Monday, December 31, 2018

New Year’s Day Is Also Emancipation Day

Our nation must fulfill the hopes unleashed by the Emancipation Proclamation.
By Jesse L. Jackson Sr.
Mr. Jackson is the founder and president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition.

    CreditGeorge McCalman
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    CreditCreditGeorge McCalman
    “Then Moses said to the people, ‘Commemorate this day, the day you came out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery, because the Lord brought you out of it with a mighty hand.’” — Exodus: 13:3.
    Late in the night of Dec. 31, in African-American churches across the country, congregants gather to welcome the new year. They sing songs of freedom and overcoming. They testify to how far their faith has brought them and how much faith and courage they will need to face another year.
    The tradition is called Watch Night, and it dates back 156 years to when President Abraham Lincoln set forth an essential document of freedom that most Americans have probably never read or thought much about: the Emancipation Proclamation.
    The night before the proclamation went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, free blacks in the North and their enslaved brothers and sisters in the South sat vigil in churches, in shabby slave shacks and in moonlit plantation woods to watch, pray and hope throughout the night to hear news that Lincoln’s promises of freedom had been officially issued and millions of our ancestors were legally free.
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    The president kept his word — although two more years of slaughter and civil war lay ahead. African-Americans emerged from that long night of waiting and watching with the right to pick up arms and join the military struggle to save the Union as soldiers and aboard “vessels of all sorts.” The proclamation declared that those enslaved in the Confederacy were now “forever free,” and the might of the United States government, “including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.”
    The proclamation was the most consequential executive order in the history of the United States. It should be celebrated and honored.
    For every American who cherishes freedom and democracy, New Year’s Day should mean far more than college bowl games and parades. The nation must revive and reclaim the true meaning and significance of Jan. 1, Emancipation Day.
    This Jan. 1 is even more significant in that the year 2019 marks the 400th anniversary of the first documented African slaves’ forced arrival on the shores of the New World that was to become the United States of America. This anniversary year should be a time of commemoration and celebration, reflection — and action — on how far we have come and how far we must still travel to reach the mountaintop.
    The journey from slavery to freedom was largely completed in 1865 with the adoption of the 13th Amendment. The march from freedom to equality is far from over.
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    I spent Christmas morning — as I have for more than 40 years — visiting and praying with the inmates and staff at Cook County Jail, the sprawling warehouse of the poor and dispossessed on the West Side of Chicago. As I looked out over the faces crowded into the jail’s gym, I saw that they were overwhelmingly black and brown.
    Although African-Americans make up just 24 percent of the population of Cook County, nearly 74 percent of the jail’s population is black.
    This story of inequality was four centuries in the making. It began in August 1619, when some 20 frightened, bewildered and beleaguered Africans arrived in Jamestown, Va., as prizes that had been pirated from Spanish ships on the open seas.
    Even as revolutionary Americans rebelled against the British monarchy, declaring all men created equal, the founding fathers at the Constitutional Convention bowed to the South with three slave compromises that still haunt our nation: permitting the international slave trade; counting slaves as three-fifths of a person for congressional representation; and establishing the Electoral College, giving the South congressional representation disproportionate to its voter eligibility.
    Yet in the darkness of chattel slavery, the enslaved were able to sustain enough of their humanity to maintain a light of hope for a better day, for freedom and for equality. African-Americans were able to see the dimly lit outlines of a more just social, economic and political order, even during slavery, apartheid and centuries of discrimination. But black people did not wait for freedom to fall from the sky. The Colonial era and beyond bristled with slave rebellions and resistance.
    The lies, myths and insanity of white supremacy contaminated the soil and the soul of America. The Academy said African-American minds were inferior. The medical establishment said our bodies were inferior; the church, our morality. The banks determined that we were unworthy for loans or investment. These barriers have yet to be completely broken down. We are free but unequal. Yet still we rise.
    History is an unbroken continuity that cannot be denied. Americans should not hide from the past nor engage in an extended exercise of rehashing 400 tragic years. Although there can be no plan for the future without comprehending the past, we cannot go forward while only looking backward.
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    2019 must be about the vision of a fully equal society.
    In the coming year, we must set goals and a timetable for the most profound and in-depth corrective action program in history and show what true equality for all Americans means and looks like.
    We must examine how much such repair will cost, what failure to repair has already cost, and the continuing cost to the nation in terms of human and economic underdevelopment if we fail to even the playing field for African-Americans and other people of color.
    In 2020, there will be another presidential election. As the candidates campaign in the next two years, they must be challenged to share their vision of what an equal, nondiscriminatory, multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious and nonsexist society looks like, and how they propose to take us there.
    In the meantime, we the people — red, brown, yellow, black and white — must do what African-Americans have done for 400 years, from bondage to emancipation, from lynch mobs to great migrations, from the back of the bus to Rosa Parks, from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis to President Barack Obama on the balcony of the White House.
    Keep hope alive.
    Jesse L. Jackson Sr. (@RevJJackson) is the founder and president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition.
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    Saturday, December 29, 2018

