Monthly Archives: September 2018

Off the Rails, Republicans

Senate Judiciary Committee Kavanaugh hearing as job interview: Lindsey Graham seeks soon-to-be-vacant position of Attorney General

Well, actually I don’t know what happened to Senator Graham. He has transitioned abruptly from Trump critic to Trump sycophant since his buddy John McCain left Washington in deteriorating health before his passing last month in Arizona.

As CNN reported on August 24:

For those waiting for a profile in courage to emerge from Republicans in Congress after President Donald Trump was implicated by his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty to eight criminal counts, stop holding your breath. Sen. Lindsey Graham, formerly one of Trump’s harshest critics, just paved the way for the post-midterm election fate of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, telling reporters on Capitol Hill that Trump is “entitled to an attorney general he has faith in.”

The report noted: ‘As recently as last summer, Graham said there would be “holy hell to pay” if Trump fired Sessions.’

Whatever the motivation for the about-face, he put on a bravura performance at the Kavanaugh hearing yesterday. “White House officials such as Kellyanne Conway and press secretary Sarah Sanders praised Graham’s comments.”

Update: Now it’s clear what happened to the Senator: he was looking ahead to the 2020 Republican primary.

2020 Democratic Primary, Democrats

Bernie Sanders sets up the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, as a foil with the Stop BEZOS Act — and gets clobbered by policy wonks

Poor Bernie Sanders has fallen victim to the hack gap. – Kevin Drum

A decade ago, Mark Kleiman noted a basic advantage of the right, which Matthew Yglesias dubbed, ‘the hack gap.’ Yglesias:

Just like Mark, “I don’t really wish that we behaved like our wingnut opponents, but their capacity to work up and sustain outrage has to be counted among their structural advantages.”

In brief (generalizing beyond the examples Kleiman and Yglesias discuss): rightwing proposals and theories, even those only tenuously – if at all – linked to facts, are reliably repeated by Fox News Channel, talk radio, and other outlets in the conservative media bubble and readily embraced by conservative foundation reps, policy analysts, and legislators. The goal is less to advance understanding or actual policy, than to repudiate opponents on the left – regarded as enemies of conservatism – who serve as foils to rev up the Republican base at election time.

In contrast, among mainstream liberals, there is a commitment to reality-based analysis and advocacy. Truth and accuracy are highly valued. Why? Because liberals are committed to crafting legislative and administrative solutions to real-world problems. The ideas advanced must be empirically well-grounded or there is no point to implementing them.

The failure of Congress to repeal and replace the Affordable Healthcare Act in 2017 is illustrative of the dynamic on the right: there was no Republican member of the House or the Senate with a deep understanding of the ACA and the healthcare market, of pragmatic conservative alternatives, and of the trade-offs and costs involved in making changes. No one, in other words, who had anything resembling a replacement on hand – even after many years of election promises to repeal and replace. That practical focus was nowhere on the Republican agenda.

On the liberal side, the dynamics are different. When Democrats passed the ACA in 2010 they did so to solve a genuine problem in plain sight – millions of Americans without access to affordable healthcare; the Democratic majority passed the ACA to reduce the number of people without health insurance. Among the practical goals were improving people’s health – especially among people living in poverty, with preexisting conditions, and lacking employer-based insurance – in measurable ways, and ensuring that catastrophic illness would not result in bankruptcy and financial ruin for families.

Demagoguery may help win elections; it is not a reliable route to sound public policy. Hacks are useful for rousing up the Republican base, but not for fixing problems among folks who work for a living.

Stop BEZOS

This past week, Senator Bernie Sanders (and Representative Ro Khanna) proposed the Stop BEZOS Act (Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act), a title suggestive of a simple, enticing meme, replete with moral outrage and demonization – ingredients unhesitatingly embraced daily by Fox News. The idea itself is equally beguiling: the legislation would require large companies to pay back, dollar for dollar, the cost of public benefits (such as, food stamps, Medicaid, rental subsidies, and school lunch aid) that support their low-wage employees.

“At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, when the 3 wealthiest people in America own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent and when 52 percent of all new income goes to the top one percent, the American people are tired of subsidizing multi-billionaires who own some of the largest and most profitable corporations in America,” Sanders said in a statement.

