Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

It’s All About “The Other”

Give credit to Donald Trump for one (unintended) honesty: his own racism has made it acceptable for his supporters to express  bigotries that “politically correct” social norms had suppressed. MAGA and Trump have made it impossible to think–as I naively did when we elected Obama–that America was emerging from our original sin, the fear and hatred of “the other.”

Blatantly racist rhetoric has re-emerged with a vengeance. A recent New York Times article quoted white nationalist Nick Fuentes, a prominent Right influencer, explaining that the war on immigrants was a lost cause, that the “Country’s over. We’re already a non-white country.”

For a substantial portion of the American population–and let’s be honest here, it is the portion that still supports Trump–“real” America is a straight, male-dominated White “Christian” nation. Equal status for women, gays ,non-Christians and/or people of color is unthinkable in the country of their fond imagination.

It really is impossible to ignore the virulent racism at the heart of the MAGA movement. In states like Florida and Texas, where governing bodies are controlled by today’s MAGA GOP, the effort to root out “woke” instruction at state universities has accompanied the widespread attacks on that hated DEI. Another Times article has reported on a recent effort at Texas Tech, where officials are using A.I. to identify books and other materials that include topics like sexual orientation and gender identity. The former state lawmaker who heads the five-university system, is spearheading the effort to eliminate what he has called “quite a bit of garbage in curriculum” and has called diversity concerns “leftist loyalty oaths.” (He also says that universities should focus “on degrees that employers want,” equating education with job training.)

ABC news recently reported that Trump wants to remove the tax exemption for private colleges with policies the administration believes are DEI. That proposal would strip private schools and colleges of their tax-exempt status if they provide any sort of targeted help to students based on their race.

The evidence that racism and other assorted bigotries are the heart and soul of MAGA and the Trump administration is too long-lasting and too widespread to ignore.

There was the 2017 travel ban on people from several majority-Muslim countries. The 2018 family separation policy focused disproportionately on Latino migrant families. Trump’s trademark, childish insults include his characterization of Haiti and African nations as “shithole” countries, and his discontinuation of protected status for Haitian immigrants in a shocking contrast to his invitation to and favorable treatment of White South Africans.

A jaunt down memory lane adds to the evidence.

Who can forget his response to the white nationalist riot in Charlottesville, where participants carrying tiki torches chanted “Jews shall not replace us.” Trump insisted that there were “very fine people on both sides.”

How can we miss the racism prompting his persistent attacks on “the Squad,” four Democratic congresswomen of color, especially his telling them to “go back’ to their own countries? Three of the four were born in the U.S. and the other is a naturalized citizen. (Evidently, in Trumpworld, only White folks are really citizens.) 

Trump rose to political prominence with his racist “birtherism” attacks on Obama. He accused a Judge who ruled against Trump University of bias because of his Mexican heritage. He renamed COVID a “Chinese Virus”–an accusation that led to a surge in anti-Asian harassment.  

His anti-immigration campaign has been a constant effort to dehumanize immigrants of color: he has called immigrants vermin and animals, referred to them as aliens and “people with bad genes.” His rhetoric is increasingly compared to  language employed by Hitler in the run-up to the Holocaust.

And perhaps worst–and most telling–of all, the Trump administration has unleashed a lawless assault by masked ICE goons  disproportionately targeting Black and Latino communities, and–despite insisting that they were focusing on “the worst of the worst”– arresting and deporting thousands of immigrants with absolutely no criminal record.

There’s more, of course. Every day it becomes clearer that racism–by which I mean hatred of anyone considered “other”– is the very core of this administration and the MAGA movement. Those of us who continue to wonder how any sane American can support this monumentally corrupt (and increasingly insane) President and his administration of incompetents, grifters and cranks are overlooking the obvious.

My youngest son said it best, after the 2016 election. There are only two kinds of Trump supporters: those for whom the racism resonates, and those for whom it isn’t disqualifying.

 
 
 
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Death (Of Democracy) And Taxes

A few weeks ago, Paul Krugman devoted two of his Substack letters to the growth of America’s kakistocracy–and the role played by tax policy in facilitating that growth. Both letters are worth reading in their entirety, and I encourage you to do so.

In the first letter, Oligarchy and the Great Evasion, Krugman reminded readers that Al Capone–who effectively ruled a corrupted Chicago at the time–was ultimately taken down for tax evasion. He then pointed out that, today, a similar result would be unlikely, thanks to an Internal Revenue Service that has been defunded “in large part because the modern Republican Party is effectively pro-tax-evasion” and lacks the resources to go after tax cheats. (And even in situations where charges might be brought, today’s tax evaders might “escape justice by simply buying a sufficiently large quantity of Trump family crypto.”)

