Tag Archives: Donald Trump

“What went wrong” in 2016? Are they kidding?

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Going where the denial is thickest–in the news media

As a rape survivor myself*, I believe Juanita Broaddrick. I listened to Ms. Broaddrick when she was interviewed on Dateline NBC back in 1999. I listened carefully to everything she said, and–as a lifelong registered Democrat myself–I believe her with all my heart. Her accusation was that Bill Clinton assaulted her, in Arkansas, years earlier, when he was State Attorney General and widely believed to be a rising political star and a local political wunderkind. This was a rape allegation–different in degree from the several sexual harassment allegations also leveled against Clinton, and in 2016 against Donald Trump, and very different from Clinton’s compulsive philandering. Broaddrick accused Clinton of forcible rape, on national television–network, not cable–credibly, with detail, not concealing or denying her own errors or her anger at Clinton. Yet after the Clintons left the White House, Broaddrick’s name was scarcely mentioned in what are often called the ‘elite’ media. As the highly respected late columnist William Blackberry commented, it was mystifying that a credible accusation of such magnitude could be passed over. This while The Washington Post deemed that President Clinton’s affair with an intern warranted a special pull-out section titled “Presidency in Crisis”( temporarily), and Republicans in the House were voting to impeach Clinton.

It is an unanswered question, now, how many people even know who Juanita Broaddrick is. Many younger people who voted in 2016 would not have recognized her name in 2015. The fact that she became part of the public discourse largely through some rightwing outlets and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is a source of regret for me personally.

The Democrats who should have acknowledged her story dropped the ball. So did the GOP, of course. Neither major party moved constructively to address the issue of rape, in the 1990s or under the George W. Bush administration. President Obama and Vice President Biden did more than any previous White House, addressing sexual assault on college campuses and problems such as the backlog of unprocessed rape kits in the criminal justice system. But much remains to be done.

Our top media outlets did far too little. Millions of words have been written about the 2016 election, with more to come; hundreds of opinion polls were taken, countless models predicted the outcome–wrongly–but so far as I know, no major media outlet polled the public on awareness of Juanita Broaddrick’s accusation against Clinton, or even on her name recognition.

A couple of points here. First, rape is a difficult topic, grim and painful, and difficult things by definition are harder to deal with than easy things. Fewer people will deal well with something difficult than with something easy, including people in the news media. Second,  as mentioned above, few people in large media outlets tried to deal with the Broaddrick story well. This gap is not consistent with a belief in Clinton’s innocence, which would have emphasized accuracy. It sweeps an issue under the rug instead of addressing it.

Third, a media focus on horse-race politics shed too little light on rape as an issue. Thus if Broaddrick’s name was mentioned at all, it was usually through the prism of possible effect on the campaign of Hillary Clinton for president. Those media personalities are now consumed with the question of ‘what went wrong’ with the 2016 election, and what went wrong with their predictions.

Conceding defeat in 2016

Conceding defeat in 2016

Democrats are also addressing the question of ‘what went wrong’, especially since the Clinton campaign is not telling.

And the Clintons are of course being faulted for not telling. On this narrow point, I can help them. This is a question they will not answer fully, because they cannot.

‘What went wrong’ is that the wife of a rapist ran for the White House.

Unthinkable? One would think so. But it wasn’t. There was no one to advise the Clintons, effectively, that Clinton should not run.  A deadly simple timeline resulted. The Clinton team decided to try the run and accumulated all the money not going to the GOP. Meanwhile, Republicans salivating at the prospect of running against ‘Hillary’ lined up, and money or no money, the GOP field was self-destructively large. Trump was the cue ball. Wham. He broke the rack on the table wide apart. And while Trump was breaking things open on the Republican side, the Clintons and their media allies were shutting out every better candidate on the Democratic side–Vice President Biden first, before the primary season even began; then Senator Bernie Sanders in the primaries.

So on one side Trump benefited from the arithmetic of the field, and on the other Clinton, with no essential constituency or platform except narrow self-interest, shut out the field.

Net result: 1) A small cadre of Democratic insiders decided to paste in a nominee before any votes were cast, and 2) they picked the worst possible candidate. The Clintons with their greed problem, their old-time insider status, their treatment-of-women problem, their ties to Wall Street, etc., etc., etc., were the worst possible choice to run against Donald Trump. Not that they knew enough to take Trump seriously, any more than they knew enough to take Sanders seriously. (So much for ‘electable’.) So much for the high-paid expertise with which they theoretically surrounded themselves.

I believe that even the quiet Lincoln Chafee would have done better than Clinton. Joe Biden would have crushed Trump. Bernie Sanders would have crushed Trump. But every political and/or media insider was convinced that Clinton was a shoo-in. And not content with being convinced themselves, they exerted pressures huge to tiny, broad and narrow, to exclude any contrary voice or dissenting opinion.

On a small scale, I saw a little of the action even near my own neighborhood. (A realistic pre-election poll might have taken into account how many millions of Americans witnessed unbecoming behavior by individuals who thought they were going to have the upper hand come Election Day.)

By the weekend before the election, I for one was wondering about the much-touted ‘landslide’. I was not very surprised at the outcome but was disappointed that Russ Feingold lost the Wisconsin senate race. Knowing the Clintons, Feingold’s appeal is probably one of the reasons they neglected Wisconsin. Much of their joint public career for forty years has consisted of playing keep-away, and much of their appeal has been to media insiders who play keep-away themselves. (A realistic post-election investigation might try to examine how the Clintons went about rewarding or enticing favorable media coverage.) No wonder they were so surprised: they shut out the very people they should have been listening to.

These issues connected to the Clintons and to the Democratic Party establishment extend to the news media which confidently predicted a big-time Clinton victory. For now, space and time constraints preclude my going into the media issues. Suffice it to say that we are now hearing self-serving commentators mutually affirming their moral superiority to the unwashed masses. Largely these are the people who went along with Bush’s invasion of Iraq. As with sexual assault, it saddens me to see Iraq swept under the rug. On top of the loss of blood and treasure, in all that (temporary) emphasis on sexual assault during the campaign, no one mentioned that rape follows war.

One last point: owing to the experience I suffered, I felt pummeled throughout the 2016 election cycle–beginning with the smug, complacent assertions of Clinton’s being the inevitable nominee, in 2015 and before. The reaction is difficult to write about, even now. Several media theories about election 2016 have addressed the wrongness of the opinion polls–silent Trump voters, distrust of pollsters, faulty polling methods. I have another theory to add: that I am not the only one in my position. Few Americans would have wanted to share an intensely private perspective on Bill Clinton with pollsters. Even fewer would have wanted to volunteer their private opinion–for example, believing Juanita Broaddrick–with pollsters, without being asked to do so.

And no pollsters asked.

*This was a childhood incident. I was in elementary school at the time, an undersized fifth-grader walking alone through a big park in Houston, to a Brownies meeting. The perpetrator was not someone I knew, and the police never caught him. But at least there was none of that nonsense about not believing me. Everyone knew I could not have made it up, and anyway I was taken to the ER of the local charity hospital–Ben Taub–for an exam.

 

 

The low-class Washington, D.C., chattering classes

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The chattering classes are lower-class than the masses.

We have seen this before. In 2002 and 2003, millions of ‘ordinary’ Americans figured something was wrong about wantonly invading Iraq. That perception was not shared, however, by established media authorities including George F. Will, Charles Krauthammer, the entire Republican noise machine, the three original major television networks and Fox, The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the major cable outlets. The upshot was a bloody and unconstitutional invasion of a sovereign nation that basically amounted to the betrayal of the less educated by the (nominally) educated.

Now we are seeing it again. The newest representation is our more elevated media mouths’ reaction to Donald Trump.

Typically inadequate commentary about Trump’s rise or support can be found here and here, among many other places.

