newrepublic--2020-09-24--The World Is Finally Ready for Beverly Glenn-Copeland

The composer Beverly Glenn-Copeland weaves his way toward the stage , so slight and unassuming that he is barely noticed by the hipsters thronging the bar .
Dressed in a uniform of pressed chinos , neat tie , and a mile-wide smile , he looks out over the audience and says , “ Wow !
” under his breath , as if he can ’ t quite believe all the fuss is for him .
He seems more like an excited kid than a man in his mid-seventies .
His band , who are all 40-odd years his junior , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Glenn-Copeland lifts his arms toward the rapt crowd and sings “ Ever New , ” his ode to blooming flowers and regeneration , in a voice like summer rain itself .
Versions of this scene , from the 2019 Posy Dixon documentary Keyboard Fantasies , were meant to play out across the United States this year .
After his back catalog , spanning nearly a half-century , was discovered by a Japanese aficionado a few years ago , then reissued to great acclaim and wide appeal , this was the year that Glenn-Copeland @ @ @ @ @ @ @ supposed to tour the world and finally turn a profit .
Then the pandemic devastated that plan .
At the end of May , his daughter Faith started a GoFundMe page to help her parents finance their new home .
“ Covid threw a right-hand uppercut , ” Glenn-Copeland told me over the phone this week , from his home by the ocean on the east coast of Canada ’ s New Brunswick , across from Prince Edward Island .
“ And then , once I got off the floor , presented me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ known about.
” Fans , moved by the plight of this septuagenarian Black trans artist who had just been on the cusp of receiving his due , rushed to his aid , donating enough money to keep Glenn-Copeland afloat .
That Glenn-Copeland was buoyed by a younger generation is no coincidence .
He has known the indifference of their predecessors , as well as their prejudice , and now his time has come .
His life began in Philadelphia in 1944 , born to a talented pianist father and a mother who sang @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( then Beverly ) listened to whatever he could find on the radio and bought records galore , his tastes ranging across China , India , and different parts of Africa .
He received a classical education in music , and you can still hear that training in the sound of his voice , which has deepened over the years but retained the burnished , controlled vibrato he learned as a child .

He told his mother he was a boy at age three, and remembers “making muscles in the mirror” when all the girls were primping their hair. As he grew up, he said, “some of my subconscious, bit by bit, began to emerge.” He realized that the music he was drawn to, like West African drumming, related to different strands of his own DNA. “I said, ‘I see: This is the West African. This is the Irish and the Celt speaking here. This is the Indigenous part speaking here,’” referring to his father’s mother, who was raised Cherokee. In a 2017 interview, he recalled the first time he heard bagpipes, in Montreal. “I had never heard pipes before and I ran into the window and just burst into tears,” he said. “I almost passed out, it was so amazing what I was listening to. It struck such a deep chord. Unbeknownst to me, I had Celtic grandmothers.”
He told his mother he was a boy at age three, and remembers “making muscles in the mirror” when all the girls were primping their hair.
Glenn-Copeland received a scholarship to study music at McGill University in Montreal, where he was the first Black student in the faculty of music when he arrived in 1961. He lived in a women’s residency and was open about his relationships with women at a time when that was dangerous. Homosexuality was only decriminalized in Canada in 1969, and he describes his dorm-mates as “totally, totally freaked.” More importantly, “So was the assistant dean of women of the whole university. Not the dean of women, she wasn’t freaked at all—but the assistant dean of women didn’t know that.” When he eventually fled the women’s residency, he recalled with a plum-rich laugh, the dean of women ended up giving Glenn-Copeland and his then-girlfriend a bunch of furniture.
“I’m joshing about the whole thing now, but it was quite painful,” he said. “Especially because my parents were very involved at that point and worrying about me and thinking that I wasn’t going to be safe in society. And they were reading all of these psychological assessments [written] by psychiatrists, and believing it.” He didn’t come out as trans, he said, “until the society started having a bit of a conversation about the difference in folks.” He’s known he was trans since 1995, when he read a memoir on the beach in Cape Cod. As the writer described their earliest memories, Glenn-Copeland said, “I just sat up—because I was lying down. I just sat up and went, ‘Wait a minute. Those are my memories.’ And in that moment I went, ‘Oh, I get it. I’m transgendered. That’s what’s happened here, and there’s been no word for it. So how would I know what to call it myself?’”


newrepublic--2020-09-25--How to Make Progressivism Mean Something Again

In his book The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution , legal scholar and public policy analyst Ganesh Sitaraman writes the following : “ When it is used today , ‘ progressive ’ is not usually thought of as describing someone with a coherent worldview or philosophy .
Instead , it is generally thought of as a term to describe those who prefer not to be called ‘ liberal , ’ those who are on the far left side of the political spectrum , or those who are part of a conglomeration of center-left groups in American politics.
” Sitaraman is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has become virtually ubiquitous in contemporary American political discourse , is effectively meaningless : A word that carries several different and conflicting meanings has , essentially , no real meaning .
When I once argued this point to someone who heads up an organization with the word progressive in its title , he replied , “ Yes , that ’ s the beauty of it !
You can make it mean anything you want it to mean.
” The word progressive , which had lain dormant in American politics for several decades , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ synonym for liberal , after Ronald Reagan ’ s incessant derision of the term rendered liberals terrified to use it .
After the collapse of the Soviet Union , people who previously might have been proud to call themselves “ radicals ” suddenly became soi-disant progressives as well .
Generally left-leaning people whose politics were either amorphous or polymorphous appropriated the adjective , too .
Surely , however , it ’ s long past time for an American left to get serious about the meaning of the word its members routinely use to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ start looking for the meaning—the true and original meaning—of that term is in journalist Dan Kaufman ’ s book The Fall of Wisconsin .
It recounts how Republican Governor Scott Walker waged a systematic and highly successful campaign to undermine the political reforms achieved in Wisconsin in the early twentieth century under the auspices of the original Progressive Movement .
In order to tell that story , however , Kaufman needed to explain what the Progressive Movement in Wisconsin was all about .
Wisconsin ’ s foremost Progressive leader was the great Robert @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as congressman , governor , and U.S. senator .
La Follette built a veritable political machine in Wisconsin ; at its foundation were the state ’ s numerous Scandinavian immigrant communities .
The state ’ s Scandinavian immigrants , Kaufman explains , shared a value system that was both egalitarian and communitarian in essence—one that led them to establish agricultural cooperatives among themselves and strongly support Wisconsin ’ s nascent labor union movement , together with public institutions like the state university .
Walker , as governor , effectively destroyed Wisconsin ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to scrap the University of Wisconsin ’ s mission ( devised by La Follette ) of serving the wider public interest as well as its individual students .

As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, La Follette was mentored by its then president, John Bascom, who instilled in him a dedication to public service and a sense of society “as a living thing, a type of organism,” Kaufman writes. Bascom further believed that in order “to maintain its health, the state needed to foster social, moral, and economic harmony.” Achieving the latter, of course, would require a concerted effort to drastically compress the gross inequalities of the era, one of the Progressive Movement’s foremost goals.
Bascom’s mentoring also supplied the basis for La Follette’s best-known legacy: the so-called Wisconsin Idea, involving the application of academic knowledge to public policy. Kaufman presents the legendary conservationist Aldo Leopold as an exemplar of the Wisconsin Idea in action. During the New Deal, Leopold, a University of Wisconsin professor of game management, oversaw the federal reclamation of the Coon Valley, a farming area in west-central Wisconsin with radically depleted soil. The initiative may have been where Leopold began to formulate his famous land ethic, which might be framed as an extension of the communitarian ideal to the natural world. “A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it,” he wrote. “It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.” Leopold warned against the spread of industrial agriculture, with its capacity to pulverize the family farm communities of the state. His warnings went unheeded—and, quite ironically, Scott Walker was able to exploit the resulting bitterness felt throughout the farm towns of Wisconsin to get himself elected to office and destroy the state teachers’ union. Instead of focusing their ire on the factory-farming behemoths that had filched away their livelihoods, rural Wisconsinites directed their resentment toward their children’s teachers, whom they derided as time-serving public employees with cushy jobs and sumptuous retirement benefits that rural communities subsidized with their taxes, while other citizens enjoy neither job security nor generous pensions. They became Walker’s strongest base of support.
Leopold’s biographer, Curt Meine, remarked to Kaufman that he saw a balance of “self-interest and community interest” in the way Leopold died of heart failure while struggling to douse a fire on his neighbor’s land that could also have endangered his own property. Not at all coincidentally, in his new book, The Upswing (which I also discuss in this issue), Robert Putnam shows that the equilibrium between “respect for the individual and concern for the community,” which Alexis de Tocqueville defined as “self-interest, rightly understood,” was for him the cornerstone of Progressivism. The word progressive, therefore, should not be used as synonym for the term liberal, since liberalism concerns itself in the main with individual rights. Nor can it honestly be deployed as a cover for socialism, which points exclusively in the communitarian direction. To qualify as Progressive, a movement must keep individual liberty and communal liberty in balance.