    El Chapo Trial Shows That Mexico’s Corruption Is Even Worse Than You Think


    In two months of testimony in the trial of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug lord known as El Chapo, nearly every level of the Mexican government has been depicted as being on the take.CreditCreditStephanie Keith for The New York Times

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    It is no secret that Mexico’s drug cartels have, for decades, corrupted the authorities with dirty money. But as bad as the graft has been, the New York trial of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug lord known as El Chapo, has suggested that the swamp of bribery runs even deeper than thought.
    In two months of testimony, nearly every level of the Mexican government has been depicted as being on the take: Prison guards, airport officials, police officers, prosecutors, tax assessors and military personnel are all said to have been compromised.
    One former army general, Gilberto Toledano, was recently accused of routinely getting payoffs of $100,000 to permit the flow of drugs through his district.
    Even the architect of the government’s war on Mr. Guzmán and his allies — Genaro García Luna, the former public security director — was suspected to have taken briefcases stuffed with cartel cash.
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    Federal prosecutors have charged Mr. Guzmán, a longtime leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel, with taking part in a continuing criminal enterprise by shipping more than 200 tons of heroin, cocaine and marijuana across the United States border from the 1980s until his arrest in Mexico two years ago.
    To prove its case, the government plans to call as witnesses at least 16 of the kingpin’s underlings and allies, some of whom served as cartel bag men.
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    While tales of violence have been common at the trial (which is on hiatus for the holidays), the accounts of graft have been even more extensive.
    The jurors have been told that Mr. Guzmán was practiced in the business of corruption from the earliest days of his career. In the late 1980s, witnesses have said, he started funneling millions of dollars to the first official on his payroll: Guillermo González Calderoni, the chief of Mexico City’s federal police.
    Mr. Calderoni, who was partly raised in Texas, eventually became a legendary officer in Mexico, perhaps best known for having helped the American authorities crack the case of Enrique Camarena Salazar, an agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration who was captured, tortured and killed by traffickers in 1985. But within two years, according to evidence at Mr. Guzmán’s trial, the lawman was already accepting cartel bribes.
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    One witness, Miguel Angel Martínez, told the jurors that Mr. Calderoni provided Mr. Guzmán with secret information on an almost daily basis, including an invaluable tip in the early 1990s that the United States government had built a radar installation on the Yucatán Peninsula to track his drug flights from Colombia.
    Mr. Martínez also testified that Mr. Calderoni once informed Mr. Guzmán that the Mexican authorities had discovered a smuggling tunnel he had dug beneath the Arizona border. Before the police could raid the tunnel, Mr. Guzmán was able to make off with a huge supply of cocaine.
    But as useful as he was to the kingpin’s operation, Mr. Calderoni met a violent end. In 2003, a gunman approached his silver Mercedes, as it sat parked on a street in McAllen, Tex., and shot him in the head. The authorities have never identified his killer.
    Mexico is not the only country to emerge from the trial with its reputation stained. Last month, Juan Carlos Ramírez Abadía, one of Mr. Guzmán’s Colombian suppliers, appeared in Federal District Court in Brooklyn and admitted to having paid off everyone from journalists to tax officials in his country.
    A former chief of the North Valley drug cartel, Mr. Ramírez calmly told the jurors that an entire wing of his organization was devoted to doling out payments. “It’s impossible to be the leader of a drug cartel in Colombia without having corruption,” he explained. “They go hand in hand.”
    The list of those who took his money was impressive: prison guards, border agents, lawyers and several officers with Colombia’s national police.
    Mr. Ramírez boasted from the stand that in 1997, he spent more than $10 million bribing what amounted to the entire Colombian Congress to change the country’s extradition laws in his favor. He also claimed to have paid as much as $500,000 to Ernesto Samper, the former president of Colombia, when he was running for office.
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    Even people in the private sector, witnesses have said, took cash from the cartels.
    A few weeks ago, the jurors learned that Mr. Guzmán had once reached a deal with a Colombian catering firm to sneak cocaine past security officials at the Bogotá airport onto planes owned by a Venezuelan airline, Aeropostal. When the planes arrived in Mexico City, the jurors were informed, a crew of corrupt employees would move the drugs onto trucks for the cartel.
    Jorge Cifuentes Villa, a Colombian trafficker who also shipped cocaine to Mr. Guzmán, recently testified that, during his career, he laundered up to $15 million in drug-trade profits through a crooked debit card company.
    Mr. Cifuentes also said he once paid off a professional gemologist to fraudulently certify that there were emeralds in a mine he had invested in and was using as a drug front.
    Some of the most egregious evidence of corruption has not been heard by the jury, and likely never will be.
    In November, for example, one of Mr. Guzmán’s former operations chiefs, Jesus Zambada García, was poised to reveal that two Mexican presidents — neither of whom was named — had taken massive bribes from the cartel. But the testimony was shut down before it could be heard by Judge Brian M. Cogan, who ruled that it would needlessly embarrass certain “individuals and entities.”
    But further tales of payoffs may be coming.
    In his opening statement, Jeffrey Lichtman, one of Mr. Guzmán’s lawyers, promised jurors that a witness who has not yet appeared at the trial, Cesar Gastelum Serrano, could — if asked — talk about bribing presidential candidates in Guatemala and buying off a president of Honduras.
    Then there was another potential witness, Dámaso López Núñez, one of Mr. Guzmán’s top lieutenants, who allegedly had Mexican Marines, intelligence officers and local politicians on his payroll.
    “There is no part of the Mexican government or law enforcement apparatus,” Mr. Lichtman said, “that Dámaso did not control.”
    A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: El Chapo Trial Reveals An Abyss of Corruption. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
     

    Wednesday, December 26, 2018

    Did a Queens Podiatrist Help Donald Trump Avoid Vietnam?







