Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[Winstonm]

From Katherine Stewart and Caroline Fredrickson at NYT:

 

 

This guy is way scarier than Trump.

 

Who would have thought Christians would become the enemy, because they have such a great history of tolerance - if you discount a few small details like the Crusades and Inquisitions. ;)

[y66]

The great American tax ripoff of 2017 continues.

 

In Trumpworld, corporate malfeasance is just another word for job creation.

[y66]

From Joe Nocera at Bloomberg:

 

Twenty years ago, writing in Fortune magazine, I dubbed the 1990s “the Nasdaq Decade.” And why not? Practically from the moment the browser company Netscape went public, the tech stocks that dominated the Nasdaq stock exchange only went up. Cisco Systems Inc. rose 125,000% in the 1990s. Dell Technologies Inc. was up 72,000%. Shares of EToys quadrupled on their first day of trading in 1999. The Nasdaq itself rose 685%.

 

But a few months after the decade ended, the internet bubble burst, and by 2002 the Nasdaq had declined 78%. The tech highfliers that had soared in the 1990s either went bankrupt or their valuations crashed back to earth.

 

Financially speaking, the 2010s have been characterized by corporate mergers, aggressive activist investors, out-of-control CEO pay and “maximizing shareholder value.” But more than anything, it has been a decade awash in private equity deals. I therefore dub it the private equity decade. And I’ll admit that I’m rooting for private equity to get a comeuppance similar to the one that took place in tech after the Nasdaq decade.

 

Private equity deals have been part of the financial landscape for decades, of course. Who can forget KKR’s $25 billion leveraged buyout (as they were called then) of RJR Nabisco in the late 1980s — a deal memorialized in the classic book “Barbarians at the Gate?” Indeed, some of the biggest private equity deals on record — TXU Energy, First Data, Alltel, Hilton Worldwide — took place in the frothy years before the 2008 financial crisis.

 

What was different in the 2010s was less the size of the deals as their proliferation. In 2009, private equity firms completed 1,927 deals worth $142 billion, according to the financial data firm Pitchbook. By 2018, there were 5,180 private equity deals worth $727 billion.

 

Why so many deals? One reason is more firms are holding more capital than they know what to do with; Bain & Co. recently estimated that private equity firms have a staggering $2 trillion in “dry powder” that they need to deploy. But another reason is that there just aren’t as many big deals available as there used to be, so firms have had to move down the food chain to find companies willing to be bought out. Many, if not most, of the deals in the past few years have been for less than $500 million. I half expect the bodega down the street to be bought out.

 

What has also become clear this decade is the high-minded rationale the private equity industry once used to justify its deals has largely evaporated. You don’t hear much anymore about how taking a company private will remove short-term incentives, impose necessary restructuring, yadda, yadda, yadda.

 

The main thing private equity has done this decade is to pile debt onto companies — imposing repayment costs while pulling out fees and dividends that have no bearing on what the private equity firm has actually done. Famously, Toys “R” Us went bankrupt because it was buried in private equity debt. So did Gymboree, Sports Authority, Linens ’n Things, and many others. In 2017, when the Limited announced it was shutting down its 250 stores — and throwing its employees out of work — the private equity firm that owned it, Sun Capital Partners Inc., reported to investors that it had nearly doubled its money, thanks to the dividends and fees it had paid itself.

 

One private equity skeptic, Daniel Rasmussen, conducted a study to see the effect private equity firms had on the companies they bought. Using a database of 390 deals with more than $700 billion in enterprise value, he found that:

 

In 54 percent of the transactions we examined, revenue growth slowed. In 45 percent, margins contracted. And in 55 percent, capex spending as a percentage of sales declined. Most private equity firms are cutting long-term investments, not increasing them, resulting in slower growth, not faster growth.

 

Instead, he continued, there is a new paradigm for understanding the PE model:

 

As an industry, PE firms take control of businesses to increase debt and redirect spending from capital expenditures and other forms of investment toward paying down that debt. As a result, or in tandem, the growth of the business slows. That is a simple, structural change, not a grand shift in strategy or a change that really requires any expertise in management.

 

In other words, whatever larger purpose private equity might have once had, the 2010s exposed an industry that cared about lining its own pockets — often at the expense of the companies it bought. It has become dealmaking for its own sake.

 

It seems to me that there are two likely consequences for the devolution of private equity in this decade. The first is that when the business cycle finally turns, the consequences for the thousands of companies carrying private equity debt are likely to be severe. As increasing amounts of capital have chased deals this decade, purchase prices have increased drastically. Rasmussen reports that in 2013, private equity deals were done at an average of 8.9 times adjusted earnings. Today, that number has risen to 11 times adjusted earnings. That means the debt loads are becoming heavier.

 

The second consequence is political. If the Democrats take the Senate or the presidency — or both — the private equity model is going to be under sustained attack. Titans like Henry Kravis and Steve Schwarzman will be hauled before Congress and berated for the industry’s practices. Already, Elizabeth Warren has put forth a proposal to rein in private equity — she calls it the “Stop Wall Street Looting Act.” Among other things, it would give workers rights when a bankruptcy takes place and would put private equity firms “on the hook for the debts of companies they buy.”

