Politics & Stuff

[NikkiCFC 7,950]

7 hours ago, cosmicway said:

1.30 maybe but I not in the last days - in July, August.
In the last days it was something like 1.90 - 2.20 as I recall.
Anyway 1.50 is strong as elections go.

This is on the day of election in 2016. 

https://qz.com/830626/election-2016-uk-betting-for-the-us-election-is-set-to-beat-records

Clinton is currently trading at 1.20 on Betfair, giving her an 83% chance of being elected according to those odds. In 2012, president Barack Obama was trading at 1.31 the day before election day, giving him around 76% chance of becoming president. There’s far less enthusiasm for Republican Donald Trump, who is trading at 5.80, with a 17% chance of being elected.

 

Edited October 27 by NikkiCFC

[Vesper 28,801]

How Trump could use the military to go after the 'radical left'

The military isn't supposed to police Americans, but there are exceptions.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/could-trump-use-military-go-after-radical-left/story?id=114806253

 

Former President Donald Trump says active-duty or National Guard troops could be used to go after "radical left lunatics" to handle any Election Day chaos, warning that the bigger problem facing the United States isn't a foreign enemy but "the people from within."

The suggestion of using military force following a political election is hypothetical, considering Trump won't have command of U.S. troops in November. If he wins the election, Trump wouldn't gain control of the armed forces until mid-January following the inauguration.

But deploying the military within U.S. borders is a suggestion Trump has made before, including the idea that the military could police the southern border and help deport an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.

Trump continues to demonize migrants, falsely claims they're 'building an army'

"I think the bigger problem are the people from within," Trump told Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures."

"We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics... And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or really necessary by the military, because they can't let that happen," he said.

So, can a president use U.S. troops to police Americans and quash political protests?

Many of Trump's supporters say yes, citing a 200-year-old law meant to curb rebellions. The Insurrection Act of 1807 was used during the Civil War and throughout the 1960s to enforce civil rights laws.

Legal experts are now warning the law is dangerously vague and ripe for abuse.

Here's what to know about the use of military power on U.S. soil:

The military is barred from the daily policing of Americans. But it can be used to quell rebellions

The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act mostly prohibits active-duty military troops from carrying out law enforcement duties inside the United States.

The idea behind the law is that any president -- as commander in chief of U.S. forces -- shouldn't be allowed to use federal military might against its own citizens.

But it's a different law that was passed earlier that century that's caught the attention of many Trump supporters.

First enacted in 1807, the Insurrection Act says the president can call on a militia or the U.S. armed forces if there's been "any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy" in a state that "opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws."

The Insurrection Act has been used dozens of times throughout history, but not by Trump

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the law has been invoked dozens of times throughout history, including by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War and by Lyndon B. Johnson to quell rioting after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used the law to deploy members of the Army's 101st Airborne Division to escort nine Black students into Little Rock Central High School, after the Arkansas governor used the state's National Guard to prevent the students from entering the school.

More recently, the law was invoked by President George H.W. Bush during the 1992 riots in Los Angeles that followed the trial acquittal of police officers in the Rodney King case. The law was also under consideration in 2005 following Hurricane Katrina, but was not used.

In the days leading up to the Jan. 6 riot, some Trump supporters wanted the president to invoke the Insurrection Act as a justification for far-right militia groups to storm the Capitol and to keep Trump in power despite losing the election.

Trump falsely claimed he won the election, but never invoked the Insurrection Act while in office.

Experts warn the law is dangerously vague

Legal experts have proposed reforms to the Insurrection Act, including one proposal earlier this year by the American Law Institute.

"There is agreement on both sides of the aisle that the Insurrection Act gives any president too much unchecked power," Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor and former assistant attorney general in the Bush administration, said last April.

It's unlikely, though, that such a sharply divided Congress would take up the issue any time soon.

There's another law, too, that Trump could try to rely on when it comes to handling illegal immigration -- the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which allows the president to deport any noncitizen from a country that the U.S. is at war with.

In his interview with Time magazine this year, Trump didn't cite a legal justification when he said he'd use the National Guard to conduct mass deportations and create detention camps for people living illegally inside the U.S.

In the end, whether any of Trump's proposals are legal would likely be determined by the courts, including federal judges he appointed.

[cosmicway 1,323]

10 hours ago, NikkiCFC said:

This is on the day of election in 2016. 

https://qz.com/830626/election-2016-uk-betting-for-the-us-election-is-set-to-beat-records

Clinton is currently trading at 1.20 on Betfair, giving her an 83% chance of being elected according to those odds. In 2012, president Barack Obama was trading at 1.31 the day before election day, giving him around 76% chance of becoming president. There’s far less enthusiasm for Republican Donald Trump, who is trading at 5.80, with a 17% chance of being elected.

 

Betfair is blacked out in Greece.
I was watching oddschecker.com and it was like I say above.
Betfair is sometimes strange.
Now what do they say ?

[Vesper 28,801]

Trump fills Madison Square Garden with anger, vitriol and racist threats

Marking final stretch of campaign in New York, Trump and cabal of surrogates attack Harris and mock Puerto Rico

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/27/trump-madison-square-garden-rally

Anger and vitriol took center stage at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday night, as Donald Trump and a cabal of campaign surrogates held a rally marked by racist comments, coarse insults, and dangerous threats about immigrants.

Nine days out from the election, Trump used the rally in New York to repeat his claim that he is fighting “the enemy within” and again promised to launch “the largest deportation program in American history”, amid incoherent ramblings about ending a phone call with a “very, very important person” so he could watch one of Elon Musk’s rockets land.

The event at Madison Square Garden, in the center of Manhattan, had drawn comparisons to an infamous Nazi rally held at the arena in 1939. Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ running mate, said there was a “direct parallel” between the two events, and the Democratic National Committee projected images on the outside of the building on Sunday repeating claims from Trump’s former chief-of-staff that Trump had “praised Hitler”.

There was certainly a dark tone throughout the hours-long rally, with one speaker describing Puerto Rico, home to 3.2m US citizens, as an “island of garbage”; Tucker Carlson mocking Harris’ racial identity; a radio host describing Hillary Clinton as a “sick bastard”; and a crucifix-wielding childhood friend of Trump’s declaring that Harris is “the antichrist”.

The Puerto Rico comments, made by Tony Hinchliffe, a podcaster with a history of racist remarks, were immediately criticized by the Harris-Walz campaign. Ricky Martin, the Puerto Rican popstar who has more than 18m followers on Instagram, wrote in a post: “This is what they think of us. Vote for @kamalaharris.”

Trump campaign spokesperson Danielle Alvarez in a statement said “this joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”

But that could prove problematic in Pennsylvania, where the majority of the swing state’s 580,000 eligible Latino voters are of Puerto Rican descent. Both campaigns have been trying to appeal to Latino voters in the final weeks of the campaign, and Harris had visited a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia earlier on Sunday, where she outlined plans to introduce an “economic opportunity taskforce” for Puerto Rico.

The pugnacious mood didn’t change once Trump began speaking, as the former president quickly repeated his pledge to “launch the largest deportation program in American history”.

Trump continued his frequent rants about immigration and claimed that a “savage Venezuelan prison gang” had “taken over Times Square”, which will come as a surprise to anyone who has recently visited the New York landmark. The former president also stated, wrongly, that the Biden administration did not have money to respond to a recent hurricane in North Carolina because “they spent all of their money bringing in illegal immigrants, flying them in by beautiful jet planes”.

Trump’s usual dystopian threats were on offer, as the 78-year-old expanded on his claims about “the enemy within” – a group of political opponents that he has said he will set the military on if elected.

“We’re just not running against Kamala. I think a lot of our politicians here tonight know this. She means nothing, she’s purely a vessel that’s all she is,” Trump said.

“We’re running against something far bigger than Joe or Kamala and far more powerful than them, which is a massive, vicious radical-left machine that runs today’s Democrat party. They’re just vessels.”

Trump’s appearance at Madison Square Garden – home to the New York Knicks and Rangers, and venue for countless legendary acts including Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and John Lennon’s last concert appearance before his murder – marks the culmination of his peculiar love-hate flirtation with his native city. Despite the fact that he has no chance of winning New York state – Harris is 15 points ahead in the Five Thirty Eight tracker poll – this was his third rally here this year.

In May he made an audacious attempt to woo Black and Latino voters in the south Bronx, just a few miles from his childhood home in Queens. Then in September, he pitched up in the New York City suburbs in Long Island.

What Trump intends by staging this trilogy of seemingly pointless electoral appearances is unclear. He has used his rambling speeches to take a nostalgic walk down memory lane to what he sees as the golden days of his life as a New York real estate magnate.

But he has also portrayed New York City in the most dark and dystopian terms, as a rat-infested haven for drug addicts, gangs and “illegal aliens” housed in luxury apartments while military veterans shiver on the sidewalks. His toxic language is perhaps a reflection of his bitterness towards the city of his birth, which in separate court cases has convicted him of 34 felonies, found his company the Trump Organization guilty of criminal tax fraud, and found him personally liable for sexual abuse.

