Chris Hedges's Blog, page 36

Clinton Alums Behind Disastrous Iowa Caucus App

A smartphone app was supposed to help Iowa’s 1,700 voting precincts provide smoother and quicker results for the first primary contest in the nation. Instead, in what The Los Angeles Times called “an unprecedented delay,” the Iowa Democratic Party is no closer to declaring a winner, and multiple reports suggest the much-hyped technology is to blame.

Unlike primaries in which voters cast a secret ballot, during caucuses participants “announce” their choices by physically gathering in a candidate-designated corner of a room, often in a gym or school cafeteria.

The app that was supposed to make this all easier was created by Shadow, a company affiliated with and funded by Acronym, a digital strategy nonprofit linked to multiple alumni of the Clinton and Obama campaigns. Per HuffPost:

Gerard Niemira, a veteran of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, is the head of Shadow. He previously served as chief technology officer and chief operating officer of Acronym, according to his LinkedIn page. In 2019, David Plouffe, one of the chief architects of President Barack Obama’s wins, joined the board of advisers for Acronym.

The New York Times reports that “[the app] was quickly put together in just the past two months, said the people [who were briefed on the app by the state party], some of whom asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly.”

Iowa Democratic Party chair Troy Price said in a statement Tuesday that the lack of results was due to a coding issue with the app, but defended the accuracy of the data.

“We determined with certainty that the underlying data collected via app was sound. While the app was recording data accurately, it was reporting out only partial data,” Price explained, adding, “we have determined that this was due to a coding issue in the reporting system. This issue was identified and fixed.”

It might be fixed, but as of Tuesday afternoon, the party had not released the results of the Iowa caucus.

David Jefferson, a board member of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan election integrity organization, told The New York Times Tuesday that the Democratic National Committee encouraged the Iowa party to use the app, after rejecting another proposal, in which caucus participants would phone in their votes.

Before the caucuses, party officials would not initially disclose the app’s creators, claiming that doing so would expose it to hacking and other security vulnerabilities. “We as the party have taken this very seriously, and we know how important it is for us to make sure that our process is secure and that we protect the integrity of the process,” Price told NPR in January.

In the same interview, “Price declined to answer directly whether any third party has investigated the app for vulnerabilities, as many cybersecurity experts recommend,” NPR correspondents Kate Payne and Miles Parks write.

Cybersecurity and election experts were concerned about this lack of oversight and transparency. “The cellphone ecosystem is pretty poisonous these days,” Douglas Jones, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa, told The Des Moines Register in January. He added, “The net result is if you’re running an app on a cellphone that has other apps installed, you really don’t know what permissions those other apps have and if they are in a position to be nefarious.”

Kiersten Todt, managing director of the Cyber Readiness Institute, echoed these concerns, telling the Register, “Mobile devices are so vulnerable because of all the access points on a phone.”

Since the Iowa debacle, Acronym has attempted to distance itself from Shadow. In a statement, Acronym spokesman Kyle Tharp writes, “We, like everyone else, are eagerly awaiting more information from the Iowa Democratic Party.”

U.N. Chief Warns ‘A Wind of Madness Is Sweeping the Globe’

UNITED NATIONS — U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned Tuesday that “a wind of madness is sweeping the globe,” pointing to escalating conflicts from Libya and Yemen to Syria and beyond.

At a wide-ranging news conference, he said, “All situations are different but there is a feeling of growing instability and hair-trigger tensions, which makes everything far more unpredictable and uncontrollable, with a heightened risk of miscalculation.”

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The U.N. chief also expressed great frustration that legally binding U.N. Security Council resolutions “are being disrespected before the ink is even dry.”

Guterres singled out Libya where he called the current offensives by the warring parties “a scandal” — coming soon after world powers and other key countries adopted a road map to peace in Berlin on Jan. 19 that called for respect for a U.N. arms embargo, an end to foreign interference in the fighting by rival governments and steps toward a cease-fire.

Libya has been in turmoil since 2011, when a civil war toppled longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi who was later killed.

A weak U.N.-recognized administration that holds the capital Tripoli and parts of the country’s west is backed by Turkey and to a lesser degree Qatar and Italy. On the other side is Gen. Khalifa Hifter, whose forces launched a surprise offensive to capture the capital last April from their base in the country’s east and are backed by the United Arab Emirates and Egypt as well as France and Russia.

Guterres said the 55-point Berlin agreement has been repeatedly violated by fighting and continuing arms deliveries. “We are seeing more and more civilians being targeted, … migrants in a desperate situation and all the commitments that were made apparently were made without a true intention of respecting them,” he said.

The secretary-general also expressed “enormous concern” at the escalation of attacks in Idlib, Syria’s last rebel-held province with a population of 3 million, and said the U.N. is “particularly worried” that the escalation now includes the Syrian and Tukish armies bombing each other. He again urged a cessation of hostilities “before the escalation comes to a situation that then becomes totally out of control.”

As for Yemen, Guterres said he was very encouraged recently to see Iranian-backed Houthi Shiite rebels stop attacking Saudi Arabia and the Saudis, who back the country’s internationally recognized government, limiting their military actions. But unfortunately, the last few days have seen “a new escalation,” he said, adding, “We are doing everything we can for this escalation to be reversed, and everything we can to create the conditions for a true political dialogue to be re-established.”

In Iraq, which has faced mass anti-government protests since Oct. 1 in which at least 500 demonstrators have been killed, the secretary-general called for the human rights of protesters to be protected. The protesters have decried rampant government corruption, poor services and lack of employment and are demanding the overthrow of the political establishment, electoral reforms and snap elections.

Guterres said militias have sometimes been “the worst perpetrators of violations of human rights” and attacks against protesters. It’s critical for the government to ensure that the army and policy regain the monopoly on the use of force to ensure the normal functioning of the state, he said.

He also said Iraq’s unity must be preserved and “external interferences” must be avoided because divisions are deep and the “risks of the country imploding are high… (which) would have devastating consequences for the region.”

On the decades-old conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, the secretary-general said the U.S. peace plan unveiled last week doesn’t comply with U.N. General Assembly and Security Council resolutions and international law. The resolutions support a two-state solution based on 1967 borders and call all Israeli settlements in the West Bank illegal.

The secretary-general stressed that global problems “feed on each other.”

“As economies falter, poverty remains entrenched. As future prospects look bleak, populist and ethnic nationalist narratives gain appeal,” he said. “As instability rises, investment dries up, and development cycles down. When armed conflicts persist, societies reach perilous tipping points. And as governance grows weak, terrorists get stronger, seizing on the vacuum.”

Guterres said that this year — as the United Nations marks its 75th anniversary — he will press “to break the vicious circles of suffering and conflict and push for a surge of diplomacy for peace.”