 

One other thing: In this decade of growing income inequality, nothing symbolized the gap between the haves and the have-nots like private equity. When it can walk away enriched while companies it owns go bankrupt — is that really the way capitalism is supposed to work? Perhaps the 2020s will be the decade when it starts to work for everyone again.

Talk about finding hope again.

[barmar]

The great American tax ripoff of 2017 continues.

 

In Trumpworld, corporate malfeasance is just another word for job creation.

And remember when they said that the tax breaks would pay for themselves? They aren't.

[y66]

From Joe Biden Confronts a Demagogue and a Dilemma by Francis Wilkinson at Bloomberg:

 

The New York Times headline, dated December 27, was clear: “Joe Biden Says He’d Defy Subpoena to Testify in Trump’s Senate Trial.”

 

The New York Times headline, above an Associated Press story, dated the next day, December 28, was fuzzier: “Biden Leaves it Unclear if He Would Honor Senate Subpoena.”

 

One day later, December 29, the New York Times headline reached a possibly final — but who can say? — conclusion after the meandering journey of the preceding days: “Joe Biden Says He Would Comply With a Senate Subpoena, Reversing Course.”

 

The road to the White House may be winding, but that’s a lot of swerving.

 

President Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear that he intends to keep smearing Biden, falsely alleging that the Democrat abused his power as vice president to insulate Biden’s son and his son’s Ukrainian employer from a criminal investigation. (That Trump still lacks a shred of evidence for this charge, months after deploying wide swaths of the executive branch to advance it, is strong indication that no evidence exists or ever will.) In addition to pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden, with the intent of spritzing his smear with a vapor of legitimacy, Trump has publicly requested that China investigate Biden as well.

 

To beat these scurrilous attacks, the former vice president needs more than consistent headlines; he needs a steady strategy. So here’s the question for armchair political strategists: Which one of the three distinct positions announced in the headlines above offers Biden the best chance of defanging Trump?

 

Answer: None of the above.

 

Yes, it’s a trick question. But more than that, it’s a democratic crisis. Biden bungled his response both to the smear and to the question of whether he would testify about it under oath. (Democrats must contest Republicans while also buttressing the Trump-battered rule of law; a legitimate Senate subpoena must be obeyed.) Trouble is, there is rarely a good way to respond to such smears, because the advantage almost invariably rests with the liar.

 

Whoever wins the Democratic nomination in 2020 will face some version of Trump’s attacks — like “crooked” Hillary and “corrupt” Biden — and will confront a similar quandary about responding. Ignore the smear and it spreads unchallenged. Engage and you generate hot embers to be fanned by an eager news media, which can generally be counted on to ignore even the most blatant bad faith by one of the disputants.

 

The asymmetry between a Democratic Party largely seeking to preserve democratic norms and government accountability and a GOP increasingly devoted to accumulating and exercising white Christian conservative power free of traditional legal or ethical constraint has been apparent for years. Books have been published. Academic papers have been written. Essays have detailed the danger. Yet bothsidesism, the unwillingness of mainstream arbiters to differentiate fact from fantasy or good faith argument from deliberate deception, persists.

 

The failure is more pronounced, and more perilous, when it comes to Trump, whose mental plumbing has leaked bad faith over a lifetime of personal corruption. Almost seven decades after Senator Joseph McCarthy slashed through the tapestry of American political culture, varying the number of communist spies he claimed to have found in the State Department in accord with the trajectory of the sun or the severity of his hangover, here we are — once again flummoxed by a demagogue so contemptuous of truth that he can’t be bothered to keep his lies straight.

 

Biden, and whomever Trump attacks next, cannot count on the news media to hold Trump accountable. And the proliferation of right-wing propaganda ensures that every emerging fact-based consensus will be targeted for destruction. McCarthy, who lacked a White House balcony from which to rally the nation’s dark side, had fewer political resources at hand than Trump has now yet still managed to be a “galvanizer of mobs,” as Richard Rovere called him.

 

Democratic candidates will have to get used to defending themselves with a sufficiently strong counterpunch that it puts Trump on the defensive. David Doak, a former Democratic strategist (and my one-time partner) Tweeted that Biden should agree to testify under oath before the Senate impeachment trial — provided Trump does likewise.

 

Trump, who instinctively kicks “for the groin” as McCarthy once did (Rovere again), lacks the courage or character to survive a bout of sworn public testimony. He’ll never agree to it. But in an asymmetrical political environment, in which non-demagogues pay a truth tax, Doak’s suggestion is the kind of defensive/offensive combo that a Democrat will have to level against Trump. It entails risk. But it beats three days of rhetorical wandering, seeking a safe passage that doesn’t exist against a man who will say anything, and frequently does.

[kenberg]

From Joe Biden Confronts a Demagogue and a Dilemma by Francis Wilkinson at Bloomberg:

 

 

 

 

Some people are prepared to say: "Here is who I am. If you like who I am, vote for me. If you do not like who I am, vote for the other guy."

 

Biden might have once had that trait. It's pretty clear he does not now have that trait.

 

There is a cost to making your position clear, people might not like your position. I think there is a bigger cost in having one position one day, another position the next day, and a third position the third day.

 

For some reason this rule does not apply to DT. Maybe it is the tweet mentality. Nobody expects a tweet to actually be a thought out statement. More like a burp.

