Blinken entourage rushes to shelter amid Hezbollah attack on Tel Aviv

Blinken entourage rushes to shelter amid Hezbollah attack on Tel Aviv | The Excerpt

Posted by Admin October 24, 2024 World

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On Thursday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is visiting the Middle East this week, amid heightened tensions. North Korean troops are in Russia, according to the U.S. defense secretary. USA TODAY Justice Department Correspondent Bart Jansen looks into a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll that shows a majority of voters think Donald Trump should face charges even if he’s elected. An audit finds noncitizens were only 1 in 400,000 registered Georgia voters. A Boeing strike continues. USA TODAY Personal Finance Reporter Daniel de Visé discusses a new report from the Congressional Budget Office on wealth inequality.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Taylor Wilson:

Good morning, I’m Taylor Wilson. And today is Thursday, October 24th, 2024. This is The Excerpt. Today, the latest on Middle Eastern tensions as Blinken visits the region, plus how voters feel about Donald Trump’s pending cases, whether or not he wins office, and we talk about wealth inequality.

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken brought his push for peace into Saudi Arabia yesterday, amid intensified fighting in the region that even saw his own entourage compelled to take shelter in a hotel in Israel amid a Hezbollah rocket attack. Israel’s air force said it shot down two rockets from Lebanon that set off air raid sirens in Tel Aviv while Blinken was completing a visit to the city. Sky News reported that some senior state department officials and media members at Blinken’s hotel left the breakfast hall and rushed to the shelter downstairs with other hotel guests and staff when the sirens went off. The New York Times reported that Blinken also briefly sheltered there.

Blinken later urged Israel to capitalize on the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and other military gains in recent weeks. Meanwhile, Israel launched strikes on the Syrian capital of Damascus earlier today. Israel has been carrying out strikes against Iranian-linked targets in Syria for years, but it has ramped up raids over the past year. Elsewhere some 70 world powers will meet in Paris today, aiming to raise money and urgent humanitarian aid for Lebanon and push for a ceasefire, but Antony Blinken will be absent as he continues trips elsewhere. France has historical ties with Lebanon and has been working with Washington to try to secure a ceasefire in Lebanon, but its influence has been limited since Israel launched a large scale onslaught on Iran-backed Hezbollah in September.

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Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, said yesterday that there’s evidence North Korean troops are in Russia. Austin added that it’s not clear what they’re doing, but said, “If they’re co-belligerents, if their intention is to participate in this war on Russia’s behalf, that is a very, very serious issue, and it will have impacts not only in Europe, but it will also impact things in the Indo-Pacific as well.” North Korea already has supplied Russia with large stores of artillery shells, a key component of the fighting, especially in Eastern Ukraine. A New USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll found that a majority of likely voters think Donald Trump should face charges in pending cases, even if he wins the election next month. I spoke with USA TODAY, Justice Department Correspondent, Bart Jansen, for more.

Hi, thanks for making the time.

Bart Jansen:

Thanks for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

So Bart here, just at the top, would you give us a refresher, if you don’t mind, a bird’s eye view really of what these pending cases still are against Trump?

Bart Jansen:

The first thing ahead would be sentencing in his New York hush money case. That’s the one where he was convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records. The sentencing for that is scheduled November 26th. There are a couple of pending trials for alleged election interference. One is at the federal level in Washington D.C. The judge in that case is weighing whether Trump is immune to the federal charges based on a Supreme Court decision in July. She’s still in the midst of making that decision. In Georgia, the trial is on hold because the Court of Appeals is weighing whether to remove the prosecutor in that case based on the fact that she had a romantic relationship with another prosecutor. The hearing for those arguments is December 5th, and then we’d be waiting for a decision on whether the prosecutor has to change in that case or whether it just goes forward.

Then in addition, there is a federal case in Florida that accused Trump of mishandling classified documents after he left the White House. The judge in that case has dismissed those charges saying the prosecutor was appointed illegitimately, but the prosecutor, special counsel Jack Smith, has appealed that decision and so we’re waiting to see if those charges could be reinstated.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. So new polling here, Bart. What did we learn from this USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll on really how voters feel about some of these pending charges against Trump if he were to win the White House again?

