Monthly Archives: November 2017

Goodby To The Rule Of Law

It’s all quid pro quo, sleazy self-interest and graft in Trump’s swamp. The daily revelations–we’ve just learned that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has been in business with Putin’s son-in-law, a connection that he somehow failed to disclose during his confirmation hearings—– tend to obscure the more pedestrian varieties of corruption and self-dealing that continue unabated while we are distracted by the Russian investigation and tweets from our embarrassing ignoramus-in-chief.

Case in point: Talking Points Memo had a recent article about AT&T’s planned acquisition of Time Warner for Eighty-six billion dollars. The deal is awaiting regulatory approval.

AT&T needs the Justice Department’s approval for that deal. Normally, that decision would be housed off at the Antitrust Division at the Justice Department. But no one thinks that’s how it works in the Trump Administration. AT&T needs Donald Trump’s sign off, possibly mediated through the hand of Jeff Sessions but maybe not. Indeed, there has already been quite a bit of concern on Capitol Hill that Trump would try to hold up the AT&T deal as a way to exert pressure on Time Warner.

Time Warner owns CNN, and we all know how fond President Belligerent is of “fake news” CNN. According to various sources, the White House has already put out word that it wants to condition approval of the merger proposal on AT&T’s willingness to pressure CNN to “improve” its coverage of the President.

When CNN broke the news about the imminence of a Mueller indictment, Roger Stone–a close friend of Donald Trump’s– went on a Twitter tirade so obscene that it got his Twitter account suspended. One Tweet was both specific and damning.

When AT&T aquires Time Warner the house cleaning at CNN of human excrement like @donlemon @jaketapper & dumbfuck @ananavarro will be swift

As Josh Marshall’s TPM article noted,

Obviously, Roger Stone can rant and wish all he wants. He was in a splutter and a rage. How can he know what AT&T is going to do? But let’s go back to one more thing we know. Roger Stone still regularly talks to President Trump. Is that what President Trump told Stone? That AT&T promised they’ll ‘clean house’ at CNN?

At this point, the quid pro quo is still hypothetical. But given what we know of Trump, his family, his business partners and professional associates (Paul Manafort, et al), the people he has chosen for his cabinet–it is all too plausible.

This is the way business is conducted in banana republics and corrupt, authoritarian regimes.

The essential element of the rule of law is that the same rules apply to everyone– governors and governed alike– that no one is above the law. Even under the most favorable analysis of Donald Trump’s business dealings, it would be hard to miss his disdain for the rules, his contempt for the legal system, and his conviction that neither applies to him.

Misuse of the power of the state–abuse of governmental authority–is an impeachable offense. One of the charges against Nixon involved his (mis)use of the IRS to punish personal enemies. If Trump does indeed allow the AT&T merger in return for a promise to eviscerate CNN’s independent coverage of the Administration, it would be a “high crime” for which impeachment is appropriate.

The difference, of course, is that for the Republicans who censured Nixon,  duty to country outweighed partisanship. The only thing today’s GOP has in common with that era’s Republican Party is the name.

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“A Path I’m Not Willing To Take”

By this time, any American even minimally interested in politics is aware of the speech made a week or so ago by Senator Jeff Flake. Flake took to the Senate floor to announce that he would not be running for re-election, because in the party of Trump, such a campaign would require him to go down “a path I’m not willing to take.”

Vox reported on the speech and its reception.

“Reckless, outrageous, and undignified behavior has become excused as telling it like it is when it is actually just reckless, outrageous, and undignified,” he said, referencing President Trump. “And when such behavior emanates from the top of our government, it is something else. It is dangerous to a democracy.”

Flake’s remarks were met with a standing ovation from those in the room, including Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Bob Corker (R-TN), who have both made their fair share of biting comments about the president.

The Huffington Post was among the numerous outlets reporting on Flake’s denunciation of “Trumpism.”

“It is time for our complicity and our accommodation of the unacceptable to end,” he said.

In a stunning takedown of President Donald Trump, Flake pleaded with his colleagues to “respect each other again in an atmosphere of shared facts and shared values” and called the president’s behavior “outrageous” and “dangerous to democracy.”

“I will not be complicit or silent,” Flake said. “When the next generation asks us, ‘Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you speak up?’ What are we going to say?”

It was a great speech. But–as many others have pointed out–it wasn’t accompanied by meaningful action. Flake has obediently voted for virtually all of the measures supported by Trump and Ryan, and worse still, he isn’t going to stay and fight.

The other two Republican Senators who have spoken out–Bob Corker and John McCain–are also leaving the Senate. It raises the question why Republicans who plan to run for re-election (many of whom we know to be equally appalled by Trump) aren’t speaking publicly.

I think we know the answer to that question. It’s what is known as a lack of cojones–not to mention integrity– when contemplating the current GOP “base.” The number of Americans who identify as Republicans keeps shrinking, but those who remain include most of the voters who still support Trump. The radicalization of the party’s base has gone so far, it has eclipsed even Senators whose own opinions lie on the far edge of sanity.

