Month: January 2018

WASHINGTON ― During his first State of the Union address, President Donald Trump took credit for the achievements of the black president who preceded him.

“And something I’m very proud of, African-American unemployment stands at the lowest rate ever recorded,” Trump said as the crowd packed into the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday night went wild. Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) gave the line a standing ovation.

But members of the Congressional Black Caucus, dressed in kente cloth, were unmoved. They didn’t clap. They didn’t emote at all. They sat there and gave Trump a blank stare.

Their lack of enthusiasm is understandable. The White House hasn’t detailed which of the Trump administration’s policies are to thank for the drop in black unemployment. And many political observers have noted that the unemployment rate began dropping before Trump took office, during the Obama administration.

“It’s not as if black unemployment was 18 percent under Barack Obama and, as soon as Trump took office, it plummeted. Black unemployment fell fairly consistently from 2010 on, as did the rates for whites and Hispanics,” wrote Philip Bump for The Washington Post.

“From January to December 2017, the unemployment rate among black Americans fell 1 percentage point. During the same period in 2016, it fell the same amount. In 2015, it fell 1.9 points. The previous year, it fell 1.5 points. The year before that, it fell 1.8 points,” Bump said.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) invoked rapper Jay-Z’s recent comments that Trump was “missing the whole point.”

“I probably followed the mode somewhat of Jay-Z,” she told HuffPost. “I frankly believe there’s black unemployment, and black unemployment among young African-American men, who need more than praise about unemployment. They need job training, they need education, starting from primary and secondary schools of which neighborhoods they live in that the schools are not where they should be. They need support for their families.”

“So I thought it was disingenuous, and it was placating, and insulting, to be very honest with you. Where’s the compassion and the passion for comprehensive issues dealing with our community? Gun violence? The need for housing?”

Igor Bobic contributed reporting.

This story has been updated with a quote from Sheila Jackson Lee.

WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump has repeatedly said, falsely, that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act he signed into law last month is the biggest tax cut in American history. 

Fact-checkers have repeatedly said he’s wrong, and yet, in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Trump persisted. 

“Just as I promised the American People from this podium 11 months ago, we enacted the biggest tax cuts and reforms in American history,” Trump told a joint session of Congress. 

On paper, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act costs $1.5 trillion over 10 years, though it will cost about $2 trillion if lawmakers prevent the expiration of individual tax cuts scheduled for 2025. But even if they do that, it still won’t be the biggest cut in history.  

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which opposed the tax bill because it will widen federal budget deficits, has estimated that for the Trump tax cut to be the biggest ― in terms of its size relative to gross domestic product ― it would need to reduce revenue by $6.8 trillion. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act currently ranks as the eighth biggest by that measure, and fourth biggest according to how many dollars it costs the Treasury. 

Trump could maybe claim that by saying “biggest tax cuts and reforms,” he’s not simply lying about the scale of the new tax law. Some of the bigger tax cuts on the list, including two signed into law by former President Barack Obama, simply cut taxes without making changes to the structure of the federal tax code as major as the ones in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. 

A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to HuffPOst’s request for comment. 

While Trump’s tax cut may not be the biggest in history, it’s probably the most divisive. Republicans rushed the bill through Congress without a single Democratic vote. Democratic lawmakers in the California State Legislature are trying to subvert the tax bill’s limit on deductions for state and local taxes, while the Democratic governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are threatening a long-shot lawsuit over the provision. 

Trump also touted recent bonuses that several large companies have said they’re giving workers because of the tax bill. 

“Since we passed tax cuts, roughly 3 million workers have already gotten tax cut bonuses ― many of them thousands of dollars per worker,” Trump said. 

Trump was apparently citing a Republican tally of announcements by more than 200 companies employing approximately that many people, which is about 1.8 percent of the U.S. labor force.

Though the bonus announcements have garnered massive press attention, the payouts so far represent a tiny fraction of the tax savings companies expect from the tax reform. HuffPost’s parent company Verizon, for instance, said it would dole out more than $400 million worth of stock awards to its employees, and stands to save as much as $4 billion in taxes. 

The White House previously estimated that corporate tax cuts would eventually boost workers’ earnings by at least $4,000 annually, a figure Trump cited during his speech. The higher pay would come about thanks to increased business investment that makes workers more productive, not bonuses, though most economists think the $4,000 figure is unrealistic. 

