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Sunday, July 23, 2017

I'm having a lot of trouble with websites making demands: that I pay them money, or sign up for things, or other demands I don't have the patience to parse. I understand that internet media businesses have a tough time making ends meet, and I'm not unsympathetic, but I'm not rich, and I'm not in the business of reporting on media, and I really hate where this is going: a world where information is locked up behind a handful of companies, where people have to decide something is worth paying for before they can find out whether it's worth anything at all. In such a world many people will only be able to read things that they value because they agree with, and most people will never read anything because the practical value of most information is vanishingly small. This is a hideous prospect promising a world that only grows more and more dysfunctional. Allowing paywalls to be bypassed by agreeing to look at tons of advertising only makes the information more untrustworthy and unappealing. Advertising may not be the root of all evil in America, but it's certainly contributed, especially by raising consumer manipulation to the level of a science.

I should probably compile a list of websites I'm boycotting -- or, effectively, that are boycotting me -- but I find the practice too annoying to obsess over. Looks like I should add the Washington Post to the list -- clicked on several pieces and all I get now are subscription screens. (The ad there started "I see you like great journalism" but the WP has rarely met that mark; e.g., see The Washington Post's War on Disability Programs Continues, and ask yourself: why should anyone pay these people money?) I'm especially annoyed at The Nation blocking me out, and have decided to stop linking to their articles. (We actually subscribe to the print edition of The Nation, which as I understand it entitles us to "full digital access" but I've never set that up before -- indeed, never had to.) I've started to avoid The New York Times and The New Yorker -- again, we pay them money for print editions, but they have "free article" counters, and I'd hate to waste my quota by looking at something stupid by David Brooks. We actually pay for quite a bit of print media, and my wife subscribes to digital things I don't even know about (and probably wouldn't be happy about if I did know). Still, we don't read so much or so widely because we find it entertaining or necessary for business. We do it because we're trying to be concerned, responsible citizens. And it sure looks like the goal of business in America is to make citizenship cost-prohibitive.

I'll add that I don't have paywalls, advertisements, or even any form of begware on my websites. I'm not paid for what I write, nor do I make any money off the occasional music discs I'm sent. I do this for free, and find that at least a few people find my analysis and information to be useful and worthwhile -- I guess that's my reward (that plus satisfaction in my craft). I even spend some money to make this possible, but I do feel the need to limit my losses. In this current media environment, that may mean limiting the sources I consult.

PS: Add Foreign Policy to that list, demanding about $90/year under the unsavory slogan, "Today, truth comes at a cost." The link I was following came from WarInContext: Trump assigns White House team to target Iran nuclear deal, sidelining State Department. This probably complements several links on Iran below.

Scattered links:

• Binta Baxter: How the Student Loan Industry Is Helping Trump Destroy American Democracy: Also, how Trump's helping the student loan industry.

• Cristina Cabrera: Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner Have Raked in $212 Million Since 2016.

• Daniel José Camacho: Hillary Clinton is more unpopular than Donald Trump. Let that sink in: At least before the election, she polled better than Trump. You'd think she'd do even better after six months of Trump's non-stop scandals, but many recent polls show she'd still lose, and the Democrats have yet to register tangible gains by targeting Trump -- despite Trump's own favorability polling sinking into "worst ever" territory. Still, I'd take these polls with a grain of salt. Clinton's own favorability ratings have taken a hit partly because people who voted for her -- mostly people who would never have voted for Trump -- are still pissed at her for losing. As for the Democrats, they've yet to move on from her -- something that probably won't happen until the 2018 campaigns get seriously under way. Meanwhile, for all the scandal in Washington, there hasn't been a lot of evident everyday damage that most people can blame directly on Trump (immigrants are the exception here). Those things will compound over the next year -- something Democrats need to position themselves for.

• Jonathan Cohn: Only 32 House Democrats Voted Against Reauthorizing Trump's Deportation Machine: Note, however, 9 Republicans also voted no.

• Thomas Frank: The media's war on Trump is destined to fail. Why can't it see that? Wait, there's a "media war on Trump"? How can you tell? Didn't mainstream media gave Trump ten times as much coverage in 2016 as they did anyone else? The New York Times gave him an interview sandbox just last week. Sure, it made him look stupid, but doesn't that just play into his appeal? One might argue that Steven Colbert and Seth Myers are waging something like a war on Trump, but they're also catering to large niche market of people who can't stand Trump (and who have insomnia, possibly related). But mainstream media -- the so-called objective reporters -- are fatally compromised by corporate direction and an eye towards entertainment, and both of those factors have played into Trump while leaving the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party largely unexamined. One could imagine a responsible media going after Trump's administration, examining in depth the conflicts of interest, the money trails, the intense lobbying both of business fronts and other interests like the NRA and AIPAC -- and they needn't be partisan (all the better if they catch a few corrupt Democrats along the way). But that's not going to happen as long as the media is owned by a handful of humongous conglomerates. On the other hand, Trump's own war on the "fake news" media does seem to be working, if not to deter them from serious reporting, to reinforce the tendency of his believers to disregard anything critical they may come up with.

