Month: December 2019

The monetary monster
by Tom Sullivan

All the 1% complaints about being “vilified” for their wealth miss an essential point: their getting impossibly richer eventually destabilizes the planet.

Donald Trump and his allies argue that if you don’t have borders, you don’t have a country. The subtext is about keeping non-white people from emigrating to the U.S. and diluting white sovereignty. But capital flowing unrestricted across borders? No problemo.

Eric Levitz addresses the issue of capital flows and wealth taxes for “Intelligencer.” Economists and billionaires themselves argue the country would be unable to enforce the sorts of wealth taxes supported by Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and 60 percent of Americans. Wealth taxes would simply incentivize more tax-dodging by the super-rich and/or moving their wealth offshore.

Levitz observes:

This argument asks Americans to accept a stark limitation on their nation’s sovereignty. It stipulates that in a world of globally mobile capital, the effective limit on top tax rates is set by our superrich, not our democratic polity. Why this diminution of the nation-state’s authority should be acceptable — even as a minuscule amount of undocumented immigration is regarded as a crisis of the rule of law — is difficult to explain.

Well, not really. Steeply progressive taxation is politically untenable “because of the outsize political influence (and innovative unlawfulness) of the cosmopolitan elites who bankroll the Republican Party.”

Not that Democratic elites don’t have skin in that same game too.

But here’s something else to consider as apologists for unfettered wealth ply us with tales of all the good billionaires might do with their fortunes.

Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates has pledged to give away nearly all of his wealth. He has, Vox reported last year, given away over $45 billion through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He’s saved millions of lives using his wealth to fight malaria and global poverty. (Bloomberg estimates the donations at a mere $35 billion.)

Berkshire Hathaway founder Warren Buffett has donated over $34 billion since pledging to give away his fortune. Reuters reported in July Buffet still owns “about 15.7 percent of Berkshire, despite having given away 45 percent of his 2006 holdings.” He gave $3.6 billion this year to five charitable foundations so they can give it away for him. Reporting earlier this year showed Berkshire Hathaway was taking in money faster than Buffett could invest it.

It turns out giving away money is as hard, if not harder. It takes “expensive and time-intensive” due diligence to be sure the money isn’t simply thrown at scam charities. (Our acting president’s former charity, for example.) Gates’ fortune has grown so large he can’t give away his money as fast as he’s making it. Gates’ portfolio today is $16 billion larger than when he started giving it away.

Gates and others likely didn’t set out to become Weyland-Yutani, “The Company” of the Alien and Predator franchises. But despite laudable efforts like Gates’ and Buffett’s, is that where unfettered wealth is headed?

Among the terrible B-movies from the 1950s is one called The Magnetic Monster (1953). Except, there is no monster. A scientist, naturally, creates a marvelous new something that is neither marvelous nor even visible at first. It quickly gets out of control, naturally again. But Jurassic Park this is not. The “monster” here is not alive, but a new isotope that grows, doubling in mass every 11 hours by sucking in energy and matter from around it. This script arrived before “black holes” had agents, but that’s the idea. If other scientists cannot “kill” the stuff in time, it will grow massive enough to throw Earth out of its orbit and hasta la vista, baby.

Here we have massive fortunes growing ever more massive. Wealth concentrates itself in the hands of a tiny segment of the population as the middle class shrinks. The more high-minded billionaires can’t even give it away faster than the piles swell. And in the roles of frantic science geeks trying to keep expanding piles of money from throwing the planet out of its orbit we have Warren and Sanders. Naturally, they are opposed by skeptical wealth-o-philes and Cold War dead-enders who condemn them as socialists who want to punish success.

In the 1950s, we knew who would prevail. Today, that’s not a sure bet.

I knew they didn’t love their kids. (What climate change?) Apparently, they don’t love their parents — or their voters — either.

by digby

Because you know how much money is wasted on nursing homes for poor, old people. We really need to give those elders some tough love. The regulations for their are a making ’em all soft:

NPR reports on the latest atrocity:

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Rolling back federal regulations has been a cornerstone of the Trump presidency. Now the administration has proposed rolling back some Obama-era rules for nursing homes and how they care for more than 1.3 million residents. NPR’s Ina Jaffe covers aging and joins us now. Ina, thanks for being with us.

INA JAFFE, BYLINE: Hi, Scott.

SIMON: And what’s the administration’s reasoning for this?

JAFFE: Well, they say it’ll reduce regulations that they call burdensome and inflexible. They also say that the proposed new rule will save nursing homes more than $600 million a year and that this will free up funds to improve patient care, though there’s no requirement that the nursing homes spend the savings that way.

But there could be changes before the rule is finalized. And that’s why the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees nursing homes, didn’t want to do an interview.

