Historian and activist Howard Zinn died in 2010, and the progressive world greatly misses his spirit and guidance. One wonders what he’d have to say about America today — one in which senators create legislation in secret and a president denigrates foes and allies alike via Twitter. What would he, a former Cub Scout, think about the president’s recent speech in which he exhorted Boy Scouts to boo a previous president? We can be pretty sure that he’d be dismayed and disgusted by an America where CEOs make 271 times the pay of an average worker and where the top 0.1 percent hold 11 percent of the national income. He’d certainly be no fan of a culture that made serious, though unsuccessful, attempts to ban his signature work, A People’s History of the United States.
But Zinn might also be heartened by the explosion of activism that the Trump administration, especially the outcry over health care, has spawned in American society. Back in 1970, Zinn was invited to debate philosopher and former US assistant secretary of state, Charles Frankel, about the legitimacy of civil disobedience. Zinn argued that there is a fundamental difference between respect for the law as set down by the Bill of Rights and the law as made in everyday practice. Combatting injustice wasn’t a matter of anarchy or treason — but one of respect. Zinn did more than hold his own.
His words from nearly 50 years ago are a powerful reminder of who holds the reigns of power in this country and how the populace must come together to get it back. Here are some excerpts from his speech.
Zinn on Inequality
I start from the supposition that the world is topsy-turvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out of power, that the wealth is distributed in this country and the world in such a way as not simply to require small reform but to require a drastic reallocation of wealth.
Zinn on Respect for the Rule of Law
Law is very important. We are talking about obedience to law — law, this marvelous invention of modern times, which we attribute to Western civilization, and which we talk about proudly. The rule of law, oh, how wonderful — all these courses in Western civilization all over the land. Remember those bad old days when people were exploited by feudalism? Everything was terrible in the Middle Ages — but now we have Western civilization, the rule of law. The rule of law has regularized and maximized the injustice that existed before the rule of law, that is what the rule of law has done. Let us start looking at the rule of law realistically, not with that metaphysical complacency with which we always examined it before…
And the answer to that question is much easier to come by, because we have a lot of empirical evidence about what happens if everyone obeys the law, or if even most people obey the law. What happens is what has happened, what is happening. Why do people revere the law? And we all do; even I have to fight it, for it was put into my bones at an early age when I was a Cub Scout. One reason we revere the law is its ambivalence. In the modern world we deal with phrases and words that have multiple meanings, like “national security.” Oh, yes, we must do this for national security! Well, what does that mean? Whose national security? Where? When? Why? We don’t bother to answer those questions, or even to ask them.
Zinn on Constitutional Law
The law conceals many things. The law is the Bill of Rights. In fact, that is what we think of when we develop our reverence for the law. The law is something that protects us; the law is our right — the law is the Constitution. Bill of Rights Day, essay contests sponsored by the American Legion on our Bill of Rights, that is the law. And that is good.
But there is another part of the law that doesn’t get ballyhooed — the legislation that has gone through month after month, year after year, from the beginning of the Republic, which allocates the resources of the country in such a way as to leave some people very rich and other people very poor, and still others scrambling like mad for what little is left. That is the law. If you go to law school you will see this. You can quantify it by counting the big, heavy law books that people carry around with them and see how many law books you count that say “Constitutional Rights” on them and how many that say “Property,” “Contracts,” “Torts,” “Corporation Law.” That is what the law is mostly about.
Zinn on the Society of Law
There are other problems with the law. It’s a strange thing; we think that law brings order. Law doesn’t. How do we know that law does not bring order? Look around us. We live under the rules of law. Notice how much order we have? People say we have to worry about civil disobedience because it will lead to anarchy. Take a look at the present world in which the rule of law obtains. This is the closest to what is called anarchy in the popular mind — confusion, chaos, international banditry. The only order that is really worth anything does not come through the enforcement of law, it comes through the establishment of a society which is just and in which harmonious relationships are established and in which you need a minimum of regulation to create decent sets of arrangements among people. But the order based on law and on the force of law is the order of the totalitarian state, and it inevitably leads either to total injustice or to rebellion — eventually, in other words, to very great disorder.
The rapid development of so-called NBIC technologies – nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science – are giving rise to possibilities that have long been the domain of science fiction. Disease, ageing and even death are all human realities that these technologies seek to end.
They may enable us to enjoy greater “morphological freedom” – we could take on new forms through prosthetics or genetic engineering. Or advance our cognitive capacities. We could use brain-computer interfaces to link us to advanced artificial intelligence (AI).
Nanobots could roam our bloodstream to monitor our health and enhance our emotional propensities for joy, love or other emotions. Advances in one area often raise new possibilities in others, and this “convergence” may bring about radical changes to our world in the near-future.
“Transhumanism” is the idea that humans should transcend their current natural state and limitations through the use of technology – that we should embrace self-directed human evolution. If the history of technological progress can be seen as humankind’s attempt to tame nature to better serve its needs, transhumanism is the logical continuation: the revision of humankind’s nature to better serve its fantasies.
As David Pearce, a leading proponent of transhumanism and co-founder of Humanity+, says:
If we want to live in paradise, we will have to engineer it ourselves. If we want eternal life, then we’ll need to rewrite our bug-ridden genetic code and become god-like … only hi-tech solutions can ever eradicate suffering from the world. Compassion alone is not enough.
But there is a darker side to the naive faith that Pearce and other proponents have in transhumanism – one that is decidedly dystopian.
There is unlikely to be a clear moment when we emerge as transhuman. Rather technologies will become more intrusive and integrate seamlessly with the human body. Technology has long been thought of as an extension of the self. Many aspects of our social world, not least our financial systems, are already largely machine-based. There is much to learn from these evolving human/machine hybrid systems.
Yet the often Utopian language and expectations that surround and shape our understanding of these developments have been under-interrogated. The profound changes that lie ahead are often talked about in abstract ways, because evolutionary “advancements” are deemed so radical that they ignore the reality of current social conditions.
In this way, transhumanism becomes a kind of “techno-anthropocentrism”, in which transhumanists often underestimate the complexity of our relationship with technology. They see it as a controllable, malleable tool that, with the correct logic and scientific rigour, can be turned to any end. In fact, just as technological developments are dependent on and reflective of the environment in which they arise, they in turn feed back into the culture and create new dynamics – often imperceptibly.
Situating transhumanism, then, within the broader social, cultural, political, and economic contexts within which it emerges is vital to understanding how ethical it is.
Competitive environments
Max More and Natasha Vita-More, in their edited volume The Transhumanist Reader, claim the need in transhumanism “for inclusivity, plurality and continuous questioning of our knowledge”.
Yet these three principles are incompatible with developing transformative technologies within the prevailing system from which they are currently emerging: advanced capitalism.
One problem is that a highly competitive social environment doesn’t lend itself to diverse ways of being. Instead it demands increasingly efficient behaviour. Take students, for example. If some have access to pills that allow them to achieve better results, can other students afford not to follow? This is already a quandary. Increasing numbers of students reportedly pop performance-enhancing pills. And if pills become more powerful, or if the enhancements involve genetic engineering or intrusive nanotechnology that offer even stronger competitive advantages, what then? Rejecting an advanced technological orthodoxy could potentially render someone socially and economically moribund (perhaps evolutionarily so), while everyone with access is effectively forced to participate to keep up.
Going beyond everyday limits is suggestive of some kind of liberation. However, here it is an imprisoning compulsion to act a certain way. We literally have to transcend in order to conform (and survive). The more extreme the transcendence, the more profound the decision to conform and the imperative to do so.
The systemic forces cajoling the individual into being “upgraded” to remain competitive also play out on a geo-political level. One area where technology R&D has the greatest transhumanist potential is defence. DARPA (the US defence department responsible for developing military technologies), which is attempting to create “metabolically dominant soldiers”, is a clear example of how vested interests of a particular social system could determine the development of radically powerful transformative technologies that have destructive rather than Utopian applications.
There is quite rightly a huge amount of trepidation around the creation of super-intelligence and the emergence of “the singularity” – the idea that once AI reaches a certain level it will rapidly redesign itself, leading to an explosion of intelligence that will quickly surpass that of humans (something that will happen by 2029 according to futurist Ray Kurzweil). If the world takes the shape of whatever the most powerful AI is programmed (or reprograms itself) to desire, it even opens the possibility of evolution taking a turn for the entirely banal – could an AI destroy humankind from a desire to produce the most paperclips for example?The rush to develop super-intelligent AI by globally competitive and mutually distrustful nation states could also become an arms race. In Radical Evolution, novelist Verner Vinge describes a scenario in which superhuman intelligence is the “ultimate weapon”. Ideally, mankind would proceed with the utmost care in developing such a powerful and transformative innovation.