[y66]

From Adam Liptak at NYT:

 

WASHINGTON — As Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. prepares to preside over the impeachment trial of President Trump, he issued pointed remarks on Tuesday in his year-end report on the state of the federal judiciary that seemed to be addressed, at least in part, to the president himself.

 

The two men have a history of friction, and Chief Justice Roberts used the normally mild report to denounce false information spread on social media and to warn against mob rule. Some passages could be read as a mission statement for the chief justice’s plans for the impeachment trial itself.

 

“We should reflect on our duty to judge without fear or favor, deciding each matter with humility, integrity and dispatch,” he wrote in the report. “As the new year begins, and we turn to the tasks before us, we should each resolve to do our best to maintain the public’s trust that we are faithfully discharging our solemn obligation to equal justice under law.”

 

The nominal focus of the report was the importance of civics education, but even a casual reader could detect a timely subtext, one concerned with the foundational importance of the rule of law.

 

Chief Justice Roberts began his report, as is his custom, with a bit of history, recalling a riot at which John Jay, an author of the Federalist Papers and later the first chief justice, was struck in the head by a rock “thrown by a rioter motivated by a rumor.”

 

Jay and his colleagues, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “ultimately succeeded in convincing the public of the virtues of the principles embodied in the Constitution.”

 

“Those principles leave no place for mob violence,” the chief justice wrote. “But in the ensuing years, we have come to take democracy for granted, and civic education has fallen by the wayside. In our age, when social media can instantly spread rumor and false information on a grand scale, the public’s need to understand our government, and the protections it provides, is ever more vital. The judiciary has an important role to play in civic education.”

 

The report seemed to continue a conversation with Mr. Trump about the role of the courts.

 

In 2018, the two men had a sharp exchange, with Mr. Trump suggesting that federal judges carry out the wishes of the presidents who appointed them and Chief Justice Roberts defending the independence and integrity of the judicial branch.

 

The exchange started when Mr. Trump called a judge who had ruled against his administration’s asylum policy “an Obama judge.” In response, the chief justice said the president had misunderstood the role of the federal courts in the constitutional system.

 

“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Chief Justice Roberts said in a statement. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

 

Mr. Trump took issue with the chief justice’s statement on Twitter. “Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’” Mr. Trump wrote, “and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.”

 

On Tuesday, the chief justice returned to his theme. “We should celebrate our strong and independent judiciary, a key source of national unity and stability,” he wrote. “But we should also remember that justice is not inevitable.”

 

The friction with the president has only added to the delicate spot the chief justice will find himself in when he takes on his constitutionally assigned duty to preside over Mr. Trump’s Senate trial. Mr. Trump has repeatedly pinned the future of his presidency on the trial, the details and timing of which have not been set.

 

Chief Justice Roberts’s report concentrated on the central role the judiciary has played in educating the public, notably by issuing accessible decisions, in both senses of the word.

 

“When judges render their judgments through written opinions that explain their reasoning, they advance public understanding of the law,” he wrote. “Chief Justice Earl Warren illustrated the power of a judicial decision as a teaching tool in Brown v. Board of Education, the great school desegregation case. His unanimous opinion on the most pressing issue of the era was a mere 11 pages — short enough that newspapers could publish all or almost all of it and every citizen could understand the court’s rationale. Today, federal courts post their opinions online, giving the public instant access to the reasoning behind the judgments that affect their lives.”

 

Current Supreme Court decisions in major cases are much longer than the ruling in Brown. Citizens United, the 2010 campaign finance decision, was 176 pages long, with roughly the same number of words as “The Great Gatsby.”

 

Chief Justice Roberts praised the many educational programs offered by federal courts across the nation in which students are invited to visit courthouses. He did not address the role that camera coverage of arguments at the Supreme Court, currently forbidden, could play in civics education.

 

The chief justice singled out, but did not name, a colleague, praising his exemplary educational work. “As just one example,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “the current chief judge of the District of Columbia Circuit has, over the past two decades, quietly volunteered as a tutor at a local elementary school, inspiring his court colleagues to join in the effort.”

 

That judge is Merrick B. Garland, who was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama in 2016 but denied a hearing by Senate Republicans. Mr. Trump appointed Justice Neil M. Gorsuch to fill the vacancy.

That was an encouraging note to end the year on.

[y66]

From Dan Charles at NPR:

 

In 2019, the federal government delivered an extraordinary financial aid package to America's farmers. Farm subsidies jumped to their highest level in fourteen years, most of them paid out without any action by Congress.

 

The money flowed to farms like Robert Henry's. When I visited in early July, many of his fields near New Madrid, Mo., had been flooded for months, preventing him from working in them. The soybeans that he did manage to grow had fallen in value; China wasn't buying them, in retaliation for the Trump administration's tariffs.

 

That's when the government stepped in. Some of the aid came from long-familiar programs. Government-subsidized crop insurance covered some of the losses from flooding. Other payments were unprecedented. The U.S. Department of Agriculture simply sent him a check to compensate him for the low prices resulting from the trade war.

 

"'Trump money' is what we call it," Henry said. "It helped a lot. And it's my understanding, they're going to do it again."

