The challenges ahead (Biden's America)

[N.E. Brigand]

Yes, that's the unit of time! Here's the quote above with the blanks filled in: "Sam Bankman-Fried dined with Mohammed bin Salman and Jared Kushner to get Saudi money: report In the desperate weeks before FTX's collapse, Bankman-Fried asked his friend Anthony Scaramucci to take him to the Middle East to hit up some of the region's autocratic rulers for funding."

"Judge sends Sam Bankman-Fried to jail over alleged witness tampering" (NBC). I love the description of Bankman-Fried as an "ex-billionaire." Media organizations quite understandably had petitioned the judge not to jail Bankman-Fried, because the tampering in question came in the form of him sharing information with reporters, and the move could chill freedom of the press. Still I can understand why the judge responded favorably to the government's request: "In the motion requesting Bankman-Fried’s detention, the government said that, over the last several months, the defendant had sent over 100 emails to the media and had made over 1,000 phone calls to members of the press. The final straw, according to prosecutors, was Bankman-Fried leaking private diary entries of his ex-girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, to the New York Times. Ellison pleaded guilty to federal charges in Dec. 2022." Ellison will be a government witness in Bankman-Fried's trial.

Sam Bankman-Fried has been found guilty of "all seven charges of fraud and conspiracy. Prosecutors said he orchestrated a scheme to steal as much as $10 billion from his users."

[N.E. Brigand]

In order to secure funding for Ukraine, the Biden administration knows that Democrats will probably have to accede to some Republican demands on border security and asylum laws.

[N.E. Brigand]

Sam Bankman-Fried has been found guilty of "all seven charges of fraud and conspiracy. Prosecutors said he orchestrated a scheme to steal as much as $10 billion from his users."

Attorney General Merrick Garland:

"Sam Bankman-Fried thought that he was above the law. Today's verdict proves he was wrong. This case should send a clear message to anyone who tries to hide their crimes behind a shiny new thing they claim no one else is smart enough to understand: the Justice Department will hold you accountable. I am grateful to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and the FBI for their outstanding work in bringing Mr. Bankman-Fried to justice."

It was wrong of Bankman-Fried not to plead guilty and save us all the expense of a trial.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Even Sam Bankman-Fried is entitled to due process, a presumption of innocence and jury before his peers. The system worked in this case.

[N.E. Brigand]

He abused due process by not immediately pleading guilty to the crimes for which he committed.

So did O.J. Simpson when he failed to plead guilty to the two murders he committed.

If you're guilty, aren't you morally obligated to admit it?

Edited to add: I won't belabor this point any further. I get that the U.S. legal system is set up about as well as it can be. But while Sam Bankman-Fried, like any other defendant, was entitled to a legal presumption of innocence, he was in fact not innocent of the crimes of which he was accused. Neither was O.J. Simpson. Both of them further compounded their guilt by pleading not guilty. I'm just saying they shouldn't have done that, whether or not they were entitled to do that. I don't like ignoring that aspect of moral responsibility, is all.

Edited again to add: I said I won't belabor this point any further, and I won't.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

He abused due process by not immediately pleading guilty to the crimes for which he committed.

That's not what due process means. As you well know. If you get decide that Bankman-Fried was guilty and didn't deserve a trial, a racist man in Alabama could equally just conclude that the black man accused of looking at his wife was guilty and didn't deserve a trial. That's what due process protects against. Or is suppose to.

ETA; to put it another way, due process must be available to everyone or it won't be available to anyone.

[N.E. Brigand]

Sam Bankman-Fried has been found guilty of "all seven charges of fraud and conspiracy. Prosecutors said he orchestrated a scheme to steal as much as $10 billion from his users."

People are rightly pointing out some predictions from less than a year ago:

[N.E. Brigand]

Another month, another great jobs report: 336,000 jobs were added in August, which is nearly twice what was predicted, and the unemployment rate remains at 3.8%. Following up on what I noted here last month, that means that U.S. unemployment has remained below 4% for 20 straight months, which now is tied with Feb. 1966-Sep. 1967 as the third-longest such streak. There are only five times since 1948 that unemployment remained below 4% for 10 or more months.

When asked today why, despite this happening again, the American people aren't more positive about the economy, President Biden gently blamed the very nature of journalism: "You all are not the happiest people in the world." Tolkien wrote something similar in The Hobbit or The Silmarillion (or both?), as I recall.

In October, U.S. unemployment rose from 3.8% to 3.9% as 150,000 jobs were added. This fell below expectations (which were that the rate would remain unchanged at 3.8% with 170,000 jobs added), but it does mean that U.S. unemployment has remained below 4% for 21 straight months, now the third-longest streak ever.

One reason for the increase was that 25,000 auto workers were on strike.

Two days ago, i.e., before this jobs news, the Federal Reserve declined to raise interest rates, and investors are happy that report shows the job market isn't "heated," because they believe that will incline the Fed not to raise interest rates when it meets again next month.

Edited to note that Bloomberg says that today's news "means joblessness is on the verge of triggering the so-called Sahm Rule, which has proven to be reliable predictor of recessions in the past," but in an Annie Hall moment, Claudia Sahm herself says this is not correct.

