Tag Archives: Trump

Election Officials in Every Swing State Say There’s No Evidence of Voter Fraud

Posted on by

From today’s Newsweek:

Election officials in 49 states, including swing states crucial to the victory of Democratic President-elect Joe Biden, have all publicly stated that they’ve seen no evidence of widespread voter fraud. Their statements run contrary to the claims of the Republican National Committee (RNC) and President Donald Trump‘s re-election campaign.

Months before the election, Trump claimed he would only lose if there were widespread fraud or vote-rigging. Trump subsequently lost the election by more than 5 million popular votes and 73 electoral votes.

Biden decisively won due to 273,000 popular votes and 79 electoral votes in six swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Election officials and secretaries of state from those and 43 other states told The New York Times that they neither suspect nor have proof of any widespread voter fraud. The only state not to respond was Texas, where Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick offered citizens $1 million for any evidence of fraud.

Gabriel Sterling, voting implementation manager in the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, disavowed any claims of fraud to the Times. Jake Rollow, spokesman for Michigan’s Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, told the publication, “We have not seen any evidence of fraud or foul play in the actual administration of the election.”

Jacklin Rhoads, spokeswoman for Pennsylvania’s Democratic Attorney General Josh Shapiro, said, “No active lawsuit even alleges, and no evidence presented so far has shown, widespread problems.”

Read the complete article here.

John (“Bomb Iran”) Bolton, the New Warmonger in the White House

Posted on by

From today’s The New Yorker Magazine:

Hawks are closing in on the White House. John Bolton, arguably the most abrasive American diplomat of the twenty-first century, will soon assume the top foreign-policy job at the National Security Council. As is his wont, President Trump announced yet another shakeup of his inner circle in a tweet late on Thursday. He dismissed General H. R. McMaster, who couldn’t survive a testy relationship with the impatient President despite his battle-hardened career and three stars on his epaulets. Trump tapped Bolton to take over. A former U.N. Ambassador currently best known as a Fox News pundit, Bolton has advocated far harder positions than Trump, including bombing campaigns, wars, and regime change. The late-day news flash sent chills across Washington, even among some Republicans.

With Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director, due to take over from the ousted Rex Tillerson at the State Department, the team deciding American actions across the globe will now be weighted by hard-liners and war advocates. Defense Secretary James Mattis, a retired marine general, is the most pragmatic policymaker left. What an irony. (And how long will Mattis stay? He was photographed having dinner with Tillerson on Tuesday.)

Bolton, a Yale-educated lawyer whose trademark is a white walrus mustache, championed the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which produced chaos followed by waves of extremist violence in the region. He also advocated international intervention to oust Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. He has repeatedly urged military action in Iran and North Korea, which he has called “two sides of the same coin.”

In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, written two months ago, Bolton condemned the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran as a “massive strategic blunder”—then went further. American policy, he wrote, “should be ending Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution before its fortieth anniversary,” next February. “Recognizing a new Iranian regime in 2019 would reverse the shame of once seeing our diplomats held hostage for four hundred and forty-four days. The former hostages can cut the ribbon to open the new U.S. Embassy in Tehran.”

Read the complete article here.

Tariffs bad news for American economy, including workers and consumers

Posted on by

From today’s The Hill:

There’s never a good time for tariffs. American workers and consumers will pay dearly for the Trump administration’s short-sighted action to protect an industry that shows no signs of needing any protection—the market values of the five largest steel companies have more than doubled over the past five years. Yet with a major infrastructure spending bill set to come through Congress over the next year, Trump’s tariffs are bad policy with even worse timing.

While a small amount of people will benefit from the proposed tariffs, many more will be harmed. The American steel industry employs roughly 140,000 workers, but industries that rely on steel to create their products—the ones who will suffer directly under the tariffs—employ 6.5 million workers. A recent study by the Trade Partnership found that the direct cost of tariffs on employment would be 18 jobs lost for every one created. On net, 470,000 Americans could lose their jobs.

The Trade Partnership’s study fits with the lessons of recent history. In 2002, President Bush instituted protective tariffs on foreign steel imports. After just a year in which steel prices rose by up to 50 percent, steel production was insufficient to meet demand, 200,000 Americans lost their jobs, and the tariff was dropped. A mere fifteen years later, these lessons have already been forgotten.

Nor will other countries sit idly by as Trump restricts trade. Well over 10 million Americans’ jobs are supported by exports—jobs which would be at risk in the case of a trade war. Already, the European Union has prepared a ten-page hit list of potential targets of retaliatory tariffs should Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs go into effect.

