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Month: March 2018

Rise and shine, PA-18 by @BloggersRUs

Rise and shine, PA-18
by Tom Sullivan

Groundhog Day is past in western Pennsylvania, but these post-November 2016 elections have a bit of the Bill Murray movie about them. Okay campers, rise and shine. It’s special election day. Again.

In Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District, Democrat Conor Lamb has made the race competitive against Republican state Rep. Rick Saccone. A Monmouth poll suggests Lamb has an edge as the polls open:

Lamb holds a 51% to 45% lead over Saccone if turnout yields a Democratic surge similar to voting patterns seen in other special elections over the past year. Another 1% opt for a third party candidate and 3% are undecided. Lamb also has the edge using a historical midterm lower turnout model, albeit by a much smaller 49% to 47% margin. A model with higher turnout overall, similar to a presidential electorate, gives Lamb a 51% to 44% advantage. This marks a turnaround from last month’s Monmouth poll of the race, when Saccone held a small lead in all the models – 49% to 46% in the surge model, 48% to 44% in the high turnout model, and 50% to 45% in the low turnout model.

Per recent history, Saccone should be going into election day with a double-digit lead. But special elections in 2017 showed an averaged double-digit swing towards Democrats, CNN observes. Monmouth’s poll of 372 likely voters has a margin of error of +/- 5.1 percent.

Monmouth conducted the poll before the president dropped in Saturday night to congratulate himself on being Himself. The rally was in an area key to Trump holding his white, blue-collar base. But 96% of Monmouth’s likely voters said his steel and aluminum tariff announcement had no effect on their choice.

The poll finds that likely voters in PA18 are divided on the president’s overall job performance – 49% approve and 49% disapprove. Last month, Trump earned a slightly positive 51% approve and 47% disapprove rating. Voters who approve of Trump are somewhat more likely to support the Democrat Lamb (7% to 90% for Saccone) than voters who disapprove of Trump are to support the Republican Saccone (2% to 96% for Lamb).

The NRA quietly dropped some last-minute money into the race in support of Saccone, but not on high-profile TV ads. Most of the $7,868 went into mailings, with a few hundred spent on phone banking.

It’s chilly and cloudy this morning in western Pennsylvania, with a chance of snow showers.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

The inescapable Trump legacy

The inescapable Trump legacy

by digby

No matter what happens he will leave his mark for a very long time:

More than a year into his presidency, Donald Trump is making the nation’s courts look a lot more like him: white, male and straight.

To date, Trump has nominated 87 people to be judges with lifetime tenure on U.S. district courts, circuit courts or the Supreme Court. Eighty of them are white, or nearly 92 percent. One is black, one is Latino and five are Asian or Pacific American. He hasn’t nominated any Native American judges.

The president also keeps nominating men. Sixty-seven of his court picks are male, compared to 20 who are female.

That translates to about 77 percent being men.

He’s making the courts great again:

It’s even more apparent how homogenous Trump’s picks are when compared to his recent predecessors. A Congressional Research Service analysis looked at the first 26 district and circuit court nominees from the last four presidents: Bill Clinton’s were 73 percent white, George W. Bush’s were 81 percent white, Barack Obama’s were 46 percent white, and Trump’s were 96 percent white.

In fairness, most of the fascist lawyers and judges are straight, white males. That’s just the pool he has to draw from. So it may not be that he’s being blatantly racist and sexist. He’s just being fascist.

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Russian nerve gas? What Russian nerve gas?

Russian nerve gas? What Russian nerve gas?

by digby

Robert Mackey at the Intercept:

THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT has concluded it is “highly likely” that Russia was responsible for the attempted murder of a former Russian intelligence officer and his daughter last week in the English city of Salisbury, Prime Minster Theresa May said on Monday.

While the police investigation into the attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia is not yet complete, May told Parliament that chemical weapons experts from a nearby British military facility reported that the two were “poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia,” one of a group known as novichok.

“There are, therefore, only two plausible explanations,” the prime minister said, “either this was a direct act by the Russian state against our country, or the Russian government lost control of its potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent and allowed it to get into the hands of others.”

Sarah Huckabee Sanders couldn’t say clearly that the administration agrees with that conclusion:

“Look, we’ve been monitoring the incident closely, take it very seriously,” Sanders said. “The use of a highly lethal nerve agent against U.K. citizens on U.K. soil is an outrage. The attack was reckless, indiscriminate and irresponsible. We offer the fullest condemnation, and we extend our sympathy to the victims and their families and our support to the U.K. government. We stand by our closest ally and the special relationship that we have.”

They asked her over and over again if the administration agrees with May’s conclusion that Russia was the source of the nerve agent and this was all she would say.

That is not normal, people. Not normal at all.

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Was Donald a very, very bad boy? Did he need to be punished?

Was Donald a very, very bad boy? Did he need to be punished?

by digby

I’ve been asking for a while on my regular hit on Ring of Fire with Sam Seder and on the Majority Report last Friday: what if Trump is hiding some kink?