SIMON: These are proposed changes. What might change if they’re approved?

JAFFE: Well, one proposal that’s attracted a lot of attention would change the way antipsychotic drugs can be prescribed. Now, Scott, these are drugs that are approved for treating serious mental illnesses, like schizophrenia. They also come with a black box warning that says they can raise the risk of death in older people with dementia. But in nursing homes, that’s usually who gets them. It’s a practice that’s widely criticized. So the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, known as CMS, has spent years trying to get nursing homes to reduce the use of antipsychotics. But critics say the proposed new rule would actually make it easier to prescribe them.

SIMON: Why would the government make it easier to do something they’ve been discouraging?

JAFFE: Well, currently, if a nursing home resident gets a new prescription for an antipsychotic, it can’t be renewed after two weeks without a doctor’s exam. But under the proposed rule, the doctor could keep renewing the prescription without seeing the patient again for a month or two. This has been condemned by elder rights organizations like the Long Term Care Community Coalition. Their executive director, Richard Mollot, told me that the physician he’s consulted also condemns the proposal.

RICHARD MOLLOT: What he said was that no other insurance company would ever accept that a doctor didn’t have to see a patient before continuing a prescription for medicine. But CMS is saying now that that’s OK for nursing homes in this very vulnerable population. And people die from this. They’re affected so catastrophically.

SIMON: Nursing homes see it differently, Ina?

JAFFE: They do. Dr. David Gifford is the chief medical officer of the American Health Care Association. That’s a trade group representing most nursing homes. And he says that the proposal requires doctors to document their rationale for continuing an antipsychotic, and that’s actually an improvement.

DAVID GIFFORD: It requires much more guidance from the physician to the nursing staff as to when to use them and why to use them. So I think they did a nice balance to see if these medications are being used appropriately.

JAFFE: And what Gifford calls balance is the kind of thing the nursing home industry trade group has been asking for since they sent a letter to then-President-elect Trump last December.

SIMON: What are some of the other major changes in this proposal?

JAFFE: Oh, they cover everything from who runs the kitchen to controlling infection to how to file grievances. In all of those cases, you could say that standards or staff time have been reduced.

SIMON: What has made the Trump administration turn its attention to the nursing home industry right now?

JAFFE: Actually, they’ve been chipping away at Obama-era rules for a while. Here’s just one example. They’ve changed the way that fines are assessed for substandard care. The result is that the average nursing home fine has dropped by about a third. And there’s another regulation proposed in this package that could result in a further reduction of fines.

Substandard care for sick and vulnerable old people? That’s what America is all about.

This tool for more information about the inconsistent care in nursing homes by ProPublica is sobering. It’s already bad. Trump and his nihilists are going to make it worse.

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The conspiracy theorist in chief

 by digby

I think this piece by Peter Nicholas in the Atlantic goes a long way toward explaining Trump (and his followers’) dependence on kooky conspiracy theories. The question is whether or not Republicans can, or even want to, turn this around is unanswered.

This is the conclusion.  I recommend you read the whole thing if you can. It’s fascinating:

To grasp why conspiracy theories appeal to Trump, it’s important to understand the man. Mental-health experts have described Trump as a narcissist forever feeding his grandiose sense of self. Facts and evidence aren’t nearly so convincing to Trump as what makes him feel better about himself. Trump was an illegitimate candidate in 2016 who benefited from foreign interference? No, that was Hillary! “His perception, even his definition, of good and bad is what makes him feel good in the moment,” David Reiss, a San Diego–based psychiatrist who has studied and written about Trump’s psyche, told me. “There’s no sense of consequences beyond what’s good for me in the moment, and then that gets projected onto everything. What’s good for me is good for the universe.”

Joseph Vitriol, a College Fellow in Harvard’s psychology department who has studied conspiracy theories, told me that Trump “likely will gravitate toward anything that will make him feel good about himself and believe that he’s respected. That makes him averse to information that’s inconsistent with that perception, and makes him deeply suspicious of the motivations of people who criticize him. It also makes him unable to meaningfully engage with a broad range of information.”

This propensity for self-soothing combines with an anti-intellectualism that seems part of Trump’s makeup. He’s skeptical of elite opinion and not convinced that he has anything still to learn. As my colleague Ron Brownstein wrote last week, Trump and his Republican allies have been “escalating their war on expertise.”

Trump’s mind is thus fertile soil for bogus ideas to take root. A new book written by an anonymous senior Trump-administration official, A Warning, describes Trump pushing away facts and conclusions that don’t jibe with his own views. “When he does sit down for a briefing on sensitive information, it’s the same as any other Trump briefing,” the author writes. “He hears what he wants to hear, and disregards what he doesn’t. Intelligence information must comport to his worldview for it to stick. If it doesn’t, it’s ‘not very good.’”

