READ IT AND WEEP

    The following is from Foreign Policy: http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/07/12/doj-settled-massive-russian-fraud-case-involving-lawyer-who-met-with-trump-jr/

      "Democratic congressmen on the House Judiciary Committee want to know why Attorney General Jeff Sessions abruptly settled a money laundering case in May involving the same Russian attorney who met with Donald Trump Jr. during the presidential election to offer “dirt” on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

      "The civil forfeiture case was filed in 2013 by Preet Bharara, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York — who was fired by Trump in March. The case alleged that 11 companies were involved in a tax fraud in Russia and then laundered a portion of the $230 million they got into Manhattan real estate.

      "The forfeiture case was heralded at the time as “a significant step towards uncovering and unwinding a complex money laundering scheme arising from a notorious foreign fraud,” Bharara said. “As alleged, a Russian criminal enterprise sought to launder some of its billions in ill-gotten rubles through the purchase of pricey Manhattan real estate.”

But Instead of proceeding with the trial as scheduled, the Trump Justice Department settled the case two days before it was due to begin. By then, Bharara had already been axed by the president. Bharara’s assistant did not immediately respond to request for comment.

      "In May, the Justice Department settled the case for $6 million instead of $230 million and did not demand any admission of wrongdoing. According to the lawmakers’ letter to Sessions, Veslnitskaya was surprised by how generous the settlement was, telling one Russian news outlet the penalty appeared like `an apology from the government.'”

    Quoniam res ipsa loquitor. The thing speaks for itself

QUICK HIT #5

      Today the Republicans finally gave up the ghost on the repeal-and-replace of Obamacare, an especially craven capitulation, even by political standards. After all, they did vote a straight repeal many times before they had the power to carry through. I guess the thought of 20,000,000 people losing health insurance had them more concerned with their political health than with revealing their punk-ass propensities.

      Although my wife (I’m insured by Medicare) is one of those people who’s seen their premiums rise by 50% over the past two years, I’m happy for all those Americans who got access to health care for the first time through the Affordable Care Act. Now they get to keep it… unless, of course, the Republicans settle for quietly sabotaging Obamacare. But that won’t happen, right? The Republicans can’t be that spiteful, that mean-spirited? Right? Right?

      Funny, but I fail to hear an echoing chorus here.

      Anyway, I’m going to close with a really depressing thought, but one that won’t stop running through whatever neurons still survive in my forebrain. The United States isn’t the only country struggling with the ever-increasing cost of providing health care to its citizens. Every industrialized nation on the planet struggles with the same problem, despite almost all spending less, as a percentage of their GDP, than we do. This reality leads - inexorably, in my opinion - to a question that must be asked. Is it possible that modern medicine is reaching the point where it can provide more healthcare than human beings can afford?

QUICK HIT #4

      OK, so I’m doing it again, banging my head into that oh-so-painful wall. This morning I watched C-SPAN’s call-in show, National Journal. Callers were asked to comment on the latest scandal surrounding Paul Manafort, Donald II, and Jared Kushner. As usual, conservatives dominated the Republican and Independent lines, offering various excuses for the trio’s meeting with a Russian lawyer, despite being told in advance that she was acting as an agent of the Russian government. Collusion, several insisted, is no crime. Others fell back on the fake-news saw. I’ve heard both excuses a million times over the past months, even (and maybe especially,) from Fox News. But one caller did catch my attention, significantly darkening my already-depressed state.

      How come they don’t investigate Obama? he wanted to know. Obama won 100% of the vote in 51 Philadelphia districts. That’s impossible, except if it was fixed. The same thing happened in Woods County, Ohio. Obama got 100% of the vote. So, why don’t they investigate Obama?

     What did I do? What any red-blooded American would do. I reverted to the Google, that supreme arbiter of truth and falsehood. Twenty seconds later, I was reading FactCheck’s thorough debunking of what began as an anonymous email dispatched to names listed in some conservative’s databank. FactCheck’s debunking was followed by Snopes, followed by the New York Times, followed by….

