Wednesday, November 4, 2020
#Election2020 - Trump's call to halt vote counts is his most brazen swipe at democracy yet
By Stephen Collinson
President Donald Trump's demand for vote counting to stop in an election that is still undecided may have been his most extreme and dangerous assault on the institutions of democracy yet in a presidency replete with them.
Trump appeared in the East Room of the White House early on Wednesday morning to claim falsely that he had already beaten Democrat Joe Biden, and the election was being stolen from him in a massive act of fraud. He vowed to mount a challenge in the Supreme Court and declared that he had already won states that were still counting votes, including Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
The election has not yet been won, and the President and the former vice president are still locked in a tight battle for the decisive states with millions of votes still being counted.
Trump's remarks essentially amounted to a demand for the legally cast votes of American citizens not to be recorded in a historic act of disenfranchisement. And they brought closer the potential constitutional nightmare that many have feared since Trump started to tarnish an election that he apparently worried he could lose months ago. His rhetorical broadside was also notable because it came at a moment of huge tension in a deeply divided nation -- a time when a president, even one whose political fate is in the process of being written -- could be expected to call for calm.
Trump's comments were especially remarkable since it appears that the President has a good chance of winning outstanding states in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan, which could hand him a second term. And the implication of his authoritarian remarks was that the President wants vote counting to stop in those states but to go on in Arizona, where he trails Biden.
They were also a warning sign of the kind of behavior that might be expected in a second term from a President who has survived impeachment and may be heading for a new mandate that he would view as a validation of his norm-crushing behavior. In some ways, Trump's aggressive response to a night of nail-biting tension and a yet-to-be-decided result could also take the gloss from what would be a stunning political achievement if he wins reelection despite expectations that his handling of the pandemic would cause the country to turn against him.
"Millions and millions of people voted for us," Trump said in the East Room. "A very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people."
Trump wary of early and mail-in votes
Trump is angry that hundreds of thousands of mail-in and early votes -- cast disproportionately by Democrats -- are still being counted, leaving open the possibility that Biden could challenge Trump's leads in the Midwest. But those votes were made in a way that is just as legitimate as the ballots that were lodged by voters showing up in their precincts in the traditional manner.
"We were getting ready for a big celebration. We were winning everything. And all of a sudden it was just called off," Trump said. "This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country."
"Frankly, we did win this election," he said, despite millions of votes still outstanding.
The President made his televised statement after his opponent delivered his own remarks and said that all of the votes must be counted.
"It's not my place or Donald Trump's place to declare who has won this election," Biden told his crowd in Wilmington, Delaware.Throughout his presidency, Trump has consistently taken aim at the institutions that have underpinned American government for decades. He has attacked the judiciary, the intelligence services and made clear for example that he believes that the Justice Department should be loyal to him rather than the law. He has even said that as president he has absolute power under the Constitution to do whatever he wants.
"I have an Article Two where I have the right to do whatever I want as President," Trump declared last year.
'Legally cast ballots'
It was not immediately clear on what grounds Trump planned to try to ask the Supreme Court to intervene in the election because, so far, he has not provided evidence for any voting irregularities."These are legally cast ballots or at least will be determined to be legally cast ballots by the appropriate local county and state officials," Benjamin Ginsberg, a longtime Republican election lawyer, told CNN's Jake Tapper."And for a president to say we are going to disenfranchise those legally cast ballots -- it really is extraordinary."
The President's statement sparked a sharp response from Biden's campaign manager, Jen O'Malley Dillon.
"It was outrageous because it is a naked effort to take away the democratic rights of American citizens," she said in a written statement.
"The counting will not stop."
And former New Jersey governor and top Trump ally Chris Christie voiced disagreement with Trump's election night remarks prematurely declaring victory and attacking legitimate vote counting efforts. Christie said Trump "undercut his own credibility.""There's just no basis to make that argument tonight. There just isn't. All these votes have to be counted that are in now," Christie said during a panel on ABC News moments after Trump's remarks, noting that the vote count in Pennsylvania will continue for days and "that argument's for later."
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/04/politics/election-2020-donald-trump-joe-biden-voting-speech/index.html
#Election2020 Deep-seated divisions in US contradict democratic values
By Wang Wenwen
Violence, guns. These are often fixtures of elections in underdeveloped or developing countries. What is happeningduring the US election is something that we could have never imaged in this "Beacon of Freedom."
The US is considered a model of democracy, and one characteristic of democracy is: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Democracy is exercised in a civilized and graceful manner. The one who loses in elections is supposed to stay cool, accept the result, and call for bridging differences to move the country forward. But it seems that this does not exist in the US nowadays.
In the past four years, we have witnessed how a divided US becomes even more divided. Two years ago when I went to the US to cover the mid-term elections, I clearly felt partisan division, but the social atmosphere was restrained and controllable. But this year's general election is totally different.
Ahead of the elections, the Americans went panic-buying, with many industries experiencing product delays and shortages. There has been a surge of new gun owners, looking to arm themselves in the event of a turbulent election aftermath. Gun sales in the US have hit a record this year, with 1.7 million in October. Meanwhile, businesses in major cities across the US have boarded up windows and doors for fear of election unrest.