Josh Marshal says he’s heard that’s what Stormy told Anderson Cooper in the 60 Minutes interview:

In many ways, having sex with a porn star is on-brand for Donald Trump. He spent decades playing up a reputation as a billionaire playboy. These stories seem to have stirred discord in Trump’s marriage. They’re hard to square with his current role as the darling of conservative evangelicals. But they play to the tough guy, dominant and hyper-masculine image he likes to portray. He’s boasted for years about his purported sexual prowess and the Access Hollywood tape and the subsequent string of accusations of various kinds of sexual misconduct confirmed his role as a sexual predator.

But Daniels apparently says something different. I’m told that in her 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper Daniels suggests that Trump, how to say this, likes it when women aren’t nice to him, treat him in perhaps denigrating ways.

I think that would be very much off brand for Trump. It also puts in sharper relief why he and his lawyer seem to be fighting so hard to keep Daniels’ story under wraps. It also deepens my curiosity about whether CBS will have the stomach to air that part of the story.

The interview did not run this weekend and it is not clear when it will run. CBS says they want to take their time reporting out Daniels’ claims. That is of course laudable and appropriate. But I’m not sure how they’d report out claims like that. In any case, as I noted Friday, I think we should be very skeptical whether 60 Minutes is really going to broadcast Daniels’ full story. It’s hard to imagine this isn’t playing into the apparent delay.

Mother Jones already reported this last month:

According to 2009 emails between political operatives who were at the time advising Daniels on a possible political campaign, the adult film actor and director claimed that her affair with Trump included an unusual act: spanking him with a copy of Forbes magazine…

The campaign consultant who wrote the email to Dubé tells Mother Jones that Daniels said the spanking came during a series of sexual and romantic encounters with Trump and that it involved a copy of Forbes with Trump on the cover.

A fall 2006 cover of Forbes does feature Trump and two of his children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka.

Live by the reality show tabloid dirt, die by the reality show tabloid dirt.

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If the criteria is how many people your product has killed …

If the criteria is how many people your product has killed …

by digby

Trump on Saturday made the point that you can get the death penalty for killing just one person but “you kill 5,000 people with drugs because you’re smuggling them in and you are making a lot of money and people are dying. And they don’t even put you in jail. That’s why we have a problem, folks. I don’t think we should play games.”

One could say the same thing about gun manufacturers, no?

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Sater unmasked

Sater unmasked

by digby

This story in Buzzfeed about Trump and Michael Cohen buddy Felix Sater is just wild:

In the sprawling Trump-Russia investigation, one name constantly pops up: Felix Sater. In story after story, Sater is described as Donald Trump’s former business partner, a convicted stock swindler who was born in the Soviet Union, worked in Russia, tried to win Trump a deal in Moscow, and even helped broker a Ukrainian peace plan that Vladimir Putin would have loved.

Basically, he’s portrayed as something just short of a Russian spy.

Effectively, he has been a spy — but for the United States. For the first time, BuzzFeed News has verified the surprising sweep of Sater’s undercover work and many of his specific exploits. He worked as an asset for the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (or DIA) and tracked Osama bin Laden. Then he worked for more than a decade for the FBI, providing intel on everything from the mob to North Korea’s drive for nuclear weapons. He still operates as a source for the bureau, according to two current FBI agents.

He did some of this work to fend off prison time after he admitted guilt in a stock scam — but he had started helping the US government before then, and he continued to report back to the FBI after the agreement ended. Today, as he is being questioned about Trump’s business deals and ties to Russia, he has built relationships with at least six members of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, some going back more than 10 years.

“At the direction of the FBI,” Sater traveled to the Middle East after 9/11 to collect “valuable intelligence” on “key leaders in al Qaeda.”
Fragments of Sater’s work for the government have leaked out, partly because Sater himself has bragged about “building Trump Towers by day and hunting Bin Laden by night.” But his “cloak-and-dagger claims of chasing down terrorists” were often dismissed as “wildly unlikely,” while Sater himself remained “an obsession of the many investigators — professional and amateur — searching for Trump’s Russia connection.”

Now BuzzFeed News has obtained the statement Sater gave under oath to House Intelligence Committee investigators at his attorney’s office in December, interviewed him extensively, and corroborated many details of his spy-thriller account through legal documents, emails, letters, and interviews with 10 current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials familiar with his undercover work.

“At the direction of the FBI,” the Department of Justice stated in a newly unsealed court filing, Sater traveled to the Middle East after 9/11 to collect “valuable intelligence” on “key leaders in al Qaeda,” and he helped “in a number of other areas, including Russian organized crime.” In other court filings, the Justice Department said Sater’s work on behalf of the United States “involves 18 foreign governments” as well as “various families of La Cosa Nostra,” and that his help was “of an extraordinary depth and breadth.”

Specific exploits confirmed by BuzzFeed News include:

He obtained five of the personal satellite telephone numbers for Osama bin Laden before 9/11 and he helped flip the personal secretary to Mullah Omar, then the head of the Taliban and an ally of bin Laden, into a source who provided the location of al-Qaeda training camps and weapons caches.

In 2004, he persuaded a source in Russia’s foreign military intelligence to hand over the name and photographs of a North Korean military operative who was purchasing equipment to build the country’s nuclear arsenal.

