Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[Winstonm]

I understand all that, but why would Cohen continue to lie to protect Trump under the present circumstances?

 

Here is Cohen's tweeted response at the time the McClatchy story broke:

 

“I hear #Prague #Czech Republic is beautiful in the summertime,” Cohen tweeted. “I wouldn’t know as I have never been. #Mueller knows everything!”

 

"Mueller knows everything" seems to be the key.

 

As for the article, it makes assumptions but the basic report only states that a phone traced back to Michael Cohen pinged a cell tower "near or around Prague" in August or September of 2016. This definitely seems to be second or even third-sourced information otherwise the exact date would be known.

[johnu]

Speaking of Cohen: Michael Cohen pitched book claiming Trump not liar

 

:lol:

 

As the article said,

 

how he pitched the proposal praising Trump just weeks before the FBI raided his office

You must be pretty desperate to mention this since he was still employed by Dennison at the time. Do you think Dennison would give him a big bonus if he was pitching a book claiming Dennison was the biggest liar in the world. B-)

 

Look no further than presidential press secretaries who have to constantly outright lie and obfuscate since telling the truth would immediately get them fired.

[johnu]

Ooops ...

 

Yes the Steele Dossier. Many of the points have been confirmed, Cohen's Prague trip is now in question and only the Russians probably know for sure about the Pee tape.

 

Cohen has consistently denied he was in Prague from day 1. No change in that story. McClatchy reported on phone pings. There could be more to that story. We'll see what happens in future impeachment and criminal proceedings.

[johnu]

After a disasterous meeting with Kim Jong-un that accomplished nothing and even failed to last as long as scheduled, Dennison futilely attempts to spin the focus to other things,

 

Trump Brags He Freed Otto Warmbier, Blames Obama For North Korean Capture

 

Remember, I got Otto out along with three others. The previous Administration did nothing, and he was taken on their watch.

 

Hmm, Dennison "forgets" that 2 of the other 3 North Korea detainees were arrested while he was president. He is absolutely correct that the Obama administration failed to prevent those 2 arrests. Obama could have refused to leave office :rolleyes:

 

I can't fault Dennison over not remembering the "facts". There are too many lies to juggle for any one man, even a stable genius.

 

Dennison taking credit for "freeing" Warmbier who was unconscious and had suffered brain damage and died days after being returned to the US is just sick, but nothing unusual or out of the ordinary for Individual-1.

 

And defends Kim Jong-un's involvement in Warmbier's "condition",

 

“He (Kim) tells me he didn’t know about it, and I take him at his word,” Trump said."

 

Believable or not? Kim Jong-un has executed close family relatives in gruesome ways according to some reports. Fairly low level North Korea officials are going to fatally injure an American hostage without orders from above, and then keep silent about it for months? With hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of internal informants, no word of this ever got back to the Supreme Leader (I mean Kim, not Dennison)?

[Winstonm]

As to speaking in code, as Michael Cohen described the speech of Individual-1, I used to work in Las Vegas and was friendly with an ex-NYC cop of Sicilian (he made sure I didn't say Italian, but Sicilian) decent. He described the way a hit would be ordered by a cosa nostra boss. The boss might say, That kid Vito. He rides a motorcycle, right? Dangerous thing, a motorcycle. Be a shame if he had an accident. It would kill his old man. Then, later, he would walk up to someone close to the organization, stuff $5K or whatever into his pocket and say, make sure Vito doesn't get hurt. Capiche?

 

From there it was totally up to the guy who received the cash make certain the hit was carried out - and usually by handing it off to a third and maybe even fourth party.

 

That is why a witness from inside is critical.

[Winstonm]

Lawfare has an interesting article why Cohen's testimony about the Pecker president's knowledge of Wikileaks' e-mail drop is important.

 

As a result, even if one were to believe that the Trump campaign was ignorant of WikiLeaks’s role in damaging U.S. security, the Trump administration is presumably fully aware of what WikiLeaks is and does and has done. Which means that if the president has hidden his knowledge of communications his campaign was having with WikiLeaks or what his political surrogates were doing in the summer of 2016, he has actively thwarted what are likely ongoing counterintelligence investigations related to WikiLeaks and its role in facilitating the criminal acquisition and/or unauthorized release of years’ worth of highly sensitive and classified information.

[Winstonm]

What I found most disingenuous during Cohen's testimony was when Republicans pressed him on whether Trump explicitly asked him to lie, or pay off porn stars, etc., and then Cohen had to explain that Trump gave these instructions by code and implication. Congressmen are not aliens, unfamiliar with the way people communicate by innuendo and read between the lines.

 

I can understand that during court testimony a defense lawyer might use such tactics to try to raise doubt in the jury -- they have to find some way to get their client off. But this was not a criminal case, it's was a fact-finding session. No knowledgeable person should be unable to recognize such tactics that everyone knows about to avoid being overt. And it's ridiculous that a Congressman would waste valuable testimony time pretending that it doesn't exist.

