Monday, December 5, 2016

The Scam is On

The Opinion Pages  | OP-ED COLUMNIST 

The Art of the Scam

Paul Krugman 
Eric Thayer for The New York Times 
Remember Donald Trump’s tax returns? It was unheard-of for a presidential candidate to refuse to release returns, since doing so strongly suggests that he has something to hide. And at first the Trump campaign offered excuses, claiming that the returns would eventually be made available once an I.R.S. audit was done, or something. But at this point it’s apparent that Mr. Trump believed, correctly, that he could violate all the norms, stonewall on even the most basic disclosure, and pay no political price.
Indeed, it’s clear that Hillary Clinton was in effect punished for her financial transparency, while Mr. Trump was rewarded for his practice of revealing nothing about how he makes money.
And as a result, we can expect radical lack of transparency to be standard operating procedure in the new administration. In fact, it has already started.
Take, for example, the budget process. Normally, an incoming administration issues a fiscal plan conveying its priorities soon after taking office. But as the budget expert Stan Collender notes, there are strong indications that the Trump administration will ignore this precedent (and, possibly, the law) and simply refuse to offer any explanation of how its proposals are supposed to add up. All we’ll get, probably, are assurances that it’s going to be great, believe me.
True, we don’t yet know for sure that there will be no budget. But it’s already clear that bait-and-switch — big but empty promises, completely lacking in detail — will be central to Republican strategy on one key issue: the future of health coverage for millions of Americans.
The background: Back in 2010 President Obama and the short-lived Democratic majority in Congress passed the Affordable Care Act with zero G.O.P. support. Ever since, Republicans have promised to repeal the law as soon as they had a chance, replacing it with something much better. Strange to say, however, they have never described what their replacement would look like.
And I don’t mean that they haven’t spelled out all the details. Almost seven years after Obamacare was enacted, Republicans haven’t offered even the broad outline of a health reform plan. Why not?
Actually, there’s no mystery here. While many Americans say they disapprove of Obamacare, large majorities approve of the things the Affordable Care Act does, notably ensuring that people with pre-existing medical conditions can still buy insurance. And there’s no way to achieve these things without either a major expansion of government health programs — hardly a Republican priority — or something very much like the law Democrats passed.
Worse yet, from the Republican point of view, Obamacare has worked. It’s not perfect, by a long shot, but the number of uninsured Americans has plummeted to its lowest level in history. And Americans newly insured thanks to Obamacare are highly satisfied with their coverage.
So what can the G.O.P. offer as an alternative? We know what Republicans want: a free-for-all in which insurance companies can discriminate as they like, with minimal regulation and drastic cuts in government aid. Going there would, however, cause millions of Americans — many of them people who voted for Trump, believing that their recent gains were safe — to lose coverage. The political blowback would be terrible.
Yet failing to repeal Obamacare would also bring heavy political costs. So the emerging Republican health care strategy, according to news reports, is “repeal and delay” — vote to kill Obamacare, but with the effective date pushed back until after the 2018 midterm elections. By then, G.O.P. leaders promise, they’ll have come up with the replacement they haven’t been able to devise over the past seven years.
There will, of course, be no replacement. And there’s likely to be chaos in health care markets well before Obamacare’s official expiration date, as insurance companies exit markets they know will soon collapse. But the political thinking seems to be that they can find a way to blame Democrats for the debacle.
It’s all very Trumpian, if you think about it. An honest memoir of the president-elect’s business career would be titled “The art of the scam.” After all, his hallmark has been turning a profit on failed business projects, because he finds a way to leave other people holding the bag.
In this case, the effort to replace Obamacare will clearly fail miserably in terms of serving the American people, perhaps especially the white working-class voters who backed Mr. Trump. But it could nonetheless be a political success if the public can be convinced to blame the wrong people.
You might think that this would be impossible, given the obviousness of the ploy. But given what we’ve seen so far, you have to take seriously the possibility that they’ll get away with it.
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Sunday, December 4, 2016

The Right to Vote Continues

COMMENT

 

THE REAL VOTING SCANDAL OF 2016

Jill Stein can’t call for the recount of uncast votes, but there were clearly thousands of them as a result of voter-suppression measures.

