MESSAGE
| DATE | 2016-11-16 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout-NYLXS] the New Yorker is so stupid
|
This idiot, Jonathan Chait, forgets that before Trump soundly defeated
the Democrats, he equaly defeated the Republicans. Th two parties are
so netted together that is is not really possible to do one without the
other.
Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi Have a Plan to Make President Trump Popular
By Jonathan Chait
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and incoming Senate Minority Leader
Charles Schumer.Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images
In the disorienting wake of Donald Trump’s election, Democrats in
Congress grasped for some normality. To them — being Democrats reared
for decades in a lawmaking culture — this meant some reassurance that
they would participate in legislation. They quickly settled on Trump’s
proposal for infrastructure spending as a promising venue through which
they could trade cooperation for policy leverage. Charles Schumer, the
incoming Senate minority leader, sounded excited about the prospect of
passing a bill he has worked for years to enact without success. “As
President-elect Trump indicated last night, investing in infrastructure
is an important priority of his,” announced Nancy Pelosi. “We can work
together to quickly pass a robust infrastructure jobs bill.”
How and where to cooperate with Trump presents many dilemmas for the
opposition, pitting the Democrats’ self-interest against the need to
safeguard the welfare of the country’s political institutions. There are
certainly venues where Americans alarmed by the incoming president ought
to consider working with him for the sake of preserving the welfare of
the country. But infrastructure is not one of those dilemmas. Supporting
a Trumpian infrastructure bill would be to cooperate with the subversion
of American government and an act of political self-sabotage. It is an
idea so insanely bad it disturbingly suggests the party utterly fails to
grasp the challenge before it, or the way out.
***It would make sense that Trump’s election would enable the passage of
a large infrastructure plan if he were replacing a president who opposed
such a plan. This is not the case. Obama spent years pleading publicly
and privately with the Republicans to support a national infrastructure
bank. They blocked it on the purported grounds of affordability. To the
extent they are willing to support infrastructure spending under Trump,
or at least stand aside, it is a continuation of a pattern dating back
to Reagan, in which Republicans toggle between wild expansionary fiscal
policy under Republican presidents and brutal contractionary policy
under Democratic ones.****
- Yeah, Trump, like Bloomberg and Guiliani before him, eat those
Republicans lunch...
Republicans blew up the deficit under Ronald Reagan, then fomented
hysterical warnings of insolvency under Bill Clinton. When Clinton’s
policies structurally balanced the budget, they unbalanced it with
massive tax cuts, a military and security buildup, and a prescription
drug benefit, all entirely debt-financed. When the first signs of
recession appeared in early 2008, Republicans did support a Keynesian
stimulus bill. As Obama entered office, the seeming mild recession that
had spurred both parties to action a year before had spiraled into a
bottomless crisis unlike any in memory. But at the moment the
justification for Keynesian stimulus had become stronger than at any
time in the previous 80 years, Republicans embraced austerity, insisting
temporary deficit spending would worsen the economy. They held to that
stance — with the exception of tax cuts for the rich, which they support
regardless of circumstance — throughout Obama’s presidency, which is why
they blocked infrastructure spending despite its appeal to the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce and other business groups.
The cycle has been repeated enough times that careful observers simply
assume that the GOP will immediately flip from debt hysteria to debt
mania. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy told reporters today he
still “cares” about the debt, but has realized that economic growth is a
priority that will help resolve it — a realization that somehow dawned
in the immediate aftermath of the election after eluding him throughout
Obama’s two terms. This is a major reason the stock market has taken
Trump’s election with such equanimity: The government is no longer held
hostage by an opposition party committed to tight fiscal policy. Steven
Blitz, chief economist at Pangea Market Advisory, told The Wall Street
Journal that he had previously worried the economy would tip into
recession, but that new debt-financed tax cuts and spending would allay
such a scenario: “Now that Republicans are in control, there’s no
concern about debt and deficits,” said Steven Blitz, chief economist at
Pangea Market Advisory.
Again, this reversal has no relation to actual economic conditions. The
unemployment rate is now half the level it was at the outset of Obama’s
presidency, when Republicans opposed fiscal stimulus. For Democrats to
cooperate unconditionally with this strategy is to institutionalize a
political order in which Democratic presidents must be punished with
contractionary policy while Republicans are rewarded with expansionary
policy. Reasonable people can disagree about what level of national debt
can be sustained, but the figure is finite. The political system seems
to passively accept that America’s long-term debt should be allocated
toward the goal of maximizing growth exclusively during Republican
administrations. Why Democrats would find this system good for their
country, let alone their party, is difficult to understand.