“He gets his intellectual mojo out of television,” not other forms of learning, said Brinkley, who traveled to Mar-a-Lago during the transition in 2016 to meet with Trump and discuss past presidential inaugurals.

Conspiracy theory is a convenient umbrella term for various ideas Trump holds that lack foundation. But the phrase may be assigning these notions more gravity than they deserve. Trump often dishes up brute assertions that leave no space for rational argument. Statements that stoke anger, not thought. Democrats are out to get him because they’re “sick.” The impeachment inquiry is a “hoax.” Repeat as needed. Nancy Rosenblum, a government professor emerita at Harvard, describes it as conspiracy without the theory. The term she’s coined for this sort of mind-set: conspiracism.

“There’s no answer for it,” she told me, “which is why it is so seriously disorienting to people. We’ve never seen anything like it. We don’t know how to meet it. It’s an attempt to construct a reality, and when it comes from the president, he has the capacity to impose that reality on the nation.”

It goes on to describe all the various ways we’ve learned that people inside the White House, from Priebus to Mattis to Kelly and others, tried to keep him from accessing all this conspiracy nonsense. But they have all either been kicked out or eased aside and nobody can keep Trump away from Fox or his phone which means there’s really nothing they can do.

Constructing his own reality necessitates an attack on fact-finding institutions that are central to American democracy—universities, nonpartisan government agencies, law enforcement, the intelligence community, and the news media. For Trump’s version of events to take hold, he needs people to accept that the facts leaping out at them aren’t to be believed, that institutions wedded to objective truth aren’t to be trusted.

Here, Trump’s imprint will be hard to erase. Trump acolytes inside the Republican caucus are aping his methods and standing with him as he advances his fact-free claims about Ukraine’s complicity in the 2016 election. Unceasing attacks on “fake news” have resonated with a certain audience. Polling from The Wall Street Journal/NBC News shows that in 2010, 60 percent of Republicans had either no or very little confidence in the national news media. As of June—two and a half years into Trump’s presidency—that figure had grown to 74 percent. “Conspiracy theories go right to the jugular of what a democracy is,” Vitriol said. “The stakes are as high as they could possibly be.”

One day, the conspiracist in chief will leave office. His successors will face a choice: Exploit the damage he’s done to democratic institutions and norms, or see if it can be fixed.

I think Trump is most essentially a cult of personality so some of this will fade naturally when he is no longer the center of attention.  But with the old-school conservative movement dead and the Republican Party reduced to nothing more than a party desperately clinging to power for its own sake, it’s not hard to see this phenomenon hanging around, particularly when there’s money to be made at it, which Fox and and the various profit centers of the right wing have shown can be very lucrative.

To most Americans, this stuff looks like a descent down the rabbit hole.  But to those inside it it seems to feel very comforting even though it makes no sense. Maybe that’s the key. It just requires blind faith, loyalty and features a pleasant camaraderie — reason is not required.

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The Turkey grift is more comprehensive than we knew

by digby

Here is yet another look at how everyone in Trump’s orbit, including him, is getting rich selling access to the presidency and selling out longtime allies:

It turns out that the connections between President Donald Trump and Turkey are even stranger than we thought.

Consider the recent histories of two powerful Washington lobbying groups: Mercury and Ballard.

Brian Ballard is a heavyweight lobbyist who was featured Politico’s Playbook Power list in 2018, dubbed as “The Most Powerful Lobbyist in Trump’s Washington,” for his influence over the administration. He had been a major fundraiser for the Trump campaign and chairman of Trump’s campaign in Florida.

The government of Qatar is one of Ballard’s clients, and so was the government of Turkey until last month. Turkey alone paid roughly $2 million to Ballard’s firm over the last two years. The relationship between Turkey and Ballard ended after Turkey’s state-run bank Halkbank (which at the time had also been Ballard’s client) was indicted in federal court for evading U.S. sanctions against Iran.

The sanctions-evasion scheme had been spearheaded by Reza Zarrab, a Turkey-based gold trader who was born in Iran. Zarrab, of course, was later represented by Rudy Giuliani, the President’s personal attorney.

The connections between Trump, Ballard, and Turkey go beyond Giuliani, though. In January, Brian Ballard hired Pam Bondi to be a member of his lobbying group.

You may remember Bondi because in 2016, she was briefly in the national news. In 2014, as the sitting attorney general in Florida, Bondi’s office had been investigating complaints against “Trump University.” Bondi personally solicited a campaign donation from Donald Trump. He wrote her PAC a check for $25,000. And a few days later—presto!—Bondi’s office announced that they were no longer pursuing the investigation against Trump University.