It’s also difficult to conceive of any aspect of humanity that could not be “improved” by being made more efficient at satisfying the demands of a competitive system. It is the system, then, that determines humanity’s evolution – without taking any view on what humans are or what they should be. One of the ways in which advanced capitalism proves extremely dynamic is in its ideology of moral and metaphysical neutrality. As philosopher Michael Sandel says: markets don’t wag fingers. In advanced capitalism, maximising one’s spending power maximises one’s ability to flourish – hence shopping could be said to be a primary moral imperative of the individual.
If biotech has rendered human nature entirely revisable, then it has no grain to direct or constrain our designs on it. And so whose designs will our successor post-human artefacts likely bear? I have little doubt that in our vastly consumerist, media-saturated capitalist economy, market forces will have their way. So – the commercial imperative would be the true architect of the future human.
Whether the evolutionary process is determined by a super-intelligent AI or advanced capitalism, we may be compelled to conform to a perpetual transcendence that only makes us more efficient at activities demanded by the most powerful system. The end point is predictably an entirely nonhuman – though very efficient – technological entity derived from humanity that doesn’t necessarily serve a purpose that a modern-day human would value in any way. The ability to serve the system effectively will be the driving force. This is also true of natural evolution – technology is not a simple tool that allows us to engineer ourselves out of this conundrum. But transhumanism could amplify the speed and least desirable aspects of the process.
Information authoritarianism
For bioethicist Julian Savulescu, the main reason humans must be enhanced is for our species to survive. He says we face a Bermuda Triangle of extinction: radical technological power, liberal democracy and our moral nature. As a transhumanist, Savulescu extols technological progress, also deeming it inevitable and unstoppable. It is liberal democracy – and particularly our moral nature – that should alter.
The failings of humankind to deal with global problems are increasingly obvious. But Savulescu neglects to situate our moral failings within their wider cultural, political and economic context, instead believing that solutions lie within our biological make up.
Yet how would Savulescu’s morality-enhancing technologies be disseminated, prescribed and potentially enforced to address the moral failings they seek to “cure”? This would likely reside in the power structures that may well bear much of the responsibility for these failings in the first place. He’s also quickly drawn into revealing how relative and contestable the concept of “morality” is:
We will need to relax our commitment to maximum protection of privacy. We’re seeing an increase in the surveillance of individuals and that will be necessary if we are to avert the threats that those with antisocial personality disorder, fanaticism, represent through their access to radically enhanced technology.
Such surveillance allows corporations and governments to access and make use of extremely valuable information. In Who Owns the Future, internet pioneer Jaron Lanier explains:
Troves of dossiers on the private lives and inner beings of ordinary people, collected over digital networks, are packaged into a new private form of elite money … It is a new kind of security the rich trade in, and the value is naturally driven up. It becomes a giant-scale levee inaccessible to ordinary people.
Crucially, this levee is also invisible to most people. Its impacts extend beyond skewing the economic system towards elites to significantly altering the very conception of liberty, because the authority of power is both radically more effective and dispersed.
Foucault’s notion that we live in a panoptic society – one in which the sense of being perpetually watched instils discipline – is now stretched to the point where today’s incessant machinery has been called a “superpanopticon”. The knowledge and information that transhumanist technologies will tend to create could strengthen existing power structures that cement the inherent logic of the system in which the knowledge arises.
This is in part evident in the tendency of algorithms toward race and gender bias, which reflects our already existing social failings. Information technology tends to interpret the world in defined ways: it privileges information that is easily measurable, such as GDP, at the expense of unquantifiable information such as human happiness or well-being. As invasive technologies provide ever more granular data about us, this data may in a very real sense come to define the world – and intangible information may not maintain its rightful place in human affairs.
Systemic dehumanisation
Existing inequities will surely be magnified with the introduction of highly effective psycho-pharmaceuticals, genetic modification, super intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, nanotechnology, robotic prosthetics, and the possible development of life expansion. They are all fundamentally inegalitarian, based on a notion of limitlessness rather than a standard level of physical and mental well-being we’ve come to assume in healthcare. It’s not easy to conceive of a way in which these potentialities can be enjoyed by all.
Unprecedented acute concentration of wealth happens alongside these expulsions. Advanced economic and technical achievements enable this wealth and the expulsion of surplus groups. At the same time, Sassen writes, they create a kind of nebulous centrelessness as the locus of power:In Britain, they include the 30,000 people whose deaths in 2015 were linked to health and social care cuts and the many who perished in the Grenfell Tower fire. Their deaths can be said to have resulted from systematic marginalisation.
The oppressed have often risen against their masters. But today the oppressed have mostly been expelled and survive a great distance from their oppressors … The “oppressor” is increasingly a complex system that combines persons, networks, and machines with no obvious centre.
Surplus populations removed from the productive aspects of the social world may rapidly increase in the near future as improvements in AI and robotics potentially result in significant automation unemployment. Large swaths of society may become productively and economically redundant. For historian Yuval Noah Harari “the most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: what should we do with all the superfluous people?”
We would be left with the scenario of a small elite that has an almost total concentration of wealth with access to the most powerfully transformative technologies in world history and a redundant mass of people, no longer suited to the evolutionary environment in which they find themselves and entirely dependent on the benevolence of that elite. The dehumanising treatment of today’s expelled groups shows that prevailing liberal values in developed countries don’t always extend to those who don’t share the same privilege, race, culture or religion.
In an era of radical technological power, the masses may even represent a significant security threat to the elite, which could be used to justify aggressive and authoritarian actions (perhaps enabled further by a culture of surveillance).
In their transhumanist tract, The Proactionary Imperative, Steve Fuller and Veronika Lipinska argue that we are obliged to pursue techno-scientific progress relentlessly, until we achieve our god-like destiny or infinite power – effectively to serve God by becoming God. They unabashedly reveal the incipient violence and destruction such Promethean aims would require: “replacing the natural with the artificial is so key to proactionary strategy … at least as a serious possibility if not a likelihood [it will lead to] the long-term environmental degradation of the Earth.”
The extent of suffering they would be willing to gamble in their cosmic casino is only fully evident when analysing what their project would mean for individual human beings:
A proactionary world would not merely tolerate risk-taking but outright encourage it, as people are provided with legal incentives to speculate with their bio-economic assets. Living riskily would amount to an entrepreneurship of the self … [proactionaries] seek large long-term benefits for survivors of a revolutionary regime that would permit many harms along the way.
Progress on overdrive will require sacrifices.
The economic fragility that humans may soon be faced with as a result of automation unemployment would likely prove extremely useful to proactionary goals. In a society where vast swaths of people are reliant on handouts for survival, market forces would determine that less social security means people will risk more for a lower reward, so “proactionaries would reinvent the welfare state as a vehicle for fostering securitised risk taking” while “the proactionary state would operate like a venture capitalist writ large”.
At the heart of this is the removal of basic rights for “Humanity 1.0”, Fuller’s term for modern, non-augmented human beings, replaced with duties towards the future augmented Humanity 2.0. Hence the very code of our being can and perhaps must be monetised: “personal autonomy should be seen as a politically licensed franchise whereby individuals understand their bodies as akin to plots of land in what might be called the ‘genetic commons’”.
The neoliberal preoccupation with privatisation would so extend to human beings. Indeed, the lifetime of debt that is the reality for most citizens in developed advanced capitalist nations, takes a further step when you are born into debt – simply by being alive “you are invested with capital on which a return is expected”.
Socially moribund masses may thus be forced to serve the technoscientific super-project of Humanity 2.0, which uses the ideology of market fundamentalism in its quest for perpetual progress and maximum productivity. The only significant difference is that the stated aim of godlike capabilities in Humanity 2.0 is overt, as opposed to the undefined end determined by the infinite “progress” of an ever more efficient market logic that we have now.
A new politics
Some transhumanists are beginning to understand that the most serious limitations to what humans can achieve are social and cultural – not technical. However, all too often their reframing of politics falls into the same trap as their techno-centric worldview. They commonly argue the new political poles are not left-right but techno-conservative or techno-progressive (and even techno-libertarian and techno-sceptic). Meanwhile Fuller and Lipinska argue that the new political poles will be up and down instead of left and right: those who want to dominate the skies and became all powerful, and those who want to preserve the Earth and its species-rich diversity. It is a false dichotomy. Preservation of the latter is likely to be necessary for any hope of achieving the former.
