Trump's Senate trial defense: Abuse of power is not impeachable

While the Senate mulls his fate, the president plans to speak to world economic leaders every bit as impeachable as him. President Donald Trump's legal team will go into his Senate trial on Tuesday arguing that he should never have been impeached because his conduct over Ukraine does not amount to a criminal offense. First details of the President's counter-argument is emerging from a document the White House sent to Capitol Hill on Saturday night and in television interviews of one of his new legal advisers. Senate Republicans, who will serve as jurors, are quickly buying into his new defense. Trump was impeached by the House last month on charges of abuse of power and obstructing Congress over his scheme to pressure Ukraine for political favors -- including the announcement of a probe into Joe Biden, a possible 2020 election opponent. Harvard Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz, who has just joined Trump's legal brain trust, told CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday that he would borrow arguments made by former Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Curtis during the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson in 1868. "He argued successfully to the Senate that criminal-like conduct is required. That argument prevailed. I will be making that argument as a lawyer on behalf of the President's defense team against impeachment," Dershowitz said. As the Senate debates Donald Trump’s future, chief executives, financiers, and politicians will descend on Davos in the Swiss Alps for their annual self-congratulatory defense of global capitalism. The events are not unrelated. Trump is charged with abusing his power. Capitalism’s global elite is under assault for abusing its power as well: fueling inequality, fostering corruption and doing squat about climate change. Chief executives of the largest global corporations are raking in more money and at a larger multiple of their workers’ pay than at any time in history. The world’s leading financiers are pocketing even more. The 26 richest people on Earth now own as much as the 3.8 billion who form the poorer half of the planet’s population. Concentrated wealth on this scale invites corruption. Across the world, big money is buying off politicians to procure favors that further enlarge the wealth of those at the top, while siphoning off resources from everyone else. Corruption makes it impossible to fight stagnant wages, climate change or any other problem facing the vast majority of the world’s population that would require some sacrifice by the rich. Popular anger is boiling over against elites seen as irredeemably greedy, corrupt and indifferent to the plight of most people struggling to get by. The anger has fueled uprisings in Chile, Spain, Ecuador, Lebanon, Egypt and Bolivia; environmental protests in the UK, Germany, Austria, France and New Zealand; and xenophobic politics in the US, the UK, Brazil and Hungary. Trump’s support comes largely from America’s working-class whose wages haven’t risen in decades, whose jobs are less secure than ever and whose political voice has been drowned out by big money. This has been their strategy for three decades, and it’s about to get worse. Three researchers – Daniel Greenwald at MIT’s Sloan School, Martin Lettau at Berkeley and Sydney Ludvigson at NYU – found that between 1952 and 1988, economic growth accounted for 92% of the rise in equity values. But since 1989 most of the increase has come from “reallocated rents to shareholders and away from labor compensation”. In other words, from workers. What this means is that in order for the stock market to do as well in coming years, either economic growth has to accelerate markedly (highly unlikely), or chief executives will have to siphon off even more of the gains from growth from workers and other stakeholders to their shareholders. This is likely to require even more downward pressure on wages, more payoffs to politicians for tax cuts and subsidies and further rollbacks of environmental regulations. All of which will worsen the prevailing discontent. Nothing will be achieved in the Swiss Alps because the growing global discontent has yet to affect the bottom lines of the corporations and financial institutions whose leaders are assembling to congratulate themselves on their wealth, influence and benevolence. Trump, meanwhile, is likely to be acquitted by Senate Republicans who are so cowardly and unprincipled that they will ignore his flagrantly unconstitutional acts. Trump plans to speak at Davos, by the way: an impeached president addressing world economic leaders while being tried in the Senate. He’ll probably boast about the stock market, bully and lie, as usual.

One the thing he won’t say is that the whatever-it-takes abuses of economic and political power such as he and much of his audience are engaged in threatening to destroy capitalism, democracy, and the planet.