Crowds violently clashed outside the White House on election night as thousands of protesters gathered. Over 3,000 National Guard troops have been activated in various states for fear of violence. It remains to be seen how the "civil war" evolves as a result of the election.
The US stands on the high political and moral ground among developed Western countries. In an election of such a country as the US, what was uncertain in the past was the result of the election, while the election process would always remain certain. Disputes, chaos and the refusal of election results by certain candidates were supposed to take place in developing countries where political conditions were not stable, and definitely not in a country like the US.
But things have changed - all these have occurred in the US, and the US is not synonymous to a stable, civilized and consensus-based society anymore.
The US has been keen on dividing other societies in countries it sees as rivals. It is an old hand in launching "color revolutions" which have spread from Eastern Europe to Central Asia. Ironically, US society has to face such a division in itself.
The division in the US is triggered by the split in values and conflicts of ideals. No matter whether Joe Biden or Donald Trump wins, both are consuming the Americans' trust toward elections and bringing political confrontation and social division to a higher level. A Gallup survey in February showed that 59 percent of Americans interviewed said they are not confident in the honesty of elections in their country. It also noted that a majority of Americans have consistently lacked confidence in the honesty of elections every year since 2012.
The partisan confrontation is the epitome of deep-seated divisions in US society. There is no end in sight to the social contradictions. More importantly, the US leadership has no will to solve such woes. And what comes up with the distrust is the questioning of the much-touted slogans of "democracy" and "freedom."
This is costing the US' international reputation as well. The presidential election has attracted world attention, but what everybody is interested in much more is what kind of farce the world's No.1 would make. As Paul Kelly, editor-at-large on The Australian, wrote, "The collapse of the American code of traditional virtue along with the collapse of institutional authority that once propagated that code risks generating a society that cannot deliver for the common good."
https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1205738.shtml
#Election2020 - 'Authoritarian': Trump condemned for falsely claiming election victory
#Elections2020 - Opinion 2020 Should Be the Last Time We Vote Like This - Turnout was inspiring, but our voting system is badly flawed.
By Farhad Manjoo
Tuesday, November 3, 2020
Opinion: You’re Not Just Voting for President. You’re Voting to Start Over.
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Trump and Boris Johnson have shown countries need leaders, not celebrity politicians
Rafael Behr
After four years and a pandemic, one thing is clear: the fence between entertainment and politics must urgently be rebuilt
Boris Johnson had barely finished telling the nation about new English lockdown arrangements on Saturday night when the BBC, correctly reading the mood of its primetime audience, cut live to Strictly Come Dancing.
It is easy to imagine Johnson on the other side of that switchover. There is a parallel universe where “Boris” is one of the sequin-clad celebrities waiting in an Elstree studio for the jaunty music to strike up while someone with natural gravitas delivers the serious message from Downing Street. In this scenario, Johnson’s political career fizzled out after a second term as mayor of London but his fame stayed alight. He was an obvious match for Strictly. (The judges deride his shambolic dances and dishevelled appearance, but he appeals over their heads to the voting public, who keep returning him to the dancefloor – for a laugh: a welcome distraction from the pandemic.)
And in that hypothetical world, Donald Trump still hosts The Apprentice, because liberal democracy has not been taken hostage by marauding vaudevillians.
I have witnessed Johnson holding forth over lunch with a dozen guests and declaiming to vast auditoriums. It is the same act in any venue. He adjusts his beliefs to whatever he thinks the audience wants to hear, but not the raconteur style, sustained by laughter and applause. Few things disturb his poise more than a stone-faced reception. If his words hang in the air too long, there is a danger they will be examined, remembered, taken seriously. He was not a great parliamentary speaker before the pandemic, but he really bombs in the Commons chamber now that it is thinly populated and hushed by social distancing.
Trump uses a fraction of Johnson’s vocabulary, and his delivery is less laboured, but he also uses cadences more familiar from standup comedy than traditional oration. He is master of the faux-conversational ramble that invites intimacy, the little observations and non-sequiturs, the unnatural pauses that build tension before a punchline drops.
When the fate of US democracy hangs in the balance, Trump’s rhetorical technique might not be the most pressing concern. But that showbiz patter has been a key to unlocking the character of his presidency. He has the personality of a tyrant, but not the premeditated programme of a dictator. His thirst for power has always been deep, but it is the impulsive craving of a man addicted to attention for its own sake, without the mechanical drive to rearrange society and fashion other people’s destinies in the mould of a Hitler or Stalin. Trump is a more theatrical breed of despot, who bullies people and abuses his office because he believes they exist to gratify his needs and satisfy his fan club.
The harm to the American republic is profound already. The incarceration of children, the approval of white-supremacist militias, the dehumanisation of opponents – it is the stuff of incipient fascism. But the slide into the abyss has been slowed by incoherence, infantile inattention and impatience. A more systematically ideological and intelligently focused saboteur in the White House could have done even worse.