 

Indeed, a few weeks later, the USDA announced another $16 billion in trade-related aid to farmers. It came on top of the previous year's $12 billion package, for a grand total of $28 billion in two years. About $19 billion of that money had been paid out by the end of 2019, and the rest will be paid in 2020.

 

"President Trump has great affection for America's farmers and ranchers. He knows that they're fighting the fight and that they're on the front lines," Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue told reporters while announcing the aid package.

 

The announcement aroused little controversy. "I was surprised that it didn't attract more attention," says Joe Glauber, the USDA's former chief economist, who's now a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute.

 

Glauber says it deserves more attention, for a whole collection of reasons.

 

For one thing, it's an enormous amount of money, more than the final cost of bailing out the auto industry during the financial crisis of 2008. The auto industry bailout was fiercely debated in Congress. Yet the USDA created this new program out of thin air; it decided that an old law authorizing a USDA program called the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) already gave it the authority to spend this money.

 

"What's unique about this is, [it] didn't go through Congress," Glauber says. Some people have raised questions about whether using the CCC for this new purpose is legal.

 

Glauber sees a risk of "moral hazard" — a situation in which someone is shielded from the consequences of poor decisions. The decision to start the trade war was costly, he says, and the Trump Administration, by tapping the federal treasury, is avoiding the political fallout from that decision. "The sector that is hurt the most, and which would normally complain, all of a sudden it's assuaged by these payments. To me, that's a problem," he says.

 

Also, the payments are quite generous. According to studies by several independent economists, the USDA is paying farmers roughly twice as much as the actual harm that they suffered from the trade war. And the payments are based on production; the bigger the farm, the bigger the payments. Thousands of farmers got more than $100,000 each. According to an NPR analysis of USDA records of payments made through July 2019, 100,000 individuals collected just over 70 percent of the money.

 

Catherine Kling, an economist at Cornell University, says the government could at least have demanded some public benefits in exchange for that money. "I think it's a real lost opportunity," she says.

 

What farmers do with their land has a huge impact on water quality, wildlife and climate change, Kling says. The USDA has programs that pay farmers to help the environment, doing things like restoring wetlands.

 

The budget for those environmental programs is just a quarter of the size of this year's trade-related payments. So Kling's reaction to this year's farm bailout is, "Wow, [there are] so many things that money could get spent on that could really be beneficial to taxpayers, who are ultimately footing the bill."

 

On Capitol Hill, there has long been a quiet alliance between lawmakers who support farm subsidies and those who support food stamps, or SNAP. Together, they've supported the budget of the USDA, which runs both programs.

 

Events in 2019 tested that alliance, as the USDA helped farmers while restricting SNAP payments.

 

"They've already given out $19 billion to farmers, but they're cutting $5 billion from people in need!" says Congresswoman Marcia Fudge (D-OH), who sits on the House Agriculture Committee. "I don't even know how to describe it except to say that it is cruel, it is unfair, and it is clearly designed to support the president's base, as he sees it, as opposed to those whom he sees as being undeserving."

 

The USDA has not yet announced whether it will deliver another round of trade-related payments to farmers in 2020.

[barmar]

For one thing, it's an enormous amount of money, more than the final cost of bailing out the auto industry during the financial crisis of 2008.

Isn't a big difference that the farmers needed this aid as a direct consequence of Trump's tariffs, while the financial crisis was not created by the government (except indirectly due to reduced oversight)?

[y66]

Isn't a big difference that the farmers needed this aid as a direct consequence of Trump's tariffs, while the financial crisis was not created by the government (except indirectly due to reduced oversight)?

That's a fair point. However, it does not change the fact that tax payers are getting thricely screwed: by the tariffs on imported goods, by the taxes they pay to compensate farmers and at the polls by farmers who are happy to support our anti president as long as the cash keeps coming. Or that these payments are being made without explicit congressional approval.

[y66]

From Ruth Igielnik and Kim Parker at Pew Research:

 

By many measures, the U.S. economy is doing well. Unemployment is near a 50-year low, consumer spending is strong and the stock market is delivering solid returns for investors. Despite these positive indicators, public assessments of the economy are mixed, and they differ significantly by income, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

 

Majorities of upper-income and middle-income Americans say current economic conditions are excellent or good. But only about four-in-ten lower-income adults share that view, while a majority say the economy is only fair or poor.

 

Views of the economy are strongly linked to partisanship, with Republicans and independents who lean toward the Republican Party much more likely than their Democratic and Democratic-leaning counterparts to have a positive view of the current economy. While attitudes toward the economy have long been partisan, they are particularly so today – and virtually all the increase in positive views of the economy since Donald Trump became U.S. president has been among Republicans. Still, income gaps persist within these party groups. In fact, lower-income Republicans are roughly four times as likely as those in the upper-income tier to give the economy an only fair or poor rating.

 

To the extent that current economic conditions are helping particular groups, the public sees the benefits flowing mainly to the most well-off. Roughly seven-in-ten adults (69%) say today’s economy is helping people who are wealthy (only 10% say the wealthy are being hurt). At the same time, majorities of Americans say poor people, those without a college degree, older adults, younger adults and the middle class are being hurt rather than helped by current economic conditions.

