August 2018 Archives

Dear America,

Donald Trump took another shot at self-aggrandizement yesterday in the form of his announcement that he was saving us all from NAFTA with his new "United States-Mexico Trade Agreement."  Under NAFTA, tariffs had to be paid on all cars coming into the United States that had less than 62.5% American parts.  Under Trump's new, revolutionary plan, it will be 75%.  Also, 40% of the Mexican auto workers will who make the car will have to be paid $16 per hour or more.  All of this begs this question: how does that help American workers.

Most of the electronics we use are made in China, so this tariff arrangement will punish

the Chinese, and probably the Koreans, and some workers in parts manufacturing plants might benefit, but the change seems so marginal and employment is already virtually full in this country that the benefit can't be more than miniscule.  Of course, if Trump had concomitantly sent a bill to congress raising the national minimum wage to $16 in this country, that would be a different matter...but he didn't.  Forty percent of Mexican auto workers are assured a living wage, but no Americans were protected in this agreement, and the underlying reason is that the problem with NAFTA was that our auto manufacturers used it to make sending our jobs to Mexico more profitable, and they sent a lot of them down there.  Now those Mexican workers can add Donald Trump to their Christmas card lists right after the presidents of GM, Chrysler-Fiat and Ford.  As to American workers, this seems like a classic case of thanks for nothing...like the tax cut, the restriction of the powers of the Federal Consumer Protection Bureau, deregulation of coal fired power plants and so much more.

What is encouraging is that despite Trump's people trying to spin this thing into something not just good but major, there seems to be a great deal of debunking going on.  Congressmen were interviewed this morning and their praise was equivocal rather than lavish, if they praised the deal at all.  I heard a former trade representative admit that while he thought the deal was great, it had more to do with limiting Chinese manufacturing of electronics than it did American auto workers when he was pressed by the interviewer.  Bloomberg panned the deal as a lemon citing the meager effects it will have relative to the current deal.  Even the Wall Street Journal panned the deal, albeit for all the wrong reasons.  Likewise, the Washington Post was at best tepid in its account of what the deal entails.

My suspicion is that as the deal rolls toward congress, which has to approve it before it is anything but Trump's pipedream, a fuller analysis from the perspective of American constituencies will take place and the panning will become carnivorous.  This being an election year, and the election being just over two months away, the Democrats, liberals in general, and probably conservatives too--as the WSJ pointed out the deal is further control by the federal government of trade, which the paper would prefer as a matter of editorial policy to be without any restrictions, or protections for that matter--will be as pejorative of Trump and his deal as they can be so as to protect their own incumbencies.  I'm thinking that this is one time when DT's suede shoe tactics won't work even on his base, composed largely of working people as it is.  And when the Wall Street Journal points out that much of what is in Trump's handy work is a rehash of the Trans Pacific Partnership for which, among other deals, he characterized his predecessor as the negotiator of the worst  deal ever (he vacillates between and among NAFTA, the TPP and the Iran nuclear agreement here as Trump calls everything Obama or Clinton the "worst ever"), it's hard to see where Trump is going to find vindication.

I expect that he will come up with some excuse: leprechauns were in his ears or the Mexicans used the same ultra-sonic devices that made our Cuba diplomats sick to make him do it.  But the reality should be sinking in to the political consciousness of even his faithful fans that DT is a bad dream, not a good friend.  I can hope, can't I?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

When Donald Trump sent his dismissal letter to James Comey, I said to my wife that it wasn't a falling domino, but it was teetering.  Since then, I have often returned to that analogy, saying to my wife as we watched the evening news over dinner that another domino was teetering.  Yesterday, former Trump attorney Michael Cohen pled guilty to felony counts related to his payment of money in exchange for silence from former sexual consorts of Donald Trump's during Trump's campaign for president.  His plea was that specific.  It was the biggest domino yet, and it isn't teetering. It fell.

When the Mueller investigation started relative to Russian meddling in our 2016 election, it seemed to me a fools errand.  To the best of my knowledge, collusion with someone isn't a crime unless it's collusion in the form of conspiracy to commit a crime.  I wasn't then, and I still am not, aware of any law against finding negative information, even scabrous information, other than to use it for extortion.  But over time, the investigation developed peripheral inquiries--just like the White Water investigation during the Clinton presidency--but unlike White Water, these have now yielded evidence of subornation of campaign law violations...felonies...by our illustrious president.  Like most of the nation that listens to or watches the news every day, I was dazed when I heard the report just after 4:00 pm yesterday that Michael Cohen had said on the record--in open court in front of God, a federal court judge and everybody--that he had committed felonious violations of federal campaign law at the behest of a candidate for federal office in the form of payment of sums of money to women who were accusing Trump of scandalous relations.  That candidate could be no one other than Donald J. Trump.

Cohen is now looking at significant jail time because of his conviction, which implicates this question; is Trump's subornation just the tip of the iceberg, and does Michael Cohen know about it first hand; the concatenation of prosecutions may have just begun.  An actual evidentiary domino has now fallen, and only time will tell whether it is within striking distance of other dominos that are capable of bringing down our president, though this domino on its own seems sufficient.  But there are impediments behind which Trump can hide.  For one thing, it seems to be settled law that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted during his presidency, so criminal charges will have to wait at least until Trump is out of office, if then.  Of course that is leverage that the Mueller investigation can use against Trump, which he might be able to avert by resigning.  All of the comparisons of this investigation have been to the Starr investigation of Bill Clinton and the cognate impeachment and acquittal, but in this respect, perhaps the more appropriate comparison may be to the resignation of Richard Nixon.  A bill of impeachment was reported out of the House Judiciary Committee, and within a couple of days, Nixon was at the top of stairs leading to the presidential helicopter flashing his famous peace signs as he departed from the lawn of the White House after resigning to avoid trial by The Senate and virtually certain conviction for...subornation of a felony under the rubric of obstruction of justice.  That may be Trump's only option because his conviction in any senate trial ensuing upon a bill of impeachment seems almost a certainty now, just as it was with Nixon pursuant to John Dean's testimony before a Senate committee.  Michael Cohen is Trump's John Dean.  He is not Trump's Vernon Jordan.

