Picture of the week
by digby
This photo is the perfect metaphor. Donald Trump clearly sees the world the wrong way when compared to other NATO leaders. Is it because he’s a moron, because Putin tells him to or a mixture of both? pic.twitter.com/RRGCN0Hw70— Adam Best (@adamcbest) July 11, 2018
All of the above.
.
This is what he does
by digby
That’s basically what Trump said today when he said “Germany is captive of Russia”
.
He’s got a point
by digby
General Wesley Clark on CNN answering why Trump won’t address the election interference on his behalf with Putin in public the way he does with the NATO allies:
What would people say if President Trump said, “look President Putin, stop denying it. I know you interfered in the election” and President Putin says, “You ASKED ME TOO! You asked for help with the emails you did it in an open debate in front of the American people!”
It’s true. He did.
.
Had A President Romney Nominated Kavanaugh, Would Leading Dems Oppose Him?
by tristero
No. Of course not. Too many folks in Washington think he’s such a great guy. And to too many Dems, that would have been enough of a qualification. It’s only because there so much activism against Trump right now that the leading Democrats have decided to put up what they know is an all-but-futile fight. Schumer wants my vote.
But regardless of who nominated him, Kavanaugh remains a partisan right-wing activist who has no business being on the Supreme Court. Roe may be the worst thing Kavanaugh’s appointment will unravel, but it won’t be the last, not by a long shot.
What this points to is that the process of American democracy was seriously broken long before Trump ever announced his candidacy. We need more Ocasio-Cortez’s in Washington and fewer old-school Democrats who for too long have prized acceptance inside the Washington club over their country.
“Germany is a captive of Russia”
by digby
Trump said that at the NATO meeting. Once again, it’s a problem when the president of the United States is a cretinous moron.
Angela Merkel, raised in Soviet controlled East Germany, responded:
“I have experienced myself how a part of Germany was controlled by the Soviet Union. I am very happy that today we are united in freedom, the Federal Republic of Germany…”
You cannot make this stuff up:
President Donald Trump targeted Germany on Wednesday in reiterating his demand that NATO countries step up their defense spending so that they shoulder a greater share of the burden in protecting Europe from Russia.
Trump said it is not fair to American taxpayers that Germany buys oil and gas from Russia while enjoying the umbrella of defense provided by U.S. dollars. “Germany is a captive of Russia,” he said, pointing out that the country pays “billions and billions of dollars” to a Russia for energy. Trump said he believed that was “inappropriate”, adding: “Germany is a rich country.”
Even before the pomp-filled welcoming ceremony of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting here, Trump made clear in a brief exchange with Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg that he has no intention of easing pressure on alliance nations just because Europe is nervous that tensions could empower Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom Trump is scheduled to meet Monday in Helsinki.
He also tweeted:
Then he demanded that the governments of NATO pay 4% of GDP instead of 2%.
I think he’s having small strokes or something. This is bizarre even for him.
.
Trump and Putin’s honest contempt for human rights
by digby
Before President Trump took off for the NATO summit yesterday, he stopped on the White House lawn and took some questions from reporters. In light of the failure of the government to meet a court imposed deadline to return all the little children under the age of five who were cruelly separated from their parents during the draconian “zero-tolerance” policy, a reporter asked the president:
Q: Reaction to latest deadline missed on child reunions?
Trump: “Well, I have a solution. Tell people not to come to our country illegally. That’s the solution. Don’t come to our country illegally. Come like other people do. Come legally.
Q: “Is that what you’re saying? you’re punishing the children?”
Trump: “I’m saying this: We have laws. We have borders. Don’t come to our country illegally. It’s not a good thing.”
Evidently, the age of those being punished is irrelevant in his mind as is the fact that applying for refugee status is perfectly legal. Perhaps these children should have “chosen” different parents? This issue has become more and more surreal as time goes on.
The AP reported earlier this week on a case in which the judge hearing a deportation case was faced with something so absurd that it’s a wonder everyone in the courtroom didn’t get up and run from the room screaming:
The 1-year-old boy in a green button-up shirt drank milk from a bottle, played with a small purple ball that lit up when it hit the ground and occasionally asked for “agua.”
Then it was the child’s turn for his court appearance before a Phoenix immigration judge, who could hardly contain his unease with the situation during the portion of the hearing where he asks immigrant defendants whether they understand the proceedings.
“I’m embarrassed to ask it, because I don’t know who you would explain it to, unless you think that a 1-year-old could learn immigration law,” Judge John W. Richardson told the lawyer representing the 1-year-old boy.
