Friday, May 31, 2024
The Rule of Law Prevails: Trump Guilty on All Counts
On Thursday, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his prosecutorial team, after a grueling trial punctuated by multiple contempt citations against the defendant, former president Donald Trump, obtained guilty verdicts on 34 counts of falsifying business records. Credit goes to the jury of 12 ordinary Americans who heard the evidence and applied the law. The charges were straightforward, not obtuse as critics claimed. (Similar business records cases have been brought against hundreds of other defendants.) And, as Bragg promised, the evidence was overwhelming — coming from witnesses ranging from David Pecker to Hope Hicks to, yes, Michael Cohen. A boatload of documents confirmed the “catch and kill” scheme designed to pull the wool over voters’ eyes in 2016.
Trump’s lawyers were hampered by a client who apparently insisted his counsel make absurd claims (e.g., he had no affair with Stormy Daniels). In enticing the jurors to make unreasonable leaps of logic and ignore testimony, as well as Trump’s own admissions in a civil suit, Todd Blanche likely lost their trust. Blanche, for example, argued the payments to Cohen were for legal fees despite replete documentary evidence and Trump’s admission that they were reimbursement for payments to Daniels.
The flock of pundits who insisted trying Trump was constitutionally untoward and strategically unwise now look foolish and, worse, clueless about the importance of holding Trump accountable for his crimes. One cannot defend the rule of law while simultaneously pleading for a different standard of prosecution for former presidents. . . . . . (Even if the scandal-plagued Supreme Court were to extend immunity to Trump in the Jan. 6, 2021, case, the ruling would be inapplicable to the Manhattan case concerning personal matters that took place before Trump took office.)
[W]hen the federal courts are paralyzed with partisan judges, a state criminal court verdict reaffirms the Founders’ wisdom in devising a system of government with two sets of courts. On the federal side, Trump toady and U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon and the right-wing partisan majority on the Supreme Court (besmirched by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s unforgivable breach of impartiality) seem to have ground the courts to a halt.
Federalism is designed precisely for this dilemma: If justice is thwarted in one system, it can be pursued in the other. Bragg has bolstered democracy with one guardrail — the state courts — in the face of the collapse of another, the federal courts.
[S]entencing hearing will take place this summer. Possible punishment for Trump runs the gamut from probation or community service to real prison time: up to four years’ imprisonment on each charge. Do not think the latter is out of the realm of possibility. Judges have assigned prison time in cases like Trump’s — approximately 55 times, according to Trump criminal trial guru Norm Eisen.
One factor weighing in favor of at least some prison time is the nature of the crime. . . . Moreover, Trump’s character and past conduct become relevant in sentencing. Justice Juan Merchan can consider all of the following: civil verdicts against Trump for raping and defaming E. Jean Carroll and for fraudulently inflating real estate values; New York’s civil action that fined Trump $2 million and shut down his charity over the mishandling of funds; Trump’s other pending criminal matters; his frequent “predictions” of violence if he does not win the election; and his 10 contempt citations in this trial.
Trump’s role in the violent Jan. 6 insurrection (which 57 senators found warranted an impeachment conviction), persistent lies about the gag order, attacks on the judge and track record of stirring up mobs may come back to haunt him. And finally, since Trump still takes no responsibility for his crimes and expresses no remorse, Merchan may conclude that only prison time would be an effective punishment, just as he concluded jail time might be necessary to curb Trump’s contempt of court.
The conviction comes at a critical moment in the campaign, and not just because polling suggests it will influence a significant share of swing voters. Trump’s entire persona is built around the facade that he is a powerful strongman, impervious to attacks and solely capable of defending his followers. Now he stands for election as a convict, a weak man too cowardly to take the stand who was bested by a local district attorney. The totalitarian edifice looks pockmarked.
The only thing that could upend the exquisite implementation of rule of law would be the election of this felon. Trump would then insist that the will of the voters and his right to assume power override any state sentence. His docile Supreme Court majority would likely agree. If the American people elect an insurrectionist and, now, a felon, the Oval Office will be occupied by a convict already talking about a “third term.” That such a horrifying outcome remains possible should petrify democracy defenders.