• Glenn Greenwald/Ryan Grim: US Lawmakers Seek to Criminally Outlaw Support for Boycott Campaign Against Israel:

  The Criminalization of political speech and activism against Israel has become one of the gravest threats to free speech in the West. In France, activists have been arrested and prosecuted for wearing T-shirts advocating a boycott of Israel. The U.K. has enacted a series of measures designed to outlaw such activism. In the U.S., governors compete with one another over who can implement the most extreme regulations to bar businesses from participating in any boycotts aimed even at Israeli settlements, which the world regards as illegal. On U.S. campuses, punishment of pro-Palestinian students for expressing criticisms of Israel is so commonplace that the Center for Constitutional Rights refers to it as "the Palestine Exception" to free speech.

  But now, a group of 43 senators -- 29 Republicans and 14 Democrats -- wants to implement a law that would make it a felony for Americans to support the international boycott against Israel, which was launched in protest of that country's decades-old occupation of Palestine. The two primary sponsors of the bill are Democrat Ben Cardin of Maryland and Republican Rob Portman of Ohio. Perhaps the most shocking aspect is the punishment: Anyone guilty of violating the prohibitions will face a minimum civil penalty of $250,000 and a maximum criminal penalty of $1 million and 20 years in prison.

  Also see: Philip Weiss: Critics of US 'Israel Anti-Boycott Act' say even requests for information could expose citizens to penalties. For an example of a similar state bill, see Heike Schotten/Elsa Auerbach: National movement to silence BDS disguises itself in MA legislature as 'No Hate in Bay State' act.

  As this is happening, there are dozens of articles on the unfolding human catastrophe in Gaza; e.g. Gaza on Verge of Collapse as Israel Sends 2.2 Million People "Back to Middle Ages" in Electricity Crisis. There is also renewed violence in the West Bank; see: Jason Ditz: Six Killed, Hundreds Wounded as Violence Rages Across West Bank; Sheren Khalel: Three settlers stabbed to death and three Palestinians shot dead in turmoil over security measures at al-Aqsa mosque compound; also always useful to check out Kate's latest press compilation.

• Benjamin Hart: Obamacare and the Limits of Propaganda:

  But now, Republicans control every lever of the federal government, and any illusion that replacing Obamacare would be simple has been well and truly shattered. Instead, the relentless news coverage around health care has finally revealed Republicans' philosophy on the issue: nothing more than knee-jerk opposition to the previous president combined with an overwhelming desire to cut taxes for wealthy Americans.

  And by thus far rejecting any reasonable fixes to the law, the GOP has inadvertently helped drag the American public to the left. A recent Pew survey found that 60 percent of Americans now believe that government has a responsibility to ensure health care for its citizens, the highest number in a decade. That includes 52 percent of Republicans with family incomes below $30,000, up from 31 percent a year ago.

  Propaganda works best when the enemy it conjures is hazy and easily caricatured; it works less well when everyday reality intrudes. Americans have now gotten a taste of what citizens in other industrialized nations have long become accustomed to, and they don't want less of it. They want more.

• John Judis: The Conflict Tearing Apart British Politics: An Interview With David Goodhart: Judis' interviews have generally been interesting, but this one gets pretty stupid. Goodhart's distinction between Somewheres and Anywheres isn't ridiculous -- certainly they're more neutral terms than Provincials and Cosmopolitans, but that's pretty much what they boil down to. On the other hand, the way he maps British partisan politics onto his concepts is scattered and arbitrary, obviously intent primarily on marginalizing Jeremy Corbyn, who he clearly detests on all levels:

  Jeremy Corbyn probably represents the view of about five percent of the British people, but a lot of naïve people don't remember the 1970s and the 1980s and the thing called the Soviet Union. They live in this ahistorical world. Even older people who are not so naïve and realize that Jeremy Corbyn was not to their taste in almost every respect nonetheless planned to vote for him as a protest against Brexit on the assumption that he was not going to be prime minister. The things that pushed him up, gave him twelve points more than were expected, were the very high turnout of the blob youth left, the hard core Remainers, and enough of the blue collar voters coming back to Labour on anti-austerity grounds. . . .