There is additional irony in the prospect of a Republican infrastructure
plan, one with even more chilling implications for democratic
governance. In addition to their opposition to Democratic Keynesianism,
Republicans opposed Obama’s stimulus on the purported grounds that it
contained “pork” and “crony capitalism.” As Michael Grunwald details in
“The New New Deal,” his history of the stimulus, Obama’s administration
was seized with terror of being attacked for boondoggles. It established
a rigorous vetting mechanism to ensure no dollar would be
misappropriated, and obligingly eliminated any spending program that
could be attacked as wasteful. Republicans gleefully savaged spending
plans for such infrastructure as resodding the National Mall — as if
surrounding the Washington Monument with grass was an absurd indulgence
— public swimming pools, and virtually anything else. The
administration’s terror of waste did not stop the news media from
framing the stimulus as largely an exercise in pork, or in deploying its
resources to scour the country for examples of supposed waste. As
Grunwald shows, no evidence of impropriety surfaced. As a political
exercise, though, the campaign to lambaste the stimulus as corrupt
payoffs to insiders was a success.
What makes this history relevant is not the implication Democrats should
be driven by revenge or to replicate the Republican strategy. Indeed,
low levels of routine pork-barrelling ought to be considered at worst a
third-tier problem. The issue is that Trump is actually proposing to
invite unprecedented levels of corruption into government. Trump’s high
potential for corruption involves the interplay of two different
rejections of political norms. First, unlike every other presidential
candidate in modern history, he has refused to disclose his tax returns,
so his financial interests remain opaque. Second, he will continue to
hold his interests in office rather than retreat into passive
investment. Indeed, his branding business is so intricately connected to
his name, which will be enhanced immeasurably through his standing as
president, that he will garner enormous personal profits even if he and
his family govern in a completely above-board fashion.
But that is a highly optimistic scenario given Trump’s history. He has
gravitated toward business dealings with organized criminals both in the
United States and abroad. His “foundation” was a cesspool of
self-dealing, and he is facing trial for fraud. Business lobbyists could
literally give Trump or his children stock in return for favorable
treatment, and the public would have no way of knowing.
Yesterday, Trump’s close adviser and rumored cabinet official Rudy
Giuliani gave an interview to Jake Tapper about the potential conflict
of interest. His defense made it clear how willing the new
administration is to shred any semblance of public ethics. Asked by
Tapper about the presidential tradition of placing his assets in a blind
trust, Giuliani replied (correctly) that a blind trust would do no good
if Trump’s branding business continued, since he knows its assets, and
only selling off the entire company would do. But Giuliani insisted that
such a drastic step would be unfair to Trump’s offspring: “Put his
children out of work, they’d have to go start a whole new business, that
would set up a whole set of new problems.” The premise that Trump’s
children could not find jobs that did not involve selling their father’s
name, and that averting the crisis of Trump-children unemployment should
take precedence over averting massive corruption of the federal
government is one Republicans probably do not relish having to defend.
Giuliani’s second defense was even more audacious. “You have to have
some confidence in the integrity of the president. The man is an
enormously wealthy man. I don’t think there’s any real fear or suspicion
that he’s seeking to enrich himself by becoming president,” he laughed.
“If he wanted to enrich himself, he wouldn’t have run for president.”
In reality, the world is replete with wealthy men who attained power and
used it to enrich themselves. This is the very source of concern about
Trump’s attack on the norms that prevent American presidents from using
their power for self-enrichment. These norms exist precisely because we
don’t assume a president is immune to temptation. Giuliani’s argument is
that the very fact of Trump’s wealth refutes any suspicion of his
motives and frees him from any obligation to demonstrate his integrity.
His premise is banana republicanism.
At minimum, Democrats could insist that any dealing with Trump be
conditioned upon him selling off his family business and placing the
assets in a blind trust, and attaching a law requiring presidential
candidates to disclose their tax returns. They now have the opportunity
to simultaneously expose the hollow joke of Trump’s populist image and
to defend vital protections against the subordination of the presidency
to private gain. They seem ready to choose neither.
Congressional Republicans demonstrated the partisan advantage to be
gained by unified opposition. As Mitch McConnell boasted, the public
would hold the president and his party alone responsible for how they
believed Washington was doing, and their estimation of how Washington
was doing would be colored by the degree to which the two parties were
getting along. If Democrats support elements of Trump’s agenda, it will
make Trump more popular and lift the popularity of his party, enabling
Republicans to entrench their majorities.
Giving Trump and his party such a valuable gift, and weakening
Democrats’ own chances for regaining power, is worth doing in the case
of a vital humanitarian interest. But for some highways? And to give
bipartisan cover to what may well have grants to contractors who will be
giving kickbacks to Trump and his family? From the standpoint of
Democrats like Pelosi and Schumer, the end of the Obama-era legislative
boycott and a return to the old Washington, where they can sit with
colleagues and hash out funding formulas and hold ribbon-cutting
ceremonies, probably feels like sweet relief. They appear to be in the
grips of a dangerous myopia.
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive
http://www.coinhangout.com - coins!
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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