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FOCUS: Containing the Catastrophe |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=39255"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Website</span></a>
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Monday, 08 October 2018 10:19 |
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Reich writes: "Anyone still unsure of how (or even whether) they'll vote in the midterms should consider this: All three branches of government are now under the control of one party, and that party is under the control of Donald J. Trump."
Former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)
Containing the Catastrophe
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Website
08 October 18
 nyone still unsure of how (or even whether) they’ll vote in the midterms should consider this: All three branches of government are now under the control of one party, and that party is under the control of Donald J. Trump.
With the addition of Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court is as firmly Republican as are the House and Senate.
Kavanaugh was revealed as a fierce partisan – not only the legal advisor who helped Kenneth Starr prosecute Bill Clinton and almost certainly guided George W. Bush’s use of torture, but also a nominee who believes “leftists” and Clinton sympathizers are out to get him.
He joins four other Republican-appointed jurists, almost as partisan. Thomas, Alito, and Roberts have never wavered from Republican orthodoxy. Neil Gorsuch, although without much track record on the Supreme Court to date, was a predictable conservative Republican vote on the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit – which is why the Heritage Foundation pushed for him and Trump appointed him.
Even under normal circumstances, when all three branches are under the control of the same party we get a lopsided government that doesn’t respond to the values of a large portion of the electorate.
But these are not normal circumstances. Donald Trump is President.
Need I remind you? Trump is a demagogue who doesn’t give a fig for democracy – who continuously and viciously attacks the free press, Democrats, immigrants, Muslims, black athletes exercising First Amendment rights, women claiming sexual harassment, anyone who criticizes or counters him; who treats the executive branch, including the Justice Department, like his own fiefdom, and brazenly profits off his office; who tells lies like other people breathe; and who might well have conspired with Vladimir Putin to swing the election his way.
Trump doesn’t even pretend to be the president of all the people. As he repeatedly makes clear in rallies and tweets, he is president of his “base.”
And his demagoguery is by now unconstrained in the White House. Having fired the few “adults” in his Cabinet, Trump is now on the loose (but for a few advisors who reportedly are trying to protect the nation from him).
All this would be bad enough even if the two other branches of government behaved as the framers of the Constitution expected, as checks and balances on a president. But under Republican leadership, they refuse to play this role when it comes to Trump.
House and Senate Republicans have morphed into Trump sycophants and toadies – intimidated, spineless, opportunistic. The few who have dared call him on his outrages aren’t running for reelection.
Some have distanced themselves from a few of his most incendiary tweets or racist rantings, but most are obedient lapdogs on everything else – including Trump’s reluctance to protect the integrity of our election system, his moves to prevent an investigation into Russian meddling, his trade wars, his attacks on NATO and the leaders of other democracies, his swooning over dictators, his cruelty toward asylum-seekers, and, in the Senate, his Supreme Court nominees.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has emerged as Trump’s most shameless lackey who puts party above nation and Trump above party. The House leadership is no better. House intelligence chair Devin Nunes is Trump’s chief flunky and apologist, but there are many others.
Now that Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court, you can forget about the Court constraining Trump, either.
Kavanaugh’s views of presidential power and executive privilege are so expansive he’d likely allow Trump to fire Mueller, shield himself from criminal prosecution, and even pardon himself. Kavanaugh’s Republican brethren on the Court would probably go along.
So how are the constitutional imperative of checks and balances to be salvaged, especially when they’re so urgently needed?
The only remedy is for voters to flip the House or Senate, or ideally both, on November 6th.
The likelihood of this happening is higher now with Kavanaugh on the Court and Trump so manifestly unchecked. Unless, that is, enough voters have become so demoralized and disillusioned they just give up.
If cynicism wins the day, Trump and those who would delight in the demise of American democracy (including, not incidentally, Putin) will get everything they want. They will have broken America.
For the sake of the values we hold dear – and of the institutions of our democracy that our forbearers relied on and our descendants will need – this cannot be allowed.
It is now time to place a firm check on this most unbalanced of presidents, and vote accordingly.
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The Brett Kavanaugh Travesty Will Breed a Formidable Backlash |
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Monday, 08 October 2018 08:43 |
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Abramson writes: "The forced confirmation of a conservative nominee who will tip the court much further to the right has outraged large swaths of the country."
