Month: June 2019

Politics

The Fault Is Ours…

Posted on by mjohnson

This piece first appeared in the Lewiston, Idaho Tribune

———–

Historians, philosophers and ethicists have been debating for nearly 60 years – perhaps longer really – the notion that a person can do evil without being evil. That question is at the heart of philosopher Hannah Arendt’s description of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who implemented Hitler’s slaughter of six million Jews during World War II. 

Eichmann was abducted from his Argentine hiding place in 1960, taken to Jerusalem, tried for war crimes and executed in 1962. Arendt covered Eichmann’s trial for The New Yorker and found the defendant to be a rather ordinary, unassuming little man. Thomas White wrote about what Arendt called “the banality of evil,” and says she found Eichmann “neither perverted nor sadistic”, but “terrifyingly normal” acting “without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy.” 

It is an interesting – and still controversial – notion: that “normal people” are capable of abnormal, even horrible things in service to their own ambition, or perhaps due to their inability to assess the moral dimensions of their actions.

Watching the recent viral video of a U.S. Justice Department attorney appearing before a panel of three federal judges and being unwilling to say that migrant children in government custody being denied basic sanitation, soap and a toothbrush, or a decent place to sleep was unacceptable left me thinking again about Hannah Arendt’s theory. 

And before you think that I’m equating a government lawyer with a bureaucrat of the Holocaust, I’m not. The question is rather about the human capacity, even the need, to look the other way, to disengage, to accept the unacceptable, to reduce what we all know to be wicked, wrong or malicious to, well, the banal, the commonplace. 

A bumper sticker was in wide circulation some years ago: “If you’re not outraged you’re not paying attention.” It should make a comeback. 

The fault is in all of us. We too easily become numb to an outrage, a scandal, a violation of norms and traditions, particularly if it all fits comfortably with an otherwise settled and pleasant personal opinion. 

Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate and senator from California, for example, recently said if she happens to become president she wants to see that the Justice Department goes “forward with those obstruction of justice charges” against Donald Trump. Harris was roundly criticized, as she should have been, for saying, as the Brookings Institution’s Benjamin Wittes wrote, “that as president you would supervise that person’s prosecution, as Harris did, is poisonous stuff in a democracy that cares about apolitical law enforcement.”

Trump, of course, has done the same thing by encouraging “lock her up” chants at his rallies and suggesting that his political opponents should be investigated or in jail. That Trump would engage in such poisonous stuff is wrong and that a Democrat would mimic the poison is just as wrong. You cannot accept one and condemn the other unless you have become numb to outrage. 

When the president of the United States was once again credibly accused – actually for the 22nd time – of sexual assault, a crime he actually admitted to in the infamous Access Hollywood tape, there was a collective yawn. Many major news organizations barely covered the story, even when Trump dismissed the allegation bizarrely saying: “I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, OK?”

One of the great normalizers of the abnormal in our times, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, simply said: “He’s denied it and that’s all I needed to hear.” Graham, of course, had a much different reaction to Trump’s comments in that infamous videotape in 2016: “Name one sports team, university, publicly-held company, etc. that would accept a person like this as their standard bearer,” he said. That was then. This is now. 

“When you know you can lie constantly and effectively not be held accountable,” the commentator John Ziegler wrote recently, “it is like an offensive line in football free to break any rule they want, secure that even if they get called for holding, the penalty will not be enforced.” 

We believe what we want to believe and we discount the lies we find at odds with what we want to believe. We casually dismiss a troubling outrage if confronting it requires a reckoning with our own values. In such a situational world the inconvenient is just a temporary nuisance. How else to explain a government official justifying keeping kids in abhorrent conditions as if the government had no power to change those conditions?  

Saudi journalist Jamil Khashoggi, murdered by the regime to which the U.S. is selling weapons

Or a Saudi journalist working for an American newspaper is brutally murdered with credible evidence the Saudi crown prince was involved, but those inconvenient facts aren’t allowed to stand in the way of selling billions in military equipment to a profoundly corrupt Saudi government. An Idaho politician is in a key position to make a stink. His silence is deafening. 