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ILLUSTRATION BY TOM BACHTELL
Students of political despair (a popular field these days) might consider the case of Robert Parris Moses. He was a twenty-six-year-old high-school math teacher in New York City, when, in 1961, he set off, alone, to register African-American voters in Mississippi. At the time, fewer than seven per cent of eligible African-Americans in the state were registered. Local officials kept the number low by means of literacy tests, poll taxes, and violence—aimed at those trying to register and, particularly, at those seeking to register others. They included Moses and a small band of colleagues in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee who joined him. He was beaten repeatedly, once nearly to death. A quiet, almost serene figure, he came to exemplify a special kind of civil-rights worker, who, as Taylor Branch wrote, in “Parting the Waters,” “chose to isolate himself deep behind the lines of segregation for years at a time, armed only with nonviolence.”
Moses understood that the franchise is the foundation of democracy, and, more than half a century later, that right is again under threat, often in the same places (mostly in the South) and always for the same reason (so that those in power can stay there). What makes the current controversy so dispiriting is the sense that the issue should have been settled by now. But, given the centrality of voting to our system of government, elections will always be battlegrounds, and votes are the weapons.
Some, though, are offering the wrong lesson about voting rights in this year’s Presidential election. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a substantial margin—more than two and a half million votes—but, under the baleful metrics of our Electoral College, the outcome was not especially close. Donald Trump gained surprising victories in the northern Midwest, and his margins in the dispositive states are well outside the range where recounts, which almost never result in a change of more than five hundred votes, might make a difference. Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes, Wisconsin by 22,177, and Pennsylvania by 70,638. Still, Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, has launched a successful fund-raising drive, collecting almost seven million dollars from grieving Americans, to underwrite official recounts. Wisconsin’s is under way, although lawyers supporting Trump are trying to stop the effort in all three states.
Stein’s demands for a recount reflect the same narcissism as her candidacy, whose primary function was to help Trump win. (Her roughly one per cent of the national vote included more than enough votes to swing two of the three states to Clinton.) Now she has exploited legitimate questions about interference by Russia, which, it seems, organized or backed a hacking operation that involved the theft of e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and from Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta. This drew a curiously passive response from the Obama Administration, but there remains no evidence that Russia or any other outside force systematically intervened or altered the result in any state. The recounts will only give Trump an opportunity to claim victory again.
More important, they have turned attention away from the real voting-rights scandal of 2016. This was the first Presidential election since the Supreme Court’s notorious Shelby County v. Holder decision, which gutted the Voting Rights Act. Several Republican-controlled states took the Court’s decision as an invitation to rewrite their election laws, purportedly to address the (nonexistent) problem of voter fraud but in fact to limit the opportunities for Democrats and minorities (overlapping groups, of course) to cast their ballots.
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In the words of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which, before the election, struck down some of the changes instituted by North Carolina, “Although the new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision, they constitute inapt remedies for the problems assertedly justifying them and, in fact, impose cures for problems that did not exist.” Likewise, a federal court in Wisconsin rejected some of the changes in voting rules there, but federal courts can’t police every aspect of voting rights. Ultimately, the states determine such issues as early and absentee voting, photo-identification requirements, and the locations and hours of polling places.
It’s difficult to count uncast votes, but there were clearly thousands of them as a result of the voter-suppression measures. In 2014, according to a Wisconsin federal court, three hundred thousand registered voters in that state lacked the forms of identification that Republican legislators deemed necessary to cast their ballots. (The G.O.P. likes some forms of I.D. better than others. In Texas, a gun permit works; student identification does not.) In Milwaukee County, which has a large African-American population, sixty thousand fewer votes were cast in 2016 than in 2012. To put it another way, Clinton received forty-three thousand fewer votes in that county than Barack Obama did—a number that is nearly double Trump’s margin of victory in all of Wisconsin. The North Carolina Republican Party actually sent out a press release boasting about how its efforts drove down African-American turnout in this election. 
The challenge of reversing these initiatives is formidable, not least because the President-elect also apparently believes in the myth of widespread voter fraud. (He tweeted recently, and falsely, that he “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”) Eric Holder, who did much to protect voting rights as Attorney General, will be joined by President Obama in a project to preserve Democratic and minority power in the legislative redistricting that will follow the 2020 census—a valuable project, if a daunting one.
The current situation is not nearly as bleak as the one that Bob Moses confronted. Eventually, the power of perseverance, and the unifying idea of the right to vote in a democracy, brought him a series of unlikely triumphs, culminating, in 1965, in the passage of the Voting Rights Act. But the Shelby County case, and the backlash it both reflected and accelerated, reminds us that the struggle for the right to vote, and the need to follow Moses, may never end. ♦
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Saturday, December 3, 2016