Trump didn’t repeat past claims that the new tax law would benefit the middle class and not the rich. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has estimated the wealthiest 5 percent of taxpayers would see the largest percentage increase in after-tax income under the law.

The president capped the tax portion of his speech with a note of optimism, as though he’d fulfilled a campaign promise to make supporters’ wildest dreams come true. 

“If you work hard, if you believe in yourself, if you believe in America, then you can dream anything, you can be anything, and together, we can achieve anything,” he said. 

This story has been updated to include more remarks from Trump’s speech.

WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump signed an executive order keeping the detention center at Guantanamo Bay open, formally ending an unsuccessful Obama administration effort to close the controversial military facility. Trump’s executive order will cement the existence of a detention facility that has fueled international disagreements in the 16 years it has been open. 

The White House announced the move ahead the president’s State of the Union address on Tuesday. The announcement came as the government revealed in court filings its intent to “demolish” part of the detention facility to clear the way for future renovations. 

“I just signed an order directing Secretary [Jim] Mattis to re-examine our military detention policy and to keep open the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay,” Trump said during his address to Congress.

Trump, shortly after winning the 2016 election, said he’d keep the controversial facility open and “load it up with some bad dudes.” Trump has yet to send any prisoners to the detention center, but he said in November that he’d “certainly consider” sending the suspect of an Oct. 31 New York City terror attack to the facility.

But his campaign promises have smacked into reality: Guantanamo is really bad at convicting alleged terrorists. The federal court system regularly convicts terror suspects, but the military commissions system is deeply troubled. The trial against the alleged perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attack has dragged on for years, and there’s not even a firm start date.  

“Would love to send the NYC terrorist to Guantanamo,” Trump tweeted in early November, “but statistically that process takes much longer than going through the Federal system.”

“The notion that Guantanamo is worthwhile would be laughable if it wasn’t so tragic,” Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, said in a statement. “In addition to the incalculable human suffering, it costs taxpayers more than $445 million a year to detain the 41 men now there. Congress should prevent President Trump from continuing unlawful detention and unconstitutional military commissions. And we all must pledge — not one person more in Guantanamo, not in our names.”

Trump’s move is more of a political statement than a practical change. President Barack Obama’s 2009 executive order to close the prison, which he warned was a recruiting ground for terrorist groups at the expense of taxpayers, faced strong opposition in Congress that prevented him from transferring detainees to the United States. 

The Obama administration managed to transfer nearly 200 inmates from the facility. There are just 41 inmates at Guantanamo today. 

Obama, in his final days in office, said that “history will cast a harsh judgement” on the United States for not closing Guantanamo, and said Republicans had “placed politics above the ongoing costs to taxpayers, our relationships with our allies, and the threat posed to U.S. national security by leaving open a facility that governments around the world condemn and which hinders rather than helps our fight against terrorism.” 

Attorneys for Guantanamo detainees are now trying to use a Trump tweet stating that “there should be no further releases” from Guantanamo as a way to challenge their clients’ ongoing detention. 

This post has been updated with more details about the order, background on Guantanamo Bay and a statement from Hina Shamsi.

Just minutes before President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, Hillary Clinton wrote a lengthy post on Facebook addressing the “inappropriate behavior” of an employee for her 2008 campaign and her response to it at the time.

“I very much understand the question I’m being asked as to why I let an employee on my 2008 campaign keep his job despite his inappropriate workplace behavior,” Clinton wrote late on Tuesday. “The short answer is this: If I had it to do again, I wouldn’t.”

Clinton allowed a top adviser for her 2008 presidential campaign to keep his job after she learned he had been accused of sexual harassment, The New York Times reported on Friday. 

Clinton notably did not explicitly apologize in her post for not having fired the staffer at the time, but instead pointed to how norms around sexual harassment had changed over the years. 

“We all need to be thinking about the complexities of sexual harassment, and be willing to challenge ourselves to reassess and question our own views,” Clinton wrote. “In other words, everyone’s now on their second chance, both the offenders and the decision-makers.”

“We can’t go back, but we can certainly look back, informed by the present,” she added. “We can acknowledge that even those of us who have spent much of our life thinking about gender issues and who have firsthand experiences of navigating a male-dominated industry or career may not always get it right.”

