Dear Commons Community,

Steve Rattner, counselor to the U.S. Treasury secretary in the Obama administration, has an op-ed in today’s New York Times that takes aim at the economic policies of world leaders during the past couple of years.  Essentially his message is that they took the best growth picture in a decade and put the world in danger of recession.  Below is the entire op-ed.

Tony

—————————————————————————-

New York Times

How World Leaders Ruined the Global Economy?

By Steve Rattner

August 16, 2019

Why are so many key global leaders pursuing so many stupid economic policies?

As recently as January 2018, the International Monetary Fund issued one of its most upbeat economic forecasts in recent years, extolling “broad based” growth, with “notable upside surprises.”

By last month, the fund had sliced its forecast for expansion this year to 3.2 percent — a significant falloff from the 3.9 percent projection reiterated just six months earlier — and had pronounced the economic picture “sluggish.” American investors are more concerned; the bond market is sounding its loudest recessionary alarm since April 2007.

The deterioration in the economic picture is not the consequence of irresponsible behavior by banks or a natural disaster or an unanticipated economic shock; it’s completely self-inflicted by major world leaders who have delivered almost universally poor economic stewardship.

The trade war initiated by President Trump sits firmly atop the list of bad policies. But Brexit has tipped Britain into economic contraction. With European governments unwilling to pursue structural reforms, the continent is barely growing. President Xi Jinping of China has focused on standing up to Mr. Trump and solidifying his own power. After a promising start reforming the economy, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has turned instead to oppressing his country’s Muslim minority.

And on and on.

None of this was necessary. As the January 2018 I.M.F. report indicated, the world economy was firing on all cylinders — “the broadest synchronized global growth upsurge since 2010” — as jobs were being added and inflation remained subdued.

Yes, Mr. Trump’s trade war and Brexit loomed, but amid hope that the former would prove empty and the latter would be softened.

Not so today.

Often against the recommendations of his more sensible advisers, Mr. Trump has implemented the country’s most protectionist actions since the 1930s. As a result, world trade has begun to fall for the first time in a decade, with noticeable economic impact. Last week, Goldman Sachs cut its already modest projections for fourth-quarter growth to 1.8 percent from 2 percent.

That’s a far cry from the “4, 5, 6” percent that Mr. Trump talked about just before his tax cut passed.

Nor has that been Mr. Trump’s only misstep in economic policy. Instead of nurturing growth with important investments like a robust infrastructure program, Mr. Trump deployed his political capital to secure tax cuts that disproportionately favored business and the wealthy.

The “sugar high” they produced quickly wore off. And now, instead of developing better policies, the president has chosen to attack the Federal Reserve, whose independence is cherished by investors, business people and economists.

Boris Johnson, Britain’s new prime minister, abandoned his predecessor’s notion of a “soft Brexit” that would have maintained some ties with the European Union. Instead, he reaffirmed his promise that his country would leave the E.U. on Oct. 31 with or without a deal. The pound quickly fell to its lowest level against the dollar since 1985. (It has since recovered slightly.)

Then there’s China. By virtue of both its remarkably fast industrialization and its protectionist policies, the nation has long been a trade threat. But four years ago, the government issued its “Made in China 2025” economic manifesto, which put in writing China’s plans to attain a leadership position in key new sectors, including robotics, pharmaceuticals and aerospace.

The notion of China using its state power to take on important American and European industries instead of pursuing market reforms set off alarm bells across the political spectrum and provided a concrete underpinning for Mr. Trump’s trade confrontation.

Mr. Xi, rather than acknowledging China’s protectionist practices, has proved unwilling to accept a new trade agreement with effective enforcement provisions. That has raised doubts about whether China is seriously interested in reforming its unfair trade practices — keeping key markets fully or partially closed, using state subsidies to favor its companies, forcing American companies to transfer technology to China and the like.