On Sunday Trump again criticized his home town, claiming that the Biden administration had forced “hundreds of thousands of really rough people” into the city and telling New Yorkers, despite police saying crime has declined: “Your crime is through the roof. Everything is through the roof.”

The pugnacious tone had been set earlier in the afternoon, when several of the opening speakers made obscenity-laced and hate-filled remarks.

Hinchcliffe’s comments about Puerto Rico – he also made lewd sexual innuendos about Latina women – were met with big laughs from the crowd. A comment from radio personality Sid Rosenberg that Hillary Clinton is a “sick bastard” was similarly well received, as was Rosenberg’s claim that “the fucking illegals get everything they want”.

David Rem, a Republican politician who the Trump campaign described as a childhood friend of the former president, called Harris “the devil” and “the antichrist”, to loud cheers. Rem later took a crucifix out of his pocket and announced that he was running for New York City mayor.

As soon as Trump announced his intention to stage a rally at Madison Square Garden just days before the election, critics leapt to point out historical parallels with one of the most notorious events in New York history. On 20 February 1939, just seven months before Germany invaded Poland, the pro-Hitler German American Bund held a mass Nazi rally in the exact same arena.

The organizers chose George Washington’s birthday as the date to parade their vision of an Aryan Christian country dedicated to white supremacy and American patriotism. They erected a giant portrait of Washington, which they flanked with swastika flags alongside the stars and stripes.

More than 20,000 American Nazi sympathisers attended, many dressed in storm trooper uniforms and giving the Sieg Heil salute. The “Führer” of the American Bund, Fritz Kuhn, told the crowd that America would be “returned to the people who founded it”, and decried the “Jewish controlled press”.

Hillary Clinton had noted the similarities between the two events in an interview with CNN last week, and at a rally in Nevada earlier on Sunday, Walz was happy to continue the comparison.

“Donald Trump’s got this big rally going at Madison Square Garden,” Walz said.

“There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden. And don’t think that he doesn’t know for one second exactly what they’re doing there.”

The Trump campaign reacted furiously to the accusations, describing Clinton’s comments as “disgusting”. One of the few people to reference the 1939 rally on Sunday was Hulk Hogan, who emerged to wrestling music, spent several seconds struggling to rip off his shirt, then claimed: “I don’t see no stinkin’ Nazis in here”.

After a night of fire and fury, it will be up to the American voters to decide.

 

Trump rally speakers lob racist insults, call Puerto Rico ‘island of garbage’

Later, Trump took the stage at Madison Square Garden and called the GOP “the party of inclusion.” His campaign issued a statement disavowing the “garbage” comment.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/27/trump-msg-rally-puerto-ricans/

NEW YORK — A comedian who warmed up the crowd at Donald Trump’s rally here Sunday described Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage,” attracting widespread criticism.

The comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe of the “Kill Tony” podcast, was one of several opening speakers who lobbed sexist, racist and otherwise demeaning insults at a variety of targets during a Madison Square Garden rally meant to showcase Trump’s broad-based support in the home stretch of the presidential campaign.

 

Pennsylvania, perhaps the most critical swing state, is home to one of the largest populations of Puerto Ricans in the country. Danielle Alvarez, a Trump campaign senior adviser, said in a statement that Hinchcliffe’s “joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”

Trump’s campaign did not disavow other comments made by warm-up speakers at Sunday’s rally

At an earlier point in his speech, referring to migrants in general, Hinchcliffe said: “Believe it or not, people, I welcome migrants to the United States of America with open arms. And by open arms, I mean like this.” He waved his hands in a “stop” motion, then added that Latinos “love making babies” and made a crude sex joke about them.

 

Grant Cardone, a businessman, said Vice President Kamala Harris and “her pimp handlers will destroy our country,” a metaphor that casts the Democratic presidential nominee as a prostitute.

David Rem, a childhood friend of Trump, called Harris “the devil” and “the Antichrist.”

And former Fox News host Tucker Carlson mocked the attention paid to Harris’s racial identity: “She’s just so impressive as the first Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president,” Carlson said. (Harris’s father is from Jamaica, and her mother was from India.)

When Trump took the stage later, he touted his support from people of various religions and races. Polls have shown some softening of support for Democrats among voters of color. “The Republican Party has really become the party of inclusion,” Trump said.

[Vesper 28,801]

Kamala Harris played hardball with banks. It meant billions for homeowners.

This chapter of Harris’ time as attorney general, allies say, showed a resolve to make gutsy decisions and withstand pressure to fall in line.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/28/kamala-harris-played-hardball-with-banks-it-meant-billions-homeowners/

Kamala Harris, then the attorney general of California, discusses banking reform legislation intended to protect homeowners from foreclosure, on April 16, 2012, in Sacramento. In her campaign for president, Harris frequently cites her negotiations with big banks as evidence that she knows how to deliver results for the middle class. (Rich Pedroncelli/AP)

Kamala Harris had been California’s attorney general for about eight weeks when she gathered with her peers in front of a coffee station at the Fairmont Hotel in Washington, D.C. Attorneys general from across the country were closing in on a multibillion dollar mortgage settlement with major banks, whose risky lending practices leading up to the Great Recession spurred an unprecedented crisis that by early 2011 was still costing Americans their homes.

But Harris couldn’t believe her fellow attorneys general were ready to make a deal. The banks’ offer seemed paltry considering the damage people suffered, especially in California, which had one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country. It also would also give banks some immunity from future lawsuits.

Some of the negotiators were concerned Harris might bail and risk killing the settlement. She skipped an afternoon session with her fellow attorneys general and headed to the Justice Department to drill down on what investigators were finding and push the Obama administration to do more.

“I don’t know that anyone can answer our questions,” two of Harris’s top aides recalled her saying after those meetings in March 2011. “We’re going to have to answer our own questions.”Following

Unsatisfied with what she was hearing — from the administration, other attorneys general and the banking sector — Harris walked away from those initial multistate talks six months later. There were no guarantees that move would pay off. But by early 2012, she struck a historic $18 billion agreement for California, far more than what had been on the table before. Harris now describes the saga on the campaign trail as a key example of how she has delivered for middle-class families.

The deal was far from perfect: Thousands of Californians still lost their homes, in some cases opting for sales where they lost home equity but avoided foreclosure. Advocacy groups were frustrated by the lack of data showing whether relief went to poorer communities and people of color. The settlement didn’t satisfy widespread ire at the banking system, and in the years that followed, enforcement wasn’t always smooth. Harris also wasn’t the only attorney general struggling with how much to push for, and when to decide enough was enough.

When she ran for the U.S. Senate in 2016, Harris’s Democratic opponent Loretta Sanchez accused her of exaggerating her influence in the settlement talks and faulted Harris at a news conference for not bringing “one single prosecution against any major bank executive.”

The Trump campaign has also suggested Harris has overstated the amount of relief the deal yielded for California homeowners. In a statement, Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Harris “lied about her work on the mortgage settlement.”

“She failed Californians and has failed Americans, as evidenced by unaffordable inflation, a porous border and weakness on the world stage,” Leavitt said.

But in interviews, two dozen former aides, attorneys general, banking experts and Obama administration officials underscored that Harris’s role as a tough negotiator set her apart. Her allies look back on the episode as an example of her ability to make gutsy decisions — withstanding pressure from colleagues trying to get her to fall in line and going toe to toe with banking executives who said her demands were unfair. Supporters say she was fueled by the desire to bring what she saw as “justice” to Californians on the brink of losing their homes, including many who found her at public events to beg for help.

“She got more involved in wanting to understand the remedies, and what those looked like, than any of the other AGs,” said Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Obama and one of his administration’s chief negotiators. “She pushed us hard.”

Harris was emboldened to walk away from the initial deal, said her former political adviser Brian Brokaw, because she felt the facts were on her side — putting her in a position of strength.

“It was a gamble,” Brokaw said. “She doesn’t take unnecessary risks or uncalculated risks — and she is big on cost-benefit analysis and a risk assessment. For her, this was a very calculated legal and political risk.”

Building her case

Back in California after that initial March 2011 meeting with the attorneys general, Harris began assembling a mortgage fraud strike force that launched in April. She divided it into three teams to look at different dimensions of the crisis.

One would investigate the players who were drawing up mortgages their clients couldn’t afford. A second took a deeper look at loan servicers and other businesses preying on borrowers in distress, knowing that the federal government wouldn’t prosecute such cases because they weren’t big enough. Finally, another team looked into securitization: how mortgages were being sold to investors — taking loans, wrapping them together and selling them as securities.

The strike force grew to 100 people. Harris brought on data scientists to tally specific breakdowns of how many homeowners had entered “the funnel” — the point when they were more than 90 days delinquent; how many received notices that they were facing foreclosure; and how many foreclosures had been completed. She would press her staff for updates on those figures weekly, sometimes daily.