The First Democratic Primary Should Be Illinois

This piece originally appeared on Informed Comment.

The custom of Iowa having the first Democratic primary (or as they are pleased to call it, caucus) goes back to 1972, because of the complexity of the process. I have often spoken in Iowa and love the state, but it should not be the first Democratic primary state. I make this argument entirely without reference to the Great Caucus-App Fiasco of 2020; but the fiasco does not help Iowa’s case. Then there was this sort of thing:

MSNBC spoke to a man who was still on hold after 2 hrs. to report his results. Maddow asked about the results. Sanders was 1st with over 200 votes, Warren 2nd, Buttigieg 3rd. Sanders had more than double the votes Buttigieg had & they each got 2 delegates. Is this democracy?

—

Hong Kong Reports Virus Death as Workers Strike at Hospitals

BEIJING — Hong Kong hospitals cut services as thousands of medical workers went on strike for a second day Tuesday to demand the border with mainland China be shut completely, as a new virus caused its first death in the semi-autonomous territory and authorities feared it was spreading locally.

All but two of Hong Kong’s land and sea crossings with the mainland were closed at midnight after more than 2,000 hospital workers went on strike Monday. Hong Kong health authorities reported two additional patients without any known travel to the virus epicenter, bringing the number of locally transmitted cases up to four.

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The growing caseload “indicates significant risk of community transmission” and could portend a “large-scale” outbreak, said Chuang Shuk-kwan, head of the communicable disease branch at the Center for Health Protection.

More than 7,000 health personnel joined the strike Tuesday, according to the Hospital Authority Employees’ Alliance, the strike organizer.

Hong Kong’s Hospital Authority said it was cutting back services because “a large number of staff members are absent from duty” and “emergency services in public hospitals have been affected.”

Hong Kong was hit hard by SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, in 2002-03, an illness from the same virus family as the current outbreak. Trust in Chinese authorities has plummeted following months of anti-government protests in the Asian financial hub.

The territory’s beleaguered leader, Carrie Lam, criticized the strike and said the government was doing all it could to limit the flow of people across the border.

“Important services, critical operations have been affected,” including cancer treatment and care for newborns, Lam told reporters. “So I’m appealing to those who are taking part in this action that let’s put the interests of the patients and the entire public health system above all other things.”

The leader of the nearby gambling enclave of Macao asked the city’s casino bosses to suspend operations to prevent further infections after a worker at one of the resorts tested positive for the virus. Macao has recorded 10 cases in all.

China’s latest figures of 425 deaths and 20,438 confirmed cases were up sharply from the previous day. Outside mainland China, at least 180 cases have been confirmed, including two fatalities, one in Hong Kong and the other in the Philippines.

The patient who died in Hong Kong was a 39-year-old man who had traveled to Wuhan, the mainland city where the outbreak started. The Hospital Authority said Tuesday he had pre-existing health conditions but did not give details.

Dr. David Heymann, who led the World Health Organization’s response to the SARS outbreak, said it’s too early to tell when the new virus will peak, but that it appears to still be on the increase.

He said the spike in China’s caseload in recent days is partly attributable to the fact that officials expanded their search to include milder cases, not only people with pneumonia. He declined to predict whether the virus would ultimately cause a pandemic, or worldwide outbreak. WHO defines a pandemic as sustained transmission of a disease in at least two world regions.

Heymann said as the new virus starts to spread beyond China, scientists will gain a much better understanding of it.

“What we will see is the clearer natural history of the disease,” he said. “That will occur because all the contacts of people who have come into contact into these countries (where the virus has been exported) are being traced and watched very closely.”

Britain and France advised against non-essential travel to China and urged their citizens there to leave if they can. Air France has stopped all flights to and from China. France has six confirmed cases of the virus, and Britain has two.

Belgium reported its first case, one of nine of its citizens evacuated from Wuhan last weekend, and Iran joined the growing number of countries arranging such flights.

The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said a 42-year-old South Korean woman tested positive for the virus days after she returned from a trip to Thailand with chills and other symptoms. It is South Korea’s 16th case.

Thailand confirmed six more cases, raising its total to 25, the highest outside China. Two of the new cases were motorcycle taxi drivers who had driven for Chinese tourists. Earlier a Thai taxi driver was also diagnosed with the virus. The cases are concerning because they suggest the virus can spread more easily between people.

WHO officials reported slower progress than expected in equipping laboratories across Africa to test for the new virus. No confirmed cases have been reported on the continent, but WHO health security adviser Dr. Ambrose Talisuna said the risk is “very, very high.”

China has struggled to maintain supplies of face masks, along with protective suits and other items, as it seeks to enforce temperature checks at homes, offices, shops and restaurants, require masks be worn in public and keep more than 50 million people from leaving home in Wuhan and neighboring cities.

The European Union office in Beijing said member states have shipped 12 tons of protective equipment to China, with more on the way.

Germany’s Lufthansa became the latest international airline to suspend flights to China, and several countries are barring Chinese travelers or people who passed through China recently. Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways said they were cutting back flights to several Chinese cities from mid-February to late March.

In Wuhan, patients were being transferred to a new 1,000-bed hospital that was built in just 10 days, its prefabricated wards equipped with state-of-the-art medical equipment and ventilation systems. A 1,500-bed hospital also specially built is due to open soon.

Elsewhere in Wuhan, authorities were converting a gymnasium, exhibition hall and cultural center into hospitals with a total of 3,400 beds to treat patients with mild symptoms. Television video showed beds placed in tight rows in cavernous rooms without any barriers between them.

Authorities hope that will help relieve what is being described as an overwhelmed public health system in Wuhan and surrounding areas.

One man, Fang Bin, said he saw wards so crowded during a visit to the city’s No. 5 Hospital on Saturday that some patients were forced to sit on the ground.

“There are too many patients, it’s overcrowded,” Fang told The Associated Press. He said he was taken from his home and questioned by police after he posted a video of what he saw online.

Such scenes have revived memories of the SARS outbreak that began in China and spread worldwide. The new virus is believed to be much less virulent, however.

The fatality rate, at 2.1%, is basically stable, Jiao Yahui, a National Health Commission official, said at a news conference. More than 80% of the dead were over 60 years old, and more than 75% had an underlying disease, she said.

Japanese officials were conducting medical checks on more than 3,000 people on board a Japanese-operated cruise ship after a passenger tested positive after leaving the vessel while it was in Hong Kong.

___

Associated Press writers Alice Fung in Hong Kong, Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and Maria Cheng in London contributed to this report.

Bernie Sanders Can Silence His Critics in New Hampshire

While journalists pick through the ashes of the Iowa caucuses meltdown, thousands of progressive activists are moving forward to make election history in New Hampshire. In sharp contrast to the prattle of mainstream punditry, the movements behind Bernie Sanders are propelled by people who engage with politics as a collective struggle because the future of humanity and the planet is at stake. As a result, the Granite State’s primary election on Feb. 11 could be a political earthquake.

