The important thing to understand is that the atrocities our nation is now committing at the border don’t represent an overreaction or poorly implemented response to some actual problem that needs solving. There is no immigration crisis; there is no crisis of immigrant crime. No, the real crisis is an upsurge in hatred — unreasoning hatred that bears no relationship to anything the victims have done.
This week everybody was still talking about immigration
At times it was hard to remember that anything else was going on. On the other hand, when your country starts talking about opening concentration camps, maybe that deserves some public attention. Jesse Hawken pointed out how the national conversation has evolved since the 2016 campaign:
2016: “Come on, you’re talking like Trump’s going to put people in concentration camps”
2018: “First of all, I think it’s offensive that you refer to them as ‘concentration camps'”
Anyway, the “Family Separations” post deals directly with the immigration issue, and “You can’t compromise with bullshit” was largely inspired by it.
and two cracks in the Republican wall
All along, the question facing anti-Trump Republicans has been: “Yes, but are you going to do anything?” So far, their responses have mostly been disappointing: A few congressional Republicans will tut-tut a little, and then back Trump when their votes are needed, including backing him in his effort to discredit the Mueller investigation. During the election, conservative columnists groused about their situation, but most ultimately called for an anti-Hillary vote, even if they couldn’t bring themselves to endorse Trump.
But this week, two well-known anti-Trump Republicans, George Will and Steve Schmidt, both renounced their party and called for voters to elect Democrats this fall.
In an article titled “Vote against the GOP this November“, veteran Washington Post columnist George Will castigated the Republican majorities in Congress for failing to put any checks on President Trump.
The congressional Republican caucuses must be substantially reduced. So substantially that their remnants, reduced to minorities, will be stripped of the Constitution’s Article I powers that they have been too invertebrate to use against the current wielder of Article II powers.
In particular, he denounced Paul Ryan, who has “traded his political soul for … a tax cut. … Ryan and many other Republicans have become the president’s poodles.”
Schmidt, manager of John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, withdrew “my membership in the Republican Party. It is fully the party of Trump.” In a lengthy tweet-storm, he called for Democratic majorities in Congress.
Our country is in trouble. Our politics are badly broken. The first step to a season of renewal in our land is the absolute and utter repudiation of Trump and his vile enablers in the 2018 election by electing Democratic majorities. I do not say this as an advocate of a progressive agenda. I say it as someone who retains belief in DEMOCRACY and decency.
The current scandal of separating refugee families seems to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.
[President Reagan] would be ashamed of McConnell and Ryan and all the rest while this corrupt government establishes internment camps for babies. Every one of these complicit leaders will carry this shame through history. … Today the GOP has become a danger to our democracy and values. This Independent voter will be aligned with the only party left in America that stands for what is right and decent and remains fidelitous to our Republic, objective truth, the rule of law and our Allies. That party is the Democratic Party.
I doubt that either man has a large following in today’s Republican Party. Their statements are important, though, as cover for long-time Republican voters who see no place for themselves in the corrupt and heartless Party of Trump, but still aren’t comfortable voting for Democrats. They need to understand that they will never get back the Republican Party they have loved unless Trump and his “poodles” lose.
I’ve seen a few reactions like “It took you long enough” or blaming Schmidt for putting us on this road by elevating Sarah Palin, and so on. None of that is false, but this isn’t the way to greet defectors. The more defectors, the better. Pressure should be on the most anti-Trump Republican who hasn’t called for a Democratic victory yet, not on the one who just did.
The leaders of Republican Majority for Choice also announced that they were leaving the party. This is a little less shocking, because it is so overdue. Susan Bevan and Susan Cullman seem to be the last people to realize that the GOP has no place for pro-choice activists.
but I got something wrong last week
Last week I falsely attributed a white supremacist quote by Richard Spencer to White House Advisor Stephen Miller. It was an honest, sloppy mistake: The Vanity Fair article I linked to was about Miller, but it quoted Spencer, attributing the quote to “he”. I was reading too quickly and thought “he” referred to Miller, which it obviously didn’t on closer examination. (No fault to VF.) Thanks to commenter Mark Flaherty for catching the misattribution. I removed the quote as soon as I realized my error.
and you also might be interested in …
Turkey, our NATO ally, took another step towards authoritarianism. President Erdogan won Sunday’s election, in spite of some polls that indicated he might be in trouble. So far, I’m not seeing accusations of fraud.
As I’ve been predicting, Republicans are responding to the budget deficit their tax cut created by calling for cuts in Medicare. They want you to pay more for medical care when you get old, so that rich people and multinational corporations and Donald Trump can pay lower taxes. It’s a more-or-less direct transfer of wealth from you to them.
Josh Marshall’s critique of Trump’s negotiating style is worth a read. Basically, he is building on a point made several other places, including the NYT and the Calculated Risk economics blog: You have to negotiate differently when you’re going to face the same players in future deals. In one-time deals, like on a used-car lot, you can get an advantage through bluffing, lying, and threats (like the threat to walk away). But situations where you are bound to the other party in some way (union/management, or any firm with its major clients and suppliers) call for a whole different toolkit, because you’re not just trying to grind the other party into the dust, you need to build trust, and work towards mutually beneficial agreements that continue into the future.
If you’re going to be dealing with the same players again and again, using threats or bad faith to make a one-sided deal really isn’t necessarily in your longterm interest. Because you’re going to have to deal with that cheated player again.
When we deal with allies like Canada or Germany, or even with rivals like China or Russia, the point isn’t to make a one-time “great deal” and walk away with the profit. Because unless we conquer the world, we’ll have to keep going back to these same players and making new deals.
The U.S. position regarding China would be stronger if Beijing faced a united front that also included Europe, Japan, Mexico and Canada. As it is, Mr. Trump is threatening them with large tariffs as well, driving them to explore closer relations with Beijing.
and let’s close with something spiritual
I think I’ve linked to this meditation video before, but repetition is part of any good spiritual practice. This seems like a particularly good week for this practice.
For the second straight week, I start with a Paul Krugman column. This time it’s “Return of the Blood Libel” from Thursday. The key observation concerns the Trump administration’s family-separation policy, the one that has obsessed the country for the least two weeks.
What’s almost equally remarkable about this plunge into barbarism is that it’s not a response to any actual problem. The mass influx of murderers and rapists that Trump talks about, the wave of crime committed by immigrants here (and, in his mind, refugees in Germany), are things that simply aren’t happening. They’re just sick fantasies being used to justify real atrocities.
This observation isn’t new, and Krugman isn’t the first to point it out. Trump started his campaign by talking about Mexican rapists. His acceptance speech at the Republican Convention warned that “illegal immigrant families … are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources.” His inaugural address painted a picture of “American carnage” which he promised “stops right here and stops right now”. Yesterday he tweeted: “Strong Borders, No Crime!”, as if America had no indigenous criminals, but suffered only from rampaging gangsters that cross our borders.
And from the beginning, it’s all been bullshit. Violent crime is on a long-term downward trend in America, and very little of the remaining murder and mayhem is carried out by undocumented immigrants. If the US isn’t safe enough for you yet, neither the Muslim Ban nor the mistreatment of refugees from Central America going to make you safer. And if you ignore the nationwide stats and focus on a border town like Brownsville, Texas? “We’re doing fine,” says the mayor.
[Commenters have been confused by the “per 100,000 population”, so I’ll clarify. The question is: Is that per 100K of the state’s entire population, or per 100K of the named group? If it were the former, then the apparent pro-immigrant point is lost; there are more native-born people than immigrants, so of course they commit more crimes. But if you click through to the WaPo article I got the chart from, and then keep clicking until you get to their source, you wind up at a report from the Cato Institute, where the charts are labelled less ambiguously: “per 100,000 in each subpopulation”. So the chart is saying that immigrants commit fewer crimes per capita than native-born Americans.]
Lots of writers have making comparisons to the Nazis as they see the mindless cruelty of the family-separation policy, or the concentration camps that will be needed to hold all those waiting for immigration hearings, if they have to be held. (They don’t have to be held.) But Krugman points back to an even earlier era of anti-Semitism: the centuries of random riots and organized pogroms incited by the Blood Libel — the myth that secret Jewish Passover rituals required the sacrifice of Christian children. All it took was for a child to go missing at the wrong time, and mobs would descend on the local Jewish ghetto, seeking revenge for an imaginary horror.