American consumers will be harmed as well. A combination of new steel tariffs and lumber tariffs imposed last year mean that the cost of new homes is likely to continue rising—nearly half of steel imports go towards construction. Other American staples such as cars and canned beer are also set to see price spikes resulting directly from tariffs.

Read the complete article here.

Will Trump’s Tariffs Help or Hurt American Workers? Contrasting Views

Posted on by

From the New York Times:

The Case for Trump’s Tariffs and ‘America First’ Economics

By DANIEL McCARTHY 

In his campaign, Donald Trump stressed “America First” economic nationalism. But in his first year in office, the theme languished. So when he recently announced that he intended to impose steep tariffs on steel and aluminum, Republicans were as surprised as anyone.

The conservative press and right-leaning think tanks were outraged. The director of the National Economic Council, Gary Cohn, resigned in protest. Conservatives and free-market theorists could forgive Mr. Trump many sins, but to actually flirt with economic nationalism was inexcusable.

For 25 years, free-trade orthodoxy has been a bipartisan consensus among America’s policy elite. Conservatives might editorialize about it more, but liberal presidents arguably advanced free trade the most, from Bill Clinton’s signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement to Barack Obama’s negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. (George W. Bush, by contrast, put tariffs on steel, though he did so without the trade-war rhetoric that Mr. Trump has relished.) With his signing on Thursday of a tariff order, Mr. Trump appears once again to be setting himself against the mandarins of both parties.

That has been a politically successful strategy for him in the past. But while his approval ratings may benefit from a brawl over trade, the more important question is whether economic nationalism is any good for the country. In principle, it is.

Read the completer article here.

Democrats Should Embrace an Open Economy

By TERRY McAULIFFE 

President Trump’s decision to announce tariffs on steel and aluminum is his latest effort to close America off from the world in a counterproductive movement to turn back the global economy 40 years. The decision serves as a moment for Democrats to stand up for an open America that confidently competes globally.

The immediate impact of Mr. Trump’s policy will be price increases for the middle class and loss of automotive-related jobs, which Democrats should campaign against in 2018. But for the longer term, these tariffs also represent a pessimistic and backward-looking view of the world that Democrats must reject. The future of the American economy is jobs in high-skill fields like cybersecurity, advanced manufacturing and energy technology, not in trying to reopen mills that closed down in the 1980s. Our policy must evolve to position America for technological changes and globalization, instead of pretending those trends will not continue.

The political opportunity for Democrats is even stronger because congressional Republicans under Mr. Trump have given up on defending an American economy that competes globally. The relatively sheepish response from supposed free-trade advocates in the congressional Republican leadership shows they are more fearful of offending Mr. Trump than they are concerned with preventing price increases that working families in Kentucky and Wisconsin will face on everything from beer to baby strollers.

For Democrats, the message is simple: After congressional Republicans passed a tax cut to benefit Wall Street and their wealthiest donors, they are now allowing significant price increases that will affect middle-class families, seniors and small businesses.

Read the complete article here.

Trump appointees, this time in USDA, continue to violate federal ethics laws

Posted on by

From today’s New York Times by Danielle Ivory and Robert Faturechi:

At a private meeting in September, congressional aides asked Rebeckah Adcock, a top official at the Department of Agriculture, to reveal the identities of the people serving on the deregulation team she leads at the agency.

Teams like Ms. Adcock’s, created under an executive order by President Trump, had been taking heat from Democratic lawmakers over their secrecy. What little was publicly known suggested that some of the groups’ members had deep ties to the industries being regulated.

Ms. Adcock, a former pesticide industry executive, brushed off the request, according to House aides familiar with the exchange, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. Making the names public, they recalled her saying, would trigger a deluge of lobbyists.

In fact, interviews and visitor logs at the Agriculture Department showed that Ms. Adcock had already been meeting with lobbyists, including those from her former employer, the pesticide industry’s main trade group, CropLife America, and its members. CropLife pushes the agenda of pesticide makers in Washington, including easing rules related to safety standards and clean water.

Ms. Adcock, who left the trade group in April, maintained contact with her former industry allies despite a signed ethics agreement promising to avoid for one year issues involving CropLife as well as matters that she had lobbied about in the two years before joining the government.

In one meeting, Ms. Adcock discussed issues banned by the ethics agreement with an executive who had been her lobbying partner weeks earlier at CropLife, according to the accounts of participants and the visitor logs, obtained through a public records request by The New York Times and ProPublica.

Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the U.S.D.A. who also spoke on behalf of Ms. Adcock, said she had not violated her ethics agreement by meeting with her former industry allies. He also denied that Ms. Adcock had discussed issues related to her previous lobbying at the meeting, or that she had suggested that her deregulation team would be swamped by lobbyists if names of its members were released.