The entire affair was so corrupt-looking that ethics complaints were filed against Bondi with the Florida Commission on Ethics, the Florida Elections Commission, and the Florida Bar.

Fast forward to January 2019. After joining Ballard Partners, Bondi registered as a foreign agent for Qatar. And just last week, she left her lobbying position to join the White House as a member of Trump’s impeachment defense team.

The other firm of note is Mercury Public Affairs, which is one of the three lobbying firms Paul Manafort used to boost the image of Russia. Two of Mercury’s other clients are the governments of Qatar and Turkey. Mercury’s managing director is Bryan Lanza, who joined Mercury in 2017. Before that, he was an adviser to Trump’s transition team. Before that, he worked for the Trump campaign.

And before that, he worked for Trump’s deputy campaign manager, David Bossie, when they were both at Citizens United SuperPAC.

Lanza is currently also a registered agent for the state-sponsored Turkish American Business Council (TAIK), a party involved in the aforementioned indictment with close with Erdogan. TAIK also has close ties with Jared Kushner, who runs America’s “backdoor” channel to the Turkish government.

This kind of foreign lobbying has always been a bipartisan money-pot for the politically connected. But Trump has taken it to a level no one has ever seen before. But then he is a con-man and he knows how to milk the grift.  Apparently, all his minions do too.

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This episode with Trump and the SEALs is extremely troubling

by digby

The New York Times runs down the full story of Trump and Navy SEALS and what he’s doing to the military. An Excerpt:

Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher and other Navy SEALs gave the young captive medical aid that day in Iraq in 2017, sedating him and cutting an airway in his throat to help him breathe. Then, without warning, according to colleagues, Chief Gallagher pulled a small hunting knife from a sheath and stabbed the sedated captive in the neck.

The same Chief Gallagher who later posed for a photograph holding the dead captive up by the hair has now been celebrated on the campaign trail by President Trump, who upended the military code of justice to protect him from the punishment resulting from the episode. Prodded by Fox News, Mr. Trump has made Chief Gallagher a cause célèbre, trumpeting him as an argument for his re-election.

The violent encounter in a faraway land opened a two-year affair that would pit a Pentagon hierarchy wedded to longstanding rules of combat and discipline against a commander in chief with no experience in uniform but a finely honed sense of grievance against authority. The highest ranks in the Navy insisted Chief Gallagher be held accountable. Mr. Trump overruled the chain of command and the secretary of the Navy was fired.

The case of the president and a commando accused of war crimes offers a lesson in how Mr. Trump presides over the armed forces three years after taking office. While he boasts of supporting the military, he has come to distrust the generals and admirals who run it. Rather than accept information from his own government, he responds to television reports that grab his interest. Warned against crossing lines, he bulldozes past precedent and norms. 

As a result, the president finds himself more removed than ever from a disenchanted military command, adding the armed forces to the institutions under his authority that he has feuded with, along with the intelligence community, law enforcement agencies and diplomatic corps.

This reminded me of this story from a couple of years ago:

Defense Secretary James Mattis has been charged with coming up with a new strategy for the Afghanistan conflict and Trump has notably, some would say recklessly, ceded substantial control of military decision-making to his generals.  

So, what gives? Trump wants to know. Where’s his win? “We aren’t winning,” Trump complained, according to officials. “We are losing.” To help make his generals better understand what he was talking about the president of the United States compared U.S. policy in Afghanistan to the time his favorite restaurant in Manhattan closed down for renovations in the 1980s.

From NBC News:

Trump told his advisers that the restaurant, Manhattan’s elite ‘21’ Club, had shut its doors for a year and hired an expensive consultant to craft a plan for a renovation. 

After a year, Trump said, the consultant’s only suggestion was that the restaurant needed a bigger kitchen.

Officials said Trump kept stressing the idea that lousy advice cost the owner a year of lost business and that talking to the restaurant’s waiters instead might have yielded a better result. 

He also said the tendency is to assume if someone isn’t a three-star general he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and that in his own experience in business talking to low-ranking workers has gotten him better outcomes.

It was a lie, of course. None of that happened the way he said it did.

But it’s clear that his belief that the low-level folks know better (only the ones who lick his boots, of course) stems not from some deep identification with the working class but rather with the fact that he only listens to people who confirm his biases. Since he is shockingly stupid, he often finds himself at odds with experts. And he is extremely insecure around people with leadership experience because he knows that they see through him.

There is also this story:

He said in a series of interviews that he does not need to read extensively because he reaches the right decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I had, plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.”

