BuzzFeed set off a cascading series of controversies last week when it reported that President Donald Trump had “directed” his longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about a Trump Tower deal in Moscow that was being negotiated during the 2016 election. The immediate takeaway was that, if the report were true, then Trump had committed a straightforwardly impeachable offense. The allegation was “so cut-and-dried that even Republicans would be hard-pressed not to consider impeachment,” wrote Aaron Blake in The Washington Post. Democrats in Congress raised the alarm. “If the President directed Cohen to lie to Congress, that is obstruction of justice. Period. Full stop,” Rhode Island’s David Cicilline, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, tweeted.
But then, as happens so often in this presidency, the story quickly became clouded by uncertainty and accusations of media bias. The office of the special counsel issued its first public response to a specific story since Robert Mueller began investigating Russia’s involvement in the election. “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate,” the statement read. You could practically hear the sighs of relief in the Oval Office. Trump even went so far as to express gratitude to Mueller, his most implacable enemy: “I appreciate the special counsel coming out with a statement last night,” he said. “I think it was very appropriate that they did so, I very much appreciate that.”
But there’s no reason to doubt that Trump has, in fact, repeatedly instructed subordinates to tell lies to Congress and law enforcement authorities, including lies that amount to crimes. The difference is that the media outlets that reported those other cases didn’t say, explicitly, that the president “directed” his aides to lie. Another important difference is the way in which Trump gets his subordinates to lie, which has served to delay the moment when we all admit that he is quite clearly suborning perjury.
Alexandra Petri at The Washington Post writes—Liked the wedding ring story? Here are further feel-good tales:
If you liked the heartwarming story of the furloughed federal employee who pawned her wedding ring, only to have her family buy it back for her, don’t worry! There are plenty more stories where that came from!
One of the more depressing angles of being alive in this wonderful corner of time is our relentless tendency to try to put a positive spin on horrifying situations: This isn’t a horrifying story about someone without access to the medication they need to live; it’s a heartwarming tale of how 50 strangers got together and bought insulin! This isn’t a harrowing account of how teachers supply classrooms from their own pocket; it’s a feel-good story about the Mom Who Bought 90 Glue Sticks and a Truck! (My friend Jessica M. Goldstein has written about this “Feel-Good Feel-Bad Story” phenomenon repeatedly.)
If we are going to continue this relentless insistence on presenting fundamentally alarming tales about the system’s deep brokenness as uplifting stories of human friendship, here are a few more readers should love: [...]
Heartwarming! With Help from Animals, Family Manages to Use Stable to Give Birth
Right in the Feels! This Little Match Girl Was Finally Reunited with Her Grandmother! [...]
Warm Fuzzies! When Winston Smith Was Forced to Spend Time Confronting His Fears, He Realized He and Big Brother Had More in Common than They Thought
Cas Mudde at The Guardian writes—Why Joe Biden shouldn't run for president:
According to most polls, former vice-president Joe Biden is the frontrunner of the Democratic hopefuls: 76% of the potential Democratic electorate holds a favorable opinion of him, whereas only 12% is either unfavorable or neutral/doesn’t know him.
Biden supporters will use this as evidence that he is the best presidential candidate for the Democratic party – but they are wrong. In most ways, Biden is the worst candidate for the Democrats and the best opponent for Trump.
Matt Bruenig at Jacobin writes—How to Make the TVA a Clean Energy Juggernaut:
When the Great Depression hit in the late 1920s, the whole country went into an economic tailspin. But not all places were affected equally. Less-developed rural areas like the Tennessee Valley were especially hammered by the financial collapse. When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt set out to help this area as part of his New Deal, he hit upon a relatively novel idea: create a massive public enterprise that would directly upgrade much of the area’s economy primarily by producing and distributing cheap electricity to the homes and businesses in the area.
In 1933, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was born out of this idea. The TVA has been a mainstay of the region’s economy ever since.
Operating under the slogan “Electricity for All,” the TVA immediately set about constructing hydroelectric dams across the region and selling the electricity from those dams to people in Tennessee and six adjacent states. Over the years, it has gradually built up enough energy-producing assets — including nuclear plants, coal-fired plants, oil-fired plants, solar sites, and wind farms — to annually produce 160 billion kilowatt hours of electricity that ultimately finds its way into the homes of ten million people.
As the American left tries to construct and implement a Green New Deal to avoid an imminent climate catastrophe, it should take inspiration from the electrification legacy of the first New Deal. In a paper released today by the People’s Policy Project, I outline reforms that could be made to the TVA Act to transform the TVA into a clean energy juggernaut that works to decarbonize electricity generation across the country.
NOW THAT A LIFETIME DOCUMENTARY series has brought the sordid details of R&B singer R. Kelly’s alleged sexual predation and abuse against underage girls and women to a mass audience, American culture faces still another moment of reckoning. Will we finally own up to the evasions and deferrals of justice enabled by the social privileges of superstardom? Or will Kelly’s ugly past exploits be swept under the rug once more, even in a #MeToo era premised on the overdue introduction of male accountability within our centers of cultural and media power? The questions raised by “Surviving R. Kelly” cannot be fruitfully explored without a frank confrontation with race—a confrontation that uncovers the ways the wider political culture throws Black women and girls under the bus, while damaging progressive interests in the process.