newrepublic--2020-09-25--The Unbearable Realism of The Comey Rule

Many of us like our fiction to be realistic , with plausible scenarios and nuanced , recognizably human protagonists—and meanwhile we like our nonfiction to be outlandish , full of absurd plot twists and larger than life characters .
It ’ s not so much that we want fiction and nonfiction to converge in one place as that we want them to trade places , like ships passing in the night , each bound for the other ’ s point of origin .
This paradox was on my mind throughout the nearly four hours of Showtime ’ s two-part miniseries @ @ @ @ @ @ @ FBI Director James Comey ’ s bestselling 2018 memoir , which bears the more annoying title A Higher Loyalty : Truth , Lies , and Leadership .
To the best of my understanding , The Comey Rule is an accurate retelling of some well-documented and undeniably important historical events that took place between 2015 and 2017 .
It has a first-rate cast—including Jeff Daniels as Comey , Holly Hunter as Sally Yates , Michael Kelly as Andrew McCabe , Jonathan Banks as James Clapper , and a standout Brendon Gleeson as Donald Trump—and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , who is responsible for such artful adaptations of real events as Captain Phillips and the wonderful Shattered Glass ( which recounts a scandal at this very magazine ) .
And yet the events it depicts , all of which actually happened , nonetheless strain credulity , and watching them reproduced feels exhausting—more so than in other films based on recent events .
The question I kept asking myself was whether that was Ray ’ s fault or mine , and whether there ’ s any way to dramatize the story of Donald @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that doesn ’ t feel demeaning to everyone involved .
The first episode begins with Comey ’ s interview for the FBI director job with President Barack Obama ( Kingsley Ben-Adir ) and ends with Trump ’ s surprise win in November 2016 , just days after Comey chose to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton ’ s use of a private email server , which may well have swung the election outcome .
I found myself groaning through much of this , but it was difficult to parse how much of my @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as opposed to the excruciating calamity of the 2016 election .
I ’ m no fan of Clinton or her campaign—I supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary before dutifully voting for Clinton in the general—but that doesn ’ t make it any more enjoyable to be reminded how much national energy was expended on her emails .
We already lived through these events in real time , and many of us spent the next year or two litigating them and might prefer never to think about them again .
If you never @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he did regarding the email investigation , The Comey Rule does a solid job of laying out his thought process , but all the viewer can really do with that information is scream “ You idiot !
” again and again at their laptop .
Comey himself is a good example of this uncanny valley between believable fiction and unbelievable nonfiction .
Daniels plays him as a mild-mannered boy scout , a beloved and empathetic boss and team player with a perfect home and a perfect family , a sort of aw-shucks American @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he ’ s convinced if he just maintains his own personal integrity , nothing bad can result .
This makes him enormously irritating to the savvier political operatives he clashes with , who understand , as most of us do in retrospect , that honest intentions can still have disastrous consequences .
Comey , in other words , makes a lot of sense as a fictional protagonist , and if someone made him up we would nod along at a familiar archetype .
Unfortunately , he ’ s real and has consciously styled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lot of books and paid speeches ) , and we all have to live with his mistakes .
The second episode covers Comey ’ s tenure under Trump prior to his infamous firing and subsequent testimony before Congress , and is much better , carried largely by the strength of Gleeson ’ s performance as Trump .
Again , the line between fiction and reality is an initial hurdle ; Gleeson ’ s hair and makeup look ridiculous , but they ’ re supposed to .
His voice and his line delivery and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but no more than the actual Trump ’ s are .
We may not wish to live in a world where this cartoon villain is the president , but we do , and by agreeing to sit through The Comey Rule we have also implicitly agreed to give Gleeson a chance to do something with this unbearable character that hasn ’ t been done before .

What Gleeson and Ray understand about the president that, for instance, Alec Baldwin does not, is that Trump is at least as much a menace as he is a clown. Gleeson’s Trump is deeply unsettling to watch and to be in the same room with, something most of us have not personally experienced. This is The Comey Rule’s most powerful takeaway: We’ve all watched Trump on TV and read his tweets, and in either context, it can be very funny when he complains about cable news ratings or the size of his inauguration crowds. But imagine having to enter the Oval Office in January 2017 and shake his hand, to look him in the eye, to be polite and professional while he drones on about those topics. Most likely, you wouldn’t laugh; instead, you’d feel physically unclean and psychically violated.
In hindsight, the first episode tees us up well for the second. The Comey Rule starts off as what I’ve termed a Beltway procedural, that familiar West Wing–inspired genre in which very smart political operatives bicker over the wordings of legal documents and press releases. Some of these people can’t stand one another—Rod Rosenstein (Scoot McNairy), who serves as the series’s unlikely narrator, plays Aaron Burr to Comey’s Alexander Hamilton, a sniveling careerist who finds his stubbornly principled counterpart insufferable. But they’re all loyal to the same institutional norms that have long prevailed in Washington and that The Comey Rule unapologetically celebrates in its cringiest scenes.
If you’re a skeptic of those institutional norms—if, like me, you’re the kind of leftist who finds it difficult to root for the FBI—then this is exactly as much of a drag as you’d expect. But once Trump and his cronies enter the White House, the story becomes a lot more compelling. Critics of the pre-Trump Washington status quo may enjoy the idea of all these hacks and feds being humiliated and abused by Trump’s regime. What if Comey and his ilk got what they deserved, even if it came at a horrific cost to the American public and the rest of the world? But it’s harder to maintain that conceit when watching The Comey Rule’s most memorable scenes, the ones depicting first-person interactions between the Trump White House and the career civil servants at the FBI and the Department of Justice. Even if you’ve read all the news coverage of, for instance, Comey’s one-on-one dinner with Trump, or Yates’s meetings with the White House counsel, what the actors and Ray’s screenplay offer is the visceral experience of attempting to maintain one’s dignity while taking orders from predators and cretins.


newrepublic--2020-09-25--Uber and Lyft Are Charging Through Washington’s Revolving Door

On Labor Day , Uber released its first “ climate assessment ” report , admitting that the average trip taken on its service is 41 percent more carbon-intensive than a typical car ride .
Two days later , Lyft and Uber drivers gathered in Oakland , California , under a darkened sky .
As wildfire smoke filtered the sun into an apocalyptic sepia , drivers and organizers from Gig Workers Rising blasted the ride-hailing companies ’ campaign for Proposition 22 , which would undo a 2018 California law that makes app-based drivers eligible for traditional employment benefits and would put @ @ @ @ @ @ @ change labor law in the future .
This month has offered stark reminders that the two largest ride-hailing companies have been a toxic force : eroding labor protections , worsening climate change , and corroding democratic oversight .
It should catch the eye of progressives mobilizing to influence the makeup of a possible Biden administration because , if the past is any guide , the next move for these firms will be to worm their way into the halls of power and seize the regulatory tiller for themselves .
Earlier this month , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Democratic nominee to ban fossil fuel executives and lobbyists from his team .
Citing the mantra “ personnel is policy , ” progressives have warned against appointing Wall Street veterans to the Treasury Department .
It makes sense to add Uber and Lyft alumni to this “ Do Not Appoint ” list and jam the revolving door that ’ s recently opened between the ride-share companies and the U.S. Department of Transportation .
For two years of the Trump administration , policy at the department was set by Derek Kan , formerly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
While serving as the agency ’ s undersecretary for policy , Kan helped defang environmental regulations , writing rules that encouraged grant applicants to discount the cost of carbon emissions .
He injected an unwelcome dose of Silicon Valley boosterism into the department , telling an audience at the Brookings Institution that Elon Musk ’ s perpetually overhyped Hyperloop was the type of “ disruptive ” transportation in which the federal government should invest .
Brian Barnard , a top aide to Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao , moved to Uber ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ administration veterans like Tony West and Susan Hendrick .
One of President Obama ’ s closest advisers , Valerie Jarrett , holds a seat on Lyft ’ s board , and Lyft ’ s chief policy officer is Anthony Foxx , secretary of transportation from 2013 to 2017 .

On Labor Day, Uber released its first “climate assessment” report, admitting that the average trip taken on its service is 41 percent more carbon-intensive than a typical car ride. Two days later, Lyft and Uber drivers gathered in Oakland, California, under a darkened sky. As wildfire smoke filtered the sun into an apocalyptic sepia, drivers and organizers from Gig Workers Rising blasted the ride-hailing companies’ campaign for Proposition 22, which would undo a 2018 California law that makes app-based drivers eligible for traditional employment benefits and would put new restrictions on legislators’ ability to change labor law in the future.
This month has offered stark reminders that the two largest ride-hailing companies have been a toxic force: eroding labor protections, worsening climate change, and corroding democratic oversight. It should catch the eye of progressives mobilizing to influence the makeup of a possible Biden administration because, if the past is any guide, the next move for these firms will be to worm their way into the halls of power and seize the regulatory tiller for themselves.


Morning

Under a canopy sky a man settles down a plastic apron on .
As the train slips away evenly , @ @ @ @ @ on the tracks , I open the window , glance into the courtyard , at @ @ @ @ @ The Marshall as usual is raising his hand : Greetings , People Hello-Hello , fellow @ @ @ @ @ pigeons shitting on it belong to this land , not to the hand that is @ @ @ @ @ greeting , while flies attack a fruit stand , and melons spill from a pile @ @ @ @ @ from the hill here , the sun is rising , and at the other window @ @ @ @ @ sound settling over that land .
A new , nearly-red sound .
It flies in @ @ @ @

Under a canopy sky
a man settles down
a plastic apron on.
As the train slips away
evenly, a ghost is left back on the tracks,
I open the window,
glance into the courtyard,
at the statue of Kirov.
The Marshall as usual is raising his hand:
Greetings, People
Hello-Hello, fellow Communist Party members.
The pigeons shitting on it
belong to this land,
not to the hand that is hiding
the clouds with its greeting,
while flies attack a fruit stand,
and melons spill from a pile,
and armor-plated bursts
flash from the hill here,
the sun is rising,
and at the other window,
there’s a sound
settling over that land.
A new, nearly-red sound.
It flies in through the window.


newrepublic--2020-09-25--The Suitors Demand an Audience

The Suitors Demand an Audience

Tell them to keep their eyes , their brawn , the tentacles of their need sticking to my skin .
@ @ @ @ @ Poisoned tongues saying thirst as spell , hips as prophecy .
I ’ m loomed @ @ @ @ @ my hair , waiting for my ship to come in .
No water , but @ @ @ @ @ .
The only blue—my pulse when I couldn ’ t get out of bed .
@ @ @ @ @ gem , calcified , fossil of some long-ago feeling— shatter-ready and stubborn .
Everywhere I @ @ @ @ @ dominion .
Their hunger makes me seasick .
They would drag me from my dreams @ @ @ @ @ They would mark me with their teeth as proof , as triumph , say it @ @ @ @ @ animal in me , when it was always , always , the animal in them @

Tell them to keep their eyes, their brawn,
the tentacles of their need sticking to my skin.
Their bluff and bluster. Poisoned tongues
saying thirst as spell, hips as prophecy.
I’m loomed together, stars pinned to my hair,
waiting for my ship to come in. No water, but
a dress made of salt. The only blue—my pulse
when I couldn’t get out of bed. My heart’s rough
gem, calcified, fossil of some long-ago feeling—
shatter-ready and stubborn. Everywhere I splinter.
Everywhere they hold dominion. Their hunger
makes me seasick. They would drag me from
my dreams, give me mouth-to-mouth. They
would mark me with their teeth as proof, as
triumph, say it’s because of the animal in me,
when it was always, always, the animal in them.


newrepublic--2020-09-25--Can the Census Be Saved in Indian Country?

