On Sept. 24, 2019, House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi announced that the House of Representatives was conducting an
impeachment inquiry into President Donald J. Trump. Since then, a number of
House committees (mainly the Intelligence, Judiciary, and Oversight committees)
have been involved in the impeachment inquiry. So far, they are focusing on
allegations about Ukraine, specifically on two possible impeachable offenses:
1. That for personal political
reasons, President Trump solicited Ukraine to investigate a political rival.
2. That the president pressured
that country to investigate his political rival in exchange for U.S. military
aid. (This second possible charge is the often referred to as a “quid pro
quo.”)
Witnesses have either given
depositions or testimony in closed session before the committees. (The closed
sessions are closed to the public, but committee members from all parties
participate in the sessions.)
Below is a list of all the
witnesses and all the primary documents that have been released to the public
regarding the impeachment inquiry. The list is in chronological order, going
from oldest to most recent. We will update the list periodically to add witnesses
and newly released documents.
In The Real Policy Wonks: How Economists Reshaped America,
Knowledge@Wharton interviews journalist Binyamin Appelbaum about his new book, The Economists’ Hour about how
economists grew into powerful figures who changed American policy.
Appelbaum: My book is mostly about the period from the late 1960s through 2008, what I call the economists’ hour, which is the period in which these economists are really dominant in shaping the course of public policy. During that period, they really do succeed in pushing government to focus on growth, and the very clear consequence is that inequality explodes. There are lots of reasons for the growth of inequality; economists are by no means solely responsible. But this decision to stop trying to prevent inequality, to stop taking inequality seriously as a public policy problem is a really important contributing factor.
Knowledge@Wharton: Without some of these policy changes decades ago, do you think the divide would be as large as it is now?
Appelbaum: I’ll give you a really simple comparison. If you look at the American economy and the French economy, most Americans take pride in the fact that America has grown more quickly than France. We see it as a validation of our economic model. But if you remove the top 1% of the population in both countries, what you find is that for the 99%, for the vast majority of Frenchmen and the vast majority of Americans, economic income growth has been much faster in France. It is easy to imagine a world in which you had more of a focus on distribution and less of a focus on the total size of the pie, and a lot more people ended up with larger pieces.
Knowledge@Wharton: Have other countries also seen that type of growth that allows some level of equality? [more]
In God’s Oppressed Children for the New York Review of Books, Pankaj Mishra
reviews Ants Among Elephants: An
Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India by Sujatha Gidla.
India, the world’s largest democracy, also happens to be the world’s most hierarchical society; its most powerful and wealthy citizens, who are overwhelmingly upper-caste, are very far from checking their privilege or understanding the cruel disadvantages of birth among the low castes. Dalits remain largely invisible in popular cinema, sitcoms, television commercials, and soap operas. No major museums commemorate their long suffering. Unlike racism in the United States, which provokes general condemnation, there are no social taboos — as distinct from legal provisions — against hatred or loathing of low-caste Hindus. Many Dalits are still treated as “untouchables,” despite the equal rights granted to them by India’s democratic constitution.
This constitution was drafted in the late 1940s with the help of B.R. Ambedkar, a Dalit leader, whose reputation as a bold and iconoclastic thinker has been eclipsed by the cults of his upper-caste rivals Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi. The founding principles of India’s democracy that Ambedkar helped enshrine are even more far-reaching than America’s in their guarantee of equal rights and absolute prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth. But high-minded legislation in India is rarely accompanied by a necessary change in hearts and minds. The institution of caste, the social group to which Indians belong by birth, remains the most formidable obstacle to an egalitarian ethos. [more]
On the morning of December 4, 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch, a warehouse worker and a father of two from Salisbury, North Carolina, told his family that he had a few things to do; loaded an AR-15, a .38-calibre revolver, and a folding knife into his car; and headed for Washington, D.C. Welch’s intention, he later told police, was to “self-investigate” a plot featuring — in no particular order — Hillary Clinton, sex trafficking, satanic rituals, and pizza.
At around 3 P.M., Welch arrived at Comet Ping Pong, a restaurant in Chevy Chase, where, he believed, children were being held in a network of tunnels. He made his way to the kitchen, shot open a locked door, and discovered cooking utensils. In an interview from jail, a few days later, he acknowledged to the Times, “The intel on this wasn’t a hundred percent.” He’d found no captive children in the restaurant’s basement; in fact, as many accounts of the incident noted, Comet Ping Pong doesn’t even have a basement.
