Chris Hedges's Blog, page 290

Stephen Moore’s Economic Illiteracy Puts Us All at Risk

The one silver lining in the nomination of political hack Stephen Moore to the Federal Reserve is that it might spur a productive discussion on the benefits (or lack of them) of monetary policy as an instrument of economic growth. This is principally because it’s just one ingredient for what is necessary to instill economic growth, and not a particularly good one at that. A more direct approach is via appropriately targeted and sufficiently large fiscal actions.

In regard to monetary policy, low interest rates kept in place for a long time can actually constrain economic growth unless they are coupled with sensible compensating fiscal policy, due to the adverse income impact to savers emanating from a resultant lower income stream. There is also a problem of political legitimacy when so little of the funding is explicitly approved by Congress, and is left instead to the discretion/creation of the Federal Reserve (which has historically tended to prioritize the narrow interests of finance over the rest of the economy). And Stephen Moore, a leading advocate of cutting rates to promote additional economic growth (even as he has historically championed spending cuts), will simply perpetuate the (unfortunately) widely held notion of monetary policy as an effective cure-all, if his ideas gain policy traction within the Powell-led Federal Reserve.

In fact, what is truly required is well-formulated fiscal policy and less monetary policy activism, precisely the opposite of today’s prevailing trends. Solvency per se is not the issue. The key here is how the money is spent, lest fiscal policy become as diffuse in its effects as monetary policy has become, as well as discredited politically because of perceived ineffectiveness when long-standing structural issues (such as inequality) remain unaddressed.

Moore, a Heritage Foundation fellow and former Wall Street Journal editorial board member, has called for the Federal Reserve to cut rates in order to spur faltering economic growth. Here’s the problem: interest rates are a diffuse tool to manage economic growth. For every distressed borrower who benefits from lower interest rate charges, there is a saver adversely affected by the resultant loss of income. Additionally, as Bloomberg columnist Noah Smith argues, “Cheap credit does a poor job of weeding out zombie companies that compete for scarce resources.” In fact, a case can be made that low rates actually exacerbate prevailing deflationary trends. Low rates lower investment threshold returns, and reduce the costs of holding inventory, both of which can create oversupply, as well as perpetuating asset bubbles—a highly toxic combination that prevails in the United States (indeed, globally) today. Even with lower unemployment, the U.S. economy is largely characterized by middling growth, spread too thin and too inequitably. Moore’s policy prescriptions would likely make things worse.

Low interest rate regimes have also helped to promote reckless financial engineering that has enabled corporate CEOs (and their trusty investment bankers) to inflate profits and sustain company share prices as high as possible, often at a cost of ignoring the strategic long-term planning required to handle global competitive challenges from overseas companies that are slowly eating our proverbial lunch. In essence, therefore, lax monetary policy has become the handmaiden of the “speculation economy.”

In general, the Fed’s obsession with interest rates and bond yields (along with the corresponding shape of the yield curve) has obscured the manner in which such rates have provided a low-cost laboratory for the creation of Frankenstein-like instruments of financial mass destruction. Furthermore, as Professors L. Randall Wray and Scott Fullwiler have argued, “this was made even worse by the Fed’s cultivation of a belief that no matter what goes wrong, the Fed would never allow a ‘too big to fail’ institution to suffer from excessively risky practice. If anything, this encouraged more risk-taking.”

The real paradox of using monetary policy in general is that it only “works” to the extent that it induces the private sector to spend more out of current income, or encourages binging on private debt (which low rates can facilitate). If current income is adversely impacted by weak income flows, however, the interest rate is a highly flawed tool to solve the underlying problem, especially if it means simplistically cutting rates further, as Moore advocates. Such an action can foment bubbles in a multitude of assets—stocks and real estate being two of the most prominent examples—the collapse of which ultimately creates greater deflation, as well as exacerbating income inequality. This is because asset bubbles create huge increases in income for top earners, particularly in the finance sector, due to the relentless expansion of credit brought about by prevailing low rates. Changes in technology, and increasingly poor and outdated regulation in the context of a rapidly globalized financial system have accelerated a trend of asset growth and accumulation increasingly being funneled into fewer and fewer hands at the top.

When asset bubbles burst, the economically distressed sell to those with higher prevailing cash balances, setting the stage for further increases in inequality during the subsequent cycle, as the post-2008 environment clearly has done. As a New Economics Foundation report argues, “The process is self-reinforcing because increasing wealth accrues both higher income returns and greater political power.” This means that those with the highest amount of wealth have the means to lobby governments to maintain status quo policy structures that perpetuate inequality.

Cutting rates at this juncture simply perpetuates current bubble-like conditions and therefore will make the ultimate outcome worse when the bubble inevitably bursts. Moore’s policy prescription of cutting rates is therefore akin to giving a junkie another shot of heroin, rather than dealing with the underlying addiction itself. Moreover, the single-minded focus on interest rate levels has (per Fullwiler and Wray) diverted the Federal Reserve’s attention “away from its responsibility to regulate and supervise the financial sector, and its mandate to keep unemployment low. Its shift of priorities contributed to the creation of those conditions that led to [the 2008] crisis.”

By contrast, fiscal policy can also deal more effectively with the pathology of inequality via targeted spending, which can impact distributional outcomes, as it means directing funds toward those with the highest spending propensities (as opposed to the 1 percent, who generally save more of their income, which means less bang for the fiscal buck). Contrary to prevailing neoliberal theology, economic redistribution in such circumstances actually enhances an economy’s growth potential, rather than hindering it.

But we also want to avoid the fiscal zombie mindset as well. The key is ensuring that deficits are used toward productive job creation, not a perpetuation of crony capitalism. All too often, fiscal policy has been used in service of the latter. This means it has become somewhat politically discredited as an instrument of policy by both parties: in the first instance back in 2009 because the initial fiscal rescue package was insufficiently robust given the loss of almost $2 trillion in economic output in the United States alone. Then-President Obama’s $700bn stimulus package, while helpful, mostly kept the recession from being far worse rather than enabling a significant economic recovery, which later led to Republican charges that the policy was ineffective. (By contrast, on the monetary policy front, financial institutions received commitments from the Federal Reserve that may have been as high as $29 trillion, according to a report from the Levy Institute.)

