It’s a loose analogy (yet a useful one) to say that the opioid crisis is to the Great Recession as the Dust Bowl was to the Great Depression. These deep economic downturns did not cause, respectively, either the Dust Bowl or the opioid crisis, but each downturn did exacerbate the severity of its coincident calamity. What came first made what came next worse (as in both cases they overlapped).
A Great Depression would have been loss enough, but America endured a Great Depression and a Dust Bowl. A Great Recession would have been enough, but America has endured a Great Recession and yet endures an opioid crisis.
The Midwest has been hit notably hard by both the recent recession and opioid addiction. Not to see this clearly would be something like pretending that the Depression wasn’t a hard time, and the Dust Bowl wasn’t a hard time, in the 1930s.
Truly, it hasn’t been a hard time for some of us, as the ‘30s weren’t hard for some. The least we can do, however, is to see and describe conditions clearly for those whose circumstances are more difficult than our own.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-eight. Sunrise is 7:17 AM and sunset 6:01 PM, for 10h 43m 39s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 39.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
The core of the impeachment inquiry is about whether Trump engaged in self-dealing, where he used his power in a publicly held enterprise (that is, the government of the United States) for personal gain. Most executives in the private sector know what self-dealing is, and recent headlines about Renault-Nissan or WeWork have reminded them. They also know how most corporate boards would handle a case of self-dealing that involved important programs and sums of money, and in which the CEO had fired executives who interfered with the self-dealing.
When Mulvaney was asked about a quid pro quo, he said, on Oct. 17, “We do that all the time with foreign policy.” That is correct. But there is a profound difference between using governmental power in a quid pro quo as part of a public (or fiduciary) duty to advance the public interests of the United States versus using governmental power as a quid pro quo to advance the private interests of Donald Trump or Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani, a private citizen, said in May that he was working to advance the interests of “my client.” There are many jail inmates and former executives who could not distinguish between public (or fiduciary) interests and their private interests.
Any public corruption prosecutor familiar with the federal bribery statute and self-dealing cases will recognize that firsthand witnesses, such as Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland, Mulvaney, and Trump himself, have now offered evidence to all the elements of the offense. The bribery law—18 U.S.C. § 201(b)—is easy to understand. The elements, as they pertain here, are as follows:
Whoever, being a public official …
corruptly
directly or indirectly demands or seeks …
anything of value
for himself or some other person
in return for being influenced in the performance of any official act …
has committed the felony. I believe the federal bribery crime, a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison, also gets at the heart of the self-dealing issue more effectively than some alternative theories of criminal behavior, such as “honest services fraud” (which has some complex legal issues associated with it) or foreign campaign finance violations (which tend to involve monetary help apparently lacking here).
Anyone joining knowingly in the commission of the above could be liable as well, probably under the conspiracy statute (18 U.S.C. § 371). That might include Giuliani, who is not a public official.
• Nearly one-third ($205 billion) of the estimated economic burden of the opioid crisis is attributable to excess health care spending for individuals with OUD, infants born with neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) or neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome (NOWS), and for family members of those with diagnosed OUD.
• Mortality costs accounted for 40% ($253 billion) of the estimated economic impact, predominantly driven by lost lifetime earnings for those who died prematurely due to drug overdoses involving opioids.
• Costs associated with criminal justice activities, including police protection and legal adjudication activities, lost property due to crime, and correctional facility expenditures, totaled $39 billion, roughly 6% of the total cost from 2015 to 2018.
• Costs associated with government-funded child and family assistance programs and education programs contributed another $39 billion over the four-year period.
• Lost productivity costs comprised the remaining 15% of total costs from 2015 through 2018, totaling $96 billion. Lost productivity costs are associated with absenteeism, reduced labor force participation, incarceration for opioid-related crimes, and employer costs for disability and workers’ compensation benefits to employees with OUD.
It is important to recognize who bears these economic burdens. In total, we estimate $186 billion (29%) of the total economic burden of the opioid crisis was borne by federal, state and local governments, while the remainder was borne by the private sector and individuals.