There were intense time pressures — both for people facing foreclosure and for top Obama administration officials, who wanted a deal cinched as they barreled toward his reelection campaign. Other attorneys general and the banks were also trying to wrap up talks. But Harris wanted time to gather enough data to bolster her position.

At some of her public appearances, she was swarmed by desperate Californians who showed up with weathered Post-it notes, bags of loan papers and brown accordion files asking for help. Her office began holding meetings in the most affected communities to gather information on the tactics banks were using with individual homeowners. She spent time in devastated areas like Stockton and Fresno to try to assess how much relief would reach those communities.

“Community organizations and advocates on the ground were critical to pushing her, and asking her to hold out” for a more generous settlement, said Paulina Gonzalez-Brito, now chief executive of the economic justice group Rise Economy. “And she listened.”

Brian Nelson, then Harris’s chief counsel, said his office received hundreds of letters and documents from homeowners struggling to negotiate with their banks. Nelson, who served as the Treasury Department’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence until joining the campaign in July, said Harris directed staff to make the intake process more efficient so the team could respond faster. While the AG’s office wasn’t permitted to take on individual cases, it ramped up a constituent service team to connect Californians with certified counselors and community groups who could help.

Donovan was used to getting Saturday morning calls from Harris, along with questions from her team dissecting wonky details about how relief from a settlement might be disbursed. She quizzed colleagues like Eric Schneiderman, then the New York attorney general, on how many people were underwater in his state. When Schneiderman said he didn’t know the answer on one phone call, an aide recounted, Harris told him to call her back when he knew, then hung up.

In an interview, Schneiderman said he didn’t remember that specific call. But he said the gist sounded familiar.

“I have no doubt she asked that,” Schneiderman said. “Her point was, my people were hurting, I’ve got all of these people hurting. I need relief now.” (Schneiderman later resigned over multiple physical abuse claims).

Harris wasn’t the only one pressing for a more aggressive deal while trying to get results fast. Schneiderman had been raising objections for months and withdrew from the talks before Harris. Meanwhile, Harris drew support from a small group of ideologically aligned colleagues including Beau Biden of Delaware, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Lisa Madigan of Illinois and Martha Coakley of Massachusetts. Cortez Masto, now a U.S. senator, said the group used to joke with Beau Biden (who died in 2015) that he was part of their “sisterhood,” a term she said Harris coined. There was a sense that pushing for more for California could help other states get a more substantial payout, too.

“She could have walked away completely and done her own thing,” Cortez Masto said. “She had the resources in her office to prosecute those banks on her own. Nevada — I’m so small. Delaware — so small … She could have done it on her own.”

California Attorney General Kamala Harris meets with San Francisco homeowners facing foreclosure on Nov. 21, 2011. (HUM Images/HUM Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

As Harris tried to build her case, former colleagues said, she felt the big banks weren’t taking her seriously — hardening her stance. Meetings with staff and top negotiators were tense, according to those on both sides of the negotiations. Someone in the meeting suggested that settling for the smaller deal would help Harris politically.

“This is a law enforcement action,” she snapped back, according to an aide who was in the room and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Riding in a cab afterward, an aide told Harris she should consider taking the deal. Litigation would take years and might not succeed; at least a settlement would bring in something.

Harris pushed back, asking how many people were going to lose their homes. “There’s so many people hanging on by their fingernails right now. What are they supposed to do?,” Harris asked the aide. They both realized that many families were going to lose their homes no matter what kind of deal they struck, so they ought to push for as much as possible.

In September, she pulled out of the deal.

In a letter to two of the chief negotiators — Thomas Perrelli at the Justice Department and Tom Miller, the Iowa attorney general — Harris wrote that over 11 months of settlement talks, another 560,000 California homes had fallen into foreclosure. Eight of the nation’s 10 hardest-hit cities were in her state. More than 2 million homeowners were underwater on their mortgages.

“This is not the deal California homeowners have been waiting for,” she wrote.

Friends immediately called, concerned that she had gone too far and was creating political adversaries who could doom her future career. Other attorneys general warned that without a settlement, homeowners might get nothing. California Gov. Jerry Brown told Harris, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private talk: “I hope you know what you are doing.”

‘I gave it right back’

The financial system had imploded well before Harris was elected attorney general. Some banks failed; others were bailed out by the government or forced into mergers. Public anger zeroed in on the banks and their executives, especially since people were still losing their homes and jobs after the worst of the Great Recession.

Harris set up a war room in her office. Blurry-eyed data analysts pored over their computers for weeks building a county-by-county breakdown of how many homes were at risk of foreclosure and how many were potentially eligible for relief. During the 2012 NFC championship game between the San Francisco 49ers and New York Giants, Harris — a huge football fan — catered Mexican takeout from her favorite spot. She conferred with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder about the negotiations during halftime so as not to miss a minute of the game.

Of the many heated meetings, Harris’s memoir recounts one particularly testy call with Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, who still runs the bank.

Everyone close to the negotiations knew any deal would need Dimon on board; losing him would be devastating. But Harris was direct, writing that she was tired of feeling caged- in by attorneys and other middlemen. She asked her assistant to get Dimon on the phone, and within a minute, she heard him yelling on the other end that she was trying to steal from his shareholders. (JPMorgan Chase declined to comment.)

“I gave it right back,” Harris wrote. ‘“Your shareholders? Your shareholders? My shareholders are the homeowners of California.”

That was a turning point after so much confrontation. The two talked details; one aide said Harris raised concerns about lenders creating mortgages people couldn’t afford, and pointed out that those loans were also being sold to investors.

Within weeks, a final deal for California was on the table: three of the largest mortgage companies — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — were obligated to pay up to $18 billion in mortgage assistance. The deal also had a narrower focus than the broader settlement: Only help that cut what homeowners owed on their loans could be counted by the three banks. The banks were also incentivized to get money out in the hardest-hit counties, and within the first year.

Now it was a matter of finishing the job. Donovan, the HUD secretary, recalled riding with Obama in the presidential limousine when he asked the president to call Harris for a final commitment that would seal the deal. In the heat of Obama’s reelection campaign, administration officials were frustrated by how long the talks with the banks had dragged on. Obama had been tracking the negotiations closely and had a close friendship with Harris, but her push to get more money for California had often clashed with the administration’s tactics and desire to close an agreement.

There was also lingering tension since Harris had secured her own monitor, separate from the national watchdog, which no other state had. Plus, she locked in promises to spend a specific portion of the settlement in California. The concern was that dozens of other attorneys general might demand the same, jeopardizing the process all over again.

“If every state AG asked for the same thing, the settlement couldn’t work,” said Donovan, now chief executive and president of the national housing nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners. “It would have been enormously complex, and ultimately unworkable.”

But Harris insisted on an independent monitor for California to track aid as it went out — an idea the banks adamantly opposed.

She called Elizabeth Warren, who was building the nascent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Warren floated names by Katie Porter, then a law professor at University of California at Irvine, now a Democratic member of Congress. Porter immediately realized she might want to take on the work herself, she told The Post.

Harris and Porter first spoke before the final settlement to discuss the contours of the role — and Harris made it clear that she wanted a “watchdog” who would ensure the banks fulfilled their commitments.

Members of Occupy Sacramento march through downtown Sacramento during a Dec. 6, 2011, protest against home foreclosures. (Rich Pedroncelli/AP)

The banks had rejected the idea of an independent monitor for California, Porter said. But after striking the deal, Harris put out an announcement naming Porter to the job without giving them a heads-up, Porter recalled.

Working with the banks to ensure compliance, Porter made some unusual demands. When Bank of America told her that people were not responding to letters telling them they were eligible for relief, Porter insisted they rewrite the letters in a more understandable way on higher-quality paper, and make them double-sided in English and Spanish. She also asked the banks to put the seal of the independent monitor’s office on the envelope so people would realize its contents might help them and actually open it.

“The settlement wasn’t perfect,” Porter said. “But [Harris] made it so much better, both in how she negotiated it and that she saw the project all the way through.”

In the end, the banks delivered more than they promised, according to one of Porter’s reports from September 2013. Total relief ended up about $20 billion. Roughly half that amount went to first- and second-mortgage principal reduction for some 84,100 families. The other half went to short sales, where banks took losses on houses worth less than their mortgages. That meant plenty of people lost their houses, but it was still their best financial option.

More than a decade later, Harris still uses the settlement to introduce herself to many voters unfamiliar with her record. During her speech at the Democratic National Convention in late August, Harris cited her work for homeowners as an example of how she spent her career as a prosecutor fighting for the American people.

“As attorney general of California, I took on the big banks, delivered $20 billion for middle-class families who faced foreclosure and helped pass a homeowner bill of rights, one of the first of its kind in the nation,” she said.

[Vesper 28,801]

American democracy at a crossroads: Could history repeat Itself?