Sater provided US intelligence with details about possible assassination threats against former president George W. Bush and secretary of state Colin Powell. Sater reported that jihadists were hiding in a hut outside Bagram Air Base and planned to shoot down Powell’s plane during a January 2002 visit. He later told his handlers that two female al-Qaeda members were trying to recruit an Afghan woman working in the Senate barbershop to poison President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney.

He went undercover in Cyprus and Istanbul to catch Russian and Ukrainian cybercriminals around 2005. After the FBI set him up with a fake name and background, Sater posed as a money launderer to help nab the suspects for washing funds stolen from US financial institutions.

The CIA, DIA, FBI, and leaders of the House Intelligence Committee all declined to comment.

Over the past month, two BuzzFeed News reporters met frequently with Sater in Los Angeles, where he’s been living since February and which seems to suit him. He’s tan. He had his Porsche shipped over from Long Island. He gets the good table at Delilah, a see-and-be-seen West Hollywood nightclub. He said he is telling his full story, long kept secret by the government, to clear his name. “I am being given no choice because of the ongoing Trump investigations,” he said. “The media lies about me.”

But …

Even as he was helping US intelligence and law enforcement agencies, Sater racked up enemies in his business dealings. An Arizona man said Sater threatened to cut his legs off during a failed development deal. Florida investors said his company, Bayrock, ripped them off. A former colleague said in a lawsuit that the entire Bayrock operation was run by organized crime figures, and that Sater threatened to have him killed if he didn’t cooperate. Sater denied doing any of these things.

But he doesn’t deny that he is always looking for an angle. As the Trump campaign kicked into high gear in 2015, Sater saw an opportunity.

In emails initially revealed by the Washington Post, Sater wrote to Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, boasting about being able to finally line up a real estate development in Moscow — a deal the Trump Organization had long sought.

In one of the emails, Sater told Cohen that he could get buy-in from Putin himself and that “we will get Donald elected” in the process. Those emails have become a flashpoint in the Trump-Russia investigation — but Sater, who denied having anything to do with Russian interference in the election, told BuzzFeed News he was just doing what he’s always done: working a deal.

Did he actually know Putin?

“No, of course not.”

Did he think the Trump Moscow deal could get Trump elected?

Even Trump “is fucking surprised he became the president.”

Then why send that email?

“If a deal can get done and I could make money and he could look like a statesman, what the fuck is the downside, right?”

Who in the hell are these people???? How in the hell did this happen?

Read the whole thing. It’s an amazing story.His connections to Trump and Michael Cohen run deep with business deals and that weird Ukrainian peace deal etc.

What it means, I have no idea except that it might be a good idea not to elect mobster con men as president.

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Trumpism in the mainstream right

Trumpism in the mainstream right

by digby

This was published in the National Review’s Townhall:

It’s obvious that the central tenet of the Democrat Party platform is now hatred and contempt for Normal Americans. Taking their cue from the elites in Europe and Canada who are stripping dissenters of their free speech rights and religious freedoms, the leftist elite is moving to solidify its hold on power here with the eager assistance of tech companies and the moral support of the Fredocons who yearn to return to pseudo-relevance as the ruling class’s slobberingly loyal opposition. In California, the leftist government is practically firing on Fort Sumter. And nationally, these aspiring fascists are especially eager to disarm Normal Americans – doing so would be an object lesson in who’s the boss, as well as solving that frustrating problem of the Normals having the ability to resist.

Probably because I’ve spent time where they actually had a civil war, many people ask me – people whose names you know – whether I think this turmoil will all end in a Second Civil War. They are seriously concerned, and not without cause – the left’s hatred for Normal Americans and its dedication to totally stripping the people who are the backbone of this country of their ability to participate in their own governance is threatening to rip the country apart.

Do I think there will be a civil war? No, but there could be. This is the Age of Black Swans, and anything is possible – we could easily see the country split into red and blue. Civil war is unlikely, but never underestimate Democrat stupidity and hatred. The Schlichter family learned that lesson a century and half ago, the last time the Democrats decided to try to impose their hatred of basic human rights on the rest of the country, when an army of Democrats burned our family hometown.

Oh, they paid for it. And they would pay again. Democrats are 0-1 in insurrections, and if they went for another round, they would be 0-2. It’s a matter of terrain, numbers, and morale.

Democrats, who think history began when Obama was elected, don’t understand the dangerous game they are playing when they talk about how they want to impose their brown shirt vision upon red America. The keyboard commandos of the left seek to hand wave away the massive strategic challenge of imposing control by force upon a well-armed, decentralized citizenry occupying the vast majority of the territory, so they babble about drones and tanks as counterinsurgency trump cards. But there are no trump cards in war. There are men, with rifles, standing on patches of dirt, killing the people trying to push them off. That’s the ugly reality of war. And multiply the usual brutality of war by ten when it’s a civil war.

There are two Civil War II scenarios, and the left is poorly positioned to prevail in either one. The first scenario is that the Democrats take power and violate the Constitution in order to use the apparatus of the federal government to suppress and oppress Normal Americans. In that scenario, red Americans are the insurgents. In the second scenario, which we can even now see the stirrings of in California’s campaign to nullify federal immigration law, it is the blue states that are the insurgents.

The Democrats lose both wars. Big time.