Using the latest available data, we also projected costs for 2019 based on three scenarios reflecting how the opioid crisis may develop. Our midpoint cost estimate for 2019 is $188 billion, with our low and high cost estimates ranging from $172 billion to $214 billion. These cost estimates reflect a range of potential outcomes for key assumptions such as the prevalence of OUD and the number of opioid overdose deaths in 2019 and are intended to represent a reasonable range of scenarios, rather than the minimum or maximum of possible outcomes.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-four. Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 6:02 PM, for 10h 46m 23s of daytime. The moon is in its third quarter with 51% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Unified District School Board meets at 6 PM, going into closed session “pursuant to Wis. Stat. 19.85(1)(c) for the purpose of interviewing and considering potential candidates, compensation ranges, and term of employment for Interim District Administrator position; when closed session ends, the meeting will end (Action Item).”
On this day in 1805, at the Battle of Trafalgar, “twenty-seven British ships of the line led by Admiral Lord Nelson aboard HMS Victory defeated thirty-three French and Spanish ships of the line under French Admiral Villeneuve….The Franco-Spanish fleet lost twenty-two ships, and the British lost none.”
Documents obtained by ProPublica show stark differences in how Donald Trump’s businesses reported some expenses, profits and occupancy figures for two Manhattan buildings, giving a lender different figures than they provided to New York City tax authorities. The discrepancies made the buildings appear more profitable to the lender — and less profitable to the officials who set the buildings’ property tax.
For instance, Trump told the lender that he took in twice as much rent from one building as he reported to tax authorities during the same year, 2017. He also gave conflicting occupancy figures for one of his signature skyscrapers, located at 40 Wall Street.
Lenders like to see a rising occupancy level as a sign of what they call “leasing momentum.” Sure enough, the company told a lender that 40 Wall Street had been 58.9% leased on Dec. 31, 2012, and then rose to 95% a few years later. The company told tax officials the building was 81% rented as of Jan. 5, 2013.
(This story has received insufficient attention; conduct like this points to significant legal risk for Trump after he leaves office.)
Anita Kumar and Quint Forgey report Unpaid bills pile up in Trump rallies’ wake (‘Cities across the country say the president’s campaign has failed to reimburse them for law enforcement costs’):
In city after city, across the nation, Trump has failed to pay local officials who provide thousands of dollars’ worth of security assistance to the president’s campaign during his Make America Great Again rallies.
In total, at least 10 cities have complained that the campaign has not reimbursed them for services provided by local police and fire departments, totaling more than $840,000, according to a study by the Center for Public Integrity in June.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-four. Sunrise is 7:14 AM and sunset 6:04 PM, for 10h 49m 08s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 61% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1944, the elements of United States Sixth Army land on the island of Leyte in the Philippines.
The President cast himself in 2016 as a savior for workers, taking the unusual tack of publicly pressuring corporations like Carrier into changing their plans for moving or changing production. But despite months of demands, Trump has been unable to get GM to keep jobs at Lordstown.
Trump zeroed in on the Ohio plant because of his promise to working-class voters that he would revive US manufacturing, keeping jobs in the United States. With that promise, Trump won Ohio and did well with voters in Mahoning Valley — a key to securing the election in 2016.
In 2017, Trump went to Youngstown, 15 miles down the road from the Lordstown plant, and promised residents that manufacturing jobs would be returning to the region, telling the crowd: “Don’t move. Don’t sell your house.”
GM worker Ernie Long heard that speech while he was still at the Lordstown plant.
“He said don’t sell your house, and look, now I got to sell my house that I just built three years ago,” said Long, who was at the plant for 11 years. He’s still a member of his union — Local 1112 — but is injured and not currently working.
Russia helped elect Trump, and as he faces impeachment, Russian state media is standing behind him. Propaganda outlets RT and Sputnik, which target Americans with English language content, provide a clear view of Russian messaging on the Ukraine scandal and Trump’s impeachment. Together, they present a picture of a propaganda machine working to exonerate Trump, condemn former Vice President Joe Biden, and spread doubt about the trustworthiness of American government.