On Thursday evening , United States District Judge Lucy Koh issued a preliminary injunction requiring the Census Bureau to continue its fieldwork through October 31 .
It was a dramatic turn in what has been a dramatic census season : The ruling came in response to a federal lawsuit filed against the Trump administration for shortening the time frame to perform the national headcount , and bought census workers—who were supposed to cease operations on September 30—an additional 31 days .
The administration is expected to appeal the ruling , but , at least for now , there ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ injunction was announced , Congresswoman Deb Haaland was phone banking in her district in New Mexico , calling up Native households across the state and urging them to complete their census forms as soon as they could .
“ The census is crucial to the federal government ’ s trust responsibility to Native nations , ” Haaland , who is a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo , told the other volunteers .
“ When the tribal community is undercounted , our needs are not prioritized.
” The urgency was well-founded .
PBS reported @ @ @ @ @ @ @ beginning of September , only 24 percent of Montana residents living on tribal lands had been counted ; the Navajo Nation clocked in at just 18.1 percent .
The low count was almost a foregone conclusion after the Trump administration ’ s decision to move up the end of the census .
Career Bureau employees warned the administration that shortening the count would result in unacceptable “ fatal data quality flaws.
” A coalition of House Democrats wrote to Census Bureau director Steven Dillingham in May advising him that the pandemic had created @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and that “ early analysis of the response rates ” showed that the impact would fall disproportionately on communities of color and immigrant communities .
They were ignored .
Legislative fixes , despite coming from bipartisan groups in the House and Senate , were , unsurprisingly , rebuffed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell .
For Native communities that have been consistently undercounted and underserved by the decennial count , the 2020 census seemed , to put it both dimly and honestly , doomed .
And may still be .
Even under the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ original plan , before the pandemic made the essential door-to-door visits a risk—many in Indian Country feared this census would again result in an undercount and another decade of inexcusable , treaty-breaking underfunding .
Native enumerators , Native legislators , and tribal governments and organizations have been working to drive participation in their communities despite efforts from this administration to sabotage the count .
The question is : Will any of it be enough ?

After she applied in February, it took a month for the Census Bureau to respond. Once she was cleared, she was asked to drive three hours to Window Rock, Arizona—with no reimbursement—to complete a background check and have her fingerprints taken. Then it was another nearly two-week wait before she was approved for training, which was thankfully in a nearby town. Then came a 30-hour online training session to be completed at home, which is difficult given large swaths of the Navajo Nation still lack broadband access. Herrera was fortunate, though: Her mother worked at a local high school, so she was able to complete her training in the school library. “But most people don’t have that,” she told me. “And there’s no public library or community center.”
By mid-March, Herrera was finally certified and ready to go door-knocking across her assigned area, spanning 150 miles between Tuba City, Arizona, and Bluff, Utah. For the next two-and-a-half weeks, Herrera spoke with Diné neighbors and strangers alike, knocking on what she estimated to be 100 to 200 doors each week. The work helped her realize how incomplete the previous counts and mapping efforts had been. “I just remember, one day, I had the Census map from 2010, and it had five houses on it,” Herrera said. “I had to go canvass that whole area. By the end of the day, there were 25 homes.”
Just two weeks into her work though, the pandemic hit. “The work just shut down completely,” she said. The pandemic exploded among tribal communities and brought field operations, even beyond tribal lands, to a halt. Going door to door presented a health risk, with many feeling trepidation at opening their doors to government workers and, as Herrera explained, with concern from the elderly census workers routinely tasked with doing the knocking. Operations resumed come July, but by the time Herrera was back in the field, she was one of six enumerators left for her area out of a group that had started at nearly 20.


newrepublic--2020-09-25--Giving People Money in a Pandemic Worked. Now Give Them More.

At first glance , there was something slightly counterintuitive in the Federal Reserve Board ’ s most recent report on the economic well-being of American households .
In July—at the height of the pandemic and in the midst of statewide lockdowns and mass layoffs—households in the United States appeared to be doing better financially than they had the previous year , before the coronavirus even appeared in Wuhan .
According to the Fed report , 70 percent of adults surveyed in July said they could cover an unexpected $ 400 emergency expense , up from 63 percent who said the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in fact , the highest percentage of respondents who had answered that way since the Fed started asking the question in 2013 .
This achievement , of course , wasn ’ t the result of the overall state of the economy or the strength of the job market—both of which were , and are still , mostly in ruins—but , rather , a product of the Cares Act , which temporarily loosened the purse strings of the federal government in order to turbocharge unemployment benefits and dispense $ 1,200 checks to some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also showed that the biggest increase in households who could afford a $ 400 emergency expense was among those making under $ 40,000 .
Despite decades of politicians moaning about the ineffectiveness of cash welfare and engineering tortuous forms of means-testing in order to “ solve ” poverty , it turns out that when the government simply gives people money , those people become a little less poor .
And , as researchers Kathy Edin and H. Luke Shaefer found in their 2015 study of families living on less than $ 2 a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the further down the ladder you fall .
The number of families living in deep poverty increased sharply in the wake of welfare reform in the 1990s , when cash assistance programs were drastically stripped .
And while in-kind benefits like food stamps remained important and useful , Edin and Shaefer wrote in a memo for Brookings , on their own they weren ’ t enough to lift people out of poverty .
“ How do you pay the rent or buy your kids ’ clothes with only in-kind aid ?
” the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that matter , come up with $ 400 for an emergency ? )
Against ugly and racialized stereotypes of welfare recipients frittering government money on luxury goods , the authors also found that poor people who were given cash used it to cover basic necessities , outstanding debts , and family expenses .
In other words , the only discernible drawback to the Cares provisions that dispensed strings-free stimulus checks and supplemental unemployment insurance—and subsequently bolstered the financial security of millions of families during a pandemic—is that they were temporary .
Currently , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ future assistance might take , with Republicans holding steadfast in their opposition to more unemployment aid and wavering on whether to cut new checks .
But the strange condition of more people being able to afford an emergency expense during an economic downturn than during the so-called bull market that preceded it suggests that the key to alleviating widespread financial hardship is perhaps more straightforward than we ’ ve been led to believe .
There ’ s at least one place in the U.S. that appears to have taken notice .
Last year @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , launched a universal basic income pilot program in which a group of residents were given $ 500 per month .
The participants , who used the money on things like groceries , medical care , and utilities , reported feeling less stress and anxiety and getting to spend more time with their families as the result of the cash boost .
Though the program was set to end this spring , after the coronavirus hit , Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs decided to extend it until the end of the year .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” he told Bloomberg .
“ I want to prove that basic income is an important tool to build a foundation for people to withstand these things .
”

At first glance, there was something slightly counterintuitive in the Federal Reserve Board’s most recent report on the economic well-being of American households. In July—at the height of the pandemic and in the midst of statewide lockdowns and mass layoffs—households in the United States appeared to be doing better financially than they had the previous year, before the coronavirus even appeared in Wuhan. According to the Fed report, 70 percent of adults surveyed in July said they could cover an unexpected $400 emergency expense, up from 63 percent who said the same in October 2019. It was, in fact, the highest percentage of respondents who had answered that way since the Fed started asking the question in 2013.
This achievement, of course, wasn’t the result of the overall state of the economy or the strength of the job market—both of which were, and are still, mostly in ruins—but, rather, a product of the Cares Act, which temporarily loosened the purse strings of the federal government in order to turbocharge unemployment benefits and dispense $1,200 checks to some 150 million people. The Fed report also showed that the biggest increase in households who could afford a $400 emergency expense was among those making under $40,000. Despite decades of politicians moaning about the ineffectiveness of cash welfare and engineering tortuous forms of means-testing in order to “solve” poverty, it turns out that when the government simply gives people money, those people become a little less poor.


newrepublic--2020-09-25--Why the Squad Voted Against Pelosi’s Energy Bill

If you ’ re like most people , you probably missed the news Thursday evening that the House had passed H.R .
4447 , the Clean Energy Jobs and Innovation Act .
The nearly 900-page piece of legislation itself isn ’ t much to write home about—several different energy-related bills hastily smashed together into a $ 135 billion package , with some halfway decent provisions packed in alongside plenty of handouts to the fossil fuel industry .
But the voting pattern could say a lot about the future of climate legislation should Democrats win back the White House or even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the bill was a major priority for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Representative Frank Pallone , who were eager to influence the conversation on the even less progressive Senate companion bill .
Most members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and Green New Deal co-sponsors voted for it .
But the Squad—as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , Ayanna Pressley , Ilhan Omar , and Rashida Tlaib are informally known—voted against it , as did other progressives like Ro Khanna and Pramila Jayapal .
Their “ no ” votes followed opposition to the bill from the Sunrise @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Environmental Network , and nearly 100 other progressive organizations .
“ If passed as written , ” Climate Justice Alliance director Angela Adrar wrote in a statement this week , “ this bill will decrease environmental justice and increase environmental racism.
” In all , 18 Democrats bucked party leaders and voted no—although conservative Democrat Kendra Horn likely did so for quite different reasons , being from an oil-heavy Oklahoma district .
Progressive environmental groups ’ objections to the bill hinge on its giveaways to fossil fuel companies , including its support of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from coal and gas-fired power plants and industrial operations .
“ While we ’ re pleased that this bill makes some important advances on renewable energy access and distribution and emissions reductions , it couldn ’ t be clearer that any new government investment toward fossil fuel companies is unacceptable and quite simply incompatible with tackling environmental injustice and the climate crisis , ” the Sunrise Movement ’ s Lauren Manus said in an emailed statement .
Among the “ no ” votes were some less brazenly progressive members who could be worried @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Elliot Engel and Joe Crowley , both ousted in the last two cycles by underdog primary challengers from their left .
Three of the New York Democrats who joined Ocasio-Cortez in voting against the package—Grace Meng , Carolyn Maloney , and Jerry Nadler—faced primary challenges from their left this year .
None managed to pick up much steam , but insurgent groups could recruit a successful opponent with time .
Two other New York Democrats , Adriano Espaillat and Nydia Velázquez , voted against H.R .
4447 as well .
New York has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ insurgent Democrats , a fact that ’ s kept New York City–area Democrats especially on their toes .
While Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman , backed by the left-leaning campaign group Justice Democrats , are the most well-known nationally , recent elections have also seen progressives and socialists oust longtime incumbents from their seats in Albany .
In 2018 , six mostly young progressives beat out members of the Independent Democratic Caucus , a group of Democrats who caucused with Republicans and handed them a de facto majority in the state assembly .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Democratic Socialists of America–endorsed candidates won primaries against incumbents for safe Democratic seats in the state legislature and will almost certainly head there come November .

