Tag: hit&run

The news about one of the suspects in the Jersey City shooting at a kosher supermarket apparently having been a “Black Hebrew Israelite” who apparently”wrote anti-Semitic and anti-police posts,” might surprise some who associate anti-Semitism with white nationalists and with extremist Islam or certain forms of Arab nationalism. But hostility to Jews seem to be materially more common among American blacks and American Hispanics than among American whites. (As one might gather, American Black Hebrew Israelites are blacks but not Hebrews or Israelites, at least under the conventional understandings of those terms; some are black supremacists.)

According to an October 2016 Anti-Defamation League survey, “anti-Semitic views” among black respondents were materially more common than among whites, with 23% of black respondents scoring high on the ADL’s scale, compared to only 10% of whites. The results remain largely the same when aggregating the ADL’s 6 surveys from 2007 to 2016; between that and the oversample of blacks and Hispanics among the 1532 respondents in 2016, the comparison seems likely to be pretty reliable.

Likewise, 31% of Hispanic immigrants score high on the ADL’s scale, as do 19% of U.S.-born Hispanics, compared to 10% of whites. (“White” here presumably means “non-Hispanic white.”)

Now the ADL’s “anti-Semitic index” may be faulted in some measure; it is based on how many of the following statements a responded agrees with, with a high score being defined as at least 6 out of 11 (as the 2013 survey report indicates):

Jews stick together more than other Americans.
Jews always like to be at the head of things.
Jews are more loyal to Israel than America.
Jews have too much power in the U.S. today.
Jews have too much control and influence on Wall Street.
Jews have too much power in the business world.
Jews have a lot of irritating faults.
Jews are more willing than others to use shady practices to get what they want.
Jewish business people are so shrewd that others don’t have a fair chance at competition.
Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind.
Jews are (not) just as honest as other business people.

Some of these sentiments might not necessarily reflect hostility to Jews; for instance, Jews may indeed in fact stick together more than other Americans—group solidarity is not uncommon among various ethnic groups and especially religious groups—and different people may view that negatively, positively, or neutrally. Likewise, while it’s surely an exaggeration to say that Jews always “like to be at the head of things,” it may well be both true and good that Jewish culture promotes more ambition and outspokenness than average. Some of the other sentiments may be hostile to Jews (e.g., “Jews are more loyal to Israel than America”) but still be legitimate subjects for inquiry: I don’t think American Jews are more loyal to Israel than America, or that such loyalty to another nation is an exclusive trait of Jews, but many Jews do feel a strong emotional link to Israel, and one can legitimately argue that this link may sometimes mislead them, even to America’s detriment. And don’t get Jews started on our having a lot of irritating faults …. But on balance, despite its limitations, this list seems like a reasonable basis for comparing the general tenor of attitudes among American whites, blacks, and Hispanics.

Of course, none of this can be generalized to all or even most blacks and Hispanics, any more than either the views of white anti-Semites can be generalized to all or most whites. For each group, those that the ADL labels as having especially high anti-Semitic propensities are a minority, and indeed (with the exception of among foreign-born Hispanics) a small minority. And of course even those who have anti-Semitic views will overwhelmingly not engage in crime against Jews.

But I think many people assume, both because of the high historical profile of the Nazis and the KKK, and because of the past images of WASP discrimination against Jews, that anti-Semitism in the U.S. is disproportionately a white phenomenon. Such an assumption, it appears, would be in error.

Credit: My coblogger David Bernstein first alerted me to this, by blogging about an earlier survey on the subject in 2014.

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Open with transformational hope, sink into despair, and conclude at the last minute with sly diplomatic equivocation and obfuscation. That’s the dramatic arc of negotiations and associated activist street performances that traditionally takes place during the annual two weeks of United Nations climate change conferences. The 25th Conference of the Parties (COP25) of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting now in Madrid is scrupulously adhering to that script. Currently, dark despair reigns.

“In the last ten years following the climate talks they have never been as bleak and disappointing as this conference,” declared activist Mohamed Adow of the think tank Power Shift Africa in an emailed press release. “The science is staring us in the face and school children are taking to the streets in their millions, and yet at the global climate summit countries are blocking progress and watering down climate action. It’s disgraceful and politicians are simply not doing their job of protecting the planet.”