 

When asked how economic conditions are affecting them and their families, nearly half of adults (46%) say they are being hurt, 31% say they’re being helped and 22% say they don’t see much of an impact. Overall, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say economic conditions are hurting their own families, but views differ significantly by income within parties.

 

A variety of factors go into Americans’ assessments of current economic conditions, the most prominent being perceptions about wages and income, the availability of jobs and the cost of health care. Two of these three factors are also seen as having a significant impact on people’s own financial situations: 51% say wages have a great deal of impact on their household finances, and 43% say the same about health care costs. The overall job situation is seen as less personally relevant. Instead, 45% say consumer prices have a large impact on their own financial health.

 

About two-thirds of lower-income Americans frequently worry about paying their bills A look inside the financial lives of Americans reveals an enormous gulf in the day-to-day challenges and worries that lower-income and upper-income adults experience. Two-thirds of lower-income adults (65%) say they worry almost daily about paying their bills, compared with about one-third of middle-income Americans (35%) and a small share of upper-income Americans (14%). The cost of health care is also a worry that weighs on the minds of many Americans, particularly those in the lower-income tier. More than half of lower-income adults (55%) say they frequently worry about the cost of health care for themselves and their families; fewer middle-income (37%) and upper-income Americans (18%) share this worry.

 

The nationally representative survey of 6,878 adults was conducted online from Sept. 16-29, 2019, using Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel.

[y66]

From A Ridiculously Optimistic History of the Next Decade by David Brooks at NYT:

 

Looking back at the 2020s from our vantage point in 2030, the first great event was the complete destruction of Donald Trump’s Republican Party. As the former Republican consultant Mike Murphy had noticed, there were roughly 300 state and federal elections during the Trump years and Republicans did horribly in most of them. The 2020 vote was a continuation of that trend. Trump’s landslide defeat left him humiliated, and the Republicans lost their Senate majority.

 

Trump cried fraud and tried to whip up his followers, but they turned their backs. He went from idol to scapegoat in an instant. It seemed they could forgive him everything but losing. Many temporarily retreated from political life, the way evangelical Christians did after the ignominy of the Scopes trial.

 

President Joe Biden faced an interesting dynamic in his party. The political power was with moderates. The intellectual power was with the left. People of color, whose views were largely more moderate, became the crucial swing faction.

 

As president, Biden resisted the interest groups that wanted him to address health care first. Instead, he did child and earned-income tax credits, infrastructure, expanded early childhood education, expanded prison reform, and so on — what some writers called “reparations by any other name.” He gave regulatory czar Elizabeth Warren a special portfolio to take on Big Tech.

 

The major events of the decade were cultural, not political. The Trump era had witnessed a crisis of connection at the bottom of society and a crisis of authority at the top. Social repair was the top order of the day once a new president took office.

 

The first whiff of the cultural restoration was the “Accountability Clubs” that spread across the nation’s campuses. College students realized that America stinks at accountability. Either there is no accountability (Wall Street after the financial crisis) or people have their lives destroyed for a “problematic” tweet.

 

The Accountability Clubs bore the motto “Truth and Mercy.” Students wanted to restore a culture in which facts mattered. They were also searching for a way to judge others in a graduated and humane manner, allowing for repentance, forgiveness and restoration. Marshall McLuhan once remarked that “moral indignation is a technique used to endow an idiot with dignity.” Suddenly indignation, the keystone emotion of the Trump years, was lame. Empathy made a comeback.

 

The second cultural trend of the decade was the rise of the urban church. Suburban megachurch attendance fell, because the pastors had disgraced themselves under Trump. But suddenly there was a surge in church plants in places like Brooklyn, Washington, D.C., Chicago and San Francisco, as highly educated people found homes for their spiritual longings.

 

The churches were liturgically highly charismatic (Bethel music) and highly universalistic and intellectual (Richard Rohr). Their politics were an odd mix — pro-L.G.B.T.Q., pro-life, active on climate change, pro-animal rights (one of the signature moral causes of the decade). The religious left gained on the religious right.

 

At the same time, the racial justice conversation went intimate. America is involved in a multigenerational process of truth and reconciliation. In the teens, the truth-telling had generally revolved around historic events — slavery, lynching, redlining. In the 2020s, a series of writers, artists and directors gave us vivid descriptions of the subtleties of contemporary black life.

 

The profusion of video streaming networks allowed a new generation of artists to take audiences inside the psychological lives of people of color. These artists realized that structural change would happen when people learned to see one another whole.

 

The most important cultural change came to be known as the Civic Renaissance. During the first two decades of the century, hundreds of thousands of new civic organizations came into being — healing political divides, fighting homelessness, promoting social mobility and weaving communities. But these organizations were small. They did not grow into the big national chapter-based structures that had repaired America’s social fabric a century earlier — the Y.M.C.A., the Rotary, the Boy Scouts.

 

By the 2020s, philanthropists and community builders realized the only way to change culture and weave the social fabric was by creating an A.F.L.-C.I.O. of civil society, with big national voices and large, decentralized national organizations so that people across America had easy and practical pathways to get involved in community revival.

 

In the 2010s, it seemed like the liberal order was cracking up. In the 2020s, that feeling vanished. The decline of the Chinese economy delegitimized the authoritarian model. It turns out you can’t run a centrally controlled economy without a lot of waste, corruption and riot police.