Sanders cited a report by the nonprofit New Food Economy suggesting that a third of Amazon employees in Arizona — and thousands in other states — rely on food stamps.

Since analysts on the left are more highly committed to getting the details right, than scoring points against conservatives, Sanders’ proposal was met with  a chorus of objections.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities – the preeminent liberal research shop focused on how public policy affects poverty and inequality – while praising the act as well intentioned, offered a devastating critique: “It seeks to induce large firms to raise the wages they pay, which is an important goal after decades of stagnant or falling wages for millions of hard-working Americans. But the legislation likely won’t meet that goal, and it would have a series of adverse unintended consequences. Moreover, we have better ways to induce or require firms like Amazon and Walmart to raise their wages and bear more of the costs of core government functions, including basic nutrition assistance and health coverage for struggling families.”

The problems included creating perverse incentives to hire fewer low-income and disabled workers; promoting corporate lobbying to reduce assistance programs; requiring complicated and expensive administrative procedures; and failing to do what it sets out to do – to raise wages and living standards.

Other analysts on the left, while praising Sanders’ intentions, added another criticism: that by stigmatizing people receiving benefits, it was antithetical to sustaining a healthy social safety net.

Ryan Cooper: “Now, I understand what Sanders is driving at. Amazon workers are underpaid. And it is important to note that Amazon has been directly subsidized …

But the way to wage class war on Jeff Bezos is with broad taxes, unions, and regulations, not schemes to punish him for his employees being on public programs.”

Jared Bernstein: ‘”My concern is that there is already a political movement afoot to vilify public benefits and even though I know for a fact that the main sponsors of this bill — Sanders and Ro Khanna — don’t feel that way, I worry that this idea unintentionally provides the hard right with another argument,” Bernstein told Business Insider.’

Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and  Mike Konczal at the Roosevelt Institute also offered critical perspectives on the proposal.

Michael Hiltzik takes exception to the criticism as misguided.

One would think that Democrats and progressives would praise Sanders for this legislative initiative. After all, Amazon’s employment of low-wage workers, its baleful influence on communities and the punishing working conditions in the warehouses from which its merchandise is shipped to customers have been amply documented. Instead, they’ve turned their fire hoses full-blast on Sanders himself. The drawbacks of his proposal have been picked apart to a fare-thee-well by some of the nation’s leading progressive think tanks, including the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The critics aren’t wrong about the proposal, exactly. They’re just allowing themselves to be distracted by the details of a legislative proposal that on the gonna-happen scale is a “not.”

So, should we take Sanders seriously, but not literally? Well, something like that. Hiltzik again:

The truth is that proposals like Sanders and Khanna’s serve a very clear purpose in our political system. They’re not designed to end up as the law of the land, but as prompts for debate.

Matt Yglesias argues that Sanders, whose 2016 policy proposals on Medicare-for-all, free college, and a $15 minimum wage have been widely embraced by Democrats in this cycle, intends to separate himself from the pack. So, while other Democrats would be unhappy to see their proposals dismissed as unworkable, “Sanders almost certainly won’t care, and part of the core of his appeal is a sense that this is the correct and appropriate way to think about politics.”

September 7, 2018 update – Jared Bernstein tips his hat to Senator Sanders: “When Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), scourge of the top tenth of the top 1%, and Bezos, denizen of that privileged niche, are exchanging loving tweets, attention must be paid. Sanders, along with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), has long called out Amazon for its labor practices, and they recently introduced a bill, subtly entitled the Stop BEZOS Act. While I share their goal of pushing for higher pay for low-wage workers, I thought their bill, which charged companies for the public benefits its workers received, was misguided in that it would vilify legitimate benefit receipt and lead firms to discriminate against hires they thought might draw such benefits. But I have no question that their pressure was instrumental in driving this change.”

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

 

2020 Democratic Primary

Cory Booker Profile*

U.S. Senator (Democrat – New Jersey)

Elected in 2013 in a special election for the seat of Senator Frank Lautenberg, who died in office; reelected to a full term in 2014.

Previously served as Mayor of Newark (2006-2013) and Newark City Council (1998-2002); lost his first race for mayor in 2002.

Born on April 27, 1969 (age 49) in Washington D.C. Grew up in a suburb of Newark.