As the US faces a pivotal election, parallels with history raise stark questions about the resilience of democratic institutions and the global impact of America’s choices.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/american-democracy-at-a-crossroads-could-history-repeat-itself

 

No one knows how the US presidential election will turn out. One possibility is that the Trump bubble will finally burst, allowing for a return to normalcy in America and around the world. But it is also possible that the United States will lurch toward a radical militarised authoritarianism that would establish a new norm for despots elsewhere. 

Political scientists are hardly the only ones to see worrisome historical resonances here. According to Donald Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, General John Kelly, the former president “fits the definition of fascist,” by which he means “a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralised autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy.” 

Modern US-style fascism has obvious roots in the past. In his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, Philip Roth was drawing on real historical figures and events to present his counterfactual scenario in which Charles Lindbergh is elected president on a radical isolationist, anti-Semitic “America First” program. And some analysts and historians would look back even further, not just to the 1930s, but a century earlier, to the populist rhetoric and promiscuous racism of President Andrew Jackson. 

In any case, episodes of democratic collapse always give rise to the same anguished question. Has some particular feature of the culture gradually eroded the political system, or are we dealing with a deeper, innate human tendency that can only ever be held in check by the right institutional arrangements (like those brilliantly outlined by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison in the Federalist Papers)?

The iconic case of a descent into barbarism is, of course, interwar Germany. To explain the country’s slide into political violence, fascism, militarism, and ultimately genocide, some analysts have pointed to inherent German cultural proclivities – from Martin Luther’s fierce anti-Semitism to nineteenth-century German liberals’ abdication in the face of raw political power and Bismarck’s “blood and iron.” 

Like this year’s US contest, the German elections of the 1930s were very close. In each case, Adolf Hitler and his party won a significantly smaller share of the vote than Trump is likely to receive in November. After winning a 37% share in the July 1932 election, the Nazi Party slid to 33% in the November 1932 contest. Even in the unfree election of March 1933 – when the Communist Party was banned and voters were subjected to mass intimidation – the Nazi vote was under 44%. Hitler himself won only 30% of the vote in the first round of the spring 1932 presidential election, and 37% in the second round. 

Thus, Hitler was not swept into power by a vast wave of support. Rather, he owed his political ascent to the response from traditional institutions: the army, the bureaucracy, the police force, and above all the business community. 

Like corporate America today, German captains of industry were divided. Many were suspicious of the Nazis, but even they didn’t fully recognise the radicalism of Hitler’s agenda. Georg Solmssen, the CEO of Germany’s largest bank (Deutsche Bank), had been baptised as a Protestant, but his grandfather had been a rabbi, and his father had been a banker who went into finance because Jews were excluded from the civil service. This calm, intelligent man saw the Nazis as a threat largely because of the socialist and populist elements of their program; their rabid anti-Semitism, he assumed, was just a tactical electoral ploy. 

Solmssen did not comprehend what Nazism was about until April 1933, when it was too late. He was hardly alone. Many decent people lacked the imagination to grasp the extent of the violence that Hitler would soon unleash. The assumption within the German establishment was that the demagogue could be tamed. But this dangerous view was based on an illusion. 

After all, the broader political context had fundamentally changed. The post-World War I reparations system, established at the 1919 Versailles peace conference, had severely constrained Germany and limited its room for maneuver; but by 1933, the international system had already disintegrated. Two years earlier, the Japanese army had provoked a border incident in Manchuria and then flooded across the frontier, ignoring the League of Nations and its covenant forbidding “aggression.” 

Moreover, with the global economy suffering through the Great Depression, there were few incentives to keep playing by the rules of the old economic system. Nationalism and autarky thus became increasingly attractive as costless strategies to pump up German living standards. 

Again, there are ominous parallels with the current moment. Most, if not all, international institutions are showing signs of their age, and the United Nations system has been paralysed by divisions over Russia’s war on Ukraine and Israel’s campaigns against Hamas, Hezbollah, and – perhaps soon – Iran. 

Unlike in the early 1930s, however, the world economy is still very much interconnected and interdependent. Thus, any move toward genuine autarky would not be painless. On the contrary, the costs would be glaringly obvious to Americans and the rest of the world, and to financial markets above all. 

In this context, it is stunning to hear prominent financial figures like BlackRock’s Larry Fink argue that the US election “really doesn’t matter” for markets. Why won’t leading figures like Warren Buffett come out and say something? They seem to be reproducing the behaviour of German business leaders before January 1933. 

Precisely because international economic connections can restrain national political action, severing them risks causing a major financial shock. Depending on how this election plays out, there could soon come a time when Americans (and everyone else) will be very grateful for the constraints that come with a globalised economy. Few events are more sobering – and more discrediting to those pushing bad policy – than a financial meltdown that destroys voters’ livelihoods and degrades their living standards.

[Vesper 28,801]

Outsourcing our future to for-profit AI

The recent AI Nobel Prize win and California’s vetoed AI safety bill highlight the growing trend of placing our future in the hands of private corporations, with little public accountability.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/outsourcing-our-future-to-for-profit-ai

 

Within the past month, California Governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed an artificial-intelligence safety bill, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to David Baker, a professor at the University of Washington, and to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper, employees of Google’s subsidiary DeepMind and its spin-off Isomorphic Labs. These two events may seem to have little in common, but, taken together, they suggest that outsourcing humanity’s future to profit-maximizing private corporations is something to be celebrated. 

While the California bill was not flawless, it did represent the first substantial effort to hold developers accountable for the potential harms that their AI models might cause. Moreover, it focused not just on any risk but on “critical harm,” like developing weapons of mass destruction or causing at least $500 million worth of damage. 

The tech industry, Google among them, lobbied fiercely against the bill, making a very old argument. As the Financial Times editorial board put it, new regulations could “stunt … the emergence of an innovation that could help diagnose diseases, accelerate scientific research, and boost productivity.” Once again, such opportunity costs are deemed more harmful than whatever damage AI might do to people’s ability to control their own destinies, or even to live peacefully in their societies. 

The 2024 Nobel marks the first time that the prize has been awarded in a natural science to employees of a multinational corporation. All previous awardees were or had been university professors or researchers at government-funded research institutes, all of whom had published their results in peer-reviewed journals and made their findings available to the world. Whether the Swedish Academy intended it or not, its decision to include the Google researchers helps to legitimize the privatization of science, which is no longer part of humanity’s commons. Like so many resources before it, the science of AI is enclosed within a walled garden accessible only to those who can pay the entrance fee. 

True, the AI model AlphaFold2, which earned Hassabis and Jumper the prize, together with its source code, has been made publicly available. According to the AlphaFold.com, “Google DeepMind and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) have partnered to create AlphaFold DB to make these predictions freely available to the scientific community.” On the other hand, DeepMind holds multiple patents to AlphaFold. According to the logic of property rights, the company, not the public, will always have the final say over the technology’s use. AlphaFold’s website is a “.com,” denoting something fundamentally different from, say, the Human Genome Project, with its “.gov” URL. 

In the world of information technology, “free” is never free. Payments are tendered in data, not in dollars. The data that enable AlphaFold to predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein come from the public domain. DeepMind’s partner in developing AlphaFold is an intergovernmental research organization funded by more than 20 member states of the European Union. According to Jumper, “public data were essential to the development of AlphaFold.” Without data that was compiled and organized by scientists who received taxpayer money for it, there would be no AlphaFold. 

Notwithstanding the prescience of public officials in creating this huge database, governments are regularly disparaged for lacking the knowledge, skills, resources, and foresight to promote innovations and advance scientific and economic progress. We are constantly told that only the private sector, with its compelling monetary incentives, can do what it takes to propel the world forward. 

In reality, the private sector regularly gets a free ride on work produced by scientists who were supported by public money or employed by public research institutes. The first satellite was launched by the US government, not Elon Musk; the US military developed the internet before it was commercialized; and pharmaceutical companies rarely invest in basic research. Why bother when you can just wait for scientists funded by the US National Institutes of Health or similar agencies to advance a field to the point where profitable investments can be made? 

Such is the logic of profit-seeking corporations. Their purpose is financial returns, not human progress. Once in the game, they seek to monopolize scientific knowledge by securing patents or hiding their findings behind the barriers provided by trade-secrecy law. Without the helping hand of the state, they would have neither basic science nor legal protections for the monopolies that furnish them with large returns – which they then hold up as proof of their superiority to government. 

It is not hard to understand why private companies enjoy this game. The mystery is why governments willingly play into industry’s hands, handing over years of publicly funded research without guaranteeing that the public has its say in determining how it is used. The California legislation would have mandated that AI models include a capacity for full shutdown in case things go wrong, but that provision was killed off with the rest of the bill. 

There is nothing new to the argument that if we do not know enough about future damages, we should refrain from interfering in “private” markets, which always perform best without government “interference.” Oil and gas companies relied on it when denying the risk of climate change and their contribution to it, even as their own research told them otherwise. Yet here we are again. Apparently, we should place our future in the hands of private corporations whose sole purpose is maximising shareholder value. What could possibly go wrong?

