On the eve of the impeachment trial of Donald Trump in the Senate (1/20), Majority Leader Mitch McConnell circulated his organizing resolution that would stymie the prosecution. McConnell, who has assured Republicans he is working in tandem with Trump’s defense team, offered each side 24 hours to make their opening arguments over two days, which could have the presentations going after midnight, but evidence from the House process would not be admitted and witnesses would not be allowed without a majority vote of the Senate, and Republican leaders are threatening Republican senators who vote against Trump at any stage of the trial.
Republican senators will not regain the use of their backbones unless voters in their states make it clear that they will not stand for a whitewash of the impeachment process.
Democrats need at least four Republican senators who support rules that would allow an honest trial. In any case, Democrats need to regain the majority in the Senate and put McConnell out of a job next year, and at least seven Republicans appear vulnerable — including “Moscow Mitch.”
Of the senators who are up for election in 2020, five Republicans had approval ratings down in the 30s in Morning Consult state tracking polls in the fourth quarter, ending Dec. 31. Thom Tillis (NC), was least popular at 34% approval vs. 37% disapproval, while four Republicans were stuck at 37% approval: McConnell (KY.), who had 50% disapproval; Joni Ernst (IA) with 42% disapproval; Cory Gardner (CO) with 40% disapproval; and Martha McSally (AZ) with 40% disapproval. Susan Collins (ME) is a sixth Republican with a target on her, with 42% approval but 52% disapproval in the Morning Consult polls. Also, new Sen. Kelly Loeffler (GA), who was appointed in January after Sen. Johnny Isakson quit because of health problems, will be up for election. Potentially vulnerable Democrats include Gary Peters (MI) who had 37% approval, but disapproval was only 29%, while Dick Durbin (IL), had 38% approval and 37% disapproval. And there were signs of life in Doug Jones (AL), who is considered the most vulnerable Democrat but had 41% approval and 35% disapproval in a state where Trump has a 22-point net positive.
Meanwhile, a CNN poll (1/20) found that 51% of respondents say the Senate should remove Trump from office and 69% say the trial should feature testimony from new witnesses who did not testify in the House impeachment inquiry. Among Republicans, 48% say they want new witnesses, while 44% say they do not.
EXPERT: GA. ELECTION SERVER SHOWED SIGNS OF TAMPERING. A computer security expert says he found signs that a Georgia election computer that is central to a legal battle over the integrity of Georgia elections was hacked, the Associated Press reported (1/16).
The server contains evidence that it was left exposed to the open internet for at least six months, the expert discovered in August 2016. The server was subsequently wiped clean in mid-2017 with no notice, just days after election integrity activists filed a lawsuit seeking an overhaul of what they called the state’s unreliable and negligently run election system.
Brian Kemp, who oversaw the elections as secretary of state, scored a narrow victory over Democratic opponent Stacey Abrams in the 2018 election for governor.
In late December 2019, the plaintiffs were finally able to obtain a copy of the server’s contents that the FBI made in March 2017 and retained — after the state allegedly dragged its feet in securing the image.
State officials have said they’ve seen no evidence that any election-related data was compromised. But they also long refused to submit the server image for an independent examination.
Logan Lamb, a security expert for the plaintiffs, said in an affidavit filed in Atlanta federal court (1/16) that he found evidence suggesting the server was compromised in December 2014. Lamb said the evidence suggests an attacker exploited a bug that provided full control of the server.
Lamb also said he determined that computer logs — which would have been critical to understanding what might have been altered on or stolen from the server — only go back to Nov. 10, 2016 — two days after Donald Trump was elected president. Two years later, Brian Kemp won the Georgia governor’s race by a narrow margin over Democrat Stacey Abrams.
Kemp oversaw Georgia’s elections during both races as secretary of state. Election administration was handled at Kennesaw State University by an outfit that Kemp’s office dismantled after the server-wiping incident.
Additionally, Lamb found evidence that election-related files were deleted from the server on March 2, 2017, just after a colleague of his alerted KSU officials that the election server remained vulnerable to hackers.
Lamb initially alerted Merle King, director of the elections center at KSU, in August 2016 of a gaping security hole that left the server vulnerable to tampering.