Krugman’s essential point is that the modern American oligarchy is not the result of technological or market forces, but of very deliberate policy choices–and that those enacting those policies have been engaged in a decades-long dismantling of the system of progressive taxation that had finally put an end to the Gilded Age.

Most sentient taxpayers know that there has been a significant reduction in effective tax rates. The top tax bracket on individual incomes in the 1950’s was more than 90%–it’s 37% now. Large corporations paid up to 52% on profits–that’s now  21%. But that isn’t even the worst of it.

However, beyond these reductions in statutory rates, tax avoidance and tax evasion have grown significantly. “Avoidance” and “evasion” may sound like synonyms, but they are not: avoidance involves exploiting loopholes in the tax code in ways that are legal, even if they shouldn’t be, while evasion involves breaking the law.

And tax evasion is now a very big concern. Reasonable estimates of the “tax gap” — taxes that individuals and businesses are legally obliged to pay, but don’t — are startlingly large — $600 billion a year or more – approximately 40% of the current budget deficit. Furthermore, much of this tax gap is surely accounted for by tax evasion by high-income Americans. So tax evasion is a significant contributor to both the rise of American oligarchy and the high federal debt.

Krugman ties the reduction in government efforts to make the wealthy pay the taxes they owe–both by reducing rates and foregoing enforcement– to the rise of an American oligarchy.

The letter serving as a follow-up to that discussion, From Kakistocracy to Cheatistocracy, focused not just on Kakistocracy (or government by the worst and most incompetent) but on this administration’s blatant corruption. In this letter, he traced the dominance of the tiny elite that dominates today’s U.S. to tax policies that have virtually eliminated the progressive taxation that used to limit the growth of enormous fortunes. And as he points out, “as the tax barriers to accumulation of excessive wealth went away, excessive wealth began to concentrate.”

One factor in all of that is the rise of simply not paying taxes that you’re supposed to pay. A lot of it is reductionist statutory tax rates. We tax corporate profits at a far lower rate than we did In the 1950s, we tax top incomes at a much, much lower rate than we did in the 1950s. But what’s also true is that we simply allow people to get away with not paying taxes to an enormous extent, to almost surely a much greater extent than used to be the case.

Krugman calculates that just the money owed but not collected has been a major contributing factor to the accumulation of today’s vast fortunes.

The amount that we lose to tax evasion is something like the entire budget of Medicaid. It’s something like six times what we spend on food stamps. It’s something like 15 times the amount of money that Elon Musk saved by destroying USAID and killing millions of people in Africa. And yet it has been allowed to flourish.

Failure to enforce even our very modest tax rates rather obviously benefits very rich people. As Krugman says, it’s simply more difficult–and more expensive– to “track down and audit someone who has multiple businesses, some of which are dummy businesses, some of which may be real, but nonetheless are conduits through which money can move.” Only the very wealthy can maintain offshore accounts to hide income. Republicans in Congress have purposely kneecapped the IRS capacity to audit.

We sure aren’t making America Great Again– but we are making America safe for tax cheats.

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Wow…Just Wow

I continue to be astonished by the brazenness with which the Trump administration displays its racism, lawlessness and corruption.

The attacks on diversity and inclusion have accelerated; a recent effort would deny a tax exemption to private universities that take race or ethnicity into account in any way. The administration continually insists that any attempts to ameliorate–or even acknowledge–the effects of decades of discrimination are themselves discriminatory. Its daily war against civic equality extends to its efforts to stigmatize Muslims and people of color.

Examples of financial corruption are too numerous to list: pardons issued in return for contributions, no-bid contracts to cronies, the continued bilking of Trump’s MAGA believers with crypto and other scams…

And then there’s the jaw-dropping, unbelievable lawlessness. It’s not just the endless streams of ridiculous, facially unconstitutional Executive Orders. The administration increasingly–and overtly–ignores court orders. In several cases, it has deported people the courts have explicitly protected from deportation. The recent program developed by the Postal Service to rig the upcoming midterms–disclosed by a whistleblower–was drafted in brazen defiance of a court’s explicit ruling. Trump has given a metaphorical finger to the rules governing changes to the White House, razing the historic East Wing and constructing his monstrous, gaudy ballroom without bothering to try obtaining the necessary permits, and he has recently announced that he will begin construction on his gargantuan arch in the next couple of weeks, ignoring the pesky rules and procedures that are required before any such work can legally start.

I guess rules are for the “little people.”

Now, the Department of Justice has–as the saying goes–taken it up a notch. Under the odious and corrupt Todd Blanche, the DOJ has moved to protect an ICE agent from criminal accountability. Talking Point Memo has the story.

