Trump's Missing Emails
By Kurt Eichenwald
Over the course of decades, Donald Trump’s companies have systematically destroyed or hidden thousands of emails, digital records and paper documents demanded in official proceedings, often in defiance of court orders. These tactics—exposed by a Newsweek review of thousands of pages of court filings, judicial orders and affidavits from an array of court cases—have enraged judges, prosecutors, opposing lawyers and the many ordinary citizens entangled in litigation with Trump. In each instance, Trump and entities he controlled also erected numerous hurdles that made lawsuits drag on for years, forcing courtroom opponents to spend huge sums of money in legal fees as they struggled—sometimes in vain—to obtain records.
This behavior is of particular import given Trump’s frequent condemnations of Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, for having deleted more than 30,000 emails from a server she used during her time as secretary of state. While Clinton and her lawyers have said all of those emails were personal, Trump has suggested repeatedly on the campaign trail that they were government documents Clinton was trying to hide and that destroying them constituted a crime. The allegation—which the FBI concluded was not supported by any evidence—is a crowd-pleaser at Trump rallies, often greeted by supporters chanting, “Lock her up!”
Trump’s use of deception and untruthful affidavits, as well as the hiding or improper destruction of documents, dates back to at least 1973, when the Republican nominee, his father and their real estate company battled the federal government over civil charges that they refused to rent apartments to African-Americans. The Trump strategy was simple: deny, impede and delay, while destroying documents the court had ordered them to hand over.
Shortly after the government filed its case in October, Trump attacked: He falsely declared to reporters that the feds had no evidence he and his father discriminated against minorities, but instead were attempting to force them to lease to welfare recipients who couldn’t pay their rent.
The family’s attempts to slow down the federal case were at times nonsensical. Trump submitted an affidavit contending that the government had engaged in some unspecified wrongdoing by releasing statements to the press on the day it brought the case without first having any “formal communications” with him; he contended that he’d learned of the complaint only while listening to his car radio that morning. But Trump’s sworn statement was a lie. Court records show that the government had filed its complaint at 10 a.m. and phoned him almost immediately afterward. The government later notified the media with a press release.
Prosecutors responded to Trump’s affidavit by showing he had fudged his claim by using the term “formal communication”—an acknowledgment, they said, that he had received what only he would characterize as an informal notification—which they described as an intentional effort to mislead the court and the public. But the allegation slowed the case; it required government lawyers to appear in court to shoot down Trump’s false charge.
The Trumps had more delaying tactics. Trump announced in a press conference that his family and their company were bringing a $100 million countersuit against the government for libel; anonymous tenants and community leaders, he said, had been calling and writing letters expressing shock at the government’s “outrageous lies.” Once again, motions, replies and hearings followed. Once again, the court threw out the Trump allegations.
For months, the Trumps ignored the government’s discovery demands, even though court procedure in a civil or criminal case requires each side to produce relevant documents in a timely manner. This allows for the plaintiffs or prosecutors to develop more evidence in support of their claims, as well as for the defense to gather proof to fight the case against them. When litigation is filed or even contemplated, scrupulous lawyers and corporations immediately impose document-retention programs or require that any shredding or disposing of records be halted. Courts have handed down severe sanctions or even criminal charges of obstruction of justice against executives and companies that destroyed records because they knew they were going to be sued.
Yet when the government filed its standard discovery requests, the Trumps reacted as though seeking that information was outrageous. They argued in court that prosecutors had no case and wanted to riffle through corporate files on a fishing expedition. Once again, this led to more delays, more replies, more hearings...and another specious argument thrown out of court.
Six months after the original filing, the case was nowhere because the Trumps had repeatedly ignored the deadlines to produce records and answers to questions, known as interrogatories. When a government attorney finally telephoned a Trump lawyer to find out why, he was told the Trumps had not even begun preparing their answers and had no plans to do so. The Trumps also postponed and blocked depositions, refused to provide a description of their records, as required, and would not turn over any documents.
Finally, under subpoena, Trump appeared for a short deposition. When asked about the missing documents, he made a shocking admission: The Trumps had been destroying their corporate records for the previous six months and had no document-retention program. They had conducted no inspections to determine which files might have been sought in the discovery requests or might otherwise be related to the case. Instead, in order to “save space,” Trump testified, officials with his company had been tossing documents into the shredder and garbage.
The government dashed to court, seeking sanctions against the Trumps. Prosecutors asked the judge to allow them to search through the corporate files or simply declare the Trumps in default and enter a judgment against them. The judge opted to allow the government access to the company offices so they could find the records themselves.
In three letters and three phone calls, the government notified the Trumps that this inspection would take place on June 12, 1974. When they arrived at the Trump offices, Trump was there, but he and everyone else were “surprised” that prosecutors had come and refused to allow them access to documents without their defense lawyers present. A prosecutor called those lawyers, but they were not in their offices. The frustrated prosecutors then gave up and headed back to court.
The Trump strategy was simple: deny, impede and delay, while destroying documents the court had ordered them to hand over.
They were then hit with a new delaying tactic. The Trumps submitted a filing based on statements by Trump that radically misrepresented what had occurred that day. He claimed a prosecutor, Donna Goldstein, had arrived at the company without notifying the Trumps’ counsel, refused to telephone their lawyer and demanded access to Trump’s office. The prosecutor—accompanied, the Trumps claimed, by five “stormtroopers”—then banged on doors throughout the office, insisting she and her team be allowed to “swarm haphazardly through all the Trump files and to totally disrupt their daily business routine.”
At the same time, in a move that caused another huge delay, the Trumps claimed that Goldstein had been threatening Trump employees who were potential witnesses. In several instances, the employees signed affidavits stating they had been subjected to abuse by Goldstein, then denied it when they were forced to testify. Even one of the government’s key witnesses, Thomas Miranda—who told the government the Trumps instructed managers to flag applications from minorities and that he was afraid the family would physically harm him—suddenly announced that prosecutors had threatened him and that he had never provided any evidence against the Trumps.
These allegations of misconduct, which demanded sanctions against the government for abusing its power, required more hearings. Once again, the Trump claims went nowhere.
In June 1975, more than 18 months after the government filed the case and with the Trumps still withholding potentially relevant records, the two sides struck a settlement. The agreement—which, like all civil settlements, did not contain an admission of guilt—compelled the Trumps to comply with federal housing regulations against discrimination, adopt specific policies to advance that goal, to notify the community that apartments would be rented to anyone, regardless of race, and meet other requirements.
The Trumps ignored these requirements and still refused to rent apartments to minorities, something the government proved by sending African-Americans and non-Hispanic Caucasians to pose as applicants. The government brought another complaint against the Trumps in 1978, who then agreed to a new settlement.
In that case, the government had the financial wherewithal to fight back against abuses of the courts and the discovery process by the Trump family. But many private litigants, who have to spend their own money and hire their own lawyers, have been ground down by Trump’s litigation-as-warfare-without-rules approach.
Courts are loath to impose sanctions when litigants fail to comply with discovery demands; in order to hurry cases along, judges frequently issue new orders setting deadlines and requirements on parties that fail to produce documents. But Trump and his companies did get sanctioned for lying about the existence of a crucial document to avoid losing a suit.
In 2009, a group of plaintiffs claimed Trump duped them into buying apartments in a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, development by portraying it as one of his projects. The fine print of the dense and legalistic purchase contracts, however, revealed that Trump had agreed only to license his name to the developers, and when the project hit financial snags, he walked away from it.
In their initial disclosures in 2011, Trump and his company said they had no insurance to cover any of their liability in this case. That was important because an insurance policy lets the plaintiffs calculate how much money a defendant can pay in a settlement without suffering any direct financial consequences. In other words, that insurance lets the plaintiff know how aggressively to pursue a settlement, knowing the defendant will have some losses covered by the policy.
At the time, a settlement in the then-prominent case could have been disastrous for Trump; he faced an array of similar lawsuits because he had licensed his name to developers around the world for projects that later collapsed. In each case, Trump had marketed the developments as his own, a claim contradicted by the sales contracts. A settlement in any of these cases might have encouraged other people who had lost deposits in a Trump-marketed development to file lawsuits against him.
Trump testified that officials with his company had been tossing records into the shredder and garbage.
Two years after denying that Trump had insurance that could have been used to settle the Fort Lauderdale litigation, one of his lawyers made a startling admission: Trump and his company had been insured all along for up to $5 million. But no more—the policy had recently “dried up,” the lawyer said. Stunned, the apartment buyers filed a motion seeking sanctions against Trump and his company, arguing that the case “may very well have settled long ago had the plaintiffs been provided with the policy in a timely manner,” according to a court filing.
Alan Garten, General Counsel at the Trump Organization for the past decade, said that at the time of the original disclosure, the company’s lawyers did not believe that the policy covered any potential liability in the lawsuit, which he said was an error on his part. “This solely fell on me, and if anyone is to blame for that, it’s me,’’ he said. “It was completely an innocent oversight. And it was my innocent oversight.’’ Garten said the other cases in this article preceded his time at the company and he did not know the facts surrounding them. In the Ft. Lauderdale case, Federal Judge Kathleen Williams ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered Trump to pay limited legal fees for failing to disclose the policy, then held in reserve the possibility of imposing additional sanctions. The case subsequently settled.
Perhaps the worst legal case involving Trump and his companies hiding and destroying emails and other records involved real estate developer Cordish Cos., which, through an affiliate called Power Plant Entertainment LLC, built two American Indian casinos in Florida. In January 2005, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts sued in a state court almost immediately after the opening of the casinos, which both operate under the Hard Rock brand. In his lawsuit, Trump claimed that the companies had unlawfully conspired with one of his former associates to cheat him out of the deal; he argued that the projects should be turned over to him.
Negotiations with the tribe and construction of the casinos had taken many years, raising the possibility that the state’s four-year statute of limitations had passed before Trump finally got around to filing his lawsuit. If Power Plant could prove Trump knew in early 2000 that his former associate was working on the Hard Rock deal, the case would be thrown out of court. The clock here for the statute of limitations starts ticking down when plaintiffs learn they have been swindled.
Trump claimed he learned about the deal in January 2001, about the time of the groundbreaking and more than three years before he filed suit. However, the defendants contended he had been informed of the projects in 1999. Trump offered no evidence in support of his contention except his word, so the opposing lawyers filed extensive discovery demands, seeking emails, computer files, calendars and other records that might prove he knew about the casino deal before 2000.
A full year into the case, Trump and his company, Trump Hotels, had produced only a single box of documents, many of which were not relevant—and no emails, digital files, phone records, calendars or even documents Trump lawyers had promised to turn over. Interrogatories were still unanswered. Lawyers for Power Plant obtained a court order compelling Trump and his company to comply with the discovery demands and hand over the relevant information and documents.
In a March 2006 response, Trump’s lawyers argued that the emails and other electronic documents had not been produced because the company didn’t have them. They claimed it had no servers until 2001—the year Trump claimed he had learned of the Power Plant project. They also claimed Trump Hotels had no policy regarding retaining documents until 2003. In other words, they hadn’t turned over any emails because no emails had been saved on a Trump server.
Judge Jeffrey Streitfeld reacted with near disbelief. "I don't have the patience for this," he said. "This has been going on too long to have to listen—and I don't mean to be disrespectful—to this double-talk. There has to be an attitude adjustment from the plaintiff."
Streitfeld ordered Trump executives to file sworn statements attesting to how their email systems had worked from 1996 onward. In response, Trump Hotels filed an affidavit from one of its information technology managers stating that it had had no servers prior to 2001.
That was false and by deposing numerous IT specialists with two Trump companies—the Trump Organization and Trump Hotels—lawyers for Power Plant gradually chipped away at it. Finally, during a deposition nine months after he had signed the deceptive affidavit, the same Trump executive admitted his assertions in it were untrue. In fact, an IBM Domino server for emails and other files had been installed in 1999, the same year witnesses for Power Plant contended that Trump had learned of the casino deal. Prior to that, as early as 1997, the Trump corporations used servers off-site operated by a company called Jersey Cape, according to sworn testimony by one of the Trump IT experts; the following year, the Trump Organization and Trump Hotels moved to another email provider, Technology 21.
These startling revelations changed nothing, however, because there was no trove of documents. The Trump records had been destroyed. Despite knowing back in 2001 that Trump might want to file a lawsuit, his companies had deleted emails and other records without checking if they might be evidence in his case. Beginning around 2003, the company wiped clear the data from everyone’s computers every year. Lawyers for Trump Hotels had never sent out the usual communication issued during litigation instructing employees to stop destroying records that might be related to this case. The deletions continued, and backup tapes were reused—thus erasing the data they held. Power Plant lawyers also discovered that after the lawsuit was filed, Trump Hotels disposed of a key witness’s computer without preserving the data on it.
Data from everyone’s computers at Trump’s company was wiped clear every year.
In subsequent filings, Power Plant maintained that Trump Hotels had intentionally deceived the court in its March 2006 filing when it claimed it had located no emails relevant to the case because, at that point, it had not yet conducted any searches of its computer system. Trump Hotels executives did not instruct their IT department to examine backup computer tapes until 2007, and even then the job wasn’t done, depositions show. And when computer specialists finally attempted to electronically locate any relevant documents that had survived the flurry of deletions, the procedures were absurdly inadequate. While looking for relevant documents, the technology team was told to use only two search terms—the name of the tribe and the last name of the former Trump associate. So even if there was an email that stated, “Donald Trump learned the full details of the Hard Rock casino deal in Florida in 1999,” it would not have been found by this search.
With all this proof that Trump Hotels had ignored every court order and filed false documents, Power Plant asked the judge either to impose sanctions or allow its own expert to search for relevant digital records. Trump Hotels argued it had done nothing improper, although its lawyers acknowledged having made some mistakes. Still, Streitfeld ordered Trump Hotels to make its servers and computer systems available for inspection by a computer forensics consulting firm. That review showed there was no digital data in the computers, servers or backup tapes prior to January 2001—the very month Trump claimed to have learned of the Florida casino deal.
With the likelihood of sanctions growing, Trump Hotels dropped the suit a few months later, in part because of the company’s financial troubles. A company involved in the Power Plant case agreed to purchase one of Trump’s struggling casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and included as part of the deal a requirement that the litigation be ended.
This review of Trump’s many decades of abusing the judicial system, ignoring judges, disregarding rules, destroying documents and lying about it is not simply a sordid history lesson. Rather, it helps explain his behavior since he declared his candidacy. He promised to turn over his tax returns and his health records—just as he promised to comply with document discovery requirements in so many lawsuits—then reneged. As a result, he has left a sparse evidentiary trail that can be used to assess his wealth, his qualifications for the presidency or even his fitness. Should voters choose him to be the next U.S. president, he will enter the Oval Office as a mystery, a man who has repeatedly flouted the rules. He has solemnly told the country to trust him while refusing to produce any records to prove whether he speaks the truth or has utter contempt for it.
October 31, 2016
Hype on GMOs
The New York Times Cuts Through the Hype on GMOs
They're likely safe to eat, but they sure haven't lived up to their high-yield, low-pesticide promise.
By TOM PHILPOTT
Genetically modified seeds emerged in the mid-1990s and have since conquered million of acres of US farmland. Today, upward of 80 percent of corn, soybean, and cotton acreage is planted with crops engineered to withstand herbicides or insects, as have large portions of our sugar beet and alfalfa crops. Beyond the massive marketing triumph and financial success of companies like Monsanto and Syngenta—which sell both the seeds and the related herbicides—what has the industry achieved in terms of public benefits?
Have they helped farmers churn out more food per acre and reduce pesticides, as the industry has long claimed? Or, as some of their more extreme critics suggest, are they subtly poisoning the food supply?
In Sunday's New York Times, investigative journalist Danny Hakim has an elegant, in-depth piece digging beneath considerable industry hype to examine that question. His conclusion: While "fears that they are unsafe to eat" are "largely unsubstantiated," "genetic modification in the United States and Canada has not accelerated increases in crop yields or led to an overall reduction in the use of chemical pesticides."
To reach that conclusion, Hakim compared US yields of crops like corn and sugar beets with the same crops grown in Europe (charts here), where GMOs aren't widely used. He also compared pesticide-use rates. The result: "The United States and Canada have gained no discernible advantage in yields—food per acre—when measured against Western Europe, a region with comparably modernized agricultural producers like France and Germany." The result, he notes, is consistent with a recent National Academy of Sciences report that found that "there was little evidence that the introduction of genetically modified crops in the United States had led to yield gains beyond those seen in conventional crops."
Shorter: Europe essentially rejected GMOs and paid no price for it.
For pesticides, the performance has been mixed, but not exactly an affirmation of GMO crops' 20-year run.
