“In comparison with the four criminal cases he faces, the stakes in the civil case are smaller but only when compared to a prison sentence. Judge Arthur Engoron ruled in September that Trump and the Trump Organization had committed fraud, now the matter at hand was determining the appropriate punishment. The AG’s office has asked Engoron to impose $370 million in penalties on the Trump Organization and to impose sanctions that would bar Trump from the New York real-estate industry for life. (It’s also asking for five-year bans for his sons Eric and Don Jr., who currently run the company day-to-day.) Over the course of a more than three-month trial, the state’s lawyers had presented mountains of evidence to show how Trump routinely fudged numbers — property values, cash reserves, even the square footage of his triplex penthouse in Trump Tower — for profit and vanity. In so doing, they had managed to accomplish a feat that eluded generations of financial journalists, biographers, and political antagonists. Trump may never have been the billionaire business genius that he played on TV, but until this case, no one had ever been able to definitively prove he was a phony.” (Andrew Rice/NYMag)
“Big banks have hired one of the country’s top trial lawyers and are preparing to sue the Federal Reserve — a nearly unthinkable challenge — if sweeping new industry regulations aren’t watered down. Eugene Scalia, the son of the former Supreme Court justice and a well-known conservative litigator, is quietly drawing up a lawsuit seeking to block the proposed rules on behalf of the Bank Policy Institute, a trade group that represents JPMorgan, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, and others, people familiar with the matter said. It would be the first time in recent memory that the industry has sued the Fed, and a departure from standard halls-of-power persuasion efforts that try to avoid antagonizing its chief regulator. The stakes are high: Banks warn they’ll pull back from lending, particularly to small businesses and borrowers with lower incomes or credit scores. Some of that is posturing, but the rules would eat into bank profits, pushing them in some lines of business below the returns they have promised shareholders.” (Liz Hoffman/semafor)
“Candidates for the presidency must persuade the Taiwan electorate that they will manage relations with mainland China properly. “Properly” means in accordance with mainstream public opinion, which prefers to maintain the political status quo of de facto independence in order to avoid a military conflict with China. For candidates that view Taiwan as part of China and who nominally support unification at some future point, this requires standing up to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and resisting pressure to accept its definition of Taiwan’s status (as a province of the People’s Republic of China) or to enter premature political talks on unification. For candidates who support Taiwan independence, this requires assuring the electorate that they will not take provocative actions that would lead to a Chinese attack on Taiwan or severely damage cross-strait trade and investment ties, which are critical to Taiwan’s economy.” (Phillip C. Saunders/The Diplomat)
“Archeologists have uncovered a cluster of lost cities in the Amazon rainforest that was home to at least 10,000 farmers around 2,000 years ago. A series of earthen mounds and buried roads in Ecuador was first noticed more than two decades ago by archaeologist Stéphen Rostain. But at the time, ‘I wasn’t sure how it all fit together,’ said Rostain, one of the researchers who reported on the finding Thursday in the journal Science. Recent mapping by laser-sensor technology revealed those sites to be part of a dense network of settlements and connecting roadways, tucked into the forested foothills of the Andes, that lasted about 1,000 years … The settlements were occupied by the Upano people between around 500 B.C. and 300 to 600 A.D. — a period roughly contemporaneous with the Roman Empire in Europe, the researchers found. Residential and ceremonial buildings erected on more than 6,000 earthen mounds were surrounded by agricultural fields with drainage canals. The largest roads were 33 feet (10 meters) wide and stretched for 6 to 12 miles (10 to 20 kilometers). While it’s difficult to estimate populations, the site was home to at least 10,000 inhabitants — and perhaps as many as 15,000 or 30,000 at its peak, said archaeologist Antoine Dorison, a study co-author at the same French institute. That’s comparable to the estimated population of Roman-era London, then Britain’s largest city.” (Christina Larson/APNews)