Far from being dissuaded by the new “intel,” believers in what had become known as Pizzagate dug in. Welch had dabbled in acting — he’d appeared as a victim in a low-budget slasher movie — thus, it followed, his raid on the restaurant had been staged. That the plotters had gone to such lengths to cover their tracks showed just how much evil there was to hide. “This … runs very deep,” a contributor to the subreddit thread r/Conspiracy wrote. All the while, the restaurant’s owner was receiving death threats.
Some ten months after the incident at Comet Ping Pong, a prediction surfaced on the Web that Clinton would soon be arrested. “Expect massive riots organized in defiance,” an anonymous poster, Q, warned on the message board 4chan. Other prophecies followed: Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, would also be arrested; members of the media would be “jailed as deep cover agents”; there would be a Twitter blackout heralding a government purge.
As Q’s prophecies failed, more converts were won over. [more]
In The Street Within, the Los Angeles Times profiles, over the
course of a year, seven homeless people selected by the city of Los Angeles to
take part in a program to get them off the street.
Americans see value in higher education — whether they graduated from college or not. Most say a college degree is important, if not essential, in helping a young person succeed in the world, and college graduates themselves say their degree helped them grow and develop the skills they needed for the workplace. While fewer than half of today’s young adults are enrolled in a two-year or four-year college, the share has risen steadily over the past several decades. And the economic advantages college graduates have over those without a degree are clear and growing.
Even so, there is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction — even suspicion — among the public about the role colleges play in society, the way admissions decisions are made and the extent to which free speech is constrained on college campuses. And these views are increasingly linked to partisanship. [more]
India has long been a challenging trading partner for the United States. And in the World Trade Organization (WTO), it has wavered between a begrudging participant and a full-scale obstructionist. Successive US administrations have tried to pry open its markets by offering trade concessions to get it to play by the multilateral rules, with limited success.
President Donald Trump is now reversing course, as he has on most trade issues, seeking instead to punish India with tariffs. Since the beginning of 2018, his administration has increased duties on 14 percent of India’s exports to the United States. India has recently retaliated by slapping new tariffs on about 6 percent of US exports to India, including $600 million of almonds from California.
There are key parallels with the Trump-China trade war. The largest is skepticism that Trump’s escalation intends to fix problems in the trade relationship. Despite the obvious differences with China—that it is smaller both as a trade relationship and a tariff conflict—the worry is that this is just another excuse for the self-proclaimed “Tariff Man” to impose even more duties on yet another country. [more]
Our World in Data works “to make
the knowledge on the big problems accessible and understandable.” It explores World Population Growth with graphics, charts,
interactive maps, facts, and insights on many aspects of population growth.
Below is just a brief section of a long report on population growth.
Our understanding of the world is often shaped by geographical maps. But this tells us nothing about where in the world people live. To understand this, we need to look at population density.
In the map below we see the number of people per square kilometer (km2) across the world.
Globally the average population density is 25 people per km2, but there are very large differences across countries.
Many of the world’s small island or isolated states have large populations for their size. Macao, Monaco, Singapore, Hong Kong and Gibraltar are the five most densely populated. Singapore has nearly 8,000 people per km2 – more than 200 times as dense as the US, and 2000 times that of Australia.
Of the larger countries, Bangladesh is the most densely-populated with 1,252 people per square kilometer; this is almost three times as dense as its neighbour, India. It’s followed by Lebanon (595), South Korea (528), the Netherlands (508) and Rwanda (495 per km2) completing the top five.
If you hover the mouse on the bracket from 0 to 10 on the legend then you see the world’s least densely populated countries. Greenland is the least dense, with less than 0.2 people per square km2, followed by Mongolia, Namibia, Australia and Iceland. In our population cartogram these are the countries that take up much less space than on a standard geographical map.
If we want to understand how people are distributed across the world, another useful tool is the population cartogram: a geographical presentation of the world where the size of the countries are not drawn according to the distribution of land, but according to the distribution of people.
Here we show how the world looks in this way. When we see a standard map we tend to focus on the largest countries by area. But these are not always where the greatest number of people live. It’s this context we need if we want to understand how the lives of people around the world are changing. [more]
PBS’s Great Conversations features in-depth interviews of authors. In this episode, Chuck Rosenberg, who used to work for the Department of Justice, interviews David McCraw, an attorney for the New York Times, about McCraw’s book Truth in Our Times: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts.