One measure, contained in data from the United States Geological Survey, shows the stark difference in the use of pesticides. Since genetically modified crops were introduced in the United States two decades ago for crops like corn, cotton and soybeans, the use of toxins that kill insects and fungi has fallen by a third, but the spraying of herbicides, which are used in much higher volumes, has risen by 21 percent.By contrast, in France, use of insecticides and fungicides has fallen by a far greater percentage—65 percent—and herbicide use has decreased as well, by 36 percent.
The article has predictably generated a storm of criticism from industry enthusiasts. Hakim answered some of them in a tweetstorm Sunday morning (start here). I'll have more to say about it later this week. In the meantime, as someone who has been teasing out this story for a decade, it's refreshing to see the topic covered with such precision and clarity in the paper of record.
They're likely safe to eat, but they sure haven't lived up to their high-yield, low-pesticide promise.
By TOM PHILPOTT
Genetically modified seeds emerged in the mid-1990s and have since conquered million of acres of US farmland. Today, upward of 80 percent of corn, soybean, and cotton acreage is planted with crops engineered to withstand herbicides or insects, as have large portions of our sugar beet and alfalfa crops. Beyond the massive marketing triumph and financial success of companies like Monsanto and Syngenta—which sell both the seeds and the related herbicides—what has the industry achieved in terms of public benefits?
Have they helped farmers churn out more food per acre and reduce pesticides, as the industry has long claimed? Or, as some of their more extreme critics suggest, are they subtly poisoning the food supply?
In Sunday's New York Times, investigative journalist Danny Hakim has an elegant, in-depth piece digging beneath considerable industry hype to examine that question. His conclusion: While "fears that they are unsafe to eat" are "largely unsubstantiated," "genetic modification in the United States and Canada has not accelerated increases in crop yields or led to an overall reduction in the use of chemical pesticides."
To reach that conclusion, Hakim compared US yields of crops like corn and sugar beets with the same crops grown in Europe (charts here), where GMOs aren't widely used. He also compared pesticide-use rates. The result: "The United States and Canada have gained no discernible advantage in yields—food per acre—when measured against Western Europe, a region with comparably modernized agricultural producers like France and Germany." The result, he notes, is consistent with a recent National Academy of Sciences report that found that "there was little evidence that the introduction of genetically modified crops in the United States had led to yield gains beyond those seen in conventional crops."
Shorter: Europe essentially rejected GMOs and paid no price for it.
For pesticides, the performance has been mixed, but not exactly an affirmation of GMO crops' 20-year run.
One measure, contained in data from the United States Geological Survey, shows the stark difference in the use of pesticides. Since genetically modified crops were introduced in the United States two decades ago for crops like corn, cotton and soybeans, the use of toxins that kill insects and fungi has fallen by a third, but the spraying of herbicides, which are used in much higher volumes, has risen by 21 percent.By contrast, in France, use of insecticides and fungicides has fallen by a far greater percentage—65 percent—and herbicide use has decreased as well, by 36 percent.
The article has predictably generated a storm of criticism from industry enthusiasts. Hakim answered some of them in a tweetstorm Sunday morning (start here). I'll have more to say about it later this week. In the meantime, as someone who has been teasing out this story for a decade, it's refreshing to see the topic covered with such precision and clarity in the paper of record.
Ridiculous Military Spending
Why Can't We Rein In This Ridiculous Military Spending?
William Hartung on fear, greed, and the cash cow Congress won't touch.
By WILLIAM D. HARTUNG
Through good times and bad, regardless of what's actually happening in the world, one thing is certain: In the long run, the Pentagon budget won't go down.
It's not that the budget has never been reduced. At pivotal moments, like the end of World War II as well as the war's end in Korea and Vietnam, there were indeed temporary downturns, as there was after the Cold War. More recently, the Budget Control Act of 2011 threw a monkey wrench into the Pentagon's plans for funding that would go ever onward and upward by putting a cap on the money Congress could pony up for it. The remarkable thing, though, is not that such moments have occurred, but how modest and short-lived they've proved to be.
Take the current budget. It's down slightly from its peak in 2011, when it reached the highest level since World War II, but this year's budget for the Pentagon and related agencies is nothing to sneeze at. It comes in at roughly $600 billion—more than the peak year of the massive arms buildup initiated by President Ronald Reagan back in the 1980s. To put this figure in perspective: Despite troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan dropping sharply over the past eight years, the Obama administration has still managed to spend more on the Pentagon than the Bush administration did during its two terms in office.
What accounts for the Department of Defense's ability to keep a stranglehold on our tax dollars year after endless year?
Pillar one supporting that edifice: ideology. As long as most Americans accept the notion that it is the God-given mission and right of the United States to go anywhere on the planet and do more or less anything it cares to do with its military, you won't see Pentagon spending brought under real control. Think of this as the military corollary to American exceptionalism—or just call it the doctrine of armed exceptionalism, if you will.
The second pillar supporting lavish military budgets (and this will hardly surprise you): the entrenched power of the arms lobby and its allies in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. The strategic placement of arms production facilities and military bases in key states and congressional districts has created an economic dependency that has saved many a flawed weapons system from being unceremoniously dumped in the trash bin of history.
Lockheed Martin, for instance, has put together a handy map of how its troubled F-35 fighter jet has created 125,000 jobs in 46 states. The actual figures are, in fact, considerably lower, but the principle holds: Having subcontractors in dozens of states makes it harder for members of Congress to consider cutting or slowing down even a failed or failing program. Take as an example the M-1 tank, which the Army actually wanted to stop buying. Its plans were thwarted by the Ohio congressional delegation, which led a fight to add more M-1s to the budget in order to keep the General Dynamics production line in Lima, Ohio, up and running. In a similar fashion, prodded by the Missouri delegation, Congress added two different versions of Boeing's F-18 aircraft to the budget to keep funds flowing to that company's St. Louis area plant.
The one-two punch of an environment in which the military can do no wrong while being outfitted for every global task imaginable, and what former Pentagon analyst Franklin "Chuck" Spinney has called "political engineering," has been a tough combination to beat.
The overwhelming consensus in favor of a "cover the globe" military strategy has been broken from time to time by popular resistance to the idea of using war as a central tool of foreign policy. In such periods, getting Americans behind a program of feeding the military machine massive sums of money has generally required a heavy dose of fear.
For example, the last thing most Americans wanted after the devastation and hardship unleashed by World War II was to immediately put the country back on a war footing. The demobilization of millions of soldiers and a sharp cutback in weapons spending in the immediate postwar years rocked what President Dwight Eisenhower would later dub the "military-industrial complex."
As Wayne Biddle has noted in his seminal book Barons of the Sky, the US aerospace industry produced an astonishing 300,000-plus military aircraft during World War II. Not surprisingly, major weapons producers struggled to survive in a peacetime environment in which government demand for their products threatened to be a tiny fraction of wartime levels.
Lockheed President Robert Gross was terrified by the potential impact of war's end on his company's business, as were many of his industry cohorts. "As long as I live," he said, "I will never forget those short, appalling weeks" of the immediate postwar period. To be clear, Gross was appalled not by the war itself, but by the drop off in orders occasioned by its end. He elaborated in a 1947 letter to a friend: "We had one underlying element of comfort and reassurance during the war. We knew we'd get paid for anything we built. Now we are almost entirely on our own."
The postwar doldrums in military spending that worried Gross so were reversed only after the American public had been fed a steady, fear-filled diet of anti-communism. NSC-68, a secret memorandum the National Security Council prepared for President Harry Truman in April 1950, created the template for a policy based on the global "containment" of communism and grounded in a plan to encircle the Soviet Union with US military forces, bases, and alliances. This would, of course, prove to be a strikingly expensive proposition. The concluding paragraphs of that memorandum underscored exactly that point, calling for a "sustained buildup of US political, economic, and military strength…[to] frustrate the Kremlin design of a world dominated by its will."
Sen. Arthur Vandenberg put the thrust of this new Cold War policy in far simpler terms when he bluntly advised President Truman to "scare the hell out of the American people" to win support for a $400 million aid plan for Greece and Turkey. His suggestion would be put into effect not just for those two countries but to generate support for what President Eisenhower would later describe as "a permanent arms establishment of vast proportions."
Industry leaders like Lockheed's Gross were poised to take advantage of such planning. In a draft of a 1950 speech, Gross noted, giddily enough, that "for the first time in recorded history, one country has assumed global responsibility." Meeting that responsibility would naturally mean using air transport to deliver "huge quantities of men, food, ammunition, tanks, gasoline, oil and thousands of other articles of war to a number of widely separated places on the face of the earth." Lockheed, of course, stood ready to heed the call.
The next major challenge to armed exceptionalism, and to the further militarization of foreign policy, came after the disastrous Vietnam War, which drove many Americans to question the wisdom of a policy of permanent global interventionism. That phenomenon would be dubbed the "Vietnam syndrome" by interventionists, as if opposition to such a military policy were a disease, not a position. Still, that "syndrome" carried considerable, if ever decreasing, weight for a decade and a half, despite the Pentagon's Reagan-inspired arms buildup of the 1980s.
With the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Washington decisively renewed its practice of responding to perceived foreign threats with large-scale military interventions. That quick victory over Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein's forces in Kuwait was celebrated by many hawks as the end of the Vietnam-induced malaise. Amid victory parades and celebrations, President George H.W. Bush would enthusiastically exclaim, "And, by God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all."
However, perhaps the biggest threat since World War II to an "arms establishment of vast proportions" came with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, also in 1991. How to mainline fear into the American public and justify Cold War levels of spending when that other superpower, the Soviet Union, the primary threat of the previous nearly half-century, had just evaporated and there was next to nothing threatening on the horizon? General Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, summed up the fears of that moment within the military and the arms complex when he said, "I'm running out of demons. I'm running out of villains. I'm down to Castro and Kim Il-sung."
In reality, he underestimated the Pentagon's ability to conjure up new threats. Military spending did indeed drop at the end of the Cold War, but the Pentagon helped staunch the bleeding relatively quickly before a "peace dividend" could be delivered to the American people. Instead, it put a firm floor under the fall by announcing what came to be known as the "rogue state" doctrine. Resources formerly aimed at the Soviet Union would now be focused on "regional hegemons" like Iraq and North Korea.
After the 9/11 attacks, the rogue-state doctrine morphed into the Global War on Terror (GWOT), which neoconservative pundits soon labeled "World War IV." The heightened fear campaign that went with it, in turn, helped sow the seeds for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which was promoted by visions of mushroom clouds rising over American cities and a drumbeat of Bush administration claims (all false) that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda. Some administration officials including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld even suggested that Saddam was like Hitler, as if a modest-sized Middle Eastern state could somehow muster the resources to conquer the globe.
The administration's propaganda campaign would be supplemented by the work of right-wing corporate-funded think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. And no one should be surprised to learn that the military-industrial complex and its money, its lobbyists, and its interests were in the middle of it all. Take Lockheed Martin Vice President Bruce Jackson. In 1997, he became a director of the Project for the New American Century and so part of a gaggle of hawks including future Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, his future boss Donald Rumsfeld, and future Vice President Dick Cheney. In those years, PNAC would advocate the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as part of its project to turn the planet into an American military protectorate. Many of its members would, of course, enter the Bush administration in crucial roles and become architects of the GWOT and the invasion of Iraq.
The Afghan and Iraq wars would prove an absolute bonanza for contractors as the Pentagon budget soared. Traditional weapons suppliers like Lockheed Martin and Boeing prospered, as did private contractors like Dick Cheney's former employer, Halliburton, which made billions providing logistical support to US troops in the field. Other major beneficiaries included firms like Blackwater and DynCorp, whose employees guarded US facilities and oil pipelines while training Afghan and Iraqi security forces. As much as $60 billion of the funds funneled to such contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan would be "wasted," but not from the point of view of companies for which waste could generate as much profit as a job well done. So Halliburton and its cohorts weren't complaining.
On entering the Oval Office, President Barack Obama would ditch the term "global war on terror" in favor of "countering violent extremism"—and then essentially settle for a no-name global war. He would shift gears from a strategy focused on large numbers of "boots on the ground" to an emphasis on drone strikes, the use of Special Operations forces, and massive transfers of arms to allies like Saudi Arabia. In the context of an increasingly militarized foreign policy, one might call Obama's approach "politically sustainable warfare," since it involved fewer (American) casualties and lower costs than Bush-style warfare, which peaked in Iraq at more than 160,000 troops and a comparable number of private contractors.
Recent terror attacks against Western targets—Brussels, Paris, Nice, San Bernardino, Orlando—have offered the national security state and the Obama administration the necessary fear factor that makes the case for higher Pentagon spending so palatable. This has been true despite the fact that more tanks, bombers, aircraft carriers, and nuclear weapons will be useless in preventing such attacks.
The majority of what the Pentagon spends, of course, has nothing to do with fighting terrorism. But whatever it has or hasn't been called, the war against terror has proven to be a cash cow for the Pentagon and contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon.
The "war budget"—money meant for the Pentagon but not included in its regular budget—has been used to add on tens of billions of dollars more. It has proven to be an effective "slush fund" for weapons and activities that have nothing to do with immediate war fighting and has been the Pentagon's preferred method for evading the caps on its budget imposed by the Budget Control Act. A Pentagon spokesman admitted as much recently by acknowledging that more than half the $58.8 billion war budget is being used to pay for nonwar costs.
The abuse of the war budget leaves ample room in the Pentagon's main budget for items like the overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft, a plane that, at a price tag of $1.4 trillion over its lifetime, is on track to be the most expensive weapons program ever undertaken. That slush fund is also enabling the Pentagon to spend billions of dollars in seed money as a down payment on the department's proposed $1 trillion plan to buy a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines. Shutting it down could force the Pentagon to do what it likes least: live within an actual budget rather than continuing to push its top line ever upward.
Although rarely discussed because of the focus on Donald Trump's abominable behavior and racist rhetoric, both candidates for president are in favor of increasing Pentagon spending. Trump's "plan" (if one can call it that) hews closely to a blueprint developed by the Heritage Foundation that, if implemented, could increase Pentagon spending by a cumulative $900 billion over the next decade. The size of a possible buildup under Hillary Clinton is less clear, but she has also pledged to work toward lifting the caps on the Pentagon's regular budget. If that were done, and the war fund continued to be stuffed with non-war-related items, the Pentagon and its contractors will be sitting pretty.
As long as fear, greed, and hubris are the dominant factors driving Pentagon spending (no matter who is in the White House), substantial and enduring budget reductions are essentially inconceivable. A wasteful practice may be eliminated here or an unnecessary weapons system cut there, but more fundamental change would require taking on the fear factor, the doctrine of armed exceptionalism, and the way the military-industrial complex is embedded in Washington.
Only such a culture shift would allow for a clear-eyed assessment of what constitutes "defense" and how much money would be needed to provide it. Unfortunately, the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned Americans about more than 50 years ago is alive and well, and gobbling up your tax dollars at an alarming rate.
William Hartung on fear, greed, and the cash cow Congress won't touch.
By WILLIAM D. HARTUNG
Through good times and bad, regardless of what's actually happening in the world, one thing is certain: In the long run, the Pentagon budget won't go down.
It's not that the budget has never been reduced. At pivotal moments, like the end of World War II as well as the war's end in Korea and Vietnam, there were indeed temporary downturns, as there was after the Cold War. More recently, the Budget Control Act of 2011 threw a monkey wrench into the Pentagon's plans for funding that would go ever onward and upward by putting a cap on the money Congress could pony up for it. The remarkable thing, though, is not that such moments have occurred, but how modest and short-lived they've proved to be.
Take the current budget. It's down slightly from its peak in 2011, when it reached the highest level since World War II, but this year's budget for the Pentagon and related agencies is nothing to sneeze at. It comes in at roughly $600 billion—more than the peak year of the massive arms buildup initiated by President Ronald Reagan back in the 1980s. To put this figure in perspective: Despite troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan dropping sharply over the past eight years, the Obama administration has still managed to spend more on the Pentagon than the Bush administration did during its two terms in office.
What accounts for the Department of Defense's ability to keep a stranglehold on our tax dollars year after endless year?
Pillar one supporting that edifice: ideology. As long as most Americans accept the notion that it is the God-given mission and right of the United States to go anywhere on the planet and do more or less anything it cares to do with its military, you won't see Pentagon spending brought under real control. Think of this as the military corollary to American exceptionalism—or just call it the doctrine of armed exceptionalism, if you will.
The second pillar supporting lavish military budgets (and this will hardly surprise you): the entrenched power of the arms lobby and its allies in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. The strategic placement of arms production facilities and military bases in key states and congressional districts has created an economic dependency that has saved many a flawed weapons system from being unceremoniously dumped in the trash bin of history.