 

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” (George Orwell, 1984)

[y66]

From The Return to Protectionism by Pablo D. Fajgelbaum, Pinelopi K. Goldberg, Patrick J. Kennedy and Amit K. Khandelwal via Tyler Cowen:

 

We analyze the short-run impacts of the 2018 trade war on the U.S. economy. We estimate import demand and export supply elasticities using changes in U.S. and retaliatory war tariffs over time. Imports from targeted countries decline 31.5% within products, while targeted U.S. exports fall 9.5%. We find complete pass-through of U.S. tariffs to variety-level import prices, and compute the aggregate and regional impacts of the war in a general equilibrium framework that matches these elasticities. Annual losses from higher costs of imports are $68.8 billion (0.37% of GDP). After accounting for higher tariff revenue and gains to domestic producers from higher prices, the aggregate welfare loss is $6.4 billion (0.03% of GDP). U.S. tariffs favored sectors located in politically competitive counties, suggesting an ex ante rationale for the tariffs, but retaliatory tariffs offset the benefits to these counties. Tradeable-sector workers in heavily Republican counties are the most negatively affected by the trade war.

[y66]

From The Oppression of the Supermajority by Tim Wu at NYT:

 

The defining political fact of our time is not polarization. It’s the thwarting of a largely unified public.

We are told that America is divided and polarized as never before. Yet when it comes to many important areas of policy, that simply isn’t true.

 

About 75 percent of Americans favor higher taxes for the ultrawealthy. The idea of a federal law that would guarantee paid maternity leave attracts 67 percent support. Eighty-three percent favor strong net neutrality rules for broadband, and more than 60 percent want stronger privacy laws. Seventy-one percent think we should be able to buy drugs imported from Canada, and 92 percent want Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices. The list goes on.

 

The defining political fact of our time is not polarization. It’s the inability of even large bipartisan majorities to get what they want on issues like these. Call it the oppression of the supermajority. Ignoring what most of the country wants — as much as demagogy and political divisiveness — is what is making the public so angry.

 

Some might counter that the thwarting of the popular will is not necessarily worrisome. For Congress to enact a proposal just because it is supported by a large majority, the argument goes, would amount to populism. The public, according to this way of thinking, is generally too ill informed to have its economic policy preferences taken seriously.

 

It is true that policymaking requires expertise. But I don’t think members of the public are demonstrating ignorance when they claim that drug prices are too high, taxes could be fairer, privacy laws are too weak and monopolies are too coddled.

 

Others remind us that the United States is a democratic republic, not a direct democracy, and that the Constitution was designed to modulate the extremes of majority rule. Majorities sometimes want things — like bans on books, or crackdowns on minorities — that they should not be given.

 

This is true. It is also true that a thoughtful process of democratic deliberation and compromise can yield better policy outcomes than merely following the majority’s will. But these considerations hardly describe our current situation. The invocation of constitutional principle has become an increasingly lame and embarrassing excuse. The framers of the Constitution, having experienced a popular revolution, were hardly recommending that the will of the majority be ignored. The Constitution sought to fine-tune majoritarian democracy, not to silence it.

 

The most obvious historical precedent for our times is the Progressive era. During the first decades of the 20th century, the American public voted for politicians who supported economic reforms like maximum-hour work laws and bans on child labor. But the Supreme Court struck down most of Congress’s economic legislation, deeming it unconstitutional.

 

In our era, it is primarily Congress that prevents popular laws from being passed or getting serious consideration. (Holding an occasional hearing does not count as “doing something.”) Entire categories of public policy options are effectively off-limits because of the combined influence of industry groups and donor interests. There is no principled defense of this state of affairs — and indeed, no one attempts to offer such a justification. Instead, legislative stagnation is cynically defended by those who benefit from it with an unconvincing invocation of the rigors of our system of checks and balances.

 

The president, because he is directly elected, might be thought an important remedy to this problem. And when running for office, Mr. Trump did gesture at his support for popular policies, promising to control drug prices, build public infrastructure and change trade policy to favor dispossessed workers. Yet since coming to power, Mr. Trump, with a few exceptions, like trade, has seemed to lose interest in what the broader public wants, focusing instead on polarizing issues like immigration that are not the public’s main concerns but the obsessions of a loud minority faction.

 

As the United States begins the process of choosing the next president and Congress, we need to talk more openly about which candidates are most likely to deliver the economic policies that the supermajority wants. Yes, the people can be wrong about things, but so too can experts, embedded industry groups and divisive political factions. It is not a concession to populism, but rather a respect for democracy, to suggest that two-thirds of the population should usually get what they ask for.

[kenberg]

From The Oppression of the Supermajority by Tim Wu at NYT:

 

 

 

 

 

 

A very interesting article perhaps leadnig to discussion. I think he might be oversimplifying. Take:

It is true that policymaking requires expertise. But I don't think members of the public are demonstrating ignorance when they claim that drug prices are too high, taxes could be fairer, privacy laws are too weak and monopolies are too coddled.

 

Others remind us that the United States is a democratic republic, not a direct democracy, and that the Constitution was designed to modulate the extremes of majority rule. Majorities sometimes want things — like bans on books, or crackdowns on minorities — that they should not be given.