Transhumanism and advanced capitalism are two processes which value “progress” and “efficiency” above everything else. The former as a means to power and the latter as a means to profit. Humans become vessels to serve these values. Transhuman possibilities urgently call for a politics with more clearly delineated and explicit humane values to provide a safer environment in which to foster these profound changes. Where we stand on questions of social justice and environmental sustainability has never been more important. Technology doesn’t allow us to escape these questions – it doesn’t permit political neutrality. The contrary is true. It determines that our politics have never been important. Savulescu is right when he says radical technologies are coming. He is wrong in thinking they will fix our morality. They will reflect it.
“Would you be willing to speak under oath to give your version of the events?”
ABC News’ Jonathan Karl asked Donald Trump on June 9, 2017. A day earlier, former FBI Director James Comey’s appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee had put Trump in the crosshairs of a potential obstruction of justice investigation.
“100 percent,” Trump said.
But does a serial liar become truthful when placed under oath? Perhaps Trump’s previously sworn answers to questions about Felix Sater offer a clue. As special counsel Robert Mueller “follows the money” from Russia to Trump and his associates, Sater could be someone to watch.
Who is Felix Sater?
Born in 1966, Sater was about 8 years old when he emigrated with his parents from the Soviet Union to the heavily Russian enclave of Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach. After attending Pace University briefly, he dropped out and became a Wall Street stockbroker. In a 1991 barroom fight, he stabbed a man in the face with the broken stem of a wine glass and was sentenced to prison. In 1993, he became part of a stock scheme that allegedly relied on Mafia crime families for protection. In 1998, Sater pled guilty to federal charges and, pursuant to a cooperation agreement, avoided another stint in prison by helping authorities go after mob figures.
For the next several years, he worked with the FBI and the US attorney’s office in New York. Sater also reportedly cooperated with the CIA in tracking down stinger missiles sold on the black market in Central Asia, thereby keeping them out of terrorists’ hands. As an informant, he was productive. During Loretta Lynch’s 2015 confirmation hearing to become attorney general, she said Sater had provided valuable and sensitive information “crucial to national security and the conviction of over 20 individuals, including those responsible for committing massive financial fraud and members of La Cosa Nostra.”
“I’d come back, pop my head into Mr. Trump’s office, and tell him, you know, ‘Moving forward on the Moscow deal,’” Sater said. “And he would say ‘All right…’ I showed him photos, I showed him the site, showed him the view from the site. It’s pretty spectacular.”
According to Sater, the two men became more than business associates. When Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. visited Moscow in February 2006, Donald Trump Sr. asked Sater to keep an eye on them. “He asked if I wouldn’t mind joining them and looking after them while they were in Moscow.” Sater said. He summarized the attitude of Trump’s children as “nice, big city, great. Let’s do a deal here.”
Q: “[W]hat kind of interaction did you have with Mr. Sater prior to the article appearing?”
TRUMP: “Not that much, not very much…. I would say that my interaction with Felix Sater was, you know, not —was very little.” [p. 411]
That was just the beginning.
By 2010 Sater was no longer at Bayrock. He was a “senior adviser to Donald Trump.” At least, that’s what it said on the Trump Organization business card he carried. He also had a Trump Organization email address and office. The phone number on his card had belonged previously to a lawyer in the office of Trump’s general counsel. As recently as December 2015, Sater’s LinkedIn profile boasted his prior experience as “senior adviser to Donald Trump, The Trump Organization, January 2010 – 2011 (1 year).”
Q: “Do you recall when you met Mr. Sater for the first time?”
TRUMP: “No. Many years ago. I don’t know him well at all, but it was many years ago.” [p. 148]
But apparently, Trump knew Sater well enough to vouch for him:
“I don’t think he was connected to the Mafia. He got into a barroom fight. In fact, he was supposedly very close to the government of the United States as a witness or something, but I don’t think he was connected to the Mafia… I don’t think he was connected to the Mafia and I don’t know him very well, but I don’t think he was connected to the Mafia… I don’t see Felix as being a member of the Mafia.” [pp. 149-150]
Then the lawyer asked Trump about the 2007 New York Times article describing Sater’s unsavory past:
Q: “Do you recall reading it at the time it came out?”
TRUMP: “I just vaguely remember the article, but we weren’t dealing much with him [Sater]. We were dealing with Bayrock. We weren’t dealing much with him, so — I think this was maybe the article where it talked about the barroom fight, actually, but I vaguely remember it.” [p. 156]
Finally came more focused questions about the man who said he’d escorted Trump’s children around Moscow and popped into Trump’s office to discuss plans for Trump real estate deals around the world.
Q: “About how many times have you conversed with Mr. Sater?”
TRUMP: “Over the years?”
Q: “Over the years, if you can estimate?”
TRUMP: “Not many. If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.” (pp. 156-157)
Not Done Yet
Sater may have been “forgotten,” but he was far from gone. According a Feb. 19, 2017 article in The New York Times, Sater said he was working on a plan for a Trump Tower in Moscow as recently as 2015; however, Trump’s budding presidential campaign brought that project to a halt.
Nevertheless, Sater told Politico, he visited Trump Tower in New York during July 2016 on business that he described as “confidential.” And in late January 2017, Sater surfaced again at the Manhattan Loews Regency Hotel on Park Avenue to meet with Trump’s personal attorney, Michael D. Cohen, and Andrii Artemenko, a pro-Putin lawmaker from Ukraine. Artemenko and Sater gave Cohen a peace plan that would settle the dispute in Ukraine and rid Russia of US sanctions. Cohen was supposed to deliver the plan to then-national security adviser Michael Flynn, but less than a month later, Flynn was out of a job.
Which Takes Us To Comey
Trump blamed Flynn’s undoing on intelligence “leaks.”
That’s how Trump rolls. When the truth finally emerges to unearth his latest scandal, he blames “leakers” — a label he’s used often to describe former FBI Director Comey. Given Trump’s remarkable memory lapses concerning Felix Sater, will he swear to tell the truth and then contradict Comey’s version of their private conversations? Maybe not.
Only five weeks after Trump’s June 9 Rose Garden performance, reporters for The New York Times asked him about his Feb. 14 encounter with Comey: “Did you actually have a one-on-one with Comey then?”
“Not much,” Trump replied. “Not even that I remember. He was sitting, and I don’t remember even talking to him about any of this stuff.”
Maybe Trump’s lawyers have reminded him that prosecutors have a difficult time getting a perjury conviction based on a witness’ claimed lack of recollection. Or maybe Trump responds like other blunderbuss bullies who back down when someone finally stands up to them. One thing seems clear: James Comey, Felix Sater and others remember things that Trump wants to forget. Eventually, truth prevails.
Early on the morning of July 28, Republicans were dealt a surprising blow when Sen. John McCain (R-AR), along with Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), voted against the latest installment of GOP efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
In light of Republicans’ failure to undo the ACA, President Trump was quick to react on Twitter, stating that he would simply “let ObamaCare implode” and have Democrats own the consequences. With Republicans holding all positions of power in Washington, D.C., these statements are startling by themselves.
However, with Congressional efforts in limbo, the Trump Administration seems to be going a step further than “letting” Obamacare fail. Indeed, it has emphasized an alternative strategy: actively sabotaging the Affordable Care Act.
Cutting outreach … and misdirecting it
From the get-go, the Trump Administration quickly sought to impair the success of the Affordable Care Act. In one of its first moves, the Department of Health and Human Services under the direction of Secretary Tom Price pulled advertising for the federal government’s enrollment entity, healthcare.gov.
The advertising has proven important to reach 18 to 34-years-olds. Enrolling these “young invincibles” is crucial for stabilizing risk pools because they are generally healthier and seek less medical care. States running independent campaigns, like California and its insurance marketplace Covered California, have been very successful in recruiting young people.
In an ironic twist, the Trump Administration used advertising funding intended for the promotion of the Affordable Care Act for a series of social media promotions attacking the law.
Also, in mid-July, the Administration moved to end contracts for enrollment assistance in 18 major cities. Contractors helped individuals navigate the often challenging enrollment process in such places as libraries, businesses and urban neighborhoods in these cities which had been identified by the Obama Administration as high priority.
Finally, the window for the next open enrollment period has been cut in half compared to previous years, thus making it difficult for time-pressed people and those who need enrollment help to enroll.