The separation of toddlers who can’t even speak yet from their parents makes this particularly ludicrous and bizarre, but this same absurdist process happens to 7 to 10 year olds as well, none of whom are in a position to understand. But according to our president, that’s the point. He clearly sees this policy as a tool for deterrence which has been deemed illegal by the courts.
But then he has said many times that he believes in using cruelty and violence against innocents to send a message. Most famously during the campaign he said this:
When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives. Don’t kid yourself. But they say they don’t care about their lives. You have to take out their families.
He’s also claimed that “the wives know” and even conjured up some fantasy during one of the debates in which he claimed that the wives of the 9/11 hijackers all knew what was going to happen and flew out out of the country ahead of time. (They weren’t married. There was no flight. But you knew that.) As president he’s questioned why drone strikes should try to avoid civilian casualties.
The upshot is that he believes that families of people who have broken the law are automatically complicit. Evidently that includes even babies. And he says it right out loud.
It’s not that American presidents haven’t killed innocents or supported despots when it pleased them. The US government going back to the beginning has been hypocritical on human rights, starting with slavery and native American genocide. For years, the US defended some tyrants as “allies” while condemning others. During the Obama administration the press secretary even grotesquely quipped that a 15 year old victim of a drone strike “should have had a more responsible father” which is worthy of Trump himself. Nobody is saying that the US has ever been above reproach on the human rights scale.
But in the context of his aggressive hostility toward American allies and his courting of autocrats, Donald Trump’s open contempt for human rights and the institutions that promote them is taking the US to a place it has not been for a century or more. He doesn’t even deploy the old “hypocrisy as the tribute vice pays to virtue” by at least rhetorically promoting the ideals and values that most Americans used to teach their kids. He’s blatantly selling a crude authoritarianism and millions of citizens are buying into it.
He has made it clear for some time that tyranny and state violence are simple facts of life with which he doesn’t have a problem. Even as he disrespects America’s traditional allies, he extols the virtues of leaders like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Take his comments after the Singapore Summit when he described Kim as a talented young man who took over a “very tough” country from his father. When Kim’s abominable human rights record came up he replied:
Yeah, but so have a lot of other people done some really bad things. I mean, I could go through a lot of nations where a lot of bad things were done.
It is the most repressive, totalitarian, dystopia on earth, its excesses beyond Orwellian.
But that’s not the first time he’s rationalized the tyrannical regime of an authoritarian leader he admires. During the 2016 campaign MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough asked about Russian president Vladimir Putin’s unfortunate habit of killing critical journalists and he said “I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe.”
Putin’s human rights record isn’t quite as heinous as Kim Jong Un’s but it is very bad. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists Russia is one of the deadliest countries in the world for journalists, many of them critics of government policies and corruption.
Trump has defended Putin from these charges even as he has (sort of) assured his ecstatic crowd that he wouldn’t kill journalists himself even though he hates them.
Trump said on his way out of town that of the meetings he’s having with NATO, the British government and Vladimir Putin, Putin was going to be “the easiest.” That isn’t surprising. The two leaders are philosophically a match made in heaven. Neither of them even pretends to care about human rights, and they are happy to say so right up front.
.
Yes, your leg is wet. No, it’s not raining.
by Tom Sullivan
Still from Dirty Jobs.
The drama of the last few days (weeks/year?) has delayed my commenting on a post in New York magazine on the plight of workers. An employment report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development suggests that while macroeconomic conditions couldn’t be much better for American workers, life is not getting any better for them.
Adding to a July 4 Washington Post report, Levitz writes, “Piddling wage gains … have left the vast majority of our nation’s laborers with lower real hourly earnings than they had in May 2017.” Economists looking to explain that round up the usual suspects: automation, lack of innovation, higher-paid baby boomers retiring and being replaced by lower-paid millennials, etc. Though not arguing the point explicitly, the OECD report suggests instead a political explanation, Levitz observes, writing, “American policymakers have chosen to design an economic system that leaves workers desperate and disempowered, for the sake of directing a higher share of economic growth to bosses and shareholders.”
It’s not impersonal economic forces keeping American workers treading water, but economic policy:
American workers are more likely to be poor (by the standards of their nation). In the United States, nearly 15 percent of workers earn less than half of the median wage. That gives the U.S. a higher “low-income rate” than any other developed nation besides Greece and Spain.