Ok, he says majorities should sometimes get their way, and sometimes not. Polls can be tricky. If you ask people whether the rich should pay more taxes, they will say yes. They will always say yes. If you ask someone who is pretty well off but not rich whether s/he him/herself should pay more taxes, s/he will probably say no. But people needing help will disagree with him/her. I have no quarrel with the amount of taxes I pay, I might quarrel with how some of it is spent. I'm not sure about privacy laws. I stay off of Facebook, I consider that a no-brainer, but I am not sure what this privacy point is referring to. As to immigration, I guess I think it's a problem if eleven million people are here illegally. If you poll people, asking if children should be separated from parents if they are caught crossing the border illegally, a clear majority will say no. If you ask if any parent caught illegally crossing the border with a child should then be allowed to stay, I think a majority would also say no.

 

I would like every kid to have a bike, to have two parents guiding him/her, and to be within walking distance of a decent public school. I strongly suspect a large number of people agree with this and I think it would solve a lot of problems. How to promote it is another matter.

 

An added note about privacy. Because of the revised tax laws, my medical deductions, as well as other deductions, are now replaced by the standard deduction. So I no longer have to explain which doctors I go to how often, how far I drive to get there, what medicines I might take, and so on. Not that I think anyone is keeping a list, but I always found that a little personal.

[barmar]

An added note about privacy. Because of the revised tax laws, my medical deductions, as well as other deductions, are not replaced by the standard deduction.

I assume you meant to write "are now replaced". I really hate that these two words are so similar, it's probably one of the most common typos on the Internet.

So I no longer have to explain which doctors I go to how often, how far I drive to get there, what medicines I might take, and so on. Not that I think anyone is keeping a list, but I always found that a little personal.

I've thankfully never had enough medical expenses to be able to deduct them, but when I've gone through the TurboTax steps to see whether I did, it didn't seem like I had to give that many details. It just asked for totals of office visits, medical procedures, and prescription drugs. It never asked me to name the medicines.

 

But there are already pretty strong laws regarding medical privacy, as part of HIPAA, and there are financial privacy laws as well. The privacy concerns most people have are regarding their personal lives, their Internet activities, etc. Even if you don't use Facebook, it's pretty difficult to use the Internet without giving up quite a bit of privacy, because of the way advertisers (read "Google") track you. Facebook users generally understand that they're exposing everything they do to their "friends", but the Cambridge Analytica scandal took just about everyone by surprise. Similar things could be going on with Google, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

[y66]

When Wu says "I don't think members of the public are demonstrating ignorance when they claim that drug prices are too high, taxes could be fairer, privacy laws are too weak and monopolies are too coddled" I think he is intentionally understating the case.

 

U.S. drug prices are super high. Sarah Kliff at Vox explains.

 

Taxes are unfair. William Gates at Brookings explains: Although it improved the tax code in some ways, TCJA (a) will have minimal impact on long-term growth; (b) increases disparities in after-tax income by giving the largest relative and absolute tax cuts to high-income households; © will make most households worse off after taking into account plausible ways of financing the tax cut; (d) makes the government’s troublesome long-term fiscal status even worse; (e) makes the tax system more complex and more uncertain; (f) will make it harder for policymakers to fight future recessions; and (g) will reduce health insurance coverage, raise health insurance prices, and reduce charitable giving.

 

Privacy laws are too weak. Think Equifax (143 million credit histories hacked), Yahoo (3 billion email accounts compromised), Deep Root Analytics (personal details of nearly two hundred million U.S. voters breached), and Uber (57 million accounts breached).

 

Monopolies are being coddled:

 

TIn recent years, we have allowed unhealthy consolidations of hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry; accepted an extraordinarily concentrated banking industry, despite its repeated misfeasance; failed to prevent firms like Facebook from buying up their most effective competitors; allowed AT&T to reconsolidate after a well-deserved breakup in the 1980s; and the list goes on. Over the last two decades, more than 75 percent of United States industries have experienced an increase in concentration, while United States public markets have lost almost 50 percent of their publicly traded firms.

 

There is a direct link between concentration and the distortion of democratic process. As any undergraduate political science major could tell you, the more concentrated an industry — the fewer members it has — the easier it is to cooperate to achieve its political goals. A group like the middle class is hopelessly disorganized and has limited influence in Congress. But concentrated industries, like the pharmaceutical industry, find it easy to organize to take from the public for their own benefit. Consider the law preventing Medicare from negotiating for lower drug prices: That particular lobbying project cost the industry more than $100 million — but it returns some $15 billion a year in higher payments for its products.

 

We need to figure out how the classic antidote to bigness — the antitrust and other antimonopoly laws — might be recovered and updated to address the specific challenges of our time. For a start, Congress should pass a new Anti-Merger Act reasserting that it meant what it said in 1950, and create new levels of scrutiny for mega-mergers like the proposed union of T-Mobile and Sprint.

 

But we also need judges who better understand the political as well as economic goals of antitrust. We need prosecutors willing to bring big cases with the courage of trustbusters like Theodore Roosevelt, who brought to heel the empires of J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, and with the economic sophistication of the men and women who challenged AT&T and Microsoft in the 1980s and 1990s. Europe needs to do its part as well, blocking more mergers, especially those like Bayer’s recent acquisition of Monsanto that threaten to put entire global industries in just a few hands.