Black victims of sexual abuse are often disregarded. This has been true historically, but also in media coverage of today’s #MeToo movement. Notwithstanding the intention of Tarana Burke, originator of #MeToo, to draw attention to Black women’s experience of sexual abuse, its uptake in popular culture has seen Black women and girls pretty much gentrified out of it.
For those who believe that an artist accused of abusing scores of white women and underage girls would never have survived such a powerful exposé, the music industry is now being called upon to right an intersectional wrong—to reverse its apparent disregard of Black women and girls. But, there is more than the accountability of the industry at stake now that the shattering stories in “Surviving R. Kelly” have been told once again. There’s an uncomfortable challenge at hand: we have to look at the ways that conventional fault lines between race and gender injustice have shielded behavior like Kelly’s, permitting an intra-racial closing of ranks and an inter-racial resolve to look away.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—The president is the paralyzer-in-chief. He must be stopped:
Trump wants rational people to be so horrified at the damage he’s willing to inflict that they’ll cave in. It’s his M.O., as Damian Paletta and Josh Dawsey noted in The Post: “He creates — or threatens to create — a calamity, and then insists he will address the problem only if his adversary capitulates to a separate demand.”
Giving in to such behavior is not moderate, reasonable or sensible.
What would be moderate is a suggestion from my friend, former Capitol Hill staffer Bruce Wolpe — reopen the government and name a bipartisan commission to assess border and immigration issues, with a 60-day deadline to report.
Yes, Congress regularly resorts to commissions when government seems paralyzed. But with the president assuming the mantle of paralyzer in chief, we need a resolution that does not empower a leader so selfish he’s quite happy to tear our government apart, piece by piece.
William Rivers Pitt at Truth Out writes—Shutdown Exposes How Many Americans Live Paycheck to Paycheck:
It has further exposed the Republican Party’s bottomless disdain for marginalized people through its craven refusal to contain the man who has unleashed all this misery. It has exposed deep fissures in Trump’s once-unbreakable base as more and more of his supporters — battered by tariffs and now the shutdown — come to correctly believe they’ve been played for chumps.
The shutdown has exposed something else far more personal and uncomfortable, something most folks don’t like to talk about because it is too frightening to contemplate, something they can’t see an easy way to fix. It is this simple, terrible truth: A great many people in the US are one missed paycheck away from complete financial calamity.
This has proven true for many of the federal workers and contractors furloughed by the shutdown. The end of the month is less than two weeks away, and those furloughed workers will collectively owe more than $400 million in mortgage and rent payments, to say nothing of utility bills and child care expenses. Throw in food and gasoline, and the math becomes grim in a big hurry.
This crisis is not limited to furloughed federal workers, however. According to a report by Forbes Magazine, a full 78 percent of all US workers are living paycheck to paycheck. One quarter of workers are financially unable to set aside any money for savings after each pay cycle. Three quarters of workers are in debt, and half of those believe they always will be. Most minimum wage workers are required to work multiple jobs to make ends meet.
Paul Brown at Climate Network writes—Nuclear Energy Plants Are Closing, Hurt by High Prices and Bad PR:
Once hailed as a key part of the energy future of the United Kingdom and several other countries, the high-tech atomic industry is now heading in the opposite direction, towards nuclear sunset.
It took another body blow last week when plans to build four new reactors on two sites in the U.K. were abandoned as too costly by the Japanese company Hitachi. This was even though it had already sunk £2.14 billion (300 billion yen) in the scheme. [...]
The latest withdrawal means the end of the Japanese dream of keeping its nuclear industry alive by exporting its technology overseas. With the domestic market killed by the Fukushima disaster in 2011, overseas sales were to have been its salvation.
It also leaves the British plan to lead an international nuclear renaissance by building ten new nuclear stations in the U.K. in tatters, with the government facing an urgent need for a new energy policy.
Joe Sanberg at The Nation writes—The Green New Deal Is Our Best Hope for Saving the Planet—and Ending Poverty:
If we’re going to unrig the system and make it work for everyone, we have to transform every aspect of the economy, and rebuild it from the bottom up. Luckily, the massive set of investments required to address climate change, called the Green New Deal, gives us an opportunity to do exactly that.
We’re talking about a full-scale mobilization of the economy—of both the public and private sectors—on a scale we haven’t seen since World War II, and with it, the opportunity to fundamentally shift the economic balance of power, strengthen workers’ rights, and create widespread prosperity for the 21st century.
Making the transition to a carbon-free economy is going to require a massive workforce. The Green New Deal would create tens of millions of jobs, from installing solar panels to retrofitting buildings, from manufacturing electric vehicles to reforesting public lands.
