On Friday, Manafort, who was chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign from June to August 2016, pleaded guilty in federal district court in Washington to two charges of conspiracy against the United States—one involving a lobbying scheme that involved financial crimes and foreign-agent registration violations, and the other involving witness tampering. In the course of his plea, Manafort also admitted guilt on bank-fraud charges on which a federal jury in Virginia hung last month…
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The grain of truth in Sanders’s claim is that most, though not all, of the criminal conduct to which Manafort admitted preceded his work for the Trump campaign, and none directly implicates the campaign itself or Trump. But it is only a grain. For one thing, Trump constantly boasted of hiring the “best people”—and even in March 2016, when Manafort first joined the campaign, it was clear that he was superlative chiefly in influence peddling on behalf of unsavory characters close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. His questionable reputation and murky relationships with former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska were matters of public knowledge long before the campaign began.
Indeed, though the specific crimes to which Manafort has now pleaded were not yet public, the most rudimentary vetting would have flagged him as a person of particularly high risk. As Franklin Foer noted in the Atlantic last month, Sen. John McCain rejected Manafort’s involvement in the 2008 Republican National Convention because of his disreputable ties even back then, before his involvement with Yanukovych. Trump hired him anyway.
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In this conduct, Manafort was not alone. He is the third Trump campaign official to plead guilty to having undisclosed relationships with foreign actors that he was obliged by law to make public. According to documents filed by the special counsel, Michael Flynn, Rick Gates and Paul Manafort, each of whom served in an official capacity on the campaign, failed to disclose ties to a foreign power in violation of FARA. Three points, as they say, make a pattern—and this pattern is seriously troubling. Surrounding the man who became president were multiple individuals—including his campaign chairman, his deputy campaign chairman and his campaign adviser—who surreptitiously represented foreign interests within the United States. They are also individuals whose potential criminal exposure, in the form of their failure to register under FARA, was known to foreign interests in a position to use it as leverage. One of them—Flynn—went on to join the White House as national security adviser.
All of which is to say that the White House doth protest too much. While Manafort’s plea, in contrast to Michael Cohen’s last month, does not implicate the president or the campaign in any felonies, it is not entirely separate from them either.
How to Get the Kavanaugh Hearings Right →
Here are some basic ground rules the committee should follow:
Refrain from pitting the public interest in confronting sexual harassment against the need for a fair confirmation hearing. Our interest in the integrity of the Supreme Court and in eliminating sexual misconduct, especially in our public institutions, are entirely compatible. Both are aimed at making sure that our judicial system operates with legitimacy.
Select a neutral investigative body with experience in sexual misconduct cases that will investigate the incident in question and present its findings to the committee. Outcomes in such investigations are more reliable and less likely to be perceived as tainted by partisanship. Senators must then rely on the investigators’ conclusions, along with advice from experts, to frame the questions they ask Judge Kavanaugh and Dr. Blasey. Again, the senators’ fact-finding roles must guide their behavior. The investigators’ report should frame the hearing, not politics or myths about sexual assault.
Do not rush these hearings. Doing so would not only signal that sexual assault accusations are not important — hastily appraising this situation would very likely lead to facts being overlooked that are necessary for the Senate and the public to evaluate. That the committee plans to hold a hearing this coming Monday is discouraging. Simply put, a week’s preparation is not enough time for meaningful inquiry into very serious charges.
Finally, refer to Christine Blasey Ford by her name. She was once anonymous, but no longer is. Dr. Blasey is not simply “Judge Kavanaugh’s accuser.” Dr. Blasey is a human being with a life of her own. She deserves the respect of being addressed and treated as a whole person.
"But why would someone wait so long to report their rape?" →
And that showed me what they REALLY thought about abuse and what they REALLY thought about victims, when sexual abuse wasn't an easy thing to condemn. I knew it meant if faced with a choice between a survivor and their favorite "whatever", they'd attack the survivor.
I watched them denigrate the victim's character, motives, truthfulness, and value some political, sport or ministry goal more than the truth. Completely blinded to even the possibility it could be true. It felt like a knife wound every time I saw it.
And I'm watching it again. Conservatives, you are yelling from the rooftops that you don't care what the truth is, and you aren't safe, and you'll attack a victim any time it would cost you to care. And that's shameful. You can, and should, do better.
Conservatives, you want to be the party of family values? You want to be pro-woman and pro-child? Then start by taking claims of sexual assault seriously instead of using poor logic, straw men and ad hominems to avoid the issue. Otherwise, you are part of the cultural problem.
And yes, I'm saying that as a conservative evangelical (in case anyone has missed that). Why? Because those closest to the abuse and enabling are the only ones able to change things. What you do when it's in your own community is what makes the difference.
