecution of his political rivals? His demands for the U.S. Postal Service to dramatically raise rates for shipping Amazon packages, for no obvious reason other than to punish Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos? His rescinding of the security clearances of a number of his high-profile critics, including former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan? Or consider his repeated decisions to overrule his own intelligence agencies in declassifying sensitive information related to the Russia investigation in order to score political points, with apparent disregard for the potential consequences to the country.
Chong and Wittes have pointed to another category of potential offenses: failures of moral leadership. Here, too, the list is so long as to be impossible to reproduce in a paragraph, but to name a few: Trump’s attacks on the press as “fake news” and “the enemy of the people”; his declaration that the white nationalists and neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville were “very fine people;” his description of Haiti, El Salvador, and various African nations as “shithole countries;” his repeated—and arguably libelous—abuse of private citizens as having committed treason; his lies—which, by The Washington Post’s count, now number more than 10,000.
Some of these instances more obviously fit within the description of “high crimes and misdemeanors” than others. One might object that many of Trump’s actions, ugly and petty though they might be, are not “extremely serious,” as Black put it—and, indeed, Black wrote that “general lowness and shabbiness ought not to be enough.” Still, I’m inclined to agree with Keith Whittington, who has suggested that high crimes and misdemeanors might, at a certain point, be treated cumulatively. “If Republican senators were forced to examine each such charge in turn,” Whittington wrote in August, “they might well find the president’s actions disquieting and misguided and yet not impeachable. The accumulation of such charges might, however, push the case for impeachment and removal over the line.”
Any discussion of “cumulative” high crimes and misdemeanors likewise has to include Trump’s conduct regarding Stormy Daniels. Talk of impeachment spiked in November 2018 after prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York alleged that Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen had acted “in coordination with and at the direction of” his then client in what prosecutors charged was a criminal effort to violate campaign-finance law: Soon-to-be House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler said that Trump’s involvement was “likely impeachable,” though he distinguished between an impeachable offense and an offense meriting impeachment.
In December, Bob Bauer and I argued that the Daniels payments are well within the scope of conduct that should be investigated as part of an impeachment inquiry. The case is somewhat complicated in that the bulk of the conduct at issue took place before Trump became president. But Trump’s continued involvement in coordinating payments to Cohen well into his time in office, and his insistence on lying to the public about the depth of that involvement and the initial relationship with Daniels, are relevant in evaluating the president’s failure as a leader. Consider Cohen’s account, in sworn testimony before Congress, that Trump was signing and mailing checks to refund his fixer for an illegal campaign contribution while sitting in the White House. And if preelection conduct is within the realm of what should be considered impeachable, then perhaps Trump’s involvement in his campaign’s efforts to benefit from Russian election interference—as detailed in the Mueller report—also constitutes an impeachable offense.
Taken as a whole, the picture is of a man who has no concept of the public interest as separate from his own, who has no ability to lead the country morally or even interest in doing so, who has repeatedly breached, in ways large and small, his obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” and “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.” Notably, Congress has pointed to violations of the oath of office in impeachment proceedings against Clinton, Nixon, and Andrew Johnson.
Meanwhile, the catalog of presidential misconduct did not stop at the release of the Mueller report. Trump recently declared his administration’s plans to resist “all the subpoenas” headed his way from Congress, and has taken the unprecedented step of suing, in his personal capacity, House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings over a subpoena to Trump’s accounting firm. In 1974, along with articles of impeachment for abuse of power and obstruction of justice, the House Judiciary Committee recommended Nixon’s impeachment on the basis that he had “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.” The Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden recently suggested that Congress would have “no alternative but to go to … impeachment” if Trump continues to stonewall congressional investigations.
Like Trump’s cowed performance beside Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and his initial comments in defense of white supremacists after Charlottesville, the Mueller report—as a chronicle of presidential misconduct—adds useful information, but also clarifies and distills what was already known to be true. Reading the report, I was unable to shake a sense of naive amazement that this person really is the president of the United States. Part of the impeachment process—advocating for an inquiry as citizens, and conducting one on Congress’s part—is the work of maintaining this amazement and horror. It is a project of refusing to accept what has already, somehow, become acceptable.
|
|
|
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
|
|
Friday, 03 May 2019 13:23 |
|
Borowitz writes: "Attorney General William Barr on Thursday proved unable to give honest answers to a drive-thru window at a Bethesda, Maryland, Arby’s restaurant."
Attorney General William Barr. (photo: Erik S. Lesser/Shutterstock)
Barr Unable to Give Honest Answer to Drive-Thru Window at Arby’s
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
03 May 19
 ttorney General William Barr on Thursday proved unable to give honest answers to a drive-thru window at a Bethesda, Maryland, Arby’s restaurant.
Barr, who drove up to the window just after noon, appeared evasive and halting after the drive-thru attendant asked to take his order.
“I cannot recall what I would like to order at this time,” Barr said, according to the attendant.
When pressed repeatedly to name a sandwich, drink, or side order that he preferred, Barr stonewalled, the attendant said.
“The questions I was asking him couldn’t have been clearer,” the attendant told reporters. “I asked him if he wanted to order a Smokehouse Brisket sandwich. He refused to give me a yes-or-no answer.”
“I came away feeling that he had been less than candid,” the attendant said.
Speaking through an official spokesperson later in the day, Barr said that he would never appear at Arby’s again.
|
|
’m a man of considerable loyalty. I stick with a pair of shoes for years, and I still use Ipana toothpaste because it sponsored Fred Allen on the radio, though sometimes I buy Colgate in support of higher education. But I’m all done with the friend who invited me to dinner last month. He is off my list for good.