 

The United States seems to constantly forget its own traditions, to forget what this country at its best stands for. We forget that America pioneered a kind of law — antitrust — that in the words of Roosevelt would “teach the masters of the biggest corporations in the land that they were not, and would not be permitted to regard themselves as, above the law.” We have forgotten that antitrust law had more than an economic goal, that it was meant fundamentally as a kind of constitutional safeguard, a check against the political dangers of unaccountable private power.

 

As the lawyer and consumer advocate Robert Pitofsky warned in 1979, we must not forget the economic origins of totalitarianism, that “massively concentrated economic power, or state intervention induced by that level of concentration, is incompatible with liberal, constitutional democracy.”

[Winstonm]

When Wu says "I don't think members of the public are demonstrating ignorance when they claim that drug prices are too high, taxes could be fairer, privacy laws are too weak and monopolies are too coddled" I think he is intentionally understating the case.

 

U.S. drug prices are super high. Sarah Kliff at Vox explains.

 

Taxes are unfair. William Gates at Brookings explains: Although it improved the tax code in some ways, TCJA (a) will have minimal impact on long-term growth; (b) increases disparities in after-tax income by giving the largest relative and absolute tax cuts to high-income households; © will make most households worse off after taking into account plausible ways of financing the tax cut; (d) makes the government’s troublesome long-term fiscal status even worse; (e) makes the tax system more complex and more uncertain; (f) will make it harder for policymakers to fight future recessions; and (g) will reduce health insurance coverage, raise health insurance prices, and reduce charitable giving.

 

Privacy laws are too weak. Think Equifax (143 million credit histories hacked), Yahoo (3 billion email accounts compromised), Deep Root Analytics (personal details of nearly two hundred million U.S. voters breached), and Uber (57 million accounts breached).

 

Monopolies are being coddled:

 

This CBS News article about medicine costs is troubling:

 

The study found consumers could save anywhere from $100 to $5,400 a year just by price shopping. In Ohio, they found the same inhaler being sold for $11.99 at one pharmacy and $1,136 at a different pharmacy. In North Carolina, a generic medicine to lower cholesterol could cost $7 or $393 depending on where it was purchased.

 

"You expect like when you go to the bigger pharmacy you'll get a better deal, but our research found actually the smaller independent pharmacies really consistently offered cheaper options for the same medications," Garber said.

(my emphasis)

 

Note, the bastardization of Adam Smith's ideas has led to a reduction in the choices among small, independent pharmacies. In open market capitalism, monopolies can have no place. As Smith predicated his theories, local competition was his "magic hand".

[kenberg]

I assume you meant to write "are now replaced". I really hate that these two words are so similar, it's probably one of the most common typos on the Internet.

 

I've thankfully never had enough medical expenses to be able to deduct them, but when I've gone through the TurboTax steps to see whether I did, it didn't seem like I had to give that many details. It just asked for totals of office visits, medical procedures, and prescription drugs. It never asked me to name the medicines.

 

But there are already pretty strong laws regarding medical privacy, as part of HIPAA, and there are financial privacy laws as well. The privacy concerns most people have are regarding their personal lives, their Internet activities, etc. Even if you don't use Facebook, it's pretty difficult to use the Internet without giving up quite a bit of privacy, because of the way advertisers (read "Google") track you. Facebook users generally understand that they're exposing everything they do to their "friends", but the Cambridge Analytica scandal took just about everyone by surprise. Similar things could be going on with Google, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

 

Yes,"not"->"now".. Thanks.

As to the privacy, I was just jabbering a bit trying to get at just what the issue is. I get amused when, for example, Becky shops for a swimming suit online and the next time I log on to BBO there is an add for swimming suits. I suppose if I see an ad pop up for divorce lawyers I need to start worrying.

 

There are personal, commercial, and security aspects to privacy. I just wasn't sure what he was referring to. Generally I favor not looking into the details of someone else's life unless there is a really legitimate reason for doing so. But I imagine most everyone would say the same.

 

The article that I commented on is interesting but I do not give it a total thumbs up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[y66]

From Robin Wigglesworth at FT:

 

US companies handed their shareholders a record-shattering $1.25tn through dividends and buybacks last year, lifting the post-crisis bonanza to nearly $8tn, as debate mounts over whether company share repurchases should be curtailed.

 

Corporate America bought back $797.9bn of its own stock in 2018, according to preliminary figures from S&P Dow Jones Indices. Coupled with $456.3bn in dividend payments that lifted the overall shareholder returns by 33 per cent last year — thanks largely to swingeing tax cuts boosting profits.

 

The 2018 buyback and dividend spree brings the total since 2009 up to just under $8tn. That would, at current prices, be more than enough to buy all the major listed companies of the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Sweden. It is nearly five times the size of Russia’s annual economic output, and almost equal to the current value of all gold ever mined through history, according to the World Gold Council.

 

Buybacks in particular have become controversial, with some politicians arguing that companies are starving the economy of investment and eschewing wage increases even as they funnel tax cut-enhanced profits back to shareholders.