Lockheed Martin, for instance, has put together a handy map of how its troubled F-35 fighter jet has created 125,000 jobs in 46 states. The actual figures are, in fact, considerably lower, but the principle holds: Having subcontractors in dozens of states makes it harder for members of Congress to consider cutting or slowing down even a failed or failing program. Take as an example the M-1 tank, which the Army actually wanted to stop buying. Its plans were thwarted by the Ohio congressional delegation, which led a fight to add more M-1s to the budget in order to keep the General Dynamics production line in Lima, Ohio, up and running. In a similar fashion, prodded by the Missouri delegation, Congress added two different versions of Boeing's F-18 aircraft to the budget to keep funds flowing to that company's St. Louis area plant.
The one-two punch of an environment in which the military can do no wrong while being outfitted for every global task imaginable, and what former Pentagon analyst Franklin "Chuck" Spinney has called "political engineering," has been a tough combination to beat.
The overwhelming consensus in favor of a "cover the globe" military strategy has been broken from time to time by popular resistance to the idea of using war as a central tool of foreign policy. In such periods, getting Americans behind a program of feeding the military machine massive sums of money has generally required a heavy dose of fear.
For example, the last thing most Americans wanted after the devastation and hardship unleashed by World War II was to immediately put the country back on a war footing. The demobilization of millions of soldiers and a sharp cutback in weapons spending in the immediate postwar years rocked what President Dwight Eisenhower would later dub the "military-industrial complex."
As Wayne Biddle has noted in his seminal book Barons of the Sky, the US aerospace industry produced an astonishing 300,000-plus military aircraft during World War II. Not surprisingly, major weapons producers struggled to survive in a peacetime environment in which government demand for their products threatened to be a tiny fraction of wartime levels.
Lockheed President Robert Gross was terrified by the potential impact of war's end on his company's business, as were many of his industry cohorts. "As long as I live," he said, "I will never forget those short, appalling weeks" of the immediate postwar period. To be clear, Gross was appalled not by the war itself, but by the drop off in orders occasioned by its end. He elaborated in a 1947 letter to a friend: "We had one underlying element of comfort and reassurance during the war. We knew we'd get paid for anything we built. Now we are almost entirely on our own."
The postwar doldrums in military spending that worried Gross so were reversed only after the American public had been fed a steady, fear-filled diet of anti-communism. NSC-68, a secret memorandum the National Security Council prepared for President Harry Truman in April 1950, created the template for a policy based on the global "containment" of communism and grounded in a plan to encircle the Soviet Union with US military forces, bases, and alliances. This would, of course, prove to be a strikingly expensive proposition. The concluding paragraphs of that memorandum underscored exactly that point, calling for a "sustained buildup of US political, economic, and military strength…[to] frustrate the Kremlin design of a world dominated by its will."
Sen. Arthur Vandenberg put the thrust of this new Cold War policy in far simpler terms when he bluntly advised President Truman to "scare the hell out of the American people" to win support for a $400 million aid plan for Greece and Turkey. His suggestion would be put into effect not just for those two countries but to generate support for what President Eisenhower would later describe as "a permanent arms establishment of vast proportions."
Industry leaders like Lockheed's Gross were poised to take advantage of such planning. In a draft of a 1950 speech, Gross noted, giddily enough, that "for the first time in recorded history, one country has assumed global responsibility." Meeting that responsibility would naturally mean using air transport to deliver "huge quantities of men, food, ammunition, tanks, gasoline, oil and thousands of other articles of war to a number of widely separated places on the face of the earth." Lockheed, of course, stood ready to heed the call.
The next major challenge to armed exceptionalism, and to the further militarization of foreign policy, came after the disastrous Vietnam War, which drove many Americans to question the wisdom of a policy of permanent global interventionism. That phenomenon would be dubbed the "Vietnam syndrome" by interventionists, as if opposition to such a military policy were a disease, not a position. Still, that "syndrome" carried considerable, if ever decreasing, weight for a decade and a half, despite the Pentagon's Reagan-inspired arms buildup of the 1980s.
With the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Washington decisively renewed its practice of responding to perceived foreign threats with large-scale military interventions. That quick victory over Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein's forces in Kuwait was celebrated by many hawks as the end of the Vietnam-induced malaise. Amid victory parades and celebrations, President George H.W. Bush would enthusiastically exclaim, "And, by God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all."
However, perhaps the biggest threat since World War II to an "arms establishment of vast proportions" came with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, also in 1991. How to mainline fear into the American public and justify Cold War levels of spending when that other superpower, the Soviet Union, the primary threat of the previous nearly half-century, had just evaporated and there was next to nothing threatening on the horizon? General Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, summed up the fears of that moment within the military and the arms complex when he said, "I'm running out of demons. I'm running out of villains. I'm down to Castro and Kim Il-sung."
In reality, he underestimated the Pentagon's ability to conjure up new threats. Military spending did indeed drop at the end of the Cold War, but the Pentagon helped staunch the bleeding relatively quickly before a "peace dividend" could be delivered to the American people. Instead, it put a firm floor under the fall by announcing what came to be known as the "rogue state" doctrine. Resources formerly aimed at the Soviet Union would now be focused on "regional hegemons" like Iraq and North Korea.
After the 9/11 attacks, the rogue-state doctrine morphed into the Global War on Terror (GWOT), which neoconservative pundits soon labeled "World War IV." The heightened fear campaign that went with it, in turn, helped sow the seeds for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which was promoted by visions of mushroom clouds rising over American cities and a drumbeat of Bush administration claims (all false) that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda. Some administration officials including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld even suggested that Saddam was like Hitler, as if a modest-sized Middle Eastern state could somehow muster the resources to conquer the globe.
The administration's propaganda campaign would be supplemented by the work of right-wing corporate-funded think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. And no one should be surprised to learn that the military-industrial complex and its money, its lobbyists, and its interests were in the middle of it all. Take Lockheed Martin Vice President Bruce Jackson. In 1997, he became a director of the Project for the New American Century and so part of a gaggle of hawks including future Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, his future boss Donald Rumsfeld, and future Vice President Dick Cheney. In those years, PNAC would advocate the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as part of its project to turn the planet into an American military protectorate. Many of its members would, of course, enter the Bush administration in crucial roles and become architects of the GWOT and the invasion of Iraq.
The Afghan and Iraq wars would prove an absolute bonanza for contractors as the Pentagon budget soared. Traditional weapons suppliers like Lockheed Martin and Boeing prospered, as did private contractors like Dick Cheney's former employer, Halliburton, which made billions providing logistical support to US troops in the field. Other major beneficiaries included firms like Blackwater and DynCorp, whose employees guarded US facilities and oil pipelines while training Afghan and Iraqi security forces. As much as $60 billion of the funds funneled to such contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan would be "wasted," but not from the point of view of companies for which waste could generate as much profit as a job well done. So Halliburton and its cohorts weren't complaining.
On entering the Oval Office, President Barack Obama would ditch the term "global war on terror" in favor of "countering violent extremism"—and then essentially settle for a no-name global war. He would shift gears from a strategy focused on large numbers of "boots on the ground" to an emphasis on drone strikes, the use of Special Operations forces, and massive transfers of arms to allies like Saudi Arabia. In the context of an increasingly militarized foreign policy, one might call Obama's approach "politically sustainable warfare," since it involved fewer (American) casualties and lower costs than Bush-style warfare, which peaked in Iraq at more than 160,000 troops and a comparable number of private contractors.
Recent terror attacks against Western targets—Brussels, Paris, Nice, San Bernardino, Orlando—have offered the national security state and the Obama administration the necessary fear factor that makes the case for higher Pentagon spending so palatable. This has been true despite the fact that more tanks, bombers, aircraft carriers, and nuclear weapons will be useless in preventing such attacks.
The majority of what the Pentagon spends, of course, has nothing to do with fighting terrorism. But whatever it has or hasn't been called, the war against terror has proven to be a cash cow for the Pentagon and contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon.
The "war budget"—money meant for the Pentagon but not included in its regular budget—has been used to add on tens of billions of dollars more. It has proven to be an effective "slush fund" for weapons and activities that have nothing to do with immediate war fighting and has been the Pentagon's preferred method for evading the caps on its budget imposed by the Budget Control Act. A Pentagon spokesman admitted as much recently by acknowledging that more than half the $58.8 billion war budget is being used to pay for nonwar costs.
The abuse of the war budget leaves ample room in the Pentagon's main budget for items like the overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft, a plane that, at a price tag of $1.4 trillion over its lifetime, is on track to be the most expensive weapons program ever undertaken. That slush fund is also enabling the Pentagon to spend billions of dollars in seed money as a down payment on the department's proposed $1 trillion plan to buy a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines. Shutting it down could force the Pentagon to do what it likes least: live within an actual budget rather than continuing to push its top line ever upward.
Although rarely discussed because of the focus on Donald Trump's abominable behavior and racist rhetoric, both candidates for president are in favor of increasing Pentagon spending. Trump's "plan" (if one can call it that) hews closely to a blueprint developed by the Heritage Foundation that, if implemented, could increase Pentagon spending by a cumulative $900 billion over the next decade. The size of a possible buildup under Hillary Clinton is less clear, but she has also pledged to work toward lifting the caps on the Pentagon's regular budget. If that were done, and the war fund continued to be stuffed with non-war-related items, the Pentagon and its contractors will be sitting pretty.
As long as fear, greed, and hubris are the dominant factors driving Pentagon spending (no matter who is in the White House), substantial and enduring budget reductions are essentially inconceivable. A wasteful practice may be eliminated here or an unnecessary weapons system cut there, but more fundamental change would require taking on the fear factor, the doctrine of armed exceptionalism, and the way the military-industrial complex is embedded in Washington.
Only such a culture shift would allow for a clear-eyed assessment of what constitutes "defense" and how much money would be needed to provide it. Unfortunately, the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned Americans about more than 50 years ago is alive and well, and gobbling up your tax dollars at an alarming rate.
Trump's loyal army
Who are Trump's loyal army?
By Michael Goldfarb
America is so divided in 2016 that one half of the electorate can barely understand the other. Comprehending the Donald Trump phenomenon has become the dominant theme of US election coverage, crowding out the usual questions a presidential campaign might raise about economic and foreign policy.
The question is not about the candidate himself. Trump hasn't hidden who he is - he hasn't concealed his attitudes to women and racial minorities behind sly innuendo, and his views on how he will deal with global problems are out there for all to see.
What has puzzled people who won't be voting for him, is how tens of millions of their fellow citizens could still be willing to support him. Who are they?
The answer is to be found in understanding what I call "The Bloc".
The Bloc, roughly 40% of the electorate, doesn't represent a majority in the US but it is the country's largest unified group of voters. It has lost four of the last six presidential elections but has mostly remained in control of one or both houses of Congress, and many state legislatures, making it almost impossible for Democratic administrations to govern the country.
The Bloc wasn't created by the Great Recession of 2008 or by the attacks of 9/11 or the bursting of the Dotcom Bubble in 2000. It wasn't even created by the economic bogeyman of this election, Nafta - the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement.
Instead The Bloc was created by a series of events that, in an almost geological process, added sedimentary layer after layer of voters to the Republican Party.
A new layer is laid down whenever there is "another round of economic displacement", says Todd Gitlin, professor of sociology and journalism at Columbia University, the new voters being overwhelmingly whites who had previously been Democrats.
Gitlin traces its origins to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when many farmers and their families were driven from Oklahoma and Kansas by drought. Most ended up in southern California and their children were among the early supporters of the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society and the 1964 Republican presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater.
In the late 1960s many southern whites also joined The Bloc following the enactment of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, which finally delivered - 100 years after the end of slavery - on the promise of equality for African Americans.
Then in the late 70s and early 80s, as factories in the North-east and along the Great Lakes shut down, communities like Johnstown in western Pennsylvania were devastated. Steelworkers in the town, even with their strong trade unions, were thrown out of work. People were forced to leave the region in vast numbers to find jobs elsewhere. Those jobs are nowhere near as secure as the factory jobs that sustained generations and allowed stable communities to grow. It was a displacement every bit as wrenching as that of the 1930s.
"The Rust Belt is the Dust Bowl of our times," says Gitlin.
Others, for whom the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v Wade (which gave women abortion rights) became the single issue on which they vote, joined The Bloc as well.
But both of America's major parties are grand coalitions.
Over the last 50 years, while disaffected Democrats were making common cause with the traditionally wealthy Republicans, a new Democratic Party was taking shape as well.
Its make-up is diverse, its policies dedicated to using civil rights law to undo centuries of job discrimination against minorities and women through preferential hiring, as well as pushing for socially liberal legislation on sexuality.
An overwhelming majority of African-Americans, and significant majorities of Hispanics and Asians vote Democrat, while university-educated whites dominate the party and give it its worldview and voice.
Identity and gender politics are a regular feature of life and discussion on university campuses and in the mainstream news media. Much of the debate, from the Democratic side this year, has been about white male identity. The New York Times has run dozens of articles about "angry white men".
A recent article was titled Men Need Help. Is Hillary Clinton the Answer? It was written by the paper's recently appointed gender editor, Susan Chira. Interestingly, in the late 1960s and 70s, when The Bloc began its rapid growth, it had a full-time labour correspondent. It doesn't any more.
This difference in thinking about the world provides a glimpse into America's terrible division.
When Donald Trump, speaking in his unique way, attacks Nafta for taking away American jobs, The Bloc cheers. When he attacks Democrats and their preference for gender and identity politics with its "politically correct" speech codes, the men and women of The Bloc nod in agreement.
Most Democrats shake their heads in disbelief and simply can't understand how anyone could vote for the Republican candidate.
One Clinton supporter I met while making my radio documentary, The Unswayables, did understand. Bonnie Cordova, a retired schoolteacher, and I were both watching the second presidential debate at the Bohemian Beer Garden in the New York borough of Queens. I asked her afterwards if she understood why people might vote for Trump.
She did. "I taught in inner city schools for 30 years," Cordova explained. "I was passed over a few times for promotion for a really good job because I wasn't a minority and I was working at a school where the kids got free dental and optical treatment because they were immigrant children and I was having trouble affording it for my kids." She acknowledged that made her resentful. "That's a flame that can be fanned into hatred. You have to rise above it."
Not everyone can rise above it.
And so American society and government is split. Dangerously.
But The Bloc isn't permanently moored to the Republican Party.
The Democrats would find governing easier if they brought some of its voters back. The best way to do that is directly related to employment. Economic displacement created The Bloc. Stable employment might whittle it away.
But Todd Gitlin, who has been a leader of left-liberal political movements in the US since the 1960s, doesn't hold out hope of this happening soon.
"What's the social democratic vision? There are fragmented visions, there are sectoral visions, little visions. There are no passionate centres. There is no luminous idea of what the world would look like if it were better," he says.
"People don't have a conception of the work of being a citizen and actually governing yourselves as a people. It's not just a problem on the right. It's that we don't have on the left a sustainable idea about political work."
The Bloc has been formed over a period of at least half a century. It will take more than one presidential election - dominated by the most unpresidential candidate in American history - to chip away at it.
It's not clear who on the Democratic side has the patience to give up the years that will be necessary to persuade these voters if not back to the Democratic fold at least to a position where compromise - and functioning government - is possible.
By Michael Goldfarb
America is so divided in 2016 that one half of the electorate can barely understand the other. Comprehending the Donald Trump phenomenon has become the dominant theme of US election coverage, crowding out the usual questions a presidential campaign might raise about economic and foreign policy.
The question is not about the candidate himself. Trump hasn't hidden who he is - he hasn't concealed his attitudes to women and racial minorities behind sly innuendo, and his views on how he will deal with global problems are out there for all to see.
What has puzzled people who won't be voting for him, is how tens of millions of their fellow citizens could still be willing to support him. Who are they?
The answer is to be found in understanding what I call "The Bloc".
The Bloc, roughly 40% of the electorate, doesn't represent a majority in the US but it is the country's largest unified group of voters. It has lost four of the last six presidential elections but has mostly remained in control of one or both houses of Congress, and many state legislatures, making it almost impossible for Democratic administrations to govern the country.
The Bloc wasn't created by the Great Recession of 2008 or by the attacks of 9/11 or the bursting of the Dotcom Bubble in 2000. It wasn't even created by the economic bogeyman of this election, Nafta - the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement.
Instead The Bloc was created by a series of events that, in an almost geological process, added sedimentary layer after layer of voters to the Republican Party.
A new layer is laid down whenever there is "another round of economic displacement", says Todd Gitlin, professor of sociology and journalism at Columbia University, the new voters being overwhelmingly whites who had previously been Democrats.
Gitlin traces its origins to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when many farmers and their families were driven from Oklahoma and Kansas by drought. Most ended up in southern California and their children were among the early supporters of the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society and the 1964 Republican presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater.
In the late 1960s many southern whites also joined The Bloc following the enactment of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, which finally delivered - 100 years after the end of slavery - on the promise of equality for African Americans.