More recently, the benefits of Trump’s highly touted tax “reform” have proven to be more apparent than real. The whole premise behind the lower corporate tax rate was that it would result in literally trillions of dollars allegedly parked offshore being repatriated back to the United States, resulting in a surge of job creation. However, as financial writer Alex Kimani has illustrated, “corporate America brought back just $664.9 billion of offshore profits, or just 16.6 percent of the $4 trillion Trump said they would return as a result of the tax overhaul.”

In reality, even Kimani’s analysis overstates the case. There has been no massive dollar “repatriation” as such. These dollars have always remained deposited in U.S. bank accounts, but have simply been classified as “offshore” via accounting legerdemain in order to exploit lower corporate rates abroad. As Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism points out: “Apple… managed to get a special deal with Ireland that allowed it to report corporate profits nowhere for tax purposes, kept the cash related to its Irish sub in banks in the US and managed it out of an internal hedge fund in Arizona.”

Given the prevailing deficit phobia that afflicts both political parties (depending on which is in power), this kind of gimmickry with minimal benefits being experienced by the bulk of the population has legitimized a political narrative against additional fiscal spending, on the grounds that it didn’t do what it promised to do and placed the United States closer to national bankruptcy.

While it is true that government that creates and issues its own currency can never run out of money, a policy that ignores how funds are spent can easily produce undesirable outcomes (such as inflation or rising inequality). One of the great post-Keynesian economists of the 20th century, Hyman Minsky, insisted (in the words of one of his students, L. Randall Wray), “that the impact of the budget on the economy depends on where spending and taxing is directed. Military spending and transfers, for example, are less productive and therefore more inflationary.” And yet this is precisely where much of Trump’s new spending is being directed, even as vital social spending is being cut back. Unfortunately, this has led opposition to Trump to fall into the intellectual cul de sac of obsessing about debts and deficits, rather than focusing on what we do with those deficits.

And as the paltry benefits of last year’s tax package have largely dissipated (to the extent that they created any economic benefit at all for the bulk of Americans), the focus has come back to the Federal Reserve just as Stephen Moore’s nomination has been announced. A decade on from the collapse of the 2008 bubble, the latest data on inflation shows an invidious combination: Consumer Price Index figures are now rising at their lowest level in almost two years, but virtually all core inflation, reports Rana Foroohar from the Financial Times: “was in rent or the owner’s equivalent of rent (up 0.3 per cent). Core goods inflation, meanwhile, was down 0.2 per cent.” This means higher house prices at a time when quality affordable housing is still out of reach for the average American. Lowering interest rates, as Moore suggests, will likely exacerbate the housing bubble, and fuel additional stock market speculation, without fundamentally doing much to promote further spending power on the part of the average American citizen. Meanwhile, the relative absence of a proper role for fiscal policy means that the toxic prevailing macroeconomic imbalances (such as ongoing huge levels of household indebtedness and wealth inequality) will continue.

Every tool and target deployed by the Federal Reserve has simply restored an unhealthy status quo ante in financial speculation, while the comparative diminution of fiscal policy has left us with an inefficient economy that still leaves tens of millions of workers behind in terms of wage gains, access to decent public infrastructure, and denial of quality health care. Imagine if some of those trillions of government loan guarantees, standing credit facilities, and bailouts to various financial institutions had gone toward more productive uses. How much better would the U.S. economy look today? Regrets aside, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to make the case that cutting interest rates alone is a panacea. In fact, in the current context, it may well make things worse.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Mitch McConnell on the Brink of Packing Courts With Extremists

With Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell expected as early as Wednesday to use the so-called “nuclear option” to speed up the confirmation process for President Donald Trump’s right wing judicial nominees, progressives raised alarm and urged Americans to pressure their senators to stop the “reckless court packing” by the Republican Party.

“McConnell has signaled he is ready to use the so-called ‘nuclear option’ to further pack the courts with Trump’s lifetime judicial appointments,” tweeted the progressive advocacy group 5 Calls. “Tell the Senate to block McConnell and stop further erosion of our democratic norms!”

Pete Buttigieg Isn’t Going Away Anytime Soon

In a crowded field of Democratic hopefuls, Pete Buttigieg has emerged as a dark horse for the 2020 nomination. The 37-year-old mayor from South Bend, Ind., has skyrocketed past several candidates, climbing to third in Emerson’s latest Iowa poll ahead of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke.

Buttigieg has also seen a huge spike in interest on Google. In the past two weeks, his name was searched more than the prior 93 combined. Yet even today, he’s received one quarter as many newspaper mentions as Sen. Warren, and fewer than half of Democrats have even heard his name.

During a recent appearance on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” he discussed his political rise and possible run for president:

Explaining his growing popularity, he notes, “Each election in many ways produces somebody who is the reverse of what we just had.” A former Rhodes scholar and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, the Indiana native certainly fits the bill.

Buttigieg has not shied away from challenging his own party. Last week, Democratic strategist Nick Merrill took him to task for his past criticisms of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

This is indefensible. @HillaryClinton ran on a belief in this country & the most progressive platform in modern political history. Trump ran on pessimism, racism, false promises, & vitriol. Interpret that how you want, but there are 66,000,000 people who disagree. Good luck. https://t.co/N3yRgHPVDL

— Nick Merrill (@NickMerrill) March 30, 2019

At the time, Buttigieg told The Washington Post, “Donald Trump got elected because, in his twisted way, he pointed out the huge troubles in our economy and our democracy.” He added, “At least he didn’t go around saying that America was already great, like Hillary did.”

Asked over the weekend to respond to Merrill, Buttigieg was quick to note that he supported Clinton for president and had “enormous respect” for her. But while he acknowledged  the media’s failures in the run-up to the 2016 election, he stood by his remarks that Clinton’s strategy was fundamentally flawed.

“[They] focused more about the individuals, much more about all the problems with Donald Trump and much less about the concerns of voters and especially here in the industrial Midwest,” he said. “I think a lot of people perceived our campaign, the Democratic campaign, as basically saying that everything was just fine and that we should just believe in the system, and that was unconvincing. So even though people knew that the president wasn’t a great character, I think a lot of folks voted for him just to kind of burn the house down because the system had let us down in so many ways.”

