April 2018 - Robert Kuttner

2018: The Case for Optimism

So let’s review the bidding. The investigative waters keep rising around Trump. The bill guaranteeing the safety of the special counsel won’t pass, but the support of four senior Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee sends Trump a warning—seven if Trump were to stage a Saturday Night Massacre. Too much information is now with the U.S. attorney in New York. And firing Mueller would lead directly to impeachment. Issues that looked like winners for Trump are turning blurry at best. [...]

By Robert Kuttner| 2018-04-30T16:37:07+00:00 April 30th, 2018|Kuttner on TAP|0 Comments

Courting the Next Financial Collapse

You’d almost think the Republicans want the banks to melt down again. Bit by bit, they’ve been gutting the Dodd-Frank Act. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been put on ice, placed in the hands of one of its sworn enemies, OMB Director Mick Mulvaney. Giving banks free rein to screw consumers is one thing. Letting banks play roulette with the entire economy is something else. But the latest bad idea from the Comptroller of the Currency, the agency [...]

By Robert Kuttner| 2018-04-27T16:49:37+00:00 April 27th, 2018|Kuttner on TAP|0 Comments

More Evidence of That Blue Wave

All the signs suggest that the wave is still building. In yesterday’s special election for an Arizona seat in in the U.S. House, the Republican candidate Debbie Lesko beat the Democrat, Hiral Tipirneni, by just six points, 53 to 47. This was in a staunchly Republican district that Trump carried by 21 points in 2016. If the same 15-point swing to the Democrats were to occur this November, the Democrats would enjoy a House majority of between 20 and [...]

By Robert Kuttner| 2018-04-25T15:05:13+00:00 April 25th, 2018|Kuttner on TAP|0 Comments

Make America Great Again—Progressive Variant

So let’s take Trump at his word and make America great again. A good place to start would be by repealing the $1.5 trillion in tax cuts for the rich and investing that money in America. Like in a serious infrastructure program. That would provide tangible benefits that would help real people. It would create lots of good jobs, modernize public systems that have been under-funded for decades. And it would be a pretty good down payment on a [...]

By Robert Kuttner| 2018-04-23T21:14:38+00:00 April 23rd, 2018|Kuttner on TAP|0 Comments

How Impeachment Will Whipsaw the GOP

As noted in a previous post, some too-clever Democratic strategists don’t want to talk about impeachment for fear of animating the Trump base to turn out and vote this November. But there are not enough hard-core Trumpers to keep the House in Republican hands. Once Dems take back the House, impeachment inevitably becomes the first order of business. For several months—if Trump is still in the White House by next January—more of the lurid details of his corruption and [...]

By Robert Kuttner| 2018-04-20T16:51:27+00:00 April 20th, 2018|Kuttner on TAP|0 Comments

President Pence, What’s Not to Like?

I’ve heard otherwise sensible people say that removing Donald Trump would not be a good idea because then we’d get President Pence and then Republicans could regroup. You gotta be kidding. For starters, Pence is one of the worst retail politicians in American politics. You have to be pretty lame to be on track to face defeat as an incumbent Republican governor in Indiana. Pence agreed to be Trump’s running mate only because he was in such trouble at [...]

By Robert Kuttner| 2018-04-18T16:40:09+00:00 April 18th, 2018|Kuttner on TAP|0 Comments

Depends on what you mean by “sell.”

Mark Zuckerberg’s repeated assurances to Congress last week that “We never sell your data” were in a class with Bill Clinton’s insistence in the Lewinsky affair that “I did not have sex with that woman.” (She had sex with him, but he did not have sex with her, get it?) Or maybe that kind of sex isn’t really sex. But I digress. Zuckerberg’s claim is the same sort of hogwash. Facebook may not literally “sell” a packet of data, [...]

By Robert Kuttner| 2018-04-16T14:24:11+00:00 April 16th, 2018|Kuttner on TAP|0 Comments

Let Us Praise Trump’s Incoherence

So now Trump, having bashed the Trans-Pacific Partnership as a wrongheaded product of the despised Barack Obama, wants to join it after all. Or maybe he doesn’t. The TPP was a lousy deal. It was mainly about helping big U.S. multinationals, and did little or nothing for labor and environmental rights. And despite the latter-day spin about the TPP containing China, it did nothing to restrain China’s predatory trade practices. Further, the United States already has trade deals with [...]

By Robert Kuttner| 2018-04-13T15:27:05+00:00 April 13th, 2018|Kuttner on TAP|0 Comments

Never Stiff Your Lawyer

As a developer and business mogul, Donald Trump famously stiffed contractors, college students, bankers, and partners. But he forgot the first rule of living outside the law: Never stiff your lawyer. Even the Mafia knows that. It’s not yet clear whether Trump deliberately failed to repay lawyer Michael Cohen for advancing hush money to former Playboy model Karen McDougal and porn actress Stormy Daniels, or whether Cohen and Trump just failed to figure out the choreography of laundering a reimbursement from [...]

By Robert Kuttner| 2018-04-11T16:05:00+00:00 April 11th, 2018|Kuttner on TAP|0 Comments

Trump Turns Against Putin

Here’s this week’s news quiz. Why did Donald Trump attack his chum Vladimir Putin after reports that Putin’s puppet, Bashar al-Assad, had again used nerve gas to kill children in a rebel-held area near Damascus? A) Is Trump, with Robert Mueller closing in, trying to signal distance from Putin? B) Is his new national security adviser, John Bolton, more of a Middle East hawk? C) Was Trump genuinely troubled by the appalling images of suffocating children? D) Is Trump [...]

By Robert Kuttner| 2018-04-09T16:01:29+00:00 April 9th, 2018|Kuttner on TAP|0 Comments

Monthly Archives: April 2018