Other nationalist demagogues have used the coronavirus pandemic to expand their control of society and suffocate dissent. It is the obvious move. There is a national emergency that requires some suspension of civil liberties and unusual regulation of citizens’ private business. The authoritarian opportunities have not been wasted on Vladimir Putin in Russia and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Trump could have exploited the virus to build an apparatus of political repression. Instead he opted for denial and petty frustration, belittling the pandemic because it was a bigger story than his own presidency. He couldn’t bump it out of the headlines with an aggressive tweet. Barack Obama called it right when he mocked the president for being “jealous of Covid’s media coverage”.
Johnson’s approach has been much more rational. He is better at hiding resentment of the way his job has turned out to be less fun than anticipated. But the disappointment is there – the dismay of the comedian inadvertently booked to speak at a memorial service with no fitting repertoire, no fluency in consolation.
The prime minister believes in the utility of lockdowns (unlike Trump), but he shares his American counterpart’s disregard for their use as tools of coercion. Backbench Tories are quick to highlight how the letter of Covid regulations is totalitarian, but none actually thinks Johnson intends to apply them in that spirit. The constant assertions of reluctance and regret – the pained apology for meddling in private freedoms – are about the only sincere notes he strikes in those televised addresses.
Johnson is in any case too lazy for fascism, which requires an obsession with order. His preferred flavour of control is best conveyed in a line from an old interview, when he described the “rather weird sense of power” he got as Brussels correspondent for the Telegraph, making mischief with confected tales of meddlesome European bureaucracy: “I was just chucking these rocks over the garden wall,” he said. “I’d listen to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door, over in England.”
Now Johnson is keeper of the greenhouse. That doesn’t stop him chucking rocks, but the effect is more self-defeating. He does not have “weird”, remote, unaccountable power. He has the ordinary kind that comes with elected office, where popularity is not an end in itself, but a temporary licence to get things done on behalf of other people.
Johnson is a more conventional politician than Trump, but he also reached the top by trampling through the boundary between celebrity and statecraft. His brand was built by turns as a panellist on Have I Got News For You more than on his record at City Hall. Both men benefited from a transatlantic culture of democratic complacency. They carved their way through the ranks of stale, cavilling bores because most politicians were bad for ratings and entertainment was news. Now we are stuck in a strange intermediate zone where real-life events have the febrile, climactic quality of a box-set season finale.
The pandemic shows why that fence between entertainment and politics needs to be restored. Covid cannot be played for laughs. Managing a public health crisis involves metrics of success other than applause. It requires politicians who can meet a challenge without self-pity at being forced to do the tough part of the job. Democracy is unsafe in the hands of egocentric men who do not know which way to turn in a crisis because they dare not face away from a cheering mob.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/03/trump-johnson-leaders-celebrity-politicians-pandemic-politics
#ElectionDay - After a campaign like no other, #Americans rendering final verdict at polls
By Trevor Hunnicutt, Doina Chiacu
Americans cast votes on Tuesday in the bitterly contested presidential race between incumbent Donald Trump and challenger Joe Biden after a tumultuous four years under the businessman-turned-politician that have left the United States as deeply divided as at any time in recent history.Voters lined up at polling places around the country casting ballots amid a coronavirus pandemic that has turned everyday life upside down. Biden, the Democratic former vice president who has spent a half century in public life, has held a strong and consistent lead in national opinion polls over the Republican president. But Trump is close enough in several election battleground states that he could piece together the 270 state-by-state Electoral College votes needed to win the election.Trump is hoping to repeat the type of upset he pulled off in 2016 when he defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton despite losing the national popular vote by about 3 million ballots. Trump is aiming to avoid becoming the first incumbent U.S. president to lose a re-election bid since George H.W. Bush in 1992.It is possible that it could be days before the result is known, especially if legal challenges focused on ballots sent by mail are accepted in the event of a tight race. There was a sense of anxiety among voters and concern about possible unrest after a campaign with heated rhetoric. There were buildings boarded up in anticipation of possible protests, including in Washington and New York City. A new fence was erected around the White House. Polls opened in some Eastern states at 6 a.m. EST (1100 GMT). The most closely watched results will start to trickle in after 7 p.m. EST (2400 GMT) when polls close in states such as Georgia. Biden made another appearance on Tuesday morning in the pivotal state of Pennsylvania. Speaking to supporters using a bullhorn in Scranton, the city where he was born, Biden returned to some of his familiar campaign themes, promising to unite Americans and “restore basic decency and honor to the White House.” Appearing on Fox News on Tuesday morning, Trump said the crowds he saw on Monday during his frenetic last day of campaigning gave him confidence that he would prevail. “We have crowds that nobody’s ever had before,” said Trump, who has been criticized by Democrats for holding packed rallies in defiance of social-distancing recommendations during the pandemic. “I think that translates into a lot of votes.” The voting caps a campaign dominated by a pandemic that has killed more than 231,000 Americans and put of people millions out of work. The country this year also