Hoping Ricks is Right

The Opinion Pages  | OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR 

The General Who Should Lead the Pentagon

By THOMAS E. RICKS
Nominating a retired general to be secretary of defense is an unusual move in American politics. Since just after World War II, when the Department of Defense was created, only one general has held the post. That was George C. Marshall, who was more a supreme administrator in the Army than a combat leader. In World War I, Marshall was an excellent staff officer. In World War II he oversaw the American war effort.
The retired Marine general James N. Mattis, who is President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice to lead the Pentagon, is very different from Marshall. He is revered in the Marine Corps, where he served for over 40 years, for his aggressive and decisive approach to fighting. He led the Marines into southern Afghanistan in 2001, then commanded the Marine part of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and was involved in heavy fighting in Falluja a year later.
But General Mattis is not another George Patton, a comparison Mr. Trump is fond of making. General Mattis, who retired in 2013, after leading United States Central Command for three years, is far more disciplined than Patton was, and a far more strategic thinker.
Usually, I’d oppose having a general as secretary of defense, because it could undermine our tradition of civilian control of the military.
But these are not normal times. The incoming president appears to be a profoundly ignorant man who often seems to act on gut impulse or on what pleases the crowd. That is a dangerous combination to have in the White House. Having known General Mattis for many years, I am confident that he will be a restraint on Mr. Trump’s impulsiveness. I also think he will provide a strong counterweight to some of those around Mr. Trump who hold isolationist or pro-Putin views.
He is an unusually forthright man, which is one reason his sayings have become so popular among Marines. (One of the more printable is, “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”) He will tell the president what he thinks, and that is a good thing. He has demonstrated repeatedly that he believes it part of his duty to give his candid views to his superiors.
Indeed, it was just that sort of unvarnished approach that got him in hot water with the Obama White House. In discussions of Iran, he kept pushing civilians to consider the secondary consequences of actions. “Then what?” is a favorite question of his. On Iran, he asked, what if you get a nuclear deal with Tehran and then it starts escalating conventionally in the Persian Gulf?
General Mattis also was more hawkish than Obama’s advisers on how to deal with Iranian export of mischief to other countries in the region. And he expressed unhappiness with how the administration was responding to the Arab Spring, though the nature of his disagreement isn’t publicly known.
It helps that General Mattis, unlike Mr. Trump, is extremely well read. I once casually mentioned to him that I planned to learn more about the Carthaginian general Hannibal. He immediately named two books that he considered good studies. He told me once that in combat he liked to have a copy in his rucksack of “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius, the second-century Roman philosopher-emperor, the better to help him gain some mental distance from the battlefield.
I also think that General Mattis will provide a useful balance to Michael Flynn, the retired Army lieutenant general chosen by Mr. Trump to be national security adviser. General Flynn strikes me as an erratic figure. For example, his joining in the “lock her up” chant at the Republican convention was unseemly and, for a career military officer, unprofessional. Also, General Flynn did not have a good reputation as an administrator when he ran the Defense Intelligence Agency before being moved out by the Obama administration. It will help that General Mattis retired with four stars, while General Flynn wore just three — among military men, rank matters, even in retirement.
The public notion of generals is that they know how to use only the military as a means of policy and so are more likely to get the nation into wars. That is a false conception in most cases, but especially in this one. General Mattis knows that war is the last resort, not the first one. He also understands that the threat of force works best when it works in conjunction with robust diplomatic efforts.
Some in Congress have said that they oppose waiving the law that bans recently retired generals from being secretary of defense. (Such a waiver was required to give Marshall the job.) But Congress did not bar generals from the office, it only required that they be out of uniform for seven years. The idea was to make people consider that it is unusual, and a departure from American tradition, to have military men or women in the position. In this case, waiving the law is the best course.
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Friday, December 2, 2016