Specifically many climate activists are despairingly disappointed in part because the official climate negotiators from several countries are “watering down” Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. Article 6 basically outlines the framework for setting up and linking carbon markets across the world. A majority of countries have committed to using carbon markets as one of the chief ways to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. COP25 negotiators were supposed to devise the rules that would make sure that trades between those markets were transparent and would actually produce emissions cuts.

So what’s at issue? A big one is emission reductions double counting. Say a German company wants to offset some of its carbon dioxide emissions by buying Amazon forest carbon sequestration credits from Brazil. So far so good. The problem at the COP25 negotiations is that both Brazil and Germany want the reductions to count toward meeting their national climate goals. That double counting lowers the overall ambition to reduce global emissions.

Another issue is that some countries want to use emission reduction credits that they accrued through a program called Clean Development Mechanism under the failed Kyoto Protocol. It turns out that most of the CDM projects did not result in any additional emissions reductions and that allowing the use of such credits now would undermine the ability of future carbon markets to cut emissions.

One more Article 6 sticking point at COP25 is figuring out how to make sure that emissions credit trades between countries actually result in emission reductions that would otherwise not have been made. In other words, if Indonesia was going to build a wind power plant anyway, why should France be allowed to buy credits that would count toward its emissions reductions commitments?

And as always, money transfers from rich countries to poor countries is a central concern. Under Article 6, some sort of mechanism for skimming international carbon dioxide reduction emissions trades is supposed to be permanently set up to fund climate adaptation in poor countries.

Prediction: On Friday, diplomatic equivocation and obfuscation will reign and these thorny issues will be kicked down the road to be fought over again next year at the COP26 conference in Glasgow, Scotland.

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There is a specter haunting not just Europe, but the whole globe, quaking the boots of established political parties, legacy media outlets, and transnational institutions of government and civil society.

This creeping dread is gathered under the catch-all label of “populism.” Cosmopolitan elites are on alert for its “dangerous rise.” Unelected bureaucracies are being hollowed out in its wake, including this week at the World Trade Organization.

It certainly feels like one of the biggest global upheavals of this waning decade, with each new week coughing up headlines like “Inauguration Marks Return of Peronism.” But are there measurable facts to back up this feeling?

The short answer is yes: Arguably five times as many people live under populist governments at the end of 2019 than at the end of 2009. But the longer answer requires some more precise definitions.

Start with a working model of the ism under question. Jordan Kyle and Limor Gultchin, in a very useful survey at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, synthesize the political science literature into two fundamental assertions underlying every governing populist movement: 1) “A country’s ‘true people’ are locked into conflict with outsiders, including establishment elites,” and 2) “Nothing should constrain the will of the true people.” Leaders then govern in an atmosphere of near-constant existential urgency.

From there, the authors differentiate three main populist variants: 1) Socio-economic populism (think: Venezuela), which claims that “the true people are honest, hard-working members of the working class,” fighting against “big business, capital owners and actors perceived as propping up an international capitalist system.” 2) Anti-establishment populism (think: Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy), which “paints the true people as hard-working victims of a state run by special interests and outsiders as political elites.”

And, with a bullet, 3) cultural populism, which claims that “the true people are the native members of the nation-state” battling over national sovereignty and cultural identity with the likes of “immigrants, criminals, ethnic and religious minorities, and cosmopolitan elites.” Cultural populists, in this framework, are your Viktor Orbáns, your Narendra Modis, your Donald Trumps.

You will certainly disagree with some of these classifications. The authors freely acknowledge that populism is a “slippery concept that is too often used pejoratively to describe politics that those in the mainstream do not like.” You can even make a Tony Blair joke, though his institute deserves credit for publishing a survey that is frank about the policy errors and hubristic anti-democratic approach of establishment decision-makers worldwide.

But the overall grouping of populists passes the eyeball test: These are largely identifiable as us vs. them, sovereignty-hoarding governments helmed by charismatic outsiders who speak more like the common man than the elites they rail against. And what this list of such regimes shows over the past decade is striking: “Whereas populism was once found primarily in emerging democracies, populists are increasingly gaining power in systemically important countries.”

By the end of the 2009, the Institute reckoned, there were 19 populist governments in the world, led in size by Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey (both “culturally” populist), then Italy, South Africa, Argentina, and Venezuela (the latter three from the socio-economic category). Together, those 19 countries currently account for around 577 million people and $7 trillion in annual gross domestic product.