Picture for a moment the helplessness you would feel if you were either a Jew or a sympathetic Christian hoping to prevent the upcoming Passover from ending in tragedy. You can’t get the Jews to stop sacrificing Christian children, because they were never doing that in the first place. The underlying cause of the looming riot is in a mythological realm you can’t access.
Same thing here. Both Presidents Bush and Obama imagined that they might be able to compromise with anti-immigration hardliners by strengthening enforcement. And so over the last 20 years we’ve had more and more fence built, more and more agents manning the border, more and more deportations. And what they’ve gotten in exchange is exactly nothing, because the border that matters, the one that murderers and rapists and drug mules are streaming across at will, isn’t in the real world at all. When the problem that motivates someone is imaginary, there’s nothing anybody else can do about it.
Some people, Andrew Sullivan for example, appear not to have learned this lesson. Just one more real-world effort, they think, and Trump’s irrationally fearful supporters will be satisfied:
So give him his fucking wall. He won the election. He is owed this. It may never be completed; it may not work, as hoped. But it is now the only way to reassure a critical mass of Americans that mass immigration is under control, and the only way to make any progress under this president. And until the white working and middle classes are reassured, we will get nowhere.
But why will they be reassured by a wall that doesn’t get completed and won’t work? Why will they be reassured by anything that happens in the real world? Won’t there still be examples of whites who get killed by undocumented immigrants? Won’t there still be unemployed whites who blame Hispanics with jobs? Won’t demagogues still tell them that subhuman vermin are streaming by the millions across our open borders? Build the wall, open concentration camps, start shooting illegal immigrants on sight — what changes?
You can’t compromise with bullshit. It isn’t just that it’s not smart; it simply doesn’t work.
When claims are based on nothing, they can go on being based on nothing, no matter what you do to mollify the people who make those claims.
You can sympathize with people, even if they vote against you. And when they point to actual problems in the real world, you can offer them solutions, or at least concessions.
But the Jews of Prague and Warsaw had nothing to offer Christian parents who worried about their children being sacrificed and their blood baked into matzah. Their fear was quite real, but their problem lived in a mythic realm beyond any Jew’s influence.
Similarly, there is nothing we can offer those who worry about “American carnage” or the persecution of Christians or unfair Canadian trade.
Real-world solutions can’t touch imaginary problems. You can’t compromise with bullshit.
It’s not clear what Trump’s executive order means, or what will happen in 20 days.
The national outrage against the Trump administration’s family-separation policy kept ramping up until Wednesday, when Trump seemed to back down. But the executive order he signed is confusing, and what exactly it means is still being hashed out.
The fundamental contradiction. The heart of the problem is that the order mandates two outcomes that look contradictory:
It apparently endorses the zero-tolerance policy of criminally charging everyone caught crossing the border somewhere other than an official entry point. “This Administration will initiate proceedings to enforce this and other criminal provisions of the [Immigration and Naturalization Act] until and unless Congress directs otherwise.”
But it also seems to end the family-separation policy that zero-tolerance has led to: “It is also the policy of this Administration to maintain family unity, including by detaining alien families together where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources. It is unfortunate that Congress’s failure to act and court orders have put the Administration in the position of separating alien families to effectively enforce the law.”
So:
We’re going to continue enforcing the law.
Enforcing the law required us to separate families.
But we’re going to stop separating families.
Imagine that you’re a Customs and Border Patrol officer trying to obey this order: What do you do?
Flores. The most obvious answer is to imprison the children along with the parents. However, once you get past 20 days that is illegal under what is called the Flores settlement, a series of consent decrees the government has signed going back to the Clinton administration. Vox explains:
The Flores settlement requires the federal government to do two things: to place children with a close relative or family friend “without unnecessary delay,” rather than keeping them in custody; and to keep immigrant children who are in custody in the “least restrictive conditions” possible.
No judge is going to believe that jail or a government internment camp is the least restrictive condition possible.
The administration can’t just back out of Flores on its own; a court has to let them out of it. The executive order instructs the attorney general to ask the court to modify Flores “in a manner that would permit the Secretary, under present resource constraints, to detain alien families together throughout the pendency of criminal proceedings for improper entry or any removal or other immigration proceedings.”
But there’s really no reason why a court should do that — and the judge in charge seems particularly unlikely to — because the original reasoning of Flores still applies: The kids have done nothing wrong and don’t deserve punishment. The threat that the government otherwise will mistreat them in an even worse way (by separating them from their parents) is simple extortion, as I think the judge will clearly see.
Congress. Congress could supersede Flores by writing a new law explicitly describing how the children of parents charged with illegal entry should be handled. But with the Republican majority deeply divided on how harshly to treat immigrants, and the leadership unwilling to turn its back on its anti-immigrant radicals (and on Trump) to craft a compromise bill that could get Democratic votes, that’s very unlikely to happen, especially in the next 20 days.
Thursday, a far-right immigration bill failed to pass the House by a wide margin, 193-231. That vote was supposed to be followed by a vote on a less draconian “compromise” bill. (The compromise was between moderate and conservative Republicans. No Democrats were consulted.) But that vote was postponed until next week, because supporters couldn’t round up enough votes. In a tweet Friday, Trump reversed course on his demands for a new law, and instead urged Congress to “stop wasting their time on Immigration” until after the November election.
What does he think should happen to the families between now and November? It’s a tweet; there’s no space to spell that out. At any rate, it’s quite likely that neither the courts nor Congress will resolve the executive order’s contradictory instructions. What then?
We’re suspending prosecutions of adults who are members of family units until ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) can accelerate resource capability to allow us to maintain custody.
But a DoJ spokesperson (coincidentally named Flores) said:
There has been no change to the Department’s zero tolerance policy to prosecute adults who cross our border illegally instead of claiming asylum at any port of entry at the border.
So it looks like the return to the previous procedures is temporary: Zero-tolerance prosecutions will resume as soon as CBP can find space to house the families, which will number in the thousands. Immigrant detention camps — there’s a debate about whether to call them “concentration camps” — are being assembled on military bases. This also was envisioned in Trump’s executive order:
Heads of executive departments and agencies shall, to the extent consistent with law, make available to the Secretary, for the housing and care of alien families pending court proceedings for improper entry, any facilities that are appropriate for such purposes.
These camps will set up a conflict with the courts: Flores allows holding children in such settings for 20 days. Trump wants to hold them “throughout the pendency of criminal proceedings for improper entry or any removal or other immigration proceedings”, which could be years. (The current average wait time at the most overloaded immigration court, in Houston, is 1751 days, or more than four years.)
We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country. When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came.
I’ll repeat a point I used to make when the Bush administration was threatening habeas corpus: Any time people can be imprisoned, deported, or otherwise harmed without a hearing, there’s a hole in the legal system that all kinds abuses can slip through. Suppose you, an ordinary American citizen, get swept up in an ICE raid by mistake. If there’s no hearing, who will you explain the mistake to? Or suppose it’s not a mistake, and somebody in ICE just doesn’t like you? You may find yourself on a street corner in Juarez, telling your story about how unfair this is to anybody who will listen.
If all this sounds crazy, that’s because it is. There actually is no emergency that requires this kind of response. There is a problem of rising backlogs in immigration courts. Cruz’ additional judges would help with this, but there’s nothing wrong with a case taking, say, months to assemble and decide, rather than 14 days.
In the meantime, there are far less cruel (not to mention less expensive) ways to handle the families than to lock them up, either together or separately. Sonia Nazaro explained in Friday’s NYT:
The family case management program, a pilot started in January 2016, allowed families seeking asylum to be released together and monitored by caseworkers while their immigration court cases proceeded. Case managers provided asylum seekers with referrals for education, legal services and housing. They also helped sort out confusing orders about when to show up for immigration court and ICE check-ins. And they emphasized the importance of showing up to all court hearings, which can stretch over two or three years.
The pilot was implemented with around 700 families in five metropolitan areas, including New York and Los Angeles, and it was a huge success. About 99 percent of immigrants showed up for their hearings.
It also did something Republicans love: It cut government spending. The program cost $36 per day per family, compared with the more than $900 a day it costs to lock up an immigrant parent with two children, said Katharina Obser, a policy adviser at the Women’s Refugee Commission.