The ground rule of pundits like these: always blame the many rather than the few. So much for participatory democracy. So much for each-one-teach-one. For Democrats, so much for winning in November 2016.
In commentary pieces like these, however well-meant they may be, a good guideline is to look at what is missing. Thus, in these particular pieces linked and in many others, there is no account of the staggering dearth of valid information in what passes for ‘political reporting’ in our big media outlets. Nothing about the paucity of genuine information in our politics coverage. (Far too typical. Did we learn about segregation and desegregation from the big media outlets? — not until the latter was dramatized by protests that lighted racial justice up on the big board. More recently, did we hear about insurance companies’ stiffing their own customers? — not until John Grisham and Michael Moore and, on a lesser scale, I, voiced the issue. For that matter, when was the last time Wolf Blitzer used the word ‘redlining’?) Nothing about the infotainment dished out by what Chris Matthews actually called (with a straight face) “Washington insiders.” Nothing about the brutal assaults on public education that leave many students unknowing about checks and balances. Nothing about the internal corruption in the Democratic Party that shut out an excellent candidate, Vice President Joseph Biden, away from voters who would have liked more choices. The behind-the-scenes money-and-connections apparatus, you will recall, did its collective best to lock up the party nomination for the deeply flawed Clintons. One result was that 17(?) 27(?) 127(?) GOPers were salivating at the chance to run against Hillary Clinton. And one result of that was Donald Trump–the cue ball banging into the rack, with the arithmetic of the field always in his favor.
Some of these guys in media commentary have even found ways to be unfair to Donald Trump–not a feat any ordinary person could pull off. Trump has at moments engaged in more accurate political commentary than the analysts covering him–one example being when he called out Ted Cruz for megaphoning that Ben Carson was liable to drop out of the race, just before the Iowa caucuses. The result was that Cruz came out on top in Iowa, beating Trump by a few points, with Carson well down toward the bottom. (Incidentally, the loss may have helped Trump in the long run. If he had ‘won’ Iowa and gone on to win the next couple of races, the rest of the field and the party establishment would have homed in on him that much sooner.)
More importantly–to do Donald Trump justice, it is Trump who has repeatedly criticized George W. Bush’s wanton and unconstitutional invasion of Iraq. Only Trump has had the temerity to point out that for George W. Bush to take credit for our ‘safety’ when 9/11 occurred on his watch is a dubious claim. (Imagine what would have happened to the principal of Columbine High School, had he gone around boasting, à la Bush/Pataki/Giuliani, about his actions in the immediate wake of the tragic events there). One predictable outcome is that all the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) signatories are now up in arms against Trump. PNAC was co-founded by Dick Cheney and Jeb Bush, and all the apologists for the Iraq War, all the movers and shakers who think the problem is that we just didn’t spill enough blood, are now joined with the remains of the GOP establishment to take an imaginary moral high ground against Trump.

PNAC

WOULD THAT HILLARY CLINTON AND THE SO-CALLED MAINSTREAM DEMOCRATS HAD MADE THE SAME CLEAR STATEMENTS, in recent years. Hillary Clinton never does, for obvious reasons; she voted for the Bush war. But too many Dems who see themselves as either connected or cerebral have spent the last seven years on the sidelines. Worse yet, too many of them dug in with passive-aggressive tactics against President Obama– undoubtedly partly out of the pettiest and most parochial envy/jealousy/competitiveness, partly out of spite because they underestimated him, and partly out of residual bigotry that afflicts some leftish writers as well as some rightwingers. So you have GOPers blaming President Obama, rather than GWBush, for every disaster in the Middle East. And the Blue Dog ‘centrist’ types and the sideline sitters seldom or never step up to the plate to defend one of the best presidents we have had. (Hillary Clinton now claims to be his defender, having adopted the line from people with my view that Obama should get more credit. Meanwhile, her emails show her as SecState chiefly intent on gauging Obama’s and Biden’s popularity. Read some of them.)

Priorities

I might add that the same left-ish media sources are not exactly eager to pay their own writers and lower-level staff; look at Arianna Huffington, Daily Kos’ Markos Moulitsas, and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow for examples. Too many producers take advantage of the passion of populist writers by paying, if at all, on the Walmart model–calling them Kossacks, or bloggers, etc., rather than employees, even contract employees. The treatment of PT/contingent workers has affected our republic of letters. This again is something you do not hear discussed by Hillary Clinton-type candidates–not for decades. Not until her people pick it up via social media from someone like me, or until some event makes it safe and popular.
The Democrats underestimate Trump at their peril in 2016. And downplaying Trump’s supporters as dumb will not help. Quite the contrary.
If some of the guys/gentlemen who have profited most from their media positions could be a little more concerned about fellow human beings and a little less concerned about vague notions of status, they might pull off some actual analysis once in a while. In the meantime, their accuracy will inevitably be hobbled by their vulgarity. It is quintessentially vulgar to proceed on an assumption that some individuals are worth more than others, purely on the basis of position or status or anything else extraneous to merit. The assumption also leads to a very simple but very obtuse logical slide–the view that if So-and-so is not important, then misrepresenting him is also not important.

Sanders’ claim to turnout is valid

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Several commentators have disparaged Sen. Bernard Sanders’ argument that turnout will be vital to Democrats in November and that he can help the turnout. He is right on both counts.

Commentators at MSNBC, CNN and now some of the networks have gotten on a train recently, though–pointing to the undoubted fact that Democratic turnout in primaries this year is lower than in 2008. (Barack Obama ran that year. No one has turned out newly energized voters like President Obama.) They also point out that the Democratic turnout is lower than turnout in Republican primaries, where Donald Trump has gotten the GOP moving. So–they go on to gloat–where is the turnout that Sanders promises to deliver? (Some particularly unappealing and smarmy gloating on this item has come from Wolf Blitzer, Rachel Maddow, and Chris Matthews. No surprise there. Matthews’ wife, Kathleen Matthews, is losing her race for Maryland’s 8th District congressional seat, in spite of locking hips with the Clinton team and its donor base behind the scenes; you can’t expect him to be a good sport–a man who uses the phrase “Washington insiders” with a straight face is hardly going to be an objective observer of the nation’s fortunes. Blitzer and a tiny handful of others at CNN have been drawing envious blood from Obama since moments after the president’s election November 4, 2008. They apparently resent both his and Vice President Biden’s independence of the DC media establishment. Maddow seems long since to have bought in to the notion that careerism=feminism, or something to that effect. In between fawning on Brian Williams, she seems to be pretty much engaged in boosting the most mediocre women she can find in public life.)

But there is a factor at work this year that did not weigh on turnout in previous elections. The factor is “superdelegates.” Regardless of how hard Sanders’ ardent supporters work–and most of his supporters are ardent–Hillary Rodham Clinton and her team quietly sewed up somewhere around 450 party insiders, to paste her into the nomination should she have difficulty with voters.

Senator Sanders

Hint to analysts: if you want to be an analyst, it might help to analyze. Is there any realistic possibility that the mass of offstage superdelegates would not discourage turnout, among any voters who knew about them? Or among voters who just saw the delegate tallies for the candidates, without clarification?

So much for hope and change. The insider campaign against both–again, by ‘Washington insiders’–has been relentless–while it has also been picayune, bigoted, petty, envious and competitive. Money does not mean sense.

Nor, in the media establishment, does it mean rigorous adherence to journalistic standards. (You read it here first.) Any political analyst is intellectually required to clarify those superdelegates, in the public interest. That is not happening.

The accrual of more than 400 superdelegates by the wealth- and foundation-supported Clintons should also have been rigorously and accurately reported as it occurred. That did not happen either.

This process will have to change, and will change. In the narrowest partisan terms, it is disastrous for the Democratic Party. Democrats are living in a dream world if they think that a Hillary Clinton campaign can just skate by a nominee like Donald Trump. Trump has already appealed to independents–and to Democrats. It is unrealistic just to assume that a gravely flawed candidate like Clinton can defeat him. This is a pipe dream, and that’s even before the rest of the information on the private-server emails comes out. The insecurities about Hillary Rodham Clinton as a candidate are already manifest, in the behind-the-scenes efforts to prevent anyone else from even running.