 

Meanwhile, the American political system began to work better. The G.O.P. re-emerged under Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio as a better version of a working-class party — socially right, economically left. Democrats remained dominant through the decade. Their party’s biggest accomplishment was in foreign affairs — the repair of America’s alliances and the restoration of global American leadership.

 

Americans were more collaborative in the 2020s. And the New York Mets won the World Series every single year.

[hrothgar]

Just waking up to find out the the US assassinated Qassem Soleimani. WTF? Guess the latest Gulf War just kicked off...

[johnu]

Just waking up to find out the the US assassinated Qassem Soleimani. WTF? Guess the latest Gulf War just kicked off...

Trump tweets American flag amid reports of strike against Iranian general

 

The Manchurian President continues to disgrace the office of the President of the United States with the equivalent of a crowd chanting USA ... USA at a sporting event.

 

The Pentagon later said that Trump directed the strike against Soleimani, calling it a “decisive defensive action to protect U.S. personnel abroad.”

No mention of a consensus of high ranking military or intelligence leaders endorsing the attack.

 

“General Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region,” the statement continued. “This strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans.”

Can you believe a press report from the White House led by somebody who's coming up on 15,000 lies in less than 3 years in office? It's just as likely that Putin told his American stooge to assassinate Soleimani.

 

Iran experts uniformly agreed the Soleimani was a bad actor in the region, but that's been true for decades. Israel apparently considered assassinating Soleimani but deferred because they feared worse consequences in the future. The USA under Obama also considered assassinating Soleimani but decided not to, again because they feared Iranian terrorist retaliation with unacceptable losses.

 

At least the next news cycle won't be about impeachment. B-)

[shyams]

At least the next news cycle won't be about impeachment. B-)

If it happens, Mission Accomplished!

[Winstonm]

The string that ties a bow around all these characters - Pompeo, Bolton, Pence, Cruz, Barr, et al - is religious fervor. The leader is Pope Donald I. And that is why he is infallible.

[y66]

From the Editorial Board at NYT:

 

The real question to ask about the American drone attack that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani was not whether it was justified, but whether it was wise. Many pieces of the puzzle are still missing, but the killing is a big leap in an uncertain direction.

 

General Suleimani was indisputably an enemy of the American people, a critical instrument of the Iranian theocracy’s influence across the Middle East and an architect of international terrorism responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans and a great many others in the region, from Yemen to Syria. He no doubt had a role in the campaign of provocations by Shiite militias against American forces in Iraq that recently led to the death of an American defense contractor and a retaliatory American airstrike against the militia responsible for the attack.

 

It may well be that General Suleimani had come to Iraq in part to plot the next move against United States military personnel or civilians when his car was blown up by a missile from an American Reaper drone. Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a senior commander of a Shiite militia in Iraq, was also killed. But then, General Suleimani and his whereabouts have long been well known to American and other intelligence services, and Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama had resisted killing him for fear of setting off a greater conflict with Iran and further destabilizing a chronically volatile region.

 

Assassinating General Suleimani, moreover, was not the same as hunting down Osama bin Laden or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leaders of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, both terrorists who answered to no government. General Suleimani was a senior official of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and openly targeting him was a sharp escalation in the conflict between the United States and Iran, all but taunting Iran to strike back. And that by a president who had previously demonstrated strong aversion to American involvement in the Middle East, contempt for intelligence from the region and occasional reluctance to order the use of military force.

 

“The game has changed,” the defense secretary, Mark Esper, said Thursday, before the general was killed, vowing pre-emptive action if the United States detects plotting by Iranian-backed forces to attack American interests in the region.

 

This American escalation is particularly aggressive, if not impulsive, after the administration’s hesitation to respond to a series of previous Iranian provocations, including an attack on Saudi oil facilities. It’s reasonable to ask why the administration didn’t take more measured deterrent steps before abruptly twisting the regional dial to “boil.”

 

As Senator Christopher Murphy, among other Democrats, pointed out, the Trump administration might have set off “a potential massive regional war” without congressional authorization.

 

“One reason we don’t generally assassinate foreign political officials is the belief that such action will get more, not less, Americans killed,” Mr. Murphy added. “That should be our real, pressing and grave worry tonight.”

 

Coming as Mr. Trump awaits Senate trial on his impeachment by the House of Representatives, the president’s ordering of the assassination raised discomfiting questions about his motive. Similar questions were raised in 1998 when President Bill Clinton ordered a major bombing campaign of Iraq, known as Operation Desert Fox, while Congress was holding impeachment hearings. In Washington’s acutely partisan climate, most Republicans rallied in support of Mr. Trump while Democrats demanded to know what imminent threat the attack was meant to avert.

 

Mr. Trump said Friday afternoon: “We took action last night to stop a war. We did not take action to start a war.”

 

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told CNN that President Trump’s decision to “remove” General Suleimani pre-empted a “big action” Iran was plotting that would have put American lives at risk. But neither Mr. Pompeo nor the Pentagon offered any details on the threat, or on how General Suleimani’s death would resolve it.