Thursday, May 30, 2024
A Stark Message to the Press, Third Party Voters and Non-Voters
A skilled graduation speaker who poetically delivers life lessons and imparts insightful advice can leave me teary-eyed. Unfortunately, this graduation season — rife with protests, walkouts and cancellations — deprived many graduates of an inspiring rite of passage. There was one standout: Celebrated filmmaker and chronicler of American history Ken Burns delivered a powerful address at Brandeis University to a rapt audience.
Burns offered some elegantly phrased life advice — “Leadership is humility and generosity squared.”. . . . “There’s only us. There is no them. Whenever someone suggests to you, whomever it may be in your life, that there is a them, run away.” He added, “Othering is the simplistic binary way to make and identify enemies, but it is also the surest way to your own self-imprisonment.” His plea to oppose repression everywhere earned sustained applause.
His most compelling words came when he departed, apologetically, from his usual position of neutrality. “Do not be seduced by easy equalization,” he said. “There is nothing equal about this equation. We are at an existential crossroads in our political and civic lives.” He bluntly warned that “the presumptive Republican nominee is the opioid of all opioids,” a drug meant to alleviate pain whereby “you end up re-enslaved with an even bigger problem, a worse affliction and addiction, a bigger delusion.”
The choice this election, he explained, boils down to this: “There is only the perpetuation, however flawed and feeble you might perceive it, of our fragile 249-year-old experiment, or the entropy that will engulf and destroy us if we take the other route.” If we choose former president Donald Trump, then we will see what happens when “the checks of conscience are thrown aside and a deformed picture of the soul is revealed.” There is no third choice.
These sobering words should resonate widely. They should be essential reading/listening for traditional media, as well as for voters who know the presumptive nominee is the “opioid of all opioids” but threaten to stay home or throw away their votes.
The media should collectively recognize that the pretense that “an unequal equation is equal” amounts to an in-kind gift to authoritarians who crave the appearance of normalcy and respectability. Sharp contrasts and moral judgment are kryptonite to MAGA forces, who would love nothing better than months more of fantasy politics. . . .
The media would do well to focus on the authoritarian threat. A candidate such as Trump, who lies about his crowd size, the results of past elections and the sentiments of certain voters, intends to convey inevitability, strength and the futility of resistance. Trump assiduously follows the totalitarian playbook to demoralize opponents and condition the public to believe only he can possibly win. . . . . The press can avoid Trump’s manipulation by explaining the playbook and refusing to present his braggadocio as fact.
Voters must grow up — fast. Burns’s exhortation that “the kinship of the soul begins with your own at times withering self-examination” should sound an alarm for voters (particularly 20-somethings at elite schools) who condemned Biden’s handling of the Gaza war and vowed to withhold their votes, essentially abdicating the moral decision Burns describes.
How did they arrive at this nihilist position that thrills Trumpists? The Biden team’s handling of the nearly insoluble conflict in Gaza apparently failed to meet some leftists’ elevated standards. With no realistic idea how to end the crisis, they instead choose to bathe in indignation. They vow to let Trump win because the Biden administration has no magic wand to end the suffering. The mind-set is as illogical as it is morally perverse.
A similar phenomenon exists on the right, where some wizened baby boomers turn up their noses at Biden. They cannot bring themselves to vote for someone with the audacity to raise taxes on the rich, alleviate student loan debt or create incentives for green energy. The lack of proportion should deeply disturb democracy defenders. (How big must a tax deduction be to trade it for democracy?) The four-times-indicted former president is unfit, but they would rather write in a candidate than choose Biden. They throw away a vote but maintain the facade of responsible citizenship.
If voters on the right and left renounce “withering self-examination,” they at least might imagine how they would fancy a fascist regime under Trump, who promises to suspend the Constitution and round up millions, talks of blood purity and vows to seek revenge on enemies. The vote-withholders need not go back to research European fascism of the 1930s. Current examples of countries descending into authoritarianism include Hungary, Turkey, India and Belarus.