Whether or not the Democratic Party’s corporate backers truly understand what progressive populism is all about, they’re determined to crush its strongest electoral manifestation in our lifetimes — the Bernie 2020 campaign. And, since the bottom fell out of Iowa’s capacity for dramatic political impact, New Hampshire now looms larger than ever.

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Monday night’s collapse of the caucus vote-counting process in Iowa has amped up the spotlight on — and political consequences of — what will happen in the New Hampshire primary. A clear Sanders victory would make him the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Perpetuating passivity is a key undercurrent when corporate media report on election campaigns. Routinely, the coverage is rendered as entertainment, historic events to be individually consumed rather than collectively created. Progressive social movements have the opposite approach.

Propagandistic attacks on Sanders and his campaign are likely to reach new depths between now and the New Hampshire election. Effectively countering the distortions and smears will require concerted individual efforts on a large scale.

Full disclosure: As an active Bernie supporter, I’m part of an expanding team set to do independent on-the-ground outreach in New Hampshire until Election Day. (Information available: nh@rootsaction.org.)

Whatever its budget or priorities, no presidential campaign can possibly maintain a presence in every neighborhood to do what ideally would be done. The success of the Sanders campaign depends on supporters taking the initiative rather than waiting for a national campaign to fill the gaps.

I often think about how Bernie used the opportunity to make a closing statement at a Democratic presidential debate last June. Instead of tooting his own horn and touting his leadership, he got to the core of terrible realities that won’t change unless people organize effectively from the grassroots.

After reeling off a few lowlights of the status quo — “for the last 45 years wages have been stagnant for the middle class. . . we have the highest rate of childhood poverty. . . 45 million people still have student debt” — he asked: “How can three people own more wealth than the bottom half of America?” Then he closed by saying: “And here is the answer. Nothing will change unless we have the guts to take on Wall Street, the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the military industrial complex, and the fossil fuel industry. If we don’t have the guts to take them on, we will continue to have plans, we will continue to have talk, and rich will get richer and everybody else will be struggling.”

Whether they agree with Bernie or not, people widely understand that he absolutely means what he says. And that helps to explain why, during the next seven days, in national media and across New Hampshire, corporate forces will be in overdrive to prevent a Bernie Sanders victory in the New Hampshire primary.

It’s not mere happenstance that the sound system at a Bernie rally often blasts out the song “Power to the People” as he takes the stage. Only the power of people, determined and mobilized, can overcome the forces arrayed against the Bernie Sanders campaign and the movements supporting him at this pivotal historic moment.

Tech Problem With Mobile App Causes Iowa Caucus Chaos

DES MOINES, Iowa — A new mobile app was supposed to help Democratic officials quickly gather information from some 1,700 caucus sites throughout Iowa. Instead, a “coding issue” within the app is being blamed for delays that left the results unknown the morning after the first-in-the nation presidential nominating contest.

Glitches with a new mobile app Monday caused confusion, and some caucus organizers were forced to call in results for the state party to record manually, introducing delays and the possibility of human error. Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price said the delays were not the result of a breach and party systems were secure.

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“While the app was recording data accurately, it was reporting out only partial data. We have determined that this was due to a coding issue in the reporting system,” Price said in a statement Tuesday, adding the issue has since been fixed. “The application’s reporting issue did not impact the ability of precinct chairs to report data accurately.

The party said it expects to release unofficial results later Tuesday after manually verifying its data against paper backups. Unlike the November election and state primaries administered by state and local election officials, the Iowa caucus was administered by the Iowa Democratic Party. Nevada Democrats also have plans to use a mobile reporting app for their caucuses set for Feb. 22.

Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf told Fox News on Tuesday that there was no indication of “any malicious cyberactivity.” He added that Iowa Democrats declined his department’s offer to test the reporting app. That’s not unusual, as outside security firms do similar testing. The state party had said previously they had worked closely with security experts to test the app.

Des Moines County Democratic Chair Tom Courtney said he heard that in precincts across his county, including his own, the mobile app was “a mess.” When precinct leaders called Democratic Party headquarters, “they weren’t answering the phones,” Courtney said.

The problems were an embarrassment for a state that has long sought to protect its prized status as the first contest in presidential primaries and the nation’s first vetter of candidates. The delay was certain to become fodder for critics who argued that the caucuses — party meetings that can be chaotic, crowded and messy — are antiquated and exclusionary.

The Iowa Democratic Party pressed forward with the new reporting system amid warnings about the possibility of hacking and glitches. Party officials said they took numerous security precautions and maintained that any errors would be easily correctable because of backups and a paper trail.

But organizers running precincts in Iowa didn’t get to test the app beforehand. Iowa party officials had said they would not be sending the new mobile app to precinct chairs for downloading until just before the caucuses to narrow the window for any interference.

Some precinct chairs said they had trouble downloading or logging into the app and didn’t use it.

The apps were barely working Monday night, according to a person involved in processing the data who requested anonymity to discuss the party’s internal system. That forced party aides to record results from the precincts via phone and enter them manually into a database. Officials were left using photos of results to validate results and ensure accuracy.

Jonathan Green, who chaired a precinct in Lone Tree, said that when he tried to put the results into the reporting app, he kept getting a confusing error message: “Unknown protocol. The address specifies a protocol (e.g., “wxyz:??”.) the browser does not recognize, so the browser cannot properly connect to the site.”

He said he ultimately gave up and tried to call in the results to the party. Like others, he was put on hold for an extended period of time. In the end, it took hours to report results from his small site, he said.

The slowdown was exacerbated by the fact that the party was for the first time attempting to report three different sets of data — an initial headcount of each candidates’ support, a count after supporters had realigned, and the state delegate winners.

“We found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results,” the party said in a statement. “This is simply a reporting issue, the app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion. The underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report the results.”

President Donald Trump’s campaign quickly seized on the issue to sow doubt about the validity of the results.

“Quality control = rigged?” Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted Monday evening, adding a emoji with furrowed brows.

Richard L. Hasen, an election expert and professor at University of California, Irvine School of Law, cautioned against jumping to conclusions about the integrity of the election.

“Most of the time when there is a problem with an election it turns out to be the result of administrative incompetence rather than someone cheating or some outside interference,” Hasen said.

Deploying new technology this close to an election is always a risky proposition, said Lawrence Norden, an elections expert with The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. Norden said it’s akin to a major retailer using new cash registers for the first time on Black Friday.

“To roll out a new technology without really testing it and making it available as early as possible and giving folks the opportunity to challenge it and work out all the bugs is a high-stakes decision which I think is proving to be problematic today,” Norden said.