Vice President Biden

This strategy is also being feverishly boosted by the Maddows and Matthews of the media world. Maddow spent a lengthy segment one evening on some whack-job’s push to get a death penalty(?) for gays. The clear implication was that Hillary Clinton is our only firewall against measures such as, as Maddow put it, “executing homosexuals.” Do Maddow and her ilk really think that executing homosexuals would be opposed only by a Clinton? They don’t think a candidate like, for example, Vice President Joseph Biden would step up to the plate? They don’t think Biden would oppose executing homosexuals? Do they really think Jim Webb would not have opposed these ills, if he had been allowed in the field? Lincoln Chafee? Wouldn’t even Gov. Martin O’Malley have opposed executing homosexuals, at least if the polls were going the right way?

Bernie Sanders could crush Trump. But he has to become the nominee to do so.

Meanwhile, when these over-promoted, overpaid, and under-qualified folks joined up behind scenes to paste Clinton into a nomination she has not earned and does not deserve, they took away part of my vote. They will not get the rest of it. I will not be blackmailed into voting for the ‘electable’ candidate. For one thing, she’s not. For another, the blackmail is being pushed by the very people who put us in this situation in the first place. This is not a process, a candidate, or a strategy that can withstand accurate scrutiny.

 

 

The Elephant and the Denatured Donkey in the Room

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As the New Hampshire presidential primary approaches (February 9), the national political press is consumed with speculation over Donald Trump’s lead in the GOP. Secondarily, it is speculating over how well Sen. Bernie Sanders’ lead on the Democratic side will hold up. The corollary re the GOP is that establishment candidates must be ‘winnowed’, so that Republicans can ‘coalesce’ around an alternative to Trump or Ted Cruz. The corollary re the Democrats is that loaded-with-minuses Hillary Clinton is in for the long haul, on her way to her still-inevitable nomination. Commentators do not always put it that way, but that’s the gist.

Not too ironically, one of the more interesting aspects of the 2016 race is what the national political press is not discussing. This has happened before. An avalanche of commentary in 2014 failed to disclose that the GOP ‘wave’ had a key cause: in state after state, the GOP saw to it that, while tea party candidates proliferated, party-establishment candidates had a clear path to nomination. Thus the arithmetic of the field virtually always prevailed, and in favor of the party’s preferred candidate. The relatively plausible candidate then went on, in most races, to win–especially against Blue-Dog, Clinton-like, triangulating-type Dems. More on that later.

The insurgent types seem to have learned a lesson from 2014, by the way. Trump may be a human cue ball, but most of the ‘winnowing’ this time has occurred in the non-establishment lane, as it’s now being called. Dropouts so far Bobby Jindal, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, and Rick Santorum would all be competing for the insurgent vote, if they were still in; Rick Perry and Scott Walker somewhat; only George Pataki and Lindsey Graham perhaps not. Thus with nine presidential candidates remaining, the GOP now has six candidates competing for establishment support–Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, Jim Gilmore, John Kasich, and Marco Rubio. Only two are competing for the tea party-evangelical vote–Ben Carson and Ted Cruz. Trump is running sui generis, salesman that he is.

I do not pretend to have a forecast for the New Hampshire primary. In the interest of full disclosure–to make my own position clear–if I lived in NH I would be voting for Senator Sanders. My own guess is that if Trump were to drop out of the GOP race or to do so poorly as to become irrelevant, his supporters would scatter or drop out, too. Pretty dreary prospect.

Sanders 2016

Back to what’s not being reported. First, the Republicans.

Whatever the outcome in New Hampshire, for anyone who can do arithmetic, the GOP candidate with the best chance long-term is still Jeb Bush–IF he chooses to stay in the race. Christie is ghastly. Fiorina is being sidelined pretty emphatically, in spite of her efforts to out-ugly the uglies. She would probably be sidelined more explicitly, except that the party is trying (sort of) to keep some women voters. Gilmore is being thoroughly ignored. Kasich is under none-too-subtle pressure to make like Scott Walker and bow out; that happens to GOP candidates who occasionally pay lip service to working people. The focus of commentary at the moment is on the GOP candidate most like Bush–Rubio. A few weeks of voting should answer some questions. Bush has the backing to survive not being voted for; Rubio may not. The big question is whether Bush and his backers stay in.

Jeb Bush

Meanwhile, in the tea party-ish lane, Ben Carson is facing an onslaught from Cruz, whom nobody can out-ugly. If insurgent voters were to turn on Cruz in revulsion, that whole wing of the GOP would change in a heartbeat. With Cruz hypothetically not a factor, his supporters would probably split among Carson, Trump, the multiple-candidate lane, and dropping out or voting Democratic. It will be interesting to see how they vote in New Hampshire.

So, back to the non-reported: what no esteemed commentator says about Jeb Bush is that the invasion of Iraq cost the United States dearly. No pundits bring up the statistical facts–the Iraqi civilians killed in the invasion and afterward; the assassinations of Iraqi college professors under the Coalition Provisional Authority; the deaths and injuries in American troops. No commentators point that Team Bush has never apologized for the harm done to fellow human beings, or even for the harm done to America around the globe. No mention of Iraqi children, or babies, killed; no reminder of the horrors of the Bush years–Fallujah, collateral damage, sexual assaults in the military and out of it.

Few commentators on the GOP candidates remind the public that George W. Bush used the attacks of September 11, 2001, as a pretext for invading Iraq. Not one major media figure has pointed out what I pointed out in 2002-2003, the luminously simple statement of fact that every American can understand: “The Iraqis didn’t do it.” There were no Iraqis among the hijackers. Nor do commentators tend to bring up ‘weapons of mass destruction’. (Neither do the Clintons; see below.)

Instead, we get commentary-lite, on the Jeb Bush ‘baggage’ in narrowly political terms. Two recent examples come from the pro-GOP Roll Call. One piece refers to “the family legacy” as a blessing and a curse, and to concerns about the effect on the candidate’s electability. The fact that the family has not expressed responsibility, let alone contrition, for our situation in the Middle East is omitted. Indeed, Jeb Bush says that people concerned about the actions of his father and brother need to “get therapy”–to the applause of his audience.

A succinct summary of the ethics-lite perspective is provided in the other piece:

“Bush has plenty of credentials, but they are less valuable this year. The Bush brand, once strong, was severely damaged by his brother, and Jeb himself doesn’t fit the times, when long political bloodlines and deep establishment connections are liabilities, not assets. He is, to put it bluntly, old news at a time when Republicans are looking for something new and different. For many Republicans, his name told them everything they needed to know about him and his candidacy.”

This is the way to acknowledge the biggest foreign-policy mistake in fifty years? Even Donald Trump does a better analysis of the Iraq War. Incidentally, Trump also provided a pretty good thumbnail of the effect (on the GOP) in political terms: “Lincoln couldn’t have gotten elected.” (Of course, Trump like all the GOPers blames President Obama. In my view, this is a cynical ploy to take advantage of voters too illiterate to understand that the invasion of Iraq happened before Obama’s watch, and over his opposition to the war.)

Needless to say, the same utter lack of contrition and the same failure to take responsibility extend to the Wall Street debacle in subprime lending. And the national political media tend to fall in line here, too. Too seldom is Jeb Bush, or any Republican candidate, held to account for his/her sympathy or collusion with the giant perpetrators. Meanwhile, the GOP gets to rail unchecked against the president even while unemployment falls, wages rise, prices stay level, the real estate market recovers, housing ownership revives, and coverage for health care expands. You’d think some of these gains were the capture of Osama bin Laden or the release of captured Americans all over again, they are so thoroughly ignored by big-time Republicans. Give credit to President Obama, the man who risks his life daily? Not on your bippy.

Now to the Democratic side.

As with GOP candidates, what is missing from commentary on the Democrats is exactly the information voters need. Hillary Clinton would be a disastrous nominee for Dems, but she has lined up segments of the media establishment along with her ‘Super Delegates’ and other connections.

