Michael1942's Blog

Intelligencer

Jonathan Chait 18 hrs ago

Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of MSN or Microsoft.

Republicans have spent the impeachment trial alternatively arguing that the House had not produced enough evidence to prove its case, and that more evidence is unnecessary. Last night, they introduced a novel new argument: It would be pointless to introduce more evidence, because the White House will simply block it in the courts. “A growing number of Republicans are pointing to President Donald Trump’s threat to invoke executive privilege in order to make their case against subpoenas sought by Democrats for key witnesses and documents,” reports CNN.

There are several remarkable things about this new rationale. First, Republicans have spent days lambasting Democrats for refusing to let the courts to exhaust every last Trump appeal. (Jay Sekulow: “The president’s opponents, in their rush to impeach, have refused to wait for judicial review.”) They deemed the House impeachment proceedings a “shoddy work product” for this reason, but are now prepared to argue that it’s too late and they can’t fix it.

Trump himself is arguing that the House had too few witnesses — because he blocked them! — but that the Senate should not try to get those witnesses, because “they had their chance.”

The Democrat House would not give us lawyers, or not one witness, but now demand that the Republican Senate produce the witnesses that the House never sought, or even asked for? They had their chance, but pretended to rush. Most unfair & corrupt hearing in Congressional history!

Second, the fatalistic assumption that Trump can block any new evidence is probably wrong. John Bolton, for one, has offered to testify (and, as a former White House employee, cannot be blocked). Some experts argue that, as a matter of law, the Senate is in a stronger position than the House to swiftly compel documents and testimony Trump has blocked. In any case, if the Senate wants to at least try to get more evidence, it can give the process a few weeks. There’s no reason to throw in the towel before even trying.

It is true, of course, that Trump will continue to withhold as much evidence as he can, as long as he can. But this raises a third point about his lack of transparency: Doesn’t it make Republican senators question his protestations of innocence? After all, Trump is very much not conceding that he pressured Ukraine to undertake ordered-up investigations. His defense does not merely say his actions don’t merit removal — it denies the key factual predicate of the articles of impeachment. Republicans in Congress have dutifully followed his argument, yet Trump is blocking all the relevant evidence. Doesn’t this bear upon his underlying guilt? Why is he withholding access to documents and witnesses that would presumably exculpate him?

And finally, bear in mind that refusing to cooperate with any investigation is one of the things Trump is charged with in one of the two articles of impeachment. Trump’s blanket rejection of any legitimate oversight role for Congress, and his calculation that he can withhold all evidence on every investigation of his administration and run out the clock is the second high crime.

Republican senators are saying the first crime hasn’t been sufficiently proven, but they can’t get the evidence that might prove it, because Trump will drag it out too long. Every Republican argument for refusing to convict Trump simply takes his bad faith as a background fact, and focuses all the scrutiny on the way other actors have dealt with it. What are you gonna do? The guy is obstructing Congress. Sure, we could try to get more testimony against John Gotti, but Gotti will probably just bribe or murder all the witnesses. Might as well end the trial quickly and vote not guilty.

Please Donate

Yahoo Finance

Rick Newman

Rick NewmanSenior Columnist

Yahoo FinanceJanuary 22, 2020, 2:48 PM CST

If you’re beating inflation by 1%, is that a “boom”?

President Trump thinks so. In a speech at the annual gathering of the ultra-rich in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21, Trump declared that his presidency has generated a “blue-collar boom” and a “roaring geyser of opportunity.” “The American Dream is back,” Trump said. “No one is benefitting more than America’s middle class.”

As with many of Trump’s scripted speeches, select facts provided by White House economists are mostly correct. But Trump’s overall characterization is not, and as usual, Trump falls back on the bogus conceit that everything was terrible before he arrived in Washington, while everything is fine now.

Trump has presided over an economy that has generally improved at about the same pace since 2013 or so. The pace of job growth and stock-market gains—frequent Trump bragging points—are about the same as they were during President Obama’s second term. And Trump’s focus on short-term comparisons obscures pernicious problems that no president has figured out how to solve, such as exorbitant health care costs and worsening wealth and income inequality.

Providing context for some of Trump’s claims in Davos highlights the extent to which he’s overstating prosperity. Examples:

The “blue-collar boom.” Here’s the trend in manufacturing employment since 1980:

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Does this look like a boom? The U.S. economy hemorrhaged manufacturing jobs from 2001 to 2010, with a modest recovery since then. The pace of job creation in manufacturing accelerated slightly in 2018, but it slowed again this year and declined in December. Trump’s tariffs on imports have raised costs on manufacturers and depressed output, the opposite of what he promised as a candidate in 2016.

“Wages at the bottom of the income ladder are enjoying the largest gains.” Average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers—generally considered lower-income blue-collar laborers – grew 3% in 2019. Inflation in 2019 was 2.3%. So those workers are gaining on inflation by less than 1 percentage point per year. But that’s only true for families not exposed to out-of-pocket health care costs, which are rising at least twice as fast as overall inflation.