What kind of person makes false rape accusations? →
Given the recent reporting on Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh’s alleged attempted rape, here’s some good information to keep in mind. Fake rape accusations are pretty rare, and rarer the higher the profile of the person being accused (as the person doing the accusing will have to endure an enormous backlash). Unless Ford is mentally ill, she’s likely telling the truth, and Kavanaugh’s history needs to be scrutinized.
Furthermore, in the most detailed study ever conducted of sexual assault reports to police, undertaken for the British Home Office in the early 2000s, out of 216 complaints that were classified as false, only 126 had even gotten to the stage where the accuser lodged a formal complaint. Only 39 complainants named a suspect. Only six cases led to an arrest, and only two led to charges being brought before they were ultimately deemed false. (Here, as elsewhere, it has to be assumed that some unknown percentage of the cases classified as false actually involved real rapes; what they don’t involve is countless innocent men’s lives being ruined.)
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In every academic study, one of the most common kinds of false accuser is a teenage girl who tells her parents she was raped to avoid getting in trouble. Unwanted pregnancy is sometimes cited by such girls, but the reason can also be trivial; the phrase “missed curfew” shows up with disturbing frequency in these cases. As a rule, it’s the parents who insist on getting police involved…
Another kind of case which evaporates rapidly is that of a person who falsely reports a rape in the hope of getting needed medical care or psychiatric medication; in one study, six of the 55 reports classified as false by a police department in one year fit this description. Like the teens who missed their curfew, these false accusers have no interest in pursuing charges after the lie has served its purpose.
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When one looks at a series of fabricated sexual assaults, on the other hand, patterns immediately begin to emerge. The most striking of these is that, almost invariably, adult false accusers who persist in pursuing charges have a previous history of bizarre fabrications or criminal fraud. Indeed, they’re often criminals whose family and friends are also criminals; broken people trapped in chaotic lives.
But while false accusers often have similar histories, they have various motives. These can be divided into roughly four categories: personal gain, mental illness, revenge, and the need for an alibi.
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A final note about who makes false accusations: While popular conceptions of this issue center on female mendacity, clearly many of these stories involve male accusers. Given the fact that men, too, can crave revenge and have personality disorders, this should be obvious. If it’s counter-intuitive, it’s because the issue has consistently been framed as one of gender warfare. But the truth is that false rape accusations aren’t salvos in any political struggle. They’re crimes, mostly perpetrated by the same men and women who commit other categories of crime, and for similar reasons.
Neither are false accusations the result of miscommunications taking place in a murky world of casual hook-ups and heavy drinking. False accusers almost never tell stories that could, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as an innocent misunderstanding. In a study of false rape claims made to the Los Angeles Police Department, 78% involved claims of aggravated rape—assaults involving a gun or knife, gang rapes, and/or attacks resulting in injuries.
Most of all, it should be remembered that a false accuser is a person making up a story to serve some goal. Whether the impetus is personal gain, factitious disorder, the need for an alibi, or revenge, it’s crucial to the accuser that their story be taken seriously. For this reason, it’s radically unlikely—and in practice does not happen—that a false accuser would invent a story where the issue of consent could seem ambiguous.
It’s necessary to add an important caveat: The same kinds of people who are most likely to become false accusers are also frequently targeted by predators. Teenagers, people with severe mental illness, people with criminal records—all are vulnerable to rapists, who often have a very keen sense of which victims are most likely to be mistrusted by authorities. Although the accounts of these complainants need careful scrutiny, police should take them more seriously, not less seriously, than they currently do. The lesson to be drawn here is not that any individual’s story of sexual assault should be discounted; it’s that the vast majority of rape reports can be believed.
When a woman says she’s been brutally raped by seven men at a public party on a bed of broken glass, as the UVA accuser did, and when that woman has a history of strange lies, as the UVA accuser also did, there’s nothing wrong with being skeptical. But if a woman without any history of dramatic falsehoods says she went home with a man and, after they’d kissed a while consensually, he held her down and forced her into sex—in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, you can just assume it’s true. This is not because of any political dictum like “Believe women.” It’s because this story looks exactly like tens of thousands of date rapes that happen every year, and nothing at all like a false rape accusation.
Podcast recommendation: Trump, Inc. →
The Trump administration will probably go down as one of the most corrupt in US history. This podcast series from WNYC and ProPublica investigates the public records on Trump and his family’s businesses (and various investments). Each episode looks at a different business, deal, venture, etc., and tries to follow the money. There’s a lot of very good evidence that the Trumps and Kushners launder an incredible amount of money (apparently real estate and casinos are very good for that!). And they’ve gotten away with most of it for decades. No-one should be surprised the country’s falling apart, when the law rarely applies to the wealthy. (And we can blame the last several administrations for slowly eroding our legal protections.)