Buttigieg has yet to offer a detailed list of policy proposals, but he has distinguished himself by signaling a willingness to expand the size of the Supreme Court from nine to 15 judges. In Buttigieg’s plan, the court would have five Democratic appointees and five Republican ones, with those 10 justices appointing an additional five. He has also expressed a willingness to abolish the Electoral College.

Listen to Buttigieg explore some of the biggest issues the country faces today here and here.

 

Chinese Woman Carrying Malware Allegedly Got Into Mar-a-Lago

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.—A woman carrying two Chinese passports and a device containing computer malware lied to Secret Service agents and briefly gained admission to President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club over the weekend during his Florida visit, federal prosecutors allege in court documents.Yujing Zhang, 32, approached a Secret Service agent at a checkpoint outside the Palm Beach club early Saturday afternoon and said she was a member who wanted to use the pool, court documents said. She showed the passports as identification.

Agents say she wasn’t on the membership list, but a club manager thought Zhang was the daughter of a member. Agents say that when they asked Zhang if the member was her father, she did not answer definitively but they thought it might be a language barrier and admitted her.

Zhang’s story changed when she got inside, agents say, telling a front desk receptionist she was there to attend the United Nations Chinese American Association event scheduled for that evening. No such event was scheduled and agents were summoned.

Agent Samuel Ivanovich wrote in court documents that Zhang told him that she was there for the Chinese American event and had come early to familiarize herself with the club and take photos, again contradicting what she had said at the checkpoint. She showed him an invitation in Chinese that he could not read.

He said Zhang was taken off the grounds and told she could not be there. Ivanovich said she became argumentative, so she was taken to the local Secret Service office for questioning.

There, he said, it became clear Zhang speaks and reads English well. He said Zhang said she had traveled from Shanghai to attend the nonexistent Mar-a-Lago event on the invitation of an acquaintance named “Charles,” whom she only knew through a Chinese social media app. Ivanovich said she then denied telling the checkpoint agents she was a member wanting to swim.

Ivanovich said Zhang carried four cellphones, a laptop computer, an external hard drive and a thumb drive containing computer malware. She did not have a swimsuit.

Zhang is charged with making false statements to federal agents and illegally entering a restricted area. She remains in custody pending a hearing next week. Her public defender, Robert Adler, declined comment.

There is no indication Zhang was ever near the president. There is also no indication that she is connected to Li Yang, a Chinese native, Republican donor and former Florida massage parlor owner.

Yang recently made news after it was learned she was promising Chinese business leaders that her consulting firm could get them access to Mar-a-Lago, where they could mingle with the president.

Story Details

Arizona Students’ Free Speech Rights Challenged in Border Agent Visit Protest

Two students at the University of Arizona will face misdemeanor charges after a video showing them protesting an appearance by Customs and Border Protection officials on their campus went viral, Rachel Leingang reports in the Arizona Republic.

As Border Patrol agents gave a presentation on March 19 to the Criminal Justice Association, a student club, some outside the event recorded the presentation and shouted “Murder Patrol,” “murderers,” and “an extension of the KKK,” it was reported. When the agents left, some dissenters followed them off campus, continuing chants of “Murder Patrol.”

Multiple student leaders called into question the charges, members of the university’s Associated Students wrote to the administration that it was “unacceptable” that CPB officers are allowed to make unannounced visits to campus.

Conservative media jumped on the incident, calling it another case of liberal students going “berserk.” The Daily Wire claimed protesters were “harassing” the agents, but it’s the student protesters, and not the agents nor members of the club who invited them, who are being charged with a crime.

The right has frequently accused colleges of stifling conservative speech on campus, especially during the Trump administration. When the University of California at Berkeley canceled an appearance from far-right writer Milo Yiannopoulos after extensive student protests, the Berkeley College Republicans and the Young America’s Foundation filed a lawsuit, claiming the university attempted to “restrict and stifle the speech of conservative students whose voices fall beyond the campus political orthodoxy.”

After protests at other campuses over visits from other far-right figures, Peter Beinart wrote in The Atlantic, “something has gone badly wrong on the campus left.” Jeffrey Selingo, writing in The Washington Post, suggested that  “students have a tenuous relationship with the First Amendment.”

The evidence is not so clear cut. Conservatives, a 2018 Gallup poll found, claim to be censored for their views more frequently than liberals. However, as Kelly Weill writes in The Daily Beast, while “those sentiments are subjective and difficult to quantify, actual incidents of political firings skew against the left.” Weill continues:

A 2015-2017 study of academic firings found significantly more liberal professors who were fired for their speech than conservative professors. Although that figure might reflect a greater percentage of liberal professors in academia, the rate of liberal firings increased after 2016, while conservative firings remained unchanged.

Lack of concrete data didn’t stop President Trump from getting involved. In March, claiming that American universities “have tried to restrict free thought, impose total conformity and shut down the voices of great young Americans,” he signed an executive order on campus free speech mandating that colleges must adhere to the First Amendment to continue receiving federal funds, a requirement under existing law.

In a letter to students, University of Arizona President Robert Robbins called the protest a “dramatic departure from our expectations of respectful behavior and support for free speech on this campus.” Two students will be charged with “interference with the peaceful conduct of an educational institution,” according to police.

Robbins indicated the incident will continue to be investigated for “additional criminal violations,” including on the part of university employees. However, as pointed out in Leingang’s article, “It’s unclear what role employees played in the situation.”

Robbins claimed in his letter, “Student protest is protected by our support for free speech but disruption is not.” He did not indicate why these particular students were disrupting rather than protesting, nor what generally constitutes acceptable protest for the university.

If convicted, the students face up to six months in jail.

Economic Inequality Could Spell the End of American Democracy

Despair about the state of our politics pervades the political spectrum, from left to right. One source of it, the narrative of fairness offered in basic civics textbooks — we all have an equal opportunity to succeed if we work hard and play by the rules; citizens can truly shape our politics — no longer rings true to most Americans. Recent surveys indicate that substantial numbers of them believe that the economy and political system are both rigged. They also think that money has an outsized influence on politics. Ninety percent of Democrats hold this view, but so do 80% of Republicans. And careful studies confirm what the public believes.