Norden said party officials were wise to slow down the reporting to ensure accurate results, given concerns of another round of election interference by Russia or other hostile governments seeking to undermine U.S. democracy.

“People aren’t going to remember in two weeks that these results were late, but you can bet if the results changed dramatically they would,” Norden said. “Those of us who work in the election space support accuracy over speed.”

Ruth Thompson, who chaired a precinct at Lincoln High School in Des Moines, said she did not use the app to report results because organizers had problems trying to download and test it.

“We just came to a consensus that nobody was happy with the app,” she said. She also did not try to report her site’s results over the phone after hearing reports of long delays in answering the line at state headquarters, she said.

Instead, veteran caucusgoers at her site used calculators to compute the delegate allocation and then texted a photo of the results to Polk County Democratic Party officials, who drove it to state party headquarters.

Thompson said the delays in results were unfortunate because the process went “remarkably smoothly” in other ways.

__

Associated Press writers David Pitt and Scott McFetridge in Des Moines and Ryan J. Foley in Iowa City contributed to this report.

America Is Rigged Against the Poor Even Before Birth

The plight of impoverished children anywhere should evoke sympathy, exemplifying as it does the suffering of the innocent and defenseless. Poverty among children in a wealthy country like the United States, however, should summon shame and outrage as well. Unlike poor countries (sometimes run by leaders more interested in lining their pockets than anything else), what excuse does the United States have for its striking levels of child poverty? After all, it has the world’s 10th highest per capita income at $62,795 and an unrivalled gross domestic product (GDP) of $21.3 trillion. Despite that, in 2020, an estimated 11.9 million American kids — 16.2% of the total — live below the official poverty line, which is a paltry $25,701 for a family of four with two kids. Put another way, according to the Children’s Defense Fund, kids now constitute one-third of the 38.1 million Americans classified as poor and 70% of them have at least one working parent — so poverty can’t be chalked up to parental indolence.

Yes, the proportion of kids living below the poverty line has zigzagged down from 22% when the country was being ravaged by the Great Recession of 2008-2009 and was even higher in prior decades, but no one should crack open the champagne bottles just yet. The relevant standard ought to be how the United States compares to other wealthy countries. The answer: badly. It has the 11th highest child poverty rate of the 42 industrialized countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Winnow that list down to European Union states and Canada, omitting low and middle-income countries, and our child poverty rate ranks above only Spain’s. Use the poverty threshold of the OECD — 50% of a country’s median income ($63,178 for the United States) — and the American child poverty rate leaps to 20%.

The United States certainly doesn’t lack the means to drive child poverty down or perhaps even eliminate it. Many countries on that shorter OECD list have lower per-capita incomes and substantially smaller GDPs yet (as a UNICEF report makes clear) have done far better by their kids. Our high child-poverty rate stems from politics, not economics — government policies that, since the 1980s, have reduced public investment as a proportion of GDP in infrastructure, public education, and poverty reduction.  These were, of course, the same years when a belief that “big government” was an obstacle to advancement took ever-deeper hold, especially in the Republican Party.  Today, Washington allocates only 9% of its federal budget to children, poor or not. That compares to a third for Americans over 65, up from 22% in 1971. If you want a single fact that sums up where we are now, inflation-adjusted per-capita spending on kids living in the poorest families has barely budged compared to 30 years ago whereas the corresponding figure for the elderly has doubled.

The conservative response to all this remains predictable: you can’t solve complex social problems like child poverty by throwing money at them. Besides, government antipoverty programs only foster dependence and create bloated bureaucracies without solving the problem. It matters little that the actual successes of American social programs prove this claim to be flat-out false. Before getting to that, however, let’s take a snapshot of child poverty in America.

Sizing Up the Problem

Defining poverty may sound straightforward, but it’s not. The government’s annual Official Poverty Measure (OPM), developed in the 1960s, establishes poverty lines by taking into account family size, multiplying the 1963 cost for a minimum food budget by three while factoring in changes in the Consumer Price Index, and comparing the result to family income. In 2018, a family with a single adult and one child was considered poor with an income below $17,308 ($20,2012 for two adults and one child, $25,465 for two adults and two children, and so on). According to the OPM, 11.8% of all Americans were poor that year.

By contrast, the Supplementary Poverty Measure (SPM), published yearly since 2011, builds on the OPM but provides a more nuanced calculus. It counts the post-tax income of families, but also cash flows from the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC), both of which help low-income households. It adds in government-provided assistance through, say, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), Medicaid, subsidies for housing and utilities, and unemployment and disability insurance. However, it deducts costs like child care, child-support payments, and out-of-pocket medical expenses. According to the SPM, the 2018 national poverty rate was 12.8%.

Of course, neither of these poverty calculations can tell us how children are actually faring. Put simply, they’re faring worse. In 2018, 16.2% of Americans under 18 lived in families with incomes below the SPM line. And that’s not the worst of it. A 2019 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine study commissioned by Congress found that 9% of poor children belong to families in “deep poverty” (incomes that are less than 50% of the SPM). But 36% of all American children live in poor or “near poor” families, those with incomes within 150% of the poverty line.

Child poverty also varies by race — a lot. The rate for black children is 17.8%; for Hispanic kids, 21.7%; for their white counterparts, 7.9%. Worse, more than half of all black and Hispanic kids live in “near poor” families compared to less than a quarter of white children. Combine age and race and you’ll see another difference, especially for children under five, a population with an overall 2017 poverty rate of 19.2%.  Break those under-fives down by race, however, and here’s what you find: white kids at 15.9%, Hispanic kids at an eye-opening 25.8%, and their black peers at a staggering 32.9%.

Location matters, too. The child poverty rate shifts by state and the differences are stark. North Dakota and Utah are at 9%, for instance, while New Mexico and Mississippi are at 27% and 28%. Nineteen states have rates of 20% or more. Check out a color-coded map of geographic variations in child poverty and you’ll see that rates in the South, Southwest, and parts of the Midwest are above the national average, while rural areas tend to have higher proportions of poor families than cities. According to the Department of Agriculture, in rural America, 22% of all children and 26% of those under five were poor in 2017.

Why Child Poverty Matters

Imagine, for a moment, this scenario: a 200-meter footrace in which the starting blocks of some competitors are placed 75 meters behind the others. Barring an Olympic-caliber runner, those who started way in front will naturally win. Now, think of that as an analogy for the predicament that American kids born in poverty face through no fault of their own. They may be smart and diligent, their parents may do their best to care for them, but they begin life with a huge handicap.

As a start, the nutrition of poor children will generally be inferior to that of other kids. No surprise there, but here’s what’s not common knowledge: a childhood nutritional deficit matters for years afterwards, possibly for life. Scientific research shows that, by age three, the quality of childrens’ diets is already shaping the development of critical parts of young brains like the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in ways that matter. That’s worth keeping in mind because four million American kids under age six were poor in 2018, as were close to half of those in families headed by single women.