I have written before about the accusations of hypocrisy that the Democrats will face if they retake control of congress and impeach Trump.  Their defense of Clinton will be thrown up to them as evidence, but that would be a false comparison.  Clinton was accused of suborning the perjurious affidavit of Monica Lewinsky signed by her in connection with the Paula Jones case in which she denied her sexual relationship with Clinton.  The allegation was that pressure was applied by Clinton through at least one associate of his, Vernon Jordan.  This Trump matter may be just as salacious, but it is fundamentally different.  Clinton wasn't convicted because no overt crime was committed.  Attempting to persuade isn't analogous to bribing.  One is legal, albeit marginally.  The other isn't, and the other is what Trump arranged.  And while Cohen's role may be analogous to Vernon Jordan's in the Clinton matter in that he was the go-between, he is more like Dean in that when money was discussed, Cohen was there with Trump, just as Dean was when money was discussed by Nixon in the oval office where it was caught on tape, just like the tape in Cohen's law office.

When a ball was hit out of the park in the old days, the announcer on the radio would say, "Goodbye, Mr. Spalding!"  I'm wondering, is this "Goodbye, Mr. Trump?" 

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Last week, a portentous event happened in Missouri; Missouri voters repealed the state's "right to work" law in a referendum.  It was portentous for two reasons.  First, the state is generally regarded as a Republican state.  Donald Trump won there handily in an open primary before the 2016 election.  Second, unionization is an issue primarily for working people, the preponderance of Trump's base.

The referendum barely got mentioned in the media though there was still much hand-wringing over the things the Democrats needed to do to prevail this November, not to mention in the 2020 election for president.  It still doesn't seem to have sunk in that Hillary Clinton, who was not even terribly popular among Democrats, beat Trump by 2%--nearly 3 million--of the popular vote and the Democrats gained six seats in the House of Representatives and two seats in The Senate.  The only thing the Republicans won was the electoral college, which is an irony in that it was intended to prevent a popular wave from electing a wild card like Trump to be what Alexander Hamilton referred to in the Federalist Papers as our highest "magistrate."   So the question that keeps recurring in my mind is whether the Democrats need to change anything from what they did and advocated in 2016.  Now, the result in the Missouri referendum seems to echo that question.  If the majority of the Trump, Republican working-class base sees unions as necessary to protect them from the predation of upper class, mainly Republican, capital owners, that is business people and "entrepreneurs" as the Republicans would have them called, how much do Democrats need to change?

Today, there are primaries in four states and there have been many of them in recent months across the country.  Here in Connecticut, as in few other states, there will be a gubernatorial election this fall and our airwaves are bursting with the effulgent images of people who want our votes, though very few have said anything revealing about their specific plans for change here in a state in which the Democratic incumbent, rightly or wrongly, is very unpopular.  In Wisconsin, Scott Walker has expressed his apprehension about this election not just for himself but for his Republican Party.  In fact, pundits on television have seemed to become univocal about their perception of the November prospects for the two parties.  The Democrats appear positioned for a wave in their favor, including in the House of Representatives where quite a few Republicans have declined to seek reelection, seemingly in anticipation of defeat. 

I am watching our gubernatorial primary with great interest.  We have one candidate who ran for one of our senate seats some time ago and got the Democratic nomination beating Joe Lieberman in the party primary.  But Lieberman ran as an independent and beat both the Republican and the Democrat.  Many years ago, Lowell Weicker switched from Republican to independent when he lost his party primary and he won as well.  And it seems that the mainstream Republicans have suffered several blows recently when Trump-style conservatives have taken party nominations, especially in the south.  It will be interesting to see if that phenomenon results in independent candidates come November, which seems to me the way we're headed as a nation.  At some point, the two main political parties will cease to be viable sources of representative candidates for most people and we will turn to a more syncretic form of politics.  People will stop voting party lines and begin demanding of the candidates that they wear their hearts on their sleeves and vote out of principle rather than partisan zeal...or at least subjugation.  At some point, the American people will, I hope, come to realize that what counts in a candidate is who he or she is rather than who he or she votes with.  The majority of individuals will want people in Washington, D.C. and in their various capitals who will vote the way they would on issues as opposed to electing people who just happen to belong to the same political club that each of them belongs to.

That's what interests me about this election.  In general, since the ascent of Donald Trump I have developed a kind of ennui related to the futility of talking about politics to anyone.  No one will change his or her mind in this political climate because everyone's mind is either Republican or Democratic, which determines the conclusions everyone reaches about the implications of the facts if the facts are even important him or her.  Why bother.  But his election might be the beginning of the end of that kind of mindless partisanship, and a return to, at least here in Connecticut, the last era of independent thought in which party didn't matter.  It was who you were, what you believed and what you had done that counted.  The candidate who beat Joe Lieberman in the 2006 Democratic senate primary, Ned Lamont, is running for governor now, and he has been the only candidate of either party who has actually said anything substantive in his television ads rather than slamming the other candidates.  If he wins this primary, and if he then wins in November, there is a chance that maybe...finally...we have arrived as a democracy, which means that the people rule, not the political parties.   

Your friend,

Mike