Education: Stanford University (BA, MA); Rhodes Scholar at Oxford (MA); Yale (JD)

He has been generally viewed as a moderate Democrat. For instance, when George Norcross – insurance executive and hospital chairman, and a powerful player in the New Jersey Democratic Party – offered his support for Booker’s run for the Senate, he put it this way:

“I believe he’s a winner,” Norcross said of Booker. “And he’s representative of a new Democrat — a Democrat that’s fiscally conservative yet socially progressive. He’s a fighter and not afraid of taking on a tough battle.”

A year earlier, as Barack Obama ran for reelection, then-Mayor Booker criticized the president’s campaign attacks on Bain Capital (the private equity firm founded by Mitt Romney) in an interview with Meet the Press: “It’s nauseating to the American public.” He later walked back the comments.

At a time when increasing concerns among Democrats with the growing gap between rich and poor, a middle class struggling to keep up, and the political dominance of corporations, it will be interesting to see how Senator Booker – who is well acquainted with Wall Street, right in his backyard – positions himself going forward.

At this stage – with his self-declared “I am Spartacus” moment – he is definitely playing to the anti-Trump Democratic base.

*At one point I was tempted to do profiles of each of the Democratic candidates. This was a dry run, which helped me decide this wasn’t something I wanted to continue.

Democracy, Democrats, Donald Trump, Republicans, Tribalism

“You need to vote because our democracy depends on it.” Barack Obama sounds alarm, implores students to step up to restore American values

In the twenty-two months since leaving the White House, Barack Obama has kept quiet. He broke his silence on Friday in a speech at the University of Illinois, making it clear he believes the country is in crisis, having strayed from our values, and urgently needs to get back on track:
“I’m here today because this is one of those pivotal moments when every one of us, as citizens of the United States, need to determine just who it is that we are. Just what it is that we stand for. And as a fellow citizen, not as an ex-president, but as a fellow citizen, I’m here to deliver a simple message, and that is that you need to vote because our democracy depends on it.”

Obama painted a picture of “fitful progress, uneven progress” throughout American history, as our country moved nearer our ideals, while describing “a darker aspect to the American story.”

Each time we’ve gotten closer to those ideals, somebody somewhere has pushed back. The status quo pushes back. Sometimes the backlash comes from people who are genuinely, if wrongly, fearful of change. More often it’s manufactured by the powerful and the privileged who want to keep us divided and keep us angry and keep us cynical because it helps them maintain the status quo and keep their power and keep their privilege. And you happen to be coming of age during one of those moments.

It did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause. He’s just capitalizing on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years, a fear and anger that’s rooted in our past but it’s also born out of the enormous upheavals that have taken place in your brief lifetimes.

The former president reminded students of the financial crisis at the time he took office and the progress he made in setting things right – but the fear remained.

So we pulled the economy out of crisis, but to this day, too many people, who once felt solidly middle class, still feel very real and very personal economic insecurity. Even though we took out bin Laden and wound down the wars in Iraq and our combat role in Afghanistan, and gotten Iran to halt its nuclear program, the world’s still full of threats and disorder that come streaming through people’s televisions every single day.

And these challenges get people worried. And it frays our civic trust. And it makes a lot of people feel like the fix is in and the game is rigged and nobody’s looking out for them, especially those communities outside our big urban centers.

And even though your generation is the most diverse in history, with a greater acceptance and celebration of our differences than ever before, those are the kinds of conditions that are ripe for exploitation by politicians who have no compunction and no shame about tapping into America’s dark history of racial and ethnic and religious division. Appealing to tribe, appealing to fear, pitting one group against another, telling people that order and security will be restored if it weren’t for those who don’t look like us or don’t sound like us or don’t pray like we do, that’s an old playbook. It’s as old as time.

He continued, “And in a healthy democracy, it doesn’t work.” The old playbook falls flat. When, however, “the better angels of our nature” are eclipsed, things go awry.

But when there’s a vacuum in our democracy, when we don’t vote, when we take our basic rights and freedoms for granted, when we turn away and stop paying attention and stop engaging and stop believing and look for the newest diversion, the electronic versions of bread and circuses, then other voices fill the void. A politics of fear and resentment and retrenchment takes hold and demagogues promise simple fixes to complex problems. No promise to fight for the little guy, even as they cater to the wealthiest and most powerful. No promise to clean up corruption and then plunder away. They start undermining norms that ensure accountability and try to change the rules to entrench their power further. And they appeal to racial nationalism that’s barely veiled, if veiled at all.