The Trump DOJ has fired the federal prosecutor who sought to bring civil rights charges against an ICE agent for the January shooting of a man through the closed door of his home during Operation Metro Surge.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Evans of Minneapolis was fired — and is now himself reportedly under criminal investigation — after ProPublica published emails he sent to lawyers for the victims apologizing that his efforts to bring more serious civil rights charges against ICE agent Christian Castro were being blocked by Main Justice.

“This is being directed by the Main Justice and the US Attorney,” Evans wrote in the email. “I objected in the strongest possible terms and fought it as hard as I could. It wasn’t enough.”

Evans concluded his email: “It has been an honor and a privilege to try to get justice for your clients.”

After Evans was summarily dismissed, Castro was indicted federally on the much lesser charge of making false statements–for allegedly lying to investigators about the incident. (Castro has been in the news recently because Texas Governor Abbott refused to extradite him back to Minnesota, where he is facing separate state charges.)

Evidently, just firing a lawyer for trying to do his job properly wasn’t enough for the vindictive and criminal cabal that now runs America’s Justice department. Several media outlets have reported that the DOJ has begun a federal criminal investigation of Evans. “CBS News says it’s for alleged leaks; the AP says it’s for alleged obstruction of a grand jury probe; the WaPo says it’s for alleged obstruction of justice.”

The DOJ originally brought trumped-up charges against Castro’s victims, but those charges were dropped after evidence emerged that contradicted Castro’s account of the incident.

The Department of Justice is now unrecognizable. For at least the last fifty years, the relationship between the White House and the Justice Department has been governed both by statute and by institutional norms protecting federal prosecutors against political influence. Amazingly, those norms survived Watergate, the Clinton impeachment, and even Trump’s first term.

No longer. Independence, integrity and adherence to the rule of law are now all things of the past.

Today’s Justice department engages in selective and politically motivated prosecutions (especially of the president’s political adversaries). It argues in court and administrative hearings for decisions that will benefit his allies. It lies to the courts. The changes have led to a steady exodus of the best and brightest–during Trump II, DOJ has lost over 2,600 career attorneys—about 21 percent of its total legal staff and part of a broader federal exit of more than 10,000 government lawyers.

Those who are left are expected to toe the line. Evans serves as an example.

Trump’s administration is a criminal enterprise.

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A Gold Omen

No, the title of this post doesn’t refer to Trump’s ongoing efforts to cover the White House and most of Washington, D.C. with garish, tasteless gold decorations. Vulgar as his bad taste is, peeling the faux icons off the walls and even razing his bloated ballroom will be relatively easy–far easier than repairing the monumental damage he has done to America’s place in the world.

The “gold omen” to which this post is refering is the withdrawal of gold reserves from America by countries that no longer see this country as a safe repository for those reserves. The New York Times has reported that the Netherlands has moved some 90 tons of gold out of New York’s Federal Reserve Bank. It is the second European nation this year to announce it had either decreased or entirely eliminated U.S. gold holdings.

This reverse “gold rush” reflects what the Times calls “increasingly strained relations between the Trump administration and Europe.” Economists and lawmakers in Europe–especially in Germany and Italy– have called for removal of gold reserves from the United States, based upon concerns about the increasingly erratic behavior of Donald Trump and his administration. 

At the Bulwark, Catherine Rampell compared the exodus of these longstanding deposits to the earlier movement of European gold reserves to safeguard them from the Nazis. Back then, they moved those reserves to the U.S.; today, at least some European countries are taking their gold back—to protect it from Donald Trump.

Rampell explains that the fear isn’t necessarily concern that Trump might seize the gold reserves outright. Rather, it is concern that he might move to freeze them. Such a freeze “would mean that the bullion’s owners couldn’t sell or transfer these assets even if they desperately needed to—to raise funds during a crisis, for example.” And as she points out, even the threat of a freeze could be used to exert pressure on a country to do something Trump wants.

That fear is eminently reasonable, given Trump’s increasing megalomania and his trademark petulance. (Lake America?? Please.)

The distancing and disapproval of countries that have been longtime American allies is reasonable –and devastating. Trump has done more to destroy American global dominance than Putin, et al could have hoped.

Trump has consistently criticized our European allies. He’s threatened to take over Greenland and make Canada our 51st state. He constantly disparages NATO, rhetoric leading to fears that America might actually withdraw from that essential organization. His obsession/fixation with tariffs has upended trade relations and signaled that the U.S. will not respect international trade norms. He has withdrawn America from 66 major multilateral institutions and partnerships—most notably the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Paris Peace Accords—and has shut down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and reduced funding for many UN agencies.

And then there is his insane and ill-considered war on Iran, undertaken despite warnings from military and foreign policy experts.