  I think the traditional Labour coalition has blown apart, but on a one-off basis Jeremy Corbyn has managed to stitch it back together sufficiently to give him the uplift of ten percent in the vote. By going helter skelter for the educated or semi-educated youth vote and playing on the soft left ideology that so many kids come out of the university with, combined with this bribe to abolish student tuition fees, he is shoring up for his own political ends, the middle class welfare state. So he has this huge uplift of the student vote and enough of the blue-collar vote, but it's a one-off and I think Labour is still on the road to oblivion as a party.

  I don't know anything more about Goodhart -- e.g., I have no idea why he should be considered some sort of expert on UK politics -- but he seems like a prime example of neoliberalism, especially in his disdain for "the middle class welfare state" and his painting anything government might do to help out any but the poorest of citizens as a "bribe" -- and needless to say the poor who still do get some paltry dole will also face a substantial helping of shame. The left's counter to this is to establish a set of rights which raise everyone up.

  Goldhart's view of Labour as a declining, obsolescent political force seems to be stuck in the "end of history" fantasies prevalent in the US/UK after the collapse of Communism. Until the fall, the ruling capitalists in the West at least had a healthy fear of worker revolution, and therefore sought to make society and economy more palatable. After the collapse, they lost that fear, and went on a binge of greed that still hasn't subsided, even though they seemed to trip up severely with the 2008 meltdown. Meanwhile, the left tried to rethink and regroup. A recent, interesting piece on this is: Tim Barker: The Bleak Left. I haven't finished it, and have my own ideas which gradually formed as I was trying to write about post-capitalism in the late 1990s. One of the first things I did was to jettison Marx, reinterpreting his revolutionary impulses not as early-proletarian but as late-bourgeois. Paraphrasing Benjamin on Baudellaire, I saw him (and later Marxists) as "secret agents, of the bourgeoisie's discontent with its own rule." That brought me back to equality as the foundation seed both of liberal politics and any just society. No way to properly unpack this here, but given recent trends toward extreme inequality (thanks mostly to neoliberalism, although inherited money also has much to do with it, especially on the US right) it isn't at all surprising that the left would reform to countervail, and that it would draw both on liberal and on socialist traditions to do so.

• Sam Knight: Trump's Environmental Protection Pick Is BP's Former Lawyer -- and May Preside Over Cases Involving BP.

• Mike Konczal: "Neoliberalism" isn't an empty epithet. It's a real, powerful set of ideas. Centrist Democrats are getting touchy about being called "neoliberal" -- even in The Nation I've seen Danny Goldberg (link, if you can read it, here) insist that the left stop using the term. He doesn't offer an alternative, but the first one that pops into my mind is "corporate stooges" -- "neoliberal" at least suggests some degree of coherence and integrity. Konczal tries to sketch out how that ideology developed historically, going back to Charles Peters' 1983 "A Neoliberal's Manifesto." Since then, adherents have preferred to call themselves New Democrats (or New Labour in Britain), while British critics have tended to use neoliberal for macroeconomic policies that promoted free flow of capital and trade while forcing governments to adopt austerity, with no linkages to other issues (thus, for instance, one could be neoliberal on economic policy, neoconservative on war, and either liberal or conservative on social issues). However, at present neoliberalism is a cleavage line that splits Democrats -- even if Clinton had to compromise on trade and college tuition to secure the 2016 nomination. Indeed, neoliberal only became an epithet as it became clear that its promises of widespread prosperity turned out to be not just hollow but fraudulent.

• Richard Lardner: Lawmakers Announce Bipartisan Deal on Sweeping Russia Sanctions Bill: Proves two things: (1) nothing brings a nation together like a shared enemy, even a phony one; and (2) the Democrats have still not made a serious review of America's habit of imperial power projection, even though it objectively hurts both their base and their political message. A crude way to understand the latter point is that the only times Republicans join with Democrats is when they intuit that doing so hurts (and helps disillusion) the Democratic Party base. Democrats wouldn't have to go full isolationist to turn the corner on the neocon fetish with single-power projection that has dominated US policy since the mid-1990s. (The Iraq regime change vote marked their ascendancy, again keyed to take advantage of an enemy Democrats wouldn't doubt.) Democrats could, for instance, revert to their early beliefs in international law and institutions -- a belief that led to the UN, an organization the neocons have managed to totally marginalize (except when they can use it). That reminds me of a third point: this bill again testifies to the singular anomaly of US subservience to Israel. You'd think at the very least that Democrats would defend Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, but their allegiance to Israel trumps party loyalty.

  One should note that while Congress is limiting Trump's power to reduce international tensions by curtailing sanctions, that same body is evidently giving Trump a free hand to start any war that strikes his fancy. See (if you can): John Nichols: Paul Ryan Hands Donald Trump a Blank Check for Endless War.