The pilot, scheduled to last five years, was abruptly canceled by the Trump administration almost exactly a year ago.
Other alternatives to prison have also excelled. ICE has two programs that use electronic ankle monitors, biometric voice-recognition software, unannounced home visits, telephone reporting and global positioning technologies to track people who have been released from detention while their cases are being heard, at a cost of 30 cents to $8.04 per person per day. In 2013, 96 percent of those enrolled appeared for their final court hearings, and 80 percent of those who did not qualify for asylum complied with their removal orders.
The Trump administration isn’t being driven to harshness and cruelty, it is seeking out ways to be harsh and cruel. As Jeff Sessions and several other administration officials have admitted, the point is deterrence. Families that are being terrorized by gangs in Guatemala or Honduras need to understand that if they come here, we’ll terrorize them too.
Dehumanization. The main thing that has gone wrong for the administration these last two weeks is that the American people have been seeing asylum-seeking families as human beings. The recording of crying children at a toddler jail was effective because it brought home the point that these are just children, like your kids or anybody else’s. (This was precisely the point Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade needed to deny: “Like it or not, these aren’t our kids.“)
Trump has responded to this outpouring of human sympathy by doubling down on his dehumanizing rhetoric and his effort to raise fear of an imaginary immigrant crime wave. In Trump’s version of reality, families aren’t coming here to escape danger or seek a better life, they “invade our Country“. They “pour into and infest” America. They don’t establish families like human beings, they “breed” like rats. He responded to the sympathy Americans have shown for migrant families by hosting a meeting of people who have had relatives killed by undocumented immigrants. Unlike the families Trump has separated by government policy, these families are “permanently separated” — implying that the latter injustice somehow justifies the former. [1]
Trump did not invent this language from whole cloth. Modern history is full of examples of political regimes that has described certain populations as subhuman—often to justify treating them as such. In the most extreme cases, that rhetoric preceded mass killing.
Trump’s dehumanization of Hispanic immigrants doesn’t have to go that far, but we don’t actually know where it’s going, and this kind of thing never goes anywhere good. Once you start thinking of people as less than human, and you gather thousands of them together in camps, how do you argue against any form of cruelty someone wants to inflict on them? (Miniver Cheevy makes the case that the Nazis (or at least not all of them) didn’t set out with the intention of genocide. But their short-term solutions to “the Jewish problem” left them with camps that were expensive to run and filled with subhuman vermin. When the Final Solution of annihilation was proposed, the logic seemed inescapable.)
Reunification. Even if the prosecutions and separations are suspended, what happens to the kids the government has already taken? CBP claimed on Friday that the 500 or so kids it hadn’t yet turned over to other agencies would be reunited with their parents by Sunday. But that leaves another 2,300 or so. (Homeland Security claims 2,053.) Often the parents have no idea where their children are, and it’s not entirely clear that the government knows either. (DHS claims it does.) A public defender described the situation in The Washington Post:
In a typical meeting, the defendants in a federal criminal case ask the same questions: How much time am I looking at? What do these charges mean? Is my judge fair? Should I go to trial or plead guilty? But things are different in El Paso now. In the wake of the Trump administration’s policy to purposely separate parents and children at the U.S.-Mexico border, my clients now ask: Where is my little girl? Who’s taking care of her? … I have to explain to these parents that I might never be able to answer their questions.
… At another hearing before a different judge, as one of my colleagues asked the agent on the stand about the whereabouts of our client’s child, the prosecutor objected to the relevance of the questions. The judge turned on the prosecutor, demanding to know why this wasn’t relevant. At one point, he slammed his hand on the desk, sending a pen flying. This type of emotional display is unheard of in federal court. I can’t understand this, the judge said. If someone at the jail takes your wallet, they give you a receipt. They take your kids, and you get nothing? Not even a slip of paper?
But that’s only a problem if you picture these families as human. If “they’re not our kids”, if they represent an invasion or an infestation that’s going to come here and breed, then everything is going fine. Carry on.
[1] For what it’s worth, I’ve discussed this fallacy before: You can play the same trick on any large group of people. For example, take Americans whose first names begin with D, a group that includes both myself and Donald Trump, plus millions of other people. Undoubtedly, some of those millions are criminals or even murderers. You could host a meeting of their victims, who do indeed deserve sympathy. But would that really make a case for throwing Trump and me out of the country?
Even if you ignore the collective-guilt problem — what does a murder committed by David or Denise have to do with me? — you’d need more than just anecdotes to make any kind of case at all. Are D-named people statistically more likely to commit violent crimes? Immigrants — illegal or otherwise — aren’t.
As I’m sure you know, the debate over how we’re treating families trying to enter the U.S. illegally is still going on. Far from clearing things up, the executive order Trump issued Wednesday created even more confusion about what will happen next and what should happen. Just about everybody who comments on this is trying to spin it one way or another, so it requires a bit of work to sort out where exactly we are. I’ll try to lay that out as clearly as I can in “Family Separations: Should we be horrified, relieved, or just confused?”. That should be out before 10 EDT.
Like last week’s “The corporate tax cut will never trickle down“, this week’s other featured post spins out of a Paul Krugman column — this time a far less technical piece called “The Return of the Blood Libel“. Paul’s point is that the case against immigrants — that they are pouring across our border in record numbers, spreading murder and mayhem across our country — can’t be dealt with by any rational policy, because it’s just not happening. Like the ancient belief that Jews ritually sacrifice Christian children, the immigrant-caused “American carnage” exists only as a dystopian fantasy.
Eastern European Jews couldn’t stop sacrificing children, because they had never done it. Similarly, no proposal to make Trump’s followers safe from immigrant crime can ever succeed, because their fear is not based in reality. For decades, we’ve been building fences, adding border agents, and increasing deportations, and yet the fear is greater than ever. A wall, family concentration camps, dictatorial powers to evict immigrants without hearings — none of that is going to help either, because those actions happen in the real world, and that’s not where the problem is.
In my post, I’ll take this example and generalize a bit: “You can’t compromise with bullshit”. (Other examples: Canada can’t wipe out its trade surplus with the US, because it doesn’t have a trade surplus with the US. Nothing can be done to stop the persecution of Christians in the US, because there is no persecution of Christians in the US.) It’s in the liberal DNA to seek win-win solutions through compromise, but compromising with bullshit never works. Whatever you offer to do, it won’t solve the imaginary problem, precisely because the problem is imaginary. The other side will end up just feeling conned again, because (from their point of view) they gave you something, and they got nothing.
That should be out around 11.
The weekly summary will have to be short. It will link to some articles about the trade war, Republicans starting to defect from Trump, and a few other things. It should post sometime between noon and 1.
The best distillation of the Trump Doctrine I heard, though, came from a senior White House official with direct access to the president and his thinking. … “The Trump Doctrine is ‘We’re America, Bitch.’ That’s the Trump Doctrine.”
Between October 1, 2017 and May 31, 2018, at least 2,700 children have been split from their parents. 1,995 of them were separated over the last six weeks of that window — April 18 to May 31 — indicating that at present, an average of 45 children are being taken from their parents each day.
The facts are just complex enough to allow Trump’s fans to fool themselves about the level of villainy being perpetrated.
When people are caught crossing the border without authorization, they have the right to claim that they are seeking asylum to avoid persecution in their home country. If they do, they can’t just be sent back without a hearing.
The courts that hear these cases are overwhelmed, so it takes months for an asylum case to be heard.
If border-crossers are not charged with a crime, they are held in immigration detention, where families are kept together. If they are charged with a crime, parents go to jail and the government takes custody of their children.
Court rulings limit how long people can be detained without a hearing, so many asylum-seekers have been released until their hearings, sometimes with an ankle bracelet. Not all show up for their hearings, and become undocumented immigrants.
Previous administrations did not charge asylum-seekers with a crime (unless some other crime was involved, like smuggling). They also typically held families (even those not claiming asylum) in immigration detention rather than send parents to jail, precisely to avoid the situation we’re seeing now.