 

On the contrary, the killing of a general close to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and highly popular among many Iranians rendered a major Iranian retaliation certain. What it would be, and where, were now the major unknowns, with Iran experts warning that the country had many far-flung proxies and many asymmetric means at its disposal, including cyberwarfare.

 

Any such strike would then demand an American retaliation, risking an all-out war with enormous consequences for the Middle East and beyond. Oil prices have already spiked; any chance for a new nuclear deal with Iran would be eliminated; Israel, under a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, as deeply in political trouble as Mr. Trump and potentially in search of a diversion, could be tempted to get involved; Iraq, currently without a firm government, could again become a battleground between American forces and pro-Iranian militias.

 

Given the enormous risks to which President Trump and his hawkish secretaries of state and defense, Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Esper, have exposed the nation, they must promptly and convincingly explain their reasons for ordering so fateful an action. The explanation had better be good: Mr. Trump’s record of lies, lies and more lies; his impeachment on charges of misusing the power of his office; and his record of improvising foreign policy according to his immediate political calculations have undermined his credibility, at home and abroad. Congress and the American public need the facts.

 

Another fair question: Why didn’t the White House alert senior Democrats in Congress, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as is customary before a major military action?

 

On Friday, Mr. Pompeo tweeted that “de-escalation” was the primary objective of the United States. At the same time, the Pentagon announced it had deployed roughly 3,500 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division to the region, joining another 750 who were deployed there earlier this week. In May, the United States weighed plans for a force of as many as 120,000 soldiers in bases around the Middle East. That’s approaching the number of soldiers who participated in the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

 

What about the promise to end endless wars, Mr. President?

[hrothgar]

So, spent a bunch of time wandering Seville. Its nice. Much less touristy than Granada. The locals appear to really like planting orange trees. And of course, this being me, I spent a whole bunch of time listening to podcasts about the targeted assassination a couple days back. My current thoughts (which are very much subject to change)

 

1. I think that Solemani was involved in a whole bunch of decisions that were not in the interest of the US and lead to the death of US citizens, soldiers, and allies. However, this kind of targeted assassination of a very high ranking Iranian official feels escalatory.

 

2. Regardless of whether or not Trump had the authority to kill Solemani, I suspect that this will turn out to have been a bad move on the part of the US. I don't believe that Solemani is indispensable to the Iranian regime. He might even be worth more as a martyr, especially given the civic unrest that is going on there. At the same time, the symbolism of this action is enormous and, with this, the downside risk is very large as well. I'm not sure whether this is a case where Trump is being impetuous / stupid or if this a genuine "Wag the Dog" moment. (I suppose that it is possible that this was a carefully considered and thought out action, but I doubt it and so does most everyone that I have heard speak about this)

 

3. From the looks of things, the AUMF(s) are broad enough that Trump has the authority to take this action. Those need to be superseded.

 

4. Craziest take: Trump launch this attack as a bride to Bolton to help convince him to keep his mouth shut.

[Cyberyeti]

So, spent a bunch of time wandering Seville. Its nice. Much less touristy than Granada. The locals appear to really like planting orange trees. And of course, this being me, I spent a whole bunch of time listening to podcasts about the targeted assassination a couple days back. My current thoughts (which are very much subject to change)

 

1. I think that Solemani was involved in a whole bunch of decisions that were not in the interest of the US and lead to the death of US citizens, soldiers, and allies. However, this kind of targeted assassination of a very high ranking Iranian official feels escalatory.

 

2. Regardless of whether or not Trump had the authority to kill Solemani, I suspect that this will turn out to have been a bad move on the part of the US. I don't believe that Solemani is indispensable to the Iranian regime. He might even be worth more as a martyr, especially given the civic unrest that is going on there. At the same time, the symbolism of this action is enormous and, with this, the downside risk is very large as well. I'm not sure whether this is a case where Trump is being impetuous / stupid or if this a genuine "Wag the Dog" moment. (I suppose that it is possible that this was a carefully considered and thought out action, but I doubt it and so does most everyone that I have heard speak about this)

 

3. From the looks of things, the AUMF(s) are broad enough that Trump has the authority to take this action. Those need to be superseded.

 

4. Craziest take: Trump launch this attack as a bride to Bolton to help convince him to keep his mouth shut.

 

I like Seville although my first experience of it was in August in a heatwave and it was something like 130 degrees on the streets in the sun. The crazy thing was that the buildings caught and reradiated the heat so it was still stupidly hot in the late evening.

 

Solemani was a very dangerous man the world may well be better off without, but his deputy who is taking over will mean little changes. I have no idea whether this will turn out to be a good move or not.

[Winstonm]

So, spent a bunch of time wandering Seville. Its nice. Much less touristy than Granada. The locals appear to really like planting orange trees. And of course, this being me, I spent a whole bunch of time listening to podcasts about the targeted assassination a couple days back. My current thoughts (which are very much subject to change)

 

1. I think that Solemani was involved in a whole bunch of decisions that were not in the interest of the US and lead to the death of US citizens, soldiers, and allies. However, this kind of targeted assassination of a very high ranking Iranian official feels escalatory.