The particulars of the Ukraine scandal make a natural fit for the Kremlin’s playbook for destabilizing western democracies: sowing distrust of authority and turning corruption into a “both sides” problem, encouraging citizens to resign themselves to grift and propaganda. That Russian media has jumped on stories that paint the scandal as a deep state coup—a theory that Trump himself has dangerously expounded during the Mueller investigation—is predictable.
Saturday in Whitewater will see afternoon showers with a high of sixty. Sunrise is 7:13 AM and sunset 6:05 PM, for 10h 51m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 70.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Throughout much of November 1781, there was still no certain news in London of the outcome of the Battle of Yorktown. As accounts of the strength of the enemy positions arrived, the mood of the government grew more anxious each day. George III and Lord George Germain, the cabinet minister most responsible for the conduct of the war, had been so confident of victory that the draft of the King’s speech for the state opening of Parliament predicted British success in America. Germain, in particular, was aware that the outcome of the battle would determine the fate of the war and probably the future of the government of Lord North.
….
Between one and two o’clock in the afternoon [on 11.25.1781], the three cabinet ministers arrived at the official residence of the Prime Minister in Downing Street. Although he had long despaired of the war and had many times attempted to resign, Lord North reacted to the news in a state of shock. Germain described how the Prime Minister responded, as if he had been shot, “As he would have taken a ball in his breast.” Pacing up and down his rooms for several minutes, North suddenly opened his arms exclaiming wildly, “O God! It is all over!” North repeated the words many times in a state of consternation and distress. After North had calmed down, the ministers discussed whether to postpone the state opening of Parliament, which was due to occur in less than forty-eight hours. With many members having already arrived in the capital and others on their way, they decided against a change. They then spent several hours rewriting the King’s speech, which was to be delivered from the throne in the House of Lords. The speech had originally predicted victory but was altered to make a token reference to the events at Yorktown. Germain then sent word of the news of the “melancholy termination of Lord Cornwallis’s expedition” to his Majesty King George III, who was at Kew Palace on the outskirts of London.
(Aside: Rachel Maddow refers to George H.W. Bush as ‘Poppy’ in the video. It’s a respectful reference – she’s using a term of endearment that the Bush family, itself, used often to describe their late father and grandfather.)
Congressman F. James Sensenbrenner, the gerrymandered, septuagenarian multimillionaire whose district (the Fifth) stretches all the way down to Whitewater, must think (or hope) people are ignorant. One can conclude as much because Sensenbrenner contends the reasonhe’s not attending impeachment hearings is because those hearings are not open to the public. Honest to goodness, Sensenbrenner must think (wrongly) that his constituents are clueless or slow-witted.
The reason that hearings like this are now closed is to limit, as much as possible, prospective witnesses from changing their testimony based on the testimony of prior witnesses.
Sensenbrenner must think that a feeble and inapplicable claim of transparency (during an investigation) will confuse his constituents into thinking he’s acting on principle.
No, and no again.
This does raise a question, however: what’s Sensenbrenner doing with his time while he’s not attending Congressional hearings?
Whitewater does know – from a press release – that not long ago then-Community Development Authority Chairman Kachel met with Sensenbrenner to thank him for a part of the Trump tax bill. (“Kachel met with Congressman James Sensenbrenner of Menomonee Falls over the weekend to thank him for co-sponsoring the legislation…”) Sensenbrenner votes overwhelmingly with Trump.
Now that Sensenbrenner’s skipping work, perhaps he and Kachel (still chairman of a business special-interest group enjoying an IRS tax exemption) will have time to catch up.