Trump Administration officials have been actively traveling the country and pushing talking points that are often false, or, at the very least, highly misleading and incomplete. Prominently featured in these efforts has been Vice President Mike Pence, who blamed Medicaid expansion for the backlog of disability cases in Ohio.
Efforts to spread misinformation about the ACA has been coupled with equally misleading information about Republican repeal-and-replace efforts. For example, Republicans consistently argue that draconian reductions to the Medicaid program are not actual cuts, a position that virtually all health experts disagree with.
Republicans have repeatedly and persistently argued that the ACA is facing imminent implosion. Again, this position is in direct opposition to that of most health policy experts.
Far from providing a major overhaul of the American healthcare and insurance system, the ACA provided a mere extension of the existing system, a system that relies extensively on private businesses to implement government policy.
Arguably, one of the most crucial components of the ACA is the active cooperation of insurance companies. And unlike with previous health reform efforts, insurance companies have been on board with Obamacare from the beginning.
Yet, insurance companies, both for-profits and non-profits, are first and foremost businesses that need to generate profits to stay afloat. Crucial in this endeavor is legal and regulatory certainty, which allows for long-term planning and helps guide investment decisions.
The constant undermining talk by the Trump Administration has done much to shake the confidence of insurance companies in the ACA. Entering a new market and spending resources to seek new enrollees require significant investments. Insurers do not want to see these potential investments wasted.
One of the most prominent issues in this regard has been the Administration’s lack of commitment to paying the ACA’s cost sharing subsidies. These subsidies help low-income consumers in the insurance marketplaces to shoulder out-of-pocket costs like co-payments for prescription drugs and doctor visits. Most importantly, the ACA requires insurers to cover these costs for their low-income enrollees. Insurers are then reimbursed by the federal government. Last year, reimbursements amounted to $7 billion.
Failure to pay these subsidies would be damaging to insurance markets. Insurers would still be required to make the payments for qualified individuals. However, they would not receive federal reimbursements. This would likely lead to massive premium increases as insurers are seeking to recover their payments. It could also potentially trigger an exodus by insurers.
As Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) reightfully pointed out on the last day of the vote-arama on the Republican health care plan, Obamacare is not without its flaws. It does little to contain health care costs or improve the quality of health care provided in this country. Millions of Americans are left without insurance. Some parts of the country lack insurers.
Yet, undeniably, the ACA has done much good by providing coverage to more than 20 millions of Americans and added benefits to millions more.
Republican efforts in Congress to do away with the Obama Administration’s signature accomplishment have been rather bumpy. While Republicans may still be successful, they have certainly taken much longer than President Trump’s promise to repeal the ACA on Day One.
The verdict about the effectiveness of the Trump Administration’s effort to actively undermine the ACA is still out. Yet the efforts appear deliberate and they have been ongoing since the Administration took over the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services.
Actively seeking to bring hardship to millions of Americans by sabotaging their health coverage is certainly highly questionable from a moral and ethical perspective. Future inquiries may also prove that they are illegal.
Perhaps most concerning, in my opinion, when the President of the United States and his closest advisers consistently spread false and misleading information, Americans are bound to lose. They may not only lose their health care coverage. They may also lose trust in their government and their elected leaders, and, eventually, in democratic government itself.
Once upon a time, President Trump was capable of sublimating his rage and bluster into actions that seemed presidential, at least occasionally.
His address to Congress in late February, while oversold as the "moment he became president," was at least a competent execution of an ancient Washington ritual.
His decision to bomb Syria in April, while repudiating his campaign rhetoric of non-intervention, attracted rare expressions of support from the usually hostile liberal foreign policy establishment.
His visit to France earlier this month, while marred by an offensive comment to the wife of French president Emmanuel Macron, temporarily downplayed political differences for the sake of a good military parade.
No more. Trump’s antic megalomania has entered a new phase where fear drives his anger, self-absorption, grandiosity, and toxic masculinity into behaviors that dominate the increasingly surreal news cycle and preclude him from achieving a even semblance of normality, even for his supporters.
The centrifugal force of Trump frenzy is spinning off allies in Republican and conservative elites who have been clinging to his coattails since November in the hopes of enacting their agendas. Not only is the president losing his insurance policy against impeachment, he is losing his capacity to sell himself to the sympathetic.
Turning Point
In the first months of his presidency, Trump operated in two modes: as a still-active candidate holding forth in campaign-style events, and as a passive chief executive willing to rubber-stamp the agenda of the Republican Congress.
Today, Trump has doubled down on his candidate mode—demanding the prosecution of Hillary Clinton and haranguing the Boy Scouts—but in the process he has cast the rubber stamp aside to beat his own chest.
It was impossible to see at the time, but Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision in March to recuse himself from the Russiainvestigation was a key—maybe the key—moment of the Trump presidency. Ever since, the president has been controlled by fear. Without Sessions at his side, Trump feared FBI director James Comey would conduct an independent investigation of the Russia affair. He demanded Comey’s loyalty and when he didn’t get it, he fired him, which he thought would relieve the "pressure" he felt.
It didn’t. Instead, Comey's firing and dramatic Capitol Hill testimony quickly led to the appointment of special prosecutor Robert Mueller, which only increased the pressure. Trump considered firing Mueller, but feared the consequences so he didn’t. When the New York Timesreporting on his son’s June 9, 2016, meeting with a Russian government attorney implicated his own family in the investigation, he expressed fear that Mueller might investigate his family business—a "violation" he said would be “unfair” to the presidency.
That fear was justified. When Mueller made it clear that he would look into the Trump family business, Trump made clear his intention to get rid of him.
Fear Feeds Frenzy
Trump’s bizarre passive-aggressive attacks on Jeff Sessions are understandable only as an expression of fear that he has no sure defense against Mueller. His stream of tweets denigrating Sessions, who was his first supporter in the U.S. Senate, make clear that he cares more about self-preservation than personal loyalty or Sessions’ aggressive efforts to escalate the drug war and disenfranchise Democratic voters.
Advancing these crusades are more important to the alt-right than serving as Trump apologists, which is why Breitbart News is now criticizing Trump and defending Sessions as the "man who embodies the movement that elected Trump."
Trump’s sporadic interventions in the health care debate made clear that he wanted a "win” more than he wanted Republican unity necessary to ram through unpopular legislation. When Trump called the House health care bill “mean,” he killed its chances in the Senate.
As Senate Republicans struggled to come up with new legislation, Trump demanded they send him something, anything, to sign. When nine Republicans voted with Democrats to kill a draconian bill, he singled out Alaska's Lisa Murkowski for denunciation. His fear of losing, expressed with sexist pique, was no favor to Mitch McConnell as he scrambles to assemble 50 votes for anything that can be depicted as Obamacare repeal.
Then, fearful of his growing image as an ineffectual leader under investigation, Trump suddenly tweeted that the 2,400-plus transgender people in the U.S. military are no longer welcome to serve. As a candidate needing to mobilize his shrinking base of cultural conservatives, the decision made a certain cynical sense. But as a chief executive, it further undermined his own team. In two tweets, Trump overturned Defense Secretary James Mattis' quiet decision to study the issue for six more months.
This rash style is not only a gift to the Trump resistance, which has always depicted him as an impulsive bully, it is also corrosive to the loyalty of people who took a chance on joining his government. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, whose decisions on the Iran nuclear deal and the Saudi campaign against Qatar have been undercut by the White House, has started talking about leaving his job even sooner than he planned. When Tillerson’s doubts were reported in the press, he took an unannounced vacation.
Like most Americans, the poor Secretary of State just wanted a break from the Trump frenzy, which shows no sign of abating.
The morning after the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza released a stunning and profoundly obscene interview with White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, one of the Washington Post's resident conservatives trashed evangelicals for remaining silent.
In a column entitled, "As Trump debases the presidency, the religious right looks away," columnist Jennifer Rubin called the White House a "clown show," and noted that President Donald Trump's religious right supporters don't seem to care.
"No group has been as blindly loyal to President Trump as Christian conservatives. They have not let religion or values get in the way of their support," Rubin wrote, referencing conservative Christians who blew off Trump's 'Access Hollywood" comments about how he enjoyed grabbing women by their genitals.
Now that Scaramucci's comments about White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon "sucking his own c*ck" have been revealed, Rubin challenged Christian leaders to "do some soul-searching."