Let’s talk terrain and numbers. Remember the famous red v. blue voting map? There is a lot of red, and in the interior the few blue splotches are all cities like Las Vegas or Denver. That is a lot of territory for a counter-insurgent force to control, and this is critical. The red is where the food is grown, the oil pumped, and through which everything is transported. And that red space is filled with millions of American citizens with small arms, a fairly large percentage of whom have military training.

Remember what two untrained idiots did in Boston with a couple of pistols? They shut a city down. Now multiply that by several million, with better weapons and training.

Let’s look at the counter-insurgent forces in the Democrat oppression scenario should they attempt to misuse our law enforcement and military in an unconstitutional manner to take the rights of American citizens. There are a lot of civilian law enforcement officers, but the vast majority of the agencies are local – sheriffs, small town police departments. They will not be reliable allies in supporting unlawful oppression of their friends and neighbors. The major cities’ police departments are run by Democrat appointees, so the commands would be loyal. But the rank-and-file? A small percentage would be ideologically loyal. More would be loyal because that’s their paycheck – they could be swayed or intimidated to support the rebels. Others would be actively sympathetic to the insurgents. This is true of federal law enforcement agencies as well.

And the military? Well, wouldn’t the military just crush any resistance? Not so fast. The military would have the combat power to win any major engagement, but insurgents don’t get into major engagements with forces that have more combat power. They instead leverage their decentralized ability to strike at the counter-insurgents’ weak points to eliminate the government’s firepower advantage. In other words, hit and run, and no stand-up fights.

For example, how do a bunch of hunters in Wisconsin defeat a company of M1A2 Abrams tanks? They ambush the fuel and ammo trucks. Oh, and they wait until the gunner pops the hatch to take a leak and put a .30-06 round in his back from 300 meters. Then they disappear. What do the tanks do then? Go level the nearest town? Great. Now they just moved the needle in favor of the insurgents among the population. Pretty soon, they can’t be outside of their armored vehicles in public. Their forces are spending 90% of their efforts not on actual counter-insurgency operations but on force protection. Sure, they own their forward operating bases, and they own a few hundred meters around them wherever they happen to be standing at the moment, but the rest of the territory is bright red. As my recent novel illustrates, American guerillas with small arms are a deadly threat to the forces of a dictatorship.

But the military is so big it would overwhelm any rebels, right? Well, how big do you think the military is? And, more importantly, how many actual boots on the ground can it deploy? Let’s put it in terms of brigade combat teams, which total about 4,500 troops each. There are about 60 brigades in the Army, active and reserve, here and abroad, and let’s give the Marines another 10 brigades, for about 70 brigades. Sounds impressive. But that’s deceptive.

Let’s put aside a big consideration – the existence of red states that would provide for an insurgent government structure and possibly attract the loyalty of some National Guard and even federal brigades. For example, if President Hillary Clinton put down her chardonnay long enough to sign a ban on privately owned guns, it’s not unreasonable to expect the governor of Texas to reject federal authority – after all, California just taught us that this is totally cool. But in this case, look for several brigades located there to hoist the Lone Star flag.

So, now the blue states are facing unconventional and conventional forces.

Let’s ignore that problem and focus on a different challenge. Even a normal unit has about 10% non-deployable members. Now, if these troops were assigned to combat operations against other Americans, you would have significant additional losses through desertion. Many of the senior leaders would participate – the Obama generation – and there is a certain type of junior officer only too happy to curry favor by sucking up in defiance of their oath (which is to the Constitution, not to some leftist president). You can identify them because they usually have “strategist” in their Twitter bios. But a lot of key, capable officer and NCO leaders, and enlisted troops, would vanish. That is proper. It is a violation of their oath to unconstitutionally oppress fellow Americans; their duty would be to refuse such unlawful orders.

So, you have significantly understrength units going in. Now, how many of the troops in a brigade are actually even front line combat troops? About a third – the rest are support. So a brigade is really about 1500 riflemen tops before you count losses. Cut those in half for sleep, training, and refitting at any one time (which is very generous) and your brigade is really 750 troops on your best day with everyone showing up. Realistically, it’s 300.

That holds one mid-sized town. And there are hundreds of mid-sized towns. Plus there are millions of Normal Americans who would fight back. Nothing would move without their permission – a few guys shooting up big rigs along the interstate would shut down the entire trucking industry. Bottom line: there simply are not enough military forces to clear and hold red America.

What about drones and bombers? Both are useful. But the minute a bombing strike kills some red civilians the families of counter-insurgent drone operators and pilots will be knocking at the base gates to be let inside. Now you’ll need many of those brigades to protect the civilians you now need to protect from retribution.

Civil wars are harsh. That’s why you avoid them.

How about the blue insurgency scenario? That goes even worse for the Democrats. You have the federal government apparatus in the hands of red America, and the insurgents are the opposite of decentralized and armed. They are conveniently centered in gun-unfriendly blue cities. In other words, the blue civilian population is much less of a threat.

A red counter-insurgency avoids the problem of a decentralized insurgency and insecure logistical lines. In the case of California, whose secessionist antics are approaching the point where President Trump could legitimately employ his power to crush insurrections, the tactical problem is relatively simple. For example, San Francisco is a hotbed of treason, but the populace is largely unarmed and is trapped in a confined area. You put a brigade on securing the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, then put a brigade on the San Francisco Peninsula to cut off the I-280 and US-101 corridors. Next you go to the Crystal Springs Dam and cut off the water. Then you watch and wait as the tech hipsters run out of artisanal sushi rice and kombucha.