The fact that the access logs were deleted suggests possible foul play, Lamb wrote.
“I can think of no legitimate reason why records from that critical period of time should have been deleted,” he said in his sworn statement.
The plaintiffs have accused state election officials of repeatedly and intentionally destroying evidence that could show unauthorized access to state election infrastructure and the potential manipulation of election results.
For the 2020 election, Georgia officials are replacing antiquated touchscreen voting machines that have long been discredited by computer scientists. But the Coalition for Good Governance, one of the plaintiffs in the case, rejects the computerized ballot-marking devices the state has purchased to replace them.
It maintains, paralleling the findings last year of a National Academies of Sciences report, that the only secure voting solution are hand-marked ballots processed by scanners that leave a human-readable paper trail that can be audited later.
US District Judge Amy Totenberg, who is presiding over the case, has expressed grave concerns about the vulnerability of Georgia’s election system and has scolded state officials for being slow to remedy serious vulnerabilities.
MOSCOW MITCH BLOWS OFF LATEST RUSSIAN HACKING NEWS, SAYS WE’VE DONE ENOUGH TO PROTECT THE ELECTION. The news that Russian spies had hacked into Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company central to debunked conspiracy theories from Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani about Ukrainian election interference, has rocketed 2020 election protection to the top of the intelligence community’s list of concerns. Likewise, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blasted Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump for refusing to “take meaningful action to strengthen our election security,” Joan McCarter noted at DailyKos (1/16)
Pelosi said McConnell is “giving hostile foreign powers the green light to attack our country” by refusing to take up House-passed legislation. “The President and every Republican Senator must explain to the American people why they are refusing to defend our national security and the integrity of our elections,” Pelosi added. “We only learned of this hacking through the press. Congress must be briefed on what the Administration knows about this attack and why the President doesn’t have a plan to protect our elections.”
Asked about it (1/16), McConnell blew the question off. “We’ve appropriated $800 million over the last couple of years to deal with it,” he said, scoffing off the possibility of doing further. Then he actually said “I do want to encourage the current administration on both the efforts in [2018] and the off-year elections in [2019], from which we have essentially no reports of any kind of success.” Yes, he’s congratulating the president that has been impeached because of his efforts to get a foreign country to influence the 2020 election. He concluded that “we need to keep our eye on the Russians or anybody else who’s trying to mess with our elections system, and we’re appropriating plenty of money to do just that.”
State and local governments that have to try to conduct safe elections in less than 11 months might not be so sanguine, McCarter noted.
MEDICARE FOR ALL IS NOT A PIPE DREAM. Employers currently pay about $10,000 per employee for health insurance, Kevin Drum noted at MotherJones (1/17). “This comes directly out of your paycheck, but most people can’t be convinced of this. If you were to tax them $10,000 for all-in universal health care, they’d see it as losing $10,000 per year. And who knows? Corporations aren’t known for their benevolence, and there’s no guarantee that if you eliminated their health care obligation they’d use that savings to increase everyone’s wages. So maybe ‘most people’ are right.
“This is why I continue to think that anyone who’s in favor of Medicare for All should also be in favor of funding a big chunk of it via a payroll tax on employers. That way, the people paying for health care stay roughly the same and no one is the victim of a massive tax hike. There are, of course, still details to work out. Who pays for contractors? How much do corporations pay for part-time employees? Etc. But those are not insurmountable problems. They can be worked out. And when they are, it works out to employers paying about $5 per employee hour for health insurance. According to the BEA, Americans work about 250 billion hours per year, so a payroll tax on corporations of $5 per hour of paid employee labor comes to $1.25 trillion.” Drum continued:
Current federal and state spending on Medicare and Medicaid comes to $1.25 trillion
If you figure that Medicare for All will cover 85% of health care expenses—which is about average for other health care systems—then households will continue paying about $500 billion.
Other federal spending comes to about $100 billion.
This adds up to $3.1 trillion. Total current health care spending is about $3.6 trillion, which means we need to find about $500 billion more. That’s it. You may assume any combination of your favorite spending cuts and tax increases to fill this gap. If, like me, you assume that spending won’t change (getting rid of private insurance overhead will be balanced by covering more people), then you need a $500 billion tax increase. This is hardly chump change, but it’s also far from insurmountable. We can start by reversing the Republican tax cut of 2017, and then finish up by adding a fairly modest additional tax on the rich.