It’s worth noting that Clinton posted the note just minutes before Trump’s State of the Union speech began. Nick Merrill, Clinton’s spokesman, told HuffPost she did not intend to bury the post amid all the State of the Union coverage.

“That’s when she finished it,” Merrill said, adding that he expected Clinton’s post to get plenty of press coverage and that she would likely tweet about it at some point after the speech.

Amanda Terkel contributed reporting.

WASHINGTON — She was the silent one at the edge of the table, a woman in a gray suit with a red pin emblazoned with her aunt’s name: Recy.

This was Rose Gunter, the niece of Recy Taylor, who died in December. The pin was courtesy of Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, a New Jersey Democrat whose office had a couple hundred of the pins produced.

“Recy” doesn’t have the same cachet as “MeToo” or “TimesUp.” “Recy” isn’t a movement or a cause, at least not yet. “Recy” is just a reminder of how particularly vulnerable black women are to sexual assault and of how little they have figured thus far into the broader culture’s reckoning with misogyny in all its manifestations. It’s an unfamiliar name on a button, reminding you to Google it later on.  

We were at a dinner Monday night in the back corner of Acadiana, a swanky Creole eatery in Northwest D.C. The event was organized by Watson Coleman, on whose invitation Gunter would be attending President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address. Sitting around a table covered with oysters, deviled eggs and biscuits were six women who are highly respected in their fields: Fatima Graves, president of the National Women’s Law Center; Kimberly Peeler-Allen, co-founder of Higher Heights for America; Elizabeth Meyer, founder of the Women’s March on New Jersey; Beth Hubbard, a documentary film producer; Enchanta Jackson, the organizing director at Color of Change; and Watson Coleman.

It was the seventh woman, Gunter, who got my attention by virtue of her silence. Many of us ― including most of the women at the dinner table ― had not heard of Recy Taylor before Oprah Winfrey name-dropped her in a speech at this year’s Golden Globe Awards.

Taylor was kidnapped, blindfolded and raped at gunpoint in the back of a Chevy by six white men in 1944. The men released Taylor after she promised to stay silent about the assault. But Taylor refused to be silenced. She told her family about the assault, and soon the incident had gone national. Me too, she said, years before Gwyneth Paltrow said it. Time’s up, she said, years before Natalie Portman said it.

There was nothing abnormal about Taylor’s assault or the lack of justice she and her family received afterward. In fact, the rape of black women was often a counterpart to the lynching of black men, a political tactic used to silence a community. There’s that word again. Silence.

Black women have gone missing from the #MeToo conversation, a different but still disconcerting kind of silence. “The absence of black women from the spotlight of #MeToo has historical roots that predate Taylor’s rape,” wrote Soraya McDonald for “The Undefeated.” “Taylor’s story isn’t just about her. It’s about thousands of women just like her whose stories we may never know, who were victimized and brutalized without recognition or recompense for their injuries.”

At dinner on Monday, Watson Coleman seemed aware of the absence. “Women are very prominent in this moment and this movement,” she said after taking a swallow of Malbec. “And we had to be very careful that it didn’t just have one face. When [black women] thought about feminism and the feminist movement, we automatically thought of other women. But we were there in it. We were being affected by it.”

And black women were in some ways the cause of national feminist movements, Watson Coleman noted. After Taylor told her family what had happened to her, an investigator for the NAACP named Rosa Parks came to the small town of Abbeville, Ala., to push for prosecution of the attackers. Parks was run out of town by the sheriff. But, despite the failure to achieve any legal redress, Taylor’s assault gave rise to a national campaign against the brutal rape of black women by white men.

“People don’t think of us as having suffered. People don’t think of us as having the same suffering experiences and no justice,” said Watson Coleman. “This is a classic example of that.”

The conversation at the table shifted from Trump’s current policies to how things seemed a bit easier under President Barack Obama to youth engagement in politics. Throughout it all, Gunter didn’t say a word. She’d nod her head. She’d smile. She’d laugh. But she didn’t speak. Finally, Graves addressed Gunter. She said she was excited to share a table with Gunter, “especially right now when our stories are finally being told.”

Gunter gave a quiet smile and a nod.

“That’s that silent power,” said Hubbard.