The pretense of elections remains, but unchecked executive power, ethnic violence, religious discrimination, loss of reproductive freedom, endemic corruption and erosion of civil liberties define politics. (And if Biden’s foreign policy is not their cup of tea, critics might ruminate about a foreign policy in alignment with Vladimir Putin.)
Democracy defenders should hope the essence of Burns’s message reaches beyond Brandeis. The Biden campaign seems to get it. Biden recently implored the press corps to “rise up to the seriousness of the moment. Move past the horse-race numbers and the gotcha moments and the distractions … and focus on what’s actually at stake.” . . . . Biden’s message, like Burns’s, is simple: This is the existential choice of our time. There is nothing equal about this equation.
Wednesday, May 29, 2024
Americans' Beliefs About the Economy Are Mostly Wrong
Not to beat a dead horse, but despite all the true and accurate economic data, many Americans continue to wrongly belief that America's economy is stagnant or, even worse, in a recession. Some of this phenomenon is due to fake "news" outlets like Fox News. a/k/a Faux News, as well as its imitators, constantly disseminate lies and falsehoods in order to pander to the MAGA base and, of course, ingratiate themselves with Der Trumpenfuhrer, the king of liars. In the right wing bubble, the truth and/or anything that might be positive about Joe Biden and Democrats in general is suppressed if not totally erased. The problem with reporting also falls on much of the mainstream media which is always more eager to report bad news in its never ending quest for sensation and/or controversy to drive up clicks and page views. The result is that many less politically engaged Americans or those only watching right wing propaganda outlets are clueless on the true state of America's economy as laid out in a column in the Washington Post. Here are excerpts:
Nearly everything Americans believe about the economy is wrong, according to a recent Harris-Guardian poll. And that’s pretty much everyone’s fault.
The poll, conducted earlier this month, found that perceptions of the U.S. economy are often at odds with reality. For instance, most Americans (55 percent) think the economy is shrinking, with about the same share saying we’re in a recession.
In reality, the U.S. economy has been growing consistently for nearly two years, even after accounting for inflation. By virtually every benchmark, in fact, we’re exceeding growth expectations. The U.S. economy has been outperforming other advanced economies. We’re also doing better than pre-pandemic forecasts had situated us by now, both in terms of gross domestic product and the number of jobs out there. This generally isn’t true elsewhere in the world.
The poll also found that roughly half (49 percent) of Americans believe the unemployment rate is at a 50-year high. Reality is, again, nearly the opposite: Unemployment has been below 4 percent for more than two years now, the longest stretch of time it’s stayed that low since the Nixon administration.
Roughly half of respondents (49 percent) also said stock markets were down since the beginning of the year. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 is up more than 10 percent, and major equity-market indexes have recently touched all-time highs.
Why are our perceptions so distorted?
To be fair, some economic jargon means specific things to economists but is used differently by normal people. This could explain some of the disconnect.
[E]conomists define “inflation” as growth in prices, not the level of prices. So if prices skyrocketed last year, then flattened out this year, economists would describe inflation as currently low. A normal person, however, might still complain about “inflation” since the level of prices remains higher than it was not long ago.
This is essentially what’s going on right now. Inflation reached its fastest pace in a generation back in mid-2022 and has generally been slowing since then. Price growth is still elevated, so the problem isn’t over. But to economists (including those at the Federal Reserve), a lot of progress has been made.
For normies who might be (hopelessly) expecting prices to revert to pre-covid levels, however, there is little to celebrate. . . . . Nearly three-quarters of Americans think inflation is increasing when it has definitely slowed down.
But none of this explains why the public appears so wrong about more straightforward metrics, such as whether unemployment is at historic highs or whether the stock market has risen or fallen recently.
Many commentators (particularly those on the left, who are furious about how these misperceptions reflect upon President Biden) blame the media for the public’s economic illiteracy or for leaving the public with the impression that economic conditions are terrible. I agree that we journalists generally give more play to bad economic numbers than good ones. We’ve also done a lousy job of helping the public understand what the right benchmarks are
If the media has a bad-news bias, that’s because our audiences have a bad-news bias, too.
People are more likely to click, watch, listen to and share content that induces outrage. This human predisposition toward negativity is not unique to economic news, nor news in general. For decades, social scientists have documented a “negativity bias” in how humans process and gravitate toward information. Journalists respond to those incentives, particularly when we have dwindling resources and are fighting for an audience.