The Trump administration has instituted a policy of pursuing criminal charges against anyone who crosses the border without going through an official entry point. The crime (improper entry) is a misdemeanor with a maximum jail time of six months for a first offense. NYT: “Unlike Mr. Obama’s administration, Mr. Trump’s is treating all people who have crossed the border without authorization as subject to criminal prosecution, even if they tell the officer apprehending them that they are seeking asylum based on fear of returning to their home country, and whether or not they have their children in tow.”
The government already had responsibility for children who show up at the border unaccompanied. (A wave of such children created an issue during the Obama administration.) The new children are entering a system already over-burdened. The Washington Post reports: “As of Thursday, 11,432 migrant children are in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, up from 9,000 at the beginning of May.”
Numerous reports are coming out about the facilities where the children are being held. It’s pretty horrifying, but I can’t blame HHS too much for that: If somebody dropped a couple thousand extra children on me, I’d have trouble arranging for their care too. The blame should rest higher up the chain.
Like many Trump administration policies — particularly those involving presidential advisor Stephen Miller, who has no qualifications for government office beyond his white supremacist views and would not have been hired by any previous administration — the family separation policy was poorly planned. There appears to be no system for reuniting the families, either in this country (after asylum is granted) or in their country of origin (after deportation). In many cases, the parent is deported while the child remains in government custody.
Trump has said pretty clearly what the breaking-up-families policy is about: It’s hostage-taking. He claims to hate the policy. But Democrats hate it more, because they have more empathy. So they should give in to his demands. It’s basically the same argument he’s made about DACA: He doesn’t want to deport the Dreamers, but he will if Democrats won’t pay his price.
You have to wonder how far he can push this kind of thuggery before even his supporters recognize what he’s doing. Suppose he starts taking immigrants out and having them shot until he gets his wall. It won’t be his fault, it will be the Democrats’ fault, because they won’t give him what he wants.
and about North Korea
Here’s how the Trump/Kim summit shakes out: Kim agreed to somewhat less than North Korea has agreed to in past documents. In exchange he got a huge propaganda victory: His flag was displayed as an equal of the American flag, and the President of the United States stood next to him and flattered him. Kim also got the very real concession of Trump canceling our military exercises with the South Koreans.
His country does love him. His people, you see the fervor. They have a great fervor. … I think that he really wants to do a great job for North Korea. … And, he wants to do the right thing.
“He’s a tough guy, it’s a tough country,” he told Fox News host Bret Baier Wednesday. Trump went on to praise Kim for taking over the country at such a young age calling him a “very smart guy” and a “great negotiator.” “I think we understand each other,” Trump added.
When Baier pressed Trump, protesting that Kim has done many “bad things,” the President was unmoved. “So have a lot of other people,” he said, before moving on to praise himself for his performance at the United States-North Korea summit this week.
He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.
In this hyper-partisan era, I find it useful to run a what-if-the-parties-were-reversed thought experiment: What if the exact same things were happening, but all the Republicans were Democrats and vice versa? Sometimes the experiment makes no sense, because you can’t really imagine the opposite party playing its role: I can’t picture President Hillary Clinton defending the Charlottesville Nazis, for example.
But the North Korea negotiation is a good place to run that experiment: What if President Hillary Clinton met Kim Jong Un without preconditions, signed a vacuous joint statement, flattered him effusively, gave a concession by cancelling military exercises with South Korea, and then came home claiming “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.“?
I think I’d be saying about what I’m saying now: Talking is better than not talking, so I’d give Clinton credit for that. But I’d be skeptical that anything real had been accomplished, and disturbed that the President of the United States had given Kim the propaganda victory of appearing together as a equal and being praised. The one-sided concession would bother me, and the no-longer-a-threat claim would seem unfounded. I think I’d be more inclined to imagine that something was going on behind the scenes, because I would trust Clinton’s intelligence and experience more than I trust Trump. But I’d still find the whole event worrisome and disturbing.
For Democrats in Congress, I think the difference would be between speaking up and keeping silent. But those who commented would say something close to what they’re saying now.
Republican statements, however, would bear no resemblance to what they’re saying now. They’d be talking about treason.
and voter suppression
I only skimmed the Supreme Court decision on Ohio’s method for purging its voter-registration rolls. But that was enough to convince me that I would have a hard time figuring out which side of the 5-4 decision was legally right. States are allowed to purge their voter rolls under the National Voter Registration Act, but the NVRA also restricts how they can do it.
Here’s what Ohio did: If someone didn’t vote for two years, the state sent them a mailing to find out if they’d moved. If the pre-addressed postage-paid response card didn’t come back, and if the person didn’t vote for another four years, they’d be removed from the rolls.
The NVRA says voters can’t be removed from the rolls just for failing to vote. Writing for the conservative majority, Justice Alito says the non-voting together with the card is a sufficient justification. Writing for the four liberal justices, Justice Breyer says it isn’t.
In general, I trust Breyer more than Alito. (Alito’s Hobby Lobby decision was horrible and seemed disingenuous at every turn.) And I know what I wish the law said. But without a lot more study, I can’t tell you how this should have come out.
Given that the Court has decided, I hope Ohio fixes this by referendum. Undoubtedly, lots of names are on the voter-registration rolls that shouldn’t be, but every study shows that this leads to very few illegal votes. (I’m planning to move this summer; I’ll bet my names stays on the rolls for years. But that doesn’t mean I plan to come back here and vote.) On the other hand, voter-registration purges invariably result in thousands of legal voters being turned away.
Even if the process Ohio used does satisfy the NVRA, it makes a lot less sense now than it did when the NVRA was passed. All of us get far more junk mail than legitimate mail, and we invariably throw out some mail we ought to open. It’s predictable that lots of legitimate voters won’t return the card.
and the Trump Foundation
It’s weird that the Clinton Foundation got so much critical attention during the campaign, when the Trump Foundation was clearly the sleazier enterprise.
Thursday, the New York Attorney General’s office filed a lawsuit against the Trump family and the Trump Foundation (which is incorporated in New York). According to the NYT, the suit “seeks to dissolve the foundation and bar President Trump and three of his children from serving on nonprofit organizations”, or at least “nonprofits based in New York or that operate in New York for one year, which would have the effect of barring them from a wide range of groups based in other states.”
The lawsuit claims that the Foundation has no employees and its board has not met since 1999. (New York state law requires at least annual meetings.) President Trump alone decides all grants and signs all checks. The Foundation’s accounts are managed by the same office that oversees all the other Trump Organization entities.
The sole criteria that the accounting staff used to determine whether to issue a check from the Foundation, rather than another entity in the Trump Organization or Mr. Trump personally, was the tax-exempt status of the intended recipient; no one made any inquiry into the purpose of the payment.
On several occasions listed in the lawsuit, the Foundation made payments that were clearly Trump’s personal responsibility. For example, in 2007 when his Mar-a-Lago club had a legal dispute with the Town of Palm Beach about the height and location of its flagpoles, the negotiated settlement included Trump contributing $100,000 to the Fisher House Foundation, a charity that benefits veterans. But Trump did not make this payment; the Foundation did. The lawsuit includes a photocopy of Trump’s handwritten note to the accounting staff: “DJT Foundation $100,000 to Fisher House (settlement of flag issue in Palm Beach)”. Trump reimbursed the Foundation in 2017, after he knew the issue was under investigation.
A longer-term and more complex abuse happened during the presidential campaign. Trump boycotted an Iowa debate (because Megyn Kelly would be a moderator) and held a parallel event to raise money for veterans’ charities. The money raised was channeled through the Trump Foundation, but the Trump campaign was in charge from beginning to end: It “planned, organized, financed, and directed” the event; the campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” was displayed on the podium; the charities receiving the money were chosen by the campaign and were often located in states that had upcoming primaries; much of the money raised was distributed during campaign events (with Trump presenting a giant check).
Mr. Trump’s wrongful use of the Foundation to benefit his Campaign was willful and knowing. Mr. Trump was aware of the prohibition on political activities and the requirement of restrictions on related-party transactions. Among other things, he repeatedly signed, under penalties of perjury, IRS Forms 990 in which he attested that the Foundation did not engage in transactions with interested parties, and that the Foundation did not carry out political activity. Mr. Trump also signed, again under penalty of perjury, the Foundation’s Certificate of Incorporation, in which he certified that the Foundation would not use its assets for the benefit of its directors or officers, and that it would not intervene in “any political campaign on behalf of any candidate.”