None of this should be surprising given the stark economic inequality that now marks our society. The richest 1% of American households currently account for 40% of the country’s wealth, more than the bottom 90% of families possess. Worse yet, the top 0.1% has cornered about 20% of it, up from 7% in the mid-1970s. By contrast, the share of the bottom 90% has since then fallen from 35% to 25%. To put such figures in a personal light, in 2017, three men — Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates — possessed more wealth ($248.5 billion) than the bottom 50% of Americans.

Over the last four decades, economic disparities in the U.S. increased substantially and are now greater than those in other wealthy democracies. The political consequence has been that a tiny minority of extremely wealthy Americans wields disproportionate influence, leaving so many others feeling disempowered.

What Money Sounds Like

Two recent headline-producing scandals highlight money’s power in society and politics.

The first involved super-affluent parents who used their wealth to get their manifestly unqualified children into highly selective colleges and universities that previously had reputations (whatever the reality) for weighing the merits of applicants above their parents’ wealth or influence.

The second concerned Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s reported failure to reveal, as election laws require, more than $1 million in low-interest loans that he received for his 2012 Senate campaign. (For that lapse, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) fined Senator Cruz a modest $35,000.) The funds came from Citibank and Goldman Sachs, the latter his wife’s longtime employer. News of those undisclosed loans, which also cast doubt on Cruz’s claim that he had funded his campaign in part by liquidating the couple’s assets, only added to the sense that favoritism now suffuses the politics of a country that once prided itself on being the world’s model democracy. (Journalists covering the story couldn’t resist pointing out that the senator had often lambasted Wall Street’s “crony capitalism” and excessive political influence.)

The Cruz controversy is just one reflection of the coming of 1% politics and 1% elections to America at a moment when the first billionaire has been ensconced in the Oval Office for more than two years, posing as a populist no less.

Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, money has poured into politics as never before. That’s because the Court ruled that no limits could be placed on corporate and union spending aimed at boosting or attacking candidates running for political office. Doing so, the justices determined in a 5-4 vote, would be tantamount to restricting individuals’ right to free speech, protected by the First Amendment. Then came the Court’s 2014 McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission decision (again 5-4), which only increased money’s influence in politics by removing the aggregate limit on an individual’s contribution to candidates and to national party committees.

In an age when money drives politics, even ex-presidents are cashing in. Fifteen years after Bill Clinton departed the White House, he and Hillary had amassed a net worth of $75 million — a 6,150% increase in their wealth. Barack and Michelle Obama’s similarly soared from $1.3 million in 2000 to $40 million last year — and they’re just warming up. Key sources of these staggering increases include sky-high speaking fees (often paid by large corporations), including $153 million for the Clintons between February 2001 and May 2016. George W. Bush also made tens of millions of dollars in this fashion and, in 2017, Obama received $400,000 for a single speech to a Wall Street firm.

No wonder average Americans believe that the political class is disconnected from their day-to-day lives and that ours is, in practice, a democracy of the rich in which money counts (and counts and counts).

Cash for College

Now let’s turn to what those two recent scandals tell us about the nexus between wealth and power in America.

First, the school scam. Parents have long hired pricey tutors to coach their children for the college admissions tests, sometimes paying them hundreds of dollars an hour, even $1,500 for 90 minutes of high-class prep. They’ve also long tapped their exclusive social and political connections to gin up razzle-dazzle internships to embellish those college applications. Anyone who has spent as much time in academia as I have knows that this sort of thing has been going on for a long time. So has the practice of “legacy admissions” — access to elite schools especially for the kids of alumni of substantial means who are, or might prove to be, donors. The same is true of privileged access to elite schools for the kids of mega-donors. Consider, for instance, that $2.5 million donation Charles Kushner made to Harvard in 1998, not long before his son Jared applied. Some of the folks who ran Jared’s high school noted that he wasn’t exactly a whiz-bang student or someone with sky-high SAT scores, but — surprise! — he was accepted anyway.

What’s new about the recent revelations is that they show the extent to which today’s deep-pocketed helicopter parents have gone into overdrive, using brazen schemes to corrupt the college admissions process yet more. One unnamed parent spent a cool $6.5 million to ensure the right college admitted his or her child. Others paid hefty amounts to get their kids’ college admissions test scores falsified or even hired proxies to take the tests for them. Famous actors and financial titans made huge payments to university sports coaches, who then lied to admissions officers, claiming that the young applicants were champions they had recruited in sports like water polo, crew, or tennis. (The kids may have known how to swim, row, or play tennis, but star athletes they were not.)

Of course, as figures on the growing economic inequality in this country since the 1970s indicate, the overwhelming majority of Americans lack the connections or the cash to stack the deck in such ways, even assuming they would do so. Hence, the public outrage, even though parents generally understand that not every aspirant can get into a top school — there aren’t enough spots — just as many know that their childrens’ future happiness and sense of fulfillment won’t depend on whether they attend a prestigious college or university.

Still, the unfairness and chicanery highlighted by the admissions scandal proved galling, the more so as the growing crew of fat cats corrupting the admissions process doubtless also preach the gospel of American meritocracy. Worse, most of their kids will undoubtedly present their fancy degrees as proof that quality wins out in our society, never mind that their starting blocks were placed so far ahead of the competition.

To add insult to injury, the same parents and children may even portray admissions policies designed to help students who lack wealth or come from underrepresented communities as violations of the principles of equal opportunity and fairness, democracy’s bedrock. In reality, students from low-income families, or even those of modest means, are startlingly less likely to be admitted to top private universities than those from households in the top 10%. In fact, applicants from families in the top 1% are now 77 times more likely than in the bottom 20% to land in an elite college, and 38 of those schools admit more kids from families in that top percentage than from the bottom 60%.

Buying Politics (and Politicians), American-Style

Now, let’s return to the political version of the same — the world in which Ted Cruz swims so comfortably. There, too, money talks, which means that those wealthy enough to gain access to, and the attention of, lawmakers have huge advantages over others. If you want political influence, whether as a person or a corporation, having the wealth needed to make big campaign contributions — to individuals or groups — and to hire top-drawer lobbyists makes a world of difference.