 

The justification for corporate buybacks is company has no better investment available. This may be true for any company from time to time. But what does it say when it is true for many companies year after year?

 

Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders have proposed legislation that would ban stock repurchases unless they first pay workers at least $15 an hour and offer better benefits, while Republican Senator Marco Rubio has advocated changing the tax code to scrap the tax benefits enjoyed by buybacks over dividends.

 

“The justification for corporate buybacks is company has no better investment available. This may be true for any company from time to time. But what does it say when it is true for many companies year after year?” Senator Rubio tweeted last month, pointing out that shareholder returns had tripled over the past four decades, even as corporate investments declined.

 

Buybacks have become an international phenomenon, with the global equity market last year shrinking at the fastest pace in at least two decades, according to research by Bernstein, as repurchases overwhelmed issuance of new shares and fresh listings.

 

US companies are the most active repurchasers of stock, but UK, European and Japanese companies are also on the whole spending more on buybacks than new ones are raising through raising fresh public issues, or established ones are raising through rights issues.

 

Most investors say buybacks serve a valuable function, as companies that see few investment opportunities should return their surplus cash to shareholders who might have more productive areas to put it to work.

 

Buybacks only return money to investors indirectly, by boosting stock prices, but dividend payments are taxed. While buybacks tend to be scaled up and down according to how much idle cash a company has, most companies are loath to ever cut a dividend, making it a less flexible tool to return money to shareholders.

 

Nonetheless, some investors admit they are perturbed by the scale of the buybacks bonanza, and the concurrent dearth of new companies going public, as it raises questions about the future of the public equity markets.

 

“We should pay close attention to it,” Mark Wiseman, global head of active equities at BlackRock, told the FT last year. “The joint stock company is a fantastic innovation . . . but when public markets become too complicated, too regulated, too expensive, too intermediated, too volatile . . . what happens to that source of efficient financing to fuel economic growth? Have we got, or are we getting to a point, where the public company is no longer able to do that?”

We should pay close attention to what it means that companies are no longer able to allocate capital as efficiently as in the past? The dude lives up to his name.

[barmar]

HR 1 'Respects The Voters, Gives Them Their Voices Back,' Rep. Sarbanes Says

The first big-ticket legislation from House Democrats heads to the floor this week. Its champion? Maryland Democratic Rep. John Sarbanes.

 

House Resolution 1. The so-called "For the People Act." It includes proposals such as public financing of campaigns, ending Citizens United, requiring presidential candidates to disclose tax returns, automatic voter registration, making Election Day a federal holiday and ending partisan gerrymandering.

 

According to Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, however, "a more accurate title would be 'For the People Who Want Democrats to Win Elections From Now On.' "

 

"The bill includes a laundry list of tired proposals designed to benefit the majority by tilting the playing field in their favor. It’s not a stretch to label many of these proposals radical," Jordan continued.

A democracy where elections are biased in favor of the majority? How radical!

[kenberg]

HR 1 'Respects The Voters, Gives Them Their Voices Back,' Rep. Sarbanes Says

 

A democracy where elections are biased in favor of the majority? How radical!

 

" designed to benefit the majority by tilting the playing field in their favor"

Did he think up this exquisite phrasing all by himself? Making election day a national holiday so everyone has a decent chance to vote. What will these radicals think of next?

 

[y66]

Guest post from Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

 

Tuesday’s flap was a decision by the Democratic National Committee to block Fox News from hosting debates for the party’s nomination contest. After a story in the New Yorker detailed close links between Fox and Donald Trump’s White House, the committee released a statement saying the network “is not in a position to host a fair and neutral debate for our candidates.”

 

This is a pretty simple story. But it’s important and you’re going to hear a lot of nonsense about it. So let’s get to it.

 

A crucial distinction here is between media bias and party-aligned media. Every news outlet has some sort of bias, often reflecting the sensibilities and priorities of reporters and editors, correspondents and producers. In the mainstream “neutral” media, there’s a code for what counts as news and how to report it, and that code is usually followed. So most daily newspapers and major networks adhere to strong norms that prize partisan neutrality, for instance, but also tend to favor coverage that lures a bigger audience and upholds various standards they think are important.

 

In practice, these norms often have ideological or partisan implications. But most researchers have found that overall the “neutral” media is neither liberal nor conservative. What it does have is a powerful bias toward mainstream opinion. For example, in the past the media felt free to disparage gays and lesbians; nowadays, it feels free to disparage those who discriminate against them. This shift had the effect of moving coverage from a conservative to a liberal bias (on this issue; there are others, such as budget deficits or the general superiority of capitalism, where things play out differently). But even if the research is wrong and there is an overall ideological bias, there’s strong evidence that it isn’t deliberate: The people in the newsrooms of mainstream outlets neither see themselves as part of a political party nor act as if they are.

 

All it takes is a quick look at actual party-aligned media – such as Daily Kos or the “Rush Limbaugh Show” – to spot the difference. Such outlets are not only cheerleaders for their team but also often help shape their party’s internal preferences and priorities. They can still offer good information and reporting. But the overall thrust is obviously partisan. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s just a different model than the “neutral” press.