The New York attorney general’s office has made referrals to the IRS and the Federal Election Commission, which could take further action. Another NYT article quoted Jenny Johnson Ware, a criminal tax attorney in Chicago: “People have gone to prison for stuff like this, and if I were representing someone with facts like this, assuming the facts described in this petition are true, I would be very worried about an indictment.”
The investigative decisions in the Clinton email case seemed to be made on the merits.
Some FBI officials expressed anti-Trump opinions in private messages.
The IG wonders whether Strzok may have pursued the Trump-Russia probe more vigorously than new Clinton emails found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop due to political bias. (But in the end that worked to Trump’s advantage. Since the Weiner emails were all duplicates, the sooner the public knew that the better for Clinton.)
The IG sharply criticizes Comey for deviating from policy and procedure in his statements about the Clinton case.
The idea that this report somehow de-legitimizes the Mueller investigation seems to be more Trumpian bullshit.
and you also might be interested in …
The $81 billion merger between ATT and Time Warner was completed shortly after a federal court rejected the Justice Department’s attempt to block it on Tuesday.
As best I can tell, this is one of those bad-guys-against-worse-guys stories, so it’s hard to know how to feel about it. In general, I dislike media mergers, because the media is concentrated enough already. But the Justice Department’s effort to block the merger appears to be Trump’s attempt to punish CNN, which is part of Time Warner. (The government was fine with Sinclair Broadcasting buying Tribune Media — requiring only that Sinclair not wind up owning two TV stations in the same city — because Sinclair slants even more towards Trump than Fox News does.)
So if the Justice Department had been trying to block the merger as part of some larger effort to step up antitrust enforcement, I’d be with them. But the message seems to be “You can get bigger, but only if we like your news coverage.” That strikes me as seriously dangerous to American democracy, so I’m glad they didn’t get away with it.
Some very bogus arguments have been made claiming that the Mueller investigation is unconstitutional. Here, they’re taken apart by George Conway — Kellyanne’s husband.
and let’s close with something funny
It’s been a while since I’ve linked to Bad Lip Reading. Here’s their NBA clip.
His followers are certainly religious, but they’re not Christians any more.
When Jeff Sessions quoted Romans 13 (“Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.“) to justify the villainous policy of taking immigrant children away from their border-crossing parents, he touched off a flurry of Bible-quoting in the media. Not only did Christian writers dispute his interpretation of Romans 13, which, after all, has been used to justify everything from slavery to the Nazi death camps, but they also unleashed a flurry of verses defending the rights of immigrants, such as Matthew 25:41-45, in which Jesus envisions Judgment Day proceeding like this:
Then he will say to those on his left, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink,I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.”
They also will answer, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?”
He will reply, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.”
When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt
But if those writers were expecting Sessions to slap his forehead and say “Oh, right, I get it now!”, they were disappointed. The policy continues, and Sessions still supports it.
That’s how it’s been since Trump descended the escalator to announce his candidacy in 2015. Trump has stood pretty much in direct opposition to the message of Jesus. Jesus advised his followers to “turn the other cheek” when attacked; but Trump always “fights back” — even against gold-star parents or military widows or men about to die. Jesus spoke out for “the least of these”; but Trump likes “winners” and despises “losers”. Jesus said that marriage was for life; but Trump is currently married to his third wife, and he has cheated on all of them. Jesus emphasized love and compassion, but Trump has so little compassion that needed to take notes (written by somebody else) into a meeting with shooting survivors so that he could remember to ask them about their experiences and to tell them he had heard them.
For laughs, take the Trump or Jesus quiz and see if you can identify which leader said which quote. (It’s pretty easy.)
It’s hard to find any line of the Sermon on the Mount that Trump would support: He’s not just anti-immigrant, but also anti-health-care, pro-weapon, anti-feeding-the-hungry, and just generally against the poor and the meek wherever they show their miserable faces. He’s a compulsive liar who brags that he can grab women “by the pussy” and get away with it.
And he got 81% of the votes of white evangelicals.
We believe that Jesus is the lord of the whole earth. He is the king of kings and he is the lord of lords. We believe that he, not any version of Caesar, is the Messiah. He is the Christ, the son of the living God, that salvation is found in him, not in the Republican platform or the Democratic platform, and that salvation did not come riding in on the wings of Air Force One. It came cradled in a manger.
I know that with your support and prayers, with the strong support of leaders at every level of government, with President Donald Trump in the White House, and with God’s help, we will make America safe again. We will make America prosperous again. And to borrow a phrase — (laughter) — we will make America great again.
When the Trump evangelicals explain the issues that cause them to support him, they bring up topics that don’t appear in the gospels at all: abortion and homosexuality. (With the new immigration policy, they can’t claim “family values” any more.) On immigration, white evangelicals side with Trump against Jesus: 68% deny that America has a responsibility to take in refugees.
Whatever this is, it isn’t Christianity.
More and more, metaphors of religion are used to describe Trumpism. Bob Corker called it “cult-like“. Dana Milbank wrote: “This isn’t religion. It’s perversion. It is not the creed of a democratic government or political party but of an authoritarian cult.” Cal Thomas asks who evangelicals follow: Trump or Jesus? Elizabeth Bruening says that Sessions and Press Secretary Sarah Sanders are “inventing a faith” in which order is the highest good.
But what if it’s not just a metaphor? What if what we’re seeing is an actual schism in American Christianity? On one side will be a genuinely Christian Christianity, one that takes the words of Jesus seriously. On the other side will be a Trumpist religion that is nativist and supports all the traditional supremacies: white, male, heterosexual, and born to wealth. One side will concern itself with the poor and victims of injustice. The other will preach a prosperity gospel in which God wants you to be rich and has his own reasons to leave the poor in the gutter. One side will promote humility, the other will glorify men of large egos, who never apologize or admit their mistakes.
Something bigger than politics is going on here. It goes way beyond cutting or raising taxes or wanting a bigger or smaller military. A large segment of American Christianity has been drifting away from Jesus for many years. Now they have found their voice and their leader.
The immediate benefits of the corporate tax cut have gone to stockholders and executives rather than workers. The long-term benefits will too.
Dropping the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% was the centerpiece of the tax reform package Republicans passed (with no Democratic votes) and Trump signed late last year. They sold that cut with the argument that lower corporate taxes would stimulate investment: Rather than build that new factory in Indonesia or Vietnam, a corporation might site it in Iowa instead, creating new jobs and raising wages. So while it might look like the benefits would go entirely to wealthy shareholders, in the long run that money would flow to American workers. American households, Trump economic advisors claimed, would see their incomes go up by $4000 a year over the next 3-5 years.
For a few weeks, it looked like the trickle-down was happening: A number of companies responded to the tax cut by giving their workers a one-time $1000 bonus — small potatoes compared to what the companies themselves were set to rake in, but not bad if it represented a down payment on future wage increases.
But how long would it take those increases to show up? Well, not immediately, in spite of the well-publicized bonuses. And not in one quarter. CBS reported in April that the corporate windfall (financed by increasing the federal budget deficit) was mostly going into stock manipulations.
In the first quarter, corporate America committed $305 billion to cash takeovers and stock buybacks, more than double the $131 billion in pre-tax wage growth for both new and existing workers subject to income tax withholding, TrimTabs calculates.
Worse, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is reporting bad news for “production and nonsupervisory employees”.
From May 2017 to May 2018, real average hourly earnings decreased 0.1 percent
The Washington Post elaborates, saying that this category “accounts for about four-fifths of the privately employed workers in America”. It also provides this graph.
How long? But it terms of the tax cut, it’s still early days. Of course the process of building new factories and hiring new workers would take longer than just a few months. So when should we expect the corporate tax cut to trickle down? Two years? Five years? Ten?
What about never?In his Friday column, Paul Krugman explains why the tax-motivated new factories and jobs and higher wages aren’t coming, not immediately and probably not ever. He labels his argument as “wonkish”, meaning that ordinary people who aren’t economists may find it hard to follow. So let me interpret a little.