Official data on the distribution of family income in the United States show that the overwhelming majority of Americans can’t play that game, which remains the preserve of a tiny super-rich minority. In 2015, even with taxes and government-provided benefits included, households in the lowest 20% accounted for only about 5% of total income. Their average income — not counting taxes and government-provided assistance — was only $20,000. The share of the bottom 50% — families making $61,372 or less — dropped from 20% to 12% between 1978 and 2015.  By contrast, families in the top 1% earned nearly 50% of total income, averaging $215,000 a year — and that’s only income, not wealth. The super-rich have plenty of the latter, those in the bottom 20% next to none.

Before we proceed, a couple of caveats about money and political clout. Money doesn’t always prevail. Candidates with more campaign funds aren’t guaranteed victory, though the time politicians spend raising cash leaves no doubt that they believe it makes a striking difference. In addition, money in politics doesn’t operate the way simple bribery does. The use of it in pursuit of political influence works more subtly, and often — in the new era opened by the Supreme Court — without the slightest need to violate the law.

Still, in Donald Trump’s America, who would claim that money doesn’t talk? If nothing else, from inaugural events — for Trump’s inaugural $107 million was raised from a host of wealthy donors with no limits on individual payments, 30 of which totaled $1 million or more — to gala fundraisers, big donors get numerous opportunities to schmooze with those whose campaigns they’ve helped bankroll. Yes, there’s a limit — currently $5,600 — on how much any individual can officially give to a single election campaign, but the ultra-wealthy can simply put their money into organizations formed solely to influence elections as well as into various party committees.

Individuals, companies, and organizations can, for instance, give money to political action committees (PACs) and Super PACs. Though bound by rules, both entities still have lots of leeway. PACs face no monetary limits on their independent efforts to shape elections, though they can’t accept corporate or union money or take more than $5,000 from individuals. They can provide up to $5,000 to individual election campaigns and $15,000 per party committee, but there’s no limit on what they can contribute in the aggregate. Super PACs have far more running room. They can rake in unlimited amounts from a variety of sources (as long as they’re not foreign) and, like PACs, can spend limitless sums to shape elections, providing they don’t give money directly to candidates’ campaigns.

Then there are the dark money groups, which can receive financial contributions from any source, American or foreign. Though their primary purpose is to push policies, not individual campaigns, they can engage in election-related work, provided that no more than half their funds are devoted to it. Though barred from donating to individual campaigns, they can pour unlimited money into Super PACs and, unlike PACs and Super PACs, don’t have to disclose who gave them the money or how much. Between 2008 and 2018, dark money groups spent $1 billion to influence elections.

In 2018, 2,395 Super PACs were working their magic in this country. They raised $1.6 billion and spent nearly $809 million. Nearly 78% of the money they received came from 100 donors. They, in turn, belonged to the wealthiest 1%, who provided 95% of what those Super PACs took in.

As the 2018 congressional elections kicked off, the four wealthiest Super PACs alone had $113.4 million on hand to support candidates they favored, thanks in substantial measure to business world donors. In that election cycle, 31 individuals ponied up more than $5 million apiece, while contributions from the top four among them ranged from almost $40 million to $123 million.

The upshot: if you’re running for office and advocate policies disliked by wealthy individuals or by companies and organizations with lots of cash to drop into politics, you know from the get-go that you now have a problem.

Wealth also influences political outcomes through the lobbying industry. Here again, there are rules, but even so, vast numbers of lobbyists and eye-popping amounts of lobbying money now are at the heart of the American political system. In 2018 alone, the 50 biggest lobbying outfits, largely representing big companies, business associations, and banks, spent $540 million, and the grand total for lobbying that year alone was $3.4 billion.

Nearly 350 of those lobbyists were former legislators from Congress. Officials departing from senior positions in the executive branch have also found artful ways to circumvent presidential directives that prohibit them from working as lobbyists for a certain number of years.

Do unions and public interest groups also lobby? Sure, but there’s no contest between them and corporations. Lee Drutman of the New America think tank notes that, for every dollar the former spent in 2015, corporate donors spent $34. Unsurprisingly, only one of the top 20 spenders on lobbying last year was a union or a public-interest organization.

The sums spent by individual companies to gain political influence can be breathtaking. Take now-embattled Boeing. It devoted $15 million to lobbying in 2018 — and that’s not counting its campaign contributions, using various channels. Those added another $8.4 million in the last two-and-a-half years. Yet Boeing only placed 11th among the top 20 corporate spenders on lobbying last year. Leading the pack: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at $94.8 million.

Defenders of the status quo will warn that substantially reducing money’s role in American politics is sure to threaten democracy and civil liberties by ceding undue power to the state and, horror of horrors, putting us on the road to “socialism,” the right wing’s bogeyman du jour. This is ludicrous. Other democracies have taken strong steps to prevent economic inequality from subverting their politics and haven’t become less free as a result. Even those democracies that don’t limit political contributions have adopted measures to curb the power of money, including bans on television ads (a huge expense for candidates in American elections: $3 billion in 2018 alone just for access to local stations), free airtime to allow competitors to disseminate their messages, and public funds to ease the financial burden of election campaigns. Compared to other democracies, the United States appears to be in a league of its own when it comes to money’s prominence in politics.

Those who favor continuing business as usual like to point out that federal “matching funds” exist to help presidential candidates not be steamrolled by competitors who’ve raised mounds of money. Those funds, however, do no such thing because they come with stringent limits on total spending. Candidates who accept matching funds for a general election cannot accept contributions from individuals. Moreover, matching funds are capped at $20 million, which is a joke considering that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney spent a combined $1.2 billion in individual contributions alone during the 2012 presidential election. (Super PACs spent another $350 million to help Romney and $100 million to back Obama.)

A New American Tradition?

Rising income inequality, wage stagnation, and slowing social mobility hurt ordinary Americans economically, even as they confer massive social and political advantages on the mega-rich — and not just when it comes to college admissions and politics either.

Even the Economist, a publication that can’t be charged with sympathy for left-wing ideas, warned recently of the threat economic inequality poses to the political agency of American citizens. The magazine cited studies showing that, despite everything you’ve heard about the power of small donations in recent political campaigns, 1% of the population actually provides a quarter of all the money spent on politics by individuals and 80% of what the two major political parties raise. Thanks to their wealth, a minuscule economic elite as well as big corporations now shape policies, notably on taxation and expenditure, to their advantage on an unprecedented scale. Polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans support stricter laws to prevent wealth from hijacking politics and want the Citizens United ruling overturned. But then just how much does the voice of the majority matter? Judging from the many failed efforts to pass such laws, not much.