Clinton is running basically on four planks, one semi-hidden–her electability; her inevitability (behind the scenes); her being a Democrat; and her “experience,” with the claim that she gets things done. Each claim is spurious. Setting aside longer examination for now, do they stand up to quick scrutiny? In order —

If Clinton is electable, why is she struggling so much for the nomination that she and her donors did their best to sew up beforehand? If Bill Clinton is ‘one of the best politicians of his generation’, then why did the Clintons leave the Democratic Party in shambles in Arkansas? Why was Arkansas a blue state when the Clintons began there, and a red state after their thirty-plus years? Why didn’t Hillary Clinton run for the senate from Arkansas? Speaking of New York, has there been a wave of Blue wins since the Clintons relocated there? Why did Marjorie Margolies (Mezvinsky), mother of the Clintons’ son-in-law, lose resoundingly in her New York district? The simple fact is that the Clintons are not beloved, and their coattails are nonexistent. Much of MSNBC in the tank for the Clintons. How are MSNBC’s ratings nowadays? Virginia results in 2015 were disappointing for Dems. Governor McAuliffe, widely billed as a chief Clinton ally, is not deeply beloved. Neither are the Clintons. After Clinton campaigned in Virginia in 2013, McAuliffe barely squeaked out a victory–and that was over Ken ‘Kook’ Cucinelli.

If Clinton was inevitable, why did her supporters do so much behind the scenes to keep other candidates from running? Do these machinations express confidence in their candidate?

Democrats? The Clintons are triangulators. They may be liberal on social issues, but as their track record shows, they have a pattern of shafting labor–even after receiving generous donations and support from labor, and from working people. Before she started sounding like Elizabeth Warren a few months ago, when was Clinton ever forceful on economic justice? In the senate, she voted for the resolution enabling GWBush to invade Iraq. Before that, as first lady she partnered in Bill Clinton’s anti-populist path. Before that, as wife of the candidate she stood by while Bill Clinton flew back to Arkansas to endorse personally the state’s execution of a mentally disabled African-American man.

What has Clinton ‘gotten done’? Did she work to reduce the backlog of rape kits? She now talks the game on student debt, etc., but did she ever work with her donors who are lenders to help with it before? Did she do anything beforehand to impede the coming subprime-derivatives meltdown? Did she support policies to rein in Wall Street (or the good ol’ boys in the C of C), either in Arkansas or later? Did she support gun control, before this past fall? Does her track record include support for clemency, for anyone besides Marc Rich?

These are character questions as well as economic-policy questions. Hillary Clinton is not Elizabeth Warren, and should not pretend to be. She is not someone who ‘fights for’ people outside her immediate circle. That’s not who she is. Clinton herself touts misogynistic and sexist attacks against her–but she has never stepped outside her comfort zone to defend other women, in her life. She is no Ann Richards–who endured savage and misogynistic attacks but without selling out. Clinton’s State Department emails show no consideration for President Obama, let alone for Vice President Biden. Clinton and her people, inside and outside her office, kept a wary eye out for any signs that anyone else (good) might be popular. She did the same in Arkansas, for decades. So did her husband.

One of the main problems analyzing the Clinton candidacy is that too much is deemed off-limits as ‘personal’. There is an unstated definition of ‘personal’ as ‘private’, even when the person is running for the White House. For obvious reasons, the Clintons themselves try to bat away every question of character, and many questions of policy, as mere gossip. But this strategy misconstrues the concept of the personal. Clinton has been married for decades to a man whose degrading treatment of her and of many other women is amply documented. This is not ‘right-wing conspiracy’. It is fact. It is also spousal bullying. (No, it’s not romance. It’s not intrigue. It’s not titillation. It was probably barely even sex. It’s spousal bullying–aimed at one’s own partner, while also demeaning the numerous other women involved.)

She shows the symptoms, by the way–that weird lack of judgment, that weirdly dehumanized Stay- Puft complacency, the perpetual calculatedness, the inability to empathize with any woman not ‘successful’ or established, etc.

And how did Clinton herself ‘stand up’ to the spousal bullying? –By working for the spouse’s political career, by helping the spouse advance up the ladder, by helping him into the White House. For my money, there is no way Bill Clinton could have won in 1992 if his wife had not stoutly denied every (true) accusation against him. As a result, Hillary Clinton became rich and famous; her husband became rich and famous; Arkansas was left behind. Reminding the public of this track record is not the same as gossiping about a neighbor. To remember the over-all track record of dishonesty, humiliation, and other forms of bullying is not the same as criticizing some poor woman for failing to take exactly the right course of action against an abuser. Clinton is now running for the White House, and now has all the resources in the world–entirely because of her long-term partnership with Bill Clinton. And she’s talking about the man with a credible accusation of sexual assault against him as “First Dude.”

There is not enough space here to discuss the problems with the ‘having it all’ version of feminism. Careerism is not feminism.

But the problems with the GOP and the Democratic races have one hideous parallel–that signature lack of shame. No matter what mistakes they make, no matter what harm they have caused–no shame, no remorse, no contrition. No amends. And the political media establishment is playing along on both sides.

Firearms Regulation in the Bill of Rights

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Ridicule was much used in Britain when the American colonies agitated for liberty as British subjects. Not that ridicule was the only response to American petitions and American laws–many well-informed Britons sympathized with the Americans. But among the British responses in the 1760s and 1770s, some were penned by early Charles Krauthammers and George Wills.

Take for example the commentary below by a British writer and Member of Parliament named Soame Jenyns, in 1764. Jenyns’ is not a household name today, but having been born into an affluent family, Jenyns was elected to Parliament in 1742, and used his position as a base for authorship underwritten by his cohort, the nobility and gentry. (The cronyism resembled the more recent partnership between Simon & Schuster and The Washington Post, except with inherited titles.) He ridiculed Dr. Samuel Johnson, wrote poems and essays on public policy and dancing, and was among those calling for a national militia system for Britain. In 1764, Jenyns published a pamphlet titled Objections to the Taxation of our American Colonies–meaning a reply to American objections to the proposed Stamp Act–in which he tried to defend the supremacy of Parliament over American legislatures. The rhetorical tack was ridicule. When American subjects reminded their British friends and relatives of the liberty of an Englishman, Jenyn replied,

The libery [sic] of an Englishman, is a phrase of so various a signification, having within these few years been used as a synonymous term for blasphemy, bawdy, treason, libels, strong beer, and cyder, that I shall not here presume to define its meaning;

“What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

Jenyns went on to his core issue, which was revenue:

but I shall venture to assert what it cannot mean; that is, an exemption from taxes imposed by the authority of the Parliament of Great Britain; nor is there any charter, that ever pretended to grant such a privilege to any colony in America; and had they granted it, it could have had no force; their charters heing [sic] derived from the Crown, and no charter from the Crown can possibly supersede the right of the whole legislature:

Descending rapidly from witty to ponderous, Jenyns then ran to cover in the legalism of “corporations”:

their charters are undoubtedly no more than those of all corporations, which impower them to make byelaws, and raise duties for the purposes of their own police, for ever subject to the superior authority of parliament; and in some of their charters, the manner of exercising these powers is specified in these express words, “according to the course of other corporations in Great-Britain”: and therefore they can have no more pretence to plead an exemption from this parliamentary authority, than any other corporation in England.

Set aside the question whether Britons considered the charters of the American colonies “no more than” the charters of “any other corporation.” Americans themselves disagreed, nor did they envision their settlements as corporations. While some of the founders such as Ben Franklin raised occasional doubts about the protections provided by charters, more colonists tried to treat the charters of the New World as their version of Magna Carta, especially as the Revolutionary War approached.

Jenyns’ pamphlet–like that of Dr. Johnson in 1775, titled Taxation No Tyranny–failed to turn the tide of history. The Stamp Act was passed in 1765; it was repealed after furor in 1766; but the central claim of parliament’s supremacy over American law remained unresolved, to put it nicely, until the American Revolution. Even Aristophanes’ ridicule failed to recall the Greeks to their senses, in the Peloponnesian War; Jenyns’ could hardly have had much effect on Great Britain, even if he had supported the right side.