• Dylan Matthews: President Trump's essentially unlimited pardon power, explained: Reports are that Trump has already started discussing using his pardon powers to obstruct the Russia investigation. Can he do that? Yes. Would that be grounds for impeachment? Probably. Will the Republican congress act on that? Nope. Also, where early reports merely stated that Trump was asking about his pardon powers, now he seems to have gotten the answer he wants: Cristina Cabrera: Trump Asserts His 'Complete Power' to Pardon. On the other hand, Laurence Tribe argues No, Trump can't pardon himself. The Constitution tells us so.

• Caitlin MacNeal: Spicey's Greatest Hits: Trump spokesman Sean Spicer resigned this week, after Anthony Scaramucci was appointed as White House Communications Director. Link has videos of some of Spicer's more famous gaffes, but his root problem was the material he had to work with, and the so-called journalists who cover the presidency and can't seem to dig deeper than press briefings and Trump's twitter feed. Scaramucci is a hedge fund guy, which makes you wonder what he's doing slumming in the White House staff. His first job, of course, was to clean up his own twitter history: Cristina Cabrera: Scaramucci on Twitter Deletion Spree.

• Tom McKay: Trump Nominates Sam Clovis, a Dude Who Is Not a Scientist, to be Department of Agriculture's Top Scientist: But he did work as host of a right-wing talk show back in Iowa.

• Heather Digby Parton: Trump rejects his poll numbers as fake news -- but even his voters are starting to notice the scam.

• John Quiggin: Can we get to 350ppm? Yes we can: A relatively optimistic forecast on climate change, based largely on recent technological trends like much cheaper solar power, but noting various risks, and assuming "the absence of political disasters such as a long-running Trump presidency." Links to a contrasting, downright apocalyptic view, not specifically linked to Trump: David Wallace-Wells: The Uninhabitable Earth.

• Lisa Rein: Interior Dept. ordered Glacier park chief, other climate expert pulled from Zuckerberg tour

• Sam Sacks: Trump Kicks Off Voter Fraud Commission With Innuendo That States Are Hiding Something. Kris Kobach's voter suppression racket is one of the most disgusting of Trump's programs. Still, it's rather a shock to see Trump so personally involved with it.

• Matt Taibbi: What Does Russiagate Look Like to Russians? Kind of like Americans are war-crazed fanatics whose hatred of Russia is less ideological than genetic?

  For journalists like me who have backgrounds either working or living in Russia, the new Red Scare has been an ongoing freakout. A lot of veteran Russia reporters who may have disagreed with each other over other issues in the past now find themselves in like-minded bewilderment over the increasingly aggressive rhetoric.

  Many of us were early Putin critics who now find ourselves in the awkward position of having to try to argue Americans off the ledge, or at least off the path to war, when it comes to dealing with the Putin regime.

  There's a lot of history that's being glossed over in the rush to restore Russia to an archenemy role.

  For one, long before the DNC hack, we meddled in their elections. This was especially annoying to Russians because we were ostensibly teaching them the virtues of democracy at the time.

  The case in point was Boris Yeltsin's 1966 campaign, where "three American advisers [were] sent to help the pickling autocrat Yeltsin devise campaign strategy." Yeltsin then created the corrupt oligarchy we like to blame on Putin.

  Evidently, one of the rarest skills in the world is the ability to imagine how other people view us.

• Trevor Timm: ICE agents are getting out of control. And they are only getting worse: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (not sure why the article refers to them as "Ice" rather than "ICE"). They've had the legal authority, for some time, so all Trump had to do to crank them up was "take the shackles off" ("eerily echoing the CIA's comments post-9/11 that they would 'take the gloves off' in response to the terrorist attack"). Of course, Trump is doing more: "stripping away due process protections for arrested immigrants via executive order, the US justice department has even attempted to cut off legal representation for some immigrants."

• Robin Wright: Is the Nuclear Deal With Iran Slipping Away? Also on Iran: Trita Parsi: War with Iran is back on the table -- thanks to Trump. By the way, Parsi, who wrote the definitive book on why Israel decided to pump Iran up as "an existential threat" (Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States) has a new book Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy.

• Matthew Yglesias: The most important stories of the week, explained: the Obamacare repeal push died, then came back; John McCain has brain cancer; Donald Trump said some things; House Republicans released a budget plan. Other Yglesias pieces: Trump's new communications director used to call him an anti-American hack politician (not any more: see Cristina Cabrera: Scaramucci on Twitter Deletion Spree); Trumpcare still isn't dead; A new interview reveals Trump's ignorance to be surprisingly wide-ranging; The latest Trump interview once again reveals total disregard for the rule of law; Trump is mad Democrats didn't work with him on health care, but he never tried. Also, here's a Yglesias tweet:

  Look, just because Sessions hasn't actually been convicted of a crime is no reason we can't start seizing his property now.

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