The conversation stalled as people took bites of their food. And I took my shot.

“What are your thoughts on all of this?’ I asked Gunter, who cared for her aunt in her final years. “You haven’t said that much, and I’m interested in what you have to say.”

“About this conversation?” she countered.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It was truthful,” she said before pausing to collect her thoughts. After a few seconds, she sighed and gave me a smile.“I can’t think of what I want to say right now. I’m not a talker.”

That didn’t stop the questions from flying in now that she had spoken. What would Taylor have said about the #MeToo movement, Meyer asked. “I think she’d be relieved in some way,” said Gunter. She’d be overjoyed, Gunter added, and maybe even a little satisfied.

We learned Gunter didn’t know about her aunt’s rape until 2010, which sparked a conversation on how the rapes of black women are often “family secrets.”

“She’d only talk about that with her baby brother,” Gunter said.

“So how did you find out?” asked Meyer.

“A newspaper came out when the book came out,” Gunter replied, referring to At the Dark End of the Street, a book detailing Park’s legacy as an activist and Taylor’s assault. Shortly after the book was published, Abbeville’s current mayor, the county government and the Alabama Legislature issued apologies.

“Did any of the family members apologize?” asked Watson Coleman.

“In fact, they really acted like it didn’t happen,” said Hubbard. 

“Yeah, but it did,” said Watson Coleman.

Gunter nodded, and as the questions came flooding in, she kept shifting in her seat. She seemed unaccustomed to the spotlight. She preferred her silence.

Not all quiet is created equal. There’s a difference between words suppressed and words withheld. On Tuesday night, Gunter will again sit in silence, dressed in all black. This time in front of a man who bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy.” A man whose presidency has been an act of aggression against people of color in general and black women in particular — black women, who suffer from higher rates of sexual and domestic violence than any other demographic, who are the fastest-growing part of the prison population, who are more likely than their white counterparts to be the sole providers for their households and to live below the poverty line.

Gunter will sit silently in the face of a further assault on her rights and her aunt’s legacy, and her silence will be power.

WASHINGTON ― Ever since President Donald Trump signed a massive corporate tax cut into law last month, some of the biggest American companies have been touting pay increases as evidence of profits translating into meaningful gains for workers.

But there’s a problem with this spin: Nearly all of the companies involved, from Walmart to Wells Fargo, were wildly profitable before the legislation passed, and the benefits they’re now promoting constitute just a tiny fraction those profits. Compared with the massive gains analysts expect to accrue to shareholders as a result of the new tax law, these perks really are, as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said earlier this month, little more than “crumbs.”

Whatever revenues corporations have left after paying for workers, supplies and other costs of doing business ― including taxes ― gets booked as corporate profit, enriching the company’s owners. Nothing in the tax code prior to the GOP overhaul prevented companies from turning over any of these profits to their employees in the form of higher wages or bonuses. But by slashing the corporate tax rate rom 35 percent to 21 percent, the bill did make sure that a much larger share stays with shareholders. For some companies, the difference could mean billions of dollars a year.

Consider Verizon, HuffPost’s parent company, which said it would give all its workers 50 shares, which will vest over two years. With about 161,000 employees, at $54 per share at the time of the announcement, the total benefit would come to about $434 million. Since the company said it would save $3.5 billion to $4 billion from the tax bill, the stock award represents somewhere between 10 percent and 28 percent of Verizon’s annual tax savings, and just 1.4 percent of the company’s profit in 2017.

Meanwhile, Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, announced it would spend an additional $700 million over the next two years on employee pay, thanks to the tax bill. That’s less than 5 percent of the company’s most recent annual profit. Walmart announced the closure of 63 Sam’s Club stores, which will result in hundreds of layoffs, the same week.

“Companies are probably more interested in a short-term public relations boost than anything else,” said Matt Gardner, a senior fellow with the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. “We can’t know whether these decisions had been made prior to the tax cuts.”

None of this is preventing House Republicans from attempting to take credit for every dollar workers receive. “For the families who are living paycheck-to-paycheck, an increase in take-home-pay and a $1,000 bonus to start out the new year ― these are not crumbs,” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said in an email blast.