      Barack Obama did not receive 100% of the vote in Woods County. He received 51%. The lie didn’t upset me. No, what irked me was the caller’s apparent unwillingness to spend twenty seconds uncovering the truth. I don’t know what universe he lived in, but his tone, as he presented his case, was sure and certain. He had us lousy liberals. He would obliterate us with the truth.

     People (sincere, people, and well-meaning, too) who believes the Trumpians will come home if we just promise to walk away from a few trade deals are kidding themselves. His supporters are far more likely, when the time comes, to pick up a gun. Give me delusion or give me death.

FRAMING RANT

      Here’s the issue: free tuition for post-high school education at public universities. I think most Democrats favor taxpayers footing the bill, but how do we sell it to reluctant Dems and enough Republicans to see it enacted into law? Two possibilities follow.

FIRST FRAMING:

      Raised by her mom, a single parent who struggled every month to pay the bills, Rose Wentworth, from her earliest days in school, was told that education was the gateway to opportunity, the only gateway. Study hard, keep your grades up, stay out of trouble, don’t get pregnant… the list continued on, but the goal line never moved. Good grades, a decent SAT score, admission to one of Ohio State University’s many campuses and eventual graduation. That was the price of the only ticket to a middle-class lifestyle.

      The odds were stacked against Rose. She moved six times during her twelve years in the Cleveland School System, changing schools on four occasions. Worse, she passed one seven-month period in the foster care system, always a crap shoot played with loaded dice. Yet Rose persevered, at times faltering, but always rallying, until finally, with the help of a few sympathetic teachers, Rose applied to Ohio State toward the end of her junior year. She was initially overjoyed when she received an acceptance letter, but her mood darkened after she met with an admissions councilor at the University who ticked off the costs. Tuition and fees: $10,037. Room and board: $11,666. Books and supplies: $1,234. Other expenses, some as simple as toothpaste, $2,602.

      Add it up: $25,539, none of which her mother could afford to pay.

      Financial aid? Rose certainly qualified, but due to federal cutbacks, along with cutbacks in support from the government of Ohio under John Kasich… well, there just wasn’t that much help available. No, if Rose was to graduate, she’d have to fall back on student loans. Loan money, the interviewer assured her, was easily secured, enough to leave her approximately $50,000 in debt when she graduated. With no guarantee of a job at the end.

      After long and careful consideration, Rose settled for a one-year nursing program. She is now a Licensed Practical Nurse making $16.00 an hour at a Cleveland nursing home.

      Is this right? We told this girl, born into poverty, that a pathway existed, a pathway that would lead to a middle-class life. Rose followed that path, maintaining good faith, passing twelve years in mostly-failing public schools, only to discover a gap, a chasm too deep to cross, yet close enough for her to see her goal on the other side.

      Any chart of U. S. GDP in constant dealers, from any source, reveals that America is richer than it’s ever been. Our GDP, again in constant dollars, is three times what it was in 1968, at the height of the War on Poverty. Yet the nation cannot keep its promises to kids like Rose. And make no mistake, the individuals who defined the sacred pathway were mostly teachers, employees of government. Bottom line, the moral debt we owe to students like Rose compels us to make sure that she can afford the college education we insist that she acquire. Thus, tuition should be eliminated at public universities for low-income students who qualify for admission. Justice demands it.

SECOND FRAMING:

      For a long time, America, with a few exceptions, rejected taxpayer-financed education at any level. Most Americans, after all, were simple farmers living out in the boondocks. Following a plow, pulling stumps, milking cows… did they really need an education? Wasn’t a strong back, a stronger work ethic and a deep commitment to family, church and country enough to get you through life? But then the steam engine came along and suddenly farmers were confronted with plows and threshers and harvesters that made hand-farming unprofitable. Call them advances if you like, but these advances required money and financing and a host of new skills that, in turn, required education. At the same time, the country began to industrialize, again requiring workers to master new skills.