Then in the late 70s and early 80s, as factories in the North-east and along the Great Lakes shut down, communities like Johnstown in western Pennsylvania were devastated. Steelworkers in the town, even with their strong trade unions, were thrown out of work. People were forced to leave the region in vast numbers to find jobs elsewhere. Those jobs are nowhere near as secure as the factory jobs that sustained generations and allowed stable communities to grow. It was a displacement every bit as wrenching as that of the 1930s.
"The Rust Belt is the Dust Bowl of our times," says Gitlin.
Others, for whom the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v Wade (which gave women abortion rights) became the single issue on which they vote, joined The Bloc as well.
But both of America's major parties are grand coalitions.
Over the last 50 years, while disaffected Democrats were making common cause with the traditionally wealthy Republicans, a new Democratic Party was taking shape as well.
Its make-up is diverse, its policies dedicated to using civil rights law to undo centuries of job discrimination against minorities and women through preferential hiring, as well as pushing for socially liberal legislation on sexuality.
An overwhelming majority of African-Americans, and significant majorities of Hispanics and Asians vote Democrat, while university-educated whites dominate the party and give it its worldview and voice.
Identity and gender politics are a regular feature of life and discussion on university campuses and in the mainstream news media. Much of the debate, from the Democratic side this year, has been about white male identity. The New York Times has run dozens of articles about "angry white men".
A recent article was titled Men Need Help. Is Hillary Clinton the Answer? It was written by the paper's recently appointed gender editor, Susan Chira. Interestingly, in the late 1960s and 70s, when The Bloc began its rapid growth, it had a full-time labour correspondent. It doesn't any more.
This difference in thinking about the world provides a glimpse into America's terrible division.
When Donald Trump, speaking in his unique way, attacks Nafta for taking away American jobs, The Bloc cheers. When he attacks Democrats and their preference for gender and identity politics with its "politically correct" speech codes, the men and women of The Bloc nod in agreement.
Most Democrats shake their heads in disbelief and simply can't understand how anyone could vote for the Republican candidate.
One Clinton supporter I met while making my radio documentary, The Unswayables, did understand. Bonnie Cordova, a retired schoolteacher, and I were both watching the second presidential debate at the Bohemian Beer Garden in the New York borough of Queens. I asked her afterwards if she understood why people might vote for Trump.
She did. "I taught in inner city schools for 30 years," Cordova explained. "I was passed over a few times for promotion for a really good job because I wasn't a minority and I was working at a school where the kids got free dental and optical treatment because they were immigrant children and I was having trouble affording it for my kids." She acknowledged that made her resentful. "That's a flame that can be fanned into hatred. You have to rise above it."
Not everyone can rise above it.
And so American society and government is split. Dangerously.
But The Bloc isn't permanently moored to the Republican Party.
The Democrats would find governing easier if they brought some of its voters back. The best way to do that is directly related to employment. Economic displacement created The Bloc. Stable employment might whittle it away.
But Todd Gitlin, who has been a leader of left-liberal political movements in the US since the 1960s, doesn't hold out hope of this happening soon.
"What's the social democratic vision? There are fragmented visions, there are sectoral visions, little visions. There are no passionate centres. There is no luminous idea of what the world would look like if it were better," he says.
"People don't have a conception of the work of being a citizen and actually governing yourselves as a people. It's not just a problem on the right. It's that we don't have on the left a sustainable idea about political work."
The Bloc has been formed over a period of at least half a century. It will take more than one presidential election - dominated by the most unpresidential candidate in American history - to chip away at it.
It's not clear who on the Democratic side has the patience to give up the years that will be necessary to persuade these voters if not back to the Democratic fold at least to a position where compromise - and functioning government - is possible.
Rize of American Nazi's
Over a Third of Trump Supporters Follow White Nationalists on Twitter, Research Finds
Would Trump stand a chance without the support of hate groups?
By Sammy Nickalls
In a Politico article about white nationalists supporting Donald Trump published earlier this week, Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller denied the campaign's connection with hate groups, claiming that they've "rejected and rebuked" such groups, "have never intentionally engaged" with them, and "don't want votes from people who think this way." However, if Trump didn't get votes from white nationalists, he wouldn't stand a chance—at least, if you look at the numbers.
Social media analytics firm Demographics Pro analyzed 10,000 Trump supporters and 10,000 Hillary Clinton supporters active on Twitter. Then, the firm matched the account with 10 white-nationalist Twitter accounts, including David Duke and Jason Bergkamp.
The results were disturbing, to say the least. A whopping 3,549—considerably over one-third—of the Trump supporters followed one or more of the white nationalists (as illustrated by the chart above). In comparison, only 16 Hillary supporters followed any of the white-nationalist accounts.
Of course, it's possible for someone to follow white nationalist accounts without actually supporting their views, but the stark difference between the numbers is telling.
These results aren't considerably surprising considering the trajectory of Trump's campaign over the past year. Take, for example, the Anti-Defamation league officially recognizing Pepe the Frog as a hate symbol after it was hijacked by alt-right, Trump-supporting white nationalists.
Basket of deplorables, indeed.
Would Trump stand a chance without the support of hate groups?
By Sammy Nickalls
In a Politico article about white nationalists supporting Donald Trump published earlier this week, Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller denied the campaign's connection with hate groups, claiming that they've "rejected and rebuked" such groups, "have never intentionally engaged" with them, and "don't want votes from people who think this way." However, if Trump didn't get votes from white nationalists, he wouldn't stand a chance—at least, if you look at the numbers.
Social media analytics firm Demographics Pro analyzed 10,000 Trump supporters and 10,000 Hillary Clinton supporters active on Twitter. Then, the firm matched the account with 10 white-nationalist Twitter accounts, including David Duke and Jason Bergkamp.
The results were disturbing, to say the least. A whopping 3,549—considerably over one-third—of the Trump supporters followed one or more of the white nationalists (as illustrated by the chart above). In comparison, only 16 Hillary supporters followed any of the white-nationalist accounts.
Of course, it's possible for someone to follow white nationalist accounts without actually supporting their views, but the stark difference between the numbers is telling.
These results aren't considerably surprising considering the trajectory of Trump's campaign over the past year. Take, for example, the Anti-Defamation league officially recognizing Pepe the Frog as a hate symbol after it was hijacked by alt-right, Trump-supporting white nationalists.
Basket of deplorables, indeed.
Let’s Just Talk About Ferret Head...
“Let’s Just Talk About Donald Trump Again”
Down-Ballot Democrats are running unimaginative one-note campaigns. Are they working?
By Jim Newell
Sen. Marco Rubio dropped the oppo near the end of Monday’s Florida Senate debate with Rep. Patrick Murphy, the Democratic opponent he can’t fully shake off. All night Murphy had been trying to tie Rubio to Donald Trump. Over and over he would come back to the same line: that he couldn’t believe, could not believe, that Rubio would continue to support a man who had bragged about groping women.
This time, Rubio shot back: “You’re the one that posted a picture four years ago on Facebook of you groping a woman.” He was referring to this photo, where the youthful Murphy’s cupped hand is positioned conspicuously near a woman’s breast. “That’s inappropriate behavior.”
The Murphy campaign would say after the debate that it was a photo of Murphy with his then-girlfriend. But at the time Rubio mentioned it, Murphy seemed to have been wrong-footed. He awkwardly changed the subject. “Let’s just talk about Donald Trump again,” he said.
It was inartful, but “Let’s just talk about Donald Trump again” neatly summarizes the strategy of the Democratic candidates in each of the four Senate debates—Pennsylvania, Nevada, Florida, and Ohio—I had the misfortune of watching recently. The Democrats in each had their moments, but the self-limiting strategy didn’t move the needle against their well-prepared opponents. The debates were a reminder, at least in the cases of Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio, of the strength of Republicans’ 2010 recruits and why polls in these states show far more split-ticket voting than historical trends suggest should exist.
Even if the Democratic candidates were inconsistent and couldn’t produce any devastating moments—as New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan did in her debate against Sen. Kelly Ayotte—I’m not sure they’d consider the debates “losses.” As with Tim Kaine’s performance against Mike Pence in the vice presidential debate, the Democratic candidates seemed content to get edged out in round after round so long as they were able at some point to reference Donald Trump. This is the blessing and the curse of running against Trump in a down-ballot race: He’s a walking catastrophe who pulls your Republican rival into striking distance; he also narrows your vocal range and condemns you to unimaginative, cookie-cutter, one-note campaign strategies.
Katie McGinty had some painful moments in her debate against Sen. Pat Toomey, the incumbent with whom she’s locked in a dead heat, perhaps because she was focused so squarely on cornering him on Trump. You can’t really blame her. Pat Toomey is in quite the corner with Trump, and his strategy for the final weeks of the campaign seems to be to stay in the corner, take his beatings, and hope to survive. Pennsylvania is a lean-blue state whose interior Republicans—working class, small town—are very much Trump Republicans. Toomey negotiates this by not negotiating it: He still hasn’t taken a position on Trump. In the debate’s opening segment, after repeated prodding from the moderators and McGinty, Toomey wouldn’t budge, saying it was a difficult choice for him and he might make up his mind later. It was a fine segment for McGinty.
But after those 10 minutes passed, she had 50 more minutes to fill. She had a difficult time disproving attacks on her record in public office and a real foot-in-mouth moment during a discussion about police endorsements. When Toomey said that he had picked up every major police union or association endorsement in the state, McGinty responded that she had police endorsements, too. He asked her to name one she had received. She couldn’t. She also couldn’t explain specifically how she wanted to fix the Affordable Care Act beyond working to lower the cost of prescription drugs.
Trump and Rep. Joe Heck poll similarly in Nevada, and the state’s a toss-up in their respective presidential and Senate races. Heck risked base disenchantment by cutting ties with Trump following the release of the Access Hollywood tape—just days before his one and only debate with Democratic candidate Catherine Cortez Masto, who was preparing to eat his face off over that support.
Cortez Masto ate his face off over his prior support for Trump anyway in the debate held on Friday. Following President Obama’s playbook, she asked Heck how he could have supported Trump up to that point. “It is astonishing to me that for eight months, nine months, [Heck] was Donald Trump’s biggest supporter, when Donald Trump was attacking POWs, attacking Gold Star families,” she said early in the debate. “When Donald Trump was making fun of the disabled, attacking Mexicans, calling them rapists and criminals, and calling women names and denigrating women—which we know why he was, because he thinks he can sexually assault women—Congressman Heck had high hopes Donald Trump would be president.”
Once that segment was out of the way, Heck—whether one agrees with his policy preferences or not—was just more fluent on federal issues. This was a gap Heck exploited well during a later section of the debate when the candidates were allowed to pose questions to each other. “What, if anything, should the United States do to combat China’s territorial assertion in the South China Sea especially in light of the recent Hague decision?” Heck asked. Cortez Masto had no answer to this question, beyond pointing out that we needed a steady, non-Trump commander in chief to “hold China accountable.” Fair enough. It still would have been nice to hear a United States Senate candidate explain her thoughts on the territorial dispute in the South China Sea.
And yet I have little doubt that redirecting a question about existing foreign policy disputes with China into an answer about how Donald Trump is bad is the high-percentage play. That’s what made these debates, and makes these campaigns, so drab and flavorless.
For Democrats running in competitive races for federal office, redirecting any question into a criticism of Donald Trump is probably the high-percentage play. It’s absolutely embarrassing for the Republican Party that Donald Trump is its presidential nominee. He’s the reason Democrats are slight favorites to take back the Senate; he’s the reason they have even the slightest chance to take back the House. Everyone knows him, knows he’s a Republican, and knows he’s terrible. There’s more political hay to be made in Democrats pointing and gawking at him than in straightforwardly addressing any given question at hand.
That’s where Democrats are trapped in these races: adhering to the same, safe strategy of saying Trump’s name a million times, which keeps them close to their rivals but suffocates the strategies elsewhere that might reveal them as inspiring candidates in their own right, running their own races.
Unless the Republican candidates really do have unalloyed support for Trump, too, there’s a ceiling to what running against Trump earns Democrats. In Monday’s Ohio debate, poor, wholly uncompetitive Ted Strickland’s every other answer was about Donald Trump, and Sen. Rob Portman got into the habit of responding that Ted Strickland’s running against him, not Donald Trump.
It’s a stock line … but he’s not wrong. Pat Toomey, Rob Portman, Joe Heck, and Marco Rubio aren’t lying when they say they’re distinct entities from Donald Trump. They’ve chastised him when necessary and stray from plenty of his policies. Democrats are trying to force these Republicans down to Trump’s polling levels, and these Republicans are holding their own. Democrats’ next move is: Let’s just talk about Donald Trump again. And again. And again.
Down-Ballot Democrats are running unimaginative one-note campaigns. Are they working?
By Jim Newell
Sen. Marco Rubio dropped the oppo near the end of Monday’s Florida Senate debate with Rep. Patrick Murphy, the Democratic opponent he can’t fully shake off. All night Murphy had been trying to tie Rubio to Donald Trump. Over and over he would come back to the same line: that he couldn’t believe, could not believe, that Rubio would continue to support a man who had bragged about groping women.
This time, Rubio shot back: “You’re the one that posted a picture four years ago on Facebook of you groping a woman.” He was referring to this photo, where the youthful Murphy’s cupped hand is positioned conspicuously near a woman’s breast. “That’s inappropriate behavior.”
The Murphy campaign would say after the debate that it was a photo of Murphy with his then-girlfriend. But at the time Rubio mentioned it, Murphy seemed to have been wrong-footed. He awkwardly changed the subject. “Let’s just talk about Donald Trump again,” he said.
It was inartful, but “Let’s just talk about Donald Trump again” neatly summarizes the strategy of the Democratic candidates in each of the four Senate debates—Pennsylvania, Nevada, Florida, and Ohio—I had the misfortune of watching recently. The Democrats in each had their moments, but the self-limiting strategy didn’t move the needle against their well-prepared opponents. The debates were a reminder, at least in the cases of Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio, of the strength of Republicans’ 2010 recruits and why polls in these states show far more split-ticket voting than historical trends suggest should exist.
Even if the Democratic candidates were inconsistent and couldn’t produce any devastating moments—as New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan did in her debate against Sen. Kelly Ayotte—I’m not sure they’d consider the debates “losses.” As with Tim Kaine’s performance against Mike Pence in the vice presidential debate, the Democratic candidates seemed content to get edged out in round after round so long as they were able at some point to reference Donald Trump. This is the blessing and the curse of running against Trump in a down-ballot race: He’s a walking catastrophe who pulls your Republican rival into striking distance; he also narrows your vocal range and condemns you to unimaginative, cookie-cutter, one-note campaign strategies.
Katie McGinty had some painful moments in her debate against Sen. Pat Toomey, the incumbent with whom she’s locked in a dead heat, perhaps because she was focused so squarely on cornering him on Trump. You can’t really blame her. Pat Toomey is in quite the corner with Trump, and his strategy for the final weeks of the campaign seems to be to stay in the corner, take his beatings, and hope to survive. Pennsylvania is a lean-blue state whose interior Republicans—working class, small town—are very much Trump Republicans. Toomey negotiates this by not negotiating it: He still hasn’t taken a position on Trump. In the debate’s opening segment, after repeated prodding from the moderators and McGinty, Toomey wouldn’t budge, saying it was a difficult choice for him and he might make up his mind later. It was a fine segment for McGinty.
But after those 10 minutes passed, she had 50 more minutes to fill. She had a difficult time disproving attacks on her record in public office and a real foot-in-mouth moment during a discussion about police endorsements. When Toomey said that he had picked up every major police union or association endorsement in the state, McGinty responded that she had police endorsements, too. He asked her to name one she had received. She couldn’t. She also couldn’t explain specifically how she wanted to fix the Affordable Care Act beyond working to lower the cost of prescription drugs.
Trump and Rep. Joe Heck poll similarly in Nevada, and the state’s a toss-up in their respective presidential and Senate races. Heck risked base disenchantment by cutting ties with Trump following the release of the Access Hollywood tape—just days before his one and only debate with Democratic candidate Catherine Cortez Masto, who was preparing to eat his face off over that support.
Cortez Masto ate his face off over his prior support for Trump anyway in the debate held on Friday. Following President Obama’s playbook, she asked Heck how he could have supported Trump up to that point. “It is astonishing to me that for eight months, nine months, [Heck] was Donald Trump’s biggest supporter, when Donald Trump was attacking POWs, attacking Gold Star families,” she said early in the debate. “When Donald Trump was making fun of the disabled, attacking Mexicans, calling them rapists and criminals, and calling women names and denigrating women—which we know why he was, because he thinks he can sexually assault women—Congressman Heck had high hopes Donald Trump would be president.”