Asked about the vote on Thursday, Waleed Shahid of the Justice Democrats, which opposed H.R. 4447, said, “I think you’re starting to see progressives draw some lines in the sand about what is and what isn’t practical climate policy that matches the scale of the crisis.”
In the U.S., passing climate policy presents a seemingly impossible dilemma.
H.R. 4447 could be an odd preview for the fault lines of climate fights to come on Capitol Hill. In the lead-up to Barack Obama’s election in 2008, Republicans fearing defeat joined a handful of carbon pricing bills that primed the pump for the cap-and-trade legislation known as Waxman-Markey, which passed the House but failed even to come to a vote in the Senate, despite Democratic control over every branch of government. At the time, Democratic strategists made the (then somewhat plausible) argument that some Republicans were amenable to the idea of seeing some kind of climate bill pass through Congress. So Democrats and big green groups crafted their proposal to suit them and the companies that said they would join the cause.
For many reasons, that didn’t work. And the dynamic now looks a bit different. Despite H.R. 4447 being seemingly tailor-made so as not to offend GOP sensibilities—throwing cash at innovation and corporations, including polluters—just seven Republicans ended up voting for it, with most having been scared off by the White House’s threat to veto the measure should it come to Trump’s desk. Seven isn’t zero, and it’s certainly not meaningless. But what failed to win over a sizable number of Republicans also alienated progressives, who argued that the bill’s best parts (funding for renewables, hydrofluorocarbon regulations, building codes) were too small and its worst elements (giveaways for “clean” coal and gas) were too big. Given that it passed the House and has a nonzero chance of getting through the Senate in some more watered-down, polluter-friendly form, Pelosi and Pallone may well see the bill as a big win and proof of concept for the types of climate measures that can pass. Whether it’ll actually do anything to help keep emissions down is a separate question and remains to be seen.


newrepublic--2020-09-25--Senate Republicans Have No Intention of Stopping Trump From Stealing the Election

Thursday was the kind of day that many Beltway reporters have spent four years dreaming about : Democrats and Republicans came together to tell Donald Trump that he had gone too far .
The bipartisan rebuke came in response to the president declining to commit to a “ peaceful transition ” following November ’ s election .
“ We ’ re going to have to see what happens , ” Trump said , spinning his wheels .
“ Get rid of the ballots and you ’ ll , we ’ ll have a very peaceful—there won ’ t be a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ continuation.
” To the extent there even was subtext , it was this : If Trump wins , the election is legitimate ; if he doesn ’ t , it ’ s not .
Even more chilling was the fact that violence was apparently on the table .
Democrats began ringing the alarm bells immediately .
And they were joined by dozens of prominent Republicans .
“ The winner of the November 3rd election will be inaugurated on January 20th , ” tweeted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell .
“ There will be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been every four years since 1792.
” Senator John Thune concurred , telling reporters , “ Republicans believe in the rule of law and we believe in the Constitution .
And that ’ s what dictates our election process.
” The GOP ’ s rebuke was gentle—the president mostly went unnamed in these criticisms—but the press ate it up .
“ Senate Republicans opposed President Trump ’ s assertion that he might reject a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the November election , trying to deflect his challenge to a foundation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not actually occur , ” wrote The Washington Post ’ s Paul Kane and Rachel Bade .
The Hill ’ s Alexander Bolton noted that Republicans on the Hill were “ left dumbfounded ” by the president ’ s words .
It took five New York Times reporters to explain that Republicans were “ trying to reassure the public about the electoral system while withholding personal criticism of the president , a balancing act that shows their political codependence.
” Republicans might be treading lightly , but the message was clear : Trump @ @ @ @ @ @

But upon a closer read, a much different message emerges. Trump’s refusal to disavow violence, to be fair, was universally condemned. But every other crooked method of winning—involving legal challenges to a freshly stacked Supreme Court—is on the table. They weren’t drawing a red line as much as they were sending a secret code: There are quieter ways to get what you want, just stop acting like Mussolini. It’s one lesson that Washington reporters keep refusing to learn: Senate Republicans are not going to stand up to the president.
Republicans rebuked Trump on only one point: The 2020 election will not result in a civil war. Reporters have been content with this answer, but it’s far from satisfactory. Trump trying to steal the election by inciting armed conflict is faintly possible. It is much more likely, however, that he and Republicans use a series of quasi-legal maneuvers to “legitimately” hold onto power—disallowing mail ballots in swing states, for instance, or challenging the election all the way to a Supreme Court. Trump has hardly been shy about the fact that he expects Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s successor to do his bidding. In other words, Republican elected officials don’t have to do any of the skulduggery: That’s what the courts and lawyers are for.
In their rebukes of the president, Republicans were very careful to leave room for this reelection path. McConnell’s curiously specific mention of the “November 3rd election,” as Jamelle Bouie pointed out on Twitter, is disturbing given the likelihood that every ballot won’t be counted until well after that date—and that Trump appears to have an advantage with voters who have said they will vote on Election Day rather than casting a mail-in ballot. Should Trump hold onto power through a series of legal stratagems designed to make a conservative Supreme Court, rather than the American people, decide the next president, Republicans are perfectly fine with that. “If Republicans lose we will accept the result. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Joe Biden, I will accept that result,” Lindsey Graham told Fox & Friends, knowing full well the court is tilted in Trump’s favor.


newrepublic--2020-09-26--Amy Coney Barrett Wants Felons to Have Guns, But Not Votes

Like other journalists , I spent the bulk of this past week reviewing the writings and opinions of Amy Coney Barrett , who became President Donald Trump ’ s third Supreme Court nominee on Saturday .
Her confirmation by the Senate will cement what the appointments of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh already achieved : a profoundly conservative majority on the nation ’ s highest court for decades to come .
Though Trump may lose the election this fall , his imprint on the federal courts will endure well into the second half of this century .
Most of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is focused on abortion , and for good reason .
Anti-abortion and abortion-rights groups alike expect that she will vote in favor of further restrictions on the procedure , and perhaps even provide a fifth or sixth vote to strike down Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey .
She is also a public critic of Chief Justice John Roberts ’ ruling in NFIB v. Sebelius , the 2012 case where he cast the deciding vote to save the Affordable Care Act ( ACA ) .
That criticism takes on a new @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the court before it hears yet another case that could see the ACA struck down .
Her potential impact on cases involving LGBT rights , religious freedom , federal regulations , and other high-profile issues are garnering plenty of public attention as well .
But one of her opinions that caught my eye was Kanter v. Barr , a Second Amendment case decided last year by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals .
Barrett ’ s dissent in that case signaled that she could have an immediate and consequential impact on an entire @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the Roberts Court , perhaps consciously .
Her approach to that case also provided some insight into how she thinks about the Constitution and applies those ideas to modern life .
Like most Second Amendment cases , this one starts with a man who wanted a gun but couldn ’ t have it .
Rickey Kanter was the owner and proprietor of a Wisconsin firm that specialized in therapeutic footwear .
In 2004 , he submitted a selection of therapeutic shoe inserts to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services ( CMS @ @ @ @ @ @ @ program would reimburse patients who bought them .
CMS rejected the initial submission but approved a revised version of them .
Kanter , however , sold both the approved and unapproved versions to podiatrists .
When he sent a shipment of the unapproved inserts to a podiatrist ’ s office in Florida , federal prosecutors charged him with mail fraud .
He pleaded guilty to a single felony count .
Though he has now served the rest of his sentence , Kanter ’ s status as a felon excludes him from certain rights @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ban on lawfully owning a firearm under both federal law and Wisconsin law .
Kanter sued the United States and the state of Wisconsin to challenge both provisions , arguing that they violated the Second Amendment .
A federal district court rejected his claims in January 2018 , and a three-judge panel in the Seventh Circuit upheld the lower-court ruling in a 2-1 decision in March 2019 .