What about the state of populist governments today? The Blair Institute study only runs through 2018, and events move fast. But we still have the arrival to the list of India, the United States, Joko Widodo’s Indonesia, Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines, and more. Factoring in one’s own characterizations about global developments this year (I would re-add Argentina and Bolivia, for example), you arrive at a similar-to-2009 total of around 21 populist countries. But oh, what a size difference: 2.8 billion people generating an annual $34.4 trillion of economic activity. The populists are no longer coming, they are here.

How you feel about this development likely depends on your attitudes toward your leading home-country populist and his enemy elite, and also (if you otherwise favor free trade) your weighting of sovereignty vs. globally-managed tariff reduction. Regardless, the sample size of populist countries is large enough to draw some preliminary conclusions about their net comparative impact.

In a parallel study a year ago for the Tony Blair Institute, also written up at The Atlantic, Jordan Kyle and Yascha Mounk conclude that “populist governments are about four times more likely than non-populist ones to harm democratic institutions,” that more than half of them “amend or rewrite their countries’ constitutions,” often to “extend term limits or weaken checks on executive power,” and that 40 percent have been “indicted on corruption charges,” with their countries experiencing “significant drops in international corruption rankings.” Individual rights and civil society institutions disproportionately come under attack.

Conclusion: “Populist rule—whether from the right or the left—has a highly negative effect on political systems and leads to a significant risk of democratic erosion.”

Those who compile global indices of democratic health are in a glum mood these days. Freedom House’s annual “Freedom in the World” survey for 2019 was headlined “Democracy in Retreat,” lamenting a “13th consecutive year of decline in global freedom.” (Surely, we will soon read about a 14th.) Conclusion: “The reversal has spanned a variety of countries in every region, from long-standing democracies like the United States to consolidated authoritarian regimes like China and Russia. The overall losses are still shallow compared with the gains of the late 20th century, but the pattern is consistent and ominous.” Whee!

A newer index introduced by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project at the University of Gothenburg finds that “the number of liberal democracies has declined from 44 in 2008 to 39 in 2018,” and that “almost one-third of the world’s population lives in countries undergoing autocratization, surging from 415 million in 2016 to 2.3 billion in 2018.” These include India, Brazil, and the United States.

(“Autocratization” is defined by V-Dem as: “any substantial and significant worsening on the scale of liberal democracy. It is a matter of degree and a phenomenon that can occur both in democracies and autocracies….Semantically, it signals the opposite of democratization, describing any move away from [full] democracy.”)

It doesn’t take much imagination to anticipate two basic reactions to these dour reports: Either we’re so screwed or ha ha, globalist cucks! But allow me to suggest a third option.

The twin rises of nationalism and democratic socialism weren’t some historical accident. They will not go away via nostalgia, or constitutional correctives like impeachment, or even an election. People feel locked out of decision-making, and until that sense of democratic responsibility is restored, there’s going to be one messy Brexit after another.

As Kyle and Gultchin point out,

Common to many of the crises identified by populists is a sense that the political elites across all mainstream political parties have conspired to depoliticise an important policy question that should be subject to public scrutiny. Political scientist Yascha Mounk terms this phenomenon “rights without democracy”: citizens may have the right to vote, but for many issues that they care about, the issue is not even considered in the realm of public debate but is a matter for technocrats. In some countries, mainstream political parties have come to a cross-party consensus, for example, about openness to trade, openness to immigration or EU accession; and opposition to these significant policies has no vehicle for representation.

Those who lament the “democratic backsliding” associated with populism need to find different means to their policy ends than far-flung technocratic projects. And those who relish the restoration of sovereignty need to face up to the reality that populists tend toward corruption and the deliberate erosion of individual rights.

We don’t know yet how the new breed of populists will react when their promises crash into reality, or when the worldwide economic expansion finally comes to an end. What happens then will largely tell the story of the 2020s. Buckle up.

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A blow to anti-Semitism or a blow to free speech? Tuesday’s news that President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order defining Judaism as a nationality has provoked a huge amount worry and, of course, Holocaust comparisons. 

The Trump order would effectively allow anti-Jewish discrimination to be covered under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in any organization or program that receives federal funding.