      Initially, public education was limited to the primary grades. Reading, writing and arithmetic. That was enough for the time. If parents wanted more for their children, they had to foot the bill. Only later, as the new technology (and the businesses they gave rise to) grew more complex did it become necessary to add high school to the mix. Today, most employers demand a high school diploma as a condition of employment. There may be some jobs available to dropouts, but they won’t put a roof over your head and clothes on your back and food in your belly.

     Technological advances have always required new skills. Steam engines worked well, but not perfectly, and not indefinitely. Maintaining them required skills that could not be acquired on the farm. The same might be said for electricity, the internal combustion engine and a host of advances. In fact, right now, as I write this, 3,000,000 jobs in the United States remain unfilled because employers cannot find workers with the necessary skills. These are the good jobs, the high-wage jobs so many working people long for. They are also jobs that require more knowledge than a high school education can deliver.

      The monthly jobs report will be released in an hour or so. The Trump administration is hoping for a number above 200,000, though most forecasters expect a lower number, around 170,000. But even if the administration is right, it will take this nation 15 months to produce 3,000,000 jobs. And yet, according to Forbes, 62% of high school students admitted to colleges around the country decided not to attend their first-choice school because they could not afford the costs. In another poll, reported on ThinkAdvisor, 83% of Americans declared that their children cannot not afford to go to college.

      While 3,000,000 jobs go unfilled? While the tax dollars those 3,000,000 jobs would generate go uncollected? While the goods and services that would have been purchased with the salaries from those jobs go unsold?

       Simply stated, it’s time to bite the bullet, because this situation will not improve on its own. First: the technology continues to develop at a pace that’s almost disconcerting and we are fast approaching the point where poorly educated children will inevitably become dependent – or worse, delinquent. Second: the cost of a college education continues to rise. Third: under these conditions, 3,000,000 jobs must inevitably become four and five and six million.

      This is a challenge our competitors in Europe and Asia have already met. Post-high school education is guaranteed to qualified students as a matter of course. Even in France, the tuition charged at a public university comes to $400 per school year, a far cry from, for example, from Ohio State’s $10,000. And while many negative stories have been written about the competitive nature of the admission process at Chinese universities, once students are finally admitted, they don’t reject the opportunity because they can’t afford the costs.

       Again, it’s time we take our heads out of the sand. The challenges America will face over the next fifty years require that we educate our children beyond high school. We cannot have millions of well-qualified students turning away from college because they can’t afford the costs. Keep in mind, a college graduate earns, on average, $830,000 (also according to Forbes) more than a high school graduate during his/her working life. Merely in terms of economic stimulus and taxes paid, the nation will get its money back and show a handsome profit. So, let’s not be fools. Let’s not be afraid to invest tax dollars in the future. Let’s not put ourselves in a position where jobs are routinely outsourced because there are no qualified Americans to fill them.

      Personally, I like the first framing better. That’s because I’m a progressive Democrat and sympathetic to the trials and tribulations or other human beings, unlike most Republicans who view poverty as resulting from a character flaw. But I’m already a Democrat who has never voted Republican and never will. I’m the choir.

      The second framing offer more promise as a lure to Republican voters. Not the Trumpians, of course. At present, they’re unreachable, as poll after poll has demonstrated. These working-class, white voters won’t come home until they’re driven home by some Republican atrocity. There are, however, other Republicans who are very uncomfortable with a President whose misogyny, racism and xenophobia are perpetually on display. I’m talking about well-educated professionals and small business owners who don’t care to explain Trump to their daughters. The second framing, an appeal to American pragmatism, to our “can do” spirit, to the attitude that made American great, might well attract them, essentially giving them an excuse to switch parties.