 

Fox News, despite having plenty of quality journalists, is party-aligned pretty much all the time. That’s what Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article showed; frankly it’s not really a tough call. Some Democrats say they shouldn’t appear on Fox because it would validate behavior they find unacceptable. Others think they should so they can reach out to new voters. I don’t think either argument is convincing: They should avoid Fox News because it’s a Republican-aligned network, and therefore has a strong incentive to tilt coverage in a way that would help Republicans in the general election. (Just as a liberal site such as Talking Points Memo shouldn’t be trusted to host a Republican debate. In fact, Republicans canceled a debate on NBC in 2016 citing similar reasons.)

 

At this point, with Trump so close to the network, Fox’s bias is impossible to work around. The Democrats made the only call they could.

[Winstonm]

" designed to benefit the majority by tilting the playing field in their favor"

Did he think up this exquisite phrasing all by himself? Making election day a national holiday so everyone has a decent chance to vote. What will these radicals think of next?

 

The justification is flummoxing: to prevent Democrats from winning, i.e., to suppress the will of the majority of Americans who, polls show again and again, continue by a wide margin to support the ideas championed by progressives.

 

So, by eliminating the majority will and maintaining power, the goal is what again?

[y66]

From A Stanford psychologist on the art of avoiding assholes by Sean Iling at Vox:

 

Sean Illing - Before we can talk about surviving assholes, we need a proper definition of assholery. Can you give me one?

 

Robert Sutton, a psychology professor at Stanford University and author of a new book, The Asshole Survival Guide - There are a lot of academic definitions, but here’s how I define it: An asshole is someone who leaves us feeling demeaned, de-energized, disrespected, and/or oppressed. In other words, someone who makes you feel like dirt.

 

Sean - So an asshole is someone who doesn’t care about other people?

 

Robert - I would make a distinction between temporary and certified assholes, because all of us under the wrong conditions can be temporary assholes. I'm talking about somebody who is consistently this way, who consistently treats other people this way. I think it’s more complicated than simply saying an asshole is someone who doesn’t care about other people. In fact, some of them really do care — they want to make you feel hurt and upset, they take pleasure in it.

 

Sean - How many people looking for asshole survival strategies fail to notice they’re part of the asshole contingent?

 

Robert - A great question. The reason that I have this definition of assholes as somebody who makes you feel demeaned, de-energized, and so on is that you've got to take responsibility for the assholes in your life. Some people really are so thin-skinned that they think everyone is offending them when it's nothing personal. Then the other problem, which you're also implying, is because assholeness is so contagious, that if you're the kind of person where everywhere you go, the people objectively treat you like dirt and treat you worse than others, odds are you're doing something to prompt that punishment.

 

You can see this with Donald Trump. I don’t want to talk about him too much, but I think that’s part of what’s going on with him. If you insult virtually everybody, they're going to throw the ***** back at you.

 

Sean - Well, I’m not going to call the president an asshole here, but I will say that he’s checking all the asshole boxes you’ve set forth in this book.

 

Robert - Yeah, I won't call him one either, but I agree with your assessment.

 

Sean - What’s the surest way for someone to recognize that they’re being an asshole? I assume that most of us are occasionally assholes but prefer not to be.

 

Robert - Absolutely. There's some evidence in the book about how few people will say that they're assholes compared to how many people will say they're oppressed by assholes. There's a huge disparity. The main thing this research on self-awareness says is that the worst person to ask about someone’s assholeness is the asshole himself, and the best people to ask are the people around him or her who know that person at least fairly well. Bottom line: Assholes need someone in their life to tell them they’re being an asshole.

 

Sean - Being an asshole isn’t a great relationship-building strategy, but it does seem to correlate with professional success. I’m thinking of a famous asshole like Steve Jobs. Why is that?

 

Robert - Yes, if you are in a situation where it's an “I win, you lose” kind of game in the organization, then you don't need any cooperation from your competitors, and leaving people feeling like dirt might be worthwhile.

 

But there are two problems with that. One of them is that in most situations, you actually need collaboration. And we have plenty of research that shows that people who are givers rather than takers tend to do better in the long term. If you're playing a short-term game, then yeah, being an asshole might pay dividends — but I’m fairly convinced that doesn’t work in most situations.

 

Sean - And, to be fair, there are examples of assholes in business being upended by their own assholery. I’m thinking of Uber’s former CEO Travis Kalanick.

 

Robert - Right. There are typically costs for being an asshole in the professional world. When you’re climbing the corporate ladder, for example, you might be destroying the organization around you by driving out the best people, undermining their productivity, creativity, and so on.

 

Sean - Let’s get to the meat and potatoes of the book, which is about how to deal with assholes. So tell me, what’s your best asshole neutralization strategy?

 

Robert - First, it depends on how much power you have. And second, on how much time you’ve got. Those are the two questions that you have to answer before you can decide what to do. Assuming that you don't have Dirty Harry power or you’re not the CEO and can’t simply fire people you don’t like, I think you have to do two things in terms of strategy.