Of course, at least in the world’s democracies, voters bear substantial responsibility for electing these inadequate leaders. The rise of populism as a reaction to disaffection about economic and social conditions has been well documented as a principal driving force.

But the world is now suffering the consequences of these poor choices. Even in China, Mr. Xi did not take power forcibly; he rose through the Chinese political system — much like the Civil Service in other countries — and was awarded the presidency by his peers.

Occasionally, good choices have been made, such as the election of President Emmanuel Macron of France. But even that has not led to progress; public support for Mr. Macron turned to opposition when he instituted the much needed policy changes that he promised.

Any chief executive officer who botched his or her job as badly as most of these leaders have would be fired. Let’s hope that voters come to that realization when given the chance.

Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib

Dear Commons Community,

Israel made a decision yesterday to ban Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib from entering the country at the urging of President Trump. As reported by the Associated Press.

“Israel said yesterday that it will bar the two Democratic congresswomen from entering the country ahead of a planned visit over their support for a Palestinian-led boycott movement [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)], a decision announced shortly after President Donald Trump tweeted that it would “show great weakness” to allow them in.

The move to bar Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota from visiting the close American ally appeared to be unprecedented, and marked a deep foray by Israel into America’s bitterly polarized politics. It is also a sharp escalation of Israel’s campaign against the international boycott movement.

Interior Minister Aryeh Deri issued a statement saying that after consultations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials he decided not to allow Tlaib and Omar to enter because of “their boycott activities against Israel.”

The two newly-elected Muslim members of Congress are outspoken critics of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Tlaib’s family immigrated to the United States from the West Bank.

Shortly before the decision was announced, Trump had tweeted that “it would show great weakness” if Israel allowed them to visit. “They hate Israel & all Jewish people, & there is nothing that can be said or done to change their minds.” He went on to call the two congresswomen “a disgrace.”

Israel has sought to combat the BDS movement, which advocates boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israeli businesses, universities and cultural institutions. The country passed a law permitting a ban on entry to any activist who “knowingly issues a call for boycotting Israel.” Last month, however, Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer had said Israel would not deny entry to any member of Congress.

Supporters of the boycott movement say it is a non-violent way to protest Israeli policies and call for Palestinian rights. Critics say the movement aims to delegitimize Israel and ultimately erase it from the map, replacing it with a binational state.

Israel often hosts delegations of U.S. representatives and senators, who usually meet with senior Israeli officials as well as Palestinian officials in the occupied West Bank.

The decision to ban the congresswomen could further sharpen divisions among U.S. Democrats over Israel ahead of the 2020 elections. Republicans have amplified the views of left-wing Democrats like Tlaib and Omar to present the party as deeply divided and at odds with Israel. Democratic leaders have pushed back, reiterating the party’s strong support for Israel, in part to protect representatives from more conservative districts.

In July, the Democratic-led House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution against the BDS movement.”

This will be a public relations nightmare for Israel and unsettle its support among Democrats in Congress.  We have come to expect dumb tweets from Trump but Benjamin Netanyahu should know better.

Tony

Cordelia Scaife May

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured article this morning describing how a Mellon/Scaife family heiress evolved as a major funder of the anti-immigration movement in this country.  As reported:

“Cordelia Scaife May found her life’s purpose: curbing what she perceived as the lethal threat of overpopulation by trying to shut America’s doors to immigrants.

She believed that the United States was “being invaded on all fronts” by foreigners, who “breed like hamsters” and exhaust natural resources. She thought that the border with Mexico should be sealed and that abortions on demand would contain the swelling masses in developing countries.

An heiress to the Mellon banking and industrial fortune with a half-billion dollars at her disposal, Mrs. May helped create what would become the modern anti-immigration movement. She bankrolled the founding and operation of the nation’s three largest restrictionist groups — the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA and the Center for Immigration Studies — as well as dozens of smaller ones, including some that have promulgated white nationalist views.