“The career ethics officers at U.S.D.A. agree that this is not a violation of the ethics agreement that Rebeckah Adcock signed,” said Mr. Murtaugh, citing a 2009 memo by the Office of Government Ethics.

Others dispute that interpretation of the memo; the ethics office declined to say whether the memo applied to the meeting, citing its policy not to discuss individual cases.

Read entire article here.

Health Secretary Resigns After Drawing Fire for Expensive Chartered Flights

Posted on by

From today’s New York Times by Peter Baker:

Tom Price, the health and human services secretary, resigned under pressure on Friday after racking up at least $400,000 in travel bills for chartered flights and undermining President Trump’s promise to drain the swamp of a corrupt and entitled capital.

Already in trouble with Mr. Trump for months of unsuccessful efforts to repeal and replace President Barack Obama’s health care program, Mr. Price failed to defuse the president’s anger over his high-priced travel by agreeing to pay a portion of the cost and expressing “regret” for his actions.

“I’m not happy, O.K.?” Mr. Trump told reporters as he was about to head to his New Jersey golf club for the weekend, barely an hour before the resignation was announced. “I can tell you, I’m not happy.” He called Mr. Price “a very good man” but added that the secretary’s offer to reimburse the government for just part of the cost of the flights “would be unacceptable.”

The White House announcement of Mr. Price’s departure was spare, with none of the customary praise of his work or thanks for his service. The statement issued by the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said simply that Mr. Price had “offered his resignation earlier today and the president accepted.”

Mr. Trump tapped Don J. Wright, a deputy assistant secretary for health and the director of the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, to serve as acting secretary. Possible candidates for a successor include Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and Scott Gottlieb, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

Read the complete article here.

By Pulling Out on Paris, Trump’s Policy “America First” Means “America Last”

Posted on by

Today President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would pull out of the Paris Climate Accord signed by his predecessor President Barack Obama less than two years ago. At the time, the agreement was hailed as the single most important policy initiative for countries to curb carbon emissions in an effort to slow the massive and potentially cataclysmic climate changes that have been accelerated by human activity and energy pollution over the last 100 years.

In pulling out of the agreement, Trump fulfilled a campaign pledge based on soliciting the fear of working class Americans that they would suffer economically and stoking their false hopes that doing so would bring back jobs in destructive industries such as coal-fired energy plants.

The truth is coal suffers not merely from the fact that it is pollution heavy, but also from the fact that is costly to retrieve, refine, and burn—so much so that cheap and plentiful natural gas, and not the alleged bogey-man of environmental regulations, was the single largest factor leading to the market decline of coal and, to a lesser extent, oil.

So, pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement will not bring back jobs to those parts of the country that have historically relied on pollution-heavy technologies such as coal (in wide ranging places like West Virginia and Montana), and for that reason is economically inefficient and filled with false hope. What is worse, Trump’s policy change signals to the rest of the world that “American First” means American will no longer lead the world in making smart decisions to leave future generations with a habitable planet and ecology.

In short, Trump just said “Fuck You” to future generations who should be concerned about the lasting effects that relying on polluting technologies now will leave for our children and their children to clean up after we are long gone. Americans are rightly outraged, and we must work to ensure that this disastrous policy change is reversed—yet again!—in 2020.

Bribe Cases, Secret Jared Kushner Partner, Potential Conflicts of Interest

Posted on by

From today’s New York Times by Jesse Drucker

It was the summer of 2012, and Jared Kushner was headed downtown.

His family’s real estate firm, the Kushner Companies, would spend about $190 million over the next few months on dozens of apartment buildings in tony Lower Manhattan neighborhoods including the East Village, the West Village and SoHo.

For much of the roughly $50 million in down payments, Mr. Kushner turned to an undisclosed overseas partner. Public records and shell companies shield the investor’s identity. But, it turns out, the money came from a member of Israel’s Steinmetz family, which built a fortune as one of the world’s leading diamond traders.

A Kushner Companies spokeswoman and several Steinmetz representatives say Raz Steinmetz, 53, was behind the deals. His uncle, and the family’s most prominent figure, is the billionaire Beny Steinmetz, who is under scrutiny by law enforcement authorities in four countries. In the United States, federal prosecutors are investigating whether representatives of his firm bribed government officials in Guinea to secure a multibillion dollar mining concession. In Israel, Mr. Steinmetz was detained in December and questioned in a bribery and money laundering investigation. In Switzerland and Guinea, prosecutors have conducted similar inquiries.