      Will this approach, extended to a wide range of issues, attract country-club Republicans? Not being a prophet, I won’t speculate, but I can’t come up with another approach that passes the smell test. Affluent Republicans hate taxes. Locked away in their isolated (if not actually gated) communities, they also view poverty as resulting from a character flaw. It may well prove that their obsession with lower taxes will offset their distaste and they’ll work with any group that promises to save them a few dollars at the end of the year. Nevertheless, we can be certain of one thing. Neither framing will attract the Trumpians. It’s moderate Republicans or continuing to lose elections, local, state and federal. 

THE SIMPLE SOLUTION RANT #2

      Your name is Karen Harper and you live in Granville, Ohio. You’re thirty-six years old, married with two children, and you’ve been working at the Kingstown Widget factory for a total of eight years. Although you twice left the factory (without pay) for a year following the births of your children, you always came back. The factory accepted your return because the evaluations done every six months by your various supervisors were uniformly good. You showed up on time, week after week, ready willing and able to give a day’s work for a day’s pay.

    And there’s the rub.

     Kingstown Widget’s pay scale was significantly below the standard for assembly line workers in Ohio. What’s more, the firm offered no sick leave, no pension plan and no health insurance. Conditions inside the factory were poor, as demonstrated by the many fines imposed by government agencies, state and federal. Yet conditions never seemed to improve. The overhead lighting was dim enough to make accidents more likely; fumes from the paint room leaked onto the factory floor; the break rooms were haphazardly cleaned and the bathrooms so filthy employees used them only when desperate.

      Enough being enough, you decided, along with the Doyle twins, Bob and Jimmy, to seek advice from the Widget Workers of America (WWA). When the union offered to sponsor an organizing drive, you eagerly accepted. At first, you and the Doyle brothers contacted only your most trusted co-workers, urging them to sign cards indicating their desire to form a union affiliated with the WWA. The process was slow because you wanted to gather momentum before management discovered what you were doing.

      Despite your caution, someone alerted the company about six months into the drive and you had to go public. By that time, you’d convinced 30% of the workers to sign union cards, enough to force the company to hold an election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). But the experienced organizers at WWA advised against this strategy. If you hold the election now, they explained, workers who didn’t sign cards will feel left out and coerced.

      So, you persevered, promoting the union in the only places you were, by law, allowed, the break rooms and the parking lots. Management countered by posting supervisors in both places. They stood against the wall or leaned against company trucks, occasionally writing names on the small pads they carried in their back pockets. You weren’t surprised. Intimidation was a technical violation of the labor laws, but the only remedy was an appeal to the NLRB where your complaint would sit for eighteen months on average. In addition, Kingstown Widget hired Haverman, Brown and Sherman, a well-established consulting firm, to advise them on union-busting tactics. HBS charged, rumor had it, a thousand dollars an hour for its advice.

      You (and by now a dozen activists) countered these moves by shifting your activities outside the plant, contacting your fellow workers in bars, churches, PTA meetings and high school football games, until you registered 65% of the plant’s workers. At that point, you requested union recognition. This formula worked for many decades after the Wagner Act was signed into law, but Kingstown Widget, urged on by HBS, demanded an election by secret ballot, a standard ploy for businesses committed to an anti-union strategy.

       A week later, you and the Doyle brothers, in full view of other workers at the plant, were summarily fired. Supervisors approached you while you worked – this was an object lesson, after all – and escorted you to your locker, then out of the building, then into your cars. They watched you drive away, watched the factory gates close behind you.

       You knew this might be coming because the tactic, though another gross violation of labor law, was commonplace. Kingstown Widget, your advisers at WWA had explained early on, suffered no risk by firing you. Your only recourse was a complaint to the NLRB, which you made. But even if the agency eventually ruled in your favor, Kingstown Widget, with plants in four states, would at most pay a fine in the thousands of dollars. As for you, Karen Harper, you would receive back pay, but only if you didn’t work somewhere else in the meantime.