[cosmicway 1,323]

The Trumpees hate Mexicans more than anything else.
90% of Trump ideology is anti-mexican.
Strange thing, "our" Nigel, Lepen, Orban don't even talk about Mexicans.
Vaguely I remember some stories about Chilean pickpockets in Athens in the seventies, but nothing more.
The Americans have a history though.
Cuba became communist and remains communist for 35 years now after communism in Russia has been expunged.
Why ?
Because the yanks don't want it to become a state.
They say "never - Cuba is only for cigars".
This bizarre mentality culminated in Trumpism.
You d' expect yanks to want Cuba to become American, very much like the Argentinians are after the Malvinas (Falklands) that are neigbouring their shores.
What if Putin decides to send some nukes over there to Habana ?
It does n't even make sense.

Edited October 28 by cosmicway

[cosmicway 1,323]

Trump has won the battle of taxes.
Taxes are always useful for the government, for national projects.
The army and the navy first and foremost, but also roads, parks, monuments inside parks and other things.

But their usefulness in the daily life of the citizens is limited as well as ambiguous.
For the common Joe Bloggs it means two weeks vacations instead of four.
The Greek socialist governments for instance brag about "tourism for the people".
Fine. You fancy a stay in the island of Tino in the month of December ? Waves ten meters high, torrential rains like in the tropics.
Of course the money goes into the pockets of socialist aparachicks but that's another story.
And it's not even Tino. What I think is available is the top of mount Kaimakchalan, where the Greeks had been fighting the Italians.

Socialist taxes are a nightmare.
First they are directed against rich and poor alike.
The big multinational corporations actually like this because it kills competition.
A little more tax on them does n't hurt. The hunt for undeclared swimming pools does n't hurt them because theirs are declared.
If you own one of the two big carpet galleries do you like the gypsy woman who used to sell carpets in the flea markets ?
Not so good those, but some people make do with them so you love to see them taxed out of business.

Also the big companies immediately pass the additional cost due to socialist taxes to the consumer.
So you go to the supermarketand the prices have gone up.
The answer ?
Eat peeled tomatoes stuffed with rice because it's cheap.

The socialists along with their communist cousins live in the 19th century world of Dostoyevski, the little girl with the matches.
They believe the lower economic classes are allf brick layers and dockyar dworkers.
So the various "capitalist wannabes" must be punished.
The communists in particular believe we are all factory workers ready to come out in the streets and start the revolution.
They don't realise even the basic fact that most factories are nowadays away in the suburbs, in the countryside and the workers
are transported with company buses. How am I going to march from somewhere near the airport to the centre and start the
revolution ?

Hence Trump wins.




 

Edited October 28 by cosmicway

[Vesper 28,801]

9 hours ago, cosmicway said:

Trump has won the battle of taxes.
Taxes are always useful for the government, for national projects.
The army and the navy first and foremost, but also roads, parks, monuments inside parks and other things.

But their usefulness in the daily life of the citizens is limited as well as ambiguous.
For the common Joe Bloggs it means two weeks vacations instead of four.
The Greek socialist governments for instance brag about "tourism for the people".
Fine. You fancy a stay in the island of Tino in the month of December ? Waves ten meters high, torrential rains like in the tropics.
Of course the money goes into the pockets of socialist aparachicks but that's another story.
And it's not even Tino. What I think is available is the top of mount Kaimakchalan, where the Greeks had been fighting the Italians.

Socialist taxes are a nightmare.
First they are directed against rich and poor alike.
The big multinational corporations actually like this because it kills competition.
A little more tax on them does n't hurt. The hunt for undeclared swimming pools does n't hurt them because theirs are declared.
If you own one of the two big carpet galleries do you like the gypsy woman who used to sell carpets in the flea markets ?
Not so good those, but some people make do with them so you love to see them taxed out of business.

Also the big companies immediately pass the additional cost due to socialist taxes to the consumer.
So you go to the supermarketand the prices have gone up.
The answer ?
Eat peeled tomatoes stuffed with rice because it's cheap.

The socialists along with their communist cousins live in the 19th century world of Dostoyevski, the little girl with the matches.
They believe the lower economic classes are allf brick layers and dockyar dworkers.
So the various "capitalist wannabes" must be punished.
The communists in particular believe we are all factory workers ready to come out in the streets and start the revolution.
They don't realise even the basic fact that most factories are nowadays away in the suburbs, in the countryside and the workers
are transported with company buses. How am I going to march from somewhere near the airport to the centre and start the
revolution ?

Hence Trump wins.

[Vesper 28,801]

Trump’s Tax Cuts Were a Disaster. Naturally, Republicans Want Even More.

Study up, because they’re about to try again.

July/August 2020 Issue

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/06/trumps-tax-cuts-were-a-disaster-naturally-republicans-want-even-more/

In 1980 the federal deficit was soaring and Ronald Reagan campaigned on a singular promise: He planned to cut taxes on everyone, but especially the rich. He insisted that those benefits would quickly trickle down to everyone and supercharge the economy. Throw in some social safety net cuts, Republicans said, and the whole plan would pay for itself.

They were wrong. The rich got lower taxes all right, but the economy flatlined and the deficit skyrocketed. I should know: I graduated from college the same summer the tax cut passed, and I spent the next three years managing a Radio Shack waiting for the economy to get back on its feet. In 1982 Reagan was forced to raise taxes to make up for his cuts, and he continued raising them throughout his presidency.

In 1993 Bill Clinton passed a tax increase to reduce the deficit. Republicans insisted it would do no such thing. In fact, they said, it would cripple the economy.

They were wrong. The economy boomed, and for the first time since the Roaring ’20s the deficit turned into a surplus for four consecutive years.

In 2001—and again in 2003—George W. Bush passed a tax cut. Once again, Republicans said it would supercharge the economy and pay for itself.

They were wrong. All we got was a jobless recovery and a housing bubble that wrecked the economy. It produced the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

At the beginning of 2013, as part of the “fiscal cliff” negotiations, Barack Obama forced Republicans to accept a tax increase on high earners. But even though the bill passed with bipartisan support, some Republicans insisted it would kill the economy.

They were wrong. The deficit declined and Obama produced the longest economic recovery in American history—one that was still going strong until the coronavirus pandemic killed it.

Finally, in 2017, Republicans passed yet another tax cut. This one primarily benefited corporations and the rich, and once again Republicans insisted it would supercharge the economy and pay for itself.

They were wrong. No—scratch that. They lied. They knew the evidence of the past 40 years as well as anyone, but they sold the public a bill of goods anyway.

Every single economic indicator Republicans said would go up, didn’t.

Why? Because for all of Donald Trump’s bluster, this was the one thing he really, truly had to do. It’s the one thing the Republican Party’s big donors insist on. They don’t care about immigration or tariffs. Not much, anyway. But they care about lower taxes. As then-New York Rep. Chris Collins (since convicted of insider trading) told reporters shortly before the tax cut was signed into law, donors were telling him, “Get it done or don’t ever call me again.” So they got it done.

The 2017 tax cut had to be supported by a farrago of dishonesty for an obvious reason: The public would never support a tax cut aimed primarily at making the rich richer and swelling the coffers of large corporations—which also benefited the rich. Why would they? So Republicans had to lie. And this time they couldn’t rest with a single lie. Polls showed that voters were skeptical of their tax cut, so this time Repub­licans had to pile lie on top of lie.

Why does this matter? For two reasons—one, lies about tax cuts have determined the course of America’s economy, and the individual fortunes of millions of families including yours, for decades. Many of the inequities laid bare by the pandemic have been in the making since the Reagan era. And two, amid the coronavirus crisis, we’re about to have another debate over whether tax cuts can juice the economy. To evaluate those claims, it behooves us to look at what Republicans said about their 2017 tax cut—compared to what actually happened. Spoiler alert: Every single economic indicator Republicans said would go up, didn’t.

It all started with the initial justification for the tax cut: namely that American corporations paid the highest tax rates in the industrialized world, which put them at a huge competitive disadvantage. So at the end of 2017, while they still had full control of Congress, Republicans passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut—nearly the size of the gigantic coronavirus rescue bill passed in March. The 2017 bill contained cuts to both the personal tax rate—which mostly benefited the rich—and the corporate rate. But Republicans faced a cognitive dissonance problem: Weren’t American corporations actually doing pretty well? Why did they need a huge handout?

This is where the first lie came into play. It’s true that the United States had a high corporate tax rate, but few American corporations paid that official rate. In fact, if you look at actual corporate tax revenue, it turns out the United States has been pretty friendly toward big business. The real corporate tax rate is middling, and among the 20 richest developed countries, the US tied for dead last in how much of its GDP comes from such taxes.

This was no secret. So to justify cutting corporate tax rates even further, Republicans had to manufacture a laundry list of reasons it would be good for the economy. And that’s when the lies started piling up.