If the history is so clear, why did the panel’s other two judges disagree with her? According to them, they didn’t need to review it to reach a decision in the case. Rather than delving into the complex history and scholarly disputes, they took what they described as a “prudential approach” to the Wisconsin and federal laws in question. The majority found that the laws served an important government objective of stopping violent crime, and noted that the government provided statistical evidence that people convicted of nonviolent felonies were more likely to commit violent crimes in the future. When Kanter cited his own background as proof the law shouldn’t apply to him, the panel urged him to turn to the executive branch or to lawmakers for personal relief.
In other words, where two colleagues saw no need to undertake a probing review of early American history to reach a sweeping conclusion, Barrett saw an imperative to take a different path. Whatever the merits of her approach may be in this case, it also unearthed a curious approach to Americans’ rights in general. People convicted of felony offenses lose more than just the right to own a gun. In many states, for at least some period of time, they also lose the right to vote. To resolve the Second Amendment matter, Barrett noted that the governments hasn’t “introduced any evidence that founding-era legislatures imposed virtue-based restrictions on the right; such restrictions applied to civic rights like voting and jury service, not to individual rights like the right to possess a gun.”
That distinction, suggesting that the right to vote was not an “individual” right, was no accident. She elaborated on her point later to note that “history does show that felons could be disqualified from exercising certain rights—like the rights to vote and serve on juries—because these rights belonged only to virtuous citizens.” By comparison, she argued that gun ownership was an individual right that could only be suspended based on whether the individual in question was dangerous. Kanter, who was convicted of mail fraud, likely wouldn’t qualify as such. “Civic rights” like voting and jury service, on the other hand, can be denied based on whether the individual is “virtuous.”


newrepublic--2020-09-28--How Corporations Scam Their Shareholders and Screw Over Workers

I recently wrote about the pernicious effect of Milton Friedman ’ s idea that public corporations should focus exclusively on shareholders , ignoring the interests of other stakeholders including employees , customers , and the communities in which companies operate .
The single-minded focus on maximizing shareholder value has caused companies to sacrifice long-term value for short-term profits and , ironically , enriched corporate executives at the expense of shareholders .
At virtually the same time that the “ shareholder revolution ” was launched , corporations adopted a policy of downgrading dividends .
This , too , was designed to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ use of share buybacks .
The buyback policy reinforced the negative trends resulting from the doctrine of shareholder primacy—including a decline in labor ’ s share of national income , higher pay for corporate executives and greater income inequality , reduced corporate investment , and slower economic growth .
It used to be that the main reason people bought corporate stock was for the dividend yield ; the hope for a rising share price was a secondary consideration .
But as corporations focused more on generating profits to the exclusion of all else @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of stock options , the share price became the primary focus , with dividends falling in importance .
Over time , share repurchases became a substitute for dividends .
Managers rationalized the practice by saying they were doing shareholders a favor : Dividends were taxed as ordinary income , whereas capital gains were taxed much more lightly .
Moreover , capital gains taxes weren ’ t payable until shares were sold , while taxes on dividends had to be paid annually .
Assuming a share repurchase raised share prices by the same amount @ @ @ @ @ @ @ money were paid out as a cash dividend , taxable shareholders would prefer share buybacks .
( However , the bulk of shares are owned by nontaxable pension funds . )
But there are problems .
One is that managers can control the timing of share buybacks , which they use to pump up stock prices around the time their stock options are vested .
Here is the summary of a recent study of the explosion in buybacks :

We show that CEOs strategically time corporate news releases to coincide with months in which their equity vests. These vesting months are determined by equity grants made several years prior, and thus unlikely driven by the current information environment. CEOs reallocate news into vesting months, and away from prior and subsequent months. They release 5 percent more discretionary news in vesting months than prior months, but there is no difference for non-discretionary news. These news releases lead to favorable media coverage, suggesting they are positive in tone. They also generate a temporary run-up in stock prices and market liquidity, potentially resulting from increased investor attention or reduced information asymmetry. The CEO takes advantage of these effects by cashing out shortly after the news releases.
In effect, corporate executives use buybacks to manipulate stock prices for their own benefit. Indeed, for many years, corporations were restricted by the Securities and Exchange Commission from using profits to buy back shares precisely because it could too easily be done to manipulate stock prices. But the SEC changed its policy in 1983. Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan explained the significance in a 2002 speech:
Prior to the past several decades, earnings forecasts were not nearly so important a factor in assessing the value of corporations. In fact, I do not recall price-to-earnings ratios as a prominent statistic in the 1950s. Instead, investors tended to value stocks on the basis of their dividend yields. Since the early 1980s, however, corporations increasingly have been paying out cash to shareholders in the form of share repurchases rather than dividends. The marginal individual tax rate on dividends, with rare exceptions, has always been higher than the marginal tax rate on capital gains that repurchases create by raising per share earnings through share reduction. But, until the early 1980s, share repurchases were frowned upon by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and companies that repurchased shares took the risk of being investigated for price manipulation. In 1982, the SEC gave companies a safe harbor to conduct share repurchases without risk of investigation. This action prompted a marked shift toward repurchases in lieu of dividends to avail shareholders of a lower tax rate on their cash receipts. More recently, a desire to manage shareholder dilution from the rising incidence of employee stock options has also spurred repurchases. As a consequence, dividend payout ratios, which in decades past averaged about 55 percent, have in recent years fallen on average to about 35 percent. But because share prices have risen so much more than earnings in recent years, dividend yields — the ratio of dividends per share to a company’s share price – have fallen appreciably more than the payout ratio. A half-century ago, for example, dividend yields on stocks typically averaged 6 percent. Today such yields are barely above 1 percent. The sharp fall in dividend payout ratios and yields has dramatically shifted the focus of stock price evaluation toward earnings. Unlike cash dividends, whose value is unambiguous, there is no unambiguously “correct” value of earnings.
Former SEC Commissioner Robert Jackson warned that corporate executives frequently take advantage of buyback-driven spikes in stock prices to dump shares, thus capturing for themselves gains that belong to public shareholders. “The evidence shows that buybacks give executives an opportunity to take significant cash off the table, breaking the pay-performance link,” Jackson said in a 2018 speech. He added that SEC rules do not prohibit or even discourage such self-dealing.
In a 2019 letter to Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, Jackson said his staff’s research showed that the main victims of this action are long-term investors. After a short-term price pop, firms with significant executive cash-outs tended to see their stock prices underperform the market.


newrepublic--2020-09-28--“Just the Hint of Something Coming Here Terrorizes You”

On September 4 , 2017 , Hurricane Irma became the first Category 5 hurricane of the season , with sustained winds of 180 miles per hour at its peak .
The storm slammed into Cudjoe Key , Florida , as a Category 4 , on the morning of September 10 .
Irma ’ s full-throated arrival at Lynda and Tom Ciano ’ s home in central Florida was unexpected .
Forecasters predicted the storm would hug the state ’ s west coast .
But it shifted track .
“ The radioman said , ‘ Arcadia , you ’ re going @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Tom Ciano recalled .
Arcadia is a mere 40 miles from the Cianos ’ Lake Placid home .
“ That was a real shock , when we heard that on the radio , and the darkness made it worse , ” said Tom , a retired electronics technician .
“ The electricity went out .
We couldn ’ t see anything .
It ’ s one thing to go into a cage with a tiger , and it ’ s another thing to go into a cage with a tiger when it ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they heard objects pummeling the house .
“ It sounded like it was being destroyed.
” The Cianos ’ home remained standing , but their neighborhood was transformed , as was their outlook on life .
“ I was afraid of the hurricane before it hit .
I ’ m really afraid of hurricanes now , ” said Tom .

The couple now feels overwhelming empathy for others hit by natural disasters. Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico just a few weeks after Irma left Florida, shook the Cianos. “We see that, and we sit here crying for them,” says Tom. “I can’t begin to understand what it must have been like.” Overall, they feel lucky. “When I think about those people in the fires in California, and what we went through, what do we have to complain about?” asks Tom.
But given the increasing threat of storms in the Southeast, the Cianos say they are planning to move to Arizona, Tom’s home state.
“We definitely wouldn’t have to be afraid of hurricanes anymore, flooding, tornadoes, earthquakes, or any of those things,” said Tom. “Fire would be about the worst thing we would have to worry about. It would feel a lot safer, that’s for sure. We have a whole list of reasons to go there, and that’s one of them.”


newrepublic--2020-09-28--Big Banks Cratered the Economy. Now They Swear They’ll Fix It.

In 2005 , long before Occupy Wall Street , the publication of Thomas Piketty ’ s Capital in the Twenty-First Century , or Bernie Sanders ’ s bid for the presidency , Citigroup released a report that outlined the transformation of the United States into a highly unequal “ plutonomy , ” in which money and power were concentrated in the hands of a very few people at the top .
But rather than sounding an alarm , the report was only meant to advise investors on how better to take advantage of the trend .
Since the rich had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ driving consumer spending , Citigroup ’ s recommendation to investors was , as Bloomberg summarized it , “ Buy the stuff rich people like.
” Fifteen years and a Great Recession later , plutonomy appears to be showing some signs of wear .
Economic inequality hasn ’ t diminished , but working people fed up with stagnant wages and their own declining standard of living while Wall Street flourishes have increasingly challenged the free-market consensus of prior decades .
Over the last few years , a swell of populist , if not quite @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the U.S. and Europe , and even conservative politicians have been forced to acknowledge wide-scale downward mobility .
“ No one is ready for this new world , ” Ajay Kapur , one of the authors of the 2005 Citigroup report , told Bloomberg last summer .
That could be one reason why Citigroup and a number of other big banks now appear eager to rehabilitate their reputations , which suffered a serious blow after their various financial manipulations were unearthed during the 2008 financial crash .
Banks ’ early-2000s greed—and legislators ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the last recession , and now , in the midst of yet another serious downturn , several financial institutions seem to be rebranding as social justice–minded , through a series of nominally progressive new initiatives .
But while Citigroup , Bank of America , Wells Fargo , and others may be launching fresh programs to combat racial and economic inequality , when it comes to the big banks , their recent acts of charity feel less like atonement—let alone justice—and more like a case of destroying the world with one hand while doling @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s the disease trying to package itself as the cure .
Earlier this week , Citigroup—fresh off naming its first woman CEO—announced that it was pledging over $ 1 billion to help close the racial wealth gap .
In a new report , Citigroup estimated that the persistence of racial inequality had cost the economy as much as $ 16 trillion .
To help ameliorate long-standing disparities , the bank said , it would put $ 550 million toward increasing homeownership among people of color , among other measures .
“ We @ @ @ @ @ @ @ current events and to frame them with an economic lens in order to highlight the real costs of longstanding discrimination against minority groups , especially against Black people and particularly in the U.S. , ” Citigroup economists said in a statement .
But the problem with Citigroup ’ s portrayal of today ’ s racial wealth gap as the product of an ambient and all-encompassing “ systemic ” racism is that it obfuscates its own role in perpetuating and widening that very gap .
Citigroup had a notoriously heavy hand in inflating the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ crisis ; like a number of other banks in the years prior to the Great Recession , it engaged in predatory lending to home buyers , particularly Black and Latinx families , and sold securities backed by risky mortgages to investors .