We also get fired more often — and with far less notice. Roughly one in five American workers leave their jobs each year, a turnover rate higher than those in all but a handful of other developed countries. And as the Washington Post’s Andrew Van Dam notes, that churn isn’t driven by entrepreneurial Americans quitting to pursue more profitable endeavors:
[D]ecade-old OECD research found that an unusually large amount of job turnover in the United States is due to firing and layoffs, and Labor Department figures show the rate of layoffs and firings hasn’t changed significantly since the research was conducted.
Not only do Americans get fired more than other workers; we also get less warning. Every developed nation besides the U.S. and Mexico requires companies to give individual workers at least a week’s notice before laying them off; the vast majority of countries require more than a month. But if you’re reading this from an office in the U.S., your boss is free to tell you to pack your things at any moment.
Our government does less for us when we’re out of work than just about anyone else’s. Many European countries have “active labor market policies” — programs that provide laid-off workers with opportunities to train for open positions. The United States, by contrast, does almost nothing to help its unemployed residents reintegrate into the labor force; no developed nation but Slovakia devotes a lower share of its wealth to such purposes. Meanwhile, a worker in the average U.S. state will stop receiving unemployment benefit payments after they’ve been out of a job for 26 weeks — workers in all but five other developed countries receive unemployment benefits for longer than that; in a few advanced nations, such benefits last for an unlimited duration.
Labor’s share of income has been falling faster in the U.S. than almost anywhere else. Between 1995 and 2013, workers’ share of national income in the U.S. dropped by eight percentage points — a steeper decline that in any other nation except for South Korea and Poland.
A chart from the 2018 World Inequality Report paints a stark contrast:
Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining
The sitting president may boast about low unemployment, but it recalls the joke about the tourism-driven economy where I live: “There are a lot of good jobs in [insert your town here]. I know people who have two or three.” Those jobs pay doodly-squat. In part by design:
On Monday, a group of 10 state attorneys general and the District of Columbia announced an investigation into “no poach” agreements, as they are known, at eight national fast-food chains. The investigators are seeking additional information from Burger King, Wendy’s, Arby’s, Panera, Dunkin’ Donuts, Five Guys, Little Caesars and Popeyes.
The goal of the probe is to help quantify how many people are affected and how it affects workers’ ability to move up the ladder, says Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s attorney general.
“All you’re doing there is holding people back; you’re driving down wages and benefits and decreasing opportunity,” Shapiro says. “We see that as being wrong, potentially violative of the law, which is why we are leading this investigation and trying to get to the bottom of it.
Wage growth has been slower than under George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, reports MarketWatch.
“[A]t the same time as they’re able to admit that there are more jobs available in their area, [they’re] equally likely or more likely to say that those jobs just don’t pay what they used to, and that’s a real problem,” Democracy Corps managing director Nancy Zdunkewicz told Hill TV.
Social mobility has been stagnant since the 1970s, Drew Hanson writes at Forbes:
The chances of achieving the American Dream, which Stanford’s Raj Chetty defines as moving from the bottom fifth of income distribution to the top fifth, are almost twice as high in Canada than in the United States. Economic mobility is lower in the US than in most European countries.
The powerful, Hanson writes, have used their positions “to take an undeserved slice of the pie.” Furthermore:
Recent research combines equality of opportunity and freedom of poverty to measure unfair inequality. From 1969 until 1980, levels of inequality in the US remained stable. From 1980 to 1995, total inequality increased but only weakly attributed to unfairness. From 1995 to 2012, inequality continued to increase, the majority of which due to unfairness. Overall, the amount of inequality explained by unfairness doubled from 1969 to 2012. Unfair inequality is higher in the US than any of the 31 European countries included in the study.
The chart above illustrates the trend.
As the president launches his trade war, he is not looking to help the American worker so much as find “wins” for himself. There are no indications any of his policies will do more to reverse inequality or restore the American Dream his supporters feel they have lost. That won’t stop him from claiming he’s worked wonders for them.
* * * * * * * * *
For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.
Yes, we’re sleeping. And it’s a nightmare
by digby
MOther Jones has published a great piece from David Corn called “While America Sleeps” evoking the famous book by John F. Kennedy:
Read the whole thing. The conclusion is … bracing:
So as Trump prepares (yeah, right) for his sit-down with Putin—which is expected to include a private one-on-one with no aides present—much of the nation has lost sight of the big story. With Trump’s repeated cries of “witch hunt” and his lapdog Republicans slavishly concocting false narratives to cover for the boss, they have managed to convince Trump’s tribalized Fox-fed followers there is nothing to see here. And for many others, the scandal is not presented or viewed as the original sin and paramount controversy of the scandal-ridden Trump presidency.