The chief executive repeatedly demeans the head of the Federal Reserve, undermining more than 100 years of tradition that the country’s central bank is insolated from political interference. An Idahoan chairs the key Senate committee that plays a critical role in ensuring that independence. He has never said a word, let alone used his influence to affect such behavior. 

A top Democratic appointee in Idaho state government, a state tax commissioner, mysteriously is placed on “administrative leave” and just as mysteriously returns. No explanation is offered. No accountability is demanded. Democrats are silent. Republicans are mute. 

Offer a hundred other examples of the normalization of outrage from the perspective of your own worldview, but also ask why is any of this acceptable? Why has such behavior on so many levels in so many ways become banal? 

The fault, as the bard so eloquently wrote, is not in our stars, but in ourselves. If you’re not outraged, you really are not paying attention. 

Economy, Taxes

Taxes and Tariffs…

Posted on by mjohnson

The two foundational pillars of Republican (read Trump) economic policy – tax cuts and tariffs – have settled in on the country like so much else has for the last two and a half years. They are the product of ignorance, misdirection, wishful thinking and lies. 

First, let’s review the bidding on the 2017 Trump tax cut passed with only Republican votes in Congress. 

Idaho Senator Mike Crapo, a member of the tax writing Finance Committee said at the time, “The tax relief passed by Congress will reshape our tax policy to the benefit of Idaho’s taxpayers help make the United States more competitive.” Crapo was also sure that tax rates for all Americans would go down, jobs would spike, competitiveness would soar and “despite claims to the contrary, the reforms to our tax system will address our growing debt and deficits.” 

In a joint statement with Crapo celebrating the passage of the tax cut, Senator Jim Risch was over the moon in touting the benefits. “The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will produce growth not seen in generations, giving Americans access to higher wages, greater job opportunities and a more vibrant economy, all of which will result in greater dynamic revenue generation to reduce the deficit and improve our nation’s fiscal standing.” 

But what has actually happened after the happy talk faded away? In as nutshell, and according to an in-depth analysis by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), a branch of the Library of Congress, Crapo and Risch’s claims were wildly overstated, indeed were largely wrong. 

Consider who benefited from the tax legislation. “From 2017 to 2018,” CRS says, “the estimated average corporate tax rate fell from 23.4% to 12.1% and individual income taxes as a percentage of personal income fell slightly from 9.6% to 9.2%.” That helps explain why you saw tiny, if any, reduction in your personal tax bill, while corporations had their tax bill nearly halved. 

The CRS analysis documents that much of the corporate tax cut went not to investment in workers or plants, but for “a record-breaking amount of stock buybacks, with $1 trillion announced by the end of 2018.” In other words, investors, corporate CEO’s and the already well to do enjoyed the benefits. 

And how about the notion that cutting government revenue would some how magically contribute to a reduction in government debt? Here’s how Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik describes what happened: “Overall revenue fell in 2018, largely because of a $40-billion decline in corporate tax revenue. Individuals, particularly working- and middle-class individuals haven’t been so fortunate. Although the legislation increased the standard deduction and child credit, whatever tax reductions those would produce for families were ‘largely offset’ by the elimination of personal exemptions, and limitations on itemized deductions such as those for state and local taxes.” 

In point of fact the federal deficit – remember when Risch and Crapo used to talk about that all the time – has increased by 40% in the current fiscal year, at a time when the economy continues to grow. This is more than blue smoke and mirrors masquerading as economic policy. It’s really economic malpractice on a huge scale. Congressional Republicans sold you a bill of goods and most of them continue to mouth the platitudes about how good it is for you. 

Let’s consider the other “T” in Trumpland economics: tariffs. Despite mounting evidence of the impact on Idaho of the administration’s tariff wars with China, India and a host of other countries, Risch and Crapo stand at attention and march over the economic cliff with the president. Trump, don’t forget, has taken his tariff actions in an unprecedented manner, invoking a provision meant to deal with matters of national security. The Constitution expressly reserves to the Congress the “Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.” In other words, Congress has acquiesced to this presidential power grab. 