The references to Jenyns above come from material left over from my book, Firearms Regulation in the Bill of Rights. I would have liked to include Jenyns’ commentary, but there was no extra space to devote to British reactions to American rights. Most of my book concerns the rights themselves. Figures like Soame Jenyns went to the cutting-room floor. With luck, historians in a future century can afford to do the same with Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

Full disclosure: I am launching a campaign on Kickstarter to cover the costs of printing the book, today’s version of publishing ‘by subscription’ as they called it in the eighteenth century. Speaking of American rights, Trump’s supporters will hate this book. They don’t tend to take kindly to someone’s actually reading the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They don’t love it when someone actually knows English, either.

ScreenShotKickstarter

This blog entry concerns the book, and the book is not separate from current events. That said, some things are interesting purely as history. A few examples:

  1. Eighteenth century: A copy of Charles Pinckney‘s draft of a U.S. constitution may still exist
  2. An American snark against a royalist colonial governor became part of the constitutional language of American public documents
  3. Entire artillery units in 1789 killed fewer soldiers than a single weapon today
  4. For decades, the line between newspapers and public documents was rather thin (as were the newspapers), because the press was so largely devoted to communiqué, re-publishing circulars, declarations, and public letters. In this regard, today’s newspapers have returned to eighteenth-century form.
  5. Nineteenth century: A Dred Scott judge reworded the Second Amendment in a judicial decision, to give a pass to Confederate organizing
  6. Republican Party platforms in the new party supported the rights of former slaves, immigrants, and refugees, generating several later constitutional amendments

There were some bright lights. Firebrand printers up and down the East Coast clearly saw themselves as passing on the beacon light of freedom, rights and liberties, in the Revolutionary Era. (My thanks to Eric Burns–no relation–for his observations on the remarkable high literacy rate in early America.) After 1782, they saw themselves as providing guidance for civil business in the new nation.

Naturally, much American public discourse began with British sources–the documents forming British constitutional law over centuries; legal writing like Blackstone’s Commentaries; English dictionaries; and British newspapers and other periodicals. But the history of early printing in America points to what interested the American colonists. Americans were big on print. They believed strongly in preserving a written record–a belief attacked root and branch by the Stamp Act, which was about more than money. They believed in having statements of principles reduced to writing, to which they could refer self and others.

Back before the new continent was settled by Europeans, my discussion includes historical and linguistic research in early dictionaries and other sources, from Old English through Middle English and the Renaissance (early modern), in Chapter 2.

Going forward, Chapter 5 deals with the U.S. in the nineteenth century, when the language that had been used to unite the new nation, the century before, was used to polarize it.

The project incorporates archival research into primary sources and entailed consulting hundreds of source documents including early newspapers and early dictionaries, some in the Library of Congress collections and the National Archives; some in other helpful databases like the Online Library of Liberty. Shelf-miles of rich historical material are now accessible on site and remotely, but no other book has been written on this subject, with the same parameters (sources, range), using modern corpus methods to explore the large text repositories.

The book is interdisciplinary, or course. In spite of some specialized language (at times), it is written for educated lay readers as well as for historians and legal scholars; for constitutional scholars, jurists, and a general audience.

–And speaking of leftover material: I have not yet written the Afterword. I have to decide whether to include a recent comment by a federal judge, that the word “arms” is plural. (Does he cut a piece of paper with one scissor? Have his friends asked him whether he puts on his pant one leg at a time? The word can be plural, of course; it is also singular.)

One statement I do plan to put in the Afterword is something along the line of ‘This entire book is a series of footnotes to John Phillip Reid’s Constitutional History of the American Revolution.

 

More GOP debates, too few glimpses of decency

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Public discourse in the 21st-century USA sometimes forgets clear fundamentals, and the problem is most acute in the Republican Party sector.

Yesterday I wrote that I would post a follow-up after watching last night’s GOP lineup on Fox Business News, to see whether any of the candidates would refer to mass deportation. Discussion of the debate is below, at bottom (scroll down).

Meanwhile, forgetfulness has clearly set in among people who oppose any kind of “regulation.” These people are inwardly divided. Some of them want to deport children whose parents were not born in this country, for example, forgetting that there would have to be careful fact-checking before anyone’s parents could be proven not born in this country.

Deportation: more regulation, more government, more cost, more taxes

Note to other writers and journalists: not to join in media-bashing, but why doesn’t some moderator or television reporter or interviewer ask the obvious question, when one of these guys comes out whaling on deporting children of “illegals”? Question:

How would you know that their parents are ‘illegal’?

Follow-up questions:

Who would determine that the parents of a five-year-old are undocumented?

Who, if anyone, would check?

Who would verify?

As we live now, under the Fourteenth Amendment, a person born in the United States is an American citizen. Under the Fourteenth Amendment, who my parents are, or were, is my business. Who your parents are, or were, is your business. (This is America.) Expunging the Fourteenth Amendment would make it anyone’s business, or someone’s business. Exactly whose has not been designated. Donald Trump never mentions who would handle a mass shipping-out, but the facts would have to be checked by duly constituted authorities. The authorities in turn would have to be monitored–Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? There would have to be oversight. There would have to be a route for appeal, in cases tainted by (inevitable) error or corruption. There would have to be meticulous records, documentation (this being the concept, after all), preferably supported by video recording. All of this (nightmarish) process would involve regulations.

Not that deportation is the only work site requiring regulation. (I cannot believe I’m having to write these words.) Fuel manufacturing, handling, and storage require oversight, monitoring, and concern for public health and public safety; and not every human being can or will provide these prompted by conscience alone. In other words, they have to be regulated. So do the manufacturing and handling of all other explosives. The same goes for airplane maintenance; airplane parts should not fall off in the air. Fruit juice fed to babies should not contain pesticides and herbicides. Meat and bread should not catch mold and worse from grocery shelves. Children’s toys, cribs, and car seats should not be accidents waiting to happen, causing the deaths of an actuarially predictable number of toddlers each year. The contents of prescription medications should be what the label says they are, in the proportions specified and prescribed. All of the foregoing are sites where regulation is necessary. So are manufacturing and storage for fertilizer and the many other household and construction products, whether or not created for demolitions, that turn out to be flammable and/or explosive.

Here and there

Fortunately, there are good-faith ways to reduce the need for regulation. Organic farming and local buying alleviate problems connected to toxins, transportation and freight. If any of the current presidential candidates are actually interested in reducing ‘excessive regulation’, they could consider helping the environment. The need for regulations could be made less urgent, and big areas to build improvement include food and water, travel and shipping, and health and medical care. There will be less difficulty regulating toxins and other hazards, when they are not disseminated into the environment in the first place.

(Side note: Look for Hillary Clinton using these or similar words in the next couple of days. Her campaign people are constantly on the lookout for lines she can appropriate. As a voter, and a viewer, I do wish she would stop trying to sound like Elizabeth Warren. My own sense is that if she were going to ‘fight for you’, she would have done it years ago.)

Back to illegal immigration–the undocumented immigration so vilified is a perfect example of lack of forethought, lack of clear thinking, and lack of rational prevention beforehand creating back-end problems. The hysterical eagerness to deport millions of people forgets that such a process would require the ‘regulation’ vilified as much as immigration itself. More importantly, the anti-immigrant hysteria also forgets why this immigration happens in the first place.

The immigration stems from the wish for survival. People risk their lives, and many of them lose their lives, to slip across our border hoping to be able to make a living, hoping for freedom from poverty and worse, hoping to move farther away from imminent danger and the threat of starvation as well as from local dictators. Some of the world’s poor people put themselves into the hands of human traffickers, sometimes getting scammed and virtually always in danger en route. They do so to survive. Heartbreakingly, survival in Latin America is jeopardized by the flood of weapons shipped south of the border, weapons sourced overwhelmingly from the United States. But American citizens have been prevented from taking rational measures to stem the flow of weapons south–largely by the NRA and its bought-and-paid-for operative, the GOP; partly by self-advancing Dems like Rahm Emanuel and the Clintons. Yet the most vehement opponents of gun control also tend to be the most vehement critics–to put it nicely–of illegal immigration.