He indicted the Congress of the United States for its failures:

This Congress has championed the unwinding of campaign finance laws to give billionaires outside influence over our politics. Systematically attacked voting rights to make it harder for young people, the minorities and the poor to vote. Handed out tax cuts without regard to deficits. Slashed the safety net wherever it could, cast dozens of votes to take away health insurance from ordinary Americans, embraced wild conspiracy theories, like those surrounding Benghazi or my birth certificate, rejected science, rejected facts on things like climate change, embraced a rising absolutism from a willingness to default on America’s debt by not paying our bills, to a refusal to even meet, much less consider, a qualified nominee for the Supreme Court because he happened to be nominated by a Democratic president. None of this is conservative.

I don’t mean to pretend I’m channeling Abraham Lincoln now, but that’s not what he had in mind, I think, when he helped form the Republican Party. It’s not conservative. It sure isn’t normal. It’s radical. It’s a vision that says the protection of our power and those who back us is all that matters even when it hurts the country. It’s a vision that says the few who can afford high-price lobbyists and unlimited campaign contributions set the agenda. And over the past two years, this vision is now nearing its logical conclusion.

He denounced the lack of checks and balances, passage of $1.5 trillion tax cuts for the richest Americans with resulting skyrocketing deficits, carte blanche to polluters and dishonest lenders, repudiation of the global climate change agreement, eroding our relationships with allies, cozying up with Russia, and sabotaging the Affordable Healthcare Act. He also criticizes, in passing, the infamous Anonymous op-ed:

In a healthy democracy, there’s some checks and balances on this kind of behavior, this kind of inconsistency, but right now there’s nothing.

Republicans who know better in Congress, and they’re there, they’re quoted saying, yes, we know this is kind of crazy, are still bending over backwards to shield this behavior from scrutiny or accountability or consequence, seem utterly unwilling to find the backbone to safeguard the institutions that make our democracy work. And, by the way, the claim that everything will turn out okay because there are people inside the White House who secretly aren’t following the president’s orders, that is not a check. I’m being serious here. That’s not how our democracy’s supposed to work.

These people aren’t elected. They’re not accountable. They’re not doing us a service by actively promoting 90 percent of the crazy stuff that’s coming out of this White House. And then saying, don’t worry, we’re preventing the other 10 percent. That’s not how things are supposed to work.

This is not normal. These are extraordinary times. And they’re dangerous times.

Finally, Obama urged his listeners to participate in the political process  – and, especially, to vote – to change the country’s direction:

Thirty minutes, 30 minutes of your time, is democracy worth that? We have been through much darker times than these and some how each generation of American’s carried us through to the other side. Not by sitting around and waiting for something to happen, not by leaving it to others to do something but by leading that movement for change themselves.

And if you do that, if you get involved and you get engaged and you knock on some doors and you talk with your friends and you argue with your family members and you change some minds and you vote, something powerful happens.

The complete speech, annotated by Amber Phillips, is available at the Washington Post.

Democracy, Donald Trump

Amid deep background reporting and anonymous bravado, the overall picture is unchanged: a train wreck of a presidency

In a week when Bob Woodward’s “Fear” paints in chilling detail a portrait of a White House engulfed in conflict, chaos, and covert insubordination, and an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times attests to the derisive views of President Trump by those closest to him and persistent workarounds to keep him from getting his way, what have we learned?

Conflict in presidential administrations is commonplace. Appointees often represent wings of a political party with different priorities than the president. Directives are often ignored by cabinet members. Aides try to protect the president from his worse impulses. This is all normal.

“But,” Jonathan Bernstein writes, “what we’re hearing about in these Trump stories is sort of a radical version of standard operating procedure for White House staff and the executive branch when faced with a president who is utterly unfit for the job.”