It may be ineffective or counterproductive to shout out each day, “Where’s the outrage?” Yet the public record remains: Trump and Putin have jointly worked to disappear perhaps the greatest crime ever committed against American democracy and their respective complicity in this villainy. And it is crucial for the Republic that they not succeed.
This is happening.
Listen to Corn talk about this here:
No NATO doesn’t owe the US money
by digby
Trump goes on and on about NATO being a deadbeat debtor who can either pay the US what its owed or find someone else to protect them if they get attacked. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
The actual NATO budget is quite small — a $1.4 billion military budget and a $250 million civilian budget. The U.S. pays a relatively modest part of that total, about 22 percent. The percentage is based on a formula which includes the size of each member state’s economy. This mainly goes to pay for the NATO headquarters in Belgium and the quite thin military infrastructure which coordinates and integrates the various member-country militaries which make up the alliance. That’s it. The whole thing is budgeted at less than $2 billion. The percentage the U.S. pays is reasonable relative to the size of the U.S. economy and no one is in arrears.
The vastly greater amount is the military budgets of all the member countries combined, which was $921 billion in 2017. The great majority of that is made up of the U.S. military budget. In 2017 the U.S. military budget was $610 billion. The coming fiscal year puts it at $700 billion. (That big run-up is significant and we’ll return to it.) Some of that difference is driven by the fact that the U.S. economy is far larger than any individual NATO member state. But the U.S. also spends much more on a per-capita basis. Staying with the 2017 numbers, the U.S. spends 3.61 percent of GDP on defense. The next major NATO member is the U.K. down at 2.36 percent while most other major NATO powers are significantly under 2 percent. (Examples: France, 1.79 percent; Germany, 1.2 percent; Canada, 1.02 percent.)
In 2014, at U.S. urging, NATO set a target that member states should get to a minimum of 2 percent of GDP on military spending by 2024. Almost all of them have increased spending in GDP terms. But few are at 2 percent yet and it’s an open question how many will get there by 2024.
Josh rightly notes that there is a legitimate debate to be had about America’s role in the world and whether or not the post war order still makes sense. But regardless of where you come down on that he points out something that should make anyone who truly wants the US to withdraw from its global role take notice:
[N]one of the players in this debate are proposing any reductions to U.S. defense spending. Indeed, President Trump is overseeing and frequently brags about a dramatic increase in U.S. military spending.
There are a number of reasons the U.S. would want NATO members to increase spending. One is to make it possible over time for the U.S. to reduce its own spending. The other more immediate issue is that an allied military, for it to be really useful as a military partner, has to have a certain level of readiness, modern and interoperable weaponry and so forth. In other words, it’s not just a matter of your spending X on your military. A member state has to meet some threshold level of being a modern military force for it to be useful for the U.S. military to work with at all. Just where that level is, what percentage of GDP gets you in the ballpark are details beyond my knowledge. But those are the reasons the U.S. wants and has wanted NATO partners to up their spending. And Trump is not the first U.S. President to push for this. Bush and Obama did too.
As you can see, though, there is no sense here that the Europeans ‘owe’ the U.S. any money. That’s absurd on a purely factual level. But it’s absurd at a more specific, substantive level as well. How this could make a certain sense is if the U.S. were looking at its $700 billion annual Pentagon budget and saying, “We don’t want to spend that much money anymore. We want to drop down to $350 billion a year. To make that possible we need you European countries to pick the shortfall.” If the NATO partners refused or were laggard in upping spending they still wouldn’t owe us money. But we would have a strong argument that their miserliness was forcing the U.S. to spend hundred of billions a year it didn’t want to spend.
But as you can see, that’s precisely what we’re not doing. We’re actually at the beginning of a new military buildup (coming after another in the first years of the century.) As military policy analysts point out, those numbers only make sense if you’re planning on continuing, permanent deployments of big navies and armies East Asia and Europe basically forever. President Trump is apparently griping that the 30k+ U.S. deployment in Germany costs too much. He wants to considering withdrawing them. But the U.S. doesn’t actually have bases for them in the U.S. and, again, the spending numbers Trump’s demanding assume those troop deployment numbers and that spending — along with the U.S.’s other big permanent deployments in South Korea and Japan.