was shaken by protests against racism and police brutality. Biden, who has framed the contest as a referendum on Trump’s handling of the pandemic, promised a renewed effort to combat the public health crisis, fix the economy and bridge America’s political divide. Trump has downplayed the pandemic, saying the country is “rounding the corner” even as numerous states set single-day records of new infections in the final days of the campaign. More than 99 million Americans voted early either in person or by mail, motivated not only by concerns about waiting in lines on Election Day amid the pandemic but also by extraordinary levels of enthusiasm after a polarizing campaign. The record-shattering total is nearing three-quarters of the total 2016 vote, according to the U.S. Elections Project at the University of Florida. Experts predict the vote could reach 160 million, exceeding the 138 million ballots cast in 2016. While there were long lines in some places, in many states lines were shorter, perhaps a reflection of the massive early vote. In McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania, about a dozen voters lined up, bundled in jackets and hats on an unseasonably chilly morning. “He’s a bit of a jerk, and I appreciate that,” Martin Seylar, a 45-year-old welder who had just finished his shift, said of Trump, his preferred candidate. “He doesn’t get everything that he says done, but the way I see it is he’s trying, versus where everybody else blows smoke at us.” In Detroit, Republican voter Nick Edwards, 26, cast a ballot for Biden but voted for Republican candidates for Congress. “Honestly, decency in the White House,” Edwards said when asked about his main concern. “When someone leads the party, they need to hold those values, as well. I don’t think Trump encompasses that.” Some crucial states, such as Florida, begin counting absentee ballots ahead of Election Day and could deliver results relatively quickly on Tuesday night. Others including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin are barred from processing the vast majority of mail ballots until Election Day, raising the possibility of a prolonged vote count that could stretch for several days. U.S. stocks opened higher on Tuesday, as investors wagered that Biden would prevail and usher in fresh stimulus spending. CONTROL OF CONGRESS AT STAKE Voters on Tuesday will also decide which political party controls the U.S. Congress for the next two years, with Democrats pushing to recapture a Senate majority and expected to retain their control of the House of Representatives. Trump, 74, is seeking another four years in office after a chaotic first term marked by the coronavirus crisis, an economy battered by pandemic shutdowns, an impeachment drama, inquiries into Russian election interference, U.S. racial tensions and contentious immigration policies. Trump, looking tired and sounding hoarse after days of frenetic campaigning, struck a decidedly less belligerent tone on Tuesday than he did on the trail over the weekend. He was expected spend most of Tuesday at the White House, where an election night party is planned for 400 guests, all of whom will be tested for COVID-19. Biden, 77, is looking to win the presidency after a five-decade political career including eight years as vice president under Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama. He mounted unsuccessful bids for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and 2008. Biden started his day at St. Joseph on the Brandywine, his Roman Catholic church near Wilmington, Delaware, where he spent some time at his son Beau’s grave with Beau’s daughter, Natalie. Beau Biden died of cancer at age 46 in 2015. The two candidates have spent the final days barnstorming half a dozen battleground states, with Pennsylvania emerging as perhaps the most hotly contested. Biden will have made at least nine campaign stops in Pennsylvania between Sunday and Tuesday. Biden’s polling lead has forced Trump to play defense; almost every competitive state was carried by him in 2016.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election/after-a-campaign-like-no-other-americans-rendering-final-verdict-at-polls-idUSKBN27J0GK
Monday, November 2, 2020
#Election2020 - Final Pennsylvania presidential polls have Biden winning the pivotal swing state
By Alex Abad-Santosalex
@vox.com
Pollsters found Trump would need a repeat of 2016’s surprise results to win the state again.
Total swing states in the 2020 presidential election: Pennsylvania.
The final polls of the state from Monmouth University and Morning Consult have Biden ahead of President Donald Trump.
A Monmouth University poll — taken from October 28 to November 1 and released Monday morning — has Biden with a 5 to 7 percentage point lead over Trump among likely voters. The spread is the result of Monmouth pollsters modeling two turnout scenarios: the poll found Biden had 51 percent support compared to Trump’s 44 percent among likely Pennsylvania voters in a high turnout scenario; and 50 percent support for Biden compared to 45 percent for Trump in a low turnout model. The low turnout model took into account a large number of ballots being rejected, which remains a possibility due to a recent Supreme Court decision. If ballots aren’t rejected, given current turnout, the high turnout scenario is more likely.
Morning Consult’s poll, taken from October 22 to 31, did not differentiate turnout. It found Biden leading Trump by 9 percentage points among likely voters, 52 to 43 percent.
Morning Consult’s results are a bit of an outlier compared to FiveThirtyEight’s average of Biden leading by around 5 percentage points. Monmouth’s low turnout result is line with FiveThirtyEight’s polling average.
These polls are significant because of Pennsylvania’s Electoral College importance.
As national polls continue to spell out a Biden lead, and as the traditionally Republican-dominated state of Texas has become a toss-up race, the question for Trump and Republicans has become where the president’s path to reelection lies. A crucial piece to that puzzle is Pennsylvania, which swung for Trump in 2016 by fewer than 45,000 votes. Trump winning Pennsylvania was seen as part of the fall of the proverbial “Blue Wall,” a block of Democratic-leaning states that have boosted Democratic presidential nominees’ Electoral College totals in the past.