After about a week, they surrender. After all, you can’t eat and drink smugness. LA is just bigger in scope – more corridors to cut off, but in the end the population concentrations in large liberal urban areas that are their strength also make them extremely vulnerable to logistical pressure.

Then there’s another factor, an intangible but a crucial one. It’s commitment. The Democrat threat to peace is based on its policies designed to deprive Normal Americans of their right to speak freely, to worship freely, and to defend themselves and their rights with firearms. Make no mistake – millions of Normal Americans are willing to risk death to defend those rights. In fact, many swore to do so when they entered our military and law enforcement. But who is the leftist big talker willing to die to impose the fascist dream of censorship, religious oppression, and disarmament on Normal American citizens? Is the screeching SJW at Yale going to suit up in Kevlar? Is the Vox columnist going to grab a M4? Is the Hollywood poser going to switch her gyno-beanie for a helmet?

No. Hell, we just heard our liberal opponents explaining why a cop shouldn’t be expected to go fight a scumbag murdering kids because it’s scary. America might split apart, but it’s highly unlikely Team Kale n’ Vinyl would fight should their big talk finally push Normal America too far.

Just thought you should know.

yikes.

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Obstruction will wait

Obstruction will wait

by digby


I guess this is news?

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether President Donald Trump obstructed justice is said to be close to completion, but he may set it aside while he finishes other key parts of his probe, such as possible collusion and the hacking of Democrats, according to current and former U.S. officials.

That’s because Mueller may calculate that if he tries to bring charges in the obstruction case — the part that may hit closest to Trump personally — witnesses may become less cooperative in other parts of the probe, or the president may move to shut it down altogether.

The revelation is a peek into Mueller’s calculations as he proceeds with his many-headed probe, while pressure builds from the president’s advisers and other Republicans to show progress or wrap it up.

The obstruction portion of the probe could likely be completed after several key outstanding interviews, including with the president and his son, Donald Trump Jr. The president’s lawyers have been negotiating with Mueller’s team over such an encounter since late last year. But even if Trump testifies in the coming weeks, Mueller may make a strategic calculation to keep his findings on obstruction secret, according to the current and former U.S. officials, who discussed the strategy on condition of anonymity.

Any clear outcome of the obstruction inquiry could be used against Mueller: Filing charges against Trump or his family could prompt the president to take action to fire him. Publicly clearing Trump of obstruction charges — as the president’s lawyers have requested — could be used by his allies to build pressure for the broader investigation to be shut down.

Other key matters under investigation by Mueller’s team, with its 17 career prosecutors, include whether Trump or any of his associates helped Russia meddle in the 2016 campaign. Mueller is also expected to indict some of those responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee before the election and publicly leaking stolen material in an effort to hurt Democrat Hillary Clinton.

The timing for whether — and when — to interview Trump or his family members is one of the most sensitive decisions Mueller faces at this stage of his investigation. The special counsel’s office declined to comment for this story.

Trump, who has branded the probe a “witch hunt,” is growing increasingly frustrated as Mueller’s work continues, and the president’s lawyers have signaled that they expect the investigation to wrap up quickly.

Yeah, I really doubt that any prosecutor would bring obstruction charges without completing the investigation into the underlying crime. Maybe I’m wrong. I guess they could use the leverage of one to get cooperation for the other. But in a politically explosive case like this I suspect any prosecutor would want to get the chronology straight and be able to provide a clear motive for the cover-up before they charge the cover-up.

But what do I know?

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Killing a parasite, part 2 — How to implement student debt cancellation, by @Gaius_Publius

Killing a parasite, part 2 — How to implement student debt cancellation

by Gaius Publius

The other side of student debt: Salaries of some private college presidents according to the Chronicle of Higher Education (source). These numbers are deceptive. According to the Huffington Post, the president of the University of Chicago, for example, was paid $3.3 million in 2011 if you include deferred compensation.
The other side of student debt: Salaries of presidents of some public (taxpayer-funded) colleges and universities according to the Chronicle of Higher Education (source), These numbers do not appear to include deferred compensation.

This is the second part in a short series, “Killing a Parasite — Canceling Student Debt.”

In Part 1, we made the case that the institutionalized and growing student debt crisis is not fed by predatory activity on creditors, but by parasitic activity. Predators kill, eat, and move on. Parasites disable, then live off the energy system of the disabled host for as long as they can keep the host alive. The argument there was simple: “Viruses are a form of parasite. So are credit card companies.”

A non-human parasite: The “tongue-eating louse” is a parasitic crustacean of the family Cymothoidae. The parasite enters fish through the gills and then attaches itself to the fish’s tongue, strangling and replacing it. Then it feeds on the fish as the fish feeds itself (source).

An especially pernicious form of “loan parasite” includes institutions preying financially on students, who incur their debt without current income to pay it, yet need a college degree to effectively compete in the post-graduation job market. Because at one point the federal government guaranteed many or most student loans in the U.S., private lenders eagerly extended credit to anyone who asked for it. No-risk lending is a no-brainer in the financial world.