The vision of low corporate taxes creating new jobs with higher wages comes from the Industrial Era, the age of coal-powered textile mills and Henry Ford’s assembly lines. Business investment in those days was mostly big, heavy equipment that cost a lot of money and was meant to last for decades or even longer. (I live in an apartment in a converted textile mill. The mill was built in the 1820s.) Businesses were national (or more likely, local) in those days, so a company located in Akron or Dearborn paid taxes in Akron or Dearborn.
That’s not what the economy looks like any more.
Tax havens. The biggest corporations are multi-national, and they book their profits in whatever countries their accountants choose. One trick is to transfer a company’s intellectual property to a foreign subsidiary, and then pay massive royalties and licensing fees to that subsidiary.
The rights to Nike’s Swoosh trademark, Uber’s taxi-hailing app, Allergan’s Botox patents and Facebook’s social media technology have all resided in shell companies that listed as their headquarters Appleby offices in Bermuda and Grand Cayman, the records show.
When pieces of your product — an iPhone, say — are made all over the world, who’s to say what country the profit is made in? Your accountants say. And they all say the same things: You made your profits in a tax haven.
Indeed, a tiny handful of jurisdictions — mostly Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands — now account for 63 percent of all profits that American multinational companies claim to earn overseas, according to an analysis by Gabriel Zucman, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Think about it: When was the last time you bought something marked “Made in Luxembourg”? Multinationals don’t build factories and employ workers in low-tax countries, they just route their profits there.
Krugman looks at the profit-to-wage ratio of foreign firms and local firms in a variety of countries.
If places like Puerto Rico and Ireland were just massively more productive than the US or Germany — producing enormous profits with relatively low labor costs — that would apply to their local firms too. But it doesn’t. For local firms, the ratio of profits to wages stays pretty constant across the board. It’s only foreign firms that have managed to unlock the Irish productivity miracle — not with actual production that employs workers, but via accounting tricks that claim profits produced by workers in other countries.
In short, multinational corporations have benefited enormously from Ireland’s generous tax laws. Irish workers, not so much. And with time, the corporations get better and better at gaming the tax system.
So lower US corporate taxes may induce corporations to book more of their profits here, for what that’s worth. But that’s an accounting gimmick, not an actual change in economic activity.
But even with that illusion making the effect look bigger than it is, won’t lower taxes still motivate investment and create jobs? Why doesn’t that work? This is where Krugman gets wonkish.
What investment means now. In the Industrial Era, nothing was more solid than a factory. Henry Ford started building his massive River Rouge complex in Dearborn during World War I, and it’s still there. Once it made Model T’s; now it makes F-150 trucks. The US Steel complex in Gary is even older, going back to 1908. Firestone in Akron, Caterpillar in Peoria — the big Industrial Era companies were virtually synonymous with the towns where their factories were.
In the Industrial Era, corporate investment was long-haul investment. You bought land and erected massive buildings to house huge machines. You dug canals and built railroad spurs that came right up to the beginnings and ends of your production lines. The industrialists who made those investments were looking half a century into the future, or even longer.
But most corporate investment these days is far more ephemeral. Take Google, the second-most valuable company in the world. What does it make exactly? Where is its River Rouge or Gary Works? If it wants to create a new product, it may have to hire some extra designers and programmers. But what does it invest in? An office, some computers. The office could be rented, the computers will be obsolete in a few years. Ditto for Facebook. Amazon also needs some warehouses, and maybe some robots to move boxes around. In a few years the warehouses could be somewhere else and the robots will be replaced by better robots. It’s all short-term stuff.
Whenever a company makes an investment, it’s weighing its expected profits against two things: the cost of capital (for example, the interest rate it has to pay on the money it borrows) and the depreciation rate (how fast the investment becomes obsolete). In the Industrial Era, when a factory complex or a railroad might be around for half a century, depreciation was low. So the cost of capital really mattered. If interest rates dropped from 6% to 4%, all your calculations changed. Investments you’d been putting off suddenly made sense again.
But when the equipment you’re buying is going to be scrap in 3-5 years, the cost of capital doesn’t matter nearly so much. Cutting interest rates still motivates people to buy houses, because those are long-term investments. But it doesn’t motivate business investment much any more. Krugman looks at the huge interest rate spike of 1979-1982, when the Fed pushed rates up over 20%. Housing investment crashed. Business investment not so much.
If that was divergence was happening already in the early 80s, it’s even moreso now.
What’s that have to do with tax rates? Now comes the wonky part:
What does this have to do with taxes? One way to think about corporate taxes in a global economy is that they raise the effective cost of capital. Suppose global investors demand an after-tax rate of return r*. Then the pre-tax rate of return they’ll demand in your country – your cost of capital — is r*/(1-t), where t is the marginal tax rate on profits. So cutting the corporate tax rate reduces the effective cost of capital, which should encourage more investment.
Let’s work an example of that. Suppose global investors are looking for a 5% return on their investment after taxes. (That’s Krugman’s r*.) If the corporate tax rate is 35%, they’ll need to make a pre-tax return of 7.7%. (That’s 5%/(1 – .35).) So for every $1,000 you invest, you make $77, you pay 35% of your profit in taxes ($27), and you wind up with $50, or a 5% profit.
Now cut the tax rate to 21%. Now you only need to make 6.3% before taxes to wind up with 5% after taxes. For every $1,000 invested, you make $63, pay 21% in taxes ($13) and wind up with $50.
So in this example, the tax cut effectively reduces the cost of capital from 7.7% to 6.3%.
That would have been a big deal to Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie. Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg prefer the lower rate, of course, but it doesn’t drive their decisions in the same way.
Hence Krugman’s conclusion: It’s not that cutting corporate taxes will have no effect on jobs or wages, but it’s going to work out to a huge loss of goverment revenue in exchange for a small number of jobs.
But the vision of a global market in which real capital moves a lot in response to tax rates is all wrong; most of what we see in response to tax rate differences is profit-shifting, not real investment. And there is no reason to believe that the kind of tax cut America just enacted will achieve much besides starving the government of revenue.
The end result. Krugman’s argument needs one more step, because he leaves one question unanswered: Why should you care if the government collects less tax revenue? OK, maybe the lost revenue flows mainly to rich shareholders and billionaire CEOs and only a few jobs are created. Maybe the overall effect on wages doesn’t amount to much. But if it’s something, isn’t that good? The taxman may bag a little less — or even a lot less — but why should American workers cry about that?
Over the last few decades, conservatives have done a good job of convincing many Americans that taxes just go down a rat hole and aren’t connected to the valued services government provides. (In states like Kansas and Louisiana, though, people are starting to see the relationship.) And for the moment, Republicans have stopped worrying about the budget deficits that they were so focused on during the Obama administration. Less revenue means bigger deficits, but, again, why should you care?
Because deficit phobia will be back someday. We are already looking at trillion-dollar deficits beginning in 2020, and that’s under the assumption that we aren’t in recession by then. (This economic cycle is already getting a little old; that’s why unemployment numbers are so low.) In any serious recession — and one always comes eventually — the deficit will top $2 trillion, which is much higher than the record Bush/Obama deficit of FY 2009.
There is only one pile of money big enough cover a shortfall like that: entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. (We could zero out the defense budget and still have a deficit.) When Republicans remember that they care about deficits, that’s where they’re going to look.
So American workers who cheer for the corporate tax cut are like Esau being grateful to Jacob for his porridge: In the long run, the tax cut they let the rich monopolize will cost them their birthright of Social Security and Medicare.
This week the separating-families-at-the-border issue blew up, with even Republicans trying to distance themselves from it. Hostage-taking has been part of the Republican toolbox at least since the debt-ceiling crisis of 2011, but it has never been done this nakedly before. Trump is terrorizing young children, and promises to keep doing it until his demands are met. He wants a wall, changes in immigration laws, and safe passage to a country of his choice. (OK, I made that last one up.)
More significant reports were issued this week than I was able to read. There was the NY attorney general’s lawsuit against the Trump Foundation, the Supreme Court’s OK of Ohio’s voter suppression plan, and the Justice Department Inspector General’s report on how the FBI handled the Clinton email investigation. I’ll have to rely on other people’s opinions on most of that.
Oh, and North Korea. Remember North Korea? That’s so last week, but people have been making up their minds about the outcome of the Trump/Kim summit. My opinion is that we’ll be lucky if it turns out to have been just a big photo op. A far worse outcome is that Trump makes a bad deal and then can’t admit it, so to protect his own ego he winds up covering for Kim’s misbehavior (in much the same way that he has been covering for Putin).