Trump said he is skeptical of experts because “they can’t see the forest for the trees.” He believes that when he makes decisions, people see that he instinctively knows the right thing to do: “A lot of people said, ‘Man, he was more accurate than guys who have studied it all the time.’ ”

Anyway, back to Trump and the war criminals:

“We’re going to take care of our warriors and I will always stick up for our great fighters,” Mr. Trump told a rally in Florida as he depicted the military hierarchy as part of “the deep state” he vowed to dismantle. “People can sit there in air-conditioned offices and complain, but you know what? It doesn’t matter to me whatsoever.”

The president’s handling of the case has distressed active-duty and retired officers and the civilians who work closely with them. Mr. Trump’s intervention, they said, emboldens war criminals and erodes the order of a professional military.

“He’s interfering with the chain of command, which is trying to police its own ranks,” said Peter D. Feaver, a specialist on civilian-military relations at Duke University and former aide to President George W. Bush. “They’re trying to clean up their act and in the middle of it the president parachutes in — and not from information from his own commanders but from news talking heads who are clearly gaming the system.”

Chris Shumake, a former sniper who served in Chief Gallagher’s platoon, said in an interview that he was troubled by the impact the president’s intervention could have on the SEALs.

“It’s blown up bigger than any of us could have ever expected, and turned into a national clown show that put a bad light on the teams,” said Mr. Shumake, speaking publicly for the first time. “He’s trying to show he has the troops’ backs, but he’s saying he doesn’t trust any of the troops or their leaders to make the right decisions.”

Chief Gallagher, who has denied any wrongdoing, declined through his lawyer to be interviewed. Mr. Trump’s allies said the president was standing up to political correctness that hamstrings the warriors the nation asks to defend it, as if war should be fought according to lawyerly rules.

How far will people like this go? Trump, for instance, has always been in favor of torture and mass executions. He likes putting people in camps, we know that. And he has control of the biggest nuclear arsenal on earth.

He is showing us who he is. If people think tax cuts and judges matter more than that they are just as dangerous as he is.

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Senator Kennedy is the Matt Gaetz of the Senate

by digby

The man is supposedly some kind of academic superstar, having been educated at Oxford and all. Apparently what he learned is to be a stone cold liar. On Meet the Press today, Chuck Todd brought up the fact that Kennedy had spewed conspiracy theories about Ukraine interfering in the 2016 election. Kennedy said he had misunderstood the question and corrected it but Todd pressed further, explaining that people are actually criticizing Kennedy for conflating Ukraine and Russia and doing Trump’s “dirty work” for him.

The Daily Beast takes it from there:

Kennedy, meanwhile, insisted that there was sufficient evidence that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election on behalf of Clinton, citing a handful of articles to claim that a number of Ukrainian officials “meddled in the election on social media and otherwise.”

“In fact, in December of 2018, a Ukrainian court ruled that Ukrainian officials had violated Ukrainian law by meddling in our election and that was reported in The New York Times,” Kennedy added, referencing a court ruling that the leaking of the so-called “black ledger” on ex-Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort was against the law. (The court has since canceled that ruling.)

Todd would eventually confront Kennedy on the U.S. intelligence community recently briefing lawmakers that attempts to frame Ukraine for Russian election meddling was actually “a Russian intelligence propaganda campaign in order to get people like you to say these things about Ukraine,” a briefing Kennedy claimed he didn’t attend.

“When does opinion become fact?” Todd wondered aloud. “Does 17 intelligence services saying it, does every western intelligence ally saying Russia did this—I get sort of confused at what point is it no longer an opinion for you?”

After once again noting that a Ukrainian court “smacked down several Ukrainian officials for meddling in our elections,” Kennedy then made a claim that gobsmacked the Meet the Press host.

“Russia was very aggressive and they’re much more sophisticated,” the conservative senator declared. “But the fact that Russia was so aggressive does not exclude the fact that President Poroshenko actively worked for Secretary Clinton.”

“Actively worked for Secretary Clinton?! My goodness, wait a minute, Senator Kennedy,” Todd shot back. “You now have the president of Ukraine saying he worked for the Democratic nominee for president. C’mon. You realize the only other person selling this argument outside the United States is this man, Vladimir Putin!”

The NBC host then highlighted the Russian president recently boasting that “nobody is accusing us anymore of interfering in U.S. election” but instead blaming Ukraine.

Todd further pushed back on Kennedy’s assertion, asking him if he believed that Ukrainian officials criticizing Trump during the election over his endorsement of Russia’s annexation of Crimea was equivalent to Russia’s hacking.

Kennedy, for his part, said that there would be no harm allowing President Trump to “introduce evidence” that could support these assertions since Trump “has a demonstrated record fighting foreign corruption.”