Pennsylvania, which has 20 electoral votes (candidates need to rack up 270 to win the White House) is seen as an opportunity for Trump once again this year. As Vox’s Andrew Prokop explained, Trump needs to pick up electoral votes in swing states, where polling currently shows him down between 5 and 9 percentage points, in order to win. While polling suggests the race is currently closer in swing areas like Nebraska’s Second District (where Biden has a 4.5 percentage point average lead, according to FiveThirtyEight).
So Trump is working hard to make sure current polling isn't predictive of the outcome in the state. He visited Pennsylvania five times in September. In the weekend before the election, Trump visited the state an additional five times as part of his 17 rallies in four-day stretch tour. Biden and his team understand the importance as well, and will campaign with Lady Gaga and John Legend in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia on November 2.
It’s also crucial to understand that four years ago Pennsylvania’s final polls had Hillary Clinton leading Trump by around the same margin as Biden leads Trump. FiveThirtyEight’s final average of Pennsylvania polling had Clinton at 48.9 percent to Trump’s 45.2 percent — a lead that vaporized when votes were tabulated. As Vox’s Matthew Yglesias explained, polling methodologies have improved since then, but that does not mean polling will reflect the final result in the state. Biden is ahead now, but Trump’s late attention on the state could mean a victory for him there once all votes are totaled.
https://www.vox.com/2020/11/2/21545863/pennsylvania-final-polls-2020-biden-trump
#ElectionEve #Election2020 - COVID-19 Isn’t Just A Trump Failure. It’s a Right-Wing Failure Too.
By Jonathan Cohn
Republicans and their allies spent decades attacking the experts and agencies that the country needs right now.Voters are getting exactly the picture they should on the eve of Election Day: President Donald Trump in denial of an ongoing pandemic and actively participating in its spread. At rallies over the weekend, Trump repeated what has become his new favorite line: that the U.S. is “rounding the corner” on the coronavirus outbreak. He attacked doctors, allegedly for inflating COVID-19 numbers in order to make money, and Democratic governors, for supposedly overreacting to the threat. He even hinted he might fire Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who since the start of the pandemic has arguably been the most consistent, reliable voice of reason at the national level. Meanwhile, as of Sunday, reported cases were up 43% from two weeks ago and deaths were up 15%, as part of a third coronavirus surge that public health experts long predicted. Trump’s rallies, which pack thousands onto buses and into airplane hangars with sometimes poor ventilation, are likely playing some small part in this. As many as 30,000 cases and 700 deaths trace back to his rallies, according to one modeling exercise from some Stanford University economists. The surge is hitting hardest in the upper Great Plains and Midwest, including the Dakotas and Iowa, where three very Trumpy Republican governors have been refusing to mandate mask-wearing and, in the case of South Dakota GOP Gov. Kristi Noem, bragging about it. The U.S. is not alone in struggling with a new surge: France, Italy and even Germany are facing big increases. But the U.S. is the only one of those countries with a leader pretending things are getting better. More than 230,000 Americans have already died from COVID-19, a number Trump himself once suggested would be a worst-case scenario. At this rate, nobody would be surprised if the number hits 300,000 or even 400,000 before the pandemic is over. Trump’s determination to deny this reality, rather than react to it, has a lot to do with his personal traits ― his habit of surrounding himself with charlatans, his refusal to study problems in detail, and his apparent inability to summon the basic level of empathy we associate with most members of the human species. But Trump’s behavior alone doesn’t explain why the U.S. pandemic response looks like it does. Right-wing thought and its grip on the Republican Party have also played a role ― by denigrating experts, undermining the public sector and preaching a libertarian ethos that says we can’t or shouldn’t bother responding collectively to big problems. A Trumpy Approach To The Virus It is not surprising that a president who seeks economic advice from Lawrence Kudlow, whose record includes predicting Bill Clinton’s tax hikes would kill the 1990s economy and that the 2007 housing bubble was a mirage, is taking cues on the pandemic from Scott Atlas, a politically conservative radiologist without special expertise in public health or epidemiology. Nor is it surprising that a president who has suggested energy-efficient light bulbs cause cancer and once confused HIV and HPV would hype unproven (and later deemed to be too risky) COVID-19 treatments and speculate that injecting bleach might be an effective way to treat patients. And when a politician literally brags that he could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue without losing the support of his base, it is to be expected that he might be the type to hold big political gatherings smack in the middle of COVID-19 hot spots, creating what looks like a rolling series of superspreader events ― in order to rally his supporters or, maybe, just to bask in the adulation. If Mitt Romney, who is famously data-driven and known for his managerial skills, were president, the federal response to COVID-19 would almost surely be a lot more aggressive and more faithful to science. The same goes for Republican governors like Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, Mike DeWine of Ohio and Larry Hogan of Maryland, all of whom have followed the advice of public health experts and acted aggressively to assist both providers and citizens in need ― frequently, because the federal government was not. The Right’s Crusade Against Expertise But the failures of the Trump pandemic response also have deep roots in the way mainstream Republican thinking has evolved over the past few decades. And that evolution has not taken by accident, as writers like investigative journalist Jane Mayer and political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have chronicled over the years. Conservatives have repeatedly questioned the authority of experts, especially scientific experts, because of an alleged liberal bias. And since the 1970s, they have invested heavily in the creation of an alternative reality with alternative facts, which are then spread by an alternative