What I like to do with the Sift is mention and link to the important stories of the week, but also take a step back and look at the bigger picture. This week’s big-picture view de-wonkifies a Paul Krugman column that explains something important: There’s a reason why the big corporate tax cut passed in December is never going to trickle down to workers, and it has to do with the difference between an information economy and an industrial economy. We all sort of know that things are different now, but still a lot of our economic intuitions come from the age of Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan. That article “The corporate tax cut will never trickle down” should be out before 9 EDT.
Another long-view question I want to raise is whether Trumpism is turning into a religion. As the majority of evangelicals continue to support him (in defiance of just about everything Jesus ever said) and the anti-Trump minority begins to peel off, more and more people are starting to use religion as a metaphor for Trumpism. But what if it isn’t a metaphor? What if Trumpism is really, literally becoming a new American religion? I still haven’t decided whether that’s its own article or just a paragraph or two in the weekly summary.
There’s still a lot to do on the summary, so I’ll be lucky to get it out by noon.
This week everybody was talking about summit meetings
For the G-7 meeting in Quebec, Trump arrived late and left early, skipping sessions on trivialities like climate change. After leaving, he tweeted a denunciation of the host, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and instructed the remaining US representatives not to sign the meeting-concluding joint communique that he had previously agreed to. (That is so Trump: For all his apparent bluster, he can’t handle face-to-face confrontation. He’ll leave and then tweet something nasty from the road.)
Trump described the US as “the piggy bank that everybody’s robbing”, and threatened to cut off trade with the other G-7 countries entirely:
It’s going to stop. Or we’ll stop trading with them. And that’s a very profitable answer, if we have to do it.
There is so much wrong with this. First, remember who we’re talking about here. These are our most trusted allies: Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Japan. If we want to solve any of our real trade problems (like getting China to respect our intellectual property), we’ll need them on our side.
And second, Trump continues to display a child’s understanding of international trade: If the US has a trade deficit with a country, he imagines that cutting off trade with them results in a “profit”, as if everything stays the same except that we now have back all the money we would have spent in the other country.
According to [the theory espoused by Trump’s economic advisors], if the United States made it illegal to import oil, thus wiping $180 billion off the trade deficit, our GDP would rise by $180 billion. With labor constituting 44 percent of GDP, that would mean about $80 billion worth of higher wages for American workers. So why doesn’t Congress take this simple, easy step to boost growth and create jobs?
Well, because it’s ridiculous.
What would actually happen is that gasoline would become much more expensive, consumers would need to cut back spending on non-gasoline items, businesses would face a higher cost structure, and the overall economy would slow down with inflation-adjusted incomes falling.
Third, Trump has no power to cut off trade with other countries, and Congress isn’t going to give it to him. Foreign leaders know that he’s just blustering. To re-purpose a John Kelly insult: Empty barrels make the most noise.
To our allies: bipartisan majorities of Americans remain pro-free trade, pro-globalization & supportive of alliances based on 70 years of shared values. Americans stand with you, even if our president doesn’t.
He didn’t put America first; Russia first would be a better description. And he didn’t demand drastic policy changes from our allies; he demanded that they stop doing bad things they aren’t doing. This wasn’t a tough stance on behalf of American interests, it was a declaration of ignorance and policy insanity.
… Was there any strategy behind Trump’s behavior? Well, it was pretty much exactly what he would have done if he really is Putin’s puppet: yelling at friendly nations about sins they aren’t committing won’t bring back American jobs, but it’s exactly what someone who does want to break up the Western alliance would like to see.
BTW: Trump’s proposal to let Putin back into the G-7 isn’t just servile, it makes no sense (as Krugman points out): The G-7 is an economic forum of democratic countries. Russia is an autocracy and its economy is tiny; it never belonged in this group. If the G-7 wants to expand, Brazil and India are much better candidates. And if nobody cares about democracy any more, China should be there.
In a different column, Krugman points out something important: The more Trump insults other democratic countries and acts like he has the whip hand over them, the less those countries’ leaders can offer him.
Real countries have real politics; they have pride; and their electorates really, really don’t like Trump. This means that even if their leaders might want to make concessions, their voters probably won’t allow it.
You can see this most clearly in Mexico: Trump is poison in Mexico. Any leader who refused to stand up to him would be committing political suicide.
Trump’s tough talk, then, is purely for the consumption of his base. If he were really trying to negotiate something that would help American workers, he’d “speak softly and carry a big stick” when he dealt with other democratic leaders.
Trump is also spreading joy and happiness in Germany, where his new ambassador has said that he wants to “empower other conservatives throughout Europe”. Diplomats typically do not visibly interfere in the politics of their host countries. The ambassador doubled down in the face of criticism: “I stand by my comments that we are experiencing an awakening from the silent majority – those who reject the elites & their bubble. Led by Trump.” In Germany, the “elites” include Angela Merkel and her government.
Trump is on to Singapore, where he is scheduled to meet with North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un tomorrow morning.
and immigrant children
Since May 7, the Trump administration has been routinely separating children from their parents when they arrive at our southern border. Vox has a good article describing what’s new about this and what isn’t. The big thing that’s new is that we’re not even trying to claim that we’re doing this for the children’s own good. The policy is purely punitive; it’s meant to discourage people from coming to America without a visa.
It’s worth pointing out that people who come here seeking asylum are not breaking the law if they present themselves at an official border crossing. Trump has characterized our asylum laws, which require some kind of due process for asylum seekers, as a “loophole”.
To me, it’s the government that seems to be taking advantage of loopholes.
So now they can deport her. Back to a country where said rebels now run the government.
I cover the legal side of the Supreme Court’s Masterpiece Cakeshop decision in a featured post.
I wanted that article to have a tone that is opinionated, but not abrasive. But here I want to get more argumentative: I think the media as a whole, and liberals in particular, have been way too soft on special-rights-seeking people who claim to be motivated by Christianity. We’ve been way too willing to grant their claims that their actions have something to do with Jesus, and are motivated by sincere religious faith rather than simple bigotry.
I want to assert a few things:
Wedding cakes do not have, and have never had, religious significance in the Christian tradition. For the wedding at Cana, Jesus did not turn water into cake. Or into flowers or photographs or catering. It is ridiculous to treat cakes for same-sex wedding receptions as if they were communion wafers for a Satanic black mass. (Gorsuch really does invoke a comparison to “sacramental bread”.)
From the beginning of the Republic, civil marriage has been a separate institution from religious marriage. If your Christian religion says that people the state regards as married are not married in the eyes of God, you have the freedom to believe and proclaim that view. But you don’t get to decide whether or not they’re married in the eyes of the state, because that has nothing to do with Christianity or any other religion. And if a couple wants to hold a party to celebrate becoming married in the eyes of the state, that also has nothing to do with Christianity or any other religion.
In the Bible, marriage is not “between one man and one woman”. Often it’s between one man and several women. Example: Jacob and Leah and Rachel and their two handmaidens. If you don’t support that kind of marriage today, then you don’t believe in “Biblical” marriage. You also don’t believe that an unchanging institution of marriage was established by God once and forever. (Justice Kennedy quotes the baker: “God’s intention for marriage from the beginning of history is that it is and should be the union of one man and one woman.” The baker should tell that to whoever wrote Genesis.)
Most of the self-described Christians who refuse to serve same-sex couples are not acting out of sincere religious conviction; they’re acting out of spite. Their side lost the same-sex marriage debate, they’re pissed about it, and they want to take it out on somebody. There is nothing Christ-like about this set of motives. The New Testament does not record any examples of Jesus being a sore loser.
and healthcare
If you’re an insurance company that doesn’t want to cover people with pre-existing conditions, the Trump administration has your back.
Led by Texas, twenty Republican-dominated states are participating in a lawsuit asserting that the individual mandate portion of the Affordable Care Act (i.e., ObamaCare) will become unconstitutional in 2019, when the tax penalty that enforces it goes away. (That was part of last year’s big tax cut bill.) That may sound harmless — who cares if the courts eliminate something that was unpopular to begin with and isn’t going to be enforced any more anyway? — but there’s a kicker: The suit claims that the whole ACA is inseparable from the individual mandate, so it all has to be struck down, including the popular parts like the guarantee of insurance to people with pre-existing conditions.