Social media and political echo chambers then amplify our biases for negative news, particularly when consumers see developments that also align with their other preferences.
So by all means, tell your preferred political team to highlight their wins; and pressure those of us in the media to do better. But the most useful thing you personally can do to help the public be more informed about good news, on the economy or anything else? Reward it with your attention.
Too many Americans do not pay attention and watch outlets that reinforce their prejudices instead of looking at numerous sources to determine the truth.
Tuesday, May 28, 2024
The Looming Cost and Stench of Climate Change Denial
This may sound a bit weird, but when I think about my adolescent years, I sometimes associate them with the faint smell of sewage.
You see, when I was in high school, my family lived on the South Shore of Long Island, where few homes had sewer connections. Most had septic tanks, and there always seemed to be an overflowing tank somewhere upwind.
Most of Nassau County eventually got sewered. But many American homes, especially in the Southeast, aren’t connected to sewer lines, and more and more septic tanks are overflowing, on a scale vastly greater than what I remember from my vaguely smelly hometown — which is both disgusting and a threat to public health.
The cause? Climate change. Along the Gulf and South Atlantic coasts, The Washington Post reported last week, “sea levels have risen at least six inches since 2010.” This may not sound like much, but it leads to rising groundwater and elevated risks of overflowing tanks.
The emerging sewage crisis is only one of many disasters we can expect as the planet continues to warm, and nowhere near the top of the list. But it seems to me to offer an especially graphic illustration of two points. First, the damage from climate change is likely to be more severe than even pessimists have tended to believe. Second, mitigation and adjustment — which are going to be necessary, because we’d still be headed for major effects of climate change even if we took immediate action to greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions — will probably be far more difficult, as a political matter, than it should be.
On the first point: Estimating the costs of climate change and, relatedly, the costs polluters impose every time they emit another ton of carbon dioxide requires fusing results from two disciplines. On one side, we need physical scientists to figure out how much greenhouse gas emissions will warm the planet, how this will change weather patterns and so on. On the other, we need economists to estimate how these physical changes will affect productivity, health care costs and more.
Actually, there’s a third dimension: social and geopolitical risk. How, for example, will we deal with millions or tens of millions of climate refugees? But I don’t think anyone knows how to quantify those risks.
There has, of course, been a decades-long campaign aiming to discredit climate research and, in some instances, defame individual climate scientists. But if you step back from the smears, you realize that climatology has been one of history’s great analytical triumphs. Climate scientists correctly predicted, decades in advance, an unprecedented rise in global temperatures. They even appear to have gotten the magnitude more or less right.
The economic side of the effort looks flakier. That’s not because economists haven’t tried. . . . . I’ve long been worried that these models understate the economic costs of climate change, because so many things you weren’t thinking of can go wrong. The prospect of part of America awash in sewage certainly wasn’t on my list.
There has been a trend in recent studies to mark up estimates of the damage from climate change. The uncertainty remains huge, but it’s a good guess that things will be even worse than you thought.
So what are we going to do about it? Even if we were to take drastic steps to reduce emissions right now, many of the consequences of past emissions, including much bigger increases in sea level than we’ve seen so far, are already, as it were, baked in.
So we’re going to have to take a wide range of steps to mitigate the damage — including expanding sewer systems to limit the rising tide of, um, sludge.
But will we take those steps? Climate denial was originally all about fossil fuel interests, and to some extent it still is. But it has also become a front in the culture war, with politicians like Ron DeSantis of Florida — who happens to be the governor of one of the states at greatest immediate risk — apparently deciding that even mentioning climate change is woke.
Now imagine the collision between that kind of politics and the urgent need for substantial public spending, on everything from sea walls to sewer systems, to limit climate damage. Spending on that scale will almost surely require new tax revenue. How quickly do you think right-wing culture warriors will agree to that?
So I’m very worried about the climate future. We probably won’t do enough to limit emissions; President Biden has done far more than any of his predecessors, but it’s still not enough, and Donald Trump has promised oil executives that if he wins, he will reverse much of what Biden has done. Beyond that, we’re unlikely to do enough to limit the damage.