“Remember that in Hitler’s first written comment in 1919 on the so-called Jewish Question, he likewise defined the Jews as a race and not a religious community,” tweeted Jon Cooper, chair of the Democratic Coalition. 

“Hitler kicked off the Holocaust with the Nuremberg Laws that, among other things, declared German Jews weren’t of German nationality. So Trump signing an executive order declaring Judaism it’s own nationality is….well not great for us descendants of Holocaust survivors,” commented science journalist Erin Biba.

A number of people have pointed out that defining Judaism as a race or ethnicity rather than a religion is a plank white supremacists promote.

“Anti-semites like David Duke say Judaism is not a religion, but a nationality/race,” in order “to advance formation of a white ethnocentric state” that excludes Jews, tweeted author Kurt Eichenwald. “Trump just affirmed this trope by executive order.”

To be clear, Trump has not signed the order yet but is expected to on Wednesday.

Not all critics of the order went right to Hitler-level racist motives.

The New York Times article first reporting on it describes the Trump administration’s move as one targeting anti-Israel boycotts and protest movements on college campuses. (For many in Trump’s orbit, support for free speech on college campuses stops where criticism of Israel begins.) In this framing, Trump is actually acting in support of Jewish people, or at least in support of pro-Israel politics, but doing so as a way to harm Palestine or squelch pro-Palestinian speech.

“This is using Jews and Judaism as a shield to go after Palestinians and anti-authoritarian professors and student activists,” tweeted activist Sophie Ellman-Golan.

“The main thing you need to know about Trump’s executive order is that he is using Jews as fodder to go after the Palestine solidarity movement, which hurts both communities and helps billionaire donors and weapons manufacturers who don’t want lasting peace & justice in the region,” suggested organizer Rose Fasa.

Trump supporters claim the order is needed to protect Jewish college students in the U.S. from anti-Semitism.

But tying Judaism to Israel (and anti-Semitism to criticism of Israel) is something many American Jews reject, despite strong support for such intimate linkage in establishment and right-leaning political circles.

1/ The road to Trump’s EO on US Jews was paved – over yrs of effort – by US Jewish orgs/activists/politicos that legitimize/promote view that criticizing Israel=criticizing Jews, & that have led/backed escalating onslaught of laws & initiatives codifying this as US policy & law.

— Lara Friedman???? (@LaraFriedmanDC) December 11, 2019

“If opposition starts & stops with the EO & doesn’t extend to recognizing the fundamental error/danger in the equation that underlies it—the conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism—opposition to the EO is meaningless,” said Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace.

“The notion that Jewish students on college campuses are being “marginalized” [presumably by BDS resolutions?] and therefore need *the President of the United States* to intervene on their behalf by threatening to cut off federal funding to universities is an astounding position,” tweeted Harry Reis, director of policy and strategy for the New Israel Fund. 

Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, told the Times:

Israeli apartheid is a very hard product to sell in America, especially in progressive spaces, and realizing this, many Israeli apartheid apologists, Trump included, are looking to silence a debate they know they can’t win.

Some see less cynical motives. Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, told the paper:

the fact of the matter is we see Jewish students on college campuses and Jewish people all over being marginalized. The rise of anti-Semitic incidents is not theoretical; it’s empirical.

Greenblatt said he hopes the new Trump order would “be enforced in a fair manner.”

If our experience with the Obama administration’s expansion of Title IX (which governs sex and gender discrimination at educational institutions and is also tied to federal funding) has been any indication, expanding the power of the executive branch to micromanage school speech policies across the country—and impose huge sanctions on those in violation—only leads to a huge chilling of campus expression and activism across the board, and a lot of lives interrupted over administrators’ “abundance of caution.”

---

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On November 20, a pro-Israel group at York University hosted an event entitled “Reservists on Duty: Hear from former Israeli Defence Force soldiers.” Various leftist campus groups vowed to shut the event down. They didn’t, thanks to a heavy police presence, but they did disrupt the event while shouting anti-Israel and pro-terrorism slogans; a few lovely individuals changed to the organizers, “Intifada, Intifada, go back to the ovens.” Scuffles between protesters seeking to block entrance to the event and attendees often broke out; contemporary news sources almost universally attribute blame for the violence to the protesters.