 

To begin with, you've got to build your case. You’ve also got to build a coalition. One of my mottos is that you have to know your assholes. We already talked about temporary versus certified assholes, but another distinction that's really important is that some people, and you mentioned this at the outset, some people are clueless assholes and don't realize they're jerks, but maybe they mean well.

 

In that situation, you can have backstage conversations, gently informing them that they’ve crossed a line. This is simple persuasive work. But if it’s somebody who is one of those Machiavellian assholes who is treating you like ***** because they believe that’s how to get ahead, in that case you’ve got to get the hell out of there if you can.

 

Sean - Let’s make this more concrete. Say you’re someone who’s struggling against an asshole boss. Obviously, there’s a power asymmetry, so it’s not as simple as telling him or her they’re an asshole. I imagine this is a common situation for many readers interested in this book. What’s your advice?

 

Robert - The first question is, can you quit or transfer to another department? If you’re stuck under a certified asshole, that means you’re suffering. And if that’s the case, you should get out — it’s that simple.

 

The second question is, if you must endure, are you going to fight or are you just going to take it? If you’re going to fight, you need a plan and a posse, you need to collect your evidence, and then you have to take your chances. In any case, I tell people to try to have as little contact as possible with assholes, and I offer strategies for doing that in the book.

 

One of the simplest — but admittedly hardest — things you can do is simply learn not to give a *****. Not giving a ***** takes the wind out of an asshole’s sails. When an asshole’s being nasty to you, ignore him. Think about when you’ll get home later that night and the fact that that asshole won’t be there and won’t matter. Think about how a year from now that asshole won’t be in your life, but he’ll still be the asshole he always was.

 

Sean - What if you’ve got an asshole as a peer or a colleague? Does that call for a different strategy?

 

Robert - Your chances of getting rid of them are higher because you have more power. But there’s a simpler way to handle a situation like this: just freeze them out. I’m in academia, which means there are lots of assholes we can’t fire, but we can absolutely freeze them out. We don’t have to invite them to events or gatherings. We can shun them politely and smile at them as necessary, but other than that we just ignore them. That’s how we deal with assholes.

 

But there are some situations in which you may have to be an asshole to survive because you’ve got no choice but to push back against them. This isn’t ideal, but if that’s what you have to do, then that’s what you do.

 

Sean - That dovetails nicely with my next question: Is it ever appropriate to out-asshole an asshole?

 

Robert - Sure. I try to see this from the perspective of the reader. If somebody has a long history of hurting you, and they have a Machiavellian personality, the only thing they understand is a display of force. If that’s the case, the best way to protect yourself is to fire back with everything you’ve got.

 

Look, some people deserve to be treated badly. More importantly, they need to be treated badly. Sometimes you have to speak to the asshole in the only language they understand, and that means you have to get your hands dirty.

 

Sean - Most of us don’t want to be assholes, but sometimes we are. When I wake up in the morning, for instance, I’m frequently a grumbling asshole. I don’t want to get up for this or that reason, so I roll out of bed and spend the first 30 minutes of my day stampeding around like an asshole. Not every day is like this, but it happens and it’s embarrassing. So I guess my question is, how we can better check our own asshole tendencies?

 

Robert - First, it sounds like you’re self-aware and that’s a good thing. But look, there are certain situations that turn most of us into jerks, and we have to be aware of that and work on developing techniques to calm ourselves down. Sleep deprivation, for example, is one of the most reliable ways to become an asshole. If you’re tired and in a hurry, you’re likely to be an asshole. If you have an excess of power in a situation, you’re at risk of becoming an asshole. One thing I’ve learned is that great differences in power bring out the worst in us.

 

Ultimately, you have to know yourself, be honest about yourself, and rely on people around you to tell you when you’re being an asshole. And when they are kind enough to tell you, listen.

 

 

Sean - Plato famously argued in The Republic that a tyrant, however powerful, ultimately suffers in the end by corrupting his own soul. You make a similar argument about assholes — that they might win at life but still fail as human beings.

 

Robert - Wow, I've never heard the Plato connection. That’s not a question I expect to hear from a journalist, but I guess that’s the former political theorist speaking. I have to say, I love that connection. We know that assholes have a corrosive effect on the people around them. There are longitudinal studies that demonstrate pretty clearly that people who, for example, work under assholes for many years end up being more depressed, more anxious, and less healthy.

 

So there’s compelling evidence that assholes are terrible human beings who do harm to other people. I think the way you described Plato’s analogy is far more elegant than anything I could say.

 

At the end of the day, if you’re an asshole, you’re a failure as a human being because you promote unnecessary suffering. What else is there to say?

So, like, what does it mean if you vote for an asshole for president?

[Winstonm]

The U.S. government at the moment is home to some incredibly vile human beings: Kirstjen Nielsen, child/parent-separator-in-chief - being at the top of that list. First runner-up: Wilbur Ross.

 

“Finally, and perhaps most egregiously, the evidence is clear that Secretary Ross’s rationale was pretextual—that is, that the real reason for his decision was something other than the sole reason he put forward in his Memorandum, namely enhancement of DOJ’s VRA enforcement efforts,” Judge Furman notes. “…that conclusion is supported by evidence in the Administrative Record alone, including evidence that Secretary Ross had made the decision to add the citizenship question well before DOJ requested its addition in December 2017.”