These practices put a flood of money into the higher education system, money which continually drives up the price of higher education, even in public colleges and universities. Institutions charge what students can afford to pay, and since students were paying with government-backed loans — and today are paying with government-originated loans (see below) — they become a mere pass-through from lenders to college and university administrations.

Thus the more money this “program” makes available, the higher the tuitions charged by the receiving institutions. (It’s really a racket in the classic sense, since students are coerced by the ever-increasing need for “credentialization” in an ever-deteriorating full-time labor market. Again, see below.)

A great deal of the new money that colleges and universities acquire ends up in the hands of the administrators themselves via growth in their number and growth in their salaries. At the top, many college presidents are paid like corporate CEOs, whom they consider themselves to resemble.

Paul Campos, writing in the New York Times, first identifies the “cover story,” the comfortable myth, that’s used to explain the booming cost of college (my emphasis throughout):

Once upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational debt loads, and everyone lived unhappily ever after.

This is the story college administrators like to tell when they’re asked to explain why, over the past 35 years, college tuition at public universities has nearly quadrupled, to $9,139 in 2014 dollars. It is a fairy tale in the worst sense, in that it is not merely false, but rather almost the inverse of the truth.

He then shows that the truth is almost exactly opposite:

In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general. For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are more than 10 times higher.

In other words, far from being caused by funding cuts, the astonishing rise in college tuition correlates closely with a huge increase in public subsidies for higher education.

If car prices had gone up as fast as tuition over the same period, he writes, “the average new car would cost more than $80,000.”

Where is this money going? Among other places, into the pockets of the administrator class. Campos notes that “an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase.”

To see the effect on the salaries of college presidents, the industry’s CEO class, see the charts at the top.

Part 1 in this series looked at the Why question — Why should all student loans be canceled? — and answered it in economic terms, since ending student loan debt would benefit not just the students affected, but the economy as a whole. It also answered the Why question in moral terms: Ending the practice of parasitism, humans preying on humans, is a good thing in itself.

This piece looks at the How question — How should ending student loans be implemented? A future installment, the last, will address the What Next and What If We Don’t questions. (Hint: Extreme parasitism is not a stable system, and the social consequences of extreme human suffering aren’t limited to the ballot box.)

The federal government is the largest originator of student loans

A little background before we get to the implementation. The largest originator and owner of student loans is now the U.S. government:

The Federal Student Aid (FSA) loan portfolio balances were $896 billion at the end of 2012. The FSA managed $473 billion under the Federal Direct Student Loan Program at the end of 2012. New loans originated under the program during 2012 totaled $106.7 billion. Loan portfolio balances managed by the FSA for the Federal Family Education Loan Program are slowly and steadily shrinking as new loans offered to students by the U.S. Department of Education originate under the FDSL program. Most of the growth in FDSL loan portfolio balances can be attributed to new loan originations, while being the sole government program for student loans. Another contributor to the rapid escalation in loan balances is due to the cost of higher education increasing rapidly, faster than inflation. Students are spending and borrowing more to finance their higher-priced, higher education.

As of the 2015 GAO audit, the total of the Federal Student Aid loan portfolio was one trillion dollars. [Footnotes removed]

By comparison, note that the aggregate national student loan total, including both public and privately originated loans, is close to $1.5 trillion.

The percentage of private loans is actually much smaller that these numbers imply. According to a new paper by Scott Fullwiler, Stephanie Kelton, Catherine Ruetschlin, and Marshall Steinbaum, “The vast majority of [student] debt originates from federal lending, with the private student loan market accounting for just
7.6 percent
($99.7 million) of all student debt.” (More from this paper below.)

Also note that the government-guaranteed loan program, in which private lenders were the source of the money, was eliminated only recently, in 2010:

Following the passage of the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, the Federal Direct Loan Program is the sole government-backed loan program in the United States. Guaranteed loans—loans originated and funded by private lenders but guaranteed by the government—were eliminated because of a perception that they benefited private student loan companies at the expense of taxpayers, but did not help reduce costs for students.

So the loan guarantee program became a loan origination program. This makes the U.S. government today the major parasite driving the student loan crisis, though $100 million in private student debt is still a sizable prize for private lenders.

This also puts the U.S. government in a unique and powerful position — it can, if it wishes, solve this problem by its own action alone.

How to end the student loan crisis

Part 1 of this series argued the benefits of a “debt jubilee” on all student loans in the U.S. The paper cited above also argues those benefits (see the Executive Summary). The mechanics of this cancellation, ways it can be implemented, are as follows. Note in the second bulleted paragraph how private loan debt would be handled (emphasis mine):

The current portfolio of student loans held by the ED would be cancelled or, equivalently, borrowers would simply be allowed to stop making payments and any principal due on a given date would be cancelled at that time (that is, the loan would effectively be cancelled in stages as payments come due). As of the second quarter of 2016, the ED’s outstanding loans totaled $986.19 billion.