“Since my election, the net worth of the bottom half of wage earners has increased three times faster than the increase for the top 1%.” This is true, according to Federal Reserve data. Lower-income Americans have mostly benefited from the rebound in home values that began in 2012. Yet the bottom 50% controls just 1.5% of the wealth in the United States, while the top 1% controls nearly one-third. Wealth inequality in the United States is nearly the worst among advanced nations, an insidious problem nobody has come close to solving.

“Real median household income is at the highest level ever recorded.” True, but so what? In a growing economy this should always be true, as it has been many times before under many prior presidents. Superlatives based strictly on population and economic growth can mask important weaknesses. What matters more are per-capita measures. On the Yahoo Finance Trumponomics Report Card, for instance, Trump ranks third out of the last 7 presidents on GDP per capita, one reason his overall grade is a respectable B rather than the A+ Trump would probably give himself.

Trump is hardly the only politician to exaggerate his accomplishments and take credit for salutary developments that would have happened anyway. But he does have to justify an unpopular tax cut, a war on regulation, a confounding trade policy and a disruptive style of governing. Voters will have their say in November, letting Trump know whether they see the same boom he does.

Rick Newman is the author of four books, including “Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success.” Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman. Confidential tip line: rickjnewman@yahoo.com. Encrypted communication available. Click here to get Rick’s stories by email.

Please Donate

Charles M. Blow 12 hrs ago

Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of MSN or Microsoft.

When I was young I idolized the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the way most boys look up to athletes or pop stars.

I had a poster of him. I had a T-shirt with his face on it. I recited his “I Have a Dream” speech. It seemed to me that he was a role model, an example of a life for a Southern boy who loved books and learning, leadership and public speaking.

There was a dignity about King to which I aspired, a politics of character, a Southern erudition that was rooted in religion, but encompassed an exquisite learnedness.
He was a black man who most people had come to venerate, one existing, it seemed, above the trivialities of tense day-to-day racial exchanges, one existing on a higher moral plane.
But, as I grew older and learned and read more about King, it became ever more clear to me that the King I had been fed was a caricature of the man he was. I had been taught a reduced King, smooth and polished, a one-dimensional impersonation of a person.
Sign up for the Morning Briefing newsletter
I had been taught only the “Dream” King. That is what America wants King to remain: Frozen in perpetual optimism, urging more than demanding, appealing to America’s better angels rather than ruthlessly calling out its persistent demons.
But, that must not be done. That must not be done.
As King said in a 1967 interview when asked about the “Dream” speech, after much soul-searching he had come to see that “some of the old optimism was a little superficial, and now it must be tempered with a solid realism.”
That evolution, toward a more “solid realism,” toward the more rational King, toward the more radical King, is why I happen to believe that one of King’s most consequential speeches is a little-discussed address he gave in 1967 at Stanford University. It was called “The Other America.”
In it, King blasted “large segments of white society” for being “more concerned about tranquillity and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity.”
He slammed what he called the “white backlash” for being the cause of black discontent and demands for black power, rather than the result of it, calling it “merely a new name for an old phenomenon.”
And he declared that true integration “is not merely a romantic or aesthetic something where you merely add color to a still predominantly white power structure.”
This speech was delivered after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As King put it in the 1967 interview, passage of those acts came at “bargained rates.”
He explained: “It didn’t cost the nation anything. In fact, it helped the economic side of the nation to integrate lunch counters and public accommodations. It didn’t cost the nation anything to get the right to vote established. And, now we are confronting issues that cannot be solved without costing the nation.”
It seems that King was even open to the idea of reparations, if not explicitly by name, at least in spirit.
King said in his Stanford speech:
“In 1863 the Negro was freed from the bondage of physical slavery. But at the same time, the nation refused to give him land to make that freedom meaningful. And at that same period America was giving millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, which meant that America was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor that would make it possible to grow and develop, and refused to give that economic floor to its black peasants.”
He extended this thought in other speeches, pointing out that not only did the government give the land to these white people, it also used government money to start land-grant colleges to teach them how to farm, sent out county agents to further their expertise, offered low-interest loans so that they could mechanize and instituted a system of subsidies for them, and these became “the very people telling the black man he ought to lift himself by his own boot straps.”
As King put it about his Poor People’s Campaign, “Now, when we come to Washington in this campaign we’re coming to get our check.”
King was assassinated a month before the campaign was supposed to head to Washington.
And King was not afraid to point out white people’s hypocrisy, particularly that of the white moderates, those who were opposed to anti-black cruelty but did not genuinely endorse black equality, fully and unequivocally.
King wrote in his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.”
As a child, I idolized the narrowed King. As an adult I love the more complicated King: agitated, exhausted and even angry.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram.

Please Donate