Obama's Economy

President Obama will hand over an unusually strong economy to Trump. The economy added 178,000 jobs in November. Unemployment has dropped to 4.6% The deficit has plummeted since he took office. (From today's NY Times)
It won't take Trump long to bring Republican economics back and blame Obama. Look for continuing tweets and media blind spots to change the subject as the economic facts reverse.
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Thursday, December 1, 2016

Slavery vs Race

The Distinction Between Slavery And Race In U.S. History

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“Slaves in front of a cabin” (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library)
The history of the Electoral College is receiving a lot of attention. Pieces like this one, which explores “the electoral college and its racist roots,” remind us how deeply race is woven into the very fabric of our government. A deeper examination, however, reveals an important distinction between the political interests of slaveholders and the broader category of the thing we call “race.”
“Race” was indeed a critical factor in the establishment of the Constitution. At the time of the founding, slavery was legal in every state in the Union. People of African descent were as important in building northern cities such as New York as they were in producing the cash crops on which the southern economy depended. So we should make no mistake about the pervasive role of race in the conflicts and compromises that went into the drafting of the Constitution.
Yet, the political conflicts surrounding race at the time of the founding had little to do with debating African-descended peoples’ claim to humanity, let alone equality. It is true that many of the Founders worried about the persistence of slavery in a nation supposedly dedicated to universal human liberty.  After all, it was difficult to argue that natural rights justified treason against a king without acknowledging slaves’ even stronger claim to freedom. Thomas Jefferson himself famously worried that in the event of slave rebellion, a just deity would side with the enslaved.
James Madison
James Madison
But the Framers never got to the point of debating black freedom and equality in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787. They were too busy arguing over how much extra power slaveholders would have in the new form of government. As James Madison noted, of all the divides between the states, the one that came to drive debates most was that between slave states and those becoming free. But these debates were over slavery–not race.  They were about the political power of slaveholders, not the rights of those enslaved or degraded by the racial identity ascribed to them.
Slavery divided the nation; race, not so much. At the Founding, the argument over slavery was an argument between powerful elites, some of whom depended completely on slavery for their profits and some who did not. While the issue of slaveholder power eventually came to dominate the national political agenda, the question of race — and particularly the racial equality of non-Europeans — did not. Widespread consensus consigned nearly all blacks to sub-citizen status, even when they were not legal property.
Northern emancipation demonstrated how race could thrive even in slavery’s absence. Ending slavery was never easy, but it was easier where slavery was less central to the economy. It was no surprise that New Hampshire, home to around one hundred slaves in the 1770s, ended the institution in 1777, while New Jersey, home to some ten thousand at the Founding, still listed eighteen “apprentices for life” on its 1860 census.
Wherever and whenever slavery ended in the North, freedom generated whole new waves of racial hostility. Slavery, it turned out, rested atop the deeper foundation of a vicious racial caste order. Labor competition between white and black workers unleashed new furies of racial violence. It became possible for European immigrants to leverage their whiteness into a form of symbolic capital that proved quite precious when the real article was scarce. Racial science elicited fears of “amalgamation” while blackface minstrel shows wove denigrating stereotypes into the nation’s burgeoning popular culture.
As a consequence, people of African descent were largely written out of the civic body. In the so-called Jacksonian “age of the common man,” free states dropped property requirements to vote only to add the word “white” to their constitutions for the first time. This removed blacks from the electorate where some had once held the franchise. All new free states entering the union before the Civil War did so without property qualifications for voting, but with explicit constitutional denials of black suffrage: Ohio (1803), Indiana (1816), Illinois (1818), Michigan (1837), Iowa (1846), Wisconsin (1848), California (1850), and Oregon (1859). It was as if whites regardless of class could be welcome in the new America, but only with the sacrifice of blacks’ claim on citizenship. Freedom was a great idea; it was just going to be reserved for white people.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. "Anti-Slavery Meeting on the [Boston] Common." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-7965-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