A superficially unrelated article, also from Vox, provides a window into the “thought process” (a generous description) of that base.

“We’ve had this view that the voters were with us on conservatism — philosophical, economic conservatism,” said conservative intellectual Avik Roy in an interview with Zack Beauchamp. “In reality, the gravitational center of the Republican Party is white nationalism.”

The article looked at a phenomenon called “rolling coal.” The New York Times reported  on it in 2016; it’s the name given to the practice of modifying a truck’s diesel engine “so that it spews thick, toxic black smoke in order to … well, to be obnoxious.”

Entire dissertations could be written about rolling coal. Even more than Trump’s ascension, it seems to perfectly capture a moment in time, an inarticulate yawp of protest from angry white men. They feel disdained and overlooked and they will blow thick black smoke in your face until you pay attention….

What FOX and talk radio have been teaching the right for decades is that native-born, working- and middle-class whites are locked in a zero-sum struggle with rising Others — minorities, immigrants, gays, coastal elitists, hippie environmentalists, etc. — and that the major institutions of the country have been coopted and are working on behalf of the Others.

There’s much more in the article, and I encourage you to click through and read it, but its relevance to the silence of so many GOP elected officials is in its description of the hostility of a significant percentage of today’s Republican base. These are voters who don’t care about policy, or civility, or traditional Republican positions. They can’t define conservatism.  They just want to stick it to those “others.” In the immortal words from Network, they’re mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore.

And they frighten–and cow– Senators and Representatives for whom job security is more important than the country, the public good or self-respect.

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Stuck In The Swamp

Can you stand one more diatribe about Betsy DeVos?

According to Gail Collins at the New York Times, DeVos isn’t just devoting herself to the destruction of public elementary and high schools. She’s after public universities too.

DeVos is the superrich Republican donor who once led a crusade to reform troubled Michigan public schools by turning them into truly terrible private ones. Now she’s in the Trump cabinet, and she seems to be dedicating a lot of her time to, um, lowering higher education.

When no one was watching she hired a lot of people that come from the for-profit colleges,” complained Senator Patty Murray of Washington, who feels the additions are far more interested in protecting their old associates than in overseeing them. Murray is the top Democrat on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, otherwise known as HELP. These days it’s hard to tell whether that’s a promise of assistance or a cry of distress.

To oversee the critical issue of fraud in higher education, DeVos picked Julian Schmoke Jr., whose former job was a dean of — yes! — a for-profit university. Specifically a school named DeVry. Last year, under fire from state prosecutors and the Federal Trade Commission, DeVry agreed to pay $100 million to students who complained that they had been misled by its recruitment pitch.

Over the past several years, we have learned that students attending these for-profit institutions pay far more, and get far less, than they would at a public college. They have huge dropout rates, and even larger rates of default on the government grants that almost all of them take out. (On the other hand, they have very low rates of employment, despite the rosy promises made by these institutions.)

Although there are some legitimate private colleges, the statistics are pretty devastating.

“The outcomes for people who take out loans at for-profits are abysmal,” said Ben Miller of the Center for American Progress. He added that almost all the students borrow, for courses they could sometimes get for one sixth the price at a community college. And about half the people who borrow default.

As the stories about deceitful for-profits mounted, the Obama administration came up with regulations making it easier for students to refuse to pay their loans if a school had misrepresented their chances of graduating and getting a lucrative career. The rules were supposed to go into effect in July, but DeVos has delayed their implementation.

Not only has DeVos “delayed” implementation of the new regulations, under her management the Department of Education has stopped approving new fraud claims against for-profits, leaving a backlog of more than 87,000.

Give her credit for one educational advance, though: Betsy DeVos is giving us all a lesson on what happens when big political contributions buy a cabinet position for a theocratic ignoramus.

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The Horrific Truth

The GOP’s tax “reform” bill has now been unveiled. Reform it isn’t.

I guess all sentient beings already knew what was coming…but Krugman’s accurate prediction distills its awfulness.

Republicans in Congress know perfectly well that Trump is utterly unfit for office and has been abusing his position for personal gain…

If they nonetheless circle the wagons around Trump… there will be one main reason: Trump offers their big opportunity to cut taxes for the very wealthy. Indeed, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that almost 80 percent of the Trump tax cut would go to people with incomes over $1 million; these people would get an average cut of around $230,000 a year.

Now that Ryan and crew have unveiled the plan’s specifics, there is something for everyone to hate. According to Americans for Tax Fairness, the plan jeopardizes Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and public education; it repeals the Alternative Minimum Tax (which insures that rich people with write-offs pay at least something), slashes corporate taxes and vastly increases the deficit (whatever happened to those GOP “deficit hawks”?)

Talking Points Memo zeroed in on what it identified as the five most controversial provisions; although I agree their chosen provisions are horrible, there are arguably others that are even worse. (I’m particularly incensed by the utterly insane attack on environmentally-friendly provisions; the bill eliminates tax credits for electric vehicles, and raises taxes on clean energy.)