BBC illustration

Risch recently told a television interviewer that he’s “not a tariff guy,” chuckling that Republicans “are free traders.” Yet when given the chance to even mildly rebuff Trump – the Senate last year approved 88-11 a non-binding objection to a tariff war – Risch declined, as Crapo did, citing “onerous restrictions” on the president’s authority to implement tariffs for national security reasons.

Even if Trump manages to navigate a pathway out of his tariff cul-de-sac some time soon much damage has already been done. Supply chains have been disrupted, long-to-develop trading relationships shattered and uncertainty dominates. 

“Our businesses have spent a lot of time and a lot of money building relationships in some of these markets,” the Idaho Department of Agriculture’s Laura Johnson told the Idaho Press recently, “and as customers go somewhere else, it’s really hard to get them back. We may have other opportunities elsewhere, but it’s costly.” Jay Theiler, the Executive Director of Marketing for Agri Beef, a significant Idaho exporter, says, “Right now, politics is in the way of the trade.”

There is ample evidence that the president of the United States doesn’t understand how tariffs – or tax policy for that matter – actually work, that American consumers and businesses pay the duties when imports become more expensive and cutting tax rates increases the deficit. But, ignorance in politics isn’t a new phenomenon. What is unusual is the willful disregard of facts on the part of Idaho’s senators, and others, who have stood idly by while this economic malpractice continues to unfold. 

Tax cuts and tariffs have done almost nothing beneficial for most Americans. If fact, GOP economic policy is costing you money. You would be entitled to ask: whose looking out for your interest? 

2020 Election

Order, Order…

Posted on by mjohnson

“I am not a member of any organized political party,” the cowboy comic Will Rogers famously said. “I am a Democrat.”

Democrats fight among themselves, argue about the future of their party and display a genuine affinity for forming a circular firing squadron whenever an election looms. Joe Biden is being attacked for saying he actually believes in bipartisanship. Bernie Sanders is too old and too socialist, but even he struggles to explain what his brand of socialism really looks like. Kamala Harris was a tough on crime prosecutor and that is somehow a liability. I could go on, but you get the drift. 

Will Rogers

The Twenty-three angry Democrats now running for president is all the proof required that the Democrats are no “organized political party.” 

So, since no one is asking, I offer a Democratic Manifesto for both national and Idaho Democrats to impose some order on the chaos. 

First, the basics: every election is about the future. Donald Trump made the 2016 election a referendum on his version of the future, which ironically – or cynically, or manipulatively – was actually about recreating a vision of the country that never existed. “Make America Great Again” was his slogan. It’s time for Democrats to make him eat those words. 

Ronald Reagan made Jimmy Carter squirm in 1980 by asking a question Democrats should be asking: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Trump partisans will point to a strong economy, but the micro answer to Reagan’s question is clearly: No. 

Karl Rove, the politically smart, but ethically challenged brains behind George W. Bush, always had a formula: attack your opponent at his point of greatest strength. John Kerry was a decorated Vietnam veteran, while Bush arguably dodged the draft, so in Rove World the correct response was to “swift boat” Kerry with attacks on his military record and patriotism. Trump is oh so vulnerable to the same approach and best of all a Democrat need not distort the record as Rove had to in order to pin his ears back. 

Imagine a Democrat with this line of logic: Let’s talk about that Mexican funded wall. Is immigration better than four years ago? Trump will soon have been in office for three years, he had both houses of Congress for half his term – what’s he really done? Well, he tweets a lot. He thinks he’s tough on immigration, but he hasn’t fixed a thing and, if anything, it’s all much worse than when he started. Trump is a failure at the border. 

Trump was going to end our endless wars, but how is that going? He’s incompetent and hasn’t fixed a thing. He hasn’t Made America Great; he’s made the presidency all about himself. 