“The violence that Israel is unleashing is the same kind of violence that made the West the dominant force in the international system. And it is Israel’s grounding in a Western colonial order that’s used to justify the savagery it rains down on Gaza. Violence that is unfortunate but necessary to defend the frontiers of ‘civilization’ from ‘barbarism’ is a long-standing principle of Western powers. And it is by that principle that Israel demands support for its campaign in Gaza. The New York Times reported that in diplomatic conversations and public statements, Israel officials ‘have cited past Western military actions in urban areas dating from World War II to the post-9/11 wars against terrorism…to help justify a campaign against Hamas that is claiming thousands of Palestinian lives.’ But the charge of genocide South Africa has brought at the International Court of Justice in hope of halting Israel’s campaign is a reminder of Huntington’s observation that non-Westerners never forgot how the West was made, nor are they willing to accept its prerogatives. Many in the Global South see in Israel’s violence an echo of their own historical brutalization and humiliation at the hands of Western power. South Africa is not only stepping up to confront Israel; it is effectively challenging the United States, Israel’s key enabler, which aggressively blocks any attempts to hold Israel accountable to international law. By filing suit at the ICJ, South Africa is telling the world that the US and its allies cannot be trusted to halt Israel’s genocidal campaign.” (Tony Karon/The Nation)
“Two years after the expiration of the expanded child tax credit, a pandemic-era policy that temporarily but dramatically lowered child poverty rates, federal lawmakers are close to a bipartisan deal that may reinstate some version of the credit. Leaders of the tax-writing committees in the House and Senate are working on a deal to expand the existing child tax credit in exchange for extending certain business tax credits, including a popular credit related to research and development that expired at the end of 2022. Punchbowl News reported on Tuesday that the tax deal on the table may end up in the $50 to $80 billion range. A source familiar with negotiations told me that the leaders of the Senate Finance Committee and House Ways and Means Committee had not yet agreed to a final number, but that it would likely be a multiyear deal, rather than making the credits permanent.” (Grace Segers/TNR)
“This year will be a make or break for several of Africa’s leading economies. Some will exploit the window of opportunity created by the current debt crisis to make lasting positive reforms and strengthen their fiscal capacity. Many more will miss the opportunity and instead implement the minimum reforms needed to keep financial support from the IMF, the World Bank, and other donors flowing. Inflation will ease across the board in 2024, but the lasting effects of the hit on households’ purchasing power will endure. Currency depreciations in countries dependent on food imports will exacerbate the squeeze on household incomes. The projected 4.1% increase in regional GDP, is respectable, but will barely make a dent on per capita incomes. Only Sudan and Equatorial Guinea will see their economies contract. East Africa will be the continent’s growth engine in 2024. Growth will mostly come from natural resource sectors (especially hydrocarbons), transportation and logistics (including infrastructure investments), resurgent tourism in Eastern and Southern Africa, and agriculture. In addition, this might be the year that Gulf cash comes to the rescue in a few of the region’s economies (e.g., Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Tanzania). China’s slowdown, subdued global commodity prices, policy-related barriers to investment and trade, and political risk will continue to weigh down many regional economies. While Africa will host 12 of the world’s 20 fastest growing economies in 2024, much of the growth will be from a low base (made even lower by the COVID shock and its aftermath) and will barely make a dent on poverty rates in the face of rapid population growth. In addition, several countries’ growth will come from investments in hydrocarbons and other natural resources that create very few jobs and have limited multiplier effects on the wider economy.” (Ken Opalo/TAP)
“I loved The White Lotus — not as much as its first season, but still, Mike White is the best argument for why writers should be allowed to have a writers room of one. Andor did not feel like a Star Wars money grab. It felt like Tony Gilroy walked in and said, “I’m going to go in a whole other direction. Let me tell a story about how a rebellion starts, about what turns a normal person into Martin Luther King.” There’s not a bad decision in the whole fucking show. The Last of Us? Right after Chernobyl, I had lunch with Craig [Mazin] and asked what he was doing next. He goes, ‘HBO gave me this video game.’ I went, ‘You’re going from Chernobyl to a video game?!’ He goes, ‘Yeah. Even worse, it’s about zombies.’ I was like, ‘What are you doing?!’ He goes, ‘It’s going to surprise you.’ And man, did it ever. It’s an absolute work of art. In almost any other year, I’d vote for it. But the obvious choice is Succession. This season was its best — the best written, best directed, best acted. They killed the patriarch in episode three?! The scene on the balcony with Tom and Shiv?! This is an all-time top three show.” (Anonymous/THR)