"What about Trump, exactly, reflects their values? (Taking Medicaid away from millions and separating families to deport law-abiding immigrants?)," Rubin wrote. "The Trump administration is a clown show — but it’s the evangelicals who supplied the tent, the red noses and the floppy shoes. Each day presents a new insult to the office of the presidency and a repudiation of civilized behavior."
"If Trump nevertheless proceeds to fire Sessions and then order Justice Department officials to fire Mueller (or fire them if they won’t), Republicans will have no remedy at their disposal other than impeachment; they may very well choose not to use it, but then we have the makings of a constitutional crisis on our hands," Ruben continued.
She then focused on evangelicals.
"The religious right, which intones 'Judge Gorsuch, Judge Gorsuch!' when confronted with the series of Trump abominations, should do some soul-searching," she wrote. "Was this trashing of the White House, assault on civil language and conduct and contempt for the Constitution (the one the religious right thinks is so important that the new Supreme Court justice must protect it) worth it?"
"And if it gets worse, is there any point at which the religious might put country above tribe, morality above partisanship? No, I don’t think it will do so ever," she concluded.
Having made restoring the United States’ manufacturing might a cornerstone of his “America first” nationalism, Trump seems to think that obtaining what he believes would be a better “deal” with our two closest neighbors will accomplish that goal.
Unfortunately, renegotiating NAFTA – especially as planned by Trump’s trade team – is unlikely to bring significant benefits to U.S. workers.
The wrong objectives
Although plausible estimates of job losses caused by U.S. trade with Mexico range up to nearly 700,000, the tweaks to NAFTA proposed by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer would not bring most of those jobs back.
Lighthizer said the administration’s top objective is to shrink the U.S. trade deficits with Canada and Mexico. The real objective, however, should not be to improve bilateral trade balances for their own sake but rather to foster an integrated industrial structure in North America that can provide jobs and higher wages for workers in all three countries.
In fairness, there are some positive elements in the USTR’s proposed negotiating agenda. For example, the administration wants to strengthen NAFTA’s rules of origin to ensure that only goods with substantial amounts of North American content qualify for preferential (often zero) tariffs.
Lighthizer has also proposed moving labor rights and environmental standards into the main body of the agreement and making them enforceable, which would be an improvement over the current toothless side agreements.
But the proposal also includes various in-your-face elements that the Canadians and Mexicans are sure to reject or demand for themselves as well. One such objective is the right to pursue “buy American” policies. Lighthizer also wants to strengthen the ability of the U.S. to impose trade restrictions such as tariffs and anti-dumping duties on the other two NAFTA members.
Rather than punishing the other NAFTA members, it would make far more sense for the three parties to focus on better coordinating their policies to counter unfair trade practices from outside the continent, such as import surges in steel from China.
Furthermore, the proposed changes to NAFTA would not even begin to address the greatest problem affecting most U.S. workers: the widening gap between rising labor productivity and stagnant inflation-adjusted wages. In fact, this gap is rising in Mexico as well, suggesting that Mexican workers have not benefited from the NAFTA trade strategy of their government either.
None of the administration’s proposed changes would change the fact that manufacturing labor costs in Mexico average only about 16 percent of U.S. levels, a gap that will continue to pull many industries south of the border regardless of any revisions to NAFTA.
In fact, since a revised NAFTA would not do much (if anything) to raise Mexican wages either, it would do nothing to end the economic disparities that underlie both the outsourcing of jobs to Mexico and the flow of Mexican workers to the U.S. It would also do nothing to boost the bargaining power of U.S. workers relative to their employers, who are more free to move jobs abroad thanks to trade agreements like NAFTA.
What we should do instead
My own research on NAFTA and the U.S. and Mexican economies – as well as
the work of others – suggests there are several things that the U.S., Canada and Mexico could to to make North America a more competitive trading zone and benefit all of its workers.
One of the best ways would be for all three countries to commit to investing more in their public resources, such as infrastructure, education and technology. Although Trump promised a “massive” infrastructure plan during the campaign, he has backed away from making a significant federal investment, and his budget proposes large cuts to science and research and development.
Another serious problem is that labor’s share of national income has been falling in both the U.S. and Mexico because workers’ wages are not keeping up with their growing productivity. In other words, the average worker is producing more and more but not seeing any increase in his or her paycheck.
A first step for addressing that would be an increase in each country’s minimum wage to a level that would afford a family a decent (above-poverty) living in terms of its own standards, and then to index minimum wages to inflation so as to prevent the erosion of their purchasing power over time. At present, the minimum wage in Mexico is about a fifth of the poverty line, while in the U.S. families earning the minimum wage have a hard time staying out of poverty.
If the Trump administration seriously wants to curtail illegal immigration and reduce incentives for U.S. companies to open factories south of the border, it needs to make sure that a renegotiated NAFTA benefits Mexico’s economy. That’s the only way to push Mexican wages higher and thus turn Mexico into more of a market for U.S. products than a competitor for U.S. jobs.
An “America first” negotiating strategy that focuses only on what the U.S. gains while impoverishing Mexico with greater trade restrictions would only worsen the problems that Trump says he wants to address.
Toward a shared prosperity
We should not kid ourselves that a few tweaks to NAFTA will achieve the kind of shared and inclusive prosperity that would truly benefit workers in the U.S., Mexico and Canada.
In the end, what would really put workers first across North America would be policies that would lift up all of us together. U.S. and Mexican leaders promised that NAFTA would accomplish that, but as my research with Mexican economist Gerardo Esquivel shows, the agreement failed to raise Mexican wages and living standards closer to U.S. levels.
Trump’s combative, America first negotiating strategy would only take the U.S. and its neighbors in the wrong direction, leading to a Balkanized North American industrial structure that would be less competitive globally. Rather than focusing on shared growth, the administration sees a zero sum game in which for every benefit going to Mexico or Canada, the U.S. loses.
As Canada and Mexico are the United States’ two largest export markets, we should be working together to make North American industries more competitive and boost wages on all sides of our two borders. This would be the right way to create jobs and promote prosperity in the U.S. as well as its neighbors.
The United States has been waging a war on drugs for nearly 50 years.
Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on this long campaign to thwart the production, distribution, sale and use of illegal drugs. This sustained investment has resulted in millions of drug offenders being processed through the American criminal justice system. It has also influenced crime control strategies used by American police.
Under President Barack Obama, there was a period of reform and moderating of tactics. But President Donald Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, is announcing plans to return to “law and order” approaches, such as aggressive intervention by law enforcement and use of mandatory minimum sentences by prosecutors.
Unlike violent or property crimes – which usually yield cooperative victims and witnesses – police and prosecutors are at a disdvantage when fighting drugs. Drug users don’t see themselves as crime victims or their dealers as criminals. Police thus have limited options for identifying offenders. Alternatives include the use of undercover operations or conducting aggressive crackdown operations to disrupt the market in real time. But sneaking up on or infiltrating secretive and multilayered drug organizations is not easy to do, and usually produces only low-level offenders. Poor police-community relations don’t help. Heightened enforcement and punishments have made matters worse by increasing the secrecy and sophistication of the illegal drug market and forcing police to develop criminal intelligence on offenders.
So how do police gather criminal intelligence on drug crimes?
The most honorable way is to rely on law-abiding sources who see the criminal activity and feel compelled to report it to the police in order to stop the problem.
The second option is for police to turn to a paid informant who is familiar with the drug operations to set up a buy or inform on the criminal activities of others in exchange for money.
A third option is to apprehend known drug offenders and coerce them into divulging information on higher-ups in exchange for a lighter sentence. We call these folks “indentured informants” because they “owe” the police information. If they don’t follow through on their end of the deal, they face the weight of criminal prosecution, often through heavy mandatory minimum sentences.
As police-community relations have eroded over time, police have slowly but surely increased their reliance on criminal informants – especially to develop cases on higher-level criminals.
Not surprisingly, drug dealers fight back against this coercive method of getting evidence with a “stop snitchin’” campaign. Retaliatory violence often erupts, and it becomes harder for police to get evidence from both criminal and civic-minded informants who fear reprisals from drug dealers. Anger grows against police who are perceived as not following through on promises to protect witnesses or clean up neighborhoods.
There exists yet another wrinkle in the equation. Reliance on harsh drug sentences and confidential informants has become part and parcel to how other types of criminal cases are solved. Witnesses or persons privy to information in homicide or robbery cases are routinely prodded into cooperating only after they find themselves facing a stiff penalty due to their involvement in an unrelated drug case. Here again, this produces short-term gains but long-term complications for criminal justice authorities as states move to decriminalize or legalize drugs. What happens when prosecutors working violent or property crime cases can no longer rely on the threat of mandatory minimum sentences to compel individuals to provide information?