In short, it’s not hard to see some terrible outcomes in the not-too-distant future, even before full global catastrophe arrives.
Monday, May 27, 2024
Russia's Disinformation Campaign in Europe IS a Warning for America
In 2022, European monitors who track Russian disinformation spotted an ambitious online influence operation they called Doppelganger. The Moscow-run effort cloned the websites of legitimate newspapers, magazines and news services, including Britain’s Guardian and Germany’s Bild, posted replicas under similar domain names and filled them with Kremlin propaganda.
The campaign was not shocking, given Russia’s kitchen-sink efforts to manipulate Western public opinion. More surprising is that, at least two years after they were detected, Doppelganger’s phony sites continue popping up around the internet like mushrooms after a cloudburst, despite ongoing efforts to close them down.
The sites’ persistence reflects the flood of Russian interference — and the near-impossibility of monitoring it, let alone stopping it — ahead of elections next month for the European Parliament. They’re also a foretaste of what Americans can expect in the fall’s presidential contest, in which Moscow will try to amplify the venomous clamor of U.S. politics.
Social media has made the distribution of disinformation and propaganda almost free. Now generative AI has slashed the cost of producing it in the run-up to the E.U. parliamentary voting between June 6 and 9, when more than 200 million voters across the bloc’s 27 member states are expected at the polls.
The barrage of disinformation, manipulation and malice is ubiquitous. A website impersonating France’s Defense Ministry announced 200,000 French recruits would be sought for service in Ukraine. A well-known German broadcast journalist known as “the Putin connoisseur,” and sympathetic to Moscow, was revealed to have been paid more than $600,000 by a Russian billionaire allied with the Kremlin. Belgian, Polish and Czech authorities say they have uncovered evidence that the Kremlin was greasing the palms of European parliamentarians.
Previous elections have taken place amid the toxic torrent of Russian meddling. What’s different this year is the war in Ukraine has raised the stakes for Vladimir Putin — and the possible payoff, in terms of subverting Western backing for Kyiv.
The European ballot will not yield ironclad evidence that Russian scheming has tilted the vote against mainstream parties, or strengthened ones sympathetic to Moscow and opposed to further Western backing for Ukraine. Polls forecast those blocs, especially on the populist right, will make gains, but it will be impossible to say how far Moscow’s mischief moved the needle.
But as a trial run for the U.S. elections this fall, and a test of democratic accountability, the E.U. elections are already raising red flags. Specifically, they are laying bare the barriers facing governments, academics and civic groups in discovering what Russia is up to.
[D]espite a new E.U. law intended to ensure that tech giants are transparent and vigilant, the signs so far are that government agencies and civil society groups are not getting the information they need to assess Russia’s disinformation and interference.
Last month, E.U. officials opened investigations into Facebook and Instagram — on top of an existing probe of X — on suspicions they are not meeting their obligation to contain the metastasis of lies and manipulation. Those rules took effect this year under the bloc’s new Digital Services Act; failing to obey them could mean stiff fines.
Under Elon Musk’s ownership, X last year began charging more than $40,000 monthly for data access to accounts and posts that was free before the platform’s rebranding. That sum is beyond the means of most academics, researchers and nongovernmental groups. Meta has also announced it will shutter its own data-tracking tool, known as CrowdTangle, which has provided analysts with critical insights.
Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of the EU DisinfoLab, the civil society group that revealed the Doppelganger operation’s existence, told me its resilience and persistence, even after being exposed, is a worrying sign.
The question, Alaphilippe said, isn’t whether Russia is winning the propaganda war in Europe. “It’s whether democracy is up to the challenge of holding everyone accountable. Do we have the democratic safeguards?”
If the answer in Europe is no — which looks increasingly likely — then the picture will look even grimmer elsewhere. Especially in the United States, where dysfunctional politics and First Amendment safeguards make monitoring Russian mischief even harder.
Be very afraid for the future. Even now I continue to be shocked by Republican friends and acquaintances who are only to open to consuming Russian propaganda and repeating it on social media.
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