Donald Trump is impulsive, indulges in reckless rants and incoherence, has a short attention span, is easily distracted, lacks intellectual curiosity, is ignorant of history and policy, and reveals an irrepressible narcissism. We already know all this (which touches only on Trump’s mental capacity, not on his prejudice, avarice, or lack of principle) from watching the public Donald Trump and, for anyone who reveres democratic government, this is frightening. In Bernstein’s words:

What’s really scary is that Trump’s ineptitude at his job means that the normal constraints that keep presidents from doing terrible things may simply not apply. Normal presidents care about their professional reputation among those they work with, and about their popularity among the nation at large, and so they attempt to do the sorts of things that would enhance their reputations and make voters like them. Because he’s unable to even try to do those things — because he has apparently has no sense at all of how the job works — Trump doesn’t see the clear warning signs and then back off things that damage himself and the nation.

Or, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Timothy L. O’Brien puts it, “he generally doesn’t care about the long-term damage he might inflict on himself or those around him as long as he’s the center of attention.” That’s truly scary because the entire political system, as those who have read Federalist 51 will recognize, depends on politicians who care deeply about avoiding damage to themselves.

Federalist 51, generally attributed to James Madison, describes the features of the Constitution intended to “furnish the proper checks and balances between different departments” of government, such as constraints on personal ambition and buffers against encroachment of one branch on another. As remarkable as Donald Trump’s incapacity is, equally remarkable is the implacable abdication of the Republican majority in Congress to provide oversight over the executive branch.

Two of the President’s ‘critics’ in the majority party – both of whom have chosen not to seek reelection, which would require them to face the GOP voter base (still in lockstep with Trump) – find no grounds for disputing the devastating portrait of their leader.

Senator Bob Corker: “This is what all of us have understood to be the situation from day one… I understand this is the case and that’s why I think all of us encourage the good people around the President to stay. I thank General Mattis whenever I see him…”

Senator Ben Sasse: “It’s just so similar to what so many of us hear from senior people around the White House, you know, three times a week. So it’s really troubling, and yet in a way, not surprising.”

Neither Senator proposed any activity by Congress to remedy the situation our nation finds itself in. Congressional investigations of the executive branch are commonplace, even when the same party controls both Congress and the White House. Yet taking a closer look at what is going on is not in the cards for this Congress.

There is ample evidence, dating back to Newt Gingrich’s first days as Speaker of the House, of Republicans paring back the capacity of Congress to do its job. The inability to repeal the Affordable Healthcare Act (aka Obamacare) is the most glaring example of this failure in the current Congress (in part because no one on the Republican side of the aisle had developed the policy expertise to understand the ACA or to craft a plausible alternative, and no one in the leadership or among committee chairmen cared enough to do so).

Nonetheless, Speaker Paul Ryan and his team, which encouraged investigation after investigation of Benghazi (while boasting that it would harm Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election prospects) hasn’t simply forgotten Congress’s investigative role. Republicans have actually catalogued scandals and controversies that Congress could be investigating, if it had the will to do so (which is anticipated if Democrats regain the majority in the House this fall). A partial list from Axios, which obtained a copy of a document prepared by House Republicans:

  • President Trump’s tax returns
  • Trump family businesses — and whether they comply with the Constitution’s emoluments clause, including the Chinese trademark grant to the Trump Organization
  • Trump’s dealings with Russia, including the president’s preparation for his meeting with Vladimir Putin
  • The payment to Stephanie Clifford — a.k.a. Stormy Daniels
  • James Comey’s firing
  • Trump’s firing of U.S. attorneys
  • Trump’s proposed transgender ban for the military
  • Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s business dealings
  • White House staff’s personal email use
  • Cabinet secretary travel, office expenses, and other misused perks
  • Discussion of classified information at Mar-a-Lago
  • Jared Kushner’s ethics law compliance
  • Dismissal of members of the EPA board of scientific counselors
  • The travel ban
  • Family separation policy
  • Hurricane response in Puerto Rico
  • Election security and hacking attempts
  • White House security clearances

Things aren’t normal in either the executive or legislative branches of government. (I’ll set aside for the moment consideration of the judicial branch, which will be transformed for at least a generation as Brett Kavanaugh takes a seat on the Supreme Court and the U.S. Senate continues to approve ideologues to district and appellate courts nationwide.)

Things aren’t normal because the Republican Party has become an outlier, trashing traditional governing norms whenever it has glimpsed a partisan advantage, while ignoring – and diverting attention from – the resulting harm to the country.