An emerging consensus among economists argues that only massive and sustained investment in the real economy, not stimulus or tax cuts, can raise stagnating wages and permanently revive American prosperity. And a comprehensive Green New Deal plan would include measures for encouraging unionization, supporting local business, worker ownership and co-ops, and for paying a living wage and even a true middle class wage.
David Newville at USA Today writes—Ocasio-Cortez is right: Rich must pay more to help close America's wealth and income gaps:
Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s comments about a 70 percent tax rate on the wealthy set off a controversy over who does and doesn’t understand how America’s tax system works. What has been lost in the dust-up is that the wealthy pay relatively little in taxes compared with their peers in other developed countries, and the congresswoman is correct that they will need to pay more if we are going to continue to provide the quality public services, infrastructure, health care and economic equity all Americans truly deserve.
The signature achievement of the last Congress and the Trump administration, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, took us in exactly the wrong direction. It radically reduced taxes for the wealthy and corporations, at a cost of $1.9 trillion over 10 years. And the new law provides only marginal or no benefits for average Americans and households of color in particular.
A recent report by my group Prosperity Now found that $200 billion in benefits from the new law, out of a total of $275 billion, goes to the top 20 percent of households. Furthermore, white households will receive $2,020 on average in benefits compared with $970 and $840 for Latino and black households respectively. Regardless of race, even solidly middle-class households (earning between $40,000 and $110,000) received relatively little — an average of $2.75 a day compared with the top 1 percent of earners, who get $131 a day. [...]
Now that they control the House, Democrats have a big opportunity to design and advance a progressive economic agenda that could become a reality after 2020. This agenda should place a clear emphasis on helping the most vulnerable — the poor, the working class and households of color — and not retrace historical patterns of providing the biggest benefits to wealthy white families.
The Bloomberg Editorial Board writes—The Case Against 70 Percent: Income taxes should be progressive, but their purpose is not to castigate the rich. Yes, it’s pretty what you’d expect from them, but it’s worth knowing what various opponents are going to be say in this matter if it ever gets introduced and given a committee hearing.
Robert Kuttner at The American Prospect writes—Wall Street Journal Follies:
I could write an entire blog just on the intellectual dishonesty of The Wall Street Journal. Just when I think they can’t get sink any lower, they top their old record.
Over the weekend, their lead editorial was titled “Harvesting Democratic Votes.”
The Journal is mightily aggrieved that California has actually made it easier for citizens to vote—things like same day registration, automatic registration, expanded use of provisional ballots and mail in ballots.
The Journal is doubly offended that so many Californians apparently choose to vote for Democrats. Imagine that! And worse, the Democrats, in the federal voting reform bill HR 1 “are trying to do for the country what they’ve done for California.”
This from a publication that did not say boo about gross forms of voter suppression throughout the country that threw millions of qualified voters off the rolls. Indeed, for all of the Republican stated concern about supposed voter fraud, the prime case of ballot fraud in the 2018 midterms was in North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District, where Republican operatives used fake mail-in ballots to stuff ballot boxes for the GOP candidate. [...]
Elizabeth Zach is the staff writer at the nonprofit Rural Community Assistance Corporation, where she covers rural poverty and economies, the environment, and tribal issues across the 13 states of the American West, including Alaska and Hawaii. At In These Times she writes—Emigrating From the U.S. May Be the Only Way To Afford Eldercare:
Later this year, my partner and I plan to marry and move to Cologne, Germany, where he lives, and we agreed to bring my mother with us. So, last September, I visited the Residenz am Dom, a senior care facility in Cologne, and met with Marie-Luise Wrage, a social worker who counsels family members of potential residents.
When it came time to discuss costs, Wrage appeared slightly flustered, concerned that the amounts would be off-putting. First she explained to me that the German healthcare system uniformly classifies stages of disability and that costs are strictly regulated based on a patient’s needs. The monthly fees for my mother to be housed, fed and cared for at the Residenz, she finally revealed, would come to about $3,200—at which point I revealed that my mother pays more than twice that in Sacramento.
We laughed, but joking aside, agreed: Growing old—or falling ill—in the United States is not for the poor.
The national median cost in the United States for a one-bedroom unit in an assisted living community is now $4,000 per month, or $48,000 per year. Alzheimer’s or dementia care increases that cost by an additional $1,200 per month. Seniors must also often plan for out-of-pocket expenses, in some cases up to $2,000 in copays, coinsurance and prescription drugs, as well as amenities not provided by care facilities, such as toiletries and nonprescription medicines.
Why the disparity between Germany and the United States? Benjamin Verghe, research director at the advocacy group Caring Across Generations (CAG)—who, like me, lived for 15 years in Germany—explains, “There is no organized system for eldercare in the United States, while Germany has a social insurance program. Also, healthcare in the United States is mostly private providers, and since individuals have no leverage to bargain, costs are higher. In Germany, there is a budget for healthcare, whereby the government negotiates prices with providers. Everyone pays in, creating a whole nation of clients and a viable business model.” [...]