This failure of logic in the public discourse is not entirely accident. It is intensified by deliberate assaults on logic, information and common sense mounted daily by lobbyists. The loosely defined but well funded gun lobby pressures elected officials; pressures media outlets; pressures schools, colleges and law schools. Scientists and researchers are under pressure. So are scholarly journals. The assault has been blatant, intense and profitable for the last thirty years.

So, back to last night’s debates–in which shootings and weapons were mostly not mentioned, while “regulation” and “free market” were much in the air. Anti-“regulation.” Pro-“free market.”

One quick comment on that “free market” meme. As I wrote years ago–in a small community newspaper that has since been sold out, speaking of markets–“free market” is an oxymoron. If it were free, there wouldn’t be money in it. In economics language, constraints are part of the market. One person or entity has something; another person or entity wants it. Party A conveys same to Party B, for a consideration. Something of value changes hands in each direction.

But the big question going into last night’s debate, for me, was whether any of the candidates would refer to mass deportation, and if so, who, and in what way.

The good news: a couple of prominent Republican candidates did indeed mention mass deportation, and mentioned it to oppose it–forcefully.

The bad news: I am so reduced by the level of discourse in general that I for one am pathetically grateful when any GOPer says something decent in public.

Let’s start with the good news. In the primetime debate, when Donald Trump reiterated his ‘plan’ to ship out illegal immigrants, even Trump softened the position somewhat with a throw-away “They can come back.” Neither other candidates nor moderators pursued that softly spoken “come back” line of thought, but he said it.

Better yet, Ohio Governor John Kasich blasted the idea of mass deportation. In a forceful and eloquent statement, Kasich characterized shipping out 11 million people as “silly.” High time someone said it. Following up, Jeb Bush said that “to send them back” is simply impossible. He also pointed out that the plan is not who we are, not in line with American values. Again, high time someone said it. Bush also pointed to the inartful politics–saying that the Clinton campaign was watching this and doing “high-fives.”

(From my living room: I watched the debates with my son and his girlfriend. We all noticed that the GOP mentioned Clinton exclusively. They’re salivating at the chance to run against her, and with good reason.)

Ironically, given the destructive rhetoric Trump has unleashed on the public, at this point I think it’s possible that Trump is better than most of his supporters. Trump is a salesman. He knows his market components. He’s playing to them. That’s why he said “I like this guy,” in a room with the man who accused President Obama of being Muslim rather than Christian, etc. Trump is a salesman. I have no experience in his field myself, but as I understand it, if you as a salesman are in a room full of people, making your pitch, that’s what you focus on. If you catch sight of some guy wearing a white costume with a white pointed hood, you don’t seize that moment to condemn the Klan; you sing out, “Hey, Jim, nice toga.”

But that’s the moment when you’ve gone too far. Trump has unleashed something in the Republican Party that its leaders have long known about–none better–but have long sought to deny and to conceal. I am by no means sure that a President Trump actually would deport millions of people, as declared by my correspondent yesterday. But in the interim, his campaign has exposed a nasty wish to do so, among the electorate courted by the GOP.

 

More later.

Message from a typical Donald Trump supporter

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Here is today’s moronic email message. Found in my inbox this morning:

[text follows]

“Here is my insight.
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

I suggest you continue your education till you learn the meaning of all the words in this founding document. I’ll translate
for you to a more modern version of this Amendment.

Since a well regulated militia is necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms
SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED.

If you are still having cognition problems after reading this, God help you when you are under threat from any enemy of
the people whether foreign or domestic.

If you are not a real American, meaning born here to citizens, English speaking as a first language, please cease and
desist begging and using resources not intended for you and return to your nation of origin, in as timely a manner as
possible. Our next President, Donald J. Trump will remove you and it’s always better to remove yourself than be removed.

Thank you for the opportunity to offer you my insight.”

I did write back to this person. –Briefly rebutted any suggestion about my ancestry, reminded her/him that my doctorate was in English. Forbore to mention that I have just spent close to three years working on my book, Firearms Regulation in the Bill of Rights.

(Obvious plug: find at Kickstarterhere: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/560423647/firearms-regulation-in-the-bill-of-rights)

I also pointed out that persons of courage and integrity usually put their names to what they say.

Funny how these absolute-gun-rights extremists always seem to think they’re being bravely defiant when they’re hiding behind a username. They probably think they’re going up and giving Joe Stalin a kick in the shin.

In any case, while I doubt that this writer is a careful analyst of language (English or any other), I am confident that indeed this is the vision that Trump voters embrace–a nation in which any of us could be instantly deported, if we happened to be unable to pinpoint our parents or to produce our birth certificate.

In Milwaukee tonight. A nation bates its breath.

More tomorrow, AFTER tonight’s presentation of the GOP lineup. Must admit, though, I may be watching it with the beer that made Mel Famee Walk Us.

Live-blogging election night, November 3, 2015

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An interesting set of elections in off-year (anti-democratic) states. Some intermittent live-blogging–

Final results in the rest of the special elections must wait until tomorrow or later. Washington state has two house districts up, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts one, Missouri three, Michigan and Texas one. Georgia has a house and a senate seat up; Maine has two house districts. Of these 13 contests, four are for seats held by the GOP (in Washington, Missouri and Georgia). It will be interesting to see whether there’s any shift. At this point, Virginia’s house seats seem to be staying put, party-wise. Only the [34th] seems to be switching, [correction] and it’s a very close race.

Bevin took the Kentucky governorship. He should be good for headlines.

Now Bevin’s odd candidacy looks like enough to get him the governorship in Kentucky. He’s still solidly ahead of Conway with most precincts in. On the other hand, Grimes is still winning for Sec of State and Beshear for Attorney General. Not a statewide sweep for either party.

In Virginia, a few results are mildly interesting–not in the state senate elections, hyped as the event on which Gov. McAuliffe’s legacy depends, but in some state house elections. At this writing, Democrats may flip a couple of state house districts from red to blue–the 12th and 34th. They might have accomplished more, in the year of Trump, if they had bothered to field candidates in more districts. Out of 21 contested seats currently held by the GOP, they might take 2 or 3 or 4–doesn’t sound like much, but if they had contested twice as many, that would up their percentage in the legislature. Too many VA districts have Republican legislators running unopposed, and the effects may seep into nearby districts.

An hour after polls close in Kentucky, Democrats still ahead in several statewide races, but Bevin ahead of Conway for governor. Polls now closed in Virginia for state house and senate, and in Georgia for special election for House 122. Too early to tell. Two special elections in Maine as well. Results not in.

Half an hour after polls close, Democrats still up on the whole in Kentucky. My question for the whole evening, in most states voting, is the extent of the Trump effect. In how many state and local elections will GOPers bite the dust?

The polls closed first in Kentucky. First up: In the Kentucky gubernatorial election, Democrat Jack Conway is ahead so far. (Link is to the Kentucky Board of Elections.) Dems are also ahead in several other statewide races, though it’s early yet.

 

Donald Trump, Staying Puft

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Fun’s fun. Admittedly, it has been fun to watch Donald Trump ruining the field for sixteen or more other Republican candidates for the White House. He’s like a human-shaped cue ball. Knocked into the rack, he has sent minor and major candidates careening in all directions, colliding with each other and banging up against sides of the green baize table. All their careful game plans gone awry. Their carefully tailored appeals overwhelmed. Their thoughtfully crafted pathways to attention in a crowded field, demolished by the Trump campaign, if you call it that. More oafish and media-baiting than Chris Christie, more openly immigrant-baiting than Scott Walker, more plugged in than Jeb Bush, more ‘centrist’ or unpredictable on some individual issues than any governor, more woman-baiting than any other candidate–Trump has exploded the usual paths to celebrity for other Republicans. He’s stomping on their dog whistles. Red meat? Next to Trump, they look more like pink SweeTARTS®.