As Foreign Affairs has reported, the war has fractured longterm security arrangements in the region. We have probably permanently ceded control of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran, a situation that will keep prices for gasoline and fertilizer (among other things) high for the foreseeable future. The attacks have depleted America’s store of armaments and cost billions of dollars while reshaping–and vastly degrading– this country’s role in the Middle East. And we’ve suffered all of those negative consequences without achieving any of Trump’s supposed strategic goals–the radical Iranian government remains firmly in control, and Iran retains its nuclear program.

The Brookings Institution convened several scholars to address the ways the conflict will change the world.  Spoiler alert: the one thing they agree upon is that those changes will not favor the U.S.

No wonder European countries have lost confidence in our trustworthiness. I wouldn’t keep my savings in a bank whose president was acting like a three-year-old throwing a tantrum either.

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Is The MAGA Fever Abating?

There’s an old academic caution to the effect that anecdotes are not data. It’s an especially important observation in politics; most of us surround ourselves–intentionally or not–with like-minded folks, and I know I’m inclined to see comments from my own circle as evidence of wider public opinion.

Trumpers aren’t the only ones who engage in confirmation bias.

And yet…there does seem to be a recent shift in the political atmosphere that may or may not be reflected in the (sometimes dubious) political polling. The legacy media seems somewhat less inclined to normalize our decidedly abnormal administration, more willing to highlight Trump’s increasing lunacy. The anger of people posting to social media has noticeably increased.

The results of this year’s special and primary elections suggest a pronounced desire for political change. There has been a steady stream of Democratic wins and over-performances in special elections all year, and a variety of upsets in the local races that garner less publicity. I was especially gratified to read about the results of a recent Florida school board election, because Florida under DeSantis has moved steadily into fascist territory–anti-intellectual, anti-education, anti-gay. But in August, The New Republic reported that a Florida school board in Sarasota—”known for its book bans, anti-mask mandates, and anti-LGBTQ stance”— had lost its conservative majority.

That School Board had been led by a co-founder of the reactionary Moms for Liberty. But in the August election, two Democrat-endorsed candidates cruised to victory, while a third Democratic candidate, Jimmy Glover, will face a run-off vote in November. (The article noted that if Glover wins, he will be “the first person of color to ever sit on the five-person Sarasota County School Board.”)

Also in Florida, there was an apparently unexpected (and immensely satisfying) consequence of renaming Palm Beach’s airport to honor Trump.  Not only did thousands of people sign petitions against the move, so many already-booked passengers decided to boycott the hub that carriers like United Airlines were forced to offer free flight changes to alternative airports.

Closer to home, I’ve been watching a Congressional campaign in Indiana’s Fifth District. The district was frantically re-gerrymandered during the last redistricting to keep it safely Red (it seemed to be turning a bit purple). This year, the Democratic candidate is J.D. Ford, a two-term member of Indiana’s General Assembly who had defeated a “shoo in” Republican for that seat.

I’ve known J.D. since his first campaign–he’s a great guy and has been an unusually effective lawmaker, so I decided to attend a fundraiser being held for him–one of those campaign events that are part and parcel of such campaigns. I fully expected the usual turnout–thirty or perhaps even fifty supporters gathering to have a drink in someone’s living room and listen to a pep talk–so I was astonished to find myself surrounded by a crowd I estimated at a hundred and fifty people. More impressive, and more significant, the crowd included several (former) Republicans, some of whom had once been high-ranking Republican officeholders.

Some of the enthusiasm for J.D. may be a result of widespread distaste for the incumbent. Victoria Spartz has been investigated by her peers, prompted enormous staff turnover, exhibited behavior that can only be characterized as “bizarre” and been roundly booed by her constituents at her own town halls. Still, the enthusiasm and makeup of the large crowd assembled at the fundraiser was striking in a district that has been gerrymandered to be–at least on paper– safely Red.

My head tells me that these and similar signs of an awakened electorate are anecdotal. And yet…

As frequently as we read about Trump’s frantic efforts to rig the upcoming elections, as worrisome as the millions of dollars being poured into the midterms by the billionaire “Epstein class,” I’m increasingly tempted to indulge my inner Pollyanna. The millions of people who have turned out for ongoing protests aren’t going to sit this midterm out. The voters who are struggling with the results of economic “policies” that are merely the insane whims of a deeply unhinged man are paying attention, many for the first time. Members of a military being endangered by a former Fox commentator playing soldier are realizing that voting Republican is a vote to eviscerate the Department of Defense.

Early voting starts September 18 in four states. In Indiana, it starts October 6th, and my husband and I plan to vote then. If enough people vote early, we can frustrate efforts to rig the election, and kickstart a Blue tsunami that will dislodge the cranks, cowards and Christian nationalists who are facilitating this corrupt and incompetent administration.

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