Right. There’s no harm in allowing Trump and his henchmen to baselessly smear Hillary Clinton all over again.  Don’t be surprised to see them start yelling “Lock her up! Lock her Up!” in the middle of the fucking impeachment trial. I can’t wait to see Lindsey Graham screaming and spitting like a rabid hyena.  Should be fun.

This is the stuff that terrifies me. Kennedy isn’t this stupid. He’s just doing it to maintain power by any means necessary. If he can lie like this with a straight face in order to defend this monster in the White House, what else will he do?  What else will any of them do?

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The whistleblower was right

by digby

As you know, Trump has been bellowing ht the whistlblower got it all wrong and his/her report has been proven wrong. He is, of course, lying.  NPR went through the whistleblower’s letter and laid it all out.

When the House impeachment inquiry began more than a month ago, much of the focus was on a complaint from a whistleblower that drew attention to a July 25 phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, during which Trump asked for investigations into potential political rivals.

The whistleblower accused Trump of abusing his office for political gain and laid out a road map that House Democrats have followed in their investigation.

Trump has spent weeks questioning the whistleblower’s motives and slamming the account for being inaccurate. But as this annotation shows, most of the complaint has been corroborated during closed-door depositions of administration officials, through public statements and from a rough transcript of the call itself, released by the White House.

You’ll have to go to the site to click on the letter and see all the instances of corroboration. It looks like this:

I don’t know how to get past Trump’s lies about this. It seems almost hopeless. It isn’t, actually. This twitter thread from Jerry Taylor of the Niskanen Center :

Why does the Republican base remain unmoved by the devastating findings of the Mueller investigation and by the revelations of Trump’s extortion of the Ukrainian government for political favors? A recent study sheds light with somewhat surprising and heartening answers.

It’s not that Republicans follow the president robotically. It’s that they are not either paying attention to, or are not being exposed to, media reports about what’s really going on here. cambridge.org/core/journals/…

The more reports Republicans see about these scandals, the more their support for Trump declines. Just the headlines alone are enough to prompt their decline of support.

This is encouraging news. The authors of the study conclude thusly.

It’s not so much that the right-wing media echo chamber has convinced it’s audience that Trump is a saint. It’s more that they report on his scandals far less than do mainstream media outlets. Accordingly, out of sight, out of mind. You can see that from this analysis by @NateSilver538. And from what I can tell, it remains true. fivethirtyeight.com/features/all-t…

That’s why I think the Democrats are right, as a political matter, to pursue impeachment regardless of the likely vote count in the Senate. And who knows–an erosion of Republicans support for Trump might still be coming, which could effect that trial.

From the authors:The major challenge is the degree to which the Republican base is either paying little attention to politics these days or paying little attention to media outlets outside of the right-wing bubble.

That’s a very big challenge. Maybe even insurmountable. But it is a tiny bit hopeful that these people aren’t totally brainwashed.

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“Broke” culture
by Tom Sullivan

The blizzard of news, opinion and data that tears the eyes and cuts the cheeks each day leaves little cognitive space for considering the swirling chaos behind it. Everything is a crisis. Urgent demands pour from every digital device. It was a simpler time when advertisers manufactured paltry concerns like dandruff, bad breath, and “iron-poor, tired blood.”

Behind the cacophony of newsworthy concerns, 40 years after Koyaanisqatsi the sense that things are terminally out of balance has moved from art houses to our own houses. One wonders Hollywood still manages to sell dystopian futures to people living in a dystopian present. Not even Margaret Atwood can be shocked anymore.

So it is that Yoni Appelbaum asks in The Atlantic whether this is how America ends. The U.S. is undergoing a demographic shift perhaps no other rich, stable democracy has seen: “Its historically dominant group is on its way to becoming a political minority—and its minority groups are asserting their co-equal rights and interests.”

Echoing David Frum’s warning nearly two years ago, Applebaum wonders if Trumpism persists beyond Donald Trump whether a Republican party defined by white identity will abandon democracy altogether, opting for ethno-nationalism upheld by voter suppression and only the veneer of popular suffrage. With its push for minority rule, the party is on the verge of that now. “All political parties maneuver for advantage,” Applebaum writes, “but only a party that has concluded it cannot win the votes of large swaths of the public will seek to deter them from casting those votes at all.”

Without a strong center-right to counter the radicals, conservatives will soon have nowhere else to go.

Thus, Fareed Zakaria’s optimism about America’s prospects is wearing thin. We survived the First Red Scare, McCarthyism, Vietnam and Watergate, he writes. But atop other disturbing trends, the Trump administration represents a presidency moving towards becoming “an elected dictatorship” powered by right-wing vilification of opponents (I’d add, though Zakaria doesn’t) that echoes Rwanda in 1994.