TPM points out that changes to the treatment of mortgage interest and property taxes will have a negative effect on the value–and sales price–of homes. Those of us who factored in these deductions when we bought a home will be selling them to people who won’t get those deductions–and won’t be willing to pay as much.

The bill eliminates a deduction for medical bills that currently only benefits very sick people with high medical costs. It will hit senior citizens and the critically ill, giving new meaning to “kick ’em when they’re down.” It will also eliminate deductions for contributions to  certain medical savings accounts, and the tax credit for companies that make drugs that treat extremely rare diseases. (Without that tax credit, even fewer pharmaceutical companies will bother…)

The enormous amount of student loan debt has been identified as a major drag on the economy, so the “reform” bill makes it worse, eliminating the deductibility of interest on those loans.

We will no longer be able to take a deduction for state and local income taxes. I’ll just leave that one here for you to ponder.

And in the “fine print,” our happy theocrats buried repeal of the  “Johnson Amendment”—the 50-year-old policy that churches lose their tax exempt status if they endorse candidates or engage in partisan politicking from the pulpit.

Repealing the Johnson Amendment isn’t the only culture war provision hidden in the dry language of tax policy. Welcome to “Fetal Personhood.”

Congressional Republicans are using their new tax plan for more than tax breaks for corporations and the rich. Their plan gives fetuses federal benefits in an apparent attempt to codify the view that life begins at fertilization—and to take another swipe at legal abortion.

Let me go on record as favoring a first-trimester abortion for this bill, which was conceived through incestuous relations between America’s plutocrats and their legislative prostitutes.

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Choice And Consequences

As regular readers of this blog know (and as yesterday’s post confirmed) I am not a fan of school vouchers. My concerns range from the philosophical to the practical, and the emerging research has confirmed most of the practical ones.

One consequence of voucher programs that is rarely, if ever, addressed (although, I will immodestly point out that I have addressed it): the unfair impact on small towns. Vouchers were first promoted as a way to allow poor kids to escape failing inner-city schools. (Ignore, for now, the fact that in Indiana, at least, most vouchers are being used by white kids who are leaving non-failing schools for religious ones…).

Most small towns don’t have enough students to support an alternative to the public school. Since most private schools accepting vouchers are in cities large enough to have inner-cities and multiple schools, and since they are receiving tax dollars paid by people throughout the state, small towns are effectively subsidizing private schools in more metropolitan areas.

Recently, I came across an illustration of this inequity. It’s a story from Stinesville, Indiana, a town I will readily admit I’d never heard of, although I was born (and will undoubtedly die) in Indiana.

With the largest private school voucher program in the country, and a charter sector that has grown “explosively,” Indiana is a poster state for the kinds of education policies pushed by President Trump and his Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. But for small rural communities, the growth of school choice over the past six years is now forcing another choice: whether to close the public schools that are at their heart as competing schools pull students and money away. As vouchers and charters were sold to voters, the cost to small towns like Stinesville, IN, where officials voted this week to shutter the elementary school, was left out of the sales pitch.

The article reports on a school board meeting held just last month, at which the decision to close the school was the agenda item.

On this night, October 18, 2017, despite the sleepy look of the downtown street, there is nothing sleepy about school’s parking lot. It is packed. Inside, the gym is full of people, filling the folding chairs that have been set on the floor, and squeezing into the bleachers. Many are wearing red. There are parents with young children, teenagers, and plenty of older people too.

The superintendent explained why he advocated closing Stinesville Elementary School and busing the children to Ellettsville, population 6,600, six miles away: declining enrollment, declining funds and escalating costs.

So what does this have to do with vouchers? The article explains.

As the voucher and charter programs were explained and advertised as “school choice” to the public, one corollary fact was not included: Indiana residents might lose a choice that many of us have taken for granted for decades—the ability to send our kids to a local, well-resourced public school. The kind of school that serves lunch and participates in the federal school lunch program. The kind of school that provides transportation. The kind of school that has certified teachers and a library and is in a district obligated by law to accept all children in the attendance area, including those with profound special needs, and to provide them a free and appropriate public education….

Governor Daniels cut $300 million from the state budget for K-12 in 2009, during the recession. That money was never replaced even as the economy began to recover. Indiana voters wrote tax caps into the state constitution through a referendum in 2010, weakening the ability of local governments to provide services.

Since 2011, public dollars being diverted from the public school system to charters and vouchers have ballooned. By the end of 2015, according to an analysis done by the Legislative Services Agency at the request of Democratic state representative Ed Delaney, $920 million had been spent on charters and vouchers. From its inception in 2011 through the 2016-2017 school year, the voucher program cost Indiana taxpayers $516.5 million.

The article documents the dollars diverted to religious schools from Stinesville’s public school, which had been ranked as one of the state’s most effective, and references research on the negative effects suffered by small communities that lose their schools.

I notice that proponents of “school choice” never discuss these issues.

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