The possibilities are as limitless as their imaginations —
Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifty-nine. Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset 6:07 PM, for 10h 54m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 80.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
… The troops being promptly formed, were, at precisely half past three o’clock, brought to a ‘present arms’, the signal given to the [USS] Ossipee … which was to fire the salute, and the ceremony was begun by lowering the Russian flag … The United States flag … was properly attached and began its ascent, hoisted by my private secretary [and son], George Lovell Rousseau, and again salutes were fired as before, the Russian water battery leading off. The flag was so hoisted that in the instant it reached its place the report of the big gun of the Ossipee reverberated from the mountains around … Captain Pestchouroff stepped up to me and said, ‘General Rousseau, by authority from his Majesty the Emperor of Russia, I transfer to the United States the Territory of Alaska’ and in a few words I acknowledged the acceptance of the transfer, and the ceremony was at an end.”
During a press conference, Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney admitted to the quid pro quo with Ukraine and defiantly justified it as just a shift in foreign policy.
That decision is without precedent in modern American history: The president used his public office to direct a huge contract to himself.
Trump’s Doral resort — set among office parks near Miami International Airport — has been in sharp decline in recent years, according to the Trump Organization’s own records. Its net operating income fell 69 percent from 2015 to 2017; a Trump Organization representative testified last year that the reason was Trump’s damaged brand.
Now, the G-7 summit will draw hundreds of diplomats, journalists and security personnel to the resort during one of its slowest months of the year, when Miami is hot and the hotel is often less than 40 percent full. It will also provide a worldwide spotlight for the club.
….
It also appears to signal the collapse of promises made by the president and Eric Trump, his son and the day-to-day leader of Trump’s businesses, at the start of the Trump presidency — when they pledged to create separation between the president’s private business and his new public office.
“I will be leaving my great business in total,” Trump said as president-elect in 2016.
“There are lines that we would never cross, and that’s mixing business with anything government,” Eric Trump said in 2017.
The Trump Organization on Thursday said it was “honored” to have been chosen by its owner, the president, for this event.
This flashy building? Sorry, Wisconsin, you’re not getting this. Illustration via Mount Pleasant Development Dept.
Foxconn’s plans to build a nine-story circular office building reminiscent of Epcot’s iconic Spaceship Earth building at the entrance of its Orlando theme park in Mount Pleasant have been put on hold.
On Thursday morning [9.12.19], Sam Schultz, community development director with the village of Mount Pleasant, released plans to Wisconsin Public Radio about the project at 12001 Braun Road. The plans also included an approximately 34,000-square-foot building at the site.
The building, Schultz said, was going to serve as Foxconn’s network operations center. It would have been a central location where administrators will “manage, control and monitor one or more networks.”
….
But around 3:30 p.m. Thursday, the village released a statement saying those plans had been put on hold so Foxconn can “explore additional design options.”
Instead, Foxconn is moving forward with another building, the “Fii Smart Manufacturing Center.” The one-story, 260,000-square-foot building will house manufacturing, office support staff, packaging and shipping and receiving functions, according to plans submitted to the village.
Trump said this project would be the “eighth wonder of the world,” but the project’s not even getting a cheesy knock-off of an amusement park’s architecture.
Honest to goodness, only someone foolish would have had confidence in this project.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifty-three. Sunrise is 7:11 AM and sunset 6:08 PM, for 10h 57m 26s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 87.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets today at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1931, Al Capone is convicted of tax evasion.
The White House’s trenchant declaration to House impeachment investigators last week was unequivocal: No more witnesses or documents for a “totally compromised kangaroo court.”
But just a week later, it has become clear that President Trump’s attempts to stonewall the Democrat-led inquiry that has imperiled his presidency and ensnared much of his inner circle are crumbling.
One by one, a parade of Trump administration career diplomats and senior officials has offered a cascade of revelations. Those accounts have corroborated and expanded upon key aspects of the whistle-blower complaint that spawned the impeachment inquiry into whether the president abused his power to enlist Ukraine to help him in the 2020 presidential election.
The latest disclosures came on Wednesday, when a former top aide to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo offered an inside account of what he said was a demoralized State Department, where career diplomats were sidelined and others apparently were pressed to use their posts “to advance domestic political objectives.” In six hours of voluntary testimony, the former aide, Michael McKinley, told impeachment investigators that he quit his post as Mr. Pompeo’s senior adviser amid mounting frustrations over the Trump administration’s treatment of diplomats and its failure to support them in the face of the impeachment inquiry, according to a copy of his opening remarks.