The Steinmetz partnership with Mr. Kushner underscores the mystery behind his family’s multibillion-dollar business and its potential for conflicts with his role as perhaps the second-most powerful man in the White House, behind only his father-in-law, President Trump.

Although Mr. Kushner resigned in January from his chief executive role at Kushner Companies, he remains the beneficiary of trusts that own the sprawling real estate business. The firm has taken part in roughly $7 billion in acquisitions over the last decade, many of them backed by foreign partners whose identities he will not reveal. Last month, his company announced that it had ended talks with the Anbang Insurance Group, a Chinese financial firm linked to leading members of the ruling Communist Party. The potential agreement, first disclosed by The New York Times, had raised questions because of its favorable terms for the Kushners.

Read the entire article here.

Trumpism: The Dangers of Disruption

Posted on by

From today’s New York Times (Opinion Section):

by Francis Fukuyama, Senior Fellow, Stanford University

In Silicon Valley, where I live, the word “disruption” has an overwhelmingly positive valence: Thousands of smart, young people arrive here every year hoping to disrupt established ways of doing business — and become very rich in the process.

For almost everyone else, however, disruption is a bad thing. By nature, human beings prize stability and order. We learn to be adults by accumulating predictable habits, and we bond by memorializing our ancestors and traditions. So it should not be surprising that in today’s globalized world, many people are upset that vast technological and social forces constantly disrupt established social practices, even if they are better off materially.

Of course, globalization has produced enormous benefits. From 1970 to the 2008 financial crisis, global output quadrupled, and the benefits did not flow exclusively to the rich. According to the economist Steven Radelet, the number of people living in extreme poverty in developing countries fell from 42 percent in 1993 to 17 percent in 2011, while the percentage of children born in developing countries who died before their fifth birthday declined from 22 percent in 1960 to less than 5 percent by 2016.

Yet statistics like these do not reflect the lived experience of many people. The shift of manufacturing from the West to low labor-cost regions has meant that Asia’s rising middle classes have grown at the expense of rich countries’ working-class communities. And from a cultural standpoint, the huge movement of ideas, people and goods across national borders has disrupted traditional communities and ways of doing business. For some this has presented tremendous opportunity, but for others it is a threat.

…

Mr. Trump’s ascent poses a unique challenge to the American system because he fits comfortably into the trend toward illiberal democracy. He validated himself through popular support, but his entire career has been spent trying to bypass inconvenient rules — like the requirement to pay his own subcontractors. Much of his popularity rested heavily on his willingness to break existing customs about political correctness. This seemed politically bracing at first, but quickly became worrisome when Mr. Trump suggested that as president, he would “open up our libel laws” to initiate civil suits against his media critics. His pitch to the American voter was “I alone” can fix the country’s problems through sheer force of personality, and not through a reform of the country’s institutions.

That Mr. Trump expressed admiration for Mr. Putin, and that Mr. Putin returned the favor, should come as no surprise. Like Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump seems to want to use a democratic mandate to undermine the checks and balances that characterize a genuine liberal democracy. He will be an oligarch in the Russian mold: a rich man who used his wealth to gain political power and who would use political power to enrich himself once in office. And like Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump was able to create alternative narratives that often went unchallenged by his supporters.

Read the full article here.

Trump Cabinet Signals Embrace of Wall Street Elite

Posted on by

We told you so, America. Trump voters have elected a billionaire business man, with a myriad of conflicts of interest between his private companies and his new public position, and who has deep ties to Wall Street and the wealthy and political elite of this country. There will be no change under Trump; only more of the same status quo economics that has hurt ordinary working Americans and enriched the wealthy even more. It almost belongs in a Charles Dickens novel. So sad!

From The New York Times, December 1, 2016. Read the full story here.

In a campaign commercial that ran just before the election, Donald J. Trump’s voice boomed over a series of Wall Street images. He described “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations.”

The New York Stock Exchange, the hedge fund billionaire George Soros and the chief executive of the investment bank Goldman Sachs flashed across the screen.

Now Mr. Trump has named a former Goldman executive and co-investor with Mr. Soros to spearhead his economic policy.

With Wednesday’s nomination of Steven Mnuchin, a Goldman trader turned hedge fund manager and Hollywood financier, to be Treasury secretary, a new economic leadership is taking shape in Washington.

That two investors — Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Ross — will occupy two major economic positions in the new administration is the most powerful signal yet that Mr. Trump plans to emphasize policies friendly to Wall Street, like tax cuts and a relaxation of regulation, in the early days of his administration.

While that approach has been cheered by investors (the stocks of Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have been on a tear since the election), it stands in stark contrast to the populist campaign that Mr. Trump ran and the support he received from working-class voters across the country.