  • In the fall of 1968, Donald J. Trump received a timely diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels that led to his medical exemption from the military during Vietnam.
    For 50 years, the details of how the exemption came about, and who made the diagnosis, have remained a mystery, with Mr. Trump himself saying during the presidential campaign that he could not recall who had signed off on the medical documentation.
    Now a possible explanation has emerged about the documentation. It involves a foot doctor in Queens who rented his office from Mr. Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump, and a suggestion that the diagnosis was granted as a courtesy to the elder Mr. Trump.
    Mr. Trump, center, during his senior year at the New York Military Academy. He would receive a medical exemption from the draft a few years later.CreditFred R. Conrad for The New York Times
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    Mr. Trump, center, during his senior year at the New York Military Academy. He would receive a medical exemption from the draft a few years later.CreditFred R. Conrad for The New York Times
    The podiatrist, Dr. Larry Braunstein, died in 2007. But his daughters say their father often told the story of coming to the aid of a young Mr. Trump during the Vietnam War as a favor to his father.
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    “I know it was a favor,” said one daughter, Dr. Elysa Braunstein, 56, who along with her sister, Sharon Kessel, 53, shared the family’s account for the first time publicly when contacted by The New York Times.
    Elysa Braunstein said the implication from her father was that Mr. Trump did not have a disqualifying foot ailment. “But did he examine him? I don’t know,” she said.
    For decades, Dr. Braunstein saw patients in a congested ground-floor office below Edgerton Apartments in Jamaica, Queens, one of dozens of buildings owned by the Trumps in the 1960s. The family sold the building in 2004, records show.
    A portrait of Dr. Braunstein from his podiatry school yearbook. His daughters say he made the diagnosis as a favor to Fred C. Trump, Donald’s father.
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    A portrait of Dr. Braunstein from his podiatry school yearbook. His daughters say he made the diagnosis as a favor to Fred C. Trump, Donald’s father.
    “What he got was access to Fred Trump,” Elysa Braunstein said. “If there was anything wrong in the building, my dad would call and Trump would take care of it immediately. That was the small favor that he got.”
    No paper evidence has been found to help corroborate the version of events described by the Braunstein family, who also suggested there was some involvement by a second podiatrist, Dr. Manny Weinstein. Dr. Weinstein, who died in 1995, lived in two apartments in Brooklyn owned by Fred Trump; city directories show he moved into the first during the year Donald Trump received his exemption.
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    Dr. Braunstein’s daughters said their father left no medical records with the family, and a doctor who purchased his practice said he was unaware of any documents related to Mr. Trump. Most detailed government medical records related to the draft no longer exist, according to the National Archives.
    In an interview with The Times in 2016, Mr. Trump said that a doctor provided “a very strong letter” about the bone spurs in his heels, which he then presented to draft officials. He said he could not remember the doctor’s name. “You are talking a lot of years,” Mr. Trump said.
    The yearbook photo of Dr. Manny Weinstein, who may have also played a role in the medical exemption, according to Dr. Braunstein’s daughters.
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    The yearbook photo of Dr. Manny Weinstein, who may have also played a role in the medical exemption, according to Dr. Braunstein’s daughters.
    But he suggested he still had some paperwork related to the exemption, which he did not provide.
    Mr. Trump did not mention in that interview any connection between his father and the doctor. The White House did not make Mr. Trump available for a follow-up interview and did not respond to written questions about his service record.
    An investigation by The Times in October showed the extent to which Fred Trump had assisted his son over the years, despite Donald Trump’s insistence to the contrary. The investigation revealed that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, including the equivalent of $200,000 a year by age 3.
    In the 1960s, there were numerous ways to avoid military service, especially for the sons of wealthy and connected families, but Mr. Trump has said that no one pulled strings for him.
    “I didn’t have power in those days,” Mr. Trump told the biographer Michael D’Antonio in a 2014 interview, according to transcripts shared with The Times. “I had no power. My father was a Brooklyn developer, so it wasn’t like today.”
    Dr. Alec Hochstein, who worked with Dr. Braunstein in the late 1990s, said the podiatrist had recalled over dinner with their wives how the Trumps had treated him well, including backing off from rent increases. Dr. Hochstein did not remember any discussions related to Mr. Trump’s medical exemption.
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    “He spoke very highly of the Trumps, and they were very open to negotiating with him and letting him stay in the space at a rent he was comfortable with,” Dr. Hochstein said.
    Dr. Nicholas Campion, who bought Dr. Braunstein’s practice around the time that the Trumps sold the building, which was less than a mile from the Trump family home in Jamaica Estates, said Donald Trump had had a large presence in the community.
    “Everybody recalls the Trump family around Jamaica Estates,” Dr. Campion said.
    In recent years, the diagnosis of bone spurs has subjected Mr. Trump to ridicule from critics, who have found it implausible that a healthy and athletic 22-year-old, on the cusp of being declared fit for service, could suddenly be felled by growths in his heels. Mr. Trump’s own shifting narrative over the years about his Vietnam-era experience has added to the suspicions.