Indeed, the process starts even earlier. Poor mothers may themselves have nutritional deficiencies that increase their risk of having babies with low birthweights.  That, in turn, can have long-term effects on children’s health, what level of education they reach, and their future incomes since the quality of nutrition affects brain size, concentration, and cognitive capacity. It also increases the chances of having learning disabilities and experiencing mental health problems.

Poor children are likely to be less healthy in other ways as well, for reasons that range from having a greater susceptibility to asthma to higher concentrations of lead in their blood. Moreover, poor families find it harder to get good health care. And add one more thing: in our zip-code-influenced public-school system, such children are likely to attend schools with far fewer resources than those in more affluent neighborhoods.

Our national opioid problem also affects the well-being of children in a striking fashion. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), between 2008 and 2012, a third of women in their childbearing years filled opioid-based medication prescriptions in pharmacies and an estimated 14%-22% of them were pregnant. The result: an alarming increase in the number of babies exposed to opioids in utero and experiencing withdrawal symptoms at birth, which is also known as neonatal abstinence syndrome, or NAS, in medical lingo. Its effects, a Penn State study found, include future increased sensitivity to pain and susceptibility to fevers and seizures. Between 2000 and 2014, the incidence of NAS increased by a multiple of four. In 2014, 34,000 babies were born with NAS, which, as a CDC report put it, “is equivalent to one baby suffering from opioid withdrawal born approximately every 15 minutes.” (Given the ongoing opioid crisis, it’s unlikely that things have improved in recent years.)

And the complications attributable to NAS don’t stop with birth. Though the research remains at an early stage — the opioid crisis only began in the early 1990s — it suggests that the ill effects of NAS extend well beyond infancy and include impaired cognitive and motor skills, respiratory ailments, learning disabilities, difficulty maintaining intellectual focus, and behavioral traits that make productive interaction with others harder.

At this point, you won’t be surprised to learn that NAS and child poverty are connected. Prescription opioid use rates are much higher for women on Medicaid, who are more likely to be poor than those with private insurance. Moreover, the abuse of, and overdose deaths from, opioids (whether obtained through prescriptions or illegally) have been far more widespread among the poor.

Combine all of this and here’s the picture: from the months before birth on, poverty diminishes opportunity, capacity, and agency and its consequences reach into adulthood. While that rigged footrace of mine was imaginary, child poverty certainly does ensure a future-rigged society. The good news (though not in Donald Trump’s America): the race to a half-decent life (or better) doesn’t have to be rigged.

It Needn’t Be this Way (But Will Be as Long as Trump Is President)

Can children born into poverty defy the odds, realize their potential, and lead fulfilling lives? Conservatives will point to stories of people who cleared all the obstacles created by child poverty as proof that the real solution is hard work. But let’s be clear: poor children shouldn’t have to find themselves on a tilted playing field from the first moments of their lives. Individual success stories aside, Americans raised in poor families do markedly less well compared to those from middle class or affluent homes — and it doesn’t matter whether you choose college attendance, employment rates, or future household income as your measure. And the longer they live in poverty the worse the odds that they’ll escape it in adulthood; for one thing, they’re far less likely to finish high school or attend college than their more fortunate peers.

Conversely, as Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues have shown, kids’ life prospects improve when parents with low incomes are given the financial wherewithal to move to neighborhoods with higher social-mobility rates (thanks to better schools and services, including health care). As in that imaginary footrace, the starting point matters. But here the news is grim. The Social Progress Index places the United States 75th out of 149 countries in “access to quality education” and 70th in “access to quality health care” and poor kids are, of course, at a particular disadvantage.

Yet childhood circumstances can be (and have been) changed — and the sorts of government programs that conservatives love to savage have helped enormously in that process. Child poverty plunged from 28% in 1967 to 15.6% in 2016 in significant part due to programs like Medicaid and the Food Stamp Act started in the 1960s as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Such programs helped poor families pay for housing, food, child care, and medical expenses, as did later tax legislation like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit. Our own history and that of other wealthy countries show that child poverty is anything but an unalterable reality. The record also shows that changing it requires mobilizing funds of the sort now being wasted on ventures like America’s multitrillion-dollar forever wars.

Certainly, an increase in jobs and earnings can reduce child poverty. Wall Street Journal odes to Donald Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation policies highlight the present 3.5% unemployment rate (the lowest in 60 years), a surge in new jobs, and wage growth at all levels, notably for workers with low incomes who lack college degrees. This storyline, however, omits important realities. Programs that reduce child poverty help even in years when poor or near-poor parents gain and, of course, are critical in bad times, since sooner or later booming job markets also bust. Furthermore, the magic that Trump fans tout occurred at a moment when many state and city governments were mandating increases in the minimum wage. Employers who hired, especially in heavily populated states like California, New York, Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan, had to pay more.

As for cutting child poverty, it hasn’t exactly been a presidential priority in the Trump years — not like the drive to pass a $1.5 trillion corporate and individual income tax cut whose gains flowed mainly to the richest Americans, while inflating the budget deficit to $1 trillion in 2019, according to the Treasury Department. Then there’s that “impenetrable, powerful, beautiful wall.” Its estimated price ranges from $21 billion to $70 billion, excluding maintenance. And don’t forget the proposed extra $33 billion in military spending for this fiscal year alone, part of President Trump’s plan to boost such spending by $683 billion over the next decade.

As for poor kids and their parents, the president and congressional Republicans are beginning to slash an array of programs ranging from the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program to Medicaid — $1.2 trillion worth over the next 10 years — that have long helped struggling families and children in particular get by. The Trump administration has, for good measure, rewritten the eligibility rules for such programs in order to lower the number of people who qualify.

The supposed goal: to cut costs by reducing dependence on government. (Never mind the subsidies and tax loopholes Trump’s crew has created for corporations and the super wealthy, which add up to many billions of dollars in spending and lost revenue.) These supposedly work-ethic-driven austerity policies batter working families with young kids that, for example, desperately need childcare, which can take a big bite out of paychecks: 10% or more for all households with kids, but half in the case of poor families.  Add to that the cost of unsubsidized housing. Median monthly rent increased by nearly a third between 2001 and 2015. Put another way, rents consume more than half the income of the bottom 20% of Americans, according to the Federal Reserve. The advent of Trump has also made the struggle of low-income families with healthcare bills even harder. The number of kids without health insurance jumped by 425,000 between 2017 and 2018 when, according to the Census Bureau, 4.3 million children lacked coverage.

Even before Donald Trump’s election, only one-sixth of eligible families with kids received assistance for childcare and a paltry one-fifth got housing subsidies. Yet his administration arrived prepared to put programs that helped some of them pay for housing and childcare on the chopping block. No point in such families looking to him for a hand in the future. He won’t be building any Trump Towers for them.