conservative media that now has a hold on anywhere from one-third to two-fifths of the population. The most obvious (and, in the long term, possibly most dangerous) version of this is climate denialism, which has its roots in the funding of anti-regulatory think tanks during the 1970s and 1980s but really took off in the late 2000s, when newly elected President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies tried to pass a “cap-and-trade” scheme of tradable emissions permits to reduce carbon output. Conservative groups, many of them funded by the Koch Brothers, declared all-out war and soon Republican leaders were denying that climate change was even a problem ― even though their 2008 presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, had proposed such a scheme.The party’s rhetoric has shifted a bit lately, now focusing more on the idea that climate change may be real but is unrelated to human activity ― a position that scientists almost universally reject but which is the predominant view among both GOP leaders and their voters. Just 35% of Republican voters believe climate change is a man-made phenomenon, according to Gallup, and just 18% think it will pose a serious threat in their lifetimes.It’s a straight line from that kind of thinking to Trump’s attacks on Fauci and, more broadly, his defiance of public health authorities who warned against preemptive loosening of COVID-19 restrictions in the spring and called repeatedly for mask mandates.And in this era of extreme polarization, when so many voters take their cues from their leaders, Trump can count on backing from the majority of Republican voters ― who, in poll after poll, have said the coronavirus threat is exaggerated and signaled strong approval of Trump’s response. The Right’s Crusade Against The Public Sector A big motive behind the right-wing attacks on independent expertise was a desire to weaken the case for regulation and taxes ― which, for conservative financiers like the Kochs, was very much an act of self-interest, since they perceived both regulation and taxes as direct threats to their income. The same motive explains their efforts to undermine the public sector more generally, by taking away the funds it needs to operate effectively. One example of this is the systematic, long-term neglect of public health agencies. Spending on state public health departments has fallen by 16% since 2010, while spending on local health departments has fallen by 18% in that time, according to an analysis by The Associated Press and Kaiser Health News. That decrease is especially remarkable given that it took place against the backdrop of two major outbreaks, H1N1 and Ebola, that prompted widespread alarm about America’s lack of pandemic preparedness. A ‘herd immunity’ strategy really means more mass death ― which, alas, seems to be where we are headed. The result of that underfunding has been a severe strain on local agencies that, today, are responsible for key elements of the COVID-19 response, including the contact tracing necessary to quickly contain outbreaks when they happen. An inability to conduct sufficient contact tracing has hindered public health efforts in the case of several notorious superspreader events, including the Sturgis, South Dakota, motorcycle festival in August. No single policy decision led to this neglect of public health funding. It’s the cumulative result of years and years of tight budgets, at both the federal and state levels ― which, in turn, reflect a broader mentality that government spending is always too high and that government programs are always wasteful. This is the argument that conservatives have been making for decades and that the Republican Party, which not that long ago had a more nuanced view of government, now embraces as its central dogma. And underlying that skepticism about government is a broader belief about the role of misfortune in life and what, if anything, society should do about it. The Right’s Crusade Against Solidarity The core of modern conservative thinking ― the idea that unites its aversion to taxes, regulations and government ― is that societies are fundamentally helpless to address certain problems. Fighting poverty is futile. Slowing climate change is pointless. Making sure every kid has a good public school is impossible. The best hope is to let individuals, businesses and small communities act on their own. Reasonable people can (and do) have good-faith arguments about what governments can and can’t accomplish. But some problems are simply too big and complex for anybody but governments to address. They are collective action problems, in others words. The pandemic is a perfect example of that.Nobody but the government has the resources to pay for and distribute protective gear. Nobody but the government has the ability to coordinate testing on a mass scale. Nobody but the government has the personnel to train and give hazard pay to front-line caregivers. Nobody but the government has the money to prop up the economy until the virus recedes enough to allow something resembling normal activity.The Trump administration has mostly failed on these accounts. (Vaccine development is the one exception; it invested massively in that, in ways that are likely to pay off shortly.) But the Republican Party has failed too ― most conspicuously, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his allies rejected hazard pay and extended economic relief, even as they found time to confirm Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.The ultimate expression of this attitude is what’s come to be known as the “herd immunity” strategy, which is the idea that the best response to the pandemic is to let the virus run rampant through the population while, in theory, protecting the most vulnerable. Among its chief promoters these days is reportedly Atlas, who from the look of things has replaced Fauci as the scientist with the most influence on Trump. Most public health experts reject this strategy, in part because segregating the sick is difficult. Community spread inevitably takes the virus into nursing homes and other long-term care facilities through workers, and there are many others with underlying medical conditions that leave them at high risk. A “herd immunity” strategy really means more mass death ― which, alas, seems to be where we are headed. One in five Americans already has a close family member or friend who died from COVID-19, according to a September poll. That number is going to keep going up, and the only question is how high. The answer may depend on what happens Tuesday ― and whether not just the president, but also his party, still have control over the nation’s pandemic response come January. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-covid-super-spreader-herd-immunity_n_5fa06593c5b6befb90916015