1. Business investment will skyrocket

The first and most fundamental logic behind the Republican predictions that a corporate tax cut would promote economic growth and higher tax revenues was a simple one. According to the academic language in a paper published by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, “A decrease in the tax rate on corporate profits…decreases the before-tax rate of return used to assess the profitability of an investment project.”

In plain English this means that corporations will only make investments that are likely to be profitable. Taxes are part of this, so if you decrease the tax rate on profits, more investments will go forward. In the words of Larry Kudlow, the lifelong supply-sider who became director of President Trump’s National Economic Council, corporate tax cuts produce an “investment boom.”

But Kudlow’s boom never came. Taxes may matter, but what matters a lot more is whether corporations have confidence that the economy will grow vigorously and produce more demand for their products and services. The Republican tax cut didn’t produce that confidence. Regardless of what they said in public, most CEOs knew perfectly well that a tax cut was just a temporary shot in the arm. It might modestly spur consumer demand for a short time, but in the long run it would do nothing—or maybe even produce a weaker economy.

Sure enough, business investment, which usually reflects decisions made in the past, grew on autopilot for a couple of quarters, but after that, steadily declined. In the last quarter of 2019, the level of business investment was lower than it was a year before.

You can also look at new orders for capital goods, which generally react quickly to changes in the economic outlook. But the growth rate of new orders began declining immediately after the tax cut was passed, reaching zero in late 2018 and falling into negative territory in mid-2019. (Charts are adjusted for inflation where relevant and run through the end of 2019, before the COVID-19 recession took hold.)

 

It’s been more than two years since the tax cut passed, and if an investment boom were going to happen, we would have seen it by now. We haven’t. Trump may like to brag about the “greatest economy in history” that he claims he built before the pandemic struck, but all we saw was an investment bust.

2. The economy will be supercharged

If an investment boom was the big lie that drove everything, the arguments made to the general public in support of the tax cut mostly revolved around a better-­known metric: economic growth. The usual way of measuring this is by looking at gross domestic product, the sum of all goods and services produced in the United States. In the decade since the end of the Great Recession, GDP growth has averaged 2.3 percent per year.

Republicans claimed that the investment growth spurred by the tax cut would drive GDP growth higher. Kudlow predicted growth rates of 3 to 4 percent. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin went with a more modest 2.9 percent. Trump himself told reporters at his Cabinet meeting that he was holding out for 6 percent growth. These projections were mostly just spun out of thin air.

So how did we do? Since the investment boom never materialized, it’s hardly a shock to learn that GDP growth didn’t boom either. The growth rate increased modestly for two quarters and then dropped steadily. In the last quarter unaffected by the coronavirus crisis, it was barely above 2 percent. Not only didn’t the tax cut usher in the growth that Republicans predicted, but growth rates started dropping soon after.

3. The tax cut will pay for itself

It was an article of faith among Republicans that their tax cut wouldn’t just boost economic growth, but would actually generate more revenue than the old, higher tax rates. “Not only will this tax plan pay for itself, but it will pay down debt,” Mnuchin said. Kevin Hassett, then chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, agreed: “You don’t really need to have a big growth effect to have Secretary Mnuchin be correct.” Former Rep. Jeb Hensarling, chair of the House Finan­cial Services Committee, insisted that economic growth would be “more than enough” to make up for the lower tax rates.

That growth failed to materialize. Unsurprisingly, so have higher tax revenues. Corp­orate tax receipts plummeted from $240 billion to $140 billion in the first quarter after the tax cut passed, and have stayed at that level ever since.

So what happened to the federal deficit? Republicans lied about the effect of their cut on tax receipts and at the same time they also decided to stop worrying about keeping spending down. As a result, the federal deficit has gone up—and that’s not even accounting for the COVID-19 stimulus spending. This comes as no surprise to anyone who has heard the same Republican tax argu­ments for decades and now recognizes them for the fabrications they are.

 

4. Corporations will bring back profits stashed overseas

Republicans did their best to include as many corporate giveaways as possible in their tax cut, but spun them as a benefit to the greater economy. Take “repatriated earnings.” American multinational corporations like to keep their overseas profits away from the IRS, and the Republican tax plan aimed to change this by offering companies a temporary “tax holiday.” Earnings kept overseas would be subject to a one-time tax at a very low rate that could be paid over the course of eight years. President Trump promised that this would produce a flood of repatriated earnings amounting to $4–$5 trillion—nearly twice the amount that corporations were actually storing overseas.

This was just another lie, one that no serious economist believed for a moment. And indeed, after a brief boom in repatriated earnings after the tax cut passed, there was a bust. Repatriations to date have amounted to only $840 billion above normal, and the total amount of repatriations in the last quarter of 2019 is only $60 billion higher than it was before the tax cut passed. The total will never come anywhere close to $4–$5 trillion.

Why does this matter? The Republican theory was that companies would use their repatriated earnings to invest in new capacity, which in turn would boost the economy. This was an unusually feeble lie since American companies were already sitting on huge stockpiles of cash that they could have spent if they wanted to. The four biggest US tech companies alone—Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft—had more than $340 billion in cash on their books. But companies don’t invest simply because they have spare money lying around; they only invest if they think the economy is going to grow. If they don’t believe that, they’ll take the extra cash and return it instead to stockholders—i.e., the rich. And that’s exactly what they’ve done.

But maybe foreign investors responded more positively to the tax cut than domestic investors did? Nope. Foreign investment increased briefly but then plunged. Apparently they didn’t take Republican promises any more seriously than Americans did.

 

5. Your wages will skyrocket

If all this weren’t enraging enough, just wait. You see, the White House also promised something else: that the wages of ordinary workers like you would go up. How much? The claims were all over the map. In a single CEA paper, administration economists predicted that average incomes would rise at least $3,000 and perhaps as much as $9,000 after the tax changes had been “fully absorbed by the economy.” This was on top of the normal income growth already baked into economic forecasts. So what actually happened?

Well, not only are we nowhere near the White House projections, we’re actually still on the trend that was predicted without the tax cut. The Republican tax cut did your wages no good at all.

But wait. What about bonuses? Lots of companies promised they’d pay out extra bonuses if the tax cut passed. AT&T promised $1,000 per employee. Comcast followed suit and Southwest and American Airlines joined in too. Walmart was less generous: It also announced a $1,000 bonus, but only for workers who’d been with the company for at least 20 years.

It made for great headlines. But once the klieg lights were off, bonuses nose-dived to less than they had been before the tax cut.

In the end, the Republican tax cut didn’t help your wages and it reduced your bonus. Are you mad yet?

6. Jobs, jobs, jobs!

Mnuchin declared that the Republican tax bill would be a boon for employment. “This is about jobs,” he said. “This is a jobs bill.”

But it wasn’t. If you look at the total share of the country with jobs—the “employment-to-population ratio”—nothing happened after the tax cut passed. It had been growing since the end of the Great Recession and it continued growing at the exact same rate after the tax cut was passed, until COVID-19 hit.

7. Tax cuts for all

Of course, the Republican tax act did more than just reduce the corporate tax rate. It also reduced individual income taxes for nearly everyone—partly by cutting tax rates and partly by adding a hodgepodge of other benefits. But for most of us, there’s less there than meets the eye.

In 2018, nearly everyone got a tax break, and after-tax incomes went up—although the income of the rich went up a lot more than the income of the middle class. By 2025, the tax break for the middle class will start to vanish. And by 2027, the reduction in income tax rates will disappear for everyone. However, the rich—and only the rich—will continue to benefit from other tax breaks.

Republicans claimed that ending the rate cuts in 2027 was nothing more than an accounting requirement to meet congressional budget rules. They’ll restore it later. But this is just a con job. If they were really sure they could eliminate tax cuts and restore them later, why not zero out their patchwork of tax cuts for the rich? The question answers itself.

8. But guess what? Corporate profits soared

To summarize: The economy didn’t boom, investment didn’t increase, employment didn’t go up, household earnings didn’t surge, and the middle-class tax cuts started out small and then disappeared completely. But there’s one thing that has worked—besides tax cuts for the rich, that is: corporate profits have fattened nicely. Check that out. Corporate profits jumped 8 percent immediately after the tax cut was passed, and they’ve stayed at their new, higher level ever since. It all goes to show that Republicans can accomplish their goals when they put their mind to it. You just have to know what their goals really are.

Now it’s time for a look into the near future. But first let’s zoom out a bit because there’s more to this than just tax cuts for the rich. Republicans have long been devoted to a strategy called “starve the beast,” which has a simple goal: (a) cut taxes, (b) watch revenues fall, and (c) insist that spending has to be cut to avoid big budget deficits. And while the rich may get the tax cuts, the spending cuts are inevitably aimed at the poor and middle class. This is especially effective at the state level because most states aren’t allowed to run budget deficits. If tax revenues fall, they have to cut spending.

And now we have to deal with a pandemic. If the holes in our eroding social safety net seemed patchable before, they don’t any longer. Unemployment insurance? Democrats did a good job of demanding a temporary funding increase, but not everyone benefits because many states have spent years deliberately making their systems hard to use and they’re unable to hold up under hundreds of thousands of new applicants.