All of this leads to a couple possible conclusions. One is that President Trump, at a very basic level, doesn’t understand how the U.S. military or the U.S. military budget works. The changes Trump is demanding in European military spending are ones that cannot have any impact on U.S. military spending because he wants to spend well over the current rates that interlock with current NATO member state spending levels. They can make NATO work better, create militaries that are more useful for the dominant force, the U.S. military, to work with. (Again, Bush and Obama both pressed for this.) But they can’t save money. The more obvious conclusion is that, for whatever reasons, President Trump is hostile to the very concept of our primary alliances in Europe and Northeast Asia, in which we do pay substantial sums to be the guarantor of security in those regions. He simply hasn’t reconciled that with his braggadocious clamoring for higher military spending which, whether he knows it or not, assume those continuing commitments.
Not that he knows that because he is an in-over-his-head dotard who is flailing about mindlessly in order to create some new alliance with Russia for reasons we aren’t quite sure of just yet.
He’s basically telling the world to arm up. We sure are.
What could go wrong?
BTW: A third of the casualties in the war in Afghanistan have been European and North American allies.
.
A mountain of Trumpian lies and bs in one rally
by digby
The Washington Post decided to take a look at Trump’s lies in a single rally. It’s astonishing. He’s even more pathologically dishonest and ignorant than I would have guessed. And I know very well just what a dumb liar he is.
According to our analysis, the truth took a beating in Montana. From a grand total of 98 factual statements we identified, 76 percent were false, misleading or unsupported by evidence.
Here’s a breakdown: 45 false or mostly false statements, 25 misleading statements and four unsupported claims. We also counted 24 accurate or mostly accurate statements. False or mostly false statements alone accounted for 46 percent of all claims.
A small sample of Trumpian bullshit in one rally:
I’m going to tell NATO, “You got to start paying your bills. The United States is not going to take care of everything.”
Misleading. NATO’s guideline is that defense expenditures should amount to 2 percent of each country’s gross domestic product by 2024. In 2017, the United States and three other countries met that standard, and Poland spent virtually 2 percent. NATO allies have been steadily boosting defense spending since 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea. In any case, these funds would not be going to the United States or even necessarily to NATO; this is money that countries would spend to bolster their own military.
We’re paying for anywhere from 70 to 90 percent to protect Europe, and that’s fine.
Misleading. The United States is the largest contributor to NATO’s organizational expenses, which includes its headquarters in Brussels and subordinate military commands, but it funds only 22 percent of these programs. Separately, the U.S. defense expenditure represents 72 percent of defense spending across NATO. But this reflects what the United States spends on all military programs, not just those related to Europe.
Of course, they kill us on trade. … They make it impossible to do business in Europe, and yet they come in and they sell their Mercedes and their BMWs to us. So we have $151 billion in trade deficits with the E.U., and on top of that, they kill us with NATO.
False. The European Union is the largest goods trade partner for the United States. Trump has a habit of using trade numbers that factor in only goods, not services. The combined trade deficit with the E.U. was $92 billion in 2016. Although the E.U. imposes a 10 percent tariff on U.S. cars, while the U.S. tariff is 2.5 percent for European cars, tariff rates vary by product and in some cases U.S. tariffs are higher.
So we pay 4 percent of a huge GDP, which got a lot bigger since I became your president.
Misleading. The United States spends close to 4 percent of gross domestic product on defense, but GDP growth under Trump has been par for the course. GDP grew 2.3 percent in 2017, Trump’s first year in office. It grew at a faster rate in three of the years Barack Obama was in office and for much of the George W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations.
Germany, which is the biggest country of the E.U., European Union, Germany pays 1 percent.
Mostly accurate. Germany increased its defense spending by 5 percent in 2017, but because the country saw healthy economic growth, defense spending was 1.2 percent of its GDP. German leaders say they plan to reach 1.5 percent by 2024.
And then they go out and make a gas deal, oil and gas, from Russia, where they pay billions and billions of dollars to Russia. Okay, so they want to protect against Russia, and yet they pay billions of dollars to Russia, and we are the schmucks that are paying for the whole thing.
False. Germany in March approved an $11 billion pipeline, Nord Stream 2, to be built by Russian energy giant Gazprom. But the United States is not “paying for the whole thing,” not even by some logic that factors in U.S. spending on NATO. Germany is the second-highest contributor to NATO’s common programs. The United States pays 22 percent of these costs; Germany pays 15 percent.
Since I came, which is a year and a half, almost $33 billion more is projected to be paid by those NATO nations, but it’s not enough.
Misleading. NATO member nations pledged to end defense cuts and began to ramp up spending in 2014, years before Trump took office.
That’s just the lies and ignorant nonsense he spews about NATO and Europe which is relevant to the summit. They counted