Whatever “Make America Great Again” may mean, it certainly doesn’t involve helping America’s poor kids. As long as Donald Trump oversees their race into life, they’ll find themselves ever farther from the starting line.

A Sordid New Genre of Stories Emerges in Corporate Media

Big news, everyone! Billionaires don’t like socialism.

In response to a rising progressive tide in the United States, a new genre of stories has emerged in corporate media: rich guys warning against taxing them, or really changing anything about the system at all. Just as the press are keen for you to know that Medicare for All is a very bad idea (FAIR.org, 4/29/19), they are equally anxious to make sure that the voices of beleaguered, unheard plutocrats are given as much of a boost as possible.

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Is the opinion of the CEO of the world’s fifth-largest oil company that Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “have a completely unrealistic idea of the complexity of the global energy system” (CNBC, 1/22/20) really “breaking news”?

A case in point is CNBC’s recent article (1/22/20) headlined, “BP’s CEO Chides AOC and Bernie Sanders for Their ‘Completely Unrealistic’ Green New Deal Ideas.” Reporter Jessica Bursztynsky begins:

Outgoing BP chief Bob Dudley on Wednesday criticized sweeping climate proposals from Sen. Bernie Sanders, a top-tier 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a champion of the far left. “They have a completely unrealistic idea of the complexity of the global energy system,” Dudley told CNBC’s Squawk Box from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

To sum up the story, a CNBC journalist went to Davos (where the cheapest hotel room last year was $1,000 per night) to get ideas about socialism and the environment from the CEO of BP, one of the 100 corporations responsible for over 70% of the world’s emissions. At no point did Bursztynsky warn the audience or even allude to the enormous conflict of interest the oil multi-millionaire might have in discussing solutions to the climate crisis. Instead, his views are presented as a straight and important news story.

In contrast, the first sentence primes the reader against AOC and Sanders by presenting them as “far left” – in other words, as some sort of out-there crazies, even though their ideas are supported by the majority of the American people (FAIR.org, 1/23/19). It allows Dudley to claim that there is a distinct “lack of realism” from his critics (emphasis added):

“There’s just a lot of people, very well-meaning people, who want to believe that there is a simple solution,” Dudley said at the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition & Conference.

Jeez, I wonder what oil CEOs at an energy forum in a Mideastern monarchy think about renewable energy? Good thing CNBC is on the case.

If you don’t understand what socialism is, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase will fill you in (CNBC, 1/22/20).

Not content with hearing only one CEO’s opinion, on the same day CNBC (1/22/20) published another Davos interview, called “JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon Takes on Socialism, Says It Will Lead to an ‘Eroding Society,’” where Dimon told readers that “socialism has failed everywhere it’s been tried” and claimed that millennials don’t understand what it really is. A billionaire investment banker doesn’t like socialism!? Stop the presses!

CNBC is a particularly frequent culprit of publishing non-news such as this. Last year it ran an article (6/20/19) titled “Bernie Sanders ‘Doesn’t Have a Clue,’” featuring supposed wisdom from multibillionaire Goldman Sachs alum Leon Cooperman, who stated bluntly: “We have the best economy in the world. Capitalism works,” and that Sanders’ “far-left” agenda is “counterproductive.” “I’m not in favor of raising taxes. Taxes are high enough,” Cooperman predictably said.

Neither article mentioned JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs’ role in the 2008 global financial crash, the up to $29 trillion bailout their industry received, and how these corporations need capitalism to continue regardless of whether it “works” or not. Instead, these tycoons’ bland statements are treated as important facts from experts. Media present their position as CEOs of oligarchic corporations as making their opinions inherently noteworthy. That might be true on some issues, but on questions like this, their invested positions actually make them less credible.

Yet CNBC (4/16/19) not only allowed United Healthcare CEO David Wichmann to claim that Medicare for All would “destabilize the nation’s health system,” leading to a crisis and a “severe impact on the economy,” without a word of scrutiny, it also bolstered his credibility, telling readers that he “rarely discusses politics,” implying that this was a highly reliable expert opinion, and certainly not scaremongering from a giant for-profit organization making billions annually off the sick.

It is already debatable if plutocrats’ entirely predictable pronouncements on economic issues are even news at all, given their obvious incentives. And there is also the question as to whether CNBC should be using its considerable resources to give a megaphone to some of the most powerful people in the world, letting them define and set the agenda of public debate. But to constantly feature these people without even mentioning the massive and glaring personal and economic conflict of interests they hold in pushing these ideas is tantamount to journalistic malpractice.

“Big companies are an easy target for candidates looking for convenient villains for the economic distress felt by many of our citizens,” declared Verizon‘s CEO in a blog post that was reported as news by many media outlets owned by big companies (CBS News, 4/13/16).

This practice is hardly limited to just CNBC. For example, a number of prominent outlets, including NBC News (4/13/16), the Wall Street Journal (4/13/16), Business Insider (4/13/16), USA Today (4/14/16), CBS News (4/13/16),  Politico (4/13/16) and Fortune (4/13/16), covered a Verizon CEO’s LinkedIn blog post (4/13/16) that claimed Sanders held “uninformed” and “contemptible” views on the economy. “But when rhetoric becomes disconnected from reality, we’ve crossed a dangerous line,” Verizon’s Lowell McAdam wrote, insinuating that the rich were “targets” in potential danger.

In many of the write-ups, Sanders came across as a dishonest rabble-rouser readying the pitchforks, rather than a popular political leader critiquing the greed and power of the extremely wealthy. Is a LinkedIn blog post really newsworthy enough to garner so many national headlines? Evidently, if it says the right thing, then the answer is “yes.”

The fight for a $15 minimum wage has also, predictably, been attacked by restaurant owners who are among the stingiest when it comes to wages. Fox Business (6/6/19) repeated former CKE Restaurants CEO Andy Puzder’s claims that “Bernie Sanders’ proposals will kill economic growth” and lead to a reduction in wages for those he claims to represent. Surely it would have been more honest to at least mention that the ex-boss of the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s restaurant franchises might have a conflict of interest on the matter?

And surely when Ken Langone described Sanders as “the Antichrist”—a particularly ugly epithet to hurl at a Jewish politician—the Wall Street Journal (5/10/18) should have at least pointed out that the multibillionaire founder of Home Depot and major Republican donor might be a biased commentator. And it certainly was not obliged to present a man whose net worth has increased by nearly 60% in five years as some kind of ultra-philanthropist, a modern-day Francis of Assisi.

Bank of America’s CEO spells out what used to be an unspoken rule in US politics and media (Yahoo! Finance, 1/24/20).