By exploiting intelligence sources and putting them at risk, the war on drugs has pitted the police against residents in drug-ridden communities. This runs contrary to the ideals of community policing, in which trust and legitimacy are essential to members of the community and law enforcement collaborating to prevent and combat crime.
The past decade has witnessed significant reforms within the criminal justice system, particularly as it relates to drug enforcement. Authorities have sought to integrate a public health approach into the long-standing criminal justice model and adopt a more patient and long-term view on the drug problem. In the end, the reliance on informants and mandatory minimum sentences creates numerous unanticipated negative consequences which will continue to grow if we revert back to them.
It should come as no surprise that Trump chose Kobach to be the vice chairman of Vice President Mike Pence’s new Commission on Election Integrity. This appointment gives Kobach a national platform by which to pursue his agenda.
Kansas’ voter ID law went into effect when I was a graduate student at the University of Kansas. The pervasive campaign promoting the new law piqued my interest. My co-author and I set out to assess the impact advertisements – specifically, the “Got ID?” campaign – had on voter turnout during the 2012 election.
Kobach personally drafted the Kansas Secure and Fair Elections Act (SAFE Act), which was signed into law in 2011. He also played an integral role in the proliferation of derivative voter ID laws, advocating for them at national conferences and on his radio show.
Republican Party leaders supported voter ID laws in their 2012 party platform, declaring “we applaud legislation to require photo identification for voting and to prevent election fraud … Voter fraud is political poison. It strikes at the heart of representative government.”
In 2016, the party expanded their support of voter ID laws to back legislation requiring proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. These efforts have spread; 34 states now require voters to show some form of identification prior to voting.
While Kansas was not the first state to pass a voter ID law – that was South Carolina in 1950 – it was and remains one of the most restrictive and comprehensive laws of its kind. The SAFE Act requires voters to 1) present photo IDs prior to casting a ballot, 2) present a full driver’s license number and have their signatures verified in order to absentee vote and 3) provide proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Although a few states had previously adopted one or two of these provisions, Kansas was the first to combine all three. In an interview, Kobach defended the law, stating, every “time an alien votes, it cancels out the vote of a United States citizen.”
Our study suggested that, in 2012, the SAFE law and ads about it tended to decrease turnout. However, this effect was mitigated in precincts where local officials played an important role in educating voters about their rights – in stark contrast to Kobach’s statewide advertising. Turnout in these precincts was 2.3 percent higher than statistically identical precincts across the state that were only exposed to the “Got ID?” advertisements.
Not readily available
Arguably, the most restrictive provision of the Kansas SAFE Act is its requirement that people show a birth certificate, U.S. passport or other document showing citizenship before they can register to vote.
Other researchers have also found that proof of citizenship requirements make it more difficult for people to vote. Research has found that as many as 7 percent of Americans, mostly minorities, do not have these documents readily available. Yet, it is unclear that proof of citizenship requirements actually add any real value to the integrity of the election process. Federal law already requires that individuals registering to vote affirm in writing that they are a U.S. citizen. Lying carries serious criminal penalties. Further, research consistently finds that voting by noncitizens is extremely rare.
Advocates of voter ID laws insist that requiring all voters to show a photo ID or proof of citizenship makes it more difficult for noncitizens, felons and individuals who have already voted to vote illegally.
Despite these claims, documented cases of noncitizens voting are extremely rare. A study of all 50 states between 2001 to 2012 found only 633 reported cases of voter fraud, and only 10 of those were from voter impersonation. Opponents of voter ID laws argue that any benefits gained by voter ID laws are not worth the risks of reduced voter turnout and disenfranchisement. Research shows that underrepresented populations, such as minorities and the poor, are less likely than whites to have photo IDs. It is also worth pointing out that restrictive voting laws have historically been used to prevent racial minorities and women from participating in the electoral process.
While Republican lawmakers ostensibly support voter ID laws on the grounds that they want to prevent voter fraud, the lack of evidence of such fraud makes this reasoning suspect. In contrast, research shows that these laws are electorally advantageous for the Republican Party. It hardly seems a coincidence that the individuals most likely to be impacted by ID laws are more likely to support Democrats. Historically, Democrats support policies that encourage turnout, while Republicans support more restrictive voting laws. Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, famously said “I don’t want everybody to vote … our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
More recently, North Carolina GOP county precinct chair Don Yelton told “The Daily Show” that state’s new photo ID law “is going to kick the Democrats in the butt,” adding that “if it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.”
Given his relentless pursuit of voter fraud and tenacious support for ID laws, it seems likely that Kobach will use his new national influence to push for voting laws that disproportionately impact minorities, low-income people and the elderly. While these laws might help to insure “safe” election margins for Republican candidates, they do not safeguard the rights of all Americans to participate in the democratic process.
As President Trump drops increasingly broad hints that he believes he is above the law, Congress and the public face an impending crisis that will test whether the Republican Party is more loyal to Trump or to the rule of law. The crisis is all but certain, and the outcome is very much in doubt.
In talking up his "complete power" of pardon, humiliating Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and denigrating special prosecutor Robert Mueller, Trump has made clear that he doesn’t believe any investigation of his campaign’s contacts with the Russian government is legitimate. “A special counsel should never have been appointed in this case,” Trump told the New York Times.
With investigators closing in on his friends and family, time is not on Trump’s side. But the weakness of the rule of law is.
The pace of the various investigations is picking up. Mueller has assembled a high-powered staff. The House and Senate intelligence committees both grilled Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner this week. The Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, has now joined the hunt, issuing a subpoena for Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager. If Trump doesn’t act soon, more revelations—or indictments—could further limit his options to act.
Trump understands that Mueller’s investigation is a mortal threat to his presidency, which is why he is looking for the earliest opportunity to fire him. And the obstacles he faces are not insurmountable, at least from the White House's point of view.
Hollowed-Out Congress
The opposition to Trump is divided, not just along party lines but also over the meaning of democratic government. The Citizens United decision and gerrymandering have hollowed out Congress as a deliberative body. The House and Senate have become a collection of fiefdoms where party loyalty ensures survival, and adherence to tradition (at least among Republicans) is seen as betrayal or suicide.
Unlimited money and safe seats have made the norms of a parliamentary democracy disposable. The idea that the House and Senate would vote on national health care legislation without a single hearing, and without input from doctors, nurses, patients, hospitals, senior groups, and anyone save insurance company lobbyists, would have once been inconceivable. Now it's the new normal.
Polarization has subordinated principles to politics. Support for law enforcement was once a given among conservatives. A registered Republican like former FBI director Mueller, a man comfortable with mass surveillance and the drug war, could have once counted on GOP support in Congress. Now when he investigates Trump, he is viewed as the cat's paw of Democrats. The rule of law is seen as just another partisan trick.
Trump hopes to provoke Sessions into quitting so he can use a recess appointment to hire a more compliant attorney general willing to fire Mueller.
Mitch McConnell has the power to put principle ahead of party—but how often has the Senate majority leader or his caucus done that? Trump's most outspoken Republican critics, such as John McCain and Ben Sasse, will complain about his policies and his tweets, but not about his contempt for the rule of law.
Cataclysm or Cave-In?
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer predicts firing Muller would provoke a "cataclysm." Among Democrats, he is probably right. Among Republicans, a cave-in seems more likely.
House Speaker Paul Ryan gives every indication that he will acquiesce to Trump’s whims. Ryan defended Mueller from Trump’s claim that he is a Democratic partisan. But when asked about the possibility of Mueller’s firing, Ryan signaled he would not object.
“Look, the president gets to decide what his personnel is...” Ryan told reporters. “He’s the executive branch, we’re the legislative branch.”
Rank-and-file Republicans agree.
“Bob Mueller’s obviously intent on hiring people who are antagonistic toward this administration. He’s one of Mr. Comey’s closest friends, and it looks like there’s a deliberate orchestration to damage or undermine the president regardless of the basic facts,” Arizona Rep. Trent Franks declared in an interview with Politico.
Perhaps the most telling sign of the weakness of rule of law in Washington is that its most prominent defender is now former CIA director John Brennan, a man who ran a lawbreaking agency and has never been elected to anything.
“I really hope that our members of Congress, elected representatives, are going to stand up and say enough is enough, and stop making apologies and excuses for things that are happening that really flout, I think, our system of laws and government,” Brennan told CNN.