Opinion: Hillary Clinton Was Right to Warn Us
By Jennifer Senior
She grasped the danger posed by the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” Russian interference and Trump..jpg/1200px-Hillary_Clinton_by_Gage_Skidmore_4_(cropped).jpg)
I liked it far more than I thought I would — actually, I just plain liked it — but that’s not what I want to discuss as these four grim years come to a close, with Hillary’s more dignified, more intelligent, more presidential presence rattling spectrally about. What I want to discuss is the chapter about Donald Trump and Russia. I still remember my reaction to it. (Whoa, this chapter is LONG, I scribbled in the margins.) Hillary herself seemed aware that she’d become a bit obsessed. “At times,” she wrote, “I felt like C.I.A. agent Carrie Mathison on the TV show ‘Homeland,’ desperately trying to get her arms around a sinister conspiracy and appearing more than a little frantic in the process.” Something drove me back to that chapter recently — maybe because we have to vote this horrid man out, when history will surely show that the Senate should have removed him when it had the chance. Rereading it now, what leaps out isn’t how long that chapter was. It’s how right it was. If anything, Hillary’s compendium of Trump’s ties to Russia was svelte. What we know about them today is that chapter, cubed. This is the thing, if you go back and review Hillary’s speeches and tweets and debate performances from 2016: She was right about an awful lot. Not about everything. She had her share of lulus, like predicting that the election of Trump would set off a global financial panic and plunge the economy into a recession. (Oops. Took a pandemic to do that.) But she did have some strikingly good insights. You see it in the “she warned us” memes on Twitter: Here’s the snippet of her listing possible reasons Trump hadn’t released his tax returns (he’s a tax evader, he’s in hock to mysterious creditors, he’s not the bazilionaire we think), all of which turned out to be true; there’s the snippet of Hillary telling Trump that he was a puppet, which is worth reading in fuller context:
TRUMP: … from everything I see, [Putin] has no respect for this person.
CLINTON: Well, that’s because he’d rather have a puppet as president of the United States.
TRUMP: No puppet. No puppet.
CLINTON: And it’s pretty clear …
TRUMP: You’re the puppet!
CLINTON: It’s pretty clear you won’t admit …
TRUMP: No, you’re the puppet.
CLINTON: … that the Russians have engaged in cyberattacks against the United States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do, and that you continue to get help from him, because he has a very clear favorite in this race.
So I think that this is such an unprecedented situation. We’ve never had a foreign government trying to interfere in our election. We have 17 — 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin and they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing.
#Pakistan #PPP - Imran Khan is a hypocrite and a liar, Chairman PPP Bilawal Bhutto Zardari
Sunday, November 1, 2020
#Elections THE PRESIDENT’S TAXES - Trump Records Shed New Light on Chinese Business Pursuits
By Mike McIntire, Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig
President Trump and his allies have tried to paint the Democratic nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., as soft on China, in part by pointing to his son’s business dealings there. Senate Republicans produced a report asserting, among other things, that Mr. Biden’s son Hunter “opened a bank account” with a Chinese businessman, part of what it said were his numerous connections to “foreign nationals and foreign governments across the globe.” But Mr. Trump’s own business history is filled with overseas financial deals, and some have involved the Chinese state. He spent a decade unsuccessfully pursuing projects in China, operating an office there during his first run for president and forging a partnership with a major government-controlled company. And it turns out that China is one of only three foreign nations — the others are Britain and Ireland — where Mr. Trump maintains a bank account, according to an analysis of the president’s tax records, which were obtained by The New York Times. The foreign accounts do not show up on Mr. Trump’s public financial disclosures, where he must list personal assets, because they are held under corporate names. The identities of the financial institutions are not clear. The Chinese account is controlled by Trump International Hotels Management L.L.C., which the tax records show paid $188,561 in taxes in China while pursuing licensing deals there from 2013 to 2015. The tax records do not include details on how much money may have passed through the overseas accounts, though the Internal Revenue Service does require filers to report the portion of their income derived from other countries. The British and Irish accounts are held by companies that operate Mr. Trump’s golf courses in Scotland and Ireland, which regularly report millions of dollars in revenue from those countries. Trump International Hotels Management reported just a few thousand dollars from China. In response to questions from The Times, Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, said the company had “opened an account with a Chinese bank having offices in the United States in order to pay the local taxes” associated with efforts to do business there. He said the company had opened the account after establishing an office in China “to explore the potential for hotel deals in Asia.” “No deals, transactions or other business activities ever materialized and, since 2015, the office has remained inactive,” Mr. Garten said. “Though the bank account remains open, it has never been used for any other purpose.” Mr. Garten would not identify the bank in China where the account is held. Until last year, China’s biggest state-controlled bank rented three floors in Trump Tower, a lucrative lease that drew accusations of a conflict of interest for the president. China continues to be an issue in the 2020 presidential campaign, from the president’s trade war to his barbs over the origin of the coronavirus pandemic. His campaign has tried to portray Mr. Biden as a “puppet” of China who, as vice president, misread the dangers posed by its growing power. Mr. Trump has also sought to tar his opponent with overblown or unsubstantiated assertions about Hunter Biden’s business dealings there while his father was in office. “He’s like a vacuum cleaner — he follows his father around