Once that segment was out of the way, Heck—whether one agrees with his policy preferences or not—was just more fluent on federal issues. This was a gap Heck exploited well during a later section of the debate when the candidates were allowed to pose questions to each other. “What, if anything, should the United States do to combat China’s territorial assertion in the South China Sea especially in light of the recent Hague decision?” Heck asked. Cortez Masto had no answer to this question, beyond pointing out that we needed a steady, non-Trump commander in chief to “hold China accountable.” Fair enough. It still would have been nice to hear a United States Senate candidate explain her thoughts on the territorial dispute in the South China Sea.
And yet I have little doubt that redirecting a question about existing foreign policy disputes with China into an answer about how Donald Trump is bad is the high-percentage play. That’s what made these debates, and makes these campaigns, so drab and flavorless.
For Democrats running in competitive races for federal office, redirecting any question into a criticism of Donald Trump is probably the high-percentage play. It’s absolutely embarrassing for the Republican Party that Donald Trump is its presidential nominee. He’s the reason Democrats are slight favorites to take back the Senate; he’s the reason they have even the slightest chance to take back the House. Everyone knows him, knows he’s a Republican, and knows he’s terrible. There’s more political hay to be made in Democrats pointing and gawking at him than in straightforwardly addressing any given question at hand.
That’s where Democrats are trapped in these races: adhering to the same, safe strategy of saying Trump’s name a million times, which keeps them close to their rivals but suffocates the strategies elsewhere that might reveal them as inspiring candidates in their own right, running their own races.
Unless the Republican candidates really do have unalloyed support for Trump, too, there’s a ceiling to what running against Trump earns Democrats. In Monday’s Ohio debate, poor, wholly uncompetitive Ted Strickland’s every other answer was about Donald Trump, and Sen. Rob Portman got into the habit of responding that Ted Strickland’s running against him, not Donald Trump.
It’s a stock line … but he’s not wrong. Pat Toomey, Rob Portman, Joe Heck, and Marco Rubio aren’t lying when they say they’re distinct entities from Donald Trump. They’ve chastised him when necessary and stray from plenty of his policies. Democrats are trying to force these Republicans down to Trump’s polling levels, and these Republicans are holding their own. Democrats’ next move is: Let’s just talk about Donald Trump again. And again. And again.
Hatred Syndrome
What’s Behind the Hillary Hatred Syndrome?
The Democratic contender has been disrespected like no other presidential nominee in history. Is in an accident that the rest of them were male?
By Todd Gitlin
While making a case that harsh mainstream media have slimed Hillary Clinton and damaged her reputation — a case with which I largely agree — my colleague Neal Gabler attributes to me the belief that “Clinton’s popularity is a casualty of misogyny.” I’m grateful to him for affording me the opportunity to expand upon the kind of misogyny I mean. And I’m grateful to FBI director James Comey and several Republican members of Congress for bolstering my case with several pointed illustrations of that misogyny.
In the piece I wrote on this subject three weeks ago, I did argue that misogyny “has to be a big hunk” of the explanation for the venomous hatred directed at her — the “Hang the Bitch” mentality.
It cannot be denied, as Gabler points out, that Hillary Rodham Clinton has always been a woman — even as her popularity has fluctuated and, much of the time, gone high. He is right to point out that Hillary Clinton’s ratings “were very high when she was secretary of state,” rising to 60 percent. Of course, that’s not so unusual for secretaries of state. Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice did just as well. Clinton did rank higher than John Kerry after he replaced her, but for that matter, Colin Powell’s ratings were considerably higher — 83 percent and above.
What I conclude from the above is that Americans tend to like their secretaries of state. This might be because they don’t know much about what their secretaries of state are up to. But now we are back to square one, trying to understand the spike in Hillary-hatred.
For Clinton, as Gabler points out, was a woman in March 2015, when Gallup found 50 percent of the country viewing her favorably and only 39 percent unfavorably, as she remained a woman in July 2015, when her favorables descended below her unfavorables, there to remain through September 2016. How to explain the precipitous decline in her reputation? Gabler makes a strong case that the explanation is media obsession with her notorious emails:
[T]he fixation on emails, which had long been an addiction among Republicans and the right-wing media, suddenly became an addiction in the mainstream media as well. According to a Lexis-Nexis search, The New York Times, to cite one example, had seven stories that month with “Clinton” and “emails” in the headline. More important, most news sources reported erroneously that Clinton was the subject of a criminal investigation by the FBI.
And consider too the flood of abuse directed by the Republicans at Hillary Clinton over the Benghazi deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three colleagues in 2012. Raked over the coals by Republican inquisitors in Congress who could never make a case that she had acted wrongly in Libya — and who, for that matter, never acknowledged that they had cut security funds for American embassies — Clinton had to face long-drawn-out accusations of vastly greater malfeasance than when the 1983 bombing of the American Marine barracks in Beirut resulted in the killing of 241 American servicemen and women. After that massacre, conducted on Ronald Reagan’s watch, a single Democratic House subcommittee conducted a six-week-long investigation. After the killings of the four Americans in Benghazi, the Republican-led House conducted seven investigations, one of which lasted three years; the Republican-led Senate conducted another one.
On the face of it, then, the media obsession damaged her reputation, but the obsessives were not original. They were cringing before the Republicans’ tar-and-feather job. They bent over backward to show they were not prisoners of coastal cosmopolitanism. Media organizations followed the lead of Republicans whose bitter partisanship was, and remains, unparalleled. “Such a nasty woman” — this has been the premise of the Republican inquisitors and the email-obsessed media for months before Donald Trump uttered those words aloud.
Because Hillary Clinton is no longer a former secretary of state. She is a former secretary of state running for president. Americans have gotten used to female secretaries of state. To use the metaphor du jour, the glass ceiling that used to hang over the State Department was smashed to smithereens. But a secretary of state is not a president.
A Democrat running for president is going to be smeared by the Republicans. This goes without saying. But a Democratic woman running for president gets extra layers of smear, though the smear required new material to work with. Clinton could still be viewed favorably when she ran for the presidential nomination in 2007-08 — consistent, overall, with how she was viewed during the more than two decades between 1992 and 2014. Benghazi and emails were not yet in the picture. Now, should Clinton get to the White House, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) will be ready: He’s sharpening his pencils and knives, planning “years” of hearings on Clinton depredations.
Meanwhile Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is vowing to block any Clinton nominee to the Supreme Court (perhaps hoping that a Republican appointee will be the last standing?) and at the FBI, Comey cryptically announced the reopening of the agency’s investigation into — yes, Clinton’s emails — just in time to revive Republican hopes and send the stock market into a swoon over the prospect of a President Trump. Keep in mind that Justice Department guidelines caution against such election-eve releases. “Law enforcement officers and prosecutors may never select the timing of investigative steps or criminal charges for the purpose of affecting any election,” the attorney general cautioned in a 2012 memo.
So much for the traditional political niceties. I suppose it’s remotely possible that a male potential president would be treated this way — but none has been. Ever.
This is where Gabler’s j’accuse is most apropos. Thrown off balance by their genuflections before the phony god of false equivalency, journalists had to strain to prove that they were not in the Clinton tank. Drowning themselves and their audiences in trivialities, it became a point of weird professional pride to batter away at this woman who, when she wasn’t too wonkish, was laughing too hard; if she wasn’t smiling too much, she was smiling too little — one way or the other always refusing to know her place.
Understandably transfixed by the spectacle of the vicious, bigoted demagogue sniffing around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, journalists missed another story: the reaction to the immense, unprecedented and culture-disrupting fact that a woman is poised to become president of the United States.
A woman! Imagine! A woman stands at the threshold of the men’s room!! And the protectors of that room are throwing up every bit of available debris to derail her.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the kind of misogyny I mean. The kind the mainstream media is too blind or too timorous to call out.
The Democratic contender has been disrespected like no other presidential nominee in history. Is in an accident that the rest of them were male?
By Todd Gitlin
While making a case that harsh mainstream media have slimed Hillary Clinton and damaged her reputation — a case with which I largely agree — my colleague Neal Gabler attributes to me the belief that “Clinton’s popularity is a casualty of misogyny.” I’m grateful to him for affording me the opportunity to expand upon the kind of misogyny I mean. And I’m grateful to FBI director James Comey and several Republican members of Congress for bolstering my case with several pointed illustrations of that misogyny.
In the piece I wrote on this subject three weeks ago, I did argue that misogyny “has to be a big hunk” of the explanation for the venomous hatred directed at her — the “Hang the Bitch” mentality.
It cannot be denied, as Gabler points out, that Hillary Rodham Clinton has always been a woman — even as her popularity has fluctuated and, much of the time, gone high. He is right to point out that Hillary Clinton’s ratings “were very high when she was secretary of state,” rising to 60 percent. Of course, that’s not so unusual for secretaries of state. Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice did just as well. Clinton did rank higher than John Kerry after he replaced her, but for that matter, Colin Powell’s ratings were considerably higher — 83 percent and above.
What I conclude from the above is that Americans tend to like their secretaries of state. This might be because they don’t know much about what their secretaries of state are up to. But now we are back to square one, trying to understand the spike in Hillary-hatred.
For Clinton, as Gabler points out, was a woman in March 2015, when Gallup found 50 percent of the country viewing her favorably and only 39 percent unfavorably, as she remained a woman in July 2015, when her favorables descended below her unfavorables, there to remain through September 2016. How to explain the precipitous decline in her reputation? Gabler makes a strong case that the explanation is media obsession with her notorious emails:
[T]he fixation on emails, which had long been an addiction among Republicans and the right-wing media, suddenly became an addiction in the mainstream media as well. According to a Lexis-Nexis search, The New York Times, to cite one example, had seven stories that month with “Clinton” and “emails” in the headline. More important, most news sources reported erroneously that Clinton was the subject of a criminal investigation by the FBI.
And consider too the flood of abuse directed by the Republicans at Hillary Clinton over the Benghazi deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three colleagues in 2012. Raked over the coals by Republican inquisitors in Congress who could never make a case that she had acted wrongly in Libya — and who, for that matter, never acknowledged that they had cut security funds for American embassies — Clinton had to face long-drawn-out accusations of vastly greater malfeasance than when the 1983 bombing of the American Marine barracks in Beirut resulted in the killing of 241 American servicemen and women. After that massacre, conducted on Ronald Reagan’s watch, a single Democratic House subcommittee conducted a six-week-long investigation. After the killings of the four Americans in Benghazi, the Republican-led House conducted seven investigations, one of which lasted three years; the Republican-led Senate conducted another one.
On the face of it, then, the media obsession damaged her reputation, but the obsessives were not original. They were cringing before the Republicans’ tar-and-feather job. They bent over backward to show they were not prisoners of coastal cosmopolitanism. Media organizations followed the lead of Republicans whose bitter partisanship was, and remains, unparalleled. “Such a nasty woman” — this has been the premise of the Republican inquisitors and the email-obsessed media for months before Donald Trump uttered those words aloud.
Because Hillary Clinton is no longer a former secretary of state. She is a former secretary of state running for president. Americans have gotten used to female secretaries of state. To use the metaphor du jour, the glass ceiling that used to hang over the State Department was smashed to smithereens. But a secretary of state is not a president.
A Democrat running for president is going to be smeared by the Republicans. This goes without saying. But a Democratic woman running for president gets extra layers of smear, though the smear required new material to work with. Clinton could still be viewed favorably when she ran for the presidential nomination in 2007-08 — consistent, overall, with how she was viewed during the more than two decades between 1992 and 2014. Benghazi and emails were not yet in the picture. Now, should Clinton get to the White House, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) will be ready: He’s sharpening his pencils and knives, planning “years” of hearings on Clinton depredations.
Meanwhile Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is vowing to block any Clinton nominee to the Supreme Court (perhaps hoping that a Republican appointee will be the last standing?) and at the FBI, Comey cryptically announced the reopening of the agency’s investigation into — yes, Clinton’s emails — just in time to revive Republican hopes and send the stock market into a swoon over the prospect of a President Trump. Keep in mind that Justice Department guidelines caution against such election-eve releases. “Law enforcement officers and prosecutors may never select the timing of investigative steps or criminal charges for the purpose of affecting any election,” the attorney general cautioned in a 2012 memo.
So much for the traditional political niceties. I suppose it’s remotely possible that a male potential president would be treated this way — but none has been. Ever.
This is where Gabler’s j’accuse is most apropos. Thrown off balance by their genuflections before the phony god of false equivalency, journalists had to strain to prove that they were not in the Clinton tank. Drowning themselves and their audiences in trivialities, it became a point of weird professional pride to batter away at this woman who, when she wasn’t too wonkish, was laughing too hard; if she wasn’t smiling too much, she was smiling too little — one way or the other always refusing to know her place.
Understandably transfixed by the spectacle of the vicious, bigoted demagogue sniffing around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, journalists missed another story: the reaction to the immense, unprecedented and culture-disrupting fact that a woman is poised to become president of the United States.
A woman! Imagine! A woman stands at the threshold of the men’s room!! And the protectors of that room are throwing up every bit of available debris to derail her.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the kind of misogyny I mean. The kind the mainstream media is too blind or too timorous to call out.
Brainstorm Shouldn’t Die
Why Bernie Sanders’ Brainstorm Shouldn’t Die
While running for office, Sanders backed the idea of using the US Postal Service as an alternative to pay lenders and other expensive fringe financial services.
By Mary Kane
In a presidential campaign dominated by controversies over groping women, leaked emails, rigged voting and border walls, a promising idea to help the most vulnerable Americans that began to gain traction during the primaries has fallen by the wayside.
Last fall, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) proposed using the US Postal Service to offer basic banking services in low-income communities. Post offices, said the then-candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, could become an alternative for millions of consumers who regularly use payday lenders, check cashing stores and other expensive fringe financial services.
The post office proposal has met the same fate as other poverty-related issues in this contest: It’s not on the agenda.
Sanders touted the idea in a high-profile New York speech earlier this year, during his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), a longtime proponent of postal banking, served as a vocal supporter. By the summer, the idea had gained enough prominence that Democrats included it in their official party platform.
“It really was a huge, huge win, and I don’t think a lot of people even realized it,” said Mehrsa Baradaran, a University of Georgia law professor and author of How The Other Half Banks. “There have been people who were working on this for some time, but certainly Bernie brought the nation on board.”
Since then, however, the post office proposal has met the same fate as other poverty-related issues in this contest: It’s not on the agenda.
As The New York Times pointed out, both candidates consistently avoid talking about poverty. Postal banking is no exception. “There’s nothing for either candidate to gain politically by touching it,” said Adam Levitin, a Georgetown University law professor and an expert on financial regulation. “No one’s going to vote for someone because they want the post office to offer banking. And the unbanked aren’t exactly a group with a strong lobby.”
Indeed, the only real mention of the post office so far in this campaign has been of the one Donald Trump turned into the site of his latest luxury hotel in downtown Washington.
It doesn’t mean the post office idea is going away for good. But its declining profile does show the difficulty of generating interest in exploring solutions to the financial problems that plague the lowest-income Americans, who often get chased away from banks by high overdraft fees and turn to sometimes exploitative products outside the mainstream. The post office idea, some poverty experts said, highlighted how little understood the concerns of underbanked Americans are, and the lack of effective solutions for them. Now, with the post office proposal off the political radar, at least in the near term, that’s unlikely to change — another casualty of the 2016 campaign.
“We don’t talk about any policy prescriptions for what we should do for people at the bottom, or even what those people look like,” said Gregory Fairchild, a University of Virginia Darden School of Business professor who researches financial inclusion and underserved markets.
“We don’t really know how they live their lives. We know they spend lots of time in line, but we don’t know how they manage their bills and their money. We don’t even think about how they make financial transactions.”
While agreeing that the problems of unbanked Americans often go unaddressed, others still see an upside remaining from the post office proposal. Sanders, they said, tapped into some of the same money worries middle-class consumers have, potentially creating more incentive to focus on safe financial services for everyone.
“Talking about the unbanked and the underbanked really ties into the conversation about economic insecurity, which stretches up and down the income ladder,” said Justin King, policy director of the Asset Building Program at New America. “The lack of savings, lack of access to helpful and productive financial products and services once were fringe issues. They’ve gotten a lot more attention as a mainstream middle-class issue. It’s starting to percolate in the policy conversation.”
The scandal at Wells Fargo, where employees opened credit card and bank accounts for customers without their permission, also has added to a push by some advocates for the government to more aggressively back financial products and protections. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton immediately called for a larger government watchdog role after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau slapped Wells with a record $185 million fine.
“Think of what came out of the Great Depression,” said Joe Valenti, Director of Consumer Finance at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. “There was a massive fear of people putting money in banks. So the government came out with deposit insurance and other ideas that that sought to boost public confidence. There’s a similar movement going on now. There’s interest in anything we can do to build public confidence in banks, and to help people manage their money safely and cheaply.”
