20 people, 3 companies indicted or plea bargaining. 75 charges.
For the benefit of those of you who seem convinced that Robert Mueller has somehow accomplished nothing just because he hasn’t beaten the record for solving a collusion puzzle in the least number of moves, here’s WaPo’s Philip Bump to get everybody up to speed.
On Friday afternoon, the 24th and 25th shoes dropped on Paul Manafort.
Earlier this week, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III filed court documents alleging that Manafort and an unnamed individual had tried to tamper with a potential witness in the case. Then, a superseding indictment: Manafort and a longtime aide, Konstantin Kilimnik, were each indicted on one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice and one count of obstruction of justice.
That brings the investigation by Mueller — derided regularly by President Trump as an unwarranted and unfair “witch hunt” — to a total of 20 individuals and three businesses that have either been indicted or admitted guilt and a total of 75 charges filed by the year-old probe.
One-third of the counts included in Mueller’s indictments, 25 of them, target Manafort, once Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman. The charges include conspiracy and financial crimes, and they span a period from 2006 to the present.
The complete list goes on for awhile, but since he’s been a very special boy recently, here’s Manafort.
It was not meant to be this way. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher and her
allies championed what they called “popular capitalism”. According to
this theory, voters would be given a permanent stake in the market
through the sale of council housing and shares in privatised utilities.
And, for a period, it worked. The sale of more than a million council
homes helped transform Labour voters into Tory loyalists. In 1984,
shares in the privatised BT were 10 times oversubscribed, gifted a
windfall to the government and voters. The sale of British Gas
(exemplified by the populist “Tell Sid” campaign), British Airways and
the water companies followed. By the end of the 1980s, share ownership
among the public had risen from seven per cent to a quarter.
The revenue from privatised assets, and the North Sea oil boom,
underwrote Thatcherism as unemployment spiked, and funded costly income
tax cuts. But these unique circumstances cannot be repeated. As
left-wingers have taken to remarking, the problem with Thatcherism is that eventually you run out of other people’s assets.
Ok, this is a common narrative in both Britain and in the US about Republicans, and it is definitely true, there is an intellectual exhaustion and a lack of anything positive to sell from conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic. The public is more skeptical of unfettered capitalism and increasingly feels like the marketplace doesn’t work for them. The low hanging policy fruit for conservatives has been picked. This narrative has been true for at least ten years now.
But what I’m confused by is this: you’d think the left would have decisively taken power in a durable way given this. And yet, in both the US and UK, the right has managed to hang onto power, and the left parties are merely competitive at best. In the UK, Labor still lags slightly behind conservatives albeit somewhat less so than one might expect. In the US, Democrats look like they’ll make gains, but the polling leads haven’t been large enough or durable enough to guaranteed that they’ll win any real power back in either 2018 or 2020, at least from our present vantage point. This despite our current president being someone that a consistent majority of people disapprove of.
Why isn’t the left more successful? Why aren’t we at the start of a generation of left party dominance as was seen in the mid-20th century?
very off-the-cuff answer, but it could be because instead of offering to give people things, the tories are now offering to stop some nebulous other from taking away people’s things. see things like anti-immigration policies or anti-fiscalism.
admittedly these have always been strategies of the right. but working conditions have been steadily deteriorating for the past few years (thanks in no small measure to the right’s policies), and the right has played on people’s fears about their future quite effectively. and the more they get re-elected the worse they make working conditions and the more they get to stoke people’s fears, hence creating a cycle.
Also most of the people who dislike capitalism on the left are younger and more politically disengaged so it doesn’t translate as easily into political gains.
The bizarre nature of the US economic system means that poor people in the US can have a smartphone (under $30) and a choice between 20 different colors of $1 socks but then have no choice but to die of a tooth infection because that costs hundreds of dollars in order to access treatment.
This shit that “nobody starves, doesn’t have running water, has untreated parasitical diseases, etc. in the US” is flat out nonsense. And I can’t imagine how these beliefs could withstand any actual extended contact with poor communities in the US unless someone was intentionally refusing to acknowledge what was right in front of their eyes.
So the Republican argument is that the Republican decision to freeze Puerto Rico in a second class state so that vulture capitalists can dismantle it, and the Republican decision to refuse Puerto Rico the same quality of disaster relief that Texas and Florida got and make them take loans instead of getting desperately needed funding even though the people of Puerto Rico are American citizens because Republicans are racist has all been somehow a secret plot by the Democrats to get Republicans to render Puerto Rico nearly unlivable so that people have to move en masse to other states where their votes count and that therefore the citizen rights of Puerto Ricans need to be revoked to render it illegal for them to vote in the states where they live. How Democrats, while begging and pleading with Republicans to do the decent thing, are somehow forcing Republicans to be so greedy and racist that their cruelty is still killing people on Puerto Rico is not explained. Republicans, your racism is showing.
Late last year, a pair of economists released an interesting paper
that used mobile location data to estimate the likelihood that
political polarization had shortened family Thanksgiving dinners in
2016.
Then the researchers used the same brokerages to get the location of the
precinct where their subjects had voted, and they used that to infer
the subjects’ political alignment (precinct-level voting is a matter of
public record and tends to be very homogenous).
It’s not hard to imagine how the re-identification process could have
gone farther – for example, you could look up the owner of the house
where the diners ate, then look for people with the same surname living
at the addresses they went home to.
The tech industry is in the midst of a largely invisible re-identification crisis:
much of the promise of machine learning and other Big Data applications
rests on the idea that potentially compromising data can be rendered
safe for use and sharing through “de-identification” (the GDPR has a
huge loophole that absolves companies of most of their responsibilities
if they “de-identify” data before sharing it!), and the existence of
reliable de-identification is taken as an article of faith within
industry and regulators, even though computer scientists are incredibly
skeptical that it can be effective or even possible.
The real interesting thing about the Thanksgiving Effect is how trivial
it is to identify the political alignment, familial relations, and other
personal (and confidential) information about people from supposedly
harmless marketing data.
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