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) is keeping an official running tally of more than 250 companies that have announced pay increases because of the tax bill. Of the 48 companies from the list that also ranked among the 500 biggest firms by revenue in 2017, only 18 are actually raising wages, as of Tuesday morning. Most are doling out small, one-time bonuses and improved retirement benefits. Some haven’t announced pay increases of any kind.

Eleven of the 18 firms that did announce raises are banks, mostly bumping hourly pay to $15 ― which they would likely be doing without the advantageous tax changes.

One of the banks on the GOP list, Capital One, didn’t mention the tax bill when it told employees their hourly pay would rise to $15. A bank spokesperson told HuffPost the raises had nothing to do with taxes.

“As we noted to our associates, over the past year, we’ve focused on raising base pay as part of our long term pay strategy,” the spokesperson said. “Seeing top competitors move toward a minimum wage of $15/hour created an optimal opportunity for us to accelerate our pay strategy so that we can continue to maintain our competitive edge in attracting and retaining great talent.”

In other words, the Capital One pay increase had more to do with labor market conditions than a desire to share tax bill savings. The median hourly pay for a bank teller in 2016 was $13.10, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and several banks had been slowly raising teller pay of late. In its announcement celebrating the tax bill, PNC acknowledged that its new $15-an-hour minimum wage would complete a “goal that has been underway for some time.” In their announcements, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan, SunTrust, BB&T, and U.S. Bancorp all credited the tax bill for moving with their peers to a $15 minimum wage.

SunTrust also said it would hand out $1,000 employee bonuses ― but only to workers who completed a “financial fitness program.” Like other banks, SunTrust is raising its minimum wage to $15 an hour. The company also said it would offer unspecified “merit based pay increases for certain other hourly teammates.” SunTrust notched $2.3 billion in earnings in 2017.

Neither Bank of America nor American Express, which the GOP also listed as evidence that “tax reform works,” are raising wages as a result of the bill. Bank of America announced that it will pay a one-time bonus of $1,000 to 145,000 workers ― a total of less than 1 percent of the company’s $18.2 billion profit from 2017 alone. American Express said it would make an unspecified “incremental contribution to our employee profit-sharing plans.”

Though Republicans cite Hartford Insurance Group’s plan to give a $1,000 bonus to 9,500 employees ― an amount equal to about 3 percent of the dividends the company pays out each year ― the company’s CEO sounded ambivalent about the overall consequences of the tax bill itself, worrying it would spur a “race to the bottom” in tax policy around the world.

“I think we need to ultimately still recognize that the governments, the states need a certain percentage of revenue that supports basic goods and services,” Christopher Swift said at a Connecticut Business and Industry Association conference.

It’s possible the tax law itself created an incentive for companies to pay bonuses before the end of their fiscal years, which for some firms match the calendar year and for others extend through February. Since wages are deducted from a corporation’s taxable income, and the corporate tax rate is sharply lower for fiscal 2018, firms have an incentive to boost compensation earlier in order to reduce the amount of income subject to the higher rate. 

“At the end of the day, total compensation for workers may be about the same as it would otherwise be, but the corporation gets tax savings from making the payment sooner rather than later,” Daniel Hemel of the University of Chicago law school and David Kamin of the New York University law school wrote in a blog post on Saturday.

Several companies said last fall that they’d use a tax windfall for stock dividends and buybacks, not for higher wages, simply converting it into shareholder wealth. But Republicans insisted workers would eventually benefit from the law. White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett wrote in an October paper that a lower corporate tax rate would spur investment that would ultimately result in wage increases of at least $4,000 annually. The wage hikes weren’t supposed to spontaneously appear in press releases; the theory is that companies would make new capital investments that would eventually make workers more productive, and ultimately more valuable.

If the tax bill is sparking increased investment, it’s probably too soon to tell. One influential analysis, by the financial firm Moody’s, said not to expect a surge.

“We do not expect a meaningful boost to business investment,” Moody’s analysts said in a report last week, arguing that most companies would use their increased profits to purchase shares of their own stock, enriching company owners, or by just paying off debt more quickly.

Dean Baker, a labor expert with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said the lack of raises among the corporate announcements suggested the new tax law hadn’t really altered the labor market.

“The fact they’re giving bonuses indicates they don’t feel confident enough the tax cut’s changing the market environment where they will have to raise wages,” Baker said.

This article has been updated to include a comment from Daniel Hemel and David Kamin. 

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