    At the time of the diagnosis, Mr. Trump was navigating a tumultuous period for the country after he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. The United States inducted about 300,000 men into the military in 1968. At that time, a year before the draft lottery was instituted, local boards had to meet quotas and called men for service, leaving those without deferments or exemptions vulnerable.
    Mr. Trump had been declared available for service two years earlier and undergone a physical exam, Selective Service records show. That exam did not result in a medical exemption, but he did receive an education deferment. When officials again declared him available for service in July 1968, he had exhausted four education deferments and finished school, so it was the medical exemption that kept him from being eligible.
    He has often said it was “ultimately” a high draft lottery number that spared him, but Mr. Trump had been medically exempted for more than a year before the lottery began in December 1969.
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    Beginning in October 1968, records show, Mr. Trump had a 1-Y classification, a temporary medical exemption, meaning that he could be considered for service only in the event of a national emergency or an official declaration of war, neither of which occurred during the conflict in Vietnam. In 1972, after the 1-Y classification was abolished, his status changed to 4-F, a permanent disqualification.
    Dr. Braunstein’s office was below Edgerton Apartments, one of dozens of buildings owned by the Trumps in the 1960s. The family sold the building in 2004, records show.CreditDave Sanders for The New York Times
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    Dr. Braunstein’s office was below Edgerton Apartments, one of dozens of buildings owned by the Trumps in the 1960s. The family sold the building in 2004, records show.CreditDave Sanders for The New York Times
    The Times began looking into Mr. Trump’s draft record anew when an anonymous tipster suggested that a podiatrist who was a commercial tenant of Fred Trump’s had provided the medical documentation.
    The tipster offered no names, but The Times used old city directories, held by the New York Public Library, and interviews with Queens podiatrists to identify Dr. Braunstein.
    The doctor’s daughters said his role in Mr. Trump’s military exemption had long been the subject of discussions among relatives and friends.
    “It was family lore,” said Elysa Braunstein. “It was something we would always discuss.”
    She said her father was initially proud that he had helped a “famous guy” in New York real estate. But later, her father, a lifelong Democrat who had served in the Navy during World War II, grew tired of Donald Trump as he became a fixture in the tabloid gossip pages and a reality television star, she said. The daughters, both Democrats, say they are not fans of Mr. Trump.
    Dr. Braunstein’s daughters said his role in Mr. Trump’s military exemption had long been the subject of discussions among relatives and friends.CreditSharon Kessel
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    Dr. Braunstein’s daughters said his role in Mr. Trump’s military exemption had long been the subject of discussions among relatives and friends.CreditSharon Kessel
    Mr. Trump has had a complicated relationship with the military, having quarreled with the likes of Senator John McCain, a prisoner of war during Vietnam; the parents of a slain soldier; and the architect of the Osama bin Laden raid, even while speaking during campaign rallies about his enthusiastic support for veterans and the armed forces. He has also been critical of people who have been less than forthright about their Vietnam records. Earlier this month, he chided Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, over misleading statements he made years ago about his own Vietnam record, calling him “Da Nang Dick” on Twitter.
    Dr. Braunstein’s daughters said that when he discussed Mr. Trump’s medical exemption, he often mentioned Dr. Weinstein, though it was unclear to them what role Dr. Weinstein may have played. He was close to the family, they said, and known as Uncle Manny.
    The two men forged a close friendship after meeting in podiatry school in New York, from which they graduated in 1953. Dr. Weinstein was among the oldest students in the class, classmates said, and Dr. Braunstein was remembered for being among the smartest.
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    One possible explanation that has been raised over the years, the Braunstein sisters said, is that Dr. Weinstein had a connection to the draft, as some private practitioners did. In fact, multiple doctors would have been involved in the final determination.
    Dr. Weinstein rented an apartment from Fred Trump in Brooklyn, moving in the same year that Donald Trump received the exemption.CreditDave Sanders for The New York Times
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    Dr. Weinstein rented an apartment from Fred Trump in Brooklyn, moving in the same year that Donald Trump received the exemption.CreditDave Sanders for The New York Times
    Before people were inducted into the service, they underwent a physical exam overseen by military doctors, court records from that era show. Men could bring along documentation of medical concerns from private physicians. That information was presented at their exams and considered by a medical officer. Often, a civilian specialist working with the exam station would be asked to review the case and make a recommendation. A local draft board would finalize the man’s classification.
    Dr. Weinstein practiced podiatry in Brooklyn’s Bath Beach neighborhood, maintaining an office near another Trump building, Shore Haven Apartments. In 1968, phone books show, Dr. Weinstein moved into an apartment in Westminster Hall, a Trump-owned building. He lived in that building for many years, and later lived in another owned by the Trumps.
    Dr. Weinstein had no children and never married, but some people who knew him were surprised by a possible Trump connection.
    When Dr. Weinstein closed his practice in the late 1980s, he referred patients to a nearby podiatrist, Dr. Mark L. Schwartz. When contacted by The Times, Dr. Schwartz said he had never heard about a possible connection between Dr. Weinstein and the Trumps.
    The office where Dr. Larry Braunstein practiced podiatry in Jamaica, Queens. His daughters say he came to Donald J. Trump’s aid with a diagnosis of bone spurs during the Vietnam draft.CreditCreditDave Sanders for The New York Times
    NYT