Biden may be making a major mistake, as he demonstrated this week, in questioning Trump’s intelligence and morals. That cake is baked. Only Trump’s die hard 40% think he’s anything approaching intelligent and as for morals, well just ask Sen. Mike Crapo who said he couldn’t support Trump after the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape and then supported him. There is little margin in emphasizing something everyone knows: Trump isn’t all that bright and everyone knows he’s sleazy, and he lies all the time.  

I’m not sure the young mayor of South Bend, Indiana Pete Buttigieg will be or should be the Democratic nominee, but he certainly has demonstrated an understanding that elections are about the future. “We face not just another presidential election, but a transition between one era and another,” Buttigieg said this week in a meaty speech on foreign policy. “I believe that the next three or four years will determine the next 30 or 40 for our country and our world.”

Pete Buttigeig, one of 23 Democratic presidential candidates2020

Second, appeal to reason and understand that politics in a game of addition, not subtraction. There is not a person in the country today that voted for Hillary Clinton who is going to vote for a second Trump term. The president is defying a law of political gravity, a very simple law: expand your base, attract new supporters, and keep what you have. Trump has turned those ideas upside down. He’s hoping to win a second term by purposefully not expanding his base of support. The only way this strategy works is if Democrats fail to reach out to the few independent voters who remain or if Trump succeeds in depressing the large and, I would argue, growing anti-Trump vote. 

One way to appeal to these folks is to respond to Trump with a bumper sticker slogan, some variation on: “Time for an adult in the White House.” Even many of his supporters cringe at Trump’s rants, incoherent insults and non-stop lies. 

Third, understand that the modern Democratic Party is defined by its broad coalition, while what passes for the Republican Party is an older, white ideological movement that at the moment stands only for Trump. The Democratic future in the next election and the next is the demographic reality that younger Americans, people of color and women will increasingly decide American elections. 

This would be the place where I throw down the gauntlet to Idaho Democrats, a beleaguered, largely leaderless group that has been operating without a strategy for more than 20 years. Here’s the bumper sticker: Youth, Women and Hispanic Americans. Idaho Democrats don’t just need a strategy they need a long game strategy, one that strives for real political relevance in ten years. Younger Idahoans, people in high school and college today, should be the core of that strategy. Then organize, organize, organize and aggressively bring many more young people into the political process. It would not only be the right thing to do, but it offers a path out of the wilderness. 

It’s an old fashioned notion, I know, but I still believe most elections come down to a question of fear versus hope. Donald Trump won, as every Republican since Reagan has, by emphasizing division, despair and decline. Against a flat-footed, yesterday candidate like Hillary Clinton it worked. In the moment of reckoning coming soon we’ll see if it works again. 

—–0—–

Idaho Politics, Mueller, Russia

A Nothing Burger…

Posted on by mjohnson

Nine days ago Robert Mueller III, the decorated former Marine Corps officer, the former assistant attorney general who prosecuted Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and helped put crime boss John Gotti in jail, the former FBI director, the life-long Republican finally spoke. 

“I will close by reiterating the central allegation of our indictments,” Mueller said at the conclusion of his less than 10 minutes in front of the cameras, “that there were multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election. That allegation deserves the attention of every American.” 

The former special counsel Robert Mueller III

During a Boise TV interview a few days later Idaho Sen. Jim Risch dismissed Mueller’s statement as – he actually said this – “a nothing burger.” 

Near as I can tell Risch, or for that matter no other member of the Idaho congressional delegation, has said anything about the substance of Bob Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference or the efforts by the president to obstruct the investigation. They’re all like Sgt. Schultz in the old Hogan’s Heroes television show – they see nothing, nothing. 

Yet, if you actually read Mueller’s report you’ll understand his detailed analysis of ten different and very specific instances when Trump sought to impede the Russia investigation. First by firing the FBI director and then ordering Mueller’s firing, a decision he lied about and told others to lie about. 