That interest, however, hasn’t translated into a public debate over the unbanked. And beyond that, postal banking isn’t supported by everyone. Republicans are unlikely to approve any government expansion. Even advocates have practical concerns, such as the Postal Service’s troubled bottom line and poor customer service reputation. Figuring out how, exactly, post offices will handle deposits, short-term loans or collecting overdue payments hasn’t been worked out. Backers point to the Postal Service’s role from 1911 to 1967 in providing basic accounts for consumers as a basis for returning to it. But consumer financial needs now also involve mobile and digital services, raising questions about whether refitting postal buildings would be worth the effort.
In Arlington, Virginia, recently, dental assistant Frew Beku was dashing inside a storefront to buy a prepaid phone card on her way home from work. She said she buys money orders at the post office, and she wouldn’t mind going there for some basic banking services, too. “If I could get a lot done all at once, it would be convenient,” she said. But then again, parking at her local post office is always a hassle, and she got hit with ticket once, so she’s not entirely sold on it.
Beku belongs to the 24 million underbanked households in America, consumers who have bank accounts but also rely on payday lenders or other alternative providers. Their numbers haven’t budged in recent years, but a new survey by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation showed an improvement among in the number of Americans with bank accounts. Unbanked households in 2015 totaled 7 percent of all households, down from 7.7 percent in 2013.
But as UVA’s Fairchild and others pointed out, the numbers can’t measure how long consumers will keep these accounts, or the quality of the bank products sold to them. And no one has a good answer yet to what safe and inexpensive financial services are available beyond the payday lenders and check cashers.
Not long ago, Pew Charitable Trusts looked more closely at these questions, holding focus groups with unbanked and underbanked consumers. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Pew found the unbanked work hard to carefully budget; one woman managed her money using a series of Ziploc bags. Others tried, without success, to track their debit card spending to the penny to avoid overdraft fees.
It was a small glimpse into the lives of the unbanked. Sanders provided another by pushing postal banking. In the final stretch of this campaign, that window seems to be shut.
While running for office, Sanders backed the idea of using the US Postal Service as an alternative to pay lenders and other expensive fringe financial services.
By Mary Kane
In a presidential campaign dominated by controversies over groping women, leaked emails, rigged voting and border walls, a promising idea to help the most vulnerable Americans that began to gain traction during the primaries has fallen by the wayside.
Last fall, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) proposed using the US Postal Service to offer basic banking services in low-income communities. Post offices, said the then-candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, could become an alternative for millions of consumers who regularly use payday lenders, check cashing stores and other expensive fringe financial services.
The post office proposal has met the same fate as other poverty-related issues in this contest: It’s not on the agenda.
Sanders touted the idea in a high-profile New York speech earlier this year, during his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), a longtime proponent of postal banking, served as a vocal supporter. By the summer, the idea had gained enough prominence that Democrats included it in their official party platform.
“It really was a huge, huge win, and I don’t think a lot of people even realized it,” said Mehrsa Baradaran, a University of Georgia law professor and author of How The Other Half Banks. “There have been people who were working on this for some time, but certainly Bernie brought the nation on board.”
Since then, however, the post office proposal has met the same fate as other poverty-related issues in this contest: It’s not on the agenda.
As The New York Times pointed out, both candidates consistently avoid talking about poverty. Postal banking is no exception. “There’s nothing for either candidate to gain politically by touching it,” said Adam Levitin, a Georgetown University law professor and an expert on financial regulation. “No one’s going to vote for someone because they want the post office to offer banking. And the unbanked aren’t exactly a group with a strong lobby.”
Indeed, the only real mention of the post office so far in this campaign has been of the one Donald Trump turned into the site of his latest luxury hotel in downtown Washington.
It doesn’t mean the post office idea is going away for good. But its declining profile does show the difficulty of generating interest in exploring solutions to the financial problems that plague the lowest-income Americans, who often get chased away from banks by high overdraft fees and turn to sometimes exploitative products outside the mainstream. The post office idea, some poverty experts said, highlighted how little understood the concerns of underbanked Americans are, and the lack of effective solutions for them. Now, with the post office proposal off the political radar, at least in the near term, that’s unlikely to change — another casualty of the 2016 campaign.
“We don’t talk about any policy prescriptions for what we should do for people at the bottom, or even what those people look like,” said Gregory Fairchild, a University of Virginia Darden School of Business professor who researches financial inclusion and underserved markets.
“We don’t really know how they live their lives. We know they spend lots of time in line, but we don’t know how they manage their bills and their money. We don’t even think about how they make financial transactions.”
While agreeing that the problems of unbanked Americans often go unaddressed, others still see an upside remaining from the post office proposal. Sanders, they said, tapped into some of the same money worries middle-class consumers have, potentially creating more incentive to focus on safe financial services for everyone.
“Talking about the unbanked and the underbanked really ties into the conversation about economic insecurity, which stretches up and down the income ladder,” said Justin King, policy director of the Asset Building Program at New America. “The lack of savings, lack of access to helpful and productive financial products and services once were fringe issues. They’ve gotten a lot more attention as a mainstream middle-class issue. It’s starting to percolate in the policy conversation.”
The scandal at Wells Fargo, where employees opened credit card and bank accounts for customers without their permission, also has added to a push by some advocates for the government to more aggressively back financial products and protections. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton immediately called for a larger government watchdog role after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau slapped Wells with a record $185 million fine.
“Think of what came out of the Great Depression,” said Joe Valenti, Director of Consumer Finance at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. “There was a massive fear of people putting money in banks. So the government came out with deposit insurance and other ideas that that sought to boost public confidence. There’s a similar movement going on now. There’s interest in anything we can do to build public confidence in banks, and to help people manage their money safely and cheaply.”
That interest, however, hasn’t translated into a public debate over the unbanked. And beyond that, postal banking isn’t supported by everyone. Republicans are unlikely to approve any government expansion. Even advocates have practical concerns, such as the Postal Service’s troubled bottom line and poor customer service reputation. Figuring out how, exactly, post offices will handle deposits, short-term loans or collecting overdue payments hasn’t been worked out. Backers point to the Postal Service’s role from 1911 to 1967 in providing basic accounts for consumers as a basis for returning to it. But consumer financial needs now also involve mobile and digital services, raising questions about whether refitting postal buildings would be worth the effort.
In Arlington, Virginia, recently, dental assistant Frew Beku was dashing inside a storefront to buy a prepaid phone card on her way home from work. She said she buys money orders at the post office, and she wouldn’t mind going there for some basic banking services, too. “If I could get a lot done all at once, it would be convenient,” she said. But then again, parking at her local post office is always a hassle, and she got hit with ticket once, so she’s not entirely sold on it.
Beku belongs to the 24 million underbanked households in America, consumers who have bank accounts but also rely on payday lenders or other alternative providers. Their numbers haven’t budged in recent years, but a new survey by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation showed an improvement among in the number of Americans with bank accounts. Unbanked households in 2015 totaled 7 percent of all households, down from 7.7 percent in 2013.
But as UVA’s Fairchild and others pointed out, the numbers can’t measure how long consumers will keep these accounts, or the quality of the bank products sold to them. And no one has a good answer yet to what safe and inexpensive financial services are available beyond the payday lenders and check cashers.
Not long ago, Pew Charitable Trusts looked more closely at these questions, holding focus groups with unbanked and underbanked consumers. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Pew found the unbanked work hard to carefully budget; one woman managed her money using a series of Ziploc bags. Others tried, without success, to track their debit card spending to the penny to avoid overdraft fees.
It was a small glimpse into the lives of the unbanked. Sanders provided another by pushing postal banking. In the final stretch of this campaign, that window seems to be shut.
Tax Conspicuous Consumption
Why We Should Tax Conspicuous Consumption
Economist Robert H. Frank says the rich would be better off — and so would the rest of us.
By Kathy Kiely
Economist Robert Frank is arguably the country’s leading expert on wretched excess.
Over the course of a four-decade career as a distinguished academic (he has written several college textbooks, including one with former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke), the Cornell University professor has developed a curious subspeciality: Studying the lifestyles of the filthy rich and spectacularly successful.
His anthropological field guides to life among the extremely affluent, including Luxury Fever and his recently published Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, have led him to one conclusion: The 1 percent are a problem. But not necessarily for the reasons you might think.
The reason the nation’s wealthiest have become a menace to the commonweal, Frank has concluded, is not because of how much more they make than the rest of us. It’s how much more they spend.
For a society that has consumers (as opposed to private investment or the government) to thank for two-thirds of all its spending, that considers the Consumer Confidence Index a key measure of economic health, what Frank has to say might be regarded as unconventional, if not downright heresy. He prefers the term “radical pragmatism.”
It boils down to this: Scrap the income tax.
It’s not that Frank is a dour socialist who wants to completely level the playing field. Let the rich have their baubles, he said. Just impose reasonable limits, and keep the rest to make investments that will benefit everyone.
“Who’s happier? A guy driving a $300,000 Ferrari on roads riddled with foot-deep potholes, or somebody driving a $150,000 Porsche 911 Turbo on well-maintained roads?” reasoned the professor, whose reed-thin physique suggests a long-distance runner, but who described himself as an unredeemed “car buff.”
Ultimately, given the advances in technology that is replacing humans in even complex jobs, Frank said in an interview with BillMoyers.com, the next president may want to consider an even more radical method of sharing the wealth: A guaranteed income and a broad public works program that would subsidize displaced workers to take on socially useful tasks like planting green spaces, transporting the frail elderly and assisting in day care centers.
To Frank, the real source of the middle-class squeeze and much of the anger in the year’s presidential campaign, is both a matter of hard facts and human psychology.
The facts are that globalization and technology have promoted “winner-take-all” economies in which “winners” are able to completely shut out people and companies whose skills (or luck) and products are just marginally less than their own. That has led to “an enormous concentration of economic rewards,” Frank said.
The psychology is that when we humans have it, we like to flaunt it. Among the super-wealthy, Frank said, has triggered a “spending cascade” that forces people further down the income ladder to work more and more hours or go deeper and deeper into debt to keep pace. Call it trickle-down consumerism.
Whatever you do, just don’t call it keeping up with the Joneses on steroids. Frank finds that too judgmental. The reason the median family is spending 50 to 75 percent more to buy a house that’s at least 50 percent bigger than the ones they bought in 1970, or proud parents are spending more than three times as much on weddings than they did in 1980, Frank says, has less to do with envy or status-seeking than what he calls “context.”
To explain, Frank recalls a house he lived in when he was a young Peace Corps volunteer in rural Nepal. It had two rooms, no plumbing and no electricity. “Never once during the two years I lived in that house did it ever occur to me for an instant that the house was unsatisfactory in any way,” he said.
But he acknowledges, “if I lived in a house like that in Ithaca,” his home town in upstate New York, “it would have been shameful… a clear signal that I’d failed in some spectacular way to meet even the minimal expectations of society.”
Yes, on one hand, what Frank is describing is classic peer pressure. “There’s a sense in which people are a prisoner of what others do,” he said. But, he added, the consequences of not meeting the minimal expectations of society can be very real: “The better schools are located in the neighborhoods where the houses are more expensive,” he said. So middle-class families “bid up the prices, of course, in the better school districts.”
But if he believes “you can’t escape context,” Franks also is convinced that “it’s a problem we can solve politically.”
How his proposed “ steeply progressive consumption tax” would work: Taxpayers would report to the IRS how much they made and how much they saved. The difference is their consumption. Frank envisions a “big standard deduction, say $30,000 for a family of four” that would mean “people in the bottom half and slightly above would pay no more tax than they do under the current system.”
“Once your consumption goes beyond a certain point, though,” he said, “the rates begin rising.” How much? “Let me not frighten you,” Frank hesitated, evidently forgetting his context (speaking to a journalist). “But I’ll say, suppose it were 100 percent for people consuming already $5 million a year or more, what would that mean?”
It would mean the $1 million yacht might cost the purchasers $2 million. Or the $10 million New York City penthouse suddenly gets a price tag of $20 million. Frank doesn’t think it will stop luxury spending. But, he predicted, “By making additional purchases for people at the top of the ladder much more expensive, that would steer money out of those purchases and into savings and investment.”
In 1980, Frank said, the average expenditure for a wedding was $10,000; last year, $31,000. “Nobody thinks the people getting married who are spending $31,000 are happier,” he said. “In fact there’s some evidence that they are less happy because the extra debt they take on creates problems for them.”
It’s not that he’s looking to put florists out of business, but Frank argued, “florists and gratuitously expensive weddings aren’t inherently a better form of employment than people planning landscaping in public spaces. There are lots of things we could do that would generate employment that I think people would value more highly.”
Top on his list: Improved infrastructure. Noting that the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates the cost of the overdue maintenance at $3.6 trillion, he said that should be the top of the nation’s agenda.
Further down the road, Frank said, the next president may need to focus on growing “concern that new advances in AI — artificial intelligence — are putting people out of work who never thought they’d be automated out of their jobs.” As an example, he cited radiologists. That’s causing economists like him to have doubts about whether the labor market will continue to create enough new jobs to replace the ones that innovation destroys.
“We’ve started to hear now even conservatives calling cautiously for a basic income guarantee,” said Frank, who recommends that it be “too small to [allow people to live] wholly at taxpayer expense,” but able to be supplemented with low-income jobs “in the old tradition of public works employment.”
“A good life can never be had with just private consumption,” he said. “You need good schools, you need good roads, you need safety features to keep people from harm. And those expenditures contribute to well-being too.”
Frank doesn’t expect his recommendations to come to fruition overnight. “This is not a natural way for people to think about things,” he said. But, he noted, other once-unthinkable things, such as a tax on carbon consumption and legalized gay marriage, gained rapid acceptance once they had gathered momentum. “Things happen incrementally until they don’t,” said Frank. “Revolutions, when they come, are never widely predicted.”
Economist Robert H. Frank says the rich would be better off — and so would the rest of us.
By Kathy Kiely
Economist Robert Frank is arguably the country’s leading expert on wretched excess.
Over the course of a four-decade career as a distinguished academic (he has written several college textbooks, including one with former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke), the Cornell University professor has developed a curious subspeciality: Studying the lifestyles of the filthy rich and spectacularly successful.
His anthropological field guides to life among the extremely affluent, including Luxury Fever and his recently published Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, have led him to one conclusion: The 1 percent are a problem. But not necessarily for the reasons you might think.
The reason the nation’s wealthiest have become a menace to the commonweal, Frank has concluded, is not because of how much more they make than the rest of us. It’s how much more they spend.
For a society that has consumers (as opposed to private investment or the government) to thank for two-thirds of all its spending, that considers the Consumer Confidence Index a key measure of economic health, what Frank has to say might be regarded as unconventional, if not downright heresy. He prefers the term “radical pragmatism.”
It boils down to this: Scrap the income tax.
It’s not that Frank is a dour socialist who wants to completely level the playing field. Let the rich have their baubles, he said. Just impose reasonable limits, and keep the rest to make investments that will benefit everyone.
“Who’s happier? A guy driving a $300,000 Ferrari on roads riddled with foot-deep potholes, or somebody driving a $150,000 Porsche 911 Turbo on well-maintained roads?” reasoned the professor, whose reed-thin physique suggests a long-distance runner, but who described himself as an unredeemed “car buff.”
Ultimately, given the advances in technology that is replacing humans in even complex jobs, Frank said in an interview with BillMoyers.com, the next president may want to consider an even more radical method of sharing the wealth: A guaranteed income and a broad public works program that would subsidize displaced workers to take on socially useful tasks like planting green spaces, transporting the frail elderly and assisting in day care centers.
To Frank, the real source of the middle-class squeeze and much of the anger in the year’s presidential campaign, is both a matter of hard facts and human psychology.
The facts are that globalization and technology have promoted “winner-take-all” economies in which “winners” are able to completely shut out people and companies whose skills (or luck) and products are just marginally less than their own. That has led to “an enormous concentration of economic rewards,” Frank said.
The psychology is that when we humans have it, we like to flaunt it. Among the super-wealthy, Frank said, has triggered a “spending cascade” that forces people further down the income ladder to work more and more hours or go deeper and deeper into debt to keep pace. Call it trickle-down consumerism.
Whatever you do, just don’t call it keeping up with the Joneses on steroids. Frank finds that too judgmental. The reason the median family is spending 50 to 75 percent more to buy a house that’s at least 50 percent bigger than the ones they bought in 1970, or proud parents are spending more than three times as much on weddings than they did in 1980, Frank says, has less to do with envy or status-seeking than what he calls “context.”
To explain, Frank recalls a house he lived in when he was a young Peace Corps volunteer in rural Nepal. It had two rooms, no plumbing and no electricity. “Never once during the two years I lived in that house did it ever occur to me for an instant that the house was unsatisfactory in any way,” he said.
But he acknowledges, “if I lived in a house like that in Ithaca,” his home town in upstate New York, “it would have been shameful… a clear signal that I’d failed in some spectacular way to meet even the minimal expectations of society.”