Bart Jansen:

Yeah, we found that a majority of likely voters, nearly 58% who responded to the poll, said that it would be wrong for Trump to direct the Justice Department to drop those federal charges that compares to 30% saying it would be the right thing for him to do, and about one in 10 were undecided. So Trump has expected to direct the Justice Department to abandon those two cases. That’s the election interference and then the mishandled classified documents. He’s already asked the judges to dismiss the cases. He calls them a witch-hunt and calls the prosecutor deranged, but a majority of likely voters said that those cases should go forward.

Taylor Wilson:

And Bart, how does this USA TODAY/Suffolk poll compare to previous polling on similar issues?

Bart Jansen:

It runs about along the same lines as a couple of polls we’ve seen earlier in the year. The Pew Research Center found in September that about half of voters said that Trump had broken the law in trying to change the outcome of the election and another 14% said that he had done something wrong but didn’t break the law. So basically around a majority, again, supporting charges in the cases. An ABC News poll in May found about half the recipients thought the New York hush money case was significant with one in five saying they would reconsider their support for him if convicted. Of course, that was right before he was convicted in that case.

Taylor Wilson:

And Bart, what do legal experts really say about all this? I know you have a lot of these conversations in that world. What do they say about what might happen to the various Trump cases if he were to win office and really just kind of what impact this election will have on these cases?

Bart Jansen:

At the very least, if he wins the White House back, there’s a great expectation that the cases would all be put on hold one way or another. We’ve got legal experts saying that the sentencing, for example, scheduled at the end of November. Now that’s a New York court, so that’s a state court, not a federal court, but that that sentencing would likely either be postponed until he was done serving in the White House for another four years and perhaps sentenced, but having the punishment, the actual whatever the service is, probation or potentially a jail term, postponed until after Trump finishes serving in office. Likewise, the federal charges would almost certainly be postponed. The Justice Department has a policy against charging sitting presidents, and so there’s the expectation that if they were to continue, they would be postponed until after his administration, and the same for his Georgia pending trial.

If he were to lose the election to Vice President Kamala Harris, the expectation is that any of those cases could continue to move forward. Prosecutors say that they have studied the facts and the law and that they think the charges are justified in each of those cases. He continues to fight each of those cases and claims immunity from all of them. He has pleaded not guilty in all of those cases, but I think we’d expect to see all of them move forward in one way or another if he were to lose the election.

Taylor Wilson:

All right, we’ll have some of these questions answered soon. Bart Jansen covers the Justice Department for USA TODAY. Thank you, Bart.

Bart Jansen:

Thanks for having me.

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Taylor Wilson:

A state audit uncovered fewer than one in 400,000 registered voters in Georgia who were non-citizens. That’s according to Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s announcement yesterday. The audit by Raffensperger’s office found just 20 non-citizens among more than 8.2 million registered voters. The registrations were canceled for all 20 who have been referred for potential criminal prosecution. Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer within Raffensperger’s office said the audit shows non-citizenship voting is extremely rare despite growing claims from some Republicans that non-citizens who are not eligible to vote could somehow fraudulently vote in next month’s election.

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Boeing factory workers yesterday voted to reject a contract offer and continue a more than five-week strike. The vote was 64% in opposition to the deal, which offered a 35% raise in over four years. The move marks a big setback for new CEO Kelly Ortberg’s plan to stabilize the struggling plane manufacturer’s finances.

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America’s top 10% controls most of the country’s wealth. That’s according to a new report on wealth inequality from the Congressional Budget Office. I caught up with USA TODAY Personal Finance Reporter, Daniel de Visé, to learn more.

How are you today, Daniel?

Daniel de Visé:

Good. It’s a pleasure.

Taylor Wilson:

Always a pleasure having you on, Daniel. So let’s just start with the report. What did it find? This report from the Congressional Budget Office.

Daniel de Visé:

First, it is the Congressional Budget Office and they are non-partisan. So this is an agency that regularly inconveniences Democrats as well as Republicans with their reports. They cut right down the middle. And they found that as of basically now the top 10% of us, in terms of wealth, now control 60% of all the wealth in the country, while the poorer half of us, half of the country, holds only 6% of the wealth.

Taylor Wilson:

Wow. You read about social security as part of this analysis here, Daniel, how does this really show the importance of the role social security plays in shoring up the wealth of many Americans who don’t belong to that top 10%?