Today, 14 years after Mrs. May’s death, her money remains the lifeblood of the movement, through her Colcom Foundation. It has poured $180 million into a network of groups that spent decades agitating for policies now pursued by President Trump: militarizing the border, capping legal immigration, prioritizing skills over family ties for entry and reducing access to public benefits for migrants, as in the new rule issued just this week by the administration.

From 2005 to 2017, the Colcom Foundation gave millions to anti-immigration and population-control groups, some with close ties to the Trump administration.

Mrs. May’s story helps explain the ascendance of once-fringe views in the debate over immigration in America, including exaggerated claims of criminality, disease or dependency on public benefits among migrants. Though their methods radically diverged, Mrs. May and the killer in the recent mass shooting in El Paso applied the same language, both warning of an immigrant “invasion,” an idea also promoted by Mr. Trump.

In many ways, the Trump presidency is the culmination of Mrs. May’s vision for strictly limiting immigration. Groups that she funded shared policy proposals with Mr. Trump’s campaign, sent key staff members to join his administration and have close ties to Stephen Miller, the architect of his immigration agenda to upend practices adopted by his Democratic and Republican predecessors.

“She would have fit in very fine in the current White House,” said George Zeidenstein, whose mainstream population-control group Mrs. May supported before she shifted to anti-immigration advocacy. “She would have found a sympathetic ear with the present occupant.”

Unlike her more famous brother, the right-wing philanthropist and publisher Richard Mellon Scaife, Mrs. May largely stayed out of the public eye. A childless widow who lived alone outside Pittsburgh, she instructed associates not to reveal her philanthropic interests and in some cases even to destroy her correspondence. While her unlikely role as the quiet bursar to anti-immigration organizations has been previously reported, her motivation and engagement in the immigration issue remained largely hidden.”

Excellent reporting and timely!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A gunman opened fire on police yesterday afternoon as they were serving a drug warrant in Philadelphia.  Six officers were wounded and later released from the hospital.  Philadelphia police Sgt. Eric Gripp said early this morning that the man was taken into custody after an hours-long standoff.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“The shooting began around 4:30 p.m. as officers went to a home in a north Philadelphia neighborhood of brick and stone row homes to serve a narcotics warrant in an operation “that went awry almost immediately,” Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross said.

Many officers “had to escape through windows and doors to get (away) from a barrage of bullets,” Ross said.

The six officers who were struck by gunfire have been released from hospitals, Gripp said.

Two other officers were trapped inside the house for about five hours after the shooting broke out but were freed by a SWAT team well after darkness fell on the residential neighborhood. Three people that officers had taken into custody in the house before the shooting started were also safely evacuated, police said.

“It’s nothing short of a miracle that we don’t have multiple officers killed today,” Ross said.

An attorney who said he has a relationship with the suspect identified him as Maurice Hill.

The attorney, Shaka Johnson, said in an interview after the arrest that Hill called him Wednesday evening, said he was barricaded in the house and that he “wanted to try to figure out a way out without any further violence coming to anyone or himself.”

“I could sense that he was panicking and trying to figure out, how do I get out of this situation alive,” Johnson said.

We thank God no one was killed!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In response to mounting pressure from business and community groups, President Trump yesterday unexpectedly put off new tariffs on many Chinese goods, including cellphones, laptop computers and toys, until after the start of the Christmas shopping season, acknowledging the effect that his protracted trade war with Beijing could have on Americans.  Mr. Trump pushed a 10 percent tariff on some imports to Dec. 15, and excluded others from it entirely. The stock market soared after the announcement, following weeks of volatility driven by fears that the standoff between the world’s two largest economies could hamper global economic growth.   As reported by the New York Times:

“The decision was the latest twist in a dispute during which China and the United States have alternately escalated tensions with tit-for-tat tariffs and softened their positions as they sought a deal. 

Mr. Trump continued to insist yesterday that the trade war was hurting only China. But he also admitted that there was potential for the new tariffs to inflict economic pain closer to home.