Yes, on one hand, what Frank is describing is classic peer pressure. “There’s a sense in which people are a prisoner of what others do,” he said. But, he added, the consequences of not meeting the minimal expectations of society can be very real: “The better schools are located in the neighborhoods where the houses are more expensive,” he said. So middle-class families “bid up the prices, of course, in the better school districts.”
But if he believes “you can’t escape context,” Franks also is convinced that “it’s a problem we can solve politically.”
How his proposed “ steeply progressive consumption tax” would work: Taxpayers would report to the IRS how much they made and how much they saved. The difference is their consumption. Frank envisions a “big standard deduction, say $30,000 for a family of four” that would mean “people in the bottom half and slightly above would pay no more tax than they do under the current system.”
“Once your consumption goes beyond a certain point, though,” he said, “the rates begin rising.” How much? “Let me not frighten you,” Frank hesitated, evidently forgetting his context (speaking to a journalist). “But I’ll say, suppose it were 100 percent for people consuming already $5 million a year or more, what would that mean?”
It would mean the $1 million yacht might cost the purchasers $2 million. Or the $10 million New York City penthouse suddenly gets a price tag of $20 million. Frank doesn’t think it will stop luxury spending. But, he predicted, “By making additional purchases for people at the top of the ladder much more expensive, that would steer money out of those purchases and into savings and investment.”
In 1980, Frank said, the average expenditure for a wedding was $10,000; last year, $31,000. “Nobody thinks the people getting married who are spending $31,000 are happier,” he said. “In fact there’s some evidence that they are less happy because the extra debt they take on creates problems for them.”
It’s not that he’s looking to put florists out of business, but Frank argued, “florists and gratuitously expensive weddings aren’t inherently a better form of employment than people planning landscaping in public spaces. There are lots of things we could do that would generate employment that I think people would value more highly.”
Top on his list: Improved infrastructure. Noting that the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates the cost of the overdue maintenance at $3.6 trillion, he said that should be the top of the nation’s agenda.
Further down the road, Frank said, the next president may need to focus on growing “concern that new advances in AI — artificial intelligence — are putting people out of work who never thought they’d be automated out of their jobs.” As an example, he cited radiologists. That’s causing economists like him to have doubts about whether the labor market will continue to create enough new jobs to replace the ones that innovation destroys.
“We’ve started to hear now even conservatives calling cautiously for a basic income guarantee,” said Frank, who recommends that it be “too small to [allow people to live] wholly at taxpayer expense,” but able to be supplemented with low-income jobs “in the old tradition of public works employment.”
“A good life can never be had with just private consumption,” he said. “You need good schools, you need good roads, you need safety features to keep people from harm. And those expenditures contribute to well-being too.”
Frank doesn’t expect his recommendations to come to fruition overnight. “This is not a natural way for people to think about things,” he said. But, he noted, other once-unthinkable things, such as a tax on carbon consumption and legalized gay marriage, gained rapid acceptance once they had gathered momentum. “Things happen incrementally until they don’t,” said Frank. “Revolutions, when they come, are never widely predicted.”
Twists your mind...
Fox News fans pessimistic about the country, and Clinton
by Brian Stelter
New data shows that Fox loyalists, when compared to the public at large, are far more pessimistic about America's future; are far more critical of President Obama's performance; are far more fearful of Hillary Clinton; and are more forgiving of Donald Trump.
The sharp differences in opinion extend to beliefs about political corruption, voter fraud and media coordination with campaigns. Fox fans, when compared to fans of other networks, are far more likely to express concern about November's election results being manipulated.
They are also more likely to agree with the sentiment that divisions in the United States are deeper than in the past.
The data -- from a new national poll by Suffolk University -- shows deep divisions, indeed. And it demonstrates why 21st Century Fox patriarch Rupert Murdoch recently told the Wall Street Journal that it would be "business suicide" to change Fox's editorial direction.
Overall, the poll finds that the country is split about Clinton, with 46% of all respondents having a favorable view of her versus 47% unfavorable. Among people who rate Fox News as their most-trusted source of news, however, sentiments are much more solidly anti-Clinton, with 84% viewing her unfavorably, versus just 13% favorably.
Similarly, 54% of all Suffolk respondents approve of President Obama's job performance, versus 41% who disapprove. But among Fox loyalists, the numbers are radically different, with 16% approving of the president's performance and 80% disapproving.
During the Obama presidency Fox News positioned itself as a voice of the opposition. Fox's most popular shows, like "The O'Reilly Factor," reinforced these sentiments.
If Clinton is elected president, Fox's audience will expect more of the same.
Fox News says it reaches many independents and some Democrats. But several surveys, including Suffolk's, shows that Fox's base is passionately pro-Republican, aligning with GOP positions and GOP candidates.
Suffolk's polls ask many of the same questions that other pollsters ask during presidential election years -- but add a layer of questions about media consumption on top.
The Suffolk pollsters ask: "What TV news or commentary source do you trust the most?"
In the most recent poll, 270 of the 1,000 respondents said Fox -- the single highest result of any of the networks named in the poll. This reflects Fox's tight grip on conservatives. More than 70% of the respondents who chose Fox described themselves as "conservative" or "very conservative."
154 respondents said they trusted CNN the most. The rest chose MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, C-SPAN or PBS. A small number chose Comedy Central.
The smaller the numbers get, the wider the margin of error, and the less reliable the data becomes. But Suffolk's poll is clear about the divergence between Fox loyalists and others.
An example: Only 14% of people who say they trust Fox the most say the country is headed in the right direction. 81% say it's on the wrong track.
The divide is not nearly so extreme among other respondents. For example, 55% of people who rate CNN as their most-trusted source say "right direction," and 35% say "wrong track."
Suffolk's polling can't answer the obvious chicken-or-egg question. Do people have these views because they watch Fox, or are they drawn to Fox (with its "fair and balanced" slogan) because they already have these views?
In many cases, the opinions of self-described "conservative" and "very conservative" people overlap quite closely with Fox loyalists.
In Suffolk's most recent poll, 74% of people with conservative views, 73% of people with very conservative views and 84% of people who trust Fox the most say they have an unfavorable opinion of Clinton.
Overall, 61% of respondents have an unfavorable view of Trump, while 31% said their view of him is favorable. Among Fox's partisans, the numbers are flipped, with 68% reporting a favorable view of the candidate and 23% reporting an unfavorable view.
Keep that number in mind: 23% unfavorable. Among people who say they trust CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, or PBS the most, Trump's unfavorable number ranged between 69% and 88%. (The second-lowest unfavorable rating for Trump, at 65%, came from people who said they trust Comedy Central the most.)
When asked "if the general election was held today... for whom will you vote or lean toward," 83% of Fox loyalists said Trump and 11% said Clinton.
On the flip side, 77% of CNN loyalists and 94% of MSNBC loyalists said Clinton.
People who trusted Fox the most were also far more likely than people who trusted CNN, MSNBC or other channels to say that recent revelations from hacked emails released by Wikileaks raise conflicts of interest for Clinton if she is elected president.
85% of Fox fans said yes, according to the poll, compared with 45% of CNN fans and 15% of MSNBC fans.
Some of these findings are just predictable examples of polarization. But the poll also shows that Fox loyalists are more susceptible to claims of election corruption.
Suffolk asked, "If the candidate you support loses," will you feel that "the other candidate won fair and square and deserves the support of all Americans," or that "corruption cost your candidate the election, and the new president shouldn't be seen as legitimately elected?"
43% of Fox loyalists cited corruption, versus 28% of overall respondents.
65% of Fox loyalists in the poll said they are worried that election results could be manipulated, far higher than the 38% overall response. Only 12% of MSNBC fans and 19% of CNN fans said they shared the concern.
Conversely, only 31% of Fox loyalists agreed with the view that the election results can be trusted to be fair and accurate, compared with 77% of CNN viewers, 85% of MSNBC viewers, and 57% of overall respondents.
Among people who are worried about the security of the election, many Fox fans expressed concern about the news media trying to "change the election results" -- possibly a result of Fox's anti-media tone.
Fox allies might say the poll findings show that other channels have a liberal bent.
Fox critics might say that the results illustrate the echo chamber of conservative media.
"The conservative entertainment news complex has constructed an alternative reality so all-encompassing that the chance of conservatives happening on any sort of good news is virtually nil," USA Today contributor and National Memo columnist Jason Sattler wrote on Thursday. "Hosts teach their viewers how to debunk anything Democrats might claim as an accomplishment and make sure they believe six terrible things about Obama before breakfast."
Suffolk's pollsters asked, "When it comes to the economy, do you think we are in an economic recovery, stagnation, recession, or depression?"
Overall, 38% of respondents said a recovery; 35% said stagnation; 12% said recession; and 8% said depression. CNN and MSNBC regulars were more bullish.
But Fox viewers were the opposite. Only 11% of Fox loyalists said America is in an economic recovery; 50% said stagnation; 19% said recession; and 13% said depression.
Suffolk conducts the national polls on a regular basis, including questions about media consumption. The Washington Post noted that the data for the past 15 months shows that "people who trust Fox News the most have consistently viewed Trump positively, on net," compared to people who trust other networks the most.
by Brian Stelter
New data shows that Fox loyalists, when compared to the public at large, are far more pessimistic about America's future; are far more critical of President Obama's performance; are far more fearful of Hillary Clinton; and are more forgiving of Donald Trump.
The sharp differences in opinion extend to beliefs about political corruption, voter fraud and media coordination with campaigns. Fox fans, when compared to fans of other networks, are far more likely to express concern about November's election results being manipulated.
They are also more likely to agree with the sentiment that divisions in the United States are deeper than in the past.
The data -- from a new national poll by Suffolk University -- shows deep divisions, indeed. And it demonstrates why 21st Century Fox patriarch Rupert Murdoch recently told the Wall Street Journal that it would be "business suicide" to change Fox's editorial direction.
Overall, the poll finds that the country is split about Clinton, with 46% of all respondents having a favorable view of her versus 47% unfavorable. Among people who rate Fox News as their most-trusted source of news, however, sentiments are much more solidly anti-Clinton, with 84% viewing her unfavorably, versus just 13% favorably.
Similarly, 54% of all Suffolk respondents approve of President Obama's job performance, versus 41% who disapprove. But among Fox loyalists, the numbers are radically different, with 16% approving of the president's performance and 80% disapproving.
During the Obama presidency Fox News positioned itself as a voice of the opposition. Fox's most popular shows, like "The O'Reilly Factor," reinforced these sentiments.
If Clinton is elected president, Fox's audience will expect more of the same.
Fox News says it reaches many independents and some Democrats. But several surveys, including Suffolk's, shows that Fox's base is passionately pro-Republican, aligning with GOP positions and GOP candidates.
Suffolk's polls ask many of the same questions that other pollsters ask during presidential election years -- but add a layer of questions about media consumption on top.
The Suffolk pollsters ask: "What TV news or commentary source do you trust the most?"
In the most recent poll, 270 of the 1,000 respondents said Fox -- the single highest result of any of the networks named in the poll. This reflects Fox's tight grip on conservatives. More than 70% of the respondents who chose Fox described themselves as "conservative" or "very conservative."
154 respondents said they trusted CNN the most. The rest chose MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, C-SPAN or PBS. A small number chose Comedy Central.
The smaller the numbers get, the wider the margin of error, and the less reliable the data becomes. But Suffolk's poll is clear about the divergence between Fox loyalists and others.
An example: Only 14% of people who say they trust Fox the most say the country is headed in the right direction. 81% say it's on the wrong track.
The divide is not nearly so extreme among other respondents. For example, 55% of people who rate CNN as their most-trusted source say "right direction," and 35% say "wrong track."
Suffolk's polling can't answer the obvious chicken-or-egg question. Do people have these views because they watch Fox, or are they drawn to Fox (with its "fair and balanced" slogan) because they already have these views?
In many cases, the opinions of self-described "conservative" and "very conservative" people overlap quite closely with Fox loyalists.
In Suffolk's most recent poll, 74% of people with conservative views, 73% of people with very conservative views and 84% of people who trust Fox the most say they have an unfavorable opinion of Clinton.
Overall, 61% of respondents have an unfavorable view of Trump, while 31% said their view of him is favorable. Among Fox's partisans, the numbers are flipped, with 68% reporting a favorable view of the candidate and 23% reporting an unfavorable view.
Keep that number in mind: 23% unfavorable. Among people who say they trust CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, or PBS the most, Trump's unfavorable number ranged between 69% and 88%. (The second-lowest unfavorable rating for Trump, at 65%, came from people who said they trust Comedy Central the most.)
When asked "if the general election was held today... for whom will you vote or lean toward," 83% of Fox loyalists said Trump and 11% said Clinton.
On the flip side, 77% of CNN loyalists and 94% of MSNBC loyalists said Clinton.
People who trusted Fox the most were also far more likely than people who trusted CNN, MSNBC or other channels to say that recent revelations from hacked emails released by Wikileaks raise conflicts of interest for Clinton if she is elected president.
85% of Fox fans said yes, according to the poll, compared with 45% of CNN fans and 15% of MSNBC fans.
Some of these findings are just predictable examples of polarization. But the poll also shows that Fox loyalists are more susceptible to claims of election corruption.
Suffolk asked, "If the candidate you support loses," will you feel that "the other candidate won fair and square and deserves the support of all Americans," or that "corruption cost your candidate the election, and the new president shouldn't be seen as legitimately elected?"
43% of Fox loyalists cited corruption, versus 28% of overall respondents.
65% of Fox loyalists in the poll said they are worried that election results could be manipulated, far higher than the 38% overall response. Only 12% of MSNBC fans and 19% of CNN fans said they shared the concern.
Conversely, only 31% of Fox loyalists agreed with the view that the election results can be trusted to be fair and accurate, compared with 77% of CNN viewers, 85% of MSNBC viewers, and 57% of overall respondents.
Among people who are worried about the security of the election, many Fox fans expressed concern about the news media trying to "change the election results" -- possibly a result of Fox's anti-media tone.
Fox allies might say the poll findings show that other channels have a liberal bent.
Fox critics might say that the results illustrate the echo chamber of conservative media.
"The conservative entertainment news complex has constructed an alternative reality so all-encompassing that the chance of conservatives happening on any sort of good news is virtually nil," USA Today contributor and National Memo columnist Jason Sattler wrote on Thursday. "Hosts teach their viewers how to debunk anything Democrats might claim as an accomplishment and make sure they believe six terrible things about Obama before breakfast."
Suffolk's pollsters asked, "When it comes to the economy, do you think we are in an economic recovery, stagnation, recession, or depression?"
Overall, 38% of respondents said a recovery; 35% said stagnation; 12% said recession; and 8% said depression. CNN and MSNBC regulars were more bullish.
But Fox viewers were the opposite. Only 11% of Fox loyalists said America is in an economic recovery; 50% said stagnation; 19% said recession; and 13% said depression.
Suffolk conducts the national polls on a regular basis, including questions about media consumption. The Washington Post noted that the data for the past 15 months shows that "people who trust Fox News the most have consistently viewed Trump positively, on net," compared to people who trust other networks the most.
Government is NOT a business!!!!
The problem with Trump's 'plan' to save Social Security
by Tami Luhby
Donald Trump says he won't touch Social Security if he becomes president.
He wouldn't have to, he believes: His plan to boost economic growth to at least 4% would take care of Social Security's long-term problems.
If only it were so easy.
Put aside the fact that most economists think achieving 4% growth -- even for a few years -- is unrealistic.
Even if such growth were possible, Trump's plan would only delay Social Security's shortfall, not fix it.
Here's where things stand now: Though the Social Security system is not going "bankrupt," it won't have enough money to pay full benefits beginning in 2034, according to the latest Social Security trustees' report. Retirees will get 79% of what's been promised.
Funding for Social Security payments come from payroll taxes — employees and employers each pay 6.2% on the first $118,500 income. Most solutions focus on lifting that income cap or raising the age at which retirees start collecting benefits.
The Urban Institute looked at whether faster economic growth — 3.4% — could do the trick. Such growth would boost wages and bring more people into the labor force, giving the system a big payroll tax infusion that would keep it solvent for about another three decades.
However, all those folks would also be eligible for bigger benefits once they retired, and the system will not be able to afford that bill. The scenario would ultimately only close about one-third of the gap.
"It will push out solvency, but not put Social Security on permanently firm financial footing," said Richard Johnson, director of Urban's Program on Retirement Policy.
In fact, a shorter economic boost could prove even more harmful to Social Security, said Marc Goldwein, senior vice president for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. That would increase the amount ultimately owed, but the tax revenue bump would peter out beforehand.
Trump, like many politicians, has also said he would root out fraud to save money. And while roughly $5 billion in improper Social Security payments are made annually, that accounts for only 3% of the shortfall, Goldwein said. Plus, not all of those payments are fraudulent.