'The angry crowds massed outside the US supreme court and the Capitol after the vote reflected a national outrage that is building.' (photo: Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images)
The Brett Kavanaugh Travesty Will Breed a Formidable Backlash
By Jill Abramson, Guardian UK
08 October 18
The forced confirmation of a conservative nominee who will tip the court much further to the right has outraged large swaths of the country
 he stain will be indelible. Brett Kavanaugh’s tenure on the US supreme court will always be tainted by the highly partisan and morally bankrupt process that forced through his US Senate confirmation.
The outcome was never really in doubt. Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell were determined to win from the first mention of Dr Christine Blasey Ford’s name. Her serious allegations of sexual misconduct against Judge Kavanaugh, which had convincing corroboration, including a second woman accuser, Deborah Ramirez, were never fully considered. Dr Ford did get to testify, but the hearing was stacked against her before it started. It was designed to end in a he said/she said stalemate. The FBI investigation was a joke. Dr Ford was demeaned not only by President Trump, who mocked her at a Mississippi rally, but by the entire confirmation process.
Republicans paid lip service to the need to “listen and hear from her”, but outsourced her questioning to a female sex crimes prosecutor who predictably concluded that Dr Ford’s charges were unproven.
The hasty swearing-in of Justice Kavanaugh on Saturday was another heavy-handed partisan move destined to inflame the bitterness created by a corrupt confirmation process. The angry crowds massed outside the US supreme court and the Capitol after the vote, the closest ever for a successful supreme court nominee, reflected a national outrage that is building. President Trump and the Republicans may brag that the Kavanaugh fight has motivated the Republican base for the midterm elections, but that effect will be short-term and fleeting. The forced confirmation of a conservative nominee who will tip the court much further to the right has outraged large swaths of the country, not only in coastal urban areas but among suburban women in red states, too. The backlash will build, becoming an important political force for the 2020 presidential campaign.
There were many low moments in the past week. In the flush of victory, President Trump actually had the nerve to praise the FBI, an agency he has lambasted, for its whitewash of Judge Kavanaugh.
Susan Collins’ grandstanding speech before announcing her yes vote suggested that Dr Ford was herself grandstanding by choosing to testify publicly, rather than in private in California. Her vote for Kavanaugh was never really in doubt, anyway.
Jeff Flake’s elevator conversion was another piece of Kabuki theater. He was momentarily cowed by the gutsy women who confronted him, but he, too, was always inclined to support Kavanaugh. After calling, belatedly, for an FBI investigation, he did nothing to ensure that it was either thorough or fair.
The confirmation process reeked of hypocrisy from the start. After blocking Merrick Garland, a moderate who President Obama chose, the Republicans had the nerve to claim the Democrats were the partisan ones, orchestrating a last-minute hit job on their nominee. There is not a scintilla of evidence that Dr Ford had any partisan motive.
At first, President Trump seemed genuinely rattled by Dr Ford’s accusations and kept a careful distance from his nominee. White House lawyers, too, were worried after Dr Ford’s credible testimony, but Judge Kavanaugh’s emotional and outraged denial reassured them, as did overnight polling. Within hours the president was unshackled, making fun of Dr Ford’s memory lapses, which were actually a sign of her honesty.
The confirmation vote was the final triumph of Donald McGahn, the White House counsel whose singular mission has been getting rightwing judges confirmed. But his legacy will also be stained by the rank brutality of this confirmation process. Mr McGahn learned hardball, partisan politics when he represented the Koch brothers.
The Kavanaugh nomination should have been pulled right after his histrionic testimony, so filled with baseless claims of victimhood. His outrageous performance put on display a temperament completely at odds with anything remotely judicial. After wildly claiming the Democrats were seeking revenge on behalf of the Clintons, how can anyone seriously think he can fairly decide any political cases that come before the court? His palpable anger made a mockery of his own earlier speech insisting that judges should always be impartial umpires.
The performance was so embarrassing and worrisome to some conservatives that Judge Kavanaugh had to admit error on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal.
Once again, Washington has proven to be an indecent place.
There were few silver linings, such as when thoughtful politicians, like Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, did decide to oppose Kavanaugh. The real moment for reconsideration should have come when former Justice John Paul Stevens, 98, in highly unusual remarks, said that Judge Kavanaugh’s openly expressed prejudices should disqualify him from serving on the court. It was extraordinary for a former justice to speak out against a nominee for the supreme court, but Steven’s rebuke barely registered in the partisan din.
The Kavanaugh confirmation process was worse in some ways than Clarence Thomas’s and the bitter legacy will be similar. Then, as now, conservatives were motivated to support their embattled nominee. The political passions of the moment favored Thomas’s confirmation. But a year later, public opinion had sharply turned and it was the fury of women that was felt at the ballot box in 1992.