American Schools Now Officially Have More Cops Than Counselors →
Our schools have more police officers than counseling staff. Some schools have an assigned officer, but not a single counselor. This indicates an insane and immoral misallocation of very limited school resources. As a society, we need to value mental health far higher than we currently do, and it’s pretty obvious we’re missing the mark based on these numbers.
How many “behavioral incidents” in schools could have been mitigated by having more trained counseling staff? Instead, because of media- (and lobbyist-) fueled hsytery over (thankfully rare) school shootings, we’re spending more and more on security and in-school police, which has created its own problems. The constant push for more security increases stress and fear at schools, making behavioral issues worse. And the introduction of “school resource officers” has meant that we’re now jailing kids for behavior that used to result in punishment like detention (and there’s a lot of evidence that this ramp-up in legal punishment isn’t racially neutral, either).
In 2012, police arrested a student in Milledgeville, Georgia. The student was crying and flailing in the principal’s office and was inconsolable. The student was charged with battery. The school was Creekside Elementary School. The student was a six-year-old girl in kindergarten.
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As school behavior is increasingly the purview of criminal prosecution, fewer counselors and mental health professionals are around to help students, according to findings from a series of studies conducted by UCLA and the American Civil Liberties Union.
The American School Counselor Association recommends one counselor per 250 students, but 60 percent of schools did not meet this standard. Instead, the average is one counselor serving 444 students. But for 1.7 million students, there are no counselors, only cops.
According to the ACLU, schools nationally reported 27,000 sworn law enforcement officers, but only 23,000 social workers. And this has caused the issue of school discipline to change the scope of punishment from detention to prosecution.
Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not.
The headline is taken from the New York Times article quoted below, but I thought it fitting to keep. The article talks about how wages should be much higher, by various historical measures, and how the vast majority of workers have basically been cheated out of wages. But there’s another point that the headline could refer to: in the (hopefully) long span of human history, “jobs” as currently conceived could end up being a historical anomaly. Someday we may not have to “work.” Nevertheless, addressing more pressing concerns…
The immediate Post-War era was a unique event in human history so far. To those who survived it, it was clear that World War II happened in part because power had concentrated too much: anyone who wasn’t part of the elite was treated as expendable, and the downtrodden masses threw in behind anyone that promised them a better deal. In some countries that meant warmongering autocrats.
The Great Compromise that followed the war laid down a path to ensuring peace, through ensuring a large middle class: much higher taxes on the wealthy, to constrain their power and pay for new social support services so fewer people would fall into permanent poverty; and the deliberate support and creation of middle skill/middle wage jobs, so one’s wealth was largely determined by how hard you wanted to work (well, if you were white; extreme racism was still pervasive). This arrangement lasted the better part of two decades, and the economy flourished. In fact, economists of the time looked at the trend and speculated that by the new millennium, the country would be so rich that everyone would only have to work a few hours a day to maintain a middle class lifestyle. But that assumption rested on the fact that wages for all jobs were growing with national productivity (as they had for the basically the whole course of human history). Unfortunately, that wouldn’t last.
Almost as soon as the new policies were implemented, greedy sociopaths began undermining it, slowly building power and rigging the legal system and economy in their favor once again. We’ve had steady economic growth ever since (excepting a few recessions, and the big housing bubble, which were temporary setbacks), but during the 70s, wages stopped rising along with national production. While productivity has continued to grow, profits have steadily gone to fewer and fewer at the very top, instead of being broadly shared as either higher wages or more free time. The rich grow richer, and everyone else slowly sinks deeper and deeper into debt, as wages aren’t keeping up with inflation.
No-one should wonder why our political system is so screwed up! Power (money) is again concentrated in too few hands. Some of them just don’t care about the rest of us and are fine if people die because they’re poor. But even those who do care can’t see the big picture (because we’re all just tiny humans, in our own worlds), nor should they be the only ones making decisions about how to handle all of the tough, complex issues. If we’re going to have a vibrant, free society, we’re going to have to literally spread the wealth around, and an obvious place to start is restoring the link between national wealth and wages, including boosting the minimum wage to its historical level.
Longer-term, though, we’ll still run into major issues if we remain wedded to the notion that traditional “low/middle/high skill” job categories should determine the level of one’s wage. Food for thought, for those skeptical of something even as simple as raising the minimum wage: what happens if/when robots are able to perform most menial and middle-skill jobs?