Nancy Pelosi Believes in Nothing

Last month, Nancy Pelosi gave an interview to the Washington Post that incensed an increasingly socialist flank of the Democratic Party. “I don’t think we should go down that path,” she said of President Trump’s possible impeachment, before adding the president of the United States is “just not worth it.”

It was unclear, in this context, what “worth it” meant to Pelosi. In the same interview, she claimed that Trump was unfit for office “ethically,” “intellectually” and “curiosity-wise.” So “worth it,” it seems, translated to “politically advantageous.” From this, one might draw the conclusion that the Speaker of the House thinks it better to keep this guy around—a far cry from newly elected Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s pledge several months before to “impeach the motherfucker.”

Pelosi regretted the negativity of her tone in describing the president. “I don’t usually talk about him this much,” she offered. “This is the most I’ve probably talked about him. I hardly ever talk about him. You know, it’s not about him.” Rather it’s about “lower health-care costs, bigger paychecks, cleaner government.” What exactly that “it” is remains unclear.

Her critics have seized on her impeachment language, but Pelosi gave a more telling answer in her reply to the question that immediately preceded it. Asked whether Trump had done any good for the country, she replied:

He’s been a great organizer for Democrats, a great fundraiser for Democrats and a great mobilizer at the grass-roots level for Democrats. [Laughs.] And I think that’s good for America.

A great organizer; a great fundraiser; a great mobilizer. If you are in the business of running the Democratic Party, then Donald Trump is good for business.

A few weeks later, the Mueller investigation concluded with a whimper. The former g-man had been lionized by a core of Hillary Clinton stalwarts, who came to view him with an almost messianic fervor, parsing every new tidbit that emerged from his tight-lipped shop for hints of a grand strategy. Some seemed to legitimately expect him to march Trump out of the White House in chains—or barring that, Don Jr. out of Trump Tower in handcuffs. Fed a steady diet of conspiracy theories by cable news pundits and a coterie of online grifters, they lost their ability to distinguish Cold War fantasy from late-capitalist reality.

Then Attorney General William Barr released his four-page memo on the report, which was immediately denounced as a whitewash. Barr’s memo made two principal points: that there was no proof of a grand conspiracy between the Trump campaign and malign actors in the Russian government, and that the special prosecutor remained agnostic about the possibility of criminal obstruction of justice by the president. Given the broad legal immunities enjoyed by the executive office, Barr and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, concluded the Department of Justice could not proceed with any prosecutions.

Members of the hashtag resistance were devastated that Mueller had seemingly failed to catch Teflon Don in the act of defiling their sacred republic, but the disappointment among Democratic leadership felt more muted: less concerned with how the investigation ended than that it had ended at all.

Democratic House leaders like Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff have since pivoted to calling for the release of the full Mueller report. They are right to do so, as Barr has proved himself a notorious water-carrier for corrupt conservatives. It is entirely possible he slanted his abstract of the investigation’s conclusions so they’d land with the loosest, wettest possible plop.

But these tactics still feel dilatory, as did the investigation itself, which Democrats seemed perfectly content to let unspool forever, picking off petty crooks at the fringes while leaving the more grave implications of the probe—collusion, conspiracy, treason—forever unresolved. A boundless, unending investigation, after all, could have produced precisely the kind of paralysis that marred the latter years of the Obama administration.

Pelosi and her Senate counterpart, Chuck Schumer, have not been entirely ineffective at grinding the gears of the Trump administration’s policy apparatus, in as much as it has any policy apparatus to speak of. They held firm through the “partial government shutdown,” and managed to sell it pretty effectively as the fault of the president, though not without Trump’s help in hanging it around his own neck to begin with.

But in the face of demands from their own activist base that they try to actually do something, they have sought—as Democratic centrists inevitably do—to negotiate against their own best positions before they even begin. The Green New Deal? Expensive, overly broad. Medicare-for-all? Likewise, not to mention impractical and disastrous for the beloved private health insurance industry. They did pass H.R. 1, an admirable bill to protect and expand voting rights, in the House, but only after months of quibbling over censorious anti-BDS bills and symbolic condemnations of their own ranks for trumped-up charges of anti-Semitism. The legislation is, of course, doomed in the Senate.

Since their decisive turn toward neoliberalism under Bill Clinton, Democrats have reinvented themselves as a party of technocrats, embracing a kind of proceduralism that stands in stark contrast to the red-meat ideology of the GOP. Ironically, it is the lunatic asylum of the Republican Party that has produced the most successful parliamentarian in the history of the United States, Mitch McConnell.

There is a curious void at the heart of Democratic politics. It isn’t necessary to believe in some absurd, magical notion of willpower to note that at its highest level, the party seems to lack an essential, motivating will. Instead, it views itself as something more akin to a professional membership organization that has a convention in a nice hotel every few years. They are not so much an emperor without clothes—that grand, ridiculous figure of the delusions of power—as they are clothes without an emperor—a lot of nice fabric blown away in a breeze and borne aloft on someone else’s hot air.

Supreme Court’s Death Penalty Ruling Leaves Legal Experts Aghast

Critics on Tuesday said the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in a case brought by a Missouri death row inmate fundamentally erodes protections against torture enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion for the court’s right-wing majority in the 5-4 decision, ruling that Russell Bucklew can be executed by lethal injection despite his medical condition, cavernous hemangioma. The disease, warn his legal team and medical experts, will cause Bucklew to choke for several minutes on his own blood before dying as the tumors growing in his throat and elsewhere in his body rupture.

“The Eighth Amendment does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death,” wrote Gorsuch.

The decision was denounced as “atrocious,” “blood-thirsty” and “barbaric” by death penalty abolitionists and other critics, with some saying the high court’s approval of Bucklew’s execution is tantamount to nullifying the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment—the law banning cruel and unusual punishment.