“Just in case they might have an impact on people,” the president told reporters, “what we’ve done is we’ve delayed it so that they won’t be relevant for the Christmas shopping season.”

Mr. Trump, frustrated that negotiations had failed to yield an agreement, said on Aug. 1 that the United States would impose the 10 percent tariff on $300 billion worth of Chinese imports on Sept. 1. That would be in addition to a 25 percent tariff already imposed on $250 billion of Chinese goods.

But on Tuesday, the United States trade representative’s office said that while a substantial amount of Chinese imports would be subject to the Sept. 1 levy as planned, various consumer electronics, shoes and other items would be spared until mid-December.

The office also said it was dropping 25 types of products from the tariff list altogether “based on health, safety, national security and other factors.” The items include car seats, shipping containers, cranes, certain fish, and Bibles and other religious literature, a spokesman said.”

The deal-maker in chief just blinked (thankfully)!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Ken Cuccinelli, Trump’s Acting Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said yesterday that the famous inscription on the Statue of Liberty welcoming immigrants into the country is about “people coming from Europe” and that America is looking to receive migrants “who can stand on their own two feet.”  The inscription comes from the Emma Lazarus’ poem, The New Colossus (see full text below) written in 1883 to raise money to construct the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal beneath the monument, served as a beacon to millions of immigrants who crossed past as they first entered the U.S. in New York Harbor. It reads, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”  As reported by the Associated Press:

“The comments from Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, came a day after the Trump administration announced it would seek to deny green cards to migrants who seek Medicaid, food stamps, housing vouchers or other forms of public assistance. The move — and Cuccinelli’s defense — prompted an outcry from Democrats and immigration advocates who said the policy would favor wealthier immigrants and disadvantage those from poorer countries in Latin America and Africa.

“This administration finally admitted what we’ve known all along: They think the Statue of Liberty only applies to white people,” tweeted former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, a Democratic presidential candidate.

The administration’s proposed policy shift comes as President Donald Trump is leaning more heavily into the restrictive immigration policies that have energized his core supporters and were central to his 2016 victory. He has also spoken disparagingly about immigration from majority black and Hispanic countries, including calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals when he launched his 2016 campaign. Last year, he privately branded Central American and African nations as “sh..hole” countries and he suggested the U.S. take in more immigrants from European countries like predominantly white Norway.

Cuccinelli said in an interview with CNN yesterday that the Emma Lazarus poem emblazoned on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty referred to “people coming from Europe where they had class based societies where people were considered wretched if they weren’t in the right class.”

…

Cuccinelli was asked earlier on NPR whether the words “give me your tired, your poor” were part of the American ethos. Cuccinelli responded: “They certainly are. Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge.”

A hard-line conservative from Virginia, Cuccinelli was a failed Republican candidate for governor in 2013 after serving as the state’s attorney general. He backed Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas for president in 2016 and for a time was a harsh critic of Trump.

He is one of a slew of immigration hardliners brought in by Trump to implement the president’s policies. He was appointed to the post in June in a temporary capacity, which doesn’t require Senate confirmation.

Trump, asked Tuesday about Cuccinelli’s comments on NPR, appeared to back him up.

“I don’t think it’s fair to have the American taxpayer paying for people to come into the United States,” Trump told reporters before boarding Air Force One for Pennsylvania. “I think we’re doing it right.”

Immigrant rights groups strongly criticized the Trump administration’s new rules for immigrants receiving public assistance, warning that the changes would scare immigrants away from asking for needed help. And they voiced concern that officials were being given too much authority to decide whether someone is likely to need public assistance in the future.

Another Democratic presidential candidate, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, also condemned Cuccinelli’s comments.

“Our values are etched in stone on the Statue of Liberty. They will not be replaced,” she tweeted. “And I will fight for those values and for our immigrant communities.”

Cuccinelli is another embarrassment for the Trump administration!