Here they are

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of people. As said, the spectacle is fun to watch. Serves them right.

Still, given that some GOP voters out there clearly hope that Trump will swing down in a golden chariot from his Tower, and scoop them up from whatever financial doldrums they’re in, it is only fair to point out that deep questions about Trump’s own finances remain open.

Is Trump distracting attention from something?

A few facts are clear from Donald Trump’s 92-page financial disclosure filing to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). One is that Trump is carrying a heavy debt load. He owes four creditors “Over $50,000,000” apiece; his loans total $215 million-plus to $400 million-plus; and at least $25 million to $125 million in loans come due in the next four years. Trump, who has declared bankruptcy four times, has taken on more than $130 million of the current debt since 2012. Trump has claimed a huge income on air, and also claims to be willing to spend $1 billion on the 2016 election, if that’s what it takes to win, but the debt load is still sizeable from any perspective.

The FEC filing also shows that few people who are not Trump himself employ Trump, or pay him for work. His occupational income seems to be largely speaker fees or fees for managing properties now partly owned by others; his pay for managing his own companies is not shown. The financial disclosure form also shows that Trump has sold or liquidated substantial assets in value stocks and in bank funds from the beginning of 2014 to now, the period covered by the filing.

It is not clear whether the assets were sold to finance Trump’s White House bid or for other reasons. The asset sales generated handsome capital gains; his own more volatile companies and properties–the corporations and LLCs with Trump as officer or member, and the famous hotels and resorts, etc., bearing the Trump name–were not sold. The FEC filing also does not clarify Trump’s net worth. Not a balance sheet or a budget, it does not clarify the proportion of income to outlay. Trump’s campaign and press office, contacted by phone and email on August 13, have not responded to questions.

Trump floated one of his preliminary statements about running for president back in 2011, with sources quoted by Politico putting out word that he was worth $7 billion. The net worth figure was disputed even at the time: “The eye-popping figure is far higher than the $2.7 billion that Forbes Magazine valued his net worth to be last month.” Estimates of Mr. Trump’s net worth have fluctuated, with Bloomberg News and the New York Times among others expressing skepticism when Trump upped his claim to $10 billion. Trump’s own estimates have also fluctuated, although Trump’s much-quoted emphasis on his wealth–“I’m really rich“–remains a constant. Since launching his campaign on June 16, Trump has reiterated the brash statements about his wealth, seemingly at every opportunity.

One statement not being recycled, however, is the unnamed 2011 sources’ claim that Trump’s financial disclosures would indicate “more than $250 million of cash, and very little debt. He is very, very liquid.”

The man at the moment

As of 2015, in actuality, Trump’s financial disclosure filing shows massive debt and undefined liquidity. “Part 8: Liabilities” (page 47) lists fifteen debts. Two are Merrill Lynch mortgages totaling less than $1 million. The remaining thirteen are gargantuan. Trump’s filing shows “Over $50,000,000” owed to Ladder Capital Finance LLC; Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas; Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC; and Capital One, although the Capital One deal has an asterisk showing it refinanced with Ladder Capital. Trump also owes another $25 million to $50 million to Deutsche Bank, due in 2024, and $5 million to $25 million to Deutsche Bank due in 2015. He also owes $5 million to $25 million apiece to seven other creditors including Bank of New York Mellon, Ladder Capital, Royal Bank America, and Amboy Bank. Two of the loans come due in 2015, one in 2016, two in 2017, and three in 2019. Setting up a blind trust for a Trump term in the White House would be a challenge.

One question put to the Trump campaign is whether the debts are in any way problematic. Does Trump expect to pay them all? If so, will he resolve them before entering the White House, should he win? If not, how would they be handled?

Meanwhile, one of Trump’s “Over $50,000,000” notes comes from an entity owned 100% by Trump himself (page A3), called Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC. Chicago Unit Acquisition generates income (page 13)  listed as “None (or less than $201).” This Trump-to-Trump loan is Trump’s highest-interest big loan, at Prime + 5%. No deadline year is given; the “Term” column is filled in with the phrase “Springing loan.”

Other questions put to Trump concern this springing loan. Not an MBA myself, and not being Barry Ritholtz, I had to look up the phrase. A “springing guaranty” is a guarantee that takes effect when something bad happens, like bankruptcy. (This arrangement is also called a “bad-boy guarantee.”) According to the asset wizards at Andrews Kurth, in a springing guarantee, “the borrower is required to fund an escrow account serving as additional security for the loan.” This way, if something bad happens–“say a key tenant decides not to renew its lease”–“when funded, the borrower has more skin in the game to offset drops in value.”

One way to keep the feds off your back? Run for the White House. What better position could there be, from which to argue that an investigation is ‘politically motivated’? Ask Hillary Clinton.

On page 13, Trump lists the value of “Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC” at $1,001 to $15,000 (thousands, not millions). So he owes the LLC at least 3,333 times its value, or he owes it to himself, or to a tiny LLC owned wholly by himself, to fund an escrow account, in case things go wrong? If he owes it to himself, is this enforceable? Will the loan be paid off? Does it have to be? If listed as a “springing loan,” is the escrow requirement enforceable, when the creditor is owned by the debtor? Whatever this dizzying arrangement means, the FEC filing makes clear that Trump owes somewhere in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars. Depending on how much over $50 million the phrase “Over $50,000,000” means, he could owe much more. Trump himself has spoken on the campaign trail in favor of transparency. It would be nice to have the debts elucidated. Trump has repeatedly said that candidate Jeb Bush is a “puppet” for donors who give him millions. Point taken, but what about a candidate who has been lent millions, or hundreds of millions?

As listed in “Part 6: Other Assets and Income,” substantial assets have been liquidated or sold since the beginning of 2014, in stocks and funds. These sales did not include the 501 corporations or LLCs for which Trump lists himself as director, president or member. The sales were of Baron funds, Paulson funds, and DJIA major companies. Recently, Trump has sold assets held in twelve of eighteen bank funds (page 35). Amounts are given in ranges, and some capital gains are combined with interest and dividends, but the sales total falls somewhere between $2 million and $15 million. The filing does not make clear how much of the fund assets remain.

Trump has also sold company stocks from several brokerage accounts, although he still owns stock in at least 190 companies. Oppenheimer and one Deutsche Asset brokerage account seem to be the fullest; a different Deutsche Asset account and a JP Morgan account seem to be the emptiest. Many remaining company stocks are listed as producing no income, “or less than $201.” Meanwhile, the JP Morgan brokerage account (pages 44-45) shows stock in forty companies from Amazon to Yahoo effectively cleaned out, their remaining value listed as “None (or less than $1,001).” Stocks sold include several on the current Dow Jones Industrial Average–Apple, Boeing, Caterpillar, Exxon Mobil, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble. The “Over $5,000,000” realized from Bank of America stock appears to be Trump’s best sale or liquidation. Nobody’s wrong all the time. B of A is also one of the largest donors to Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.

If these sales were connected to the White House campaign, there may be more sales, depending on how much the campaign costs in coming months. (“$1 billion”?) Again, the ranges given on the standardized form do not show much remains viable for further sales and assets liquidation.

Pageant winners

In the past, Trump’s flamboyant business career involved buying the Miss USA and Miss Universe beauty pageants, which deflected media attention from his real estate troubles. He is now putting himself on a pageant stage. How serious the run is remains to be seen, but the effectiveness of the deflection is undeniable. Trump has brashly and repeatedly emphasized how much he has given to politicians–“almost everybody on this stage,” he said famously (and falsely) in the August 6 GOP debate. The emphasis on his giving deflects attention from how little he has received, usually a benchmark of candidate success. (“I don’t care”; “I don’t want their money.”) The campaign website has a button for donating, of course. Data from the Center for Responsive Politics show donors to Donald Trump to be few and far between. Similarly, Trump’s brash emphasis on his own companies deflects attention from the fact that he is not hired as CEO and chair of other people’s large companies. His brash emphasis on his wealth–in general terms–deflects attention from his bankruptcies, his volatility, and the lack of specific disclosures on income and net worth.