As the People’s Policy Project has pointed out, the housing crash that resulted from banks playing fast and loose with subprime mortgages decimated Black wealth and led to a twentyfold increase in the percentage of Black homeowners with negative equity—that is, Black homeowners who owed more on their mortgages than their houses were worth. (Citigroup’s racial wealth gap report unsurprisingly doesn’t have much to say about this phenomenon.) Though Citi was eventually fined by the Justice Department and ordered to pay out $2.5 billion in “consumer relief,” that relief came in the form of financing apartments for rent, rather than helping those who had lost their homes get them back. “Citi will end up bringing in rents from people who used to own homes,” Cornell law professor Robert Hockett told NPR at the time of the settlement. “That’s cold comfort.”
The same troubling relationship to the last crash underlies a recent charity drive by Wells Fargo, which rolled out a number of food banks at its branches in partnership with the organization Feeding America this summer. While a program to provide 50 million meals during a time of increased food insecurity sounds urgent enough, Wells Fargo, like the other big banks, essentially set fire to middle-class wealth in the years before the Great Recession through risky lending to home buyers and the sale of dubious mortgage-backed securities. In 2017, The Hill further found that Wells Fargo had spent $46.7 million lobbying federal lawmakers to ease consumer protections between 2009 and 2016, or right when the bank was opening millions of fraudulent accounts under customers’ names in order to meet inflated sales goals. Distributing some low-cost meals, then, is a relatively cheap price to pay for a public relations boost just as working people are again getting squeezed.
On Wednesday, Citigroup’s outgoing CEO, Michael Corbat, stated, “Addressing racism and closing the racial wealth gap is the most critical challenge we face in creating a fair and inclusive society.” But if recent history is any indication, his bank is more an obstacle to that fair and inclusive society than it is a righteous vehicle for it. And after all, when the economy tanked in 2008, the banks were famously rewarded for their collusion in the disaster with a financial bailout. The last thing they deserve in this moment is a reputational one.


The Vampire Ship

In March 2018 , the Piraeus prosecutor ’ s office launched an investigation against Marinakis and three of his associates , for allegedly running a criminal organization that bought , trafficked , and sold narcotics .
Throughout the inquiry , Marinakis has denied any links to drug trafficking and claimed in a statement posted on his personal website that the allegations against him were politically motivated .
“ Members of the governing coalition have persistently targeted me , ” he said .
That investigation remains ongoing .
Meanwhile , five of the men imprisoned in the 2016 trial are appealing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
To many observers in Greece , Yiannousakis ’ s appeal is what the country has been waiting six years for .
If he was a front man , if he was working for someone more powerful , now is his time to start talking .
For security purposes , these new trials are held in the women ’ s quarters of Greece ’ s largest prison , which occupies a craggy mountainside overlooking Piraeus ’ s cemented coastlines .
Over the last three years , as the Noor One ’ s murder @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of a more powerful financier churned , the gaggle of journalists who once covered the case has dwindled to a handful .
It ’ s not unusual for Greek oligarchs to mitigate bad press coverage by purchasing a well-placed media outlet ; in 2017 , Marinakis bought two newspapers and a TV station .
That year , as opinion polls concerning the upcoming parliamentary elections swung evermore in Mitsotakis ’ s favor , most Athenian dailies and TV stations relaxed their previously obsessive coverage of all things Noor One .
While the investigation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ surrounding it , have lapsed into something of a state of suspended animation , the machinery of Yiannousakis ’ s appeal grinds slowly on .
Twice a month , the former oil broker struts down a Korydallos Prison hallway that is spattered with dog shit , into a bare courtroom mounted with an icon of Jesus on the cross .
He wears a pair of aviator sunglasses and moves in a cloud of cologne .
His double-breasted blazer rests over a banker ’ s collar .
From his left hand , below a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ protrude through his knuckles .
Patches of his hair have fallen out .
Yiannousakis is in solitary confinement at Korydallos after stints in prisons across Greece .
At all his prior stops in the system , he claims , other inmates have made attempts on his life .
One such assailant “ told me he ’ d slit my throat for giving up names , ” Yiannousakis told me , referring to a knife wound he took a year earlier to the hip .
In October 2017 , Yiannousakis was temporarily admitted to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to kill himself by smashing a bed plank into his forehead .
At a September 16 hearing for his appeal , he entered the courtroom and sat alone in the back , as he has over the five-year course of the case .
In 2018 , after he ’ d begun serving his life sentence , Yiannousakis didn ’ t just start offering up new details about the Noor One ; he told an entirely new story .
Contacts in jail had put him in possession of two cell phones and a direct @ @ @ @ @ @ @ leader of the Syriza party ’ s right-wing Independent Greeks coalition partner , and a man who has never made any secret of his enmity toward Marinakis .
Unaware that he was being recorded , during an interview with a Greek journalist , Yiannousakis swiftly upended everything that prosecutors believed they knew about the Noor One .
He had never trafficked two tons of heroin into Europe , he said ; there had been three .
If true , the revelation did a lot more than make the biggest known shipment of heroin @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It raised the prospect that €70 million worth of drugs had been successfully delivered somewhere .
Far from being a bust , the Noor One had profited someone .
And according to Yiannousakis , that person was Marinakis .
The place to look , he maintained , was Crete .
As the Noor One was approaching the island on its way to Elefsina , he said , a smaller vessel had swung past it , picked up a ton of its heroin , then went up the Adriatic toward ports near Serbia @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Yiannousakis claimed .
As with so much of what Yiannousakis has said over the last six years , there were plenty of reasons to doubt this latest sensational allegation .
Why hadn ’ t any of the Noor One ’ s crew ever mentioned handing heroin off to another ship ?
Yiannousakis pointed to two defendants who had died in prison : Of course their surviving colleagues hadn ’ t come forward with information to invite further retribution .
There were additional reasons to take his claims seriously .
Witnesses interrogated in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also insisting that three—not two—tons of heroin had been trafficked into Europe , according to Turkish police documents unearthed by a journalist who asked not to be named .
And inside the Noor One itself , a month after authorities claimed it had been searched , a handwritten note had been found referencing a curiously similar transaction to the one revealed by Yiannousakis .
A white sheet of a paper dated May 26 , 2014—a day when the Noor One was in the Suez Canal—reads : “ Mister Giannousakis , I am waiting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a date and a meeting point in South Crete .
Please contact us .
Master Jack.
” Below the text , which is loopy but precise , there is the stamp of a ship called the Seychelles Prelude .
Through his newspapers , Marinakis has countered that the Seychelles Prelude note is a forgery , citing the fact that the vessel was sailing near Liverpool at the time of the supposed transaction .
But if the note is indeed a forgery , another fraught conundrum presents itself : Why was the fake document @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
On the face of things , it ’ s reasonable to infer that someone with knowledge of the tanker ’ s journey and cargo , weeks after Yiannousakis had already been arrested on drug trafficking charges , was attempting to yoke the entire heroin operation around his neck through a note packed with ludicrously incriminating information .
But the most intriguing piece of the puzzle in light of Yiannousakis ’ s new story was an episode at the Athens airport .
Three months after the Noor One had reached Elefsina , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ company flew from Fujairah City to Athens .
Upon arrival , he was asked to open his suitcase .
His luggage contained €622,000 in 500-bill notes .
Marinakis has told investigators that the cash came from a recalled wire transfer ; legal authorities insist that it ’ s clear evidence of a money-laundering transaction .
The dispute is at the heart of the ongoing investigation in Piraeus .
Meanwhile , the long-running Turkish inquiry into the Noor One has converged on the Greek case .
Just months after he ’ d shocked the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mysteriously recanted it .
Marinakis had nothing to do with the Noor One , he rushed to explain .
The report of a third ton of heroin successfully trafficked through the Balkans had been a fabrication .
And the culprit behind the whole affair was not Marinakis but Zindashti—the Iranian Kurd allegedly behind the assassinations of the Noor One ’ s other backers .
As a result , in spring 2018 Athens issued a warrant for Zindashti ’ s arrest .
Across the Aegean , Turkish authorities appeared to comply .
Early one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s Istanbul villa , arresting him and nine others—four current or former police officers among them .
The next Sunday , Marinakis publicly pronounced his innocence .
“ The arrest of Zindashti is a major blow to a game of many years , ” one of his newspapers , To Vima , claimed in a bombastic English-language account .
This was self-satisfaction masquerading as vindication .
Turkish prosecutors had never made any claim that Zindashti was the mastermind behind the Noor One .
He was arrested for allegedly murdering the lawyer of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way , the Turkish action ultimately proved to be another dead end in the case .
Zindashti spent less than six months in prison—and within hours of his release , he ’ d vanished from police observation .
Zindashti ’ s extensive criminal résumé counted for less , in the grand scheme of things , than his apparent ties to the inner circles of Turkish political power .
Six months after his bizarre early release from prison , Zindashti ’ s face was plastered across the front page of the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to dinner with one of Erdoğan ’ s closest advisers , as well as a senior member of his party .
Less than a month after the photo ’ s publication , Ilhan Üngan , one of the last living Noor One funders , was shot twice in the head while walking along Istanbul ’ s seafront , weeks after his brother had told a state prosecutor that Zindashti would send gunmen after them .
Three arrests followed ; Zindashti was not among them .
What had seemed a story about Ankara ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ just be something else : a window into the connections sluicing between Turkey ’ s authoritarian state and the Mediterranean criminal underworld .
Will the Noor One tell a similar story about Greece ?
The investigation into Marinakis might yield an answer—but in the meantime , the case has already morphed into a proxy conflict within the Greek political system .
For those on the left , Marinakis and the Noor One seemed to represent everything that they had voted Syriza into power in 2015 to destroy : above all , the interlocking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and oligarchic capital .
Syriza ’ s leader , Alexis Tsipras , has continually played on developments in the case to bolster his following , in and out of power .
In early 2019 , when a photograph of then-Prime Minister Tsipras lounging on a yacht served as campaign-season ammunition for now-Prime Minister Mitsotakis , Tsipras fired back : “ At least I wasn ’ t the one who was aboard Marinakis ’ s yacht—or aboard the Noor One .
Nor is my best man someone who is awaiting trial for smuggling a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was , as it happens , not speaking accurately : Marinakis is not awaiting trial but rather under state investigation ; state prosecutors will only decide about launching a formal trial against the oligarch at the end of the inquiry . )
For the sitting government ’ s antagonists on the right , meanwhile , the story surrounding the Noor One was a signature example of how Tsipras ’ s coalition would stop at nothing to weaponize Greece ’ s justice system against its enemies .
Over the course of 2017 , Defense @ @ @ @ @ @ @ another about the tanker , rattling off the names of the companies that had put cash into Yiannousakis ’ s accounts .
The next summer , Kammenos sparked another media furor when he was photographed in Monaco alongside the prosecutor who had launched the investigation into Marinakis .
What about Marinakis himself ?
He denies any connection to the Noor One whatsoever .
He likens himself instead to Socrates—a wise man condemned by a state that fails to appreciate his services .
“ In Greece ’ s long history one can find fitting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ crowd at a ceremony in March 2019 to dedicate a statue of a Greek revolutionary .
“ Through its travails over the centuries , light always wins over dark and true heroes and benefactors finally take their rightful place in our history.
” Marinakis declined to be interviewed for this article .
But Zindashti was willing to talk .
For months , he wrote me emails from an undisclosed Middle Eastern country about his life , his friend Mohammed Diesel , and what he knew about the ship whose arrival on Greek shores @ @ @ @ @ @ @ murder of his daughter .
Zindashti never mentioned heroin trafficking or the murders he ’ s alleged to have ordered .
But he was adamant about one thing : Yiannousakis , whom Zindashti only ever knew by the nickname “ Makis , ” wasn ’ t acting alone .
Behind him was a Greek his friend Diesel called “ Shishko ” —Turkish for “ fatso.
” “ I used to hear often the name of Shishko when Shahid Ahmet [ Diesel ] and Mekish [ Yiannousakis ] were talking , ” Zindashti told @ @ @ @ @ @ @ once , in March or April 2014 , in the lobby of Dubai ’ s Hilton Jumeirah .
It was a meeting about the Noor One , scheduled to depart weeks later .
Yiannousakis confirmed this meeting for me , including the date when Zindashti said it happened , and its locale .
However , Yiannousakis claimed not to know anyone who went by the name Shishko .
I sent Zindashti numerous images of large Greeks with beards , asking him to confirm if any depicted the man he knew as Shishko .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ one of Marinakis .
“ I only remember him because he was really fat otherwise if he would be a normal man he probably wouldn ’ t get my attention , ” he said .
“ I repeat , he was REALLY FAT.
” Late last summer , I visited the Noor One .
It can still be found in Elefsina , meters from where it came to rest six years and 17 deaths ago .
It slumbers down an unlit dirt road in a lonely bay .
The slip where the ship @ @ @ @ @ @ @ side by cement stacks belching white smog ; on the other is the tumbledown sanctuary where the ancient Athenians once celebrated their religious mystery rites .
The march of rust and the lap of the sea are slowly eating away at its hull ; the Noor One lists into the water , as though doing its best to disappear from sight entirely .
It ’ s been recently put up for auction , with an asking price of €60,000—less than what it would fetch as scrap metal at the going rate .
There @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this story was funded in part by a grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation .
* Due to an editing error , a previous version of this story misstated the year of Kotsonis ’ s suspended 10-year prison sentence and the year he set up a Sharjah , UAE , front company .