Amnesty Canada has now weighed in with an extraordinary letter to York University’s president. If you think Amnesty spoke up in favor of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and against violence and disruption by protesters, well, you haven’t been paying attention to how groups that used to believe in human rights have evolved into far leftist activist groups with a particular obsession with hating Israel (my bolding):

Amnesty International is writing this Open Letter to request that you convene an independent review into all concerns associated with the “Reservists on Duty: Hear from former Israeli Defence Force soldiers” event, organized by the Herut Zionism Club at York University on November 20, 2019.

As you know, this controversial event was met with protests which descended into violent confrontations outside the venue. It was clearly foreseeable that there would be controversy and protest, given the history of human rights violations committed by Israeli Defence Force soldiers amidst the illegal occupation of the Palestinian Territories. That was exacerbated by the fact that members of the Jewish Defense League, a far-right group classified as a terrorist organization in the U.S. and with a record of violence and assaults at protests, were allowed on campus.

Amnesty International has an active and dynamic student group at York University that works on a range of campaigns, including our serious concerns about widespread and longstanding human rights violations associated with Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories. The group brings a positive voice for human rights to York, in keeping with the university’s encouragement of student agency and leadership. They actively defend and promote universal human rights protection for all people, including the freedoms of speech, expression and assembly and the obligation to condemn war crimes occurring anywhere in the world.

While Amnesty International at York had no official presence at the protest, a number of our members chose to participate in an individual capacity, as is clearly their right. We are very troubled to learn that some members were physically assaulted during the confrontations that occurred and have been receiving threatening messages on their cell phones. They are now fearful when they are on campus and have taken to limiting their movements, staying in groups, and ensuring that there are safe spaces to study in security.

It is evident that the considerable confusion, tension and fear associated with the November 20th event and its aftermath lingers. That is clear from the number and nature of statements and resolutions that have been issued by various student groups on campus. We have noted from your statement on November 21st that you have taken two steps in response, namely: (1) tasking the Vice President of Equity, People and Culture and your Division of Students to take the lead in developing a strategy for “fostering a more productive dialogue around these issues”; and (2) the launch of an upcoming Freedom of Speech Working Group to “make specific recommendations on how to create a more respectful climate on campus for the discussion of difficult topics.”

Given conflicting views about what happened that evening, the worrying ongoing impact on students at York and the important human rights considerations that are at stake, Amnesty International urges York University to go further and convene an independent review of all circumstances associated with the Herut Zionism Club event and its aftermath, with a mandate that includes examination of:

Amnesty International is writing this Open Letter to request that you convene an independent review into all concerns associated with the “Reservists on Duty: Hear from former Israeli Defence Force soldiers” event, organized by the Herut Zionism Club at York University on November 20, 2019.

As you know, this controversial event was met with protests which descended into violent confrontations outside the venue. It was clearly foreseeable that there would be controversy and protest, given the history of human rights violations committed by Israeli Defence Force soldiers amidst the illegal occupation of the Palestinian Territories. That was exacerbated by the fact that members of the Jewish Defense League, a far-right group classified as a terrorist organization in the U.S. and with a record of violence and assaults at protests, were allowed on campus.

Amnesty International has an active and dynamic student group at York University that works on a range of campaigns, including our serious concerns about widespread and longstanding human rights violations associated with Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories. The group brings a positive voice for human rights to York, in keeping with the university’s encouragement of student agency and leadership. They actively defend and promote universal human rights protection for all people, including the freedoms of speech, expression and assembly and the obligation to condemn war crimes occurring anywhere in the world.

While Amnesty International at York had no official presence at the protest, a number of our members chose to participate in an individual capacity, as is clearly their right. We are very troubled to learn that some members were physically assaulted during the confrontations that occurred and have been receiving threatening messages on their cell phones. They are now fearful when they are on campus and have taken to limiting their movements, staying in groups, and ensuring that there are safe spaces to study in security.

It is evident that the considerable confusion, tension and fear associated with the November 20th event and its aftermath lingers. That is clear from the number and nature of statements and resolutions that have been issued by various student groups on campus. We have noted from your statement on November 21st that you have taken two steps in response, namely: (1) tasking the Vice President of Equity, People and Culture and your Division of Students to take the lead in developing a strategy for “fostering a more productive dialogue around these issues”; and (2) the launch of an upcoming Freedom of Speech Working Group to “make specific recommendations on how to create a more respectful climate on campus for the discussion of difficult topics.”