Yahoo! Finance (1/24/20) offered its own entry in the musings-from-Davos genre, interviewing Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, who told editor-in-chief Andy Serwer: “One of the things we’re trying to get everybody to understand, is you can be capitalist and make progress for society. But don’t challenge capitalism.” Yahoo!’s write-up did mention that Moynihan had been paid $26.5 million in 2018, and that he “has faced scrutiny over politicized issues like executive pay.”

By reporting what multimillionaire and billionaire CEOs say about efforts to change a system they so clearly have a huge stake in staying the same, without highlighting, or even mentioning, their conflict of interest, corporate media are doing their audiences a disservice—effectively propagandizing them into supporting a model their owners and advertisers benefit from. If media are to perform their role as the fourth estate properly, they should really be scrutinizing power, not uncritically amplifying it.

Alexander Hamilton Would Have Backed Trump’s Impeachment

Unless you’ve been in a deep coma or a lengthy, drug-induced stupor, you know that the House of Representatives has failed in its bid to remove President Trump from office on two articles of impeachment. The articles charged Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress arising from his scheme to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up dirt on Joe Biden in exchange for U.S. military aid.

You also know that the Republican-controlled Senate voted for the first time in the history of U.S. impeachments not to call a single witness to testify at Trump’s Senate trial.

One other thing you probably know is that, next to Trump and his former national security adviser, John Bolton, the name invoked most frequently during the Senate impeachment trial by both the Democratic managers and Trump’s defense team was Alexander Hamilton.

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The frequent references to Hamilton were not surprising. Popularized as the title character in perhaps the greatest Broadway musical of all time, Hamilton in life was one of the primary framers of the Constitution. And among the framers, he was the most prolific writer on the topic of impeachment.

The invocation of Hamilton’s views on impeachment by both sides in Trump’s trial wasn’t just predictable; it was also entirely proper. Because the Constitution vests the House with the sole power of impeachment and the Senate with the sole power to try cases of impeachment, there is no “common law” of impeachment developed through court decisions. As the Supreme Court held in the 1993 case of Walter Nixon v. United States, in which a federal district court judge had been impeached for perjury, the issue of impeachment is a political question beyond the jurisdiction of the courts.

As a result, both sides in Trump’s trial resorted to “originalism” to explain the meaning that impeachment had for Hamilton and the Founding Fathers and, by extension, how it should be applied today.

First and foremost, Democrats and Republicans invoked Hamilton on the pivotal question of what constitutes an impeachable offense. The House managers, citing the lawyer, politician and economist, argued that impeachable offenses include abuses of power and are not limited to explicitly indictable crimes. Trump’s legal team argued the opposite. Trump’s lawyers also argued that Hamilton opposed what Trump’s team termed “purely partisan impeachments.”

As with many trials, one side got it right and one got it wrong. I won’t leave you guessing: The president’s legal team — including former Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, who calls himself a liberal Democrat — invoked a Hamilton who never existed. The Democratic managers hewed largely to historical reality. The actual, real-life Hamilton was deeply concerned with abuse of power and tyrants in the mold of Trump.

As Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow explained in a Washington Post article published in October, the future first Treasury secretary warned as early as the Revolutionary War about the dangers of demagogues driven by ambition, greed and vanity. In a 1778 letter to the New York Journal attacking Samuel Chase, a delegate to the Continental Congress from Maryland who would later become a Supreme Court justice and be acquitted in an impeachment trial in 1805, Hamilton wrote: “When avarice takes the lead in a State, it is commonly the forerunner of its fall.”

At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, he was a key participant in the debates about whether the new federal charter should include a provision authorizing the impeachment and removal of the president. Hamilton is widely credited with helping to break an impasse on the subject between proponents of the “Virginia Plan,” advocating for impeachment by the federal judiciary, and a “New Jersey Plan” that called for impeachment upon petition by a majority of state governors.

Hamilton urged instead that the convention adopt a plan modeled after British parliamentary practice, which had been in place for over 400 years at the time of the convention. In the British system (which has since become dormant), a lower legislative body (the House of Commons) promulgated articles of impeachment against government ministers in the fashion of a grand jury before an upper chamber (the House of Lords) adjudicated the articles in the fashion of a trial jury.

As initially introduced on June 18, 1787, Hamilton’s plan required “all officers of the United States to be liable to impeachment for mal-and corrupt conduct; and upon conviction to be removed from office.” Throughout the summer of that year, the framers refined the concept of impeachable offenses, finally settling the issue on Sept. 12, when they agreed on the now-famous clause inscribed in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

A fierce proponent of the new federal government, Hamilton took his defense of the Constitution and the impeachment power to the public in a series of newspaper essays — the 18th-century equivalent of today’s op-eds — that have come to be known as the Federalist Papers. Totaling 85 essays, Hamilton was the author of 51, with John Jay of New York and James Madison of Virginia penning the remainder.

Although Hamilton believed in a strong executive, he returned to the subject of tyranny raised in his 1778 letter in Federalist No. 1, urging his readers to be on guard against politicians of “dangerous ambition.” He also contended that “of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”

Hamilton addressed the issue of impeachable offenses directly in Federalist No. 65. In the second paragraph of the essay, he made it abundantly clear that impeachment would encompass noncriminal conduct amounting to abuse of power:

“A well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments is an object not more to be desired than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective. The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

Any doubt that Hamilton had in mind regarding behavior that, strictly speaking, could be noncriminal was laid to rest in other sections of No. 65, in which he wrote that an impeachable offense “can never be tied down by such strict rules, either in the delineation of the offense by the prosecutors, or in the construction of it by the judges, as in common cases serve to limit the discretion of courts.”

Hamilton also stressed that impeachable offenses were not the same as ordinary crimes in Federalist No. 69, in which he wrote: “The President of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried, and, upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.”

Both the great weight of legal scholarship and subsequent impeachment practice have borne out his interpretation of high crimes and misdemeanors.

Including Trump, only 20 federal officials have been impeached in our history (President Nixon resigned before the full House voted on three articles of impeachment). According to the House’s procedural practice manual, “Less than one-third of all the articles the House has adopted have explicitly charged the violation of a criminal statute or used the word ‘criminal’ or ‘crime’ to describe the conduct alleged.”

Consistent with Hamilton, and contrary to the arguments of Trump’s counsel, the manual notes that whether dealing with presidents, judges or Cabinet secretaries, American impeachments “have commonly involved charges of misconduct incompatible with the official position of the office holder. This conduct falls into three broad categories: (1) abusing or exceeding the lawful powers of the office; (2) behaving officially or personally in a manner grossly incompatible with the office; and (3) using the power of the office for an improper purpose or for personal gain.”

Hamilton can’t be invoked for the proposition that impeachments must originate on a bipartisan basis in the House, either, as he recognized in Federalist No. 65 that they would invariably be partisan, writing: “The prosecution of them, for this reason, will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused.”