Those close to Trump haven't shed any more light on the candidate's plans. In a recent debate, Stephen Moore, one of his economic advisers, refused to answer a question on fixing Social Security, saying Trump hasn't talked a lot about it.
Trump's running mate, Mike Pence, said at the vice presidential debate earlier this month: "All Donald Trump and I have said about Social Security is we're going to meet our obligations to our seniors. That's it." Pence has supported privatizing Social Security in the past.
In August, when Trump's friend and adviser Tom Barrack suggested that Trump may ultimately tackle Social Security reform, the campaign told CNNMoney: "'We will not cut Medicare or Social Security benefits, but protect them both."
Trump's rival, Hillary Clinton, has some very different ideas for fixing Social Security. But she's hasn't laid out a concrete plan.
Clinton has said she wants to provide more generous benefits to caregivers and lower-income widows. She'd pay for it by raising the amount the rich contribute into the system.
by Tami Luhby
Donald Trump says he won't touch Social Security if he becomes president.
He wouldn't have to, he believes: His plan to boost economic growth to at least 4% would take care of Social Security's long-term problems.
If only it were so easy.
Put aside the fact that most economists think achieving 4% growth -- even for a few years -- is unrealistic.
Even if such growth were possible, Trump's plan would only delay Social Security's shortfall, not fix it.
Here's where things stand now: Though the Social Security system is not going "bankrupt," it won't have enough money to pay full benefits beginning in 2034, according to the latest Social Security trustees' report. Retirees will get 79% of what's been promised.
Funding for Social Security payments come from payroll taxes — employees and employers each pay 6.2% on the first $118,500 income. Most solutions focus on lifting that income cap or raising the age at which retirees start collecting benefits.
The Urban Institute looked at whether faster economic growth — 3.4% — could do the trick. Such growth would boost wages and bring more people into the labor force, giving the system a big payroll tax infusion that would keep it solvent for about another three decades.
However, all those folks would also be eligible for bigger benefits once they retired, and the system will not be able to afford that bill. The scenario would ultimately only close about one-third of the gap.
"It will push out solvency, but not put Social Security on permanently firm financial footing," said Richard Johnson, director of Urban's Program on Retirement Policy.
In fact, a shorter economic boost could prove even more harmful to Social Security, said Marc Goldwein, senior vice president for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. That would increase the amount ultimately owed, but the tax revenue bump would peter out beforehand.
Trump, like many politicians, has also said he would root out fraud to save money. And while roughly $5 billion in improper Social Security payments are made annually, that accounts for only 3% of the shortfall, Goldwein said. Plus, not all of those payments are fraudulent.
Those close to Trump haven't shed any more light on the candidate's plans. In a recent debate, Stephen Moore, one of his economic advisers, refused to answer a question on fixing Social Security, saying Trump hasn't talked a lot about it.
Trump's running mate, Mike Pence, said at the vice presidential debate earlier this month: "All Donald Trump and I have said about Social Security is we're going to meet our obligations to our seniors. That's it." Pence has supported privatizing Social Security in the past.
In August, when Trump's friend and adviser Tom Barrack suggested that Trump may ultimately tackle Social Security reform, the campaign told CNNMoney: "'We will not cut Medicare or Social Security benefits, but protect them both."
Trump's rival, Hillary Clinton, has some very different ideas for fixing Social Security. But she's hasn't laid out a concrete plan.
Clinton has said she wants to provide more generous benefits to caregivers and lower-income widows. She'd pay for it by raising the amount the rich contribute into the system.
Enter Mosul in matter of hours
Iraqi troops to enter Mosul in 'matter of hours'
By Mohammed Tawfeeq and Angela Dewan
Iraqi special forces are hundreds of meters from Mosul and will enter in a "matter of hours," the country's counter-terrorism chief said Monday, as the offensive to free the key city from ISIS control entered a new phase.
"The soldiers of the Counterterrorism Force are advancing very fast. I wouldn't say a matter of days but matter of hours before advancing and (to) start cleansing the city of Mosul from terrorism," General Talib Shegati said in an interview with state-run Iraqiya TV.
A coalition of around 100,000 Iraqi-led forces have been in a decisive push toward Mosul since October 17 to end more than two years of the militant group's brutal rule.
On Monday, forces began advancing on the city from three separate fronts at dawn.
Experts have said that entering Mosul will likely trigger the fiercest fighting seen yet in the offensive, and that the battle is expected to be fought "street to street."
Mosul has been an ISIS stronghold for more than two years, and although the ISIS fighters are vastly outnumbered, they have put up fierce resistance in pockets of the territory around the city. US defense officials have said there are up to 5,000 ISIS militants fighting back in this offensive.
Since the offensive began, they have carried out mass executions of civilians, lit toxic sulfur and oil fires to fend of coalition forces, and used civilians as human shields to ward of air strikes. They are carrying out regular suicide vehicle bombings and witnesses have told CNN that they are rigging bridges and laying booby traps inside the city.
On the eastern edge of the city in the town of Gogjali, witnesses told CNN that they could see Iraqi forces in open land nearby, and that families had begun fleeing their homes after hearing gunfire and explosions, as well as several airstrikes.
The witnesses said that there were around 40 ISIS militants in the area who had set up mortar positions. ISIS has completely blocked the main road entering Mosul from Irbil with concrete T-walls, they said.
Tensions inside Mosul appear to be flaring as troops get ever closer. Five ISIS officials, including the head of the city's prisons, were shot dead by gunmen in a drive-by shooting near a market on Monday.
The battle for Mosul is seen as one of the most significant in the fight against ISIS. The city is the group's Iraqi stronghold and is considered the jewel off the group's envisaged caliphate, or its so-called Islamic State.
The city is also near critical oil fields that ISIS has used to fatten its coffers, selling the resource illegally across borders.
By Mohammed Tawfeeq and Angela Dewan
Iraqi special forces are hundreds of meters from Mosul and will enter in a "matter of hours," the country's counter-terrorism chief said Monday, as the offensive to free the key city from ISIS control entered a new phase.
"The soldiers of the Counterterrorism Force are advancing very fast. I wouldn't say a matter of days but matter of hours before advancing and (to) start cleansing the city of Mosul from terrorism," General Talib Shegati said in an interview with state-run Iraqiya TV.
A coalition of around 100,000 Iraqi-led forces have been in a decisive push toward Mosul since October 17 to end more than two years of the militant group's brutal rule.
On Monday, forces began advancing on the city from three separate fronts at dawn.
Experts have said that entering Mosul will likely trigger the fiercest fighting seen yet in the offensive, and that the battle is expected to be fought "street to street."
Mosul has been an ISIS stronghold for more than two years, and although the ISIS fighters are vastly outnumbered, they have put up fierce resistance in pockets of the territory around the city. US defense officials have said there are up to 5,000 ISIS militants fighting back in this offensive.
Since the offensive began, they have carried out mass executions of civilians, lit toxic sulfur and oil fires to fend of coalition forces, and used civilians as human shields to ward of air strikes. They are carrying out regular suicide vehicle bombings and witnesses have told CNN that they are rigging bridges and laying booby traps inside the city.
On the eastern edge of the city in the town of Gogjali, witnesses told CNN that they could see Iraqi forces in open land nearby, and that families had begun fleeing their homes after hearing gunfire and explosions, as well as several airstrikes.
The witnesses said that there were around 40 ISIS militants in the area who had set up mortar positions. ISIS has completely blocked the main road entering Mosul from Irbil with concrete T-walls, they said.
Tensions inside Mosul appear to be flaring as troops get ever closer. Five ISIS officials, including the head of the city's prisons, were shot dead by gunmen in a drive-by shooting near a market on Monday.
The battle for Mosul is seen as one of the most significant in the fight against ISIS. The city is the group's Iraqi stronghold and is considered the jewel off the group's envisaged caliphate, or its so-called Islamic State.
The city is also near critical oil fields that ISIS has used to fatten its coffers, selling the resource illegally across borders.
Daisy
Hillary Clinton enlists 'Daisy' from the 1964 ad to questions Trump on nukes
By Dan Merica
Hillary Clinton's campaign has turned to the young girl featured in the iconic 1964 "Daisy" ad in order to question Donald Trump's ability to handle nuclear weapons.
A new ad out Monday -- which features Monique Luiz, the same actress who at age three played "Daisy" in the ad for Lyndon B. Johnson's campaign -- is part of the campaign's closing argument against the Republican Party's presidential nominee. The campaign hopes to cast Trump as too reckless and unhinged to be trusted with the country's nuclear arsenal.
"This was me in 1964," Luiz says as video from the iconic ad, which features a young girl with flowers while a countdown to a nuclear warhead launch echoes in the background, plays. "The fear of nuclear war that we had as children, I never thought our children would ever have to deal with that again. And to see that coming forward in this election is really scary."
Johnson's ad only aired once nationally, but the tough charge in the spot -- that a Goldwater presidency would lead to nuclear war -- led to nationwide news coverage.
Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater had listed the use of small nuclear weapons as a way to destroy key infrastructure used by communist guerrillas in Vietnam. While he tried to back away from those comments, Democrats seized on them as a way to cast Goldwater as unhinged.
After the interview with Luiz, the ad turns to Trump, starting with a clip from MSNBC's "Morning Joe" where host Joe Scarborough says on air that during a briefing with a foreign policy expert, Trump asked three times, "why can't we use nuclear weapons?"
"I want to be unpredictable," Trump then exclaims, a comment he has made throughout his campaign about military action.
The ad implies that nothing would stand between Trump and the nuclear arsenal, should he win the presidency next week. The attack is familiar in this 2016 race: Clinton's campaign has sought to disqualify Trump by questioning his ability to handle foreign policy and military issues for months.
"Bomb the s--- out of them," Trump says to close the spot, which will air in Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller called the ad "a sad and a desperate attempt" to distract from the fallout of a letter FBI Director James Comey sent to committee chairman in Congress last week alerting them of newly discovered additional emails his agency is reviewing that might be relevant to Clinton's use of a private server while she was secretary of state.
"The fact of the matter is, the world has become a less safe place during the Obama and Clinton administration," Miller told CNN's Chris Cuomo on "New Day."
Trump's campaign has been dogged by questions about his ability to handle foreign policy for much of the general election.
Fifty Republican national security officials signed a letter in August that argued Trump would put the country's security "at risk."
And in October, 10 former nuclear launch control officers who were once tasked with the responsibility of firing the country's nuclear arsenal signed a open letter that said Trump should not be entrusted with the nuclear codes
"Donald Trump should not be the nation's commander-in-chief," the letter reads. "He should not be entrusted with the nuclear launch codes. He should not have his finger on the button."
By Dan Merica
Hillary Clinton's campaign has turned to the young girl featured in the iconic 1964 "Daisy" ad in order to question Donald Trump's ability to handle nuclear weapons.
A new ad out Monday -- which features Monique Luiz, the same actress who at age three played "Daisy" in the ad for Lyndon B. Johnson's campaign -- is part of the campaign's closing argument against the Republican Party's presidential nominee. The campaign hopes to cast Trump as too reckless and unhinged to be trusted with the country's nuclear arsenal.
"This was me in 1964," Luiz says as video from the iconic ad, which features a young girl with flowers while a countdown to a nuclear warhead launch echoes in the background, plays. "The fear of nuclear war that we had as children, I never thought our children would ever have to deal with that again. And to see that coming forward in this election is really scary."
Johnson's ad only aired once nationally, but the tough charge in the spot -- that a Goldwater presidency would lead to nuclear war -- led to nationwide news coverage.
Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater had listed the use of small nuclear weapons as a way to destroy key infrastructure used by communist guerrillas in Vietnam. While he tried to back away from those comments, Democrats seized on them as a way to cast Goldwater as unhinged.
After the interview with Luiz, the ad turns to Trump, starting with a clip from MSNBC's "Morning Joe" where host Joe Scarborough says on air that during a briefing with a foreign policy expert, Trump asked three times, "why can't we use nuclear weapons?"
"I want to be unpredictable," Trump then exclaims, a comment he has made throughout his campaign about military action.
The ad implies that nothing would stand between Trump and the nuclear arsenal, should he win the presidency next week. The attack is familiar in this 2016 race: Clinton's campaign has sought to disqualify Trump by questioning his ability to handle foreign policy and military issues for months.
"Bomb the s--- out of them," Trump says to close the spot, which will air in Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller called the ad "a sad and a desperate attempt" to distract from the fallout of a letter FBI Director James Comey sent to committee chairman in Congress last week alerting them of newly discovered additional emails his agency is reviewing that might be relevant to Clinton's use of a private server while she was secretary of state.
"The fact of the matter is, the world has become a less safe place during the Obama and Clinton administration," Miller told CNN's Chris Cuomo on "New Day."
Trump's campaign has been dogged by questions about his ability to handle foreign policy for much of the general election.
Fifty Republican national security officials signed a letter in August that argued Trump would put the country's security "at risk."
And in October, 10 former nuclear launch control officers who were once tasked with the responsibility of firing the country's nuclear arsenal signed a open letter that said Trump should not be entrusted with the nuclear codes
"Donald Trump should not be the nation's commander-in-chief," the letter reads. "He should not be entrusted with the nuclear launch codes. He should not have his finger on the button."
Trump touts waterboarding
Donald Trump touts waterboarding, stokes immigration fears in border state
By Jeremy Diamond
Donald Trump on Sunday warned his supporters in this border state that Hillary Clinton "wants to let people just pour in," saying without evidence that hundreds of millions of people could enter the US under a Clinton presidency.
And speaking just nine days before Election Day, the Republican nominee also bemoaned criticism of waterboarding and appeared to once again call for bringing back the since-banned technique for use in the fight against ISIS.
"These savages are chopping off heads, drowning people. This is medieval times and then we can't do waterboarding? 'It's far too tough,'" Trump said, mocking critics of the technique used by the CIA in interrogations of terror suspects under President George W. Bush's post-9/11 administration.
Trump has previously called for reinstating waterboarding and "much worse" methods of torture if he becomes president.
"We have to be tough and we have to be smart. And we have to be in some cases pretty vicious I have to tell you," he added.
The Republican nominee also issued a dire -- and baseless -- warning to Americans that a Clinton administration could usher a flood of hundreds of millions of people crossing into the US.
"You could have 650 million people pour in and we'd do nothing about it. Think of it. That's what could happen. You triple the size of our country in one week. Once you lose control of your borders you just have no country folks, you have no country," Trump said, speaking in this Democrat-leaning border state.
Trump also stoked fears about undocumented immigrant crime, warning that continued illegal immigration would result "in the loss of American lives," even though undocumented immigrants do not commit crimes at a higher rate than legal US residents.
Trump's stop here came a day before Trump stumps in Michigan, also a state likely to swing in Clinton's favor, as the Republican nominee and his campaign are hoping to make late gains to help secure the 270 electoral votes Trump needs to secure the presidency. Trump's stops in these blue-leaning states also helps bolster the campaign's message that Trump's candidacy is on the rise and that the campaign is going on the offensive the final slog to Election Day.
By Jeremy Diamond
Donald Trump on Sunday warned his supporters in this border state that Hillary Clinton "wants to let people just pour in," saying without evidence that hundreds of millions of people could enter the US under a Clinton presidency.
And speaking just nine days before Election Day, the Republican nominee also bemoaned criticism of waterboarding and appeared to once again call for bringing back the since-banned technique for use in the fight against ISIS.
"These savages are chopping off heads, drowning people. This is medieval times and then we can't do waterboarding? 'It's far too tough,'" Trump said, mocking critics of the technique used by the CIA in interrogations of terror suspects under President George W. Bush's post-9/11 administration.
Trump has previously called for reinstating waterboarding and "much worse" methods of torture if he becomes president.
"We have to be tough and we have to be smart. And we have to be in some cases pretty vicious I have to tell you," he added.
The Republican nominee also issued a dire -- and baseless -- warning to Americans that a Clinton administration could usher a flood of hundreds of millions of people crossing into the US.
"You could have 650 million people pour in and we'd do nothing about it. Think of it. That's what could happen. You triple the size of our country in one week. Once you lose control of your borders you just have no country folks, you have no country," Trump said, speaking in this Democrat-leaning border state.
Trump also stoked fears about undocumented immigrant crime, warning that continued illegal immigration would result "in the loss of American lives," even though undocumented immigrants do not commit crimes at a higher rate than legal US residents.
Trump's stop here came a day before Trump stumps in Michigan, also a state likely to swing in Clinton's favor, as the Republican nominee and his campaign are hoping to make late gains to help secure the 270 electoral votes Trump needs to secure the presidency. Trump's stops in these blue-leaning states also helps bolster the campaign's message that Trump's candidacy is on the rise and that the campaign is going on the offensive the final slog to Election Day.
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