But there is no collective understanding of our "system of laws and government” in Washington. That is Trump’s biggest accomplishment and his greatest opportunity to evade the rule of law.
The Trump administration has outlined its plans to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It says the US will seek a “much better” agreement that reduces the trade deficit between the US and its partners, Canada and Mexico. In response, the two countries released brief statements welcoming the proposal. They say they consider a possible renegotiation as a step towards modernising NAFTA to address the new realities and challenges of the 21st century.
Despite these good intentions and purported goodwill, the US objectives for a revised NAFTA are unachievable. Three problems with the US negotiating position reveal the limited understanding of Donald Trump, the US trade representative, Robert Lighthizer (who will lead the negotiations), and their advisers about NAFTA and its side agreements.
1. A mistaken view of job losses
The US case for renegotiating the agreement is based on the claim that NAFTA is to blame for various (and unspecified) “problems for many American workers”. Allegedly, these problems have led to the explosion of US trade deficits since 1994, when the agreement entered into force, and the closure of “thousands of factories”. According to the US trade office, this situation left millions of American workers “stranded” and unable to use the skills in which they had been trained.
As candidate and president, Trump has repeatedly claimed that “disastrous trade deals”, including NAFTA, resulted in the loss of manufacturing jobs in the US. But US manufacturing jobs were not lost to Mexico, they were lost to China and technological change.
Meanwhile, technological change meant that between 2000 and 2010, the US lost 4.8m manufacturing jobs to machines, not foreign workers. Automation led to significant increases in US industrial output and made the US manufacturing sector more productive – at the expense of blue-collar jobs.
2. The false trade argument
The US wants to redraft NAFTA into an agreement that provides it with a “more open, equitable, secure, and reciprocal access” to the Canadian and Mexican markets. At the same time, it expects to secure an agreement that allows Washington to establish protectionist “job-creating” policies at home. Such a double-edged agreement is unworkable and incongruous.
The US argument that its market of 321m consumers is twice as large as Canada and Mexico’s combined (36m and 119m, correspondingly) also does not stack up. This is because NAFTA is mainly made up of intra-industry trade – where countries import and export similar goods from and to one another.
For instance, in 2002, the two largest US exports to Mexico were electrical machinery and appliances, and motor vehicles. These products were also the most important exports from Mexico to the US. NAFTA promotes this two-way exchange of goods, because it liberalised trade between the three countries in a wide and nearly-equal range of industrial classifications. In other words, it opened the US market to Mexico and Canada as much as it opened the Mexican and Canadian markets to the US.
The allegedly alarming figure of a US$64 billion US trade deficit with Mexico is concentrated in three industries: automobile, telecommunications and aeronautics. But because of its intra-industrial nature, the continued expansion in trade that NAFTA sustains does not cause a significant movement of manufacturing in any of these sectors or countries. And because the North American countries mostly trade the same products between them, setting tariffs in any sector will likely hurt workers in the same industries at home.
3. Lip service on the environment
Trump’s trade office says it wants to strengthen environmental obligations, which are currently covered in NAFTA’s side agreements, and bring them into the main agreement. Yet the environmental protections proposed are already well-established in the NAFTA’s framework and are governed by the US, Mexico and Canada through the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC).
Specially, Trump’s trade representative has proposed establishing “a means for stakeholder participation”. It is hard to see how this would be different to the CEC’s existing Joint Public Advisory Committee, which promotes sustainable economic development in the region.
Like the rest of the CEC, this committee is at risk of losing its US share of funding and hence seeing its capacities severely reduced. Over the past 20 years, the CEC, the only trilateral, permanent environmental institution in North America, has received only about US$7m annually to carry out its work throughout the region.
As with many other programmes and initiatives, the Trump administration is paying lip service to the well-being of the US environment, while cutting or committing limited funding for it. It is likely that the current administration will attempt to quietly quit the CEC. The Obama administration made a similar move, when it “temporarily” closed the managing institution for NAFTA’s side agreement on labour to review and enhance its operation. It never reopened it.
As with many other Trump campaign promises and government policies, the means, aims, and consequences of the intended renegotiation of NAFTA do not appear to have been carefully considered, let alone planned. Instead, its plans indicate that both the president and his lead negotiator have a very limited understanding of how NAFTA and its side agreements work.
And that is a not a solid basis for the US or its partners to start any negotiations.
Fish stinks from the head, as the ancient Greeks first said, and right now there’s a 250-pound flounder stinking up the White House and all those around the place.
“Everybody, I can honestly say, with rare exception, who has been associated with this administration and this president has been diminished by it. Their reputation has been tarnished. They’re smaller people as a result of it. And that’s tragic.”
Six months in and we’ve reached a level of mayhem, compulsive lying and incompetence that defies the imagination. Just to mix the animal metaphors, there’s more bull running through Washington right now than the streets of Pamplona, and for our nation’s capital, that’s saying something.
Or, in the words of the British actor and veteran Ernest Thesiger, when asked to describe what it had been like on World War I’s Western Front, “The noise, my dear, and the people!”
Havoc rules. And did I mention the whining? Snowflake Donald Trump should change his entrance music from “Hail to the Chief” to “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me.” Everything that happens is someone else’s fault while the real culprit is staring out at him from the bathroom mirror every morning.
By now, of course, we were supposed to have repealed and replaced Obamacare, instituted vast tax cuts and begun rebuilding America’s infrastructure. And I’m still waiting for my rocket belt and flying car.
This is not to ignore the gruesome deregulatory chainsaw being put to government departments and agencies, but legislatively this administration is a flaming train wreck.
While simultaneously claiming great lawmaking accomplishments, Trump falsely argues that what’s holding everything up is obstruction from Democrats, and certainly there has been some Dem-instigated, strategic slow walking that has impeded GOP activity in Congress, such as it is. But far more grievous are the self-inflicted wounds of incompetence, inattention and infighting that have turned the capital into Pork Chop Hill.
And Russia. Trump and his campaign team’s possible involvement with the Russian government and election tampering has created major roadblocks at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, diverting huge amounts of time and attention.
The White House is on a war footing, seemingly determined to prove that the rule of law does not apply to Trump, his children or associates. Meanwhile, Congress is enmeshed in hearings and Russia-related maneuvering. All of this while the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller and his team of prosecutors quietly hums along — even though it’s about to be subject to an even greater onslaught of mudslinging and disruption as Trump may try anything to tear it apart through legal challenges and firings.
To repeat the question over and over: What is he trying to hide? Getting to the truth of what happened is important, not just because of what it says about the amorality of this administration but also the devastating attack Russia has attempted on our democracy, part of a pattern of interference that has been perpetrated against European democracies as well.
Not to give a gratuitous plug to my place of employment, but the extent of the scandal is best seen in the stunningly thorough and quite brilliant timeline that has been assembled at the BillMoyers.com website by law professor and former litigator Steven Harper with the assistance of our editorial staff.
It’s a jaw-dropping overview that demonstrates how truly deep and longstanding this scandal may go, so much so that at Politico, former Watergate assistant prosecutor Nick Akerman recommended it as “the most enlightening thing you can possibly read… the best source out there on this stuff.”
But for this moment, let’s focus on just a couple of recent developments that suffice to show that much is rotten in the state of Trump.
First, there’s that New York Times interview Trump granted last Wednesday, a cross-examination that for sheer inarticulateness and borderline madness rivals The Caine Mutiny’s Captain Queeg clacking away with his ball bearings and muttering about the crew stealing strawberries.
The Times’ David Brooks said it demonstrated “a disturbing level of incoherent thinking,” which is putting it mildly. The president is like a one-man game of Telephone: he hears information from wherever or whomever but when he repeats it back, the facts are thrown in the air and come down as surrealist jabberwocky.
Thus, Napoleon Bonaparte, Trump thinks, “… his one problem is he didn’t go to Russia that night because he had extracurricular activities, and they froze to death.” Huh? As for health insurance, “…you’re 21 years old, you start working and you’re paying $12 a year for insurance, and by the time you’re 70, you get a nice plan.” Where would that be, the Planet Mongo?
In truth, much of the interview was far more sinister than his garbled, incomplete sentences: thinly veiled grumblings and threats about Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, whose recusal from the Russia probe was, Trump argued, “very unfair to the president;” special counsel Mueller and his staff — rife, he believes, with “conflicts of interest;” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein; and former FBI Director James Comey. By firing Comey, the president said, “I did a great thing for the American people.” Meaning a great thing for I, Donald Trump.