But behind that political soul-rot is corruption the Financial Times’ Edward Luce complains needs more disinfecting sunlight than it is receiving, to wit: the legal and illegal graft “that has seeped into all corners of US politics — and society beyond.” Loosened regulation advertised as setting free entrepreneurs has opened the door to $300 billion in annual money laundering in the U.S. by one conservative estimate. Because the country lacks a corporate central registry, the government does not know who controls the companies that make it possible for “autocrats in Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere” to thrive with “the connivance of America’s suite of service providers.”

Luce looks to Sen. Elizabeth Warren as the only 2020 candidate who might tackle the problem, as if she does not already have enough plans in her portfolio. Her prospects for enacting her plans are far from certain.

Readers finding themselves stranded in airports this Thanksgiving weekend may find solace if their experience is not as wretched as Richard Morgan’s. He writes in the Washington Post of “an ordeal spanning 53 hours, six gates, three airports and two airlines.” He could have driven from New York to San Francisco in less time.

Morgan offers this jaundiced, yet accurate, description of our present-day dystopia:

What is most galling about this economy is that we are supposed to proffer compliance and complicity as companies profit amorally off of us. Facebook unveils supposedly robust privacy protections on the same day it launches a service to connect you with your “secret crush.” You’re supposed to pay whatever rent landlords want, whatever bills hospitals charge, whatever price surge the car-share makes up. From Apple to John Deere, digital-rights-management technology has made us “tenants on our own devices.” The terms of service turn us into the servants. And what recourse do we have? We ask to speak with the manager, vent to Yelp, endure the hold muzak and hack our way to rival bargains. But let’s be honest: We don’t have power.

Essentially, the power real persons have ceded to “artificial persons” over time — plus the power corporations have usurped from the living — means humans serve them, not the other way around. Humans should be holding our creations’ leash. As Morgan found, it feels as if we’re the ones wearing the collar.

Most mornings, I peruse the Web looking for broader themes behind the news the way New York Times book reviewers often weave together common threads in new releases to tie together separate works. Amid critiques and defenses of woke culture, what one finds lately is dread verging on, if not toppling over into, the existential. Broke culture is more like it.

A friend actually did shoot his television once, long ago in cathode-ray tube days. What keeps one from reaching that point is engaging in the fight rather than helplessly watching it. You feel less like a victim that way. Even when I get run over, I never feel like political roadkill.

Saturday Night at the Movies

Get the papers, get the papers: The Irishman (****)

By Dennis Hartley

If I didn’t know better, I’d wager Martin Scorsese’s new crime drama, The Irishman was partially intended to be a black comedy. That’s because I thought a lot it was so …funny.

Funny how?

It’s funny, y’know, the …the story. It’s funny. OK, the story isn’t “ha-ha” funny; there’s all these mob guys, and there’s a lot of stealing and extorting and shooting and garroting. It’s just, y’know, it’s … the way Scorsese tells the story and everything. Like my cousin.

True story. I have this cousin. Technically 2 nd cousin, I think (my dear late mother’s 1 st cousin…however the math works). Due to our age spread he’s always seemed more like an uncle to me. He’s a character. A funny guy …always with the jokes. A modne mensch.

At any rate, he’s Brooklyn born-and-raised (as was my mother). Earlier this week he and I had a little exchange going on Facebook regarding The Irishman. I had posted about how excited I was that the film had finally dropped on Netflix following its limited 2-month theatrical run (I know what you’re thinking: “Bad movie critic! Shame!” But why schlep to the theater, with the parking and the ticket prices and the overpriced stale popcorn…and besides I’m already paying extra for Netflix on top of my $200 Comcast bill so dammit I will have my own private screening, on my couch thank you very much).

Anyway, my cousin commented that The Irishman was great, and that “the 3½ hours went by very quickly”. Knowing that portions of the film’s narrative (which is steeped in mob history) take place in NYC, I half-teasingly replied to him, “I’m guessing that a lot of Scorsese’s period mob films are kind of like a stroll down memory lane for anyone who grew up in NYC back in the day?” To which he wrote back, “The Gambinos were one block up on Carroll Street about six blocks from us …and we learned at an early age to stay away from any men wearing suits with a newspaper folded underneath their arm.”

That cracked me up. I thought it was, y’know …funny. But then he followed up with this:

“These men in suits usually had a schlom [sic] rolled up in the newspaper and were on the way to bust up somebody who was a slow payer. If they had to come back the 2nd or 3rd time they usually beat up the man’s wife, now we had two things to worry about.” The uh, “scholm”? He must have been reading my mind, adding “The schlom was a piece of pipe or a heavy piece of cable-when you saw these guys you just walked the other way.”

Oh. That’s not so funny. It’s just, y’know, the way my cuz tells the story and everything.