[y66]

Amazon-JPMorgan-Berkshire health care venture to be called Haven

[barmar]

" designed to benefit the majority by tilting the playing field in their favor"

Did he think up this exquisite phrasing all by himself? Making election day a national holiday so everyone has a decent chance to vote. What will these radicals think of next?

They do that in all those socialist countries in Europe. We wouldn't like to be like them.

[Winstonm]

Making America Great?

From NYT

By Stacy Cowley and Erica L. Green

March 7, 2019

 

 

When the Education Department approved a proposal by Dream Center, a Christian nonprofit with no experience in higher education, to buy a troubled chain of for-profit colleges, skeptics warned that the charity was unlikely to pull off the turnaround it promised.

 

What they didn’t foresee was just how quickly and catastrophically it would fail.

 

Barely a year after the takeover, dozens of Dream Center campuses are nearly out of money and may close as soon as Friday. More than a dozen others have been sold in the hope they can survive.

 

The affected schools — Argosy University, South University and the Art Institutes — have about 26,000 students in programs spanning associate degrees in dental hygiene and doctoral programs in law and psychology. Fourteen campuses, mostly Art Institute locations, have a new owner after a hastily arranged transfer involving private equity executives. More than 40 others are under the control of a court-appointed receiver who has accused school officials of trying to keep the doors open by taking millions of dollars earmarked for students.

 

The problems, arising amid the Trump administration’s broad efforts to deregulate the for-profit college industry, began almost immediately after Dream Center acquired the schools in 2017. The charity, started 25 years ago and affiliated with a Pentecostal megachurch in Los Angeles, has a nationwide network of outreach programs for problems like homelessness and domestic violence and said it planned to use the schools to fund its expansion.

 

Now its students — many with credits that cannot be easily transferred — are stuck in a meltdown. On Wednesday, members of the faculty at Argosy’s Chicago and Northern Virginia campuses told students that they had been fired and instructed to remove their belongings. In Phoenix, an unpaid landlord locked students out of their classrooms. In California, a dean advised students two months away from graduation not to invite family to attend from out of town.

 

“In less than a month, everything I have worked for the past three years has been taken from me,” said Jayne Kenney, who is pursuing her doctorate in clinical psychology at Argosy’s Chicago campus. “I am also conscious of the fact that what seems like the swift fall of an ax in less than one month has in reality been festering for years.”

 

The fall accelerated last week when the Education Department cut off federal student loan funds to Argosy after the court-appointed receiver said school officials had taken about $13 million owed to students at 22 campuses and used it for expenses like payroll. The students, who had borrowed extra money to cover things like rent and groceries, were forced to use food banks or skip classes for lack of bus fare.

 

Lauren Jackson, a single mother seeking a doctorate at the Illinois School of Professional Psychology, an Argosy school in Chicago, did not receive the roughly $10,000 she was due in January. She has been paying expenses for her and her 6-year-old daughter with borrowed money and GoFundMe donations.

 

On Tuesday, after three months of not paying her rent, she received an eviction notice.

 

“I didn’t want to go home and tell my baby that Mommy may not be a doctor,” said Ms. Jackson, whose school could close Friday. “Now I don’t want to go home and tell her that we don’t have a home.”

 

‘Bad for Everyone’

Led by Secretary Betsy DeVos, the Education Department has reversed an Obama-era crackdown on troubled vocational and career schools and allowed new and less-experienced entrants into the field.

 

“What seems like the swift fall of an ax in less than one month has in reality been festering for years,” said Jayne Kenney, a doctoral student at Argosy in Chicago.

 

“The industry was on its heels, but they’ve been given new life by the department under DeVos,” said Eileen Connor, the director of litigation at Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending.

 

Ms. DeVos, who invested in companies with ties to for-profit colleges before taking office, has made it an agency priority to unfetter for-profit schools by eliminating restrictions on them. She also allowed several for-profit schools to evade even those loosened rules by converting to nonprofits.

 

That’s what Dream Center wanted to do when it asked to buy the remains of Education Management Corporation.

 

Education Management, once the nation’s second-largest for-profit college operator, was struggling for survival after an investigation into its recruiting tactics resulted in a $200 million settlement in 2015. Despite those troubles, it had 65,000 students, and some of its schools maintained strong reputations.

 

Dream Center is connected to Angelus Temple, which was founded by Aimee Semple McPherson, a charismatic evangelist once portrayed by Faye Dunaway in a TV movie, “The Disappearance of Aimee.” It is affiliated with the Foursquare Church, an evangelical denomination with outposts in 146 countries.

 

Buying a chain of schools “aligns perfectly with our mission, which views education as a primary means of life transformation,” Randall Barton, the foundation’s managing director, said when Dream Center announced its plan.

[Winstonm]

For those keeping score, this is what a inverted treasury yield curve looks like - the shorter terms paying more than the longer terms. It does not a healthy sign for the economy going forward.

Yields

1 Mo. 2.45

2 Mo. 2.46

3 Mo. 2.45

6 Mo. 2.52

 

3 Yr. 2.44

5 Yr. 2.44