In other words, this isn’t that hard. But you have to keep all the current funding in place if you want to avoid gargantuan numbers. And here’s what the public gets for this:
• Health care is easy. Just show your M4A card when you see a doctor and you’re done. No fighting with insurance companies.
• Everyone is covered from the day they’re born.
• You don’t lose your coverage if you lose your job.
• Your coverage doesn’t change whenever your employer decides to save some money by switching insurance companies.
• Every doctor and hospital is paid via M4A, so you can see any doctor you want. You don’t have to worry about whether your doctor is part of your insurance company’s network.
• No surprise billing ever.
What’s not to like?
INFLATION-ADJUSTED WAGES ROSE 0% IN 2019, WHILE 51% OF WORKERS GOT NO RAISES. Unemployment is the lowest it has been in 50 years. Economic expansion since the Great Recession ended has been going on for 126 consecutive months, and net gains in job growth have been going on for 111 consecutive months. Both figures break the record for the 80 years that good statistics in such matters have been kept. The stock market is soaring. Every day we hear the economy is booming, Meteor Blades noted at DailyKos (1/20).
It’s true that most acute problems of the Great Recession have been overcome, although some Americans have still not fully recovered from the damage caused to their finances a dozen years after that gigantic downturn, and there will be those who never do. But while the acute problems have mostly vanished, the chronic ones predating the recession remain with us. These will not be resolved by business as usual, Blades noted.
All too rarely do we hear these days about two of the most troublesome chronic problems—the number of rotten jobs and the percentage of low-wage jobs, with the Brookings Institution putting the latter at 44%.
One example was released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (1/14), a report on real average earnings. “Real” as in adjusted for inflation. As every minimum-wage earner knows, $7.25 in 2020 is not worth what it was in 2009, the last time the federal government reset the minimum. Inflation has since knocked down its buying power to $6.09.
For all employees, real average hourly earnings fell 0.1% from November to December 2019, seasonally adjusted, according to the bureau. That result came from a rise of 0.1% in average hourly earnings plus a rise of 0.2% in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U). In addition, real average weekly earnings fell by 0.1% over the month because the average workweek didn’t change.
The year-over-year tally shows a bigger hurt. Real average hourly earnings rose 0.6%, seasonally adjusted, from December 2018 to December 2019. But those earnings have to be placed against the 0.6% fall in the average workweek. In other words, as the BLS puts it, this “resulted in essentially no change in real average weekly earnings over this period.”
Or more succinctly: wages were flat in 2019. And the situation is actually worse because including the gains of the top 10%-20% of earners skews the average upward.
Bankrate’s Financial Security Poll for December puts some flesh on that skew: 51% of American workers received no raise in 2019. That’s about 82 million people. In 2018, 62% got no raise—99 million workers…
Tying productivity to wage growth is the key to providing all workers with a higher standard of living. Blades noted. The center-left Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out:
“Productivity has grown faster than compensation adjusted for producer prices since the turn of the century, indicating that producers have been able to increase their profit margins, raising capital’s share of nonfarm business income at the expense of labor’s share. ...
“Over the course of the expansion, output per hour has risen at an average rate of 1.2% per year, compensation per hour adjusted for consumer prices has risen 0.6% per year, and compensation per hour adjusted for producer prices has risen 0.9% per year.”
Workers would earn considerably more if wage growth were tied to productivity growth. This would go a small part of the way to reducing income inequality. But given the doctrinaire views about the “proper” role for government involvement in the economy, not just among Republicans, but many Democrats as well, seeking to legislate such a link would surely encounter titanic opposition from corporate lobbyists and politicians, and if passed, from litigators determined to prove the whole idea unconstitutional and unAmerican.
VAST MAJORITY OF AMERICANS SAY US ECONOMIC SYSTEM UNFAIRLY BENEFITS POWERFUL. A 70% majority of Americans view the economy as unfairly favoring those with power, and large majorities also say politicians, giant corporations, and wealthy individuals wield too much power over the economy, according to Pew Research Center.