As with so much of what Yiannousakis has said over the last six years, there were plenty of reasons to doubt this latest sensational allegation. Why hadn’t any of the Noor One’s crew ever mentioned handing heroin off to another ship? Yiannousakis pointed to two defendants who had died in prison: Of course their surviving colleagues hadn’t come forward with information to invite further retribution.
There were additional reasons to take his claims seriously. Witnesses interrogated in Istanbul years earlier had baffled authorities by also insisting that three—not two—tons of heroin had been trafficked into Europe, according to Turkish police documents unearthed by a journalist who asked not to be named. And inside the Noor One itself, a month after authorities claimed it had been searched, a handwritten note had been found referencing a curiously similar transaction to the one revealed by Yiannousakis. A white sheet of a paper dated May 26, 2014—a day when the Noor One was in the Suez Canal—reads: “Mister Giannousakis, I am waiting 450kg of powder. Please give us a date and a meeting point in South Crete. Please contact us. Master Jack.” Below the text, which is loopy but precise, there is the stamp of a ship called the Seychelles Prelude.
“The true owners of the Noor One are being hidden,” Katsoulis repeated three times in courtroom testimony.
Through his newspapers, Marinakis has countered that the Seychelles Prelude note is a forgery, citing the fact that the vessel was sailing near Liverpool at the time of the supposed transaction. But if the note is indeed a forgery, another fraught conundrum presents itself: Why was the fake document planted in the Noor One at all? On the face of things, it’s reasonable to infer that someone with knowledge of the tanker’s journey and cargo, weeks after Yiannousakis had already been arrested on drug trafficking charges, was attempting to yoke the entire heroin operation around his neck through a note packed with ludicrously incriminating information.
But the most intriguing piece of the puzzle in light of Yiannousakis’s new story was an episode at the Athens airport. Three months after the Noor One had reached Elefsina, the managing director of Marinakis’s shipping company flew from Fujairah City to Athens. Upon arrival, he was asked to open his suitcase. His luggage contained €622,000 in 500-bill notes.
Marinakis has told investigators that the cash came from a recalled wire transfer; legal authorities insist that it’s clear evidence of a money-laundering transaction. The dispute is at the heart of the ongoing investigation in Piraeus.
Meanwhile, the long-running Turkish inquiry into the Noor One has converged on the Greek case. Just months after he’d shocked the country with his new story, Yiannousakis mysteriously recanted it. Marinakis had nothing to do with the Noor One, he rushed to explain. The report of a third ton of heroin successfully trafficked through the Balkans had been a fabrication. And the culprit behind the whole affair was not Marinakis but Zindashti—the Iranian Kurd allegedly behind the assassinations of the Noor One’s other backers. As a result, in spring 2018 Athens issued a warrant for Zindashti’s arrest.
Across the Aegean, Turkish authorities appeared to comply. Early one morning that April, police ambushed Zindashti’s Istanbul villa, arresting him and nine others—four current or former police officers among them. The next Sunday, Marinakis publicly pronounced his innocence. “The arrest of Zindashti is a major blow to a game of many years,” one of his newspapers, To Vima, claimed in a bombastic English-language account.
This was self-satisfaction masquerading as vindication. Turkish prosecutors had never made any claim that Zindashti was the mastermind behind the Noor One. He was arrested for allegedly murdering the lawyer of a murdered Noor One funder. Either way, the Turkish action ultimately proved to be another dead end in the case. Zindashti spent less than six months in prison—and within hours of his release, he’d vanished from police observation.
Zindashti’s extensive criminal résumé counted for less, in the grand scheme of things, than his apparent ties to the inner circles of Turkish political power. Six months after his bizarre early release from prison, Zindashti’s face was plastered across the front page of the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet; he’d been photographed out to dinner with one of Erdoğan’s closest advisers, as well as a senior member of his party.
Less than a month after the photo’s publication, Ilhan Üngan, one of the last living Noor One funders, was shot twice in the head while walking along Istanbul’s seafront, weeks after his brother had told a state prosecutor that Zindashti would send gunmen after them. Three arrests followed; Zindashti was not among them. What had seemed a story about Ankara’s inability to stop a vendetta may just be something else: a window into the connections sluicing between Turkey’s authoritarian state and the Mediterranean criminal underworld.
Will the Noor One tell a similar story about Greece? The investigation into Marinakis might yield an answer—but in the meantime, the case has already morphed into a proxy conflict within the Greek political system.
For those on the left, Marinakis and the Noor One seemed to represent everything that they had voted Syriza into power in 2015 to destroy: above all, the interlocking directorates of power that conjoin political dynasties and oligarchic capital. Syriza’s leader, Alexis Tsipras, has continually played on developments in the case to bolster his following, in and out of power. In early 2019, when a photograph of then-Prime Minister Tsipras lounging on a yacht served as campaign-season ammunition for now-Prime Minister Mitsotakis, Tsipras fired back: “At least I wasn’t the one who was aboard Marinakis’s yacht—or aboard the Noor One. Nor is my best man someone who is awaiting trial for smuggling a couple tons of heroin.” (Tsipras was, as it happens, not speaking accurately: Marinakis is not awaiting trial but rather under state investigation; state prosecutors will only decide about launching a formal trial against the oligarch at the end of the inquiry.)
For the sitting government’s antagonists on the right, meanwhile, the story surrounding the Noor One was a signature example of how Tsipras’s coalition would stop at nothing to weaponize Greece’s justice system against its enemies. Over the course of 2017, Defense Minister Kammenos delivered one parliamentary rant after another about the tanker, rattling off the names of the companies that had put cash into Yiannousakis’s accounts. The next summer, Kammenos sparked another media furor when he was photographed in Monaco alongside the prosecutor who had launched the investigation into Marinakis.
What about Marinakis himself? He denies any connection to the Noor One whatsoever. He likens himself instead to Socrates—a wise man condemned by a state that fails to appreciate his services. “In Greece’s long history one can find fitting role models,” he told a crowd at a ceremony in March 2019 to dedicate a statue of a Greek revolutionary. “Through its travails over the centuries, light always wins over dark and true heroes and benefactors finally take their rightful place in our history.”
Marinakis declined to be interviewed for this article. But Zindashti was willing to talk. For months, he wrote me emails from an undisclosed Middle Eastern country about his life, his friend Mohammed Diesel, and what he knew about the ship whose arrival on Greek shores, he insists, led to the murder of his daughter.
Zindashti never mentioned heroin trafficking or the murders he’s alleged to have ordered. But he was adamant about one thing: Yiannousakis, whom Zindashti only ever knew by the nickname “Makis,” wasn’t acting alone. Behind him was a Greek his friend Diesel called “Shishko”—Turkish for “fatso.”
“I used to hear often the name of Shishko when Shahid Ahmet [Diesel] and Mekish [Yiannousakis] were talking,” Zindashti told me. Zindashti said he met Shishko once, in March or April 2014, in the lobby of Dubai’s Hilton Jumeirah. It was a meeting about the Noor One, scheduled to depart weeks later. Yiannousakis confirmed this meeting for me, including the date when Zindashti said it happened, and its locale. However, Yiannousakis claimed not to know anyone who went by the name Shishko.
I sent Zindashti numerous images of large Greeks with beards, asking him to confirm if any depicted the man he knew as Shishko. The photo he sent back was the one of Marinakis. “I only remember him because he was really fat otherwise if he would be a normal man he probably wouldn’t get my attention,” he said. “I repeat, he was REALLY FAT.”
Late last summer, I visited the Noor One. It can still be found in Elefsina, meters from where it came to rest six years and 17 deaths ago. It slumbers down an unlit dirt road in a lonely bay. The slip where the ship is now located is flanked on one side by cement stacks belching white smog; on the other is the tumbledown sanctuary where the ancient Athenians once celebrated their religious mystery rites. The march of rust and the lap of the sea are slowly eating away at its hull; the Noor One lists into the water, as though doing its best to disappear from sight entirely. It’s been recently put up for auction, with an asking price of €60,000—less than what it would fetch as scrap metal at the going rate. There are no buyers.
The reporting for this story was funded in part by a grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation.
* Due to an editing error, a previous version of this story misstated the year of Kotsonis’s suspended 10-year prison sentence and the year he set up a Sharjah, UAE, front company.