Daniel de Visé:

Boy, it’s a big role. This is the first time the budget office has looked at basically future social security earnings, what you will get in the future in your life as part of your wealth. And if you factor in projected social security, it makes an enormous difference. If you take it out and don’t look at social security, then the top 10% controls just about 70% of all the wealth up from 60%, and the bottom half, that’s half of the country, holds only 3% of the wealth.

Taylor Wilson:

What are some other factors really at play here, Daniel, in terms of what has driven this gap in wealth? Is this a tax issue? Is this a matter of wealthy people really taking advantage of investments in the stock market? What really is going on here over the past few decades?

Daniel de Visé:

Well, the happy news is, and this is all from the Survey of Consumer Finances, which is a good federal survey, that everyone’s getting richer, every single income group is wealthier now than before the pandemic, and I think wealthier now than say 30 years ago. The bad thing is a greatly increased wealth disparity between the richest and the poorest. You could come up with these crazy geometries like the top 1% earns, I don’t know, hundreds of times more than the poorest. It’s crazy. And the reasons for that have to do with basically CEO pay being, you could argue sort of out of control or at least it’s astronomically higher now than it was say in the 1960s or 1970s. So the people at the very top are just earning way more than they were.

Now, the good part of this as far as the Great American experiment is that this is about entrepreneurship and successful companies and successful products and innovation. All that’s arguably great because that’s what America’s all about. But it does mean that the richest people, the ones in these companies responsible for all these wonderful innovations, are earning just a ton of money compared with the poorer people in this country.

Taylor Wilson:

Then I want to go back to a point that you just said about the poorest Americans. They’ve also grown wealthier along with the wealthiest. I’m curious what this really functionally means. Have living standards actually improved for everyone over the past few decades? Is that what these numbers tell us?

Daniel de Visé:

Oh, goodness. I think that what this federal survey shows is that everyone is wealthier now. And this is after adjusting for inflation, so it’s not just more money in raw terms. This is after inflation. Everyone’s wealthier now, and this has to do… I think the number one driver of it probably is real estate. So there’s this big middle group of Americans from lower middle class to upper middle class for whom home ownership is just this big thing. It’s like their main asset. It’s extremely important to them. Now, for the lower income people in America, social security is massively important. The report says that for the lower echelon of Americans, half of their wealth, if you look at all of it, is in future social security money. And that’s why you talk about these lower income people all over the country who are surviving and subsisting on their social security payments. It’s been a huge driver of making lower income people wealthier over the decades since it came into existence, social security.

Taylor Wilson:

All right, Daniel, it’s almost November, so we have to talk politics for a second. Social security and some of these finance conversations have been a big part of the campaign trail dialogue. What are we hearing from candidates? And really Daniel, what is the expectation for how lawmakers and political leaders will tackle this issue in the years to come?

Daniel de Visé:

It was a Democrat in the Senate who requested this report. Now the report itself is bipartisan, nonpartisan, whatever you call it, but it was a Democrat who requested it. And his argument is that we need to shore up social security. And the Democrats proposed to shore up social security, which is in danger of being underfunded by basically taxing very, very rich people in corporations. We already know this, we’ve heard about it over and over again. Now, the Democrats accused the Republicans of wanting to cut those benefits by raising the retirement age. The Republicans say that President Biden is imperiling social security with reckless overspending. You can believe the party you want to believe, but basically both parties pledge that their presidential candidates will do everything they can to save and protect social security. Neither Harris nor Trump is going to say otherwise. I mean, they both swear they’re going to keep the program healthy.

Taylor Wilson:

All right, great breakdown for us as always. Daniel de Visé covers personal finance for USA TODAY. I thank you, Daniel.

Daniel de Visé:

And thank you, sir.

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Taylor Wilson:

A recent antitrust lawsuit filed by the Justice Department and attorneys general from eight states accuses software company, RealPage, of an algorithmic pricing scheme has led rental property owners to collude rather than compete in the rental market. Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the Open Markets Institute, joins my co-host Dana Taylor at 4:00 PM Eastern Time today on The Excerpt to discuss how this may impact millions of American renters. And thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your pods. And if you’re on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I’m Taylor Wilson and I’ll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from USA TODAY.