Tony

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The New Colossus

by Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Eugene Scalia

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, has a piece describing how the new nominee, Eugene Scalia, for Secretary of Labor, has battled workers and unions for most of his career.  Kristof  likens this to nominating Typhoid Mary to be health secretary.  Here is an excerpt:

“The official mission of the Labor Department emphasizes the promotion of “the welfare of the wage earners,” but Trump’s mission has been to promote the exploitation of wage earners.

So Eugene Scalia is a perfect fit. Scalia, a son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia who has fought unions on behalf of Walmart and other companies, is a talented and experienced litigator who upon assuming office will be in a position to disembowel labor.

There’s a larger issue: The relentless assault on labor has gained ground partly because, over the last half-century, many Americans — me included — became too disdainful of unions. It was common to scorn union leaders as corrupt Luddites who used ridiculous work rules to block modernization and undermine America’s economic competitiveness.

There’s something to those critiques. Yet it’s now clear that the collapse of unions — the share of employees belonging to unions has plunged to 10 percent in 2018 from 35 percent in the mid-1950s — has been accompanied by a rise of unchecked corporate power, a surge in income inequality and a decline in the well-being of working Americans.

For all their shortcomings, unions midwifed the birth of the middle class in the United States. The period of greatest union strength from the late 1940s through the 1950s was the time when economic growth was particularly robust and broadly shared. Most studies find that at least one-fifth of the rise in income inequality in the United States is attributable to the decline of labor unions.

Unions were also a formidable political force, and it’s perhaps not a surprise that their enfeebling has been accompanied by a rise in far-right policies that subsidize the wealthy, punish the working poor and exacerbate the income gap.

“Labor unions, and their ability to create a powerful collective voice for workers, played a huge role in building the world’s largest, richest middle class,” notes Steven Greenhouse in his superb, important and eminently readable new book about the labor movement, “Beaten Down, Worked Up.”

“Unions also played a crucial role,” Greenhouse adds, “in achieving many things that most Americans now take for granted: the eight-hour workday, employer-backed health coverage, paid vacations, paid sick days, safe workplaces. Indeed, unions were the major force in ending sweatshops, making coal mines safer, and eliminating many of the worst, most dangerous working conditions in the United States.”

Greenhouse, who covered labor for 19 years for The Times, acknowledges all the ways in which labor unions were maddening and retrograde. But he notes that corporations run amok when no one is minding them.

Union featherbedding and rigid work rules have been real problems. Yet without unions to check them, C.E.O.s engage in their own greedy featherbedding and underinvest in worker training, thus undermining America’s economic competitiveness.

Sure, it’s frustrating that teachers’ unions use political capital to defend incompetent teachers. In New York City, the union hailed its defense of a teacher who passed out in class, her breath reeking of alcohol, with even the principal unable to rouse her.

It’s also true that states with strong teachers’ unions, like Pennsylvania and Vermont, have far better student outcomes than states with feeble unions, like South Carolina and Mississippi. Teachers’ unions have also been heroic advocates for early childhood education, and Red for Ed strikers forced states like West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona to improve their school systems.

Remember, too, that manufacturing workers in Germany are unionized and earn $10 more an hour than their American counterparts. Mercedes-Benz autoworkers earn $67 an hour in wages and benefits, and German workers are guaranteed a presence on corporate boards. Unions don’t detract from Germany’s economic system and competitiveness but are a pillar of it.

The bigger picture is that America’s working class is in desperate shape. Average hourly wages are actually lower today, after inflation, than they were in 1973, and the bottom 90 percent of Americans have seen incomes grow more slowly than the overall economy over the last four decades. The reasons are complex, but one is the decline of unions — for unions benefit not only their own members but also raise wage levels for workers generally.

So I’ve come to believe that we need stronger private-sector unions — yet the Trump administration continues to fight them. Greenhouse notes that nearly 20 percent of rank-and-file union activists are fired during organizing drives, because the penalties for doing so are so weak: A corporation may eventually be fined $5,000 or $10,000 for such a wrongful dismissal, but that is a negligible cost of doing business if it averts unionization.