When economists say “stimulus,” Republicans hear “tax cut.”

Food stamps? Republicans are trying to cut them back just as we need them more than ever. Medicaid? The federal government can still afford to pay its share, but can states? Their tax revenues have plummeted and Republicans have balked at helping them out.

Thanks to the pandemic, we’re about to get hammered by the business end of the starve-the-beast strategy. Tax revenues have already declined due to the Republican tax cut, and they’ll decline more because Republicans used the corona­virus rescue bills to quietly “fix” a few problems in their 2017 bill that turned out to be annoying to the rich. Beyond that, spending has exploded as the rescue bills create trillions in temporary new outlays to help people and businesses brought to their knees by lockdowns and closures. This is going to cause a massive increase in the federal deficit, and Republicans are already making noises about suddenly becoming deficit hawks again. In fact, within minutes of passing the April coronavirus bill, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was warning that “we can’t borrow enough money to solve the problem indefinitely.”

But even though Republicans may wish they could stop further rescue packages, as we come to grips with the scale of the wreckage, there will be demands for more. Epidemiologists think it’s likely we’ll have another surge of coronavirus cases in the fall, and that will produce more calls for large, broad-based stimulus bills to keep the economy afloat.

When economists say “stimulus,” Republicans hear “tax cut.” As it happens, there are actually good reasons to include certain kinds of tax cuts—those that help middle- and working-class people—in any stimulus package. They can be implemented quickly; they can be made as large as necessary; they put money directly in consumers’ pockets; and they can even be targeted to a certain degree, helping those who have suffered the biggest losses from the pandemic.

But they can also be targeted toward the rich. And that’s what Republicans are certain to propose. So here are some alternatives that Democrats would be well advised to look at.

The most obvious candidate is the Social Security payroll tax. You pay a flat tax of 6.2 percent—which makes it regressive to begin with—and it applies only to your first $137,700 of income. Everything above that is tax free, which is why millionaires pay an effective rate of less than 1 percent.

Suppose you reduce the worker’s share of the payroll tax by two percentage points. This barely affects the rich: A millionaire’s effective rate goes down from 0.9 percent to 0.6 percent. But everyone with less than $137,700 in income sees their rate go down from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent. The nonrich benefit considerably while the rich barely even notice anything has happened.

But there’s a catch: Payroll tax cuts do nothing for you if you’re unemployed, or you’ve been laid off, or you’re paid under the table. This is why Democrats fought against a payroll tax cut in the first round of corona­virus rescue packages. But even more importantly, the payroll taxes fund Social Security, and if you reduce them, Social Security will be even more underfunded than it is now. The answer is to make sure that any loss of payroll tax revenue to Social Security is made good by infusions from the general fund. These would need to last as long as the stimulus bill is active.

Another candidate is an increase in tax credits. Unlike a deduction, tax credits are subtracted from your taxes owed. The higher the credit, the lower your taxes. Current examples include the child tax credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Increasing credits is an attractive way to juice the economy because they often have fixed maximum amounts. If you lower the taxes of a millionaire by, say, $3,000, it’s a drop in the ocean. But for a middle-class family it’s real money. Democrats could propose increases in existing tax credits, or just a brand-new “pandemic tax credit.” Either way, it could cut taxes without shoveling money into the wallets of the rich.

Another subtler form of taxation that Democrats could target is tax expenditures. A tax expenditure is a deduction, exemption, or exclusion targeted at a specific activity. The most famous is the mortgage interest deduction, which is a straight-up subsidy to homeowners, but one that’s hidden in the tax system. There are more than 100 different expenditures adding up to well over $1 trillion—more than the revenue from Social Security taxes, corporate taxes, or excise taxes. (And not much less than we get from federal income taxes.)

Tax expenditures tend to favor the rich. For example, a middle-class homeowner might pay a 12 percent income tax rate and own a modest home that nets a deduction of $5,000. That’s a tax reduction of $600. And if they don’t have other expenditures to itemize, they might not get a reduction at all.

But a rich homeowner might pay an income tax rate of 37 percent and own an expensive home that nets a deduction of $50,000. That’s a tax reduction of $18,500.

If it’s a tax cut fight they want, Democrats can come armed with a slate of their own options.

The easiest way to make this fairer is to cap the amount of the deduction—as, in fact, we do with the mortgage interest deduction. But the better bet is to increase the deduction for nonrich families. Maybe we could just double the deduction for anyone with an income under $100,000. That would cut their taxes without also giving a windfall to the rich.

Finally, there’s another class of taxes entirely: state and local taxes. The sales tax is the obvious target here: It’s big and regressive. The catch is that it’s not controlled by the federal government, and Congress can’t lower it by fiat.

That doesn’t mean Congress is helpless: It could pass a federal rebate on state sales taxes. It could, for example, allow a federal tax credit based on an estimate of how much you paid in sales taxes. This would be calculated from your income and your state’s sales tax rate and would necessarily be approximate. But it would also be progressive.

And there’s one more big lever that could be used. A combination of these cuts could obviously send taxes below zero for some people. At that point, working- and middle-­class families would lose the benefit of the cut since taxes can’t be less than zero.

Except they can: If a tax credit is refundable, it means your income taxes can become negative and the federal government owes you money. In all cases where it’s possible, progressive tax cuts should be refundable. The point, after all, is to give as much money as possible to the kind of people who will spend it to boost the economy. That means working- and middle-class families, who tend to spend most of the money they earn, as opposed to rich families who end up saving or investing much of it.

Will Republicans agree to any of this? Almost certainly not. They understand perfectly well who benefits from different kinds of tax cuts, and as 2017 demonstrated, they don’t care about spurring the economy or creating jobs for the middle class. Nor do they care about reducing the deficit or raising your wages. That was all just bread and circuses to keep the rubes happy.

What they do care about is increasing the income of corporations and the rich, and that’s what they’ll fight for. But if it’s a tax cut fight they want, Democrats can come armed with a slate of their own options. Maybe they won’t get everything they want. Maybe they’ll have to accept some Republican cuts in return for some of their own. But they’ll have a story to tell, and leverage, to get at least something for the middle and working classes.

In the past, Democrats have mostly just tried to gin up opposition to Republican tax cuts by pointing out how unfair they are. It’s never worked, but the fiasco of the 2017 cut, which even the Republican rank and file was lukewarm about, gives Democrats an opportunity to fight back. Instead of just opposing cuts even if there’s a strong case that we need them to stimulate the economy, they can propose better, more equitable tax cuts than Republicans. That would be something new: a chance to educate the electorate by having a showdown over competing tax plans. In the red corner, tax cuts for millionaires. In the blue corner, tax cuts for everyone else. That’s a fight worth having.

 

[Vesper 28,801]

Trump Says Jack Smith Should Be Thrown Out of the Country, Suggesting He Believes You Can Deport American Citizens—and That in a Second Term, He’ll Try

He also called for the “mentally deranged” to be kicked out of the US.

 

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/trump-says-american-citizen-jack-smith-should-be-thrown-out-of-the-country

Donald Trump on Thursday gave voters a preview of what America would look like should he win a second term when he declared that Jack Smith, the prosecutor running two federal cases against him, should be be “throw[n]” out of the country.

“We should throw Jack Smith out with them, the mentally deranged people. Jack Smith should be considered mentally deranged, and he should be thrown out of the country,” Trump said during an interview with a conservative radio talk show.

Setting aside the idea that Trump apparently believes mental illness is a reason to kick people out of the US, he appears to also think that the US government can deport American citizens—and that, given the opportunity, he’d try. The ex-president’s comments re: Smith being thrown out of the country, came hours after he said in an interview that he would fire the special prosecutor “within two seconds.”

 

Earlier this month, Trump started warning about the need for using the military against the “enemy from within,” which he initially defined as Democratic lawmakers like California representative Adam Schiff, but later said referred to anyone who doesn’t support him.

 

In response to Trump’s latest comments, a spokesperson for Kamala Harris’s campaign said in a statement: “A second Trump term, where a more unstable and unhinged Trump has essentially no guardrails and is surrounded by loyalists who will enable his worst instincts, is guaranteed to be more dangerous. America can’t risk a second Trump term.” During a town hall with CNN on Wednesday, Harris said she believes Trump is a “fascist” and represents a “danger to the well-being and security of the United States of America.” The VP’s remarks followed a warning from John Kelly, a retired four-star general and Trump’s former chief of staff, that his ex-boss is an “authoritarian” who holds Adolph Hitler in high regard (a claim that Trump denied).

At this time, you might be wondering if Republicans have anything to say about about all of this. And the answer is, they do! Specifically, they think that Harris needs to “abandon the base and irresponsible rhetoric that endangers both American lives and institutions,” as GOP leaders Mitch McConnell and Mike Johnson wrote in the most shameless joint statement of all time, which they released on Friday. Did McConnell and Johnson have anything to say about Trump calling for the military to be used against people who don’t support him, or threatening to deport a US citizen? You probably already know the answer to that.