    Mexico’s AMLO refutes blame for chopper crash

    MEXICO CITY — Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador says “neofascists” and conservatives are blaming the government for a helicopter crash that killed two opposition politicians.
    Lopez Obrador refused to speculate on what caused the crash, but military experts said no explosive devices were found in the wreckage.
    Mexico asked the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board for help with a probe, but the U.S. government shutdown has delayed the request.
    Lopez Obrador said Wednesday that social media videos that suggest the helicopter was shot down were the work of “neofascist groups who are angry about our victory and are trying to slander us.”
    The Monday crash killed opposition Gov. Martha Erika Alonso of the central state of Puebla and her husband, ex-Gov. Rafael Moreno Valle. Two pilots and a third passenger also died.
    Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Monday, December 24, 2018

    The Ghost of Trump Chaos Future

    Sorry, investors, but there is no sanity clause.
    Paul Krugman
    Opinion Columnist


  • President Trump on a monitor at the New York Stock Exchange, as stocks plunged on Monday.CreditSeth Wenig/Associated Press
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    President Trump on a monitor at the New York Stock Exchange, as stocks plunged on Monday.CreditCreditSeth Wenig/Associated Press
    Two years ago, after the shock of Donald Trump’s election, financial markets briefly freaked out, then quickly recovered. In effect, they decided that while Trump was manifestly unqualified for the job, temperamentally and intellectually, it wouldn’t matter. He might talk the populist talk, but he’d walk the plutocratic walk. He might be erratic and uninformed, but wiser heads would keep him from doing anything too stupid.
    In other words, investors convinced themselves that they had a deal: Trump might sound off, but he wouldn’t really get to make policy. And, hey, taxes on corporations and the wealthy would go down.
    But now, just in time for Christmas, people are realizing that there was no such deal — or at any rate, that there wasn’t a sanity clause. (Sorry, couldn’t help myself.) Put an unstable, ignorant, belligerent man in the Oval Office, and he will eventually do crazy things.
    To be clear, voters have been aware for some time that government by a bad man is bad government. That’s why Democrats won a historically spectacular majority of the popular vote in the midterms. Even the wealthy, who have been the prime beneficiaries of Trump policies, are unhappy: A CNBC survey finds that millionaires, even Republican millionaires, have turned sharply against the tweeter in chief.
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    But market behavior has, until recently, been a different story.
    The reality that presidential unfitness matters for investors seems to have started setting in only about three weeks (and around 4,000 points on the Dow) ago. First came the realization that Trump’s much-hyped deal with China existed only in his imagination. Then came his televised meltdown in a meeting with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, his abrupt pullout from Syria, his firing of Jim Mattis and his shutdown of the government because Congress won’t cater to his edifice complex and build a pointless wall. And now there’s buzz that he wants to fire Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
    Oh, and along the way we learned that Trump has been engaging in raw obstruction of justice, pressuring his acting attorney general (who is himself a piece of work) over the Mueller investigation as the tally of convictions, confessions and forced resignations mounts.
    But let’s play devil’s advocate here: Does all this Trump chaos matter for the economy, or for the stock market (which isn’t at all the same thing)? At first sight, it’s not all that obvious.
    After all, aside from the prospect of trade war, none of Individual-1’s tantrums, unpresidential as they are, have much direct economic impact. Even the government shutdown will impose only a modest drag on overall spending.
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    And even trade war might not do that much harm, as long as it’s focused mainly on China, which is only one piece of U.S. trade. The really big economic risk was that Trump might break up Nafta, the North American trade agreement: U.S. manufacturing is so deeply integrated with production in Canada and Mexico that this would have been highly disruptive. But he settled for changing the agreement’s name while leaving its structure basically intact, and the remaining risks don’t seem that large.
    So why do investors seem to be losing their what-me-worry attitude? It’s not so much what Trump is doing, as what he might do in the future — or, perhaps even more important, what he might not do.
    The truth is that most of the time, presidential actions don’t matter much for the economy; short-term economic management is mainly up to the Fed. But when bad things happen, we do need the White House to step up. In 2008 and 2009, it mattered a lot that officials of both the outgoing Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration responded competently and intelligently to the financial crisis.
    Unfortunately, there’s no reason to expect a comparable degree of competence if something goes wrong again.
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    Consider how the Trumpistas have responded to falling stocks. So far these are just a minor economic bobble. Yet Trump himself, having claimed credit when stocks were rising, has flown into a rage and lashed out; hence the attacks on Powell. Meanwhile, top officials are still claiming that last year’s tax cut was a triumph in the teeth of the evidence, and issuing bizarre statements — via Twitter — about the health of the banks, which nobody was questioning.
    Now imagine how this administration team might cope with a real economic setback, whatever its source. Would Trump look for solutions or refuse to accept responsibility and focus mainly on blaming other people? Would his Treasury secretary and chief economic advisers coolly analyze the problem and formulate a course of action, or would they respond with a combination of sycophancy to the boss and denials that anything was wrong? What do you think?
    Let’s be clear: There isn’t an obvious crisis-level threat looming at the moment. But growth is slowing, and as the bumper stickers don’t quite say, stuff happens. And if and when it does, the people who would be supposed to deal with it are the gang that can’t think straight. Merry Christmas.