The idea of a “rigged” economy that both benefits and is shaped by the rich and powerful was a popular theme in 2016 and is sure to play a big role again this cycle with several Democratic candidates emphasizing it on the campaign trail. It’s a particularly good focal point too because Pew found it resonates across income groups, including 66% of upper-income individuals, 69% of middle-income folks, and 73% of lower-income adults, Kerry Eleveld noted at DailyKos (1/20).
From a partisan standpoint, however, the issue plays differently. While large majorities of Democrats in all three income brackets say the system unfairly favors the powerful, Republicans are more divided by income group. “Lower-income Republicans are far less likely than their higher-income GOP counterparts to say the economic system is generally fair (37% vs. 63%),” writes Pew, suggesting that economic inequality is an issue that resonates with certain segments of the GOP.
On the related question of who wields too much power over the economy, more than 8 in 10 respondents agree that’s true of politicians, large corporations, and wealthy individuals.
SCHIFF SAYS NSA, CIA WITHHOLD DOCUMENTS FROM CONGRESS, INCLUDING THOSE RELEVANT TO IMPEACHMENT. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff confirmed on ABC’s This Week (1/19) that the nation’s top intelligence officials are pushing Congress to cancel the year’s usual testimony to Congress on the nation’s top national security threats because they don’t want to publicly contradict Donald Trump’s false intelligence claims, Hunter noted on DaillyKos (1/19).
“Unfortunately, I think those reports are all too accurate. The intelligence community is reluctant to have an open hearing, something that we had done every year prior to the Trump administration, because they’re worried about angering the president,” Schiff said.
It isn’t an idle concern, from intelligence officials. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats was forced out of his position last year shortly after confirming to Congress that despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, the US had no evidence Iran had an active nuclear weapons program. Trump had a public meltdown, which is a now-daily occurrence, and Coats was given the boot; in the latest degradation of this nation into a kleptocratic and autocratic state, government officials are now reluctant to testify in public about the true dangers facing the nation because if their pronouncements do not match Dear Leader’s political claims, Dear Leader will mark them as personal enemies.
Schiff’s follow-up was, if possible, worse: He also asserted that this nation’s intelligence agencies are now also withholding documents pertaining to the impeachment charges now filed against Trump.
“And I’ll say something even more concerning to me, and that is the intelligence community is beginning to withhold documents from Congress on the issue of Ukraine. The NSA, in particular, is withholding what are potentially relevant documents to our oversight responsibilities on Ukraine, but also withholding documents potentially relevant that the senators might want to see during the trial. There are signs that the CIA may be on the same tragic course.”
While Rep. Schiff was intentionally opaque on what Ukraine-related documents were being withheld from lawmakers, there does seem to be a new effort to withhold documents that the agencies had originally been expected to produce. Politico reports an unnamed Intelligence Committee “official” as saying: “Both the NSA and CIA initially pledged cooperation, and it appears now that the White House has interceded before production of documents could begin.”
We had long been told that Congress had, in cases of impeachment, necessarily sweeping oversight powers. Again we are learning that these powers can simply be taken away, so long as sufficient numbers in a president’s own party are willing to sign their own names to that act.
TRUMP LEGAL TEAM: WHAT HAPPENS ‘WHEN YOU DON’T PAY YOUR LEGAL BILLS.' It wasn’t until the week before Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial was scheduled to begin that his legal team expanded, and as the Center for a New American Security’s Carrie Cordero noted, it’s not exactly a powerhouse roster.
“Contrary to tone of some coverage, I’m struck by the *lack* of conservative legal star power on Trump’s impeachment team,” Cordero tweeted, adding that there’s “no credible constitutional superstar.”
George Conway appeared to be thinking along the same lines, arguing in a Washington Post op-ed, “This is what happens when you don’t pay your legal bills.”
“President Trump, whose businesses and now campaign have left a long trail of unpaid bills behind them, has never discriminated when it comes to stiffing people who work for him. That includes lawyers — which is part of the reason he found the need to make some curious last-minute tweaks to his team, announcing the addition of the legal odd couple of Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth W. Starr.
“The president has consistently encountered difficulty in hiring good lawyers to defend him. In 2017, after Robert S. Mueller III became special counsel, Trump couldn’t find a high-end law firm that would take him as a client. His reputation for nonpayment preceded him: One major Manhattan firm I know had once been forced to eat bills for millions in bond work it once did for Trump. No doubt other members of the legal community knew of other examples.