 

[Fulham Broadway 16,844]

CNN -''Welcome to Trumps rally, We are hearing scores of lies'' 🤣

 

[Vesper 28,801]

1 week to go (and NOT my final prediction).

Gun to my head (so I force myself to give PA and NV to Harris, and GA and NC to Trump instead of leavinbg them toss-ups, plus I am a wee bit more sure Harris wins MI and Trump wins AZ).

It comes down to one state:

Wisconsin

I spent 6 hours on a zoom call yesterday for my job with all this, with our team going full deep divey.

Wisconsin atm is truly too cose to call, including looking at trends across all levels.

Many of these may change by Monday (the 4th of November, the day before the election) when I give my final prediction.

[Vesper 28,801]

1 hour ago, Vesper said:

1 week to go (and NOT my final prediction).

Gun to my head (so I force myself to give PA and NV to Harris, and GA and NC to Trump instead of leavinbg them toss-ups, plus I am a wee bit more sure Harris wins MI and Trump wins AZ).

It comes down to one state:

Wisconsin

I spent 6 hours on a zoom call yesterday for my job with all this, with our team going full deep divey.

Wisconsin atm is truly too cose to call, including looking at trends across all levels.

Many of these may change by Monday (the 4th of November, the day before the election) when I give my final prediction.

The Crucifucks - Wisconsin (Full Album) 1987

Label: Alternative Tentacles – VIRUS 53

Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Yellow Transparent

Country: UK

Released: 1987

Genre: Rock

Style: Alternative Rock, Punk

Edited October 29 by Vesper

[cosmicway 1,323]

13 hours ago, Vesper said:

 

 

[Vesper 28,801]

The nation’s birthrate has plummeted. How did we get here?

Women are having children at the lowest rate since records began, with consequences for us all

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/society/article/the-nations-birthrate-has-plummeted-how-did-we-get-here-30qtqddwn

After the Second World War came the “baby boomers” — when the fertility rate in England and Wales rose by almost 30 per cent in seven years. But the rate has now dropped to its lowest in at least 85 years.

Last year the fertility rate — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — had fallen to 1.44 children per woman.

This is the lowest rate since records began in 1938:

Greg Ceely, from the Office for National Statistics, says the decline is “most dramatic” among women in their twenties.

So, how did we get here?

In 1938, just before the Second World War, the fertility rate stood at 1.84 children per woman. As the war ended more babies were being born, rising from 614,000 in 1939 to 821,000 in 1946. 

The number of women aged between 15 and 44, considered to be childbearing age, stayed at about ten million, according to the ONS, meaning the fertility rate rose from 1.73 in 1939 to 2.47 in 1946.

The generation born during this period — known as the “baby boomers” — were more likely to have children, and earlier in life, than any other since 1920.

Westminster Hospital, 1941

GEORGE HALES/FOX PHOTOS

The average age of first birth for women born in 1946 was 23 years. More than half, or 52 per cent, of women born in 1946 had a child before the age of 24, compared with 32 per cent among women born in 1920.

Fewer than one in ten women of this generation had no children at all, compared with about one in five among women born in 1920 or 1969, the ONS said.

By the early 1960s the number of births had been rising and, as fewer babies were born in the 1930s, there were also fewer women at this time of childbearing age. The result of more babies being born to a smaller group of women across a wider age range was that the fertility rate rose to a peak of 2.93 children per woman in 1964.

The introduction of the Abortion Act 1967 and increasing availability of oral contraception gave women greater access to birth control. This contributed to a decline in births and the fertility rate fell to 2.47 in 1969.

The first babies of the new year on January 1, 1968, at Marston Green Maternity Hospital in Birmingham

MIRRORPIX/GETTY IMAGES

In the UK, women would need to have 2.08 children on average to ensure the long-term natural replacement of the population, known as “replacement level” fertility.

By 1973 the total fertility rate had fallen beneath the replacement level for the first time since the 1940s and it has remained lower ever since.

In the 1960s and 1970s more women were entering the workforce.

By 1971 more than half of women aged 16 to 64 were employed, while by 1994 almost two thirds, 62 per cent, of working-age women were in employment.

Generation X, which came after the baby boomers, increasingly had their first child later as older traditions fell away.

Fewer than two thirds of women born in 1969 got married by the age of 30 and by the mid-1990s more than a third of children were born outside of marriage.

The number of births fell from about 700,000 a year in 1990 to just over 600,000 in 2000 and the fertility rate during this time fell from 1.84 to 1.65.

Only 20 per cent of women born in 1997 — on the cusp between millennials and Generation Z — had a child before the age of 25. That is lower than any earlier generation, continuing the trend towards later births.

For women born after the mid-1970s, age-specific fertility rates were highest among those in their thirties, marking a shift from earlier generations, who had more children in their twenties.

Women born since the mid-1990s have lower age-specific fertility rates in their twenties than any other generation since 1920, statisticians found.

There were 591,072 births in England and Wales last year, the lowest number since 1977 and only the 11th time in 172 years that the number has dipped below 600,000. The number of women of childbearing age is at its highest, however, with almost 11.9 million women aged between 15 and 44 in England and Wales in 2023.

This meant the total fertility rate in 2023 was the lowest recorded, at 1.44.

It decreased for all regions of England and Wales last year, compared with the previous year.

Wales and the northwest of England saw the largest decrease, while London, the northeast and the West Midlands saw the smallest decrease.

By 2015 more than half of young women were attending university and by 2022 more than 70 per cent of working-age women were in employment.

Research from the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies found that factors dissuading millennials from having children included not feeling ready, financial pressures and not finding the right partner. The cost-of-living crisis and high housing costs in Britain have also been cited as barriers to having children.

Meanwhile, the falling fertility rate has been mirrored in other countries. The global total fertility rate was 2.3 children per woman in 2022, less than half the rate in 1963.

In the European Union the fertility rate in 2022 was 1.5.

In England and Wales, the ONS said that the fertility rate would continue to be influenced by the structure of the population and the number and timing of births, as well as by socio-economic and cultural factors.

Paul Morland, 59, a demographer and author of the book No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children, said he expected the UK’s fertility rate to drop further. He said it could even plunge to levels seen in South Korea, which has a 0.78 fertility rate.

Morland said: “I think the Generation Zs, who are coming into the childbearing cohort, are very non-natal. Having children is a very low priority for them.

“The more traditional values, when I was in my twenties and thirties, that you got married and had children have gone.

“I think it’s something deeply embedded in the culture. People want to live all kinds of lifestyles … then they get to 35 and it’s very difficult to have children.”

Morland said that in addition to making it more affordable to have children, society needed to be reorganised so that “people can start to have children when they want to”.

Edited October 29 by Vesper

[Vesper 28,801]

Computer in command

Do the consequences of Algorithmic Management for workers require EU policy action?

https://feps-europe.eu/event/computer-in-command/

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The European Economic and Social Committee, Rue Belliard 99/101, 1040 Bruss

On October 16, we were at the European Economic and Social Committee, for an engaging debate on the impact of artificial intelligence and algorithmic management at work, organised by FEPS and the EESC.

The renowned speakers included Nicolas Schmit, European commissioner for jobs and social rights; Brando Benifei, Socialists and Democrats MEP; Lucie Studničná, president of the EESC Workers’ Group, and Isabelle Schömann, deputy general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation, among many others.

We presented key findings from two pan-Nordic policy studies from the “Digital Research Programme: Algorithms in the Workplace”:

• ‘Computer in command: Consequences of algorithmic management for workers’, based on a survey of over 6,000 union members in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland
• “Algorithmic management in traditional workplaces“, based on interviews with Nordic workers in traditional sectors including retail and hospitality.

We also examined EU legal provisions on AI in the workplace, identifying critical areas that require a reassessment of its application, the potential actions trade unions can take and necessary legislative interventions.

*******************

76% of workers within sectors like warehousing and telemarketing experience one or more forms of Algorithmic Management (AM) in the workplace. They report having less autonomy in their jobs, a greater workload, feeling more stressed, and greater concern among employees about their job security.

These are the findings from the transnational survey Computer in command: Consequences of algorithmic management for workers conducted by FEPS and Nordic think tanks among over 6,000 union members in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland.

Algorithmic management, the use of algorithms and artificial intelligence to direct and control workers, is increasingly reshaping the modern workplace. These technologies are touted as pathways to greater efficiency, productivity, and streamlined operations. However, the reality is far more complex. While digital tools have the potential to revolutionise work, they often lead to heightened pressures, reduced autonomy, and increased precarity for workers.

At this event, we explored these impacts, extrapolating its focus from the unique labour environments of the Nordic countries—Finland, Sweden, and Norway— where long-standing traditions of labour organisation intersect with rapidly advancing technologies to their implications over EU policy making.