Then, as the report says, “the President engaged in a second phase of conduct, involving public attacks on the investigation, non-public efforts to control it, and efforts in both public and private to encourage witnesses not to cooperate with the investigation.”

And here is Mueller from his “nothing burger” statement: “As set forth in our report, after that investigation, if we had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that.”

Risch leads the thoroughly effete Idaho delegation in his unrelenting effort to minimize Russian electoral interference and Trump obstruction. In February, as reported by the Idaho Press, Risch said he was not worried about any threat from Russia, calling it “the most overrated country on the face of the planet.”

In March Risch dismissed the attorney general’s initial summary of Mueller’s report – we now know that summary was highly misleading and designed to confuse and minimize the findings – by saying: “For me, there was no news in Mueller’s report.” Later in his statement, Risch criticized Democrats and the media, calling claims against the president a “charade.”

When it was first disclosed that former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn had talked about sanctions with Russian officials prior to Trump’s inauguration Risch’s only comment: “I have thoughts, but I’m keeping them to myself.” Flynn, of course, later admitted to lying about his Russian contacts and still faces jail time. The former Ada County prosecutor has been silent as obstruction – denying subpoenas, resisting court orders, hiding documents – continues across the Trump Administration.

Idaho Senator Jim Risch with Florida Senator Marco Rubio

In his rare public statements addressing specific presidential acts, from North Korea to tariffs to Russia, Risch always toes the Trump line and dismisses any inconvenient truth. “I really don’t believe Trump acts in ways that help Russia,” he told the PBS NewsHour. 

When questioning former FBI director James Comey, who was fired, by Trump’s own admission to “take the heat off” the Russian investigation, Risch dismissed the president’s statement that Comey just “let Flynn go” as nothing more than a “hope” by Trump.  

For the record, the Mueller’s report lists Trump’s “let Flynn go” comment as its very first example of presidential obstruction. 

Conservative columnist George Will compares the “supine behavior” of Republicans like Risch and the rest of the Idaho delegation to “fragrant memories” of pre-World War II American communists who performed amazing mental gymnastics to keep on the right side of Josef Stalin. 

Or perhaps the more apt comparison is to the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who recently repeatedly refused to admit that Trump’s “birther” attacks on Barack Obama were racist. This is the awkward reality of Trump’s enablers, the partisan promoters like Sen. Risch: if you admit the truth you risk earning the president’s ire (or that of his all-accepting base) or you can, as the senator choses, find a way to repeatedly justify and dismiss any damaging evidence of Trump’s actions, even when that evidence is accumulated by a Republican former director of the FBI. 

After all, who you gonna believe? A president who uses lies as a governing model or your own eyes? 

Set aside, if you prefer, clear and compelling evidence that the president of the United States tried repeatedly to obstruct Mueller’s investigation, lied about it and influenced others to lie. One thousand former Justice Department officials are on the record saying he did. 

Set aside, as Mueller’s report says that the Russian government’s interference was clearly designed to help “presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.” 

Set aside that Trump’s campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts,” and it “welcomed” the help. Set aside that the Russian “social media campaign” and the Russian military’s computer hacking operations “coincided with a series of contacts between Trump Campaign officials and individuals with ties to the Russian government.”

And set aside one of the most politically intriguing details of this whole spectacularly un-American affair, that the Trump campaign shared with Russian operatives its own polling information before the election. Mueller’s investigation was unable to figure out what happened to this information because the special counsel “was not able to corroborate witness statements through comparison to contemporaneous communications or fully question witnesses about statements that appeared inconsistent with other known facts.”

Paul Manafort, the guy who apparently shared the polling information, is in jail and isn’t talking. 

Set all that aside and consider again what Mueller left us with: “There were multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election. That allegation deserves the attention of every American.” 

Then ask yourself: What has Jim Risch, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee (also a senior member of the Intelligence Committee) done about that? The only possible answer is nothing. Then ask yourself why? 

—–0—–

(This piece first appeared in the June 7, 2019 edition of the Lewiston (Idaho) Tribune.)