Ironically, this is the one GOP campaign getting high marks for truthfulness. Donald Trump, who with one of his lawyers concocted the line that a woman attorney wanted to breast-pump in front of him, is the only Republican getting credit for telling it like it is. Media commentators are paralleling Trump to Bernie Sanders–both ‘outsiders’. Actually, Trump is an insider, as his financial disclosures make clear.

The man himself

A better parallel would be to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (with thanks, or apologies, to the late Harold Ramis et al. at Ghostbusters). So long as he can stay on his feet and bully, he can roll through the avenues of New York. Impervious to loss, shame, or bankruptcy, buoyed up (in GOP opinion polls) by pestilential behavior, he stays afloat.

 

Next up:   Hillary Clinton’s emails

Trump, birtherism and the GOP race 2012: The more things don’t change, part 3

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The more things don’t change, part 3

2012 from primary to election

 

The dynamic that shaped the Republican primaries is now shaping the Republican campaign for the White House: Future nominee Mitt Romney is continuing the Rick Santorum strategy of going for the leftovers.

 

Romney supporters in Tennessee

As we know, the GOP primary season from summer 2011 to May 2012 shaped up as a contest dividing the voters from more populous counties, in general, from the voters of less populous counties. The GOP primary race was never between ‘moderate’ and ‘conservative’; all the candidates except in some ways Ron Paul support the same rapacious policies. The primary race was between Romney, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul on one hand and Santorum on the other, the fault line being metropolitan/suburban appeal versus rural appeal. Santorum took most of the less populated counties, and he took states where rural and small-town counties and congressional districts outweigh metropolitan areas and suburbs. In this metric, as previously written, Santorum had the advantage of a divided field among his opponents and the leftovers to himself. Romney, Gingrich and Paul divided the more populated areas.

 

Romney with Nikki Haley

Now Romney has the Republican electorate all to himself—an electorate dependent on voters in regions where population density is not high, where communications are not good, where newspapers are not strong, and where per capita wealth and computer literacy are most lopsidedly divided between highest and lowest. Meth lab country. ‘Safe states’? The only respectably safe state for Romney is Utah. Romney is inordinately dependent on states that gave Rick Santorum victories—Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee—or that would have boosted Santorum if he could have lasted longer or if he had gotten his electors/delegates on the ballot—Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Texas, West Virginia.

Of the states just mentioned, Texas comes closest to being Romney territory. (Texas also comes closest of these to being Obama territory, but so far the Dems have successfully kept that secret.) As written last week, however, out-of-the-race candidates Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and others pulled several thousand votes in the May 29 Texas primary won by Romney. So did “Uncommitted,” on the GOP ballot: More than sixty thousand voters turned out, in an uncontested Republican primary, to vote NOT for their party’s overwhelming favorite and frontrunner, rejecting even the cachet of putting the nominee over the top.

 

Trump

Enter Donald Trump, with his version of support for Romney.

Trump’s support is hardly intended for ‘swing states’. There is no evidence that Trump has wide popular appeal in Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin. Even in Missouri he looks iffy. Trump’s ‘birth certificate’ ploy is not part of a grand strategy to soften antagonism to Romney among people who work in the automobile industry in Michigan or even in Indiana. No, Trump’s support, his ghastly pitch for birtherism, is a straight-out invitation to the most ignorant counties in the U.S. Grabbing headlines big enough to reach people who don’t read and who distrust the ‘liberal media’ so intensely they refuse to read newspapers or to watch any television news except Fox, Trump is going openly for the voters in the 91 of 95 Tennessee counties won by Santorum.

 

The brighter side of factories closing

Regrettably, automobile workers in Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina are seldom allowed to know about Romney’s policy positions. If you want another trillion-dollar war and another trillion-dollar tax cut for speculators and hedge fund managers, Romney’s your man—video clips widely available. But the dearth of newspapers in places that need them most seals up policy discussion as though it were national secrets. The result is ongoing harm to U.S. manufacturing and to working families.

 

Back to the birthers—

Theoretically Romney came out of the Texas primary as undisputed top dog and all-round GOP winner, safely in a position to train effective opposition against the Democrats and the president for the next five months. No more press hype boosting minor opponents like Tim Pawlenty (see here and here and here). No more unappealing candidates like Bachmann, Gingrich and Santorum trying ham-handedly to swipe at Romney. Right? No more para-candidates like Rudy Giuliani, Sarah Palin and Trump to distract attention from the nominee. Uh. No more specter-candidates like Chris Christie and Jeb Bush as embarrassing reminders of how many GOPers hoped for more latecomers in the race—at least, not yet this week. No more speculation in the political press as to whether Romney will be downed by a much-hyped ‘Christian right’, Tea Party, and ‘rebellion’ in the ranks. Hm.

Theoretically Romney has massive advantages.

  • He was a primary candidate who did not flunk the one-look-from-across-a-crowded-room test.
  • He presumably has political infrastructure intact at the state level, remaining from a front-loaded primary schedule, copious early money and longstanding organization.
  • He will have unprecedented funding from everyone from Karl Rove to the Koch brothers and the Chamber of Commerce in between.
  • His campaign has five months to benefit from expensive and misleading television ads.
  • He can count on intransigence from Republicans in Congress, to prevent any legislation that would improve the condition of ordinary Americans.

And yet, and yet—he still faces, as previously written, the prospect of some voter sectors not finding a ‘top-tier’ candidate ugly enough for their tastes, and wishing they could have replaced him with someone more transparently unsavory. These are the Manchurian-candidate voters to whom Trump appeals.

If an obvious falsehood triumphs anywhere, it is most liable to triumph in wide-open stretches where mass communications are poor, where former farms produce hay and timber if they’re lucky, and where meth labs start looking like a good way to make a living. Even the most declined neighborhoods in the large industrial states do not tend to be hotbeds of birtherism. Susceptibility to Romney’s claim of being an effective manager is still found more in suburbs than in cities.

Perhaps by now we should all be used to wild claims, and used to the political press reporting wild claims as though they were substantive. Look at the way quintessential Washington insiders and career politicians typically claim to be outsiders, a new start, a fresh face—like Herman Cain, and Santorum with his lobbying career, and Gingrich with his contract with Freddie Mac. To some extent the discrepancies are aired by the national political press, though not as much as they should be and too often as though they are equally endemic to both sides in a national election.

Worse, such factual reporting as survives the filter of the national political press is jeopardized by continuous undertow from the business press. All the major GOP candidates, regardless of stylistic differences, are essentially corporate mouthpieces. Personality differences notwithstanding, the core fiscal trickle-down policy remains intact: it’s rich-get-richer. It’s always there.

They don’t put it that way, of course. The obfuscation is protected by the business press—the same commentators, analysts and journalists who failed to notice the impending mortgage-derivatives crisis and who almost unanimously supported ‘deregulation’. Still do.

It’s the same gang that keeps giving us Orwellianisms about ‘austerity’, ‘debt’, ‘energy’ and ‘jobs’ while doing everything it can to siphon off value from the many and convey it to the few, and a highly unqualified few at that.

Once again, a recent example—U.S. Treasury bills last week sold at a remarkably low rate of interest, yield, meaning that 1) U.S. Treasuries are regarded as rock-solid investment, and 2) their sale saddles the Treasury with little to no debt. But in all the hoopla about ‘the budget’, when was the last time you heard a GOPer in Congress mention the fiscal benefit of issuing U.S. Treasuries at a lower interest rate, to pay off bonds with a higher rate?

Once again, there is an analogy here to refinancing your mortgage. Most people understand the value of refinancing their mortgages if they can get a significantly lower interest rate. It would be illuminating to know which members of Congress have refinanced their houses, just to check on which members understand the same idea. Unfortunately, that information is not publicly available. Residences of congress members are exempted from financial disclosure.

Publicly, in any case, they all go the pro-corporate line of harping on ‘debt’ and ‘deficit’ anyway—except when it comes to discussing corporate debt.

 

More on Trump’s version of birtherism later