    Thursday, December 20, 2018

    Trump always said he wouldn’t be predictable. The consequences are on display this week.

    President Trump pledged in his campaign that he would not be predictable. He’s more than lived up to that promise this week, and along the way, he has made a hash out of the way business is being done in Washington.
    Three times this week, Trump abruptly and unexpectedly changed course, lending credence to perceptions of a presidency in chaos. The biggest bombshell came Thursday afternoon when Trump announced that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis would leave the administration at the end of February, and Mattis’s resignation letter explicitly stated that he and the president were not in alignment on major policy issues or on America’s role in the world.
    The Mattis news rattled nerves in Washington and no doubt in capitals around the world. It came at the end of another roller coaster day in the history of a presidency that has had many of them. The day began with Trump, for the second time in a week, reversing course on funding for a border wall. He demanded that Congress include funds for the wall, just as a compromise bill without the money he wants was making its way through Congress in an effort to avert a government shutdown this weekend.
    Trump’s allies were already reeling from the announcement via tweet on Wednesday that he was ordering the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria. On this announcement, there was no warning to U.S. allies or to members of Congress, including many in his party who opposed the move — no warning even to some in his administration.
    Trump is, by his own words, a dealmaker without peer, but his volatility overwhelms his reliability. He demonstrated anew this week that he can change his mind at any moment. Those around him are left to adapt, to pick up the pieces, to explain as best they can — including those whose advice he has spurned or whose words have been shredded by his actions. In this case, it appeared to have cost him the services of his defense secretary.
    Give the president some credit. His goals remain fixed. He wants a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, or at least he wants the issue of demanding one to use against Democrats, who oppose the wall.

    House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), right, speaks to members of the media while House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) listens following a meeting with President Trump. (Zach Gibson/Bloomberg News)
    He wants the most robust military in the world, but he doesn’t seem to want to use it. He has been consistent in questioning the commitment of U.S. forces in trouble spots such as Syria and Afghanistan. On national security policy, he remains a rhetorically muscular noninterventionist. With the announcement on Syria, the focus quickly shifted to the question of whether he would order a rapid drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
    However consistent he has been in enunciating goals, though, he has not shown much mastery of navigating the legislative process or of developing support from allies for his foreign policy objectives. He leads by impulse, by upending the status quo, leaving friends and adversaries to scramble.
    This is not an entirely unsuccessful approach. His trade policies, for example, have roiled relationships, but he has gotten the attention of China, whose policies have been criticized by past presidents and leaders in other nations for years. For that, other nations are no doubt grateful, even if no one is certain how the ongoing dispute will be resolved or when. This week, he signed a new farm bill, and he will soon be able to sign a criminal justice reform bill that was approved with overwhelming, bipartisan support.
    But the turmoil that goes along with those successes has badly strained the system, and these past few days have highlighted that reality once again. The path he has followed in pursuit of $5 billion in funding for a border wall in the latest spending bill is emblematic of his unorthodox — some would call it destructive — governing style.

    Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), joined by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), left, and Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Tex.), right, arrives to speak to reporters about the possibility of a partial government shutdown. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
    He staged an Oval Office argument with House Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). He was told he didn’t have the votes for the $5 billion he wanted. He said he would take a shutdown rather than a walk back.
    Alarmed Republican allies in Congress, who wanted no part of a shutdown if possible, began pressing for a way out, and earlier in the week, it appeared they had gotten the attention of the White House when the announcement came that it would look for other ways to fund the wall. Meanwhile, the president continued the fiction that taxpayers would not be paying for the wall. Not even the fuzziest of math could make that explanation credible.
    Trump’s retreat early in the week was enough to get Congress to move toward an agreement on a short-term bill to keep the government open until after the new year, without the $5 billion Trump was demanding.
    Few Republican members of Congress wanted to make this fight at this moment, against united Democratic opposition. But the story line of the funding fight included the claim that Trump had once again caved on a central promise of his candidacy, that he had blustered and then backed down.
    On Thursday morning, the dam broke at the White House, and congressional leaders were put in a near-impossible position to find a solution. Congress has until Friday night to find a new way to avoid a government shutdown. The president said he would shoulder the blame if the shutdown occurs. What lawmakers would probably appreciate more than that is for the president to become part of the solution, rather than adding to the problems they already have.
    The president’s explanation for the decision to withdraw troops from Syria went through a series of rewritings. Trump’s initial tweet stated that the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, had been defeated in Syria and that that was why the troops could come home. “We have won against ISIS,” he said in a White House video. “We’ve beaten them, and we’ve beaten them badly. We’ve taken back the land, and now it’s time for our troops to come back home.”
    In doing so, he ignored statements over months from others in his administration that offered contrary analysis and commitments. While the Islamic State has suffered significant losses of territory in Syria, other administration officials say, it has not been defeated. Beyond that, administration officials had vowed to keep U.S. forces there as long as necessary, to counter Iranian influence and activity.
    By Thursday, Trump had moved to a different explanation, one that no doubt comes closer to his true feelings. He asked, “Does the USA want to be the Policeman of the Middle East. . . Do we want to be there forever? Time for others to finally fight.”
    He said — despite contrary evidence — that Russia, Iran and Syria were unhappy because they now would have to fight the Islamic State alone, which only a day earlier he had claimed had been defeated. Then, in one more burst, he added, “I am building by far the most powerful military in the world. ISIS hits us they are doomed!”
    Mattis made clear in his resignation letter that he and the president do not see eye to eye on rising threats from Russia and China or on the importance of maintaining “the solidarity of our alliances.” His departure will leave a sizable void in the administration’s national security apparatus and, more significantly, point to the potential for more chaos in the months ahead.