September 9, 2018 update: Barack Obama reentered the political fray on Friday, decrying the course our nation is on, the absence of checks and balances, and the urgency of changing direction.

“This is not normal. These are extraordinary times. And they’re dangerous times.”

Image: Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) running for dear life in “The Fugitive.”

 

Democrats, Donald Trump

The status of the labor movement on a Labor Day when the President of the United States attacks the leader of the AFL-CIO

The headlines on Labor Day highlight the President’s twitter attack (and retweets with spelling corrected) on AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. The Washington Post story of the skirmish reports on the decline of labor unions in recent decades: “Union membership nationwide has fallen markedly from the 1970s, with the percentage of American workers in a union dropping from about 25 percent in the 1970s to less than 11 percent in 2017, according to survey data. But among the general public, popular support for unions has risen steadily, to a 61 percent approval rating, a high point in more than a decade, according to Gallup polling.”

The good news, for working men and women, union members, and the Democratic Party (which relies on organized labor for vital support) is that steadily rising approval rating (from the Gallup organization’s graph presented in the image over this post). When asked, “Do you approve or disapprove of labor unions?” a rising 62% of respondents surveyed approved, while only 30% disapproved.

The bad news is found in more detailed questions deeper in Gallup’s survey. For instance, this question and the most recent (August 2016) results:

Overall, do you think labor unions mostly help or mostly hurt workers who are not members of unions?

Mostly help Mostly hurt No opinion
38% 54% 8%

Organized labor has been under attack by conservatives for decades. The most recent body blow was the Janus ruling in June 2018. John Cassidy comments on the decision: “It marks the culmination of a decades-long anti-union campaign by conservative groups and billionaires tied to the Republican Party, such as the Koch brothers, the Uihlein family, and their allies. By funnelling money through tax-exempt organizations like the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, the Liberty Justice Center, and the Center for Individual Rights, these ultra-wealthy people have helped to finance a series of legal attacks on labor unions that represent ordinary working people who earn modest wages. Faced with the formidable challenge of overturning what most experts regarded as settled law, the well-funded union haters persisted, and eventually they found a court that was willing to overturn precedent: the John Roberts–Neil Gorsuch high court.”

The switch from Anthony Kennedy to Brett Kavanaugh will only intensify the SOCTUS majority’s assault on labor unions.

Although Donald Trump was elected with critical backing from the white working class (few of whom are unionized or even especially sympathetic to unions), he has done little to advance the interests of American workers. As Eric Levitz puts it (“15 Ways President Trump Has Hurt the American Worker”):

Donald Trump loves the working class as a mascot, but despises it as a class. The president will gladly take the side of the archetypal working man in his (largely imaginary) conflicts with environmentalists, welfare cheats, immigrants, and liberal elites — but never that of actual working people in their material conflicts with their bosses.

 

2020 Democratic Primary

Okay, since she is mentioned as a 2020 candidate for president, how do you pronounce ‘Kirsten Gillibrand’ …?

First, a somewhat tangential question: How would you – yes, you, dear reader – answer the question posed in the headline? If you were a New Yorker, you might call her office and ask. What could be easier? But, that direct method aside, you – and most of us – would probably seek the answer to the question on the internet. That’s what I did.

Of course while the internet is a source of much information, it is also – alas – a source of much misinformation. So, I didn’t want to rely on a how-to-pronounce website (though several got it right for Senator Gillibrand). But I found two sources, which I was more confident that we could rely on in this instance and were in agreement: the New York Times and New York Magazine – their reporters apparently called the office of the Empire State’s junior senator.

First name first (courtesy of NY Mag):

It’s KEER-sten, not KUR-sten, and definitely not KRI-sten. An easy way to remember it: “KEER-sten drinks BEER.” (Legal note: We don’t know if she drinks beer.)

Last name (NY Times):

“It’s a sibilant G,” an aide in her office in Hudson said, with the air of someone who has had a lot of practice. “JILL-uh-brand.”

So there. Ignore any variations to the contrary.

Image: screen grab of a how to pronounce website featuring an aptly characteristic quotation from Dale Carnegie  (the pronunciation of whose name fails to generate a consensus among the competing sites).