The federal government would either purchase and then cancel, or, equivalently, take over the payments on student debt currently held by the private sector. As with the ED’s loans, if the government purchases the privately held loans it can choose to cancel them immediately or as borrowers’ payments come due. The government-guaranteed loans are $266.69 billion, while nonguaranteed privately issued loans are $101.58 billion, both as of the second quarter of 2016. Having the government assume these payments or purchase and cancel the loans is preferable to cancellation by private investors. The latter would require the private sector to write down nearly $370 billion in both assets and equity, which could be highly destabilizing (or worse) for the affected sectors.

Section II of the paper works out the effects of the various choices presented above. Note again that the effect on the national debt derives solely from the loan servicing amounts (interest payments), which are either lost to the government in the case of canceled government loans, or paid by the government in the case of privately issued loans. Canceling the outstanding loans balances themselves has no effect at all on the amount of federal debt.

But wouldn’t this disproportionately benefit the rich?

One of the chief objections to this proposal is that it’s regressive, that it would disproportionately benefit the rich. The authors address this concern:

The Distributional Consequences of Student Debt, Student Debt Cancellation, and Debt-Free College

…[T]he main controversy over student debt generally and debt cancellation in particular has not been its macroeconomic impact, but rather the implications for people in different income and wealth quantiles and the impact on inequality. The controversy arises from the factual observation that among borrowers, those with the largest amount of debt outstanding tend to have the highest incomes, and those who spend the most on college (and who therefore—so the story goes—have the most to gain from the option of free college) come from the highest-earning families….

This objection, overly simple and therefore easy to “sell,” fails to take into account the wholesale changes that have occurred in both the student loan population and the U.S. labor market.

The widespread criticism of ambitious policies to address the student debt crisis, based on their supposedly regressive impact, is overdrawn. In some cases, it misinterprets the evidence about who is most burdened by student debt and who would benefit most from relief. In this section, we consider the evidence about the distribution of debt and debt burdens in the population and the evolution of those distributions over time. Our main point is that, while the largest loan balances are indeed held by comparatively high-earning households, the extent to which student debt is held by the rich has diminished significantly. Moreover, the argument that the distribution of the burden of student debt has not, in fact, changed very much, even as the total amount of debt outstanding has increased dramatically, fails to consider the significant changes in the population of people with any student debt at all. These issues of interpretation extend beyond accurately assessing the distributional impact of the policies we model—they point to larger problems with the assumptions behind existing higher education, student debt, and labor market policies. The student debt crisis is one of several linked manifestations of those problems. Others are wage stagnation, underemployment, and increasing inequality of household wealth.

Student debt was once disproportionately associated with graduate school and with relatively well-off households, in part because it was possible to graduate from community college or a four-year public institution with little or no debt, and in even larger part because many people did not need to obtain any higher education credentials in order to access the labor market. What has happened in recent decades, and especially since the mid-2000s, is a vast expansion of student borrowing, such that the preponderant share of younger cohorts newly entering the labor market carry student debt. This expansion is due in part to much higher tuition, mostly thanks to state-level cutbacks in funding for higher education, and in part because it is simply far more difficult to access the labor market now without higher education credentials. And that “credentialization,” in turn, is due to the underperformance of the labor market since 2000 and especially since the financial crisis and the Great Recession that began in 2008. Since 2000, the most important federal labor market policy has been the extension of student debt and the encouragement of a larger share of the population to obtain debt-financed higher education credentials, on the theory that underemployment and stagnant wages were caused by a “skills gap” that could be remedied through debt-financed higher education. The most obvious and acute effect of that policy was the growth of the high-priced for-profit higher education sector, but it was also evident in rising enrollment across all types of institutions, even as tuition rose. The “skills gap” was a false diagnosis of the labor market’s problems, and hence the prescription of more debt-financed credentials not only failed to solve the problem, it also created its own problem in the form of unsustainable debt.

The bottom line is this: Student debt today is killing a generation in a way it didn’t before. This is new and not a function of loans to students born of wealthy parents. It’s a societal and generational problem, actually a multi-generational one, that hurts us all. The economic harm done to an entire generation of Americans is not captured by the objection that this is somehow a “regressive” proposal.

As the authors note, there’s more in that section of the paper in support of these claims.

The need for debt-free public higher education

It’s clear that this proposal, in my view necessary, must also be accompanied by the Sanders campaign proposal of debt-free public colleges and universities. The arguments for Sanders’ proposal, on its own merits, were well explored during the campaign.

A major objection to Sanders’ idea was again that it would mainly benefit the rich — an argument that ignores, disingenuously I think, the fact that the very wealthy do not send their children to public colleges and universities. Harvard University would not become tuition-free under Sanders’ proposal.

But in the context of the current proposal for cancellation of all student debt, there’s another reason for instituting debt-free public colleges and universities: moral hazard. Briefly, canceling debt without removing the reasons debt is incurred in the first place encourages reckless borrowing in the expectation of future cancellation.

The authors address the problem this way:

The primary theoretical criticism of debt cancellation plans focuses on the reaccumulation of debt following the cancellation, in particular the potential for problems of moral hazard to arise. From this perspective, debt relief today could change the incentives of future student debtors who may increase borrowing with the expectation that the loans will be forgiven, causing an even faster accumulation of debt and increasing the negative consequences at the household, local, and macroeconomic levels. The perverse incentives for unsustainable borrowing in this scenario are the result of inappropriate policy institutions that absolve borrowers of their debts while perpetuating the necessity of increasing debt. In order to avoid problems of moral hazard, any restructuring of student debt—including our debt cancellation proposal—should be accompanied by strong and appropriate policies that enforce the consequences of borrowing and address the market failures that lead to undesirable social costs. In combination with debt cancellation, publicly funded free or debt-free college would provide the institutional reform.