That’s why we need a secretary of labor who cares about laborers. Trump campaigned in 2016 as a voice for forgotten workers, but he consistently sides with large corporations against workers, and his nomination of Scalia would amplify the sad and damaging war on unions.”

Workers of the country UNITE!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Trump administration yesterday announced that it would change the way the Endangered Species Act is applied, significantly weakening the nation’s bedrock conservation law and making it harder to protect wildlife from threats posed by climate change.   As reported by the New York Times:

“The new rules would make it easier to remove a species from the endangered list and weaken protections for threatened species, the classification one step below endangered. And, for the first time, regulators would be allowed to conduct economic assessments — for instance, estimating lost revenue from a prohibition on logging in a critical habitat — when deciding whether a species warrants protection.

Critically, the changes would also make it more difficult for regulators to factor in the effects of climate change on wildlife when making those decisions because those threats tend to be decades away, not immediate.

Over all, the revised rules appear very likely to clear the way for new mining, oil and gas drilling, and development in areas where protected species live.

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said the changes would modernize the Endangered Species Act — which is credited with rescuing the bald eagle, the grizzly bear and the American alligator from the brink of extinction — and increase transparency in its application. “The act’s effectiveness rests on clear, consistent and efficient implementation,” he said in a statement Monday.

The new rules are expected to go into effect next month.

Environmental groups, Democratic state attorneys general and Democrats in Congress denounced the changes and vowed to challenge them in Congress and in the courts.

Maura Healey, the attorney general of Massachusetts, called the changes “reckless” and said states would “do everything we can to oppose these actions.”

Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico, the top Democrat on the committee that oversees the Interior Department’s budget, said Democrats were considering invoking the Congressional Review Act, a 1996 law that gives Congress broad authority to invalidate rules established by federal agencies, to block the changes.

The Endangered Species Act has been regulators’ most powerful tool for protecting fish, plants and wildlife ever since it was signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon in 1973. The peregrine falcon, the humpback whale, the Tennessee purple coneflower and the Florida manatee all would very likely have disappeared without it, scientists say.”

There is no limit to how Trump will hurt all that has been good in American government.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

This morning, the Department of Homeland Security officially published a change to what’s known as the “public charge” rule that would make it much harder to apply for a green card or earn a visa. The new policy, which is set to go into effect in mid-October, expands the definition of what would make an applicant likely to become a “public charge,” someone who the government has deemed would be dependent on it, thus rendering them ineligible for legal permanent residency status.  As reported by The Huffington Post:

“In October 2018, the DHS released its proposal for expanding the criteria for what constitutes a “public charge” to include those receiving non-cash government services, like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), when evaluating applications for visas and legal permanent residency. Currently, people are generally only considered public charges if they use cash assistance or long-term institutional care the government is funding.

The rule change also creates other factors to be weighed in consideration of the “totality of circumstances” aspect of the rule when evaluating green cards and visa applications including English proficiency, income level and health conditions. (Refugees and asylum-seekers, among others, are exempted from the rule.)

After the release of the DHS proposal, the rule went through a 60-day public comment period, during which the department received over 260,000 comments about the proposal. It reached the desk of the Office of Management and Budget on July 12. 

Currently, the limited public charge definition means the regulation is not often used to justify the rejection of an application. 

The administration is purporting to solve the “the alleged but illusory problem that immigrants are eating up taxpayer funds,” said Doug Rand, an Obama administration veteran who co-founded Boundless Immigration, a technology company that helps immigrants get green cards and citizenship. Rand added the change “makes no sense,” as undocumented immigrants are not allowed to access federal public benefits. He also said that the proposal was the administration’s effort at making “profound” changes to the immigration system without congressional approval.