It is beyond sad that the United States now has two justices sitting under the cloud of perjury and sexual misconduct. While the supreme court was once seen as standing above politics, it, too, is now justifiably seen as partisan. How can it not, when President Trump picks his nominees from pre-approved lists blessed by the conservative Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation?
It should not really surprise anyone that Washington proved to be immune to the #MeToo movement or that the White House and Senate so callously dismissed Dr Ford. Republicans play to win by exerting brute power. They have a new hero in Brett Kavanaugh.
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=38755"><span class="small">Eric Levitz, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Monday, 08 October 2018 08:38 |
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Levitz writes: "The Times investigation is, first and foremost, an indictment of an individual billionaire's claim to self-made status. But in moments, the report hints that Trump's approach to amassing wealth (like his approach to so much else) is just an unusually obscene variation on the one percent's standard operating procedure."
Bring Back the Guillotine. Bring Back Our IRS! (photo: Ted Thai/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)
The Times' Trump Exposé Is a Compelling Case for Class War
By Eric Levitz, New York Magazine
08 October 18
 n the summer of 2012, Barack Obama informed America’s capitalists that they were not the sole authors of their success. “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help,” the president explained. “Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The internet didn’t get invented on its own — government research created the internet so that all the companies could make money off the internet.”
The Republican donor class recoiled in horror at this declaration of “class war.” In fact, Obama’s suggestion that the Mitt Romneys of the world hadn’t built their fortunes off gumption, alone — but rather owed some portion of their wealth to the existence of publicly financed infrastructure, technology, schools, and law enforcement — struck Paul Ryan’s party as so manifestly outrageous and out-of-touch, they made a refutation of it the centerpiece of their national convention.
Four years later, the GOP’s billionaire standard-bearer developed a (characteristically) narcissistic variation on Romney’s mantra, telling crowds, over and over again, “I built what I built myself.”
On Monday, the New York Times revealed that this wasn’t just false in the Obamanian, “actually, social institutions made your entrepreneurial triumphs possible” sense, but in a much more literal one: Donald Trump “built what he built” with $413 million of his father’s money — much of which Fred Trump effectively stole from the federal Treasury.
Drawing on a “vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records,” the Times demonstrates that Trump leaned on his father’s largesse for the entirety of his career. Shortly after he was out of diapers, Donald Trump was “earning” $200,000 a year from the family business. By the time he was 8, the mogul was a millionaire. From that point until his father’s death, Donald used his dad as a piggy bank, financing a series of failed business ventures with “loans” from Fred that he only occasionally repaid. And when his father went up to the great, garish penthouse in the sky, Trump used a variety of schemes to cheat the U.S. government out of roughly $500 million in estate taxes.
That said, no small amount of the one percent’s wealth is unearned and ill-gotten in the most colloquial, uncontroversial sense. In the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances, America’s one-percenters reported an average inheritance of $1.47 million. And that figure is based on solely on how much one percenters admit to inheriting — which, if Trump is any guide, is likely orders of magnitude less than they actually inherited.
Meanwhile, Trump is hardly the only fat cat in the U.S. who’s been dining out on the Treasury Department’s rightful dimes. Thanks in no small part to the congressional GOP’s tireless efforts to defund the IRS’s enforcement operations, American business owners evade roughly $125 billion in taxes each year — enough revenue to finance, for example, universal public day care and a child allowance large enough to lift 3.2 million American kids out of poverty.
And wealthy individuals evade even more. As of 2013, the global superrich were storing between $21 trillion and $32 trillion worth of hidden financial assets in offshore tax havens, according to a study authored by James Henry, the former chief economist at McKinsey & Co.
In this age of right-wing “populism,” Republicans take pains to cultivate a downward-looking class resentment in white Middle America. Trump and his allies rail against “the illegals” who run roughshod over our nation’s laws, and the shiftless “takers” who live off the toil of the forgotten man and woman. But such invective better describes the residents of Mar-a-Lago, than those of ICE’s tent prisons, or NYCHA’s public housing. And there’s reason to think that Democrats would benefit from giving Trump’s reactionary plutocrats a taste of their own demagogic medicine.