I really cannot exaggerate how radical and how significant the opinion Gorsuch handed down today is. It completely rewrites the Court’s understanding of a provision of the Bill of Rights — and it portends similarly revolutionary opinions in the future.https://t.co/0qpXBBizRg

— Ian Millhiser (@imillhiser) April 1, 2019

Gorsuch’s atrocious opinion in today’s death penalty case essentially convert’s Thomas’ extreme interpretation of the 8th Amendment—long considered a fringe view—into the law of the land. Just jaw-dropping. https://t.co/5Y9O5iS8Ty pic.twitter.com/iMIuoBEQhu

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) April 1, 2019

Gorsuch argued in his opinion that Bucklew did not make his objection known early enough to change the state’s planned course of action and accused the inmate of trying only to delay his execution.

The judge, who was confirmed in 2017 after being nominated by President Donald Trump, also suggested that Justice Clarence Thomas’s extreme view on the Eighth Amendment—that “cruel and unusual punishment” should be understood only as pain that is deliberately inflicted—is now the law of the land.

The Supreme Court’s 5–4 death penalty decision today is beyond appalling. It legalizes torture and effectively reverses 60 years of progressive precedent. It transforms a barbaric view of the 8th Amendment into the law of the land. It is horrific. https://t.co/qYTlgQHT8b @Slate

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) April 1, 2019

At the legal analysis blog Above the Law, Elie Mystal wrote that Gorsuch’s opinion will not only condemn Bucklew to a painful death instead of forcing the state to find a less painful method, as the inmate requested, but will weaken the Eighth Amendment’s protections for other death row inmates for generations to come.

“Unknown numbers of innocent people have been executed in this country since the death penalty was reinstated,” wrote Mystal. “Untold numbers of guilty people have known the spiteful vengeance some people mistake for justice. Through it all, the Eighth Amendment sits on the sidelines, a grand idea neutered by our society’s rage and cowardice, waiting for better men and women to live up to its noble promise.”

“But Neil Gorsuch is not a better man,” he continued. “Instead of just killing the murderer and being done with it, Gorsuch could not resist seeing the Bucklew case as an opportunity to experiment with justifications of the state’s right to inflict suffering that have long been discarded by decent people.”

In the minority’s dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor rebuked Gorsuch’s position that Bucklew’s execution must not be delayed any longer. Before retired Justice Anthony Kennedy was replaced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh last year, Kennedy joined Sotomayor and three other justices to issue a stay on Bucklew’s execution.

“There are higher values than ensuring that executions run on time,” Sotomayor wrote. “If a death sentence or the manner in which it is carried out violates the Constitution, that stain can never come out. Our jurisprudence must remain one of vigilance and care, not one of dismissiveness.”

In allowing Bucklew’s execution to proceed, instead of adhering to decades of interpretation of the Constitution, Ian Millhiser wrote at Think Progress, the majority opinion “literally tears out the heart of more than a half-century worth of Eighth Amendment precedents, and replaces it with a very different legal rule that, until recently, was rejected by all but the Supreme Court’s most hardline conservatives.”

“The majority’s willingness to cast aside one of the most firmly established assumptions of constitutional law so casually,” Millhiser added, “suggests that they will do it again. And again. And again.”

Pelosi Says Biden Should Stop Being Touchy-Feely With Women

WASHINGTON—As former Vice President Joe Biden’s camp scrambles to contain any political damage over his past behavior with women, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has some words of advice: Keep your distance.

“Join the straight-arm club,” Pelosi told a breakfast hour Washington event on Tuesday.

In other words, keep your handshakes at arms’ length and don’t be touchy-feely.

“Just pretend you have a cold and I have a cold,” Pelosi said.

Pelosi, D-Calif., told the event, which was sponsored by Politico, that Biden “has to understand that in the world we are in now people’s space is important to them and what’s important is how they receive it, not necessarily how you intended it.”

Her remarks came as Biden’s aides are striking a more aggressive tone as he considers running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and faces scrutiny over his past behavior toward women.

In a statement on Monday, Biden spokesman Bill Russo blasted “right wing trolls” from “the dark recesses of the internet” for conflating images of Biden embracing acquaintances, colleagues and friends in his official capacity during swearing-in ceremonies with uninvited touching.

Two women have said Biden touched them inappropriately in the past. Amy Lappos, a former aide to Democratic Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, said Monday that Biden touched her face with both hands and rubbed noses in 2009. Former Nevada politician Lucy Flores penned a magazine essay last week in which she wrote that Biden kissed her on the back of the head in 2014.

The developments underscored the challenge facing Biden should he decide to seek the White House. Following historic wins in the 2018 midterms, Democratic politics is dominated by energy from women. The allegations could leave the 76-year-old Biden, long known for his affectionate mannerisms, appearing out of touch with the party as the Democratic presidential primary begins.

Lappos told The Associated Press that she and other Himes aides were helping out at a fundraiser in a private home in Hartford, Connecticut, in October 2009 when Biden entered the kitchen to thank the group for pitching in.

“After he finished speaking, he stopped to talk to us about how important a congressional staff is, which I thought was awesome,” Lappos said.

She said she was stunned as Biden moved toward her.

“He wrapped both his hands around my face and pulled me in,” said Lappos, who is now 43. “I thought, ‘Oh, God, he’s going to kiss me.’ Instead, he rubbed noses with me.”

Biden said nothing, she said, then moved off.

She said the experience left her feeling “weird and uncomfortable” and was “absolutely disrespectful of my personal boundaries.”

The Hartford Courant first reported Lappos’ assertion.

Russo, Biden’s spokesman, didn’t directly respond to Lappos, instead referring to a Sunday statement in which Biden said he doesn’t believe he has acted inappropriately during his long public life. The former vice president said in that statement: “We have arrived at an important time when women feel they can and should relate their experiences, and men should pay attention. And I will.”

Biden hasn’t made a final decision on whether to run for the White House. But aides who weren’t authorized to discuss internal conversations and spoke on the condition of anonymity said there were no signs that his team was slowing its preparations for a campaign.

Asked on Monday by the AP about the accusations against Biden, Pelosi said, “I don’t think that this disqualifies him from running for president, not at all.”

Biden’s potential Democratic rivals haven’t rushed to back him up. Over the weekend, presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand came closest to calling out the former vice president. Warren, a Massachusetts senator, said Biden “needs to give an answer” about what occurred. Gillibrand, a New York senator, said, “If Vice President Biden becomes a candidate, this is a topic he’ll have to engage on further.”