      The news didn’t get any better when your WWA advisors told you that an appeal to the NLRB doesn’t end with their ruling, which will almost certainly be in your favor. Any decision on the part of the agency can be appealed to the federal court system, first to a district court, then to a circuit court and finally to the Supreme Court. Depending on how much money Kingstown Widget is prepared to spend, it could be many years before your case is resolved.

      Things were no better at the plant. Management called mass meeting on the factory floor, attendance compulsory, where the perils of unionization were enumerated by carefully chosen executives. Who knows what might happen, they told workers, if the drive succeeded? Profit margins at the plant were small and the competition, much of it located in China, was relentless. Decisions would have to be made. Moving overseas? Expanding Kingstown’s Wisconsin plant? Massive layoffs? No remedy was off the table.

      That wasn’t the worst of it, though. Throughout the workday, employees were called into one-on-one meetings with their immediate supervisors. Identical threats were made, along with demands to know if the workers planned to vote for the union. These supervisors were the same men and women who evaluated the workers every six months. They could – and sometimes did – recommend termination. But the supervisors were more interested in who opposed unionization than who supported it. Some anti-union employees were turned into company spies who attended meetings held outside the factory and reported back. Others were groomed to disrupt the meetings by raising the possibility that all would lose their jobs. And there would be no immediate replacements in the community. The county was shedding jobs, not adding them.

      The months dragged by, the battle going on for more than a year, but in the end a majority of Kingstown Widget’s employees voted to affiliate with the Widget Workers of America. A great victory… except for one detail. Yes, the company was forced to recognize the union as the bargaining agent for its employees. But that didn’t mean Kingstown Widget had to bargain in good faith. The company managed to postpone the first bargaining session for almost three months, then demanded a wage rollback, that a third of current employees have their hours reduced, that break times in the morning and afternoon be eliminated, that employees pay for a parking space during work hours, that cell phones be left in employee lockers during the workday, that no allowance be made for parents leaving early to pick up their children….

     The list went on, but that didn’t matter, since it was designed to be unacceptable. And yet it remained unchanged over time, all pretense at “bargaining” out the window. A WWA complaint to the NLRB, now chaired by Trump appointee Philip Miscimarra, went unaddressed. Weeks turned into months, then the months to a year, whereupon Kingstown Widget demanded that the union be decertified and a second election held. Collective bargaining was suspended at that point, pending a ruling by the NLRB. The ruling never came. Discouraged workers lost all faith in the WWA’s ability to effect change and dropped their support. Union rallies went virtually unattended. Game over.

      And as for you, Karen Harper? You now work at Chipotle for $9.00 an hour. Without benefits.

      Every element of the scenario described above is a commonplace occurrence in union organizing drives. The right of the company to force employees into mass meetings and/or one-on-one conferences with supervisors has been blessed by the Supreme Court, as has the right of the company to force an election even if every worker has signed a card indicating her/his desire for a union. Meanwhile, an underfunded NLRB – which, now that Trump has been elected will have three of its five members chosen from anti-union Republican ranks – takes eighteen months to generate rulings that can be stayed pending appeals to the various federal courts. Finally, the penalties issued by the NLRB are so small as to be laughable.

       The deck is stacked against unionization, that much is obvious. The rules of game leave workers with no effective way to determine their own fate. At the same time, poll after poll demonstrates that an absolute majority of Americans approve of unions.

      The Employee Free Choice Act discussed in a prior post addresses every one of the abuses described here. Businesses are effectively unionized when the union gathers more than fifty percent of workers’ signatures. And any attempt on the part of the company to stall contract negotiations first results in compulsory mediation, then arbitration should mediation fail. The real questions are why Democrats haven’t pushed for the legislation, and why the party allowed a few Senators, led by the execrable Ben Nelson, doom the effort in 2009 without paying a price?