“Anti-Slavery Meeting on the [Boston] Common” (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division)
All was not completely bleak. In the 1830s, new alliances with radical abolitionists offered welcome friends and needed resources. Few white people, regardless of how marginal, could escape the imaginative bounds of a pervasive race culture. But as limited as they could be, moneyed white abolitionists propelled the slavery issue onto the national stage. From there, they ventured into the very political system that maintained the accursed institution.
It was a move critical to ending slavery, but difficult to pull off. Slaveholding states’ artificial advantages in the House of Representatives and Electoral College combined with a two-party system that wanted to discuss any issue other than the one that threatened to split their coalitions cleanly in half. Antislavery activists made headway, but the pervasive racism around them made building a movement challenging.  Experimenting through several iterations over several election cycles, they eventually hit upon a two-fronted rhetorical attack.
First, they argued that the Slave Power was bent on undermining freedom. Just as masters coveted power over slaves, so too the “slaveocrats” sought to trample upon the civil liberties of free white northerners in their desire for mastery over government. As evidence, they pointed to the South’s unprecedented use of the federal government to protect and expand the institution. Second, they argued that the western territories should be kept free from slavery in order to keep it free from slave laborers who would degrade their free white counterparts.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library. "Slave-owner shooting a fugitive slave." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1853. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-75ac-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
“Slave-owner shooting a fugitive slave” (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division)
Both messages shared one obvious trait: no one needed to care much for African Americans to embrace them. Antislavery politicians threw away the dog-whistle and made their case plainly: “We, the Republican party, are the white man’s party,” declared Republican Senator Lyman Trumbell. “We are for free, white men, and for making white labor respectable and honorable, which it never can be when negro slave labor is brought into competition with it.” In short, one could stand against slavery while also being racist. Slavery and race were not the same thing. And thus we see what is hard to see unless we can distinguish race from slavery: how an overwhelmingly racist North came to fight a war to end slavery.
This is not just a story of antebellum days. The Jim Crow South patterned its segregation laws after ones tested in the North, just as civil rights challengers to such laws drew on pre-war pioneers. It was this edifice that the heroes of post-WWII America toppled, a full century after the Civil War had abolished slavery. Ultimately, then, the Civil Rights tradition is not something that began in 1954. It has been with us since the first days of the republic, just as we are in the midst of defending it once again.
There are two lessons I take from all of this. First, we must end any notion of the free states as morally superior to the slave states, for that is a calculation that only works if slavery, and not race, is being considered. It is true that the movement to end slavery came largely from the free states. But the North did not honor the abolitionists. To the end the most committed of them remained a small minority, despised almost as much as were the free blacks who had inspired them. We all need to let this one go; there was plenty of karma for everyone.
Second, we need to look at how the arc of history bent in this instance againstprogress and expanding liberty, toward a narrower and less tolerant vision of the country. Unfortunately, that happens regularly in our history. It seems bizarre that anyone could believe that democracy is bettered by writing people out of it, but of course, such arguments are today raising unprecedented levels of alarm.
This is a cautionary tale, then. History does not have to move forward. No cosmic force, historical “principle,” or benign deity will save us from ourselves. That is work for us to do.
Patrick Rael is Professor of History at Bowdoin College. He is the author of numerous essays and books, including Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (North Carolina, 2002), and his most recent book, Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777-1865 (University of Georgia Press, 2015).
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