Far from banning partisan impeachments, which he would have considered incompatible with the political character of the legal procedure and at odds with basic human nature, Hamilton argued in both Federalist No. 65 and No. 66 that the Senate, rather than the Supreme Court, would be best suited to try such cases. Only the Senate, in Hamilton’s view, commanded the respect required for such awesome undertakings. As he asked in No. 65:

“Where else than in the Senate could have been found a tribunal sufficiently dignified, or sufficiently independent? What other body would be likely to feel CONFIDENCE ENOUGH IN ITS OWN SITUATION, to preserve, unawed and uninfluenced, the necessary impartiality between an INDIVIDUAL accused, and the REPRESENTATIVES OF THE PEOPLE, HIS ACCUSERS?”

Hamilton returned again to the subject of tyranny in a different context, this time during the financial panic of 1792. In a letter to President Washington, he voiced his concerns about popular resistance to federal tax policies — local uprisings, such as the Whiskey Rebellion, that aimed to undermine America’s fledgling government:

“When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.”

I’m not a religious person by any means. But if I were, and if my faith permitted, I would bet every penny that Hamilton is spinning in his grave at the Trinity Churchyard Cemetery at the mere thought of Trump’s acquittal.

Closing Arguments in Trump Trial Aimed at Voters, History

WASHINGTON — Closing arguments Monday in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial were directed more toward history than to sway the outcome, one final chance to influence public opinion and set the record ahead of his expected acquittal in the Republican-led Senate.

The House Democratic prosecutors drew on the Founding Fathers and common sense to urge senators — and Americans — to see that Trump’s actions are not isolated but a pattern of behavior that, left unchecked, will allow him to “cheat”‘ in the 2020 election.

Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff implored those few Republican senators who have acknowledged Trump’s wrongdoing in the Ukraine matter to prevent a “runaway presidency” and stand up to say “enough.”

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“For a man like Donald J. Trump, they gave you a remedy and meant for you to use it. They gave you an oath, and they meant for you to observe it,” Schiff said. “We have proven Donald Trump guilty. Now do impartial justice and convict him.”

The president’s defense countered the Democrats have been out to impeach Trump since the start of his presidency, nothing short of an effort to undo the 2016 election and to try to shape the next one, as early primary voting begins Monday in Iowa.

“Leave it to the voters to choose,” said White House counsel Pat Cipollone.

He called for an end to the partisan “era of impeachment.”

All that’s left, as the Senate prepares to acquit Trump on charges that he abused power and obstructed Congress, is for Americans to decide now and in the November election, as the third presidential impeachment trial in the nation’s history comes to a close.

Most senators acknowledge the House Democratic managers have essentially proven their case. Trump was impeached in December on two charges: that he abused his power like no other president in history when he pushed Ukraine to investigate rival Democrats, and he then obstructed Congress by instructing aides to defy House subpoenas.

But key Republicans have decided the president’s actions toward Ukraine do not rise to the level of impeachable offense that warrants the dramatic political upheaval of conviction and removal from office. His acquittal in Wednesday’s vote is all but assured.

GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska called the president’s actions “shameful and wrong,” but in a powerful speech late Monday she also derided the highly partisan process. “I cannot vote to convict,” she said.

Republican Sens. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Marco Rubio of Florida and Rob Portman of Ohio are among those who acknowledged the inappropriateness of Trump’s actions, but said they would not vote to hear more testimony or to convict.

“What message does that send? “ asked Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., a House prosecutor. He warned senators that for Trump, the ”past is prologue.” He urged the Senate to realize its failure to convict will “allow the president’s misconduct to stand.”

The Senate proceedings are set against a sweeping political backstop, as voters in Iowa on Monday are choosing presidential Democratic primary candidates and Trump is poised to deliver his State of the Union address Tuesday in his own victory lap before Congress.

It is unclear if any Republican or Democratic senators sworn to do “impartial justice” will break from party lines. One centrist Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin, W-Va., said he was heavily weighing the vote ahead. He suggested censure may be a bipartisan alternative.

The House Democrats unveiled a striking case centered on Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, running an alternative foreign policy that drew alarm at the highest levels. As part of the “scheme,” Trump held up $391 million in U.S. aid from Ukraine, a fragile ally battling Russia, for his personal political gain, they argued. The money was eventually released after Congress intervened.

As Chief Justice John Roberts presided, the House managers opened with a plea from Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., a freshman and former Army Ranger: “We cannot and should not leave our common sense at the door.”

One by one, the Democrats drew on their life experiences to remind senators, and Americans, of the simple difference between right and wrong in the case against Trump.

Rep. Val Demings, a former police chief, argued that the president is not behaving like someone who is innocent. She warned that if senators do not convict, Trump will try to “cheat” again ahead of 2020.

“You will send a terrible message to the nation that one can get away with abuse of power, cheating and spreading of false narratives,” she told them.

Before Trump’s celebrity defense mounted its closing argument, the president himself already registered his views on Twitter, where he decried the whole thing — as he often does — as a “hoax.”

Kenneth Starr, the former prosecutor whose investigation led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment, complained about the inadequacy of the House prosecutors’ “fast track” case.

Trump attorney Jay Sekulow showed political clips of Democrats calling for impeachment — with many lawmakers of color, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a top Republican foil — to argue this was the “first totally partisan presidential impeachment in our nation’s history, and it should be our last.”

One key Trump lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, who was forced to walk back a sweeping defense of presidential power in last week’s arguments, did not appear.

Trump wanted acquittal secured before he arrives at the Capitol for the State of the Union address Tuesday, but that will not happen.

Senators carrying the power of their votes to the history books wanted additional time to make their own arguments, in public speeches from the floor of the Senate. Those began Monday afternoon and were expected to continue until Wednesday’s vote.

The trial unfolded over nearly two weeks and reached a decisive moment last Friday when senators voted against calling witnesses and documents. Key Republicans said they had heard enough. It becomes the first impeachment trial in the nation’s more than 200-year history without any witnesses.

Even new revelations from John Bolton, the former White House national security adviser, whose forthcoming book discloses his firsthand account of Trump ordering the investigations, did not impress upon senators the need for more testimony.

Bolton said he would appear if he received a subpoena, but GOP senators said the House should have issued the summons and the Senate did not want to prolong the proceedings.

Prosecutors relied on a 28,000-page report compiled over three months of proceedings in the Democratic-controlled House, including public and private testimony from 17 witnesses, among them current and former ambassadors and national security officials with close proximity to the Ukraine dealings.

The case stems from Trump’s July 25 call with Ukraine that he maintains was “perfect.” A government whistleblower alarmed by the call filed a complaint that sparked the inquiry.

__

Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick, Matthew Daly, Laurie Kellman and Padmananda Rama contributed to the story.