      And maybe there’s one more question to be answered. The Republican attack on trade unions over the past forty years has been relentless. But can Dems claim that their defense of unions has been equally relentless? I think not.

THE SIMPLE SOLUTION RANT #1

      In 2010, an amateur politician named Jimmy McMillan ran for Governor of New York as an Independent. His platform was marvelously simple: “The rent is too damn high.”

      He was wrong.

      The real key to Mr. McMillan’s inability, and the inability of so many others, to afford decent housing is that wages are too damn low. In many cases, they’re below subsistence, so that individuals who work full-time are forced to turn to the government for subsidies like food stamps and housing vouchers. Think about it. Wages for millions of jobs in the richest country in the world don’t provide the minimum necessary – food, clothing and shelter – to insure basic survival. If Walmart workers had to live on their wages, Walmart employees would be sleeping in the streets.

      So, let’s simplify. Let’s start with the obvious. Wages are too damn low.

      Given Trump’s, Hillary’s and Bernie’s various appeals to low-wage workers in the past election, the issue, even for Republicans, is what to do about low wages. Curiously, both Sanders and Trump proposed similar solutions. The various trade agreements concluded over the past 25 years, they claimed, have sucked high-wage jobs out of the country. Therefore, the United States should either renegotiate or abrogate these pacts, or add an import tax to return those high-paying jobs to the United States. Hilary’s solution was much, much simpler. It followed a long-established approach to problem solving called Occam’s razor. Always begin with the simplest solution to any challenge, from the purchase of a new refrigerator to the search for dark matter. Move to more complex analyses only if the simplest fails.

      The simplest solution to the problem of low wages is higher wages.

      Increasing the minimum wage, Hilary’s solution (and Bernie’s, too, at least in part), is by far the simplest answer. It’s nevertheless flawed, for what the Government giveth, the Government can taketh back. It already has. An historical chart of the minimum wage, reckoned in constant dollars, reveals the minimum wage’s high point to have been reached almost fifty years ago, in 1968. And while it’s risen somewhat over the Obama years, the hourly wage paid to minimum-wage workers is now approximately a third lower than it was in the late 60’s.

       Still using Occam’s razor, I propose an overhaul of the nation’s labor laws (the basic legislation governing the right to organize dates to the Wagner Act, passed in 1935) designed to give workers a chance to help themselves through unionization. I’m late to this party, however, because the Employee Free Choice Act has been waiting in the wings since 2007 when it was first introduced. The Dems in the House passed the overhaul while George Bush was President, but it did not survive a Republican filibuster in the Senate. No big deal because Bush, rather than sign the bill, would have sold his first-born daughter at a Taliban slave auction.

      Revived in 2009 with Barack Obama’s strong support, the Employee Free Choice Act again passed in the House, only to be sabotaged in the Senate by a small number of Democratic Senators. Led by Ben Nelson, the man who betrayed Obama on the public option, the list also included Arlen Specter, Blanche Lincoln, Tom Harper, Claire McCaskill and Diane Feinstein. (Yes, that Dianne Feinstein, the great liberal.) Given the defections, the bill could not overcome the inevitable Republican filibuster. It never came up for a vote.

      More to come.

LEGALIZE BRIBERY, ANYONE?

     This morning, MSNBC displayed a list of the thirteen Republican Senators who drafted Trumpcare and the contributions they’ve received from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries from 2010 thru 2016, a single election cycle for Senators. The numbers were assembled by MapLight.org.

Orrin Hatch: $471,560; Mitch McConnell: $433,400; Rob Portman: $382,400; Pat Toomey: $354,616; Lamar Alexander: $228,100; John Cornyn: $180,050; Cory Gardner: $151,850; John Barasso: $149,750; Mike Enzi: $$146,600; John Thune: $123,400; Mike Lee: $66,750; Ted Cruz: $58,895; Tom Cotton: $28,941.

     Grand Total: $2,776,012.