collecting,” Mr. Trump said recently, referring to Mr. Biden’s son. “What a disgrace. It’s a crime family.” In a misleading claim amplified by surrogates like his son Donald Trump Jr. and his lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president has said the younger Mr. Biden “walked out of China” with $1.5 billion after accompanying his father on an official trip in 2013. Numerous news articles and fact-checking sites have explained that the huge figure was actually a fund-raising goal set by an investment firm in which Hunter Biden obtained a 10 percent stake after his father left office. The firm did receive financial backing from a large state-controlled bank, but it is not clear the fund-raising target was ever met, and there is no evidence Hunter Biden received a large personal payout. As for the former vice president, his public financial disclosures, along with the income tax returns he voluntarily released, show no income or business dealings of his own in China. However, there is ample evidence of Mr. Trump’s efforts to join the myriad American firms that have long done business there — and the tax records for him and his companies that were obtained by The Times offer new details about them. As with Russia, where he explored hotel and tower projects in Moscow without success, Mr. Trump has long sought a licensing deal in China. His efforts go at least as far back as 2006, when he filed trademark applications in Hong Kong and the mainland. Many Chinese government approvals came after he became president. (The president’s daughter Ivanka Trump also won Chinese trademark approvals for her personal business after she joined the White House staff.)In 2008, Mr. Trump pursued an office tower project in Guangzhou that never got off the ground. But his efforts accelerated in 2012 with the opening of a Shanghai office, and tax records show that one of Mr. Trump’s China-related companies, THC China Development L.L.C., claimed $84,000 in deductions that year for travel costs, legal fees and office expenses. After effectively planting his flag there, Mr. Trump found a partner in the State Grid Corporation, one of the nation’s largest government-controlled enterprises. Agence France-Presse reported in 2016 that the partnership would have involved licensing and managing a development in Beijing. Mr. Trump was reportedly still pursuing the deal months into his first presidential campaign, but it was abandoned after State Grid became ensnared in a corruption investigation by Chinese authorities.It is difficult to determine from the tax records precisely how much money Mr. Trump has spent trying to land business in China. The records show that he has invested at least $192,000 in five small companies created specifically to pursue projects there over the years. Those companies claimed at least $97,400 in business expenses since 2010, including some minor payments for taxes and accounting fees as recently as 2018. But Mr. Trump’s plans in China have been largely driven by a different company, Trump International Hotels Management — the one with a Chinese bank account. The company has direct ownership of THC China Development, but is also involved in management of other Trump-branded properties around the world, and it is not possible to discern from its tax records how much of its financial activity is China-related. It normally reports a few million dollars in annual income and deductible expenses. In 2017, the company reported an unusually large spike in revenue — some $17.5 million, more than the previous five years’ combined. It was accompanied by a $15.1 million withdrawal by Mr. Trump from the company’s capital account. On the president’s public financial disclosures for that year, he reported the large revenue figure, and described it only as “management fees and other contract payments.” One significant event for the company that is known to have occurred in 2017 was the buyout of its management contract for the SoHo hotel in New York, which Bloomberg reported to have cost around $6 million. Mr. Garten would not comment on the specific amount cited by Bloomberg, but said that the contract buyout represented a “significant portion” of the company’s revenue and that the remaining money was not related to China. Outside of China, Mr. Trump has had more success attracting wealthy Chinese buyers for his properties in other countries. His hotels and towers in Las Vegas and Vancouver, British Columbia — locales known for attracting Chinese real estate investors — have found numerous Chinese purchasers, and in at least one instance drew the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. During the 2016 campaign, a shell company controlled by a Chinese couple from Vancouver bought 11 units, for $3.1 million, in the Las Vegas tower Mr. Trump co-owns with the casino magnate Phil Ruffin. The owner of a Las Vegas-based financial services firm told The Times he was later visited by two F.B.I. agents asking about the company behind the purchases, which he said had used his office address in incorporation papers without his knowledge. It is not known what became of the inquiry. Mr. Garten said the Trump Organization had “never been contacted by the F.B.I. and has no knowledge of any investigation.” In Vancouver, numerous Chinese buyers of units in Mr. Trump’s hotel and tower helped increase licensing fees from that project to $5.8 million in 2016, the year it was completed, according to tax records. The project was built by a Canadian-based firm controlled by the family of one Malaysia’s richest men, Tony Tiah Thee Kian, who operates hotels in China and elsewhere. CNN reported in 2018 that the Vancouver operation was the subject of a counterintelligence review related to Ivanka Trump’s need for a security clearance. And not long after winning the 2016 election, Mr. Trump reported selling a penthouse in one of his Manhattan buildings for $15.8 million to a Chinese-American businesswoman named Xiao Yan Chen, who bought the unit, previously occupied by Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, in an off-market transaction. Ms. Chen runs an international consulting firm and reportedly has high-level connections to government and political elites in China. Mr. Trump’s tax records show that he reported a capital gain of at least $5.6 million from the penthouse sale in 2017, his first year as president. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/us/trump-taxes-china.htmlAs he raises questions about his opponent’s standing with China, President Trump’s taxes reveal details about his own activities there, including a previously unknown bank account.
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