One of the most damning allegations in the whistleblower complaint is that President Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son by withholding congressionally approved military aid. The amounts include $250 million from the Defense Department and $141 million from the State Department.
As debates swirl over the existence and significance of a presidential quid pro quo, it is worth examining the underlying mechanics of how the White House might have withheld the money. The answer lies in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which is responsible for overseeing all executive agency spending. That is why on Oct. 7 the chairmen of three House Committees—Oversight and Reform, Intelligence and Foreign Affairs—sent letters to subpoena documents from the acting director of OMB, Russell Vought, in addition to Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. The subpoena to Vought ordered him to produce “all documents and communications in your custody, possession, or control referring or relating to” various matters linked to the withholding or deferral of congressionally appropriated funds to Ukraine. The deadline to respond to the subpoena was Oct. 15, yesterday, and Vought made clear that he would not comply.
At present, it is unclear whether OMB withheld the money in a manner consistent with its legal obligations. Without drawing any definitive conclusions, this post explains the complex legal underpinnings of the issue about which Congress seeks information.
Coffee. It’s not a bad idea to have coffee sessions with law enforcement (8:00 on the video), but it’s worth noting – because it’s true – that community policing depends on positive, routine contact between officers and residents in unstaged settings. This positive, routine contact requires that residents know officers’ names, etc. Single public-relations efforts are of lesser value than steady and respectful encounters during a daily patrol. (Simply driving about, or viewing the city behind sunglasses, doesn’t amount to a positive encounter with residents.)
More generally, public relations efforts in a city as diverse as ours are often failures – they reach only one part of the city (sometimes a part that erroneously thinks it’s the whole city).
Ordinary Public Works Requests. If every concern of the city involved an ordinary public works request (16:55 on the video), then the city would have no concerns.
Phosphorus Management. A sound plan for phosphorus management is vital for the health of the city’s residents. The recommendation before the council (22:50 on the video) on 10.15 was for Strand Associates, one of the lower bidders. They’ve done sound work for the city in the past (indeed more so than other vendors the city’s engaged over the years).
As always, embedded above, the best record is a recording.
Feature stories on major topics, in which the author begins a multi-paragraph description of a person or scene before offering a substantive consideration of the topic, have today little use in newspapers. These stories are meant to set a scene, and perhaps evoke emotions in readers who are, the author presumes, indifferent or ignorant of the substantive topic.
It should be needless to say that these are not indifferent times; these are times of continent-wide controversy when emotions are already high. No one needs six paragraphs of treacly background information to be engaged in a major topic – nearly all America is now in dispute on our country’s major topics. No one needs to be awakened to action – we are, all of us, inthe action. Those readers who are not yet awake to these times are either drunk or comatose – which, in fact, means they likely aren’t readers at all.
It serves our present condition to state plainly: who did what to whom?
Good straightforward beat or investigative reporting is like this: direct, concise, unambiguous, unsentimental. Good commentary – writing with a strong editorial tint – has time for pathos as a rhetorical technique. These two approaches are not the same, and should not be mixed.
If newspaper people want to write lengthy, take-ten-paragraphs-of-teary-anecdotes-to-get-to-the-point feature stories, they should become magazine writers, or build time machines to transport themselves to an era that needed an awakening. It’s not commendable poetry in motion to misunderstand one’s era; it’s more like an ill-timed limerick.
We are not in an easy time; we are awake already to a dozen controversies. Writing should be direct and succinct in its description of our circumstances.
It’s a loose analogy (yet a useful one) to say that the opioid crisis is to the Great Recession as the Dust Bowl was to the Great Depression. These deep economic downturns did not cause, respectively, either the Dust Bowl or the opioid crisis, but each downturn did exacerbate the severity of its coincident calamity. What came first made what came next worse (as in both cases they overlapped).