newrepublic--2020-09-28--The Amy Coney Barrett Discourse Is a Trap

Poll after poll shows that a clear majority of Americans want the Supreme Court seat once held by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to be filled after the election .
But that didn ’ t stop President Trump from nominating Amy Coney Barrett one week after Ginsburg ’ s death , or dissuade Senate Republicans from planning a lightning-fast confirmation process to get her on the court .
Once there , her approach to constitutional law will likely run counter to the majority of Americans ’ views on issues like abortion rights and health care .
With the November election already @ @ @ @ @ @ @ eager to discuss aspects of Barrett ’ s nomination that place them out of sync with voters ’ wishes .
So instead they ’ ve preemptively cast her as a martyr of sorts for the cause of religious freedom , while tarring her critics as latter-day Know Nothings who despise the Catholic faith .
Their depictions made Barrett , who faces perhaps the most certain road to a Supreme Court seat in two decades , sound like a modern Thomas More .
“ 65 million American Catholics are going to be very interested @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Democrats think they can ’ t be trusted to serve as judges or in public office if they ’ re ‘ too Catholic , ’ ” Missouri Senator Josh Hawley wrote on Twitter .
“ Democrat bigotry on full display with Amy Coney Barrett.
” Hugh Hewitt , a conservative columnist , repeatedly castigated Democrats on similar grounds .
“ Every Catholic , indeed every person of any faith , has to realize the left despises them , ” he warned first on Twitter , then later in a Washington Post column , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ faith “ should not be part of the discussion of her qualifications.
” This is a trap .
Conservatives know they can ’ t defend Barrett ’ s nomination on process grounds after Mitch McConnell ’ s Merrick Garland blockade in 2016 .
Nor can they easily defend her nomination on political grounds , since most Americans oppose replacing Ginsburg before the election and prefer Biden over Trump when it comes to choosing the next justice .
So they ’ ve invented an anti-Catholic bias on the left , seeking to bait Democrats @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s personal life and background .
The right ’ s hope , perhaps , is that the shared sense of grievance and victimhood that propels Trumpism can be harnessed in this case as well .
This anti-Catholicism claim can be traced to remarks that California Senator Dianne Feinstein made in 2017 , after Trump nominated Barrett for a seat on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals .
Some Democratic senators questioned Barrett about a law-review article she had co-written as a law student with one of her professors in 1998 .
They argued @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are faithful to the teaching of their church ) are morally precluded from enforcing the death penalty , ” and described the circumstances in which they should recuse themselves .
At the time , the Vatican opposed capital punishment in virtually all circumstances ; Pope Francis clarified in 2018 that the church ’ s opposition to executions is categorical .

Feinstein suggested during Barrett’s confirmation hearing that the article, as well as other works, indicated that Barrett would place her religious views over her judicial obligations. “Dogma and law are two different things,” Feinstein told Barrett. “And I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma. The law is totally different. And I think in your case, professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern.” Barrett, who has since distanced herself from the 1998 article, insisted that she would not decide cases according to her religious beliefs.
Feinstein’s insinuation drew allegations of bigotry from conservatives and some liberals. Some of her critics noted that she appeared to violate Article VI of the Constitution, which forbids imposing religious tests as a qualification for holding public office. “The dogma lives loudly within you” became a right-wing meme of sorts and catapulted Barrett into conservative legal stardom. The exchange did not hinder Barrett’s confirmation to the Seventh Circuit. If anything, it likely helped influence her eventual nomination to the Supreme Court.
Some conservatives have tried to transmute Feinstein’s bad questioning into a broader attack on Democrats and the left. But if Democrats are anti-Catholic, they’re not very good at it. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is currently the highest-ranking Democrat in government, is Catholic. So are almost 90 members of her caucus. The most recent Democratic president successfully nominated Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the five Catholics on the court. Indeed, Democrats are so bad at anti-Catholicism that they even chose former Vice President Joe Biden, who is well-known for his Catholic faith, as their standard-bearer to challenge Trump this November.


newrepublic--2020-09-28--Our Plutocratic Tax System Was Built for Rich Cheaters

Donald Trump ’ s previously undisclosed tax records , the subject of so much Democratic speculation since 2016 , are finally public , thanks to a New York Times report released over the weekend .
It was hardly a shock to learn that Trump—estimated by Forbes to be worth around $ 2.5 billion—had paid a scant $ 750 in income taxes in 2016 , and nothing at all during 10 of the 15 years prior to that .
( For contrast , supposedly freeloading undocumented workers paid an estimated $ 12 billion to Social Security through payroll taxes in 2010 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shock was that none of Trump ’ s tax shirking appeared to be illegal , strictly speaking .
As the Times noted , Trump—or rather , his accountants and lawyers—had simply taken full advantage of various tax loopholes , including an Obama-era business deduction that allowed him to obtain millions in refunds for business losses incurred in prior years .
As expected , some of Trump ’ s critics have seized upon his taxes ( or lack thereof ) as proof of his incompetence as a businessman and , by extension , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but it ’ s unlikely that anyone would find that revelatory by now .
What the Times exposé made plain is the fact that our current tax system was more or less designed for this .
Far from leeching off the rich or punishing them for their success , as Republicans perennially claim—taxation in this country is a deeply regressive arrangement that enables the wealthiest individuals to hoard their money at the expense of everyone else .
The real bombshell would have been if Trump had done something other than what the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2016 and would likely say again today : “ That makes me smart.
” As economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman have found , in 2018 , billionaires were essentially able to pay a lower tax rate than the bottom half of American households as a result of decades of tax cuts for the rich and flimsy laws concerning the offshoring of profits and other wealth .
The overall effect has been a state starved of money it could have used to fund robust public services ( or successfully weather a pandemic ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ upward transfer of wealth .
Trump ’ s 2017 tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy only exacerbated the trend .
“ As a group , and although their individual situations are not all the same , the Trumps , the Bezoses and the Buffetts of this world pay lower tax rates than teachers and secretaries do , ” Saez and Zucman wrote last year .
“ This is the tax system of a plutocracy.
” Even the mechanisms that are meant to enforce compliance with existing tax law more often punish the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
A few years ago , ProPublica found that the IRS was more likely to audit an individual making $ 20,000 than someone making $ 400,000 .
That cruel phenomenon is itself one consequence of austerity ; as the IRS admitted to Congress last year , it requires far fewer resources to audit people with no money than it does to audit people with too much of it , and Republicans have successfully chipped away at the IRS budget over the last decade .
While Trump was able to claw back massive refunds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people who have found themselves subject to IRS audits are left without much-needed cash .
“ You expect this money during tax season , and you don ’ t get it , ” Paul McCaw , a forklift operator whose refunds were withheld for several years in a row due to audits , told ProPublica .
“ It tears you down.
” Because there are plenty of reasons for most people to loathe the tax system , it sometimes seems like the perfect , poisonous stew for Republicans to continue gunning for tax @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stance is just cover for a program of upward wealth redistribution .
Some conservatives are naturally now attempting to take advantage of that distrust to further push an agenda of so-called tax reform in the wake of the Trump tax revelations .
“ Wouldn ’ t it be great to only give $ 750 a year to the IRS ?
” RedState editor Joe Cunningham wrote on Monday .
“ Think of how much of your income you could be stockpiling in order to actually do some good for yourselves and your families @ @

Donald Trump’s previously undisclosed tax records, the subject of so much Democratic speculation since 2016, are finally public, thanks to a New York Times report released over the weekend. It was hardly a shock to learn that Trump—estimated by Forbes to be worth around $2.5 billion—had paid a scant $750 in income taxes in 2016, and nothing at all during 10 of the 15 years prior to that. (For contrast, supposedly freeloading undocumented workers paid an estimated $12 billion to Social Security through payroll taxes in 2010.) Perhaps even less of a shock was that none of Trump’s tax shirking appeared to be illegal, strictly speaking. As the Times noted, Trump—or rather, his accountants and lawyers—had simply taken full advantage of various tax loopholes, including an Obama-era business deduction that allowed him to obtain millions in refunds for business losses incurred in prior years.
As expected, some of Trump’s critics have seized upon his taxes (or lack thereof) as proof of his incompetence as a businessman and, by extension, a president. That’s undoubtedly true, but it’s unlikely that anyone would find that revelatory by now. What the Times exposé made plain is the fact that our current tax system was more or less designed for this. Far from leeching off the rich or punishing them for their success, as Republicans perennially claim—taxation in this country is a deeply regressive arrangement that enables the wealthiest individuals to hoard their money at the expense of everyone else. The real bombshell would have been if Trump had done something other than what the system allows. As he said in 2016 and would likely say again today: “That makes me smart.”