Or so he seems to think. “I’m not under investigation,” he insisted. “For what? I didn’t do anything wrong.” Yet the very next night after the interview, both The Times and The Washington Postreported on efforts by Trump to “limit or undercut” the Mueller investigation and ongoing discussions of presidential pardons for “aides, family members and even himself.”
These latest alleged moves by Donald Trump and the legal team assembled feel like the kind of maneuvers fashioned by a crime boss when cornered by his own lies. And while the principle of innocence until guilt remains paramount in a society still deemed to be free, every action they take in the Trump/Russia case feels more like obstruction than any attempt to build a solid case for the defense.
For them to argue that some political donations to Democrats by members of Mueller’s staff are conflicts of interest and reason for recusal is rich enough, but coming from a gang that has embraced unlimited campaign contributions from big business and the wealthy as free speech is almost as ironic as a bunch of self-described nationalists and populists reaching across the oceans and steppes to sacrifice sovereignty and endorse the philosophy of a tin-hat Russian despot.
Also risible are claims that Mueller should recuse himself from his Russia probe because he once disputed his membership fees at a Trump golf course (a charge a Mueller spokesman denies).
Illogic and yes, madness. “… [A]ll agree the US president has the complete power to pardon,” Trump tweets, as his lawyer Jay Sekulow runs to the Sunday talk shows saying there will be no pardons because, hey, there is no wrongdoing to pardon.
But which is worse, the ranting nature of the president’s febrile brain, the posturing of his lawyers or the spinelessness in his Cabinet and the GOP? As several have suggested, much of this nonsense might be curbed if Republican congressional leadership simply said if you try more firings to stymy the Russia inquiry or start issuing pardons like Kleenex, impeachment proceedings immediately begin. So far, silence.
You have to ask them, are your jobs and personal ambition so overwhelming and important that you’ve abandoned courage and responsibility? As you debate what’s legal versus illegal, have you completely lost sight of what’s morally right or wrong?
Every time you pledge fealty to this man, an angel loses its wings. Meanwhile, the smell of fishiness at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. grows ranker by the minute.
Our national crisis in 2017 is a situation that we never expected, and never want to see recur.
We are up against a hellish convergence of trends that transformed the last election into a freak show. The experience for most of us was gross in the extreme — grotesque. But it was just the beginning.
We are trapped in a political chamber of horrors without any visible doors. Will there be no reprieve? Fools and fanatics run riot as the rest of us seethe — but what can we do? That depends. Our position in life will determine our options and so will the flow of events . . . including the surprises.
In any case, there are limits right now to what anyone can do and that is a fact worth remembering.
It is far too soon to foresee how the crisis of 2017 will develop. Before long, we could find ourselves so completely worn out that we will simply find a way to muddle through. Or an emotional catharsis could propel the nation forward to a much better state of affairs. That is hard to predict.
But the trend has been steadily downward so far and we might have to wait until 2018 — and the next congressional elections — before significant things can be accomplished for the sake of America.
Will we ever feel the same about our country? Who can say? The leadership issue is essential. A great figure may arise before long who will lead us back into a semblance of political normality, or even to a state approaching grace. There is little we can do about that except watch and wait as the choices of the politicians play out.
But there are other types of possibilities — some more specific than others — that could pull us out of this disaster.
One of them, of course, is a resurgence of strength on the left that could balance, or even overcome, the disproportionate power in the hands of the radical right that has warped our political culture. And a steep plunge downward in our economic fortunes could strengthen the hands of politicians who protest the extremely dangerous maldistribution of wealth in the United States.
The investigations of the Trump-and-Russia connection are proceeding and so is revulsion toward the vile behavior of the president. A congressional inquiry into his mental condition has been suggested, and a full-fledged impeachment proceeding might be unavoidable. How much longer will Americans tolerate a misfit who drags our nation into the gutter? Almost anything is possible in this bizarre situation, especially if more Republicans begin to feel that this pariah could drag the whole party down to defeat in 2018. Indeed, the tipping point for the Republicans could come before the end of this year.
The condition of the Republican Party is itself a matter for reflection. The far right dominates the party, but that situation could be challenged. Republican moderates — those who remain — are in a weak position, but a bold new nonpartisan initiative could strengthen their hand.
The ferocity of the radical right is an affront to American decency. The insistence of the radical right that our social safety net should be destroyed could force millions to die in destitution. What do Christian ethics have to say about things like that?
A crisis of conscience for Republicans would strengthen the hand of Republican moderates — would it not?
It is possible that in the next generation a new party system may emerge. Attempts to destroy our existing party system and create a brand new one have been made now and then since the current system took shape in the 1850s. None of these attempts have yet succeeded. But some third-party movements have shaken the foundations of our system and ushered in significant change, and perhaps this could happen again.
In theory — though the process would produce many risks — we might do better with three or four political parties that could join in coalitions in response to the electorate’s wishes. If the Republican Party could somehow be split in two — into a party of irrational fanatics on the one hand and a party of rational conservatives and moderates on the other — our nation would be far better off. And then the Democrats in turn could be split into a party of progressive radicals and a party of consensus-builders.
But who will take the lead in such matters? In some ways it’s really a shame that Ross Perot and his people did not persevere in the 1990s. We might be far better off if they had.
Here’s a totally different scenario.
Things would also change if some moderate Republicans gave up on the Republican Party and decided to switch their allegiance by transforming themselves into Democrats. That would change our situation a lot — especially right now in the Senate. Perhaps the current crop of moderate Republicans have never thought of doing such a thing.
If attempts to guide the flow of events toward best-case outcomes should fail, futuristic planning is in order — especially in light of the secession controversy that is going on in California. I have argued elsewhere that the constitutional case for disunion can be made.But that point would be disputed — to put it mildly — if the “Calexit” movement succeeds, and the movement is in flux. An earlier installment in this series broached the topic of a coming civil war. The bloodiest pages of history show that events can topple, quite suddenly at times, straight down to abysses of horror. Only fools would deny that this is so.
Could we save ourselves from such a fate? Would the threat of secession bring so many people to their senses — and back from the brink — that a change in our Constitution might be possible? A fundamental change through a package of constitutional amendments designed to ease the crisis? Stranger things have happened.
Some observers would stop right here in their analysis. They would shrink from any further speculation into prospects that no one can foresee. And yet . . . we might profit quite a lot from responsible attempts to think boldly, to “think the unthinkable.” Much better, perhaps, to consider some “unthinkable” ideas then to plunge on blindly into danger. So let’s proceed with the theme of disunion.
If secession should prove unavoidable, the change could still be a peaceful one — a point to emphasize. The threat of mass killing should surely make the need for a peaceful solution quite obvious — especially so if it permits our two antagonistic tribes to be rid of each other.
A no-fault separation.
If we find that nothing else can heal us, we may also discover that the strategy of disunion and rebuilding — accompanied by massive population shifts — may be impossible to prevent. Decade by decade, Americans may vote with their feet through emigration or dramatic relocation rather than submit to ways of life that they reject if their opponents try to force these situations upon them. Sophisticates, for instance, may begin to flee from “the heartland” and all that goes with it. Such migrations have played a fundamental role in the story of America — have they not?
It would take a long time for such events to play out — a very long time — and it would have to be our children or even their descendants who would make such choices later on.
The possibility of new experiments in nation-building should not be ruled out or laughed away. People may indeed choose to laugh, but we will never get to see who laughs last: historical developments have been fooling the smart alecks since time immemorial and no one can predict when that will happen.
Arrangements for cooperation between seceded states and a shrunken American Union — in matters of continental security, for instance — could be developed through intelligent treaties.
Evil must be faced, and we are all being hurried along into a future that we never foresaw. We must now turn our minds to the tasks that we believe to be our duty — to ourselves and the people we love. With intelligence and patience and audacity as needed, the best of us may prevail. Things could still go our way in due time.
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Perhaps most concerning, in my opinion, when the President of the United States and his closest advisers consistently spread false and misleading information, Americans are bound to lose. They may not only lose their health care coverage. They may also lose trust in their government and their elected leaders, and, eventually, in democratic government itself.
As Canada and Mexico are the United States’ two largest export markets, we should be working together to make North American industries more competitive and boost wages on all sides of our two borders. This would be the right way to create jobs and promote prosperity in the U.S. as well as its neighbors.
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And that is a not a solid basis for the US or its partners to start any negotiations.