In combination with a program like the one Sanders proposed during the campaign — free public colleges and universities — student debt cancellation would indeed and effectively address the current student debt crisis. The two proposals are a necessary pair and should be implemented together.

Finally, the “fairness” question

Which brings us to the last of the objections. In effect, it comes down to this: “I paid for my college degree with my hard work and sacrifice. I paid off all my loans, and believe me it was tough. But I did it. So why should others get a break that I didn’t get?”

The problem here is what one writer described as “status quo bias,” an emotional preference in which the “current baseline (or status quo) is taken as a reference point, and any change from that baseline is perceived as a loss.”

but there’s another bias as well, which could be called “retributional bias.” This situation is similar to any in which an originally beneficial policy was first rescinded and then reinstated. Public education was largely free prior to the Reagan era, and with the GI Bill, millions paid next to nothing to attend. As the paper’s authors point out, the largest loan balances were associated with post-graduate work.

But higher education policies changed under and after Reagan, reaching crisis proportions today. Should people trapped in debt by the blatant injustices of the post-Reagan world be allowed to veto, in the name of “fairness,” the repeal of those injustices?

The essence of this objection is, “It’s not fair that I was born at the wrong time.” This has been described as being “trapped by history.” Is it unfair that many be so trapped? Of course it is. But the perp in that unfairness is not the next generation to also be shackled, but the times themselves, the politicians who ruled them, and voters who kept them in power.

To therefore perpetuate that unfairness — to make, in effect, this generation suffer “because I had to” — is more than just unfair to them. It’s cruel.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP
 

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Epistemology in the Trump era by @BloggersRUs

Epistemology in the Trump era
by Tom Sullivan


Image via Science.

What is truth? And how do we know?

That question is the heart of the matter. Does anyone care? is more to the point. Robinson Meyer examines for The Atlantic a recent study published in Science on fake news and the Twitter users who love it:

The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.

As if we needed a study.

They taught computers to differentiate between accurate stories and spurious ones, then tracked how both spread. Using a “state-of-the-art sentiment-analysis tool,” researchers at MIT also found false stories are more novel, sparking retweets. The report itself found “the truth inspired replies that expressed greater sadness.”

Spread lies, be happy. Cue Bobby McFerrin.

The study did not look at recent bot activity, but rather across the entire existence of Twitter. On that time span, they found little effect of bots in furthering the spread of false stories, concluding “human behavior contributes more to the differential spread of falsity and truth than automated robots do.”

Rebekah Tromble, a professor of political science at Leiden University in the Netherlands responded in an email, “The key takeaway is really that content that arouses strong emotions spreads further, faster, more deeply, and more broadly on Twitter.” Researchers have not applied the same process to Facebook, but believe the results would be similar.

Even for readers already into a fifth of scotch, the analysis is sobering.

An accompanying article in Science considered interventions for staunching the unreality bleed. The prospects are not good:

Fact checking might even be counterproductive under certain circumstances. Research on fluency—the ease of information recall—and familiarity bias in politics shows that people tend to remember information, or how they feel about it, while forgetting the context within which they encountered it. Moreover, they are more likely to accept familiar information as true (10). There is thus a risk that repeating false information, even in a fact-checking context, may increase an individual’s likelihood of accepting it as true. The evidence on the effectiveness of claim repetition in fact checking is mixed (11).

The team called for (emphasis mine) “interdisciplinary research to reduce the spread of fake news and to address the underlying pathologies.”

As if we needed a study.

Reading through the reports brought to mind Tom Wolfe’s essay, “O Rotten Gotham: Sliding Down into the Behavioral Sink” (1968?). His tramp through New York with anthropologist Edward T. Hall spawned an essay in how overcrowding would inevitably lead in humans, as it does among rats, to disease and social dysfunction, even mass die-offs. In an over-crowded colony, a few male rats prosper and collect harems while the rest of the colony falls into chaos.

Wolfe wrote:

Most politicians are like the aristocrat rats. They are insulated from The Sink by practically sultanic buffers — limousines chauffeurs, secretaries, aides-de-camp, doormen, shuttered houses, high-floor apartments they almost never ride subways, fight rush-hours, much less live in the slums or work in the Pan-Am Building.

Overcrowding in rural America, of course, is as rare as voter fraud and does not explain the joie de vivre with which Trumpian crowds celebrate every falsehood uttered by their king. They cheered again Saturday night in Moon Township, Pennsylvania. But it is hard not to look at the false news study and feel America, with its widening gulf between haves and anxious have-nots, with its males engaging in (quoting Wolfe) “unprovoked and senseless assault upon one another,” as happened in Hall’s rat colonies, in Las Vegas, and in Parkland, Florida, is another manifestation of The Sink.

“Social-media platforms do not encourage the kind of behavior that anchors a democratic government,” writes Meyer.

As if we needed a study.

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