 

2. Regardless of whether or not Trump had the authority to kill Solemani, I suspect that this will turn out to have been a bad move on the part of the US. I don't believe that Solemani is indispensable to the Iranian regime. He might even be worth more as a martyr, especially given the civic unrest that is going on there. At the same time, the symbolism of this action is enormous and, with this, the downside risk is very large as well. I'm not sure whether this is a case where Trump is being impetuous / stupid or if this a genuine "Wag the Dog" moment. (I suppose that it is possible that this was a carefully considered and thought out action, but I doubt it and so does most everyone that I have heard speak about this)

 

3. From the looks of things, the AUMF(s) are broad enough that Trump has the authority to take this action. Those need to be superseded.

 

4. Craziest take: Trump launch this attack as a bride to Bolton to help convince him to keep his mouth shut.

 

The Bolton idea is not a crazy as you think - I considered it, too. Kind of a twofer - wag the Bolton. I don't think it is outside the realm of possibilities that Trump is trying to ingratiate himself with the hawks in the armed services and the DOD in order to have them on his side if he decides to dispute election results and stay in office regardless.

 

I am convinced that Donald Trump wants to be the American Putin. I think there is nothing he would not do to accomplish that goal.

 

Btw, I don't think it necessary for Iran to chant "Death to America" when we are already in the process of suicide.

[hrothgar]

Well worth a read

 

[johnu]

Now, the Manchurian President and his stooges are just pulling things out of their asses and presenting them as fact.

 

Pence Links Suleimani to 9/11. The Public Record Doesn’t Back Him.

 

In one of his tweets, Mr. Pence claimed that General Suleimani helped 10 of the men who would go on to carry out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks cross through Iran and enter Afghanistan. That does not match established historical accounts of General Suleimani or public United States intelligence about the hijackers.

By 2001, General Suleimani had already been named the head of the Quds Force, the powerful security branch that often coordinates with other terrorist groups worldwide. Yet General Suleimani was not named at any point in the “9/11 Commission Report.”

 

In fact, the report states in no uncertain terms that neither the Iranian government nor Hezbollah, a group that General Suleimani worked closely with, ever knew anything about the attacks or helped facilitate them:

I am still waiting for even the thinnest of imminent plots against the US that were the pretext of the Suleimani assassination. I expect that I will be waiting until a Democratic President takes office and exposes these fabrications.

[johnu]

I am still waiting for even the thinnest of imminent plots against the US that were the pretext of the Suleimani assassination. I expect that I will be waiting until a Democratic President takes office and exposes these fabrications.

 

Just like the Ukraine impeachment details, the Suleimani details are trickling out slowly, and based on past history, will soon turn into a flood of information.

 

Trump Bolted To Most Extreme Iran Measure Despite Reported Concerns By Aides

 

The president went for the most extreme alternative despite some aides’ fear that the action was not legally justified, reported The Associated Press — and that evidence was weak of “imminent attacks” from Iran quickly claimed in the wake of Soleimani’s death by the Trump administration, a source told the Times.

[kenberg]

Just like the Ukraine impeachment details, the Suleimani details are trickling out slowly, and based on past history, will soon turn into a flood of information.

 

Trump Bolted To Most Extreme Iran Measure Despite Reported Concerns By Aides

 

 

 

If I were having a personal crisis, physical, emotional, financial, whatever, who would I like to have by my side to help me through it? Is there anyone anywhere who would choose Donald Trump? For me, the answer would be "Good God, no, do I look insane?" The various people quoted in the article that you cite seem to think the same, but of course there are others out there. I hope those who support Trump might try a thought experiment. Imagine yourself in deep crisis, imagine DT is at your side. Would this really make you feel more optimistic about your chances? I cannot see why it would. Just one more danger to watch out for is how I would see it.

[y66]

Unfortunately it's not just Trump.

 

This gentleman and his wife, who are spending their last years on the planet wrestling with our increasingly strapped nursing home industry, are represented by Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse who thinks dismantling Obamacare and issuing press releases like this one are a substitute for the hard work of figuring out how to improve healthcare in the U.S.:

 

“Here’s the good news: This ruling is further proof that Obamacare is a smorgasbord of unconstitutional bunk. Here’s the bad news: the longer it stays on the books the longer Nebraska families are trapped under the weight of its impossibly complicated structure. We need to give families the power to manage their budgets with portable, flexible insurance that meets their needs. Moms and dads shouldn’t be stuck with the two crummy choices of either big government bureaucrats or big overpriced insurance companies. This ruling is another chance for Congress to work on real solutions — let’s do better.”

As if anything besides indifference has been preventing Mr. Sasse and his colleagues from working on real solutions for the last 20 years. For them "let's do better" means "lets cut taxes and let private equity solve this problem" and substantive efforts to do better are dismissed as unconstitutional bunk.

 

What a jerk.

 

Meanwhile, Mr. Sasse had this to say about Trump's decision to assassinate Suleimani:

 

"This is very simple: General Soleimani is dead because he was an evil bastard who murdered Americans. The President made the brave and right call, and Americans should be proud of our service members who got the job done. Tehran is on edge - the mullahs have already slaughtered at least a thousand innocent Iranians - and before they lash out further they should know that the U.S. military can bring any and all of these IRGC butchers to their knees."

Everything appears simple to Mr. Sasse who has a PhD in history from Yale. No doubt, in his view, the decision to go into Iraq in 2003 was also very simple.