    Saturday, December 15, 2018

    The Hard Truths of Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy

    Rural America is getting old. The median age is 43, seven years older than city dwellers. Its productivity, defined as output per worker, is lower than urban America’s. Its families have lower incomes. And its share of the population is shrinking: the United States has grown by 75 million people since 1990, but this has mostly occurred in cities and suburbs. Rural areas have lost some 3 million people. Since the 1990s, problems such as crime and opioid abuse, once associated with urban areas, are increasingly rural phenomena.
    Rural communities once captured a greater share of the nation’s prosperity. Jobs and wages in small town America played catch-up with big cities until the mid 1980s. During the economic recovery of 1992 to 1996, 135,000 new businesses were started in small counties, a third of the nation’s total. Employment in small counties shot up by 2.5 million, or 16 percent, twice the pace experienced in counties with million-plus populations.
    These days, economic growth bypasses rural economies. In the first four years of the recovery after the 2008 recession, counties with fewer than 100,000 people lost 17,500 businesses, according to the Economic Innovation Group. By contrast, counties with more than 1 million residents added, altogether, 99,000 firms. By 2017, the largest metropolitan areas had almost 10 percent more jobs than they did at the start of the financial crisis. Rural areas still had fewer.
    The Economic Innovation Group measures “distress” as a combination of data ranging from joblessness and poverty to abandoned homes and educational attainment. Since the 1990s, there has been an “intensifying ruralization of distress,” said John Lettieri, the group’s president.
    I’ve lived most of my life in big cities. I don’t pretend to understand what it’s like to live in a small town or on a family farm, or how it feels when all the jobs in a community seem to be fading away. I do spend a lot of time thinking about how the economic changes of the last several decades have undercut many American workers. One thing seems clear to me: nobody — not experts or policymakers or people in these communities — seems to know quite how to pick rural America up.
    States, municipalities and the federal government have spent billions to draw jobs and prosperity to stagnant rural areas. But they haven’t yet figured out how to hitch this vast swath of the country to the tech-heavy economy that is flourishing in America’s cities.
    There are 1,888 counties in America in which more than half the population is rural, according to the Census Bureau, and they stretch from coast to coast.
     
     
    In Comanche County, a land of cattle, farming, oil and gas on the plains of southwestern Kansas, 1,790 people live in a sparsely settled area of nearly 800 square miles. In Perry County — home to some 26,500 people in the Appalachian Mountains of Eastern Kentucky — so far no other industry has replaced once-mighty coal. Essex County in New York’s Adirondacks is three-quarters rural, by the census definition. So is Calaveras County in California.
    After World War II, small town prosperity relied on its contribution to the industrial economy. The census considers Price County, Wis., to be 100 percent rural. Still, over a third of the jobs there are in manufacturing, from building industrial machines to assembling trucks. Auto parts manufacturers in West Point, Ga., draw workers from all over Troup County. Overall, manufacturing employs about one in eight workers in the country’s 704 entirely rural counties. That’s more than agriculture, forestry, fishing and mining combined and second only to education, health care and social assistance, which includes teachers, doctors, nurses and social service counselors. Most of those jobs are government funded.
    But factory jobs can no longer keep small-town America afloat. Even after a robust eight-year growth spell, there are fewer than 13 million workers in manufacturing across the entire economy. Robots and workers in China put together most of the manufactured goods that Americans buy, and the high-tech industries powering the economy today don’t have much need for the cheap labor that rural communities contributed to America’s industrial past. They mostly need highly educated workers. They find those most easily in big cities, not in small towns.
     