“‘Negotiators Inch Closer to a Child Tax Credit Deal,’ reads a headline at Semafor. The enthusiasm around a restoration of the 2021 CTC expansion that cut child poverty in half is palpable. In campaign speeches, Joe Biden repeatedly cites that expansion as a signature policy achievement; while he acknowledges that ‘the other side … went ahead and blocked’ the move to make it permanent (leaving out Joe Manchin’s role in that), he always follows up with ‘we’re going to get it back.’ Is this emerging deal a sign that indeed, we will get it back, in time for the 2023 tax season?In a word, no. The deal that’s now on the table would have in dollar terms roughly one-ninth of the impact of the 2021 expansion, and even optimistic projections show similarly weakened impact for reduction of child poverty. Moreover, getting not only an agreement, but something that actually passes the House and Senate in time for this tax year—which would be a little more than two weeks from now—is about as unlikely as the other pie-in-the-sky negotiation happening in Washington right now over immigration. But the most important thing to say about this emerging deal is that it would expire at the end of 2025, along with the other individual provisions of the Trump tax cuts. At that time, without action the CTC would be cut in half, from $2,000 a year to $1,000. So regardless of what happens in Congress this month, the real fight of this decade on taxes and poverty, and the one that Biden should be laying out his plans for immediately, involves that 2025 fiscal cliff.” (David Dayen/TAP)
“If Hamlet is the tragedy of irresolution, Richard II is the tragedy of relativity, or rather of reversibility. A group of young princes, united by ties of blood, and profoundly divided by this same blood (which has many times been spilled by their ancestors), whose consciences are extremely refined and whose spirits are ardent and melancholic, unremittingly clash in an attempt at loyalty and unity that is continually frustrated. Behind them two old men, John of Gaunt and the Duke of York, grow feeble and obscurely fall into the same strain, already tinged with defeat or with a presage of death.” (Cristina Campo/The Paris Review)
“What happened in Room 300 of the New York County Courthouse in lower Manhattan in November had never happened. Not in the preceding almost two and a half centuries of the history of the United States. Donald Trump was on the witness stand. It was not unprecedented in the annals of American jurisprudence just because it was a former president, although that was totally true. It was unprecedented because the power dynamic of the courtroom had been upended — the defendant was not on defense, the most vulnerable person in the room was the most dominant person in the room, and the people nominally in charge could do little about it.It was unprecedented, too, because over the course of four or so hours Trump savaged the judge, the prosecutor, the attorney general, the case and the trial — savaged the system itself. He called the attorney general ‘a political hack.’ He called the judge ‘very hostile.’ He called the trial ‘crazy’ and the court ‘a fraud’ and the case ‘a disgrace.’ He told the prosecutor he should be ‘ashamed’ of himself. The judge all but pleaded repeatedly with Trump’s attorneys to ‘control’ him. ‘If you can’t,’ the judge said, ‘I will.’ But he didn’t, because he couldn’t, and audible from the city’s streets were the steady sounds of sirens and that felt absolutely apt.” (Michael Kruse/Politico)
“Chris Christie quit his longshot bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination on Wednesday with all the political theater and rhetorical bombast that has historically characterized the grasping political career of this former federal prosecutor and governor of New Jersey. Yet, for all his foibles over the years, and for all the failings of his latest bid to position himself as a credible alternative to Donald Trump, Christie’s exit from the race still deals a blow both to his party and to the broader body politic. Christie was the last high-profile GOP contender who was fighting for whatever remains of the soul of a Republican Party that, for all intents and purposes, has evolved into an authoritarian cult of personality with Trump as its center—posing what the former governor described as a real and present threat to democracy and national security. Christie, a longtime Trump backer who ultimately came to his senses after Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, mounted a 2024 campaign that aggressively challenged his party’s alarming deference to Trump, identified the former president as ‘a one-man crime wave,’ and asserted that Trump had ‘earned every one’ of his 91 criminal indictments.” (John Nichols/The Nation)