A study released in July found that 8.3 million children, most of whom are citizens, enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program or SNAP are at potential risk of being disenrolled, with more than 5 million of those children having specific medical needs. The researchers predict that between nearly 1 and 2 million children with specific medical needs will ultimately be disenrolled as a result of the rule change.

The rule’s public benefits component will not be applied retroactively, meaning those seeking green cards and visas who were enrolled in these public benefits programs before the rule was enacted will not be penalized for it.

The English proficiency criteria “privileges people from certain countries where English is already spoken,” according to Jackie Vimo, a policy analyst at the National Immigration Law Center.

The change to the public charge is one of multiple instances of the Trump administration attempting to change immigration policy without having to go through Congress. There’s also the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s proposal released on May 10 to halt eligibility for families with members holding different immigration statuses, or “mixed-status” families, in public and Section 8 housing, as well as other changes to the public charge rule and its enforcement.

Together, these changes “turn our immigration system into green cards for the highest bidder,” Vimo said.

While only those seeking green cards and visas are impacted by the rule, experts warn of a “chilling effect” that will prompt eligible immigrants to unenroll in government services. The chilling effect has already begun due to the fear generated by the proposal, ever since the idea was first reported on in February 2018.

A study from May found that one in seven adults in immigrant families have avoided public benefits programs, including some who would not be affected by the rule.

 Rand believes that the “chilling effect is part of the intent.” 

 “A very large number of people are likely to disenroll from public benefits from which they are perfectly entitled under U.S. law,” he said.

In a letter sent July 24 obtained by HuffPost, 18 state attorney generals, spearheaded by Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson (D), claimed the Department of Homeland Security “entirely failed” in their estimation of the cost of their proposed public charge rule change. The lawmakers requested a meeting with the agency to further discuss the officials’ “significant concerns about the severe impact” of the proposed rule on their residents. They argue the rules would cause “extensive injury” to the economies of their states and to their states’ residents — it would cause loss of health insurance, medical access, and food and cash benefits. 

“If implemented as proposed, the rules will result in a reduction of total economic output, a drop in workers’ wages, and elimination of jobs in our states,” the attorney generals wrote. The OMB did not accept their request for a meeting.

Ferguson told HuffPost that they are “exploring our legal options” and “actively preparing for a potential lawsuit” and that he is “confident you’ll see litigation from the states on the matter.”

Another sad day for immigrants!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Anthony Scaramucci, aka “The Mooch,” the former White House communications director for President Trump has in recent weeks turned into a sharp critic of his ex-boss. Over the weekend, he compared Trumps to the most notorious nuclear disaster in history. 

“We are now in the early episodes of ‘Chernobyl’ on HBO, where the reactor is melting down and the apparatchiks are trying to figure out whether to cover it up or start the clean-up process,” Scaramucci told Axios, comparing Trump’s presidency to the TV drama about the 1986 nuclear disaster in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union.  And he said the president’s ongoing “meltdown” could lead to him getting replaced on the top of the Republican ticket for next year’s presidential election. 

“A couple more weeks like this and ‘country over party’ is going to require the Republicans to replace the top of the ticket in 2020,” he said.

Last month, Scaramucci called Trump’s attacks on four women of color in Congress “racist and unacceptable.”

Last week, he called Trump’s visit to El Paso, Texas, to see survivors and first responders of the mass shooting there a “catastrophe” and “a bad reflection on the country.”

And on Saturday, he warned that Trump will eventually turn on the entire country.

In his latest critique of the president, Scaramucci said that unless Trump changes his tune soon, Republicans ― including him ― will start to look for a “replacement” to run in 2020. 

“Right now, it’s an unspeakable thing,” he said. “But if he keeps it up, it will no longer be unspeakable.”

White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham told Axios that it sounds like Scaramucci’s “feelings are hurt.”

Scaramucci fired back on Twitter: “I don’t get my feelings hurt.”

Go get him, Mooch!

Tony