In no small number of swing states and districts in the U.S., the balance of power is settled by cross-pressured white voters — ones whose (upward-looking) class resentments pull them toward Democrats, even as their racial, social, and cultural antipathies draw them toward the Trumpen proletariat. When Democrats appeal to the former resentments — as Obama did in 2012, and Congressman Conor Lamb did in western Pennsylvania earlier this year — they often win enough of his demographic to secure a majority coalition. When Hillary Clinton chose to deemphasize class antagonism in 2016, resentment of the rich became much less predictive of voting behavior, and Trump painted the Rust Belt red.
The best way to activate a political identity is to offer voters an outgroup they can define themselves against. When Trump decries the violence of homicidal illegals, and the treasonous “globalism” of the liberal elite, he activates his voters’ identities as proud U.S. citizens, and working-class rural dwellers. If Democrats want more white, non-coastal voters to cast their ballots on the basis of their resentment of the rich, then they’re going to have to wage a little class war.
And the true story of Trump’s fortune provides a promising line of attack: Lawless takers like our president and his corporate donors run roughshod over our nation’s laws, take American jobs by hoarding capital that could be productively invested in new enterprises, leech off taxpayers’ rightful money instead of working for a living, and violate the sanctity of our nation’s borders by moving their ill-gotten gains illegally across it.
Encouragingly, Democratic messaging appears to be moving in this general direction:
Beyond the electoral utility of this populist rhetoric, such an appeal could also lay the groundwork for a future Democratic government to tackle the scourges of wealth inequality and mass tax evasion, head-on. Now, any serious policy for combating the latter would have to be international in scope. But the United States is still the world’s most powerful nation. If our government made cracking down on tax havens its top priority in trade negotiations (as opposed to its current priority of making life-saving pharmaceuticals less affordable for the global poor), and at various world economic summits, it could surely prevent significant amounts of revenue from escaping the public coffers. Of course, doing so would likely require the U.S. to crack down on its own internal tax havens, and cease allowing foreign oligarchs to launder money through American real estate. But that’s no skin off the “forgotten man” or woman’s back.
Once the landmark, international agreement on tax enforcement is inked, Democrats can turn their attention to increasing funding for IRS enforcement (a big-government program that would genuinely pay for itself); raising taxes on capital gains, financial transactions, and estates; and equalizing the distribution of wealth on the front-end, through the establishment of a social wealth fund, baby bonds, or some other instrument that allows ordinary Americans to enjoy some of the passive wealth that we, as a society, collectively build.
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Nation's Criminals Ask for FBI Investigation Kavanaugh Just Got |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Sunday, 07 October 2018 13:44 |
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Borowitz writes: "In the latest controversy to envelop the Supreme Court nominee, criminals across the United States are demanding that their cases receive the kind of F.B.I. investigation that Brett Kavanaugh just got."
Brett Kavanaugh. (photo: Chip Domodevilla/Getty Images)
Nation's Criminals Ask for FBI Investigation Kavanaugh Just Got
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
07 October 18
 The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
n the latest controversy to envelop the Supreme Court nominee, criminals across the United States are demanding that their cases receive the kind of F.B.I. investigation that Brett Kavanaugh just got.
From coast to coast, perpetrators of crimes ranging from arson to bank robbery are arguing that, if the F.B.I. investigates them at all, such investigations should be extremely limited in scope.
Harland Dorrinson, a criminal lawyer in Cleveland, said that his clients have followed the Kavanaugh probe “with great interest” and see it as “tailor-made” for the crimes for which they stand accused.
“My clients are asking that the F.B.I. investigate them for no more than five days and only talk to the witnesses I designate,” Dorrinson said. “We think this could be a huge time saver for everybody.”
One of his clients, Denton Faldo, currently faces twenty criminal counts of cooking and selling meth, but wants the F.B.I. to investigate only an unrelated speeding violation.
“It’s important that the F.B.I. wrap up this investigation by Friday and release me from jail in time for the weekend,” Faldo said. “A man’s life is in tatters.”
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efore President Barack Obama authorized clandestine operations to defeat Syrian President Bashar al Assad in 2013, he asked the CIA to write the history of its secret wars. The classified document, say those who have read it, is a record of failure from Albania to Cuba to Angola to Nicaragua. Yet Obama went ahead with the covert program for Syria, which the CIA ran from Turkey and Jordan. Like its predecessors, Operation Timber Sycamore failed. It neither toppled Assad nor prevented Salafi jihadi fanatics from dominating the Syrian opposition. President Trump cancelled the program in July last year, but he is not immune to the siren call of another secret war – in his case, against Iran with as much chance of a positive outcome as Syria. 