Some numbers on the decline of wages, from Matthew Desmond in the New York Times:
These days, we’re told that the American economy is strong. Unemployment is down, the Dow Jones industrial average is north of 25,000 and millions of jobs are going unfilled. But for people like Vanessa, the question is not, Can I land a job? (The answer is almost certainly, Yes, you can.) Instead the question is, What kinds of jobs are available to people without much education? By and large, the answer is: jobs that do not pay enough to live on.
In recent decades, the nation’s tremendous economic growth has not led to broad social uplift. Economists call it the “productivity-pay gap” — the fact that over the last 40 years, the economy has expanded and corporate profits have risen, but real wages have remained flat for workers without a college education. Since 1973, American productivity has increased by 77 percent, while hourly pay has grown by only 12 percent. If the federal minimum wage tracked productivity, it would be more than $20 an hour, not today’s poverty wage of $7.25.
…Today, 41.7 million laborers — nearly a third of the American work force — earn less than $12 an hour, and almost none of their employers offer health insurance.
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America prides itself on being the country of economic mobility, a place where your station in life is limited only by your ambition and grit. But changes in the labor market have shrunk the already slim odds of launching yourself from the mailroom to the boardroom. For one, the job market has bifurcated, increasing the distance between good and bad jobs. Working harder and longer will not translate into a promotion if employers pull up the ladders and offer supervisory positions exclusively to people with college degrees. Because large companies now farm out many positions to independent contractors, those who buff the floors at Microsoft or wash the sheets at the Sheraton typically are not employed by Microsoft or Sheraton, thwarting any hope of advancing within the company. Plus, working harder and longer often isn’t even an option for those at the mercy of an unpredictable schedule. Nearly 40 percent of full-time hourly workers know their work schedules just a week or less in advance. And if you give it your all in a job you can land with a high-school diploma (or less), that job might not exist for very long: Half of all new positions are eliminated within the first year. According to the labor sociologist Arne Kalleberg, permanent terminations have become “a basic component of employers’ restructuring strategies.”
Amazon Isn’t Paying Its Electric Bills. You Might Be →
Amazon’s history is littered with crony capitalism. The company exists partially because states took a decade to finally get it to pay taxes, driving a lot of local retail out of business because of the unfair practice. Cties have recently been scrambling to outdo each other’s wild promises in order to get Amazon to build a new headquarters nearby (some are promising new access roads just for Amazon vehicles, or sweetheart zero-tax deals for the first few years, or new high density housing for its workers). And now we’re learning that it’s twisted state regulators’ arms to give it cheap electricity (passing the costs onto the rest of the residents in these states):
For a little while earlier this year, it seemed as though 87-year-old Rosie Thomas and her neighbors in the small town of Gainesville, Va., had beaten Amazon. Virginia’s largest utility, Dominion Energy Inc., had planned to run an aboveground power line straight through a Civil War battlefield—and Thomas’s property—to reach a nearby data center run by an Amazon.com Inc. subsidiary. After three years of petitions and protests in front of the gated data center, skirmishes punctuated by barking dogs and shooing police, Dominion agreed to bury that part of the line along a nearby highway, at an estimated cost of $172 million.
Within a month, however, the utility and state legislators had passed on the cost to Thomas and her fellow Virginians. The state’s House of Delegates approved Dominion’s proposal to raise the money needed for the Amazon line with an as-yet-unannounced monthly fee…
This sort of thing is becoming a pattern. Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing business, is its fastest-growing and most profitable division, but it comes with a lot of upfront infrastructure costs and ongoing expenses, the biggest of which is electricity…
Unlike tax incentives, which must eventually be disclosed to the public, the costs of electricity deals usually remain hidden, because they’re technically struck between companies. They do, however, require approval by state regulators. Although data centers typically yield few new jobs, politicians desperate to make up for fading manufacturing businesses have worked closely with utility companies to land Amazon data centers, using the company’s name as a shorthand for economic resurgence.
In Virginia, where Amazon’s Vadata Inc. is believed to operate at least 29 data centers and be planning 11 more, the company’s 78-page application for a special rate agreement has two versions—a heavily redacted public one and another under seal with state regulators.
Amazon has also negotiated an unknown rate discount with American Electric Power in Ohio, where it received $77 million in tax incentives for three data centers in 2016. Late last year, Amazon dangled 12 more in exchange for reduced electricity rates, and AEP exempted it from surcharges other Ohioans must pay. “That’s de facto cost-shifting,” says Ned Hill, an economist who teaches economic development policy at Ohio State University. “Other businesses and households in Ohio are now bearing all the costs of those riders.”…