As it happens, four days ago, Sahm had an op-ed in Bloomberg where she noted that the "misery index (inflation + unemployment) was twice as high in the 1970s than it is now, yet consumers [now] report hearing negative things about the economy at a much greater rate [than in the 1970s]. Social media is partly to blame."

[N.E. Brigand]

Edited to note that Bloomberg says that today's news "means joblessness is on the verge of triggering the so-called Sahm Rule, which has proven to be reliable predictor of recessions in the past," but in an Annie Hall moment, Claudia Sahm herself says this is not correct.

As it happens, four days ago, Sahm had an op-ed in Bloomberg where she noted that the "misery index (inflation + unemployment) was twice as high in the 1970s than it is now, yet consumers [now] report hearing negative things about the economy at a much greater rate [than in the 1970s]. Social media is partly to blame."

More from economist Claudia Sahm:

[N.E. Brigand]

Three columns (not entirely in accord with one another) about the challenges that President Biden faces and possible ways to move forward:

"Here’s What Biden Can Do to Change His Grim Polling" by David Frum in The Atlantic.

Why are President Joe Biden’s poll numbers so bad? Is it because of interest rates? Inflation? Crime? The border? Is it because he’s too progressive? Not progressive enough?

Whatever your theory, it should take into account a curious coincidence: how closely Biden’s approval numbers have tracked the numbers from former President Barack Obama’s first term. Obama’s numbers slumped in the second half of his third year, 2011. In the middle of that October, his disapproval number reached 41 percent, not very far off from Biden’s 37 percent at the same point in October 2023. ...

The president has a popularity problem. He needs to remind Americans who he isn’t. ... Biden already drives in the road’s middle lane. Now he just needs to toot the horn to let the other motorists know that he owns it. ... For example, did you know that the Biden administration has indicted more than 3,000 people for defrauding COVID programs? Did you know that under Biden, U.S. production of artillery shells will more than quadruple? Were you aware that the U.S. is now the world's largest producer of oil, producing almost twice as much as runner-up Saudi Arabia, and that U.S. oil exports hit an all-time high in 2022? did you know that the U.S. has become by far the planet's largest producer of natural gas, and also the largest exporter of gas in its shipborne liquid form? ...

Biden allowed the expiration of a Trump-era policy that used the COVID-19 emergency as a justification for barring asylum seekers from the country. If you watch Fox News, you probably know about that. What you probably don't know is that Biden promptly replaced Trump's temporary restrictions with a new permanent system. Those who crossed another safe country on their way to the United States will be refused an asylum hearing here. Biden is now negotiating a tougher border package with Senate Republicans that might end altogether the practice of releasing those detained while crossing the border into the United States.

"Biden Can't Stop Immigration. Time to Embrace It" by David J. Bier in The New York Times.

When Joe Biden became president, he assumed a nearly impossible task: stopping migrants from crossing the U.S.-Mexico border amid a global displacement crisis. Despite his efforts, under his watch the number of people who crossed the border has risen sharply. Republicans have blamed the president, claiming that he has opened the borders.

A recent House Judiciary Committee report shows that of the five million people who were arrested at the southwestern border during Mr. Biden’s term through March 31 this year, 49 percent had no confirmed departure date, and 51 percent were already removed.

The Republican-controlled committee’s report does not compare these results with what occurred under President Donald Trump’s last two years in office. But the Department of Homeland Security has published those statistics, and we at the Cato Institute made the comparison.

In the two years before Mr. Biden took office, the Trump administration released nearly 713,000 immigrants, or a little over 52 percent of the 1.4 million crossers. In other words, Mr. Trump’s policies resulted in far fewer removals in absolute terms and a slightly higher percentage of released border crossers than Mr. Biden’s. ...

Mr. Biden has doubled the number of immigrants detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities pending removal, and he has negotiated deals to reopen deportations to Venezuela and Cuba. He has deported more people to Haiti in less than three years than Mr. Trump did in four. Mr. Biden’s own administration has stated that all these countries are too unsafe and politically repressive to expect people to live in.

The open-borders myth won’t die even though every single day of his administration, Mr. Biden has imposed restrictions on applying for asylum far beyond those required by law. What should he do next? Dispatch his vice president to foreign countries to repeatedly tell people, “Do not come, do not come”? Oh, yeah, he did that, too. Now he’s even building Mr. Trump’s wall.

No matter how cruel or restrictive Mr. Biden’s policies are, they will never be enough to appease his critics. They also aren’t working. He can continue to do everything Mr. Trump did and more and still be the “open-borders president.” So why try? Instead he should stake his legacy on something different: legalizing immigration. Let more immigrants come humanely and legally.

"UAW's Victory And Joe Biden's Curse" by Brian Beutler at OffMessage.net.