In other words: If you’re a cancer survivor (like my wife), or have something else in your medical history that makes you a bad risk, you may not be able to get health insurance at all, and if you do it will be exorbitantly expensive.
This suit has been considered a long shot, but its shot got a little less long Thursday when the Justice Department announced that it won’t defend the case in court. (Typically, the Justice Department defends the constitutionality of laws when they are challenged. But on rare occasions, an administration decides that a law is indefensible. That’s what’s happening here and what happened when the Obama Justice Department refused to defend the Defense of Marriage Act.) Democratic-controlled states like California are expected to step into the breech and lead the defense.
The brief filed by the Justice Department doesn’t agree with Texas that the whole ACA is unconstitutional, but it does agree that two other parts of the ACA are inseparable from the individual mandate and so have to be struck down: guaranteed issue (insurance companies that offer coverage in an area have to offer it to everybody) and community rating (which says that all individuals of the same age in the same community have to be offered the same rate). Those are exactly the parts that protect people with pre-existing conditions.
It’s worth pointing out the reason we’re in this situation: Back in 2012, the Supreme Court decided 5-4 that Congress did not have the power under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to require individuals to buy health insurance. This would have sunk the ACA then and there, but Justice Roberts reinterpreted the individual mandate as a tax. That allowed him to flip and vote for the constitutionality of the ACA, which survived 5-4.
But here’s the interesting part: The idea that an individual mandate exceeded the range of the Commerce Clause was invented from whole cloth to create a pretext for striking down the ACA. Until it became part of the ACA, the mandate — which was originally the brainchild of the conservative Heritage Foundation in the 1990s — had never been considered constitutionally questionable.
So one conservative long-shot legal argument leads to another, and the upshot is that millions of Americans may lose their health insurance.
The former security director for the Senate Intelligence Committee was arrested Thursday on charges of lying to federal investigators probing a leak of information involving a former campaign aide to President Trump.
In the course of the investigation, the government seized several years worth of emails belonging to the staffer’s girlfriend, who is a New York Times reporter. The case is making journalists nervous about how far the government is now willing to go to track down leaks.
and the NFL
Last Monday, the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles were disinvited from the White House visit scheduled for the next day, because not enough of them were going to show up to suit Trump. Instead he held a patriotic rally that seems to have been attended mainly by White House staffers and interns. During the ceremony, Trump appeared not to know the words to “God Bless America”.
Trump has decided that portraying black football players as unpatriotic is a winning issue for him, so he’s going to keep doing it. This has got to be a disappointment to the NFL owners, who changed their policy specifically to try to mollify the President. Under the new rules, players can stay in the locker room during the national anthem if they want, but if they come onto the field they have to stand at attention. Kneeling — no matter how silently and respectfully it is done — will result in a fine for the team, which may decide to pass that fine on to the player.
But Trump is not having that. “No escaping to locker rooms” he tweeted. Previously he had said:
You have to stand proudly for the national anthem. Or you shouldn’t be playing, you shouldn’t be there. Maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.
the E.P.A. has in most cases decided to exclude from its calculations any potential exposure caused by the substances’ presence in the air, the ground or water, according to more than 1,500 pages of documents released last week by the agency.
Instead, the agency will focus on possible harm caused by direct contact with a chemical in the workplace or elsewhere. The approach means that the improper disposal of chemicals — leading to the contamination of drinking water, for instance — will often not be a factor in deciding whether to restrict or ban them.
The big winner here is the chemical industry. The big losers are anybody who breathes air or drinks water and was hoping not to get cancer.
Former Fox News military analyst Lt. Colonel Ralph Peters (retired): As a former military officer of the United States, I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. And I saw, in my view, Fox — particularly their prime time hosts — attacking our constitutional order, the rule of law, the Justice Department, the FBI, Robert Mueller, and (oh, by the way) the intelligence agencies. And they’re doing it for ratings and profit, and they’re doing it knowingly — in my view, doing a grave, grave disservice to our country.
Anderson Cooper: Do you think, some of the hosts in prime time, do they believe the stuff they’re saying about the Deep State, what they’re saying about the Department of Justice, about the FBI?
Lt. Colonel Peters: I suspect Sean Hannity really believes it. The others are smarter. They know what they’re doing.
When somebody from the White House says some awful thing, it’s hard to know whether to take the bait. If we ignore it, we normalize it. (“Oh yeah, public officials say shit like that. It’s no big deal.”) If we pay attention, we’ve let ourselves be distracted from the ongoing destruction of the environment, the decay of the rule of law, the plight of the Puerto Ricans, the alienation of America’s allies, the mistreatment of families who come here looking for asylum under our laws, the opening of a misguided trade war, and lots of other more immediately consequential stuff.
But OK, Rudy Giuliani, I’m taking the bait this time.
In Israel, Giuliani went on to criticize Daniels’ credibility and allegation she had an affair with Trump because she is a porn star. “Look at his three wives. Beautiful women. Classy women. Women of great substance. Stormy Daniels?” Giuliani said while shaking his head. “I’m sorry I don’t respect a porn star the way I respect a career woman or a woman of substance or a woman who has great respect for herself as a woman and as a person and isn’t going to sell her body for sexual exploitation.” …
On Thursday, Giuliani was asked to explain his comments. “So the point I made about her industry is, it’s an industry in which you sell looks at your body for money. That’s demeaning to women, the way I was brought up and the way I always believed the feminist movement has,” Giuliani said.
During the campaign, I objected to Trump critics trying to make an issue of Melania’s nude photos, because they’re irrelevant to how America is governed and “because I believe all of us have the right to display or not display our bodies as we see fit”. But if the president’s lawyer is going to claim there’s some difference-of-kind between Melania and Stormy Daniels because Daniels sells looks at her body for money, I have to call him on it. (And point out that Trump himself has appeared in three porn films, though he was clothed at the time.)
And as for who is credible, based on their previous actions, let me point out a few things Stormy Daniels hasn’t done:
I imagine a lot of people have fantasized about being Anthony Bourdain, the star of CNN’s Peabody-winning “Parts Unknown” series, in which he traveled the world eating exotic food and meeting the people who made it. That was probably the most enviable job on television.
Bourdain’s suicide, coming so soon after that of fashion designer Kate Spade, has sparked a lot of discussion about depression. (I’m not sure we really know that either was depressed at the time, but it’s a plausible assumption.) Here’s my contribution to that conversation.
No one close to me has committed suicide, but I have watched both parents and at least one close friend deal with depression. I’ve also skirted the borderlands of depression myself on occasion. In my view, the most insidious thing about it is that it first attacks the faculties that you will need to fight it off. (That’s why all the “snap out of it” advice never works. The command center that could have received and acted on that message has already fallen.) You may not even notice what’s happening until the depression has you encircled.
That’s why I think everyone needs to set alarms at the border, so that you notice the slide while you still have the resources to turn things around. In my case, I’ve flagged two thought patterns. Whenever either of them shows up, I’m in danger and need to implement high standards of mental hygiene:
I can’t lean on my friends because they aren’t really my friends. Secretly, it would give them satisfaction to know that I’m doing badly.
I can still imagine things that would make me happy, but feel like they’re not worth the bother. Whether or not I enjoy my life is really not that important.
Those are mine; you may have other typical borderland thoughts. Try to identify them and notice when they start showing up.
So what are “high standards of mental hygiene”? Obvious stuff, mostly: Eat right, sleep well, get exercise, drop unrewarding responsibilities that cause unnecessary stress, indulge any creativity or playfulness you happen to notice in yourself (even if it seems silly), spend time with people who love you (and trust that they really do), expose yourself to whatever kind of beauty moves you. If you know any children who aren’t your responsibility, they tend to make good companions: They are naturally playful, and it’s hard to believe that they are devious enough to fake caring about you.
None of that cures a depression after you’re in it. But if you’re not quite there yet, maybe you don’t have to go.
I imagine a lot of people have fantasized about being Anthony Bourdain, the star of CNN’s Peabody-winning “Parts Unknown” series, in which he traveled the world eating exotic food and meeting the people who made it. That was probably the most enviable job on television.
The Weekly Sift 