Given conflicting views about what happened that evening, the worrying ongoing impact on students at York and the important human rights considerations that are at stake, Amnesty International urges York University to go further and convene an independent review of all circumstances associated with the Herut Zionism Club event and its aftermath, with a mandate that includes examination of:

considerations that were taken into account in approving the event, including the fact that the speakers were former members of a military with a clear record of responsibility for war crimes and other serious human rights violations;

decisions made with respect to the presence of members of the Jewish Defense League on campus;

Note: (1) Amnesty does not condemn the disruption and antisemitic remarks made at the event; (2) Amnesty is apparently taking the position that anyone who has ever served in the Israeli armed forces should be treated a as a presumptive war criminal [as the spouse of an IDF veteran, you can stick it where the sun don’t shine, Amnesty]; (3) Amnesty suggests that hosting a pro-Israel event is inviting violence and disruption, and the university should therefore consider whether it was appropriate to allow such an event to proceed; and (4) Amnesty suggests that a public university should be screening members of the public for their political affiliations before they should be allowed to

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Whew! That was one heckuva webathon. We originally set our goal at $200,000. When we met that goal before the halfway mark, we knew it was going to be a good year. But you surprised us again and on the final day, we blew past $370,000 for an incredible finish. Thank you for your support of our work!

Last year, your webathon donations made possible stories like these top hits:

• Robby Soave’s debunking of the media narrative about the Covington Catholic kid
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• Zuri Davis’ reportage about the huge NYPD pot bust that turned out to be a bunch of legal hemp
• Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s exposé on the Justice Department memos that reveal the truth about the Backpage.com investigation
• Lenore Skenazy’s sickening account of the parents who got hit by SWAT after they ignored a doctor’s advice because their 2-year-old was feeling better
• Damon Root’s analysis of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s originalist bona fides
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12/11/1922: Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon decided.

 

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The St, Louis City Council voted 19-2 to designate city parks as childcare facilities. The move is aimed at thwarting a state law allowing people to carry concealed weapons. That state law includes childcare facilities, but not parks, as places where concealed carry may be banned. Council member Joe Vaccaro voted for the bill “because it seems like the thing to do” but said law-abiding people will obey the gun ban while people who commit crimes won’t.

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Congress and the media obsess endlessly over whether President Donald Trump should be impeached.

Both ignore $23 trillion of bigger problems.

That’s how deep in debt the federal government is now, and because they keep spending much more than they could ever hope to collect in taxes, that number will only go up. It’s increasing by $1 trillion a year.

“Shut up, Stossel,” you say. “You’ve been crying wolf about America’s debt for years, but we’re doing great!”

You have a point. For many years, I’ve predicted that government, to fund freebies both parties want, would print boatloads of money. That would cause massive inflation. I bought silver coins so I might afford a loaf of bread while the rest of you haul suitcases full of nearly worthless paper currency to the bakery—or go hungry!

Clearly, that inflation crisis hasn’t happened.

Thanks to Trump’s contempt for the “deep state’s” love of endless regulation, businesses are hiring and stock prices are up. America is doing great.

But while our deficits haven’t yet created a crisis, they will. You can stretch a rubber band farther and farther. Eventually, it will snap back—or break.

We can’t pay off our increasing debt—unless we’re willing to tell the government to stop stationing soldiers in 80 countries, stop sending checks to poor people and old people, and stop paying for “free” health care for people like me. If the government did stop, the public would revolt.

Voters scream if there’s even talk of cuts to Medicare or Social Security. But the programs are unsustainable. Social Security was meant to help the minority of people who outlive their savings. When Social Security was created, most Americans didn’t even reach age 65. Now it’s an “entitlement” for everyone.

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other federal health care spending account for about half of the federal budget, and because we old people rudely refuse to die, these “entitlements” consistently grow faster than the tax revenues meant to fund them.

Anyone serious about giving our kids a future has to be willing to make big cuts to those programs, or at least privatize them and let individuals make our own decisions with our own money. But good luck to any politician who proposes that.

By contrast, voters don’t get stirred up as we just quietly sink farther and farther into debt. So politicians demand even more spending.

Last week, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said appropriations bills won’t get passed by the end of the year unless Republicans agree to spend “significant resources” on fighting the opioid epidemic, gun violence, child care, violence against women, election security, infrastructure, etc.