“Of course, being cheap wasn’t the only reason Trump struck out among the nation’s legal elite. There was the fact that he would be an erratic client who’d never take reasonable direction — direction as in shut up and stop tweeting.”
Steve Benen noted at MaddowBlog (1/20) “it seems as if Trump has ended up with a group of attorneys he chose because he saw them on television. In fact, he could hardly avoid them.”
Media Matters noted: “On Jan. 17, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and Pamela Brown reported that attorneys Ken Starr, Alan Dershowitz, and Robert Ray are all expected to join President Donald Trump’s legal team for his impeachment trial in the United States Senate. The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey reported that former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi will also be joining the team. Combined, Starr, Dershowitz, Bondi, and Ray have made at least 365 weekday Fox News appearances since January 2019.”
After Team Trump confirmed the legal line-up, the Washington Post reported that the president wanted Dershowitz and Pam Bondi representing him in the impeachment case at least in part “because he thinks they are talented on TV.” Politico added that Trump liked Ken Starr because his work on the Clinton impeachment saga helped create “the type of juicy storyline Trump the executive producer wants to orchestrate.”
Benen added, “Jay Sekulow is helping lead Trump’s team, despite his own controversies, and despite having the entirely wrong kind of professional background, and it’s likely because the president learned of him by way of his media appearances.”
FOOD & WATER ACTION SAYS US-MEXICO-CANADA AGREEMENT IS BAD FOR CLIMATE AND FOOD SAFETY. The Senate overwhelmingly passed Donald Trump’s rewrite of the trade deal with Mexico and Canada (1/16), helping him fulfill a 2016 campaign promise, in a rare bipartisan vote.
Many Democrats — and many labor unions — ultimately got on board after securing changes that make the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) one of the most progressive trade agreements ever negotiated by either party, Politico reported (1/16). The bill, which earlier had passed the House, went on to Trump for his signature, but Food & Water Action asked every Democratic presidential candidate to oppose USMCA because of disastrous food safety rollbacks and a complete failure when it comes to mitigating climate change, air, and water pollution.
“Any trade deal that thwarts food safety standards and encourages dirty energy use is a one-way ticket to climate disaster. Elected officials in America are charged with protecting consumers against cheap and unsafe imported food, contaminated water, and public health threats. USMCA ransacks protections on all three fronts,” Mitch Jones, policy director of Food & Water Action, said.
“Under USMCA, chemical companies would get to keep vital data about pesticides secret. The proposed deal locks in new equivalency measures that enshrine known food safety risks while also globalizing paper-based food safety deregulation that could last for decades.
“America needs a leader who will intervene on deals like this that could lead to our children eating contaminated deli meat. Every leader in this country, especially one who wants to be our President, must oppose USMCA in the name of a healthy future.”
LEV PARNAS WORKED HIS WAY INTO TRUMP’S WORLD — AND IS NOW RATTLING IT. When Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway told CNN that “I don’t know Lev Parnas,” Parnas’ attorney, James A. Bondy, tweeted a close-up of Parnas and Conway, their heads leaning toward one another, both smiling widely. “#LevRemembers,” his lawyer wrote, the Washington Post reported (1/18).
When Trump announced that former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi was joining his legal team, Parnas’ lawyer tweeted a photo of Parnas and Bondi seated at a table together, their arms around each other’s shoulders.
When Trump himself told reporters (1/16) that he didn’t “know who this man is” — an assertion he had also made shortly after Parnas was arrested — his lawyer posted a video of Parnas chatting with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago Club in December 2016.
The video shows Parnas at the front of a crowd, introducing the president-elect to a broad-shouldered man who, according to Bondy, was then serving as the top tax official of Ukraine.
In interviews, Parnas has said he is convinced prosecutors working for Barr have pursued the criminal case against him to keep him quiet about Trump’s work in Ukraine. He said he believes transparency is now his best protection against further criminal action.
This past week, he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper his goal is to make Trump understand “he’s not a king.”
“And I think it’s important for the country to find out the truth,” he said, “exactly what happened.”
From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2020
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