The president catches hell easily; his successes often go ignored. ... With all that's happening in the world, you may have missed the news that the autoworkers' union prevailed in labor contract negotiations with General Motors, the last of the Big Three car makers, after a six-week strike. The deal, if ratified as expected, would deliver workers significant wage gains (25 percent) over four-and-a-half years. President Biden hailed the development from the White House as a "historic agreement," and called it "good economic news,showing something I've always believed: Worker power ... is critical to building an economy from the middle out and the bottom up."

This is mostly a story about victorious workers and the power of collective bargaining, but ... it should also be a victory for Biden, who sided with the workers, walked a picket line with them, and can rightfully note that their success is evidence of a strong economy, with tight labor markets. ... It is also another mark against Donald Trump, who tried to bamboozle the workers into thinking he supported their efforts, then held a campaign event at a non-uino shop and tried to subvert the very solidarity that just prevailed. ...

But that's not how the political side of the UAW strike story played out in the public sphere. Trump initially succeeded at confusing the issue, because he was able to convince many people of his lies while Biden was still deciding how tightly he wanted to link himself to the work stoppage. Getting journalists to correct the record once Trump's deceit became clear was harder than it should've been. There was a whole subgenre of punditry dedicated to the question of whether the strike would backfire. And then, when it was all over and ended well, many of those same pundits had lost interest in the story. ... Add it all up and you might have a wash vis-a-vis public perception of the candidates' support for union, against a backdrop of continued mass confusion about the state of the economy, where most people report good financial circumstances in their personal lives but believe the wider economy is depressed.

And in that instance, the union will help sell the message. But in other areas, Biden can't count on organized support. Beutler notes that both the right and the left have incentives not to acknowledge the strong economy. For example, "left-wing media ... are loath to accept economic indicators at face value because they'd then have to acknowledge that the U.S. has achieved full employment, real wage growth, and falling inequality all without either a radical policy revolution or a president who identifies as a democratic socialist. Their reach is more limited, they have no Fox News, but they hector any liberals or Democrats who have the temerity to observe that conditions are better now than they were under Trump--the last time Americans were satisfied with the economy--and it works as a force multiplier." He argues that it's no longer enough for a president to merely govern well: he must work just as hard on a public relations campaign.

All three essays contain a lot more than the parts I quoted here.

[N.E. Brigand]

I've never seen this picture before:

[N.E. Brigand]

New polling finds that when voters talk about the economy, they're talking about the price of goods and services, not whether or not they have a job. I don't think that makes sense, but most people aren't logical. Unfortunately for Joe Biden, presidents can't do much to lower prices.

And what President Biden has done, e.g. capping the price of insulin, hasn't broken through to enough voters, because "43% identified Biden as most focused on jobs while 49% identified Donald Trump as most focused on reducing prices." Also more "than half of voters said they had heard that inflation had dropped from 8.3% to 3.2% since 2021 — but only 38% said they believed it."

Trump of course did nothing and would do nothing to reduce prices. And his policies would not help inflation either.

[N.E. Brigand]

Returning to Claudia Sahm, she thinks that one of the most important things the U.S. federal and state governments can do to help consumer setiment is to get more housing built everywhere. (Because the cost of housing will then go down. Also there would be fewer people without homes.)

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Not sure if I should put this here in the congressional chaos thread, but:


Meanwhile,

[N.E. Brigand]

Knowing nothing of fashion, I appreciated some of the insights in this article from Brian Beutler:

"Joe Biden Is A Better Dresser Than Donald Trump: A bold truth the mainstream media won’t tell you."

Beutler argues that Biden leads all presidents post-JFK in this regard.

He adds that candidate Biden was outclassed sartorially by Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Beto O'Rourke.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

More news that will somehow be couched as bad news for Biden.

Inflation Cooled to 3.2% Last Month, Likely Ending Fed Rate Hikes

[N.E. Brigand]

Missed this a couple days ago:

"Hyundai joins Honda and Toyota in raising wages after auto union wins gains in deals with Detroit 3" (Associated Press).

[N.E. Brigand]

Republican pollster Frank Luntz notes the prices of many basic goods in the U.S. have dropped significantly over the past year.

[N.E. Brigand]

President Biden met yesterday in San Francisco with China's leader, Xi Jinping, for what media reports describe as a modestly productive discussion. Biden issued a statement saying that he believes China and the U.S., while disagreeing about many issues, can "compete responsibly."

When asked after the meeting if he would still describe Xi as a dictator, Biden said, "Well, he is," and correctly noted that China is a Communist country without democratic procedures. When Donald Trump as president took heat for referring to Xi as "brilliant," he replied that he obviously was brilliant because he "runs 1.4 billion people with an iron fist."

[N.E. Brigand]

An intruder broke into the home of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and attacked her 82 year old husband Paul Pelosi with a hammer, injuring him significantly. While no motive has been established, it is reported that the intruder was yelling "where is Nancy" before attacking her husband.
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/ ... index.html

Oh, that is simply horrible.

Media outlets have now posted police video of the attack on Paul Pelosi. The actual attack happens very quickly.

Edited to add: It's sad but not very surprising to see that the video isn't convincing the conspiracy theorists.

The man who attacked Paul Pelosi, husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (his intended target), was convicted today.