One thing’s for sure-after 50 years of filmmaking, Martin Scorsese knows how to tell a story and everything. And while it is not the only subject he makes films about, nor is the subject his exclusive domain, few living filmmakers have his particular flair for telling stories about the Mob; specifically for the way he pulls the viewer inside the heads of people who feel perfectly at home living in the shadows of a completely amoral universe.

Despite the consistently visceral, in-your-face nature of his crime dramas, Scorsese once commented “…there is no such thing as pointless violence” on-screen. “Deep down you want to think that people are really good—but the reality outweighs that.” C’est la vie.

I know this sounds weird, but there’s something oddly reassuring about tucking into a Scorsese film that features some of the most seasoned veterans of his “mob movie repertory” like Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel; akin to putting on your most well-worn pair of comfy slippers. And with the addition of Al Pacino …fuhgeddaboudit!

Slipping into place from the get-go like the natural bookend to a triptych that began with Scorsese’s 1990 “true-crime”-inspired New York mob drama Goodfellas and continued with Casino, his 1995 film set in the mob underworld of 1970s Vegas, The Irishman ambitiously paints an even broader historical canvas of underworld chronology; from Albert Anastasia to Sam Giancana to “Crazy Joe” Gallo and Joe Columbo. And that’s just a warm-up. Maybe you find out who ordered the Jimmy Hoffa hit. And possibly JFK (such elements of the narrative reminded me of James Ellroy’s novel American Tabloid).

At the center of this swirling, blood-spattered history is “the Irishman”-Frank Sheeran (De Niro), a Mafia hitman who, if his real-life counterpart’s “confessions” are to be believed (as documented in Charles Brandt’s non-fiction source book I Heard You Paint Houses, adapted here by Steve Zaillian) is like the Forrest Gump of the mob underworld.

“Painting houses” is mob slang for carrying out hit jobs. As the retired geriatric iteration of Sheeran pointedly assures us (breaking the fourth wall Goodfellas style throughout the film), he was a very good “painter” back in the day. He knew some guys. We meet them via flashbacks and flash-forwards. Sheeran’s key cohort is Russell Bufalino (brilliantly played by Joe Pesci, who reportedly had to be brow-beaten out of semi-retirement by Scorsese and co-producer De Niro to get the gang back together for just one final heist).

In younger days, when he is working as a truck driver for a meat packing firm, Sheeran has a (friendly) chance encounter with Bufalino, the head of a Pennsylvania mob family. The pair’s professional association does not begin at that time, but Sheeran is later “officially” introduced to Russell by his cousin Bill (Ray Romano), a union lawyer who gets Sheeran off the hook for skimming meat shipments and selling them to a Philly mob.

This is Sheeran’s entree into the mob underworld, and the ensuing tale, which spans the 1950s through the 1970s, is nothing short of a grand Mafia epic (whether it’s 100% factual or not). The story begins in Philadelphia but shifts locales to cover events that went down in New York City, Detroit and Miami (Scorsese’s use of Jackie Gleason’s “Melancholy Serenade” for his establishing shot of Miami is so money I nearly plotzed).

A significant portion of the film involves Sheeran’s association with Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). It’s a treat to savor De Niro and Pacino sharing so much screen time; a long-overdue pairing of acting titans that was comparatively teased at in Michael Mann’s 1995 crime epic Heat. I’m on the fence regarding Pacino’s take on Hoffa. It’s quite…demonstrative. Then again, Jimmy Hoffa was a larger-than-life character. Also, De Niro’s performance is relatively low-key, so perhaps it’s just their contrasting styles.

The supporting cast is uniformly excellent…and populous. Stephen Graham (as “Tony Pro” Provenzano) is a standout (the always intense UK actor had a memorable recurring role as Al Capone in the Scorsese-produced HBO series Boardwalk Empire). The cast also includes Bobby Cannavale (another Boardwalk Empire alum) and Anna Paquin (as Sheeran’s eldest daughter). I didn’t recognize comedian Jim Norton (as Don Rickles) or musician (and Sopranos veteran) Steven Van Zandt as singer Jerry Vale until the credits!

Ultimately, the film belongs to (and hinges on) De Niro and his performance; and he does not disappoint. He and Scorsese have collaborated so closely for so many decades that it is hard to distinguish when one or the other’s aesthetic begins and the other one’s ends. Not that this collaboration signals the “the end” of either artist’s creative journey; if anything, it serves to remind movie audiences what real classical film making is all about.

Previous posts with related themes:
Mikey and Nicky
Public Enemies
Gomorrah

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“We have entered into the consequences stage of the Trump presidency”

by digby

 This conversation between Chris Hayes and Steve Schmidt is quite bracing:

 yeah …

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