Ultraviolet, a women’s advocacy group, tweeted: “Joe Biden cannot paint himself as a champion of women and then refuse to listen and learn from a woman who says his actions demeaned her. Good intentions don’t matter if the actions are inappropriate. Do better, Joe. And thank you @LucyFlores for coming forward.”

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Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa. AP Washington Bureau Chief Julie Pace contributed to this report.

Hamas Tightens Grip on Gaza, Fails to Break Israel Blockade

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip—Over the weekend, Gaza’s Hamas rulers marked a year of bloody, weekly protests that have failed to break the Israeli blockade. Rocket attacks brought a wave of Israeli airstrikes and unprecedented protests broke out against the Islamic militants’ increasingly unpopular rule.

And yet Hamas’ control over Gaza is tighter than ever.

The militants’ rule has been strengthened by an unlikely overlap of interests with Israel’s right-wing government. Neither wants to see an independent state established in all the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, as the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And Hamas’ refusal to give up power — the asking price of its West Bank-based Palestinian rival for reconciliation — aligns with Israel’s long-standing policy of maintaining a separation between the West Bank and Gaza.

So even though Israel and Hamas have fought three wars and dozens of skirmishes, and even though Hamas remains committed to Israel’s eventual destruction, the two are once again meeting with Egyptian mediators and working to keep things quiet.

Under an emerging arrangement, Hamas would halt rocket fire and keep border protests peaceful in exchange for Israel easing its border blockade and allowing $30 million a month in Qatari aid into the territory. On Sunday, Israel reopened Gaza crossings to limited traffic.

Egypt has brokered short-lived deals in the past, and it is not clear if the current arrangements will last beyond Israel’s April 9 election. In a close race, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come under fire for what his challengers say is a Gaza policy that exposes Israel to Hamas blackmail.

For Gaza residents, open-ended Hamas rule is a bleak prospect. Gaza’s 2 million people have endured rising poverty and unemployment, undrinkable ground water and frequent electricity outages since Israel and Egypt closed Gaza’s borders after Hamas seized power in 2007.

In recent weeks, hundreds dared to protest Hamas policies, such as new tax hikes, chanting “We want to live.” Many were jailed and beaten. Protester Amer Balousha, a 27-year-old unemployed law school graduate, said he and others were mistreated in Hamas detention but will not be deterred.

“If the situation does not improve, the protests will continue,” he said.

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HAMAS OVER ABBAS

Hamas has demonstrated that it prefers an understanding with Netanyahu over reconciling with its Palestinian rival, President Mahmoud Abbas.

A deal with Israel would help keep Hamas in power. By contrast, Abbas — who presides over autonomous enclaves in the Israeli-occupied West Bank — wants Hamas to hand control of Gaza to him, a demand the group has repeatedly rejected.

Hamas and Netanyahu both oppose Abbas’ goal of Palestinian statehood in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, lands Israel captured in 1967. Hamas seeks to establish an Islamic state in the area encompassing Israel and the war-won lands, while a majority in Netanyahu’s Cabinet and Likud Party reject a two-state solution along the 1967 lines.

Last month, Netanyahu was quoted as saying that those who oppose Palestinian statehood should back his policy of allowing Qatari aid into Gaza and maintaining the separation between the rival Palestinian governments.

“There is a great confluence of interests” between Israel and Hamas, said Tareq Baconi, an analyst at the International Crisis Group think tank. “Netanyahu prefers to deal with Hamas because clear dynamics have been established and Hamas will not seek a final resolution (of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) from Israel.”

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MANAGING THE CONFLICT

Israel and Hamas have fought three wars, most recently in 2014. In between, there have been repeated cross-border skirmishes and periods of calm brokered by Egypt, which has close security ties with Israel and controls part of the Gaza border.

Israel’s stated reason for the blockade is to contain Hamas and prevent it from rearming, while rights groups denounce the restrictions as collective punishment.

Last summer, amid weekly mass protests along the frontier in which scores of Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire and thousands wounded, Egypt started new cease-fire talks. Hamas hoped they would lead to an easing of the blockade.

Early on, Israel consented to Qatari cash shipments and Hamas pledged to halt rocket fire, but then the talks stalled. In March, with Israel’s election campaign heating up, Hamas sensed an opportunity to apply pressure on Netanyahu to resume negotiations, twice firing rockets into central Israel.

It worked. Two Hamas officials, speaking Sunday on condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of the renewed truce talks, relished in the group’s apparent leverage. But they also expressed concern any new deal could quickly unravel.

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A NEW GAZA POLICY?

Netanyahu’s main challenger, former army chief Benny Gantz, has said he would handle Gaza differently. His party’s platform pledges a “powerful response to any provocation and violence,” while improving the lives of Gaza civilians and driving a wedge between them and Hamas.

But the plan is short on specifics.

Gantz and two other ex-military chiefs in his team held top command roles in the last three wars with Hamas, exacting a heavy price for rocket fire but coming up against the limits of military action. A consensus has emerged in Israel that Hamas cannot be brought down by force, short of a bloody reoccupation of Gaza.

Yet any easing of the blockade, meant to bring relief to Gaza’s residents, would also prolong Hamas rule.

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ODD MAN OUT

Abbas has given up on reconciliation with Hamas after years of failed efforts. He has stepped up financial pressure on Gaza, including cutting in half salaries for tens of thousands of ex-civil servants who were replaced by Hamas in 2007 but remained on the Abbas government payroll.

Such cutbacks worsened Gaza’s economic deterioration. But instead of stoking a popular uprising against Hamas, anger turned toward Abbas.

Abbas is also suspicious of multi-million-dollar Gaza development projects proposed by the U.N. and Qatar, with U.S. and Israeli backing. He fears it’s a plot to turn the territory into a Palestinian mini-state and undercut Palestinian political claims to the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

Baconi, the analyst, said that Abbas’ policies are counterproductive, even if his concerns are understandable. “Putting more sanctions on Gaza or trying to break the Hamas government will further entrench the division,” he said.

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Laub reported from Ramallah, West Bank. Associated Press writer Mohammed Daraghmeh in Ramallah contributed reporting.