    What to do? Since the presidential election in 2016, when small town voters enthusiastically endorsed the populist campaign of President Trump, policymakers and academics have thrown themselves at understanding the economic backdrop to their frustrations. They have come up with no shortage of proposals for how to turn rural America around, from offering a tax credit for employers that hire workers in distressed communities to designing investment funds to draw venture capital into rural areas.
    In a report published in November, Mark Muro, William Galston and Clara Hendrickson of the Brookings Institution laid out a portfolio of ideas to rescue the substantial swath of the country that they identify as “left behind.” They identify critical shortages bedeviling declining communities: workers with digital skills, broadband connections, capital. And they have plans to address them: I.T. training and education initiatives, regulatory changes to boost lending to small businesses, incentives to invest in broadband.
    Wisely, they suggest that any federal government effort must choose its targets carefully. Better to focus on middle-sized places that are near big tech hubs and have some critical infrastructure, rather than scatter assistance all over the landscape.
     
    Sound as these ideas may be, however, even the authors concede that they may not be up to the task. “I don’t know if these ideas are going to work,” Mr. Galston acknowledged when I pressed him on the issue. “But it is worth making the effort.”
    This is the inescapable reality of agglomeration, one of the most powerful forces shaping the American economy over the last three decades. Innovative companies choose to locate where other successful, innovative companies are. That’s where they can find lots of highly skilled workers. The more densely packed these pools of talent are, the more workers can learn from each other and the more productive they become. This dynamic feeds on itself, drawing more high-tech firms and highly skilled workers to where they already are.
    “We have a spatial reorganization of the economy,” said Mr. Muro. “We have an archipelago of superstars in an ocean of low-productivity sectors.”
    In hindsight, no amount of tax incentives would have convinced Amazon to expand in a medium-sized city such as Columbus, Ohio, rather than Northern Virginia and Queens,which sit in some of the largest pools of talent in the country. If even medium-sized cities find it difficult to compete, what are the odds that, say, a small town like Amory, Miss., where 14 percent of adults have a bachelor’s degree and a quarter of its 2,500 workers work in small-scale manufacturing, have a chance to attract well-paid tech jobs?
    Consider a recent Brookings Institution study by Benjamin Austin, Edward Glaeser and Lawrence Summers. They focus on the alarming rate of joblessness in what they call the Eastern Heartland, the region roughly between the Mississippi River and the states on the Atlantic coast, where rural communities are doing particularly poorly.
    After examining a range of potential policy interventions, they conclude that a targeted employment subsidy, such as the earned-income tax credit, is probably the most powerful tool available to revive employment. But they, too, are not sure it will work. “Our call for a wage subsidy is us saying, ‘We can’t figure this out, and we hope the private sector will,’ ” Mr. Glaeser told me.
    There are, to be sure, some rural communities with productivity as high as some big cities. But they rely on heavily mechanized and automated industries that support few jobs: oil extraction or large-scale agriculture, in which tractors talk to satellites and no drivers are involved. The livestock business on the vast pastures of Sioux County, Neb., for example, supports an economy worth $306,000 per worker, according to data from Mr. Muro and Jacob Whiton of Brookings. But only 1,200 people live there.
     
    In the Southeast Fairbanks area of Alaska, it is all about oil and gas. Output per worker is $203,000. But its population doesn’t quite reach 7,000.
    Excluding these places, the United States is still left with 50 to 55 million people living in rural communities that no longer have much to offer them economically.
    What if nothing really works? Is there really no option but to do nothing and, as some have suggested, return depopulated parts of rural America to the bison?
    Instead of so-called place-based policies to revitalize small towns, why not help their residents take advantage of opportunities where the opportunities are? Geographic mobility hit a historical low in 2017, when only 11 percent of Americans picked up shop and moved — half the rate of 1951. One of the key reasons is that housing in the prosperous cities that offer the most opportunities has become too expensive.
     
    The most helpful policy for people in small towns could be to relax zoning rules in dense cities like New York and San Francisco, so that more affordable housing could be built to receive newcomers from rural Wisconsin or Kentucky, and they wouldn’t need the income of an investment banker or a computer scientist to afford to live there.
    Policymakers might not want to push too hard against agglomeration. It adds to American prosperity. As Enrico Moretti of the University of California, Berkeley, points out, a successful strategy to draw innovative firms away from mega-clusters to small-town America would reduce overall innovation. “If you put a tech company in a place like rural Indiana, it will be vastly less productive than if you put it in a tech cluster,” Mr. Moretti said. “The effect is quite large.”
    Still, there are compelling reasons to try to help rural economies rebound. Even if moving people might prove more efficient on paper than restoring places, many people — especially older people and the family members who care for them — may choose to remain in rural areas. What’s more, the costs of rural poverty are looming over American society. Think of the opioid addiction taking over rural America, of the spike in crime, of the wasted human resources in places where only a third of adults hold a job.
    And if today’s polarized politics are noxious, what might they look like in a country perpetually divided between diverse, prosperous liberal cities and a largely white rural America in decline? As Mr. Galston warned: “Think through the political consequences of saying to a substantial portion of Americans, which is even more substantial in political terms, ‘We think you’re toast.’ ”
    The distress of 50 million Americans should concern everyone. Powerful economic forces are arrayed against rural America and, so far, efforts to turn it around have failed. Not every small town can be a tech hub, nor should it be. But that can’t be the only answer.

    Eduardo Porter, an economics writer for The Times, is the author
    of a forthcoming book about race and the American social contract.

     
     
     
     

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