“With a Democratic House consumed with impeachment, there is very little appetite for the sorts of common-sense fiscal policies that could rein in our out-of-control deficits and debt,” says Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.

That implies that if Republicans were in charge, they would restore fiscal order. But there’s little evidence of that. Republicans talk about spending cuts and “responsibility” but rarely cut anything.

Democrats want new social programs. Neither party wants to reduce the military budget. Trump wants his wall and tariffs. Farmers, once proud independent capitalists who criticized welfare, now get 40 percent of their income from the government.

“The federal budget is on an unsustainable path,” says Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

No matter who you vote for and no matter what speeches they make, none of them is doing anything to put us on a sustainable course. It’s too bad.

Fortunately, thanks to the inventiveness of American entrepreneurs, our economy keeps creating new wealth for politicians to grab.

That might mean Congress wouldn’t have to cut spending for America to gradually grow our way out of this terrible debt. All they’d need to do is make sure spending goes up slower than the rate of inflation.

They won’t even do that.

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During Monday’s impeachment hearing, Republican lawyer Stephen Castor denied that Donald Trump had asked his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading contender to oppose Trump in next year’s election. “I don’t think the record supports that,” Castor said.

That jaw-dropping moment starkly illustrated the lengths to which Republicans have gone in rebutting the charge that Trump abused his powers for personal gain. The president’s defenders have repeatedly contested well-established facts in a way that makes fair-minded nonpartisans despair of having an impeachment debate based on a shared understanding of reality.

According to the White House’s own transcript of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Trump asked Zelenskiy to look into the claim that Biden pressed the Ukrainian government to replace Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin with the aim of thwarting an investigation of Burisma, an energy company that employed Biden’s son Hunter as a board member. “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution,” Trump said, adding that “it sounds horrible to me.”

Trump asked Zelenskiy to “look into it,” and Zelenskiy agreed, saying his new prosecutor general “will look into the situation, specifically to the company that you mentioned” (i.e., Burisma). Trump himself has said what he wanted from Zelenskiy was “very simple”—”a major investigation into the Bidens.”

You can argue, as Republicans have, that there was nothing improper about that request. But you cannot credibly deny that Trump made it.

Yet Castor claims to be agnostic on that point. “I think it’s ambiguous,” he insisted. Republican legislators likewise misrepresented the public record in their recent report on the impeachment inquiry, falsely claiming that Trump brought up the Bidens only “in passing” and that Zelenskiy “did not reply.”

The Republican report concedes that Shokin, whom Trump described as a “very good prosecutor” whose dismissal was “really unfair,” was “seen by State Department officials as corrupt and ineffective.” Shokin’s shortcomings were widely recognized, and his dismissal was consistent with the Obama administration’s foreign policy, which makes Trump’s claim that Biden was only trying to protect his son implausible.

The other part of the “favor” that Trump wanted, a subject he raised immediately after Zelenskiy expressed gratitude for U.S. military support, was an investigation of “what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine” involving “Crowdstrike” and “the server.” Those are references to a bizarre conspiracy theory alleging that Ukrainians hacked the Democratic National Committee’s emails during the 2016 presidential election campaign and framed Russia for the crime as part of an effort to hurt Trump and help Hillary Clinton.

That theory has been decisively rejected by U.S. intelligence agencies, congressional committees, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller. It is so disreputable that the Republican report pretends Trump was actually concerned about the broader issue of “Ukrainian influence in the 2016 election,” as evidenced by a few Ukrainian officials’ publicly stated preference for Clinton.

The report likewise argues that Trump was legitimately concerned about official corruption in Ukraine. But Trump did not broach that subject in the July 25 call or an earlier conversation with Zelenskiy, and his interest in discrediting Biden is consistent with the lobbying of his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who by his own account was seeking “information [that] will be very, very helpful to my client” and who was intimately involved with the administration’s efforts to secure a public commitment regarding the investigations from Zelenskiy.

Current and former administration officials have testified that such an announcement was a prerequisite for a White House meeting and the release of congressionally approved military aid that Trump had delayed without explanation. While Zelenskiy denies that he was “pressured” or subjected to “blackmail,” that is exactly what you would expect an ally desperate for U.S. support to say, especially if he believes he is dealing with a mercurial president driven by personal interests.

Whether that’s an accurate description of Trump is the issue at the center of his impeachment.

© Copyright 2019 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

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