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Sunday, August 12, 2018
Weekend Roundup
Haven't made my transition to posting on Notes on Everyday Life:
partly inertia early in the week, but my server vanished from the
web Thursday evening and still (late Sunday) hasn't come back. Not
being able to do anything about this -- ISP says they've had a "power
problem," adding that some hard drives were damaged and "we are
attempting to slave primary drives on several servers," evidently
a slow process -- I went ahead and assembled a Weekend Roundup,
not that I have anywhere to post it.
Some scattered links this week:
Jonathan Chait: Trump Invites For-Profit Colleges to Exploit Students:
Sure, too late to help Trump University, but Betsy De Vos believes in
the principle that if government has to subsidize education, the benefits
should go to business, not students.
Jane Coaston: What Sunday's Unite the Right 2 rally tells us about the
state of the alt-right in America: I'd just as soon ignore the whole
thing (at least as long as Trump himself doesn't make an appearance, or
send a personal representative, like Steven Miller or Jared Kushner). He
has little need for the "bad optics" ("marching with tiki torches and
chanting slogans from the Third Reich") and media hassle of associating
himself with these poseurs. After all, his own stand up act at "campaign
rallies" is safer and more effective, and most importantly reinforces
his own movement leadership. So why doesn't he try to shut Unite the
Right down? Probably because he figures counterprotests and media flak
will redound to his benefit: the more his enemies attack him, the more
he seems like the lord and protector of his fan base. (See
Laura McGann: Donald Trump seems fine with Nazis gathering on his
lawn.) So I'd skip the counterprotests as well (not that I won't
be amused when the latter outnumber the former, as has usually been
the case). As we've seen, targeted protests against Trump/Republican
policies have drawn much larger crowds than anyone can imagine here.
Still, the season is coming when the most critical protests against
Trump will be at the ballot box.
Kevin Cook: Joe Pyne Was America's First Shock Jock: A little
nostalgia here, as I watched Pyne regularly in the late 1960s.
Always thought he was something of an asshole, but he wasn't stupid.
I liked a few of his guests (like Paul Krassner) and didn't mind him
eviscerating some of the others (like George Lincoln Rockwell and,
especially, Nathaniel Branden). The article includes a Krassner
story I didn't witness but read about in The Realist. I
hadn't heard the Frank Zappa one, also pointing out Pyne's wooden
leg.
Jason Ditz: Trump, Pence Again Announce Intentions to Establish
'Space Force'. So ridiculous, it looked to me like getting Pence
to hold the press conerence was meant to permanently demolish his
political career. (Mattis also appeared, and looked every bit as
dumbfounded, but most news outlets skipped over that. I thought
Jimmy Kimmel had the best line on this: "The logo for the Space
Force should just be a picture of money being shredded and thrown
at the moon." Actually, instead of "money" I thought Kimmel said "a
trillion dollars." Although ridicule is the obvious reaction, one
piece that takes this proposal seriously is
Fred Kaplan: Space Farce, where among other tidbits you will find
that there already is an Air Force Space Command, "founded in 1982 and
headquartered in Colorado Springs, has 36,000 personnel and budget this
year of $8.5 billion" -- so they'll finally have something to defend:
their turf in the ensuing budget battles. There's also the even larger,
$15 billion National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which runs all (or
most) of America's spy satellites. Kaplan sees lots of practical issues,
but doesn't raise basic ones, like what sort of message does forming
an expensive Space Force sends to the rest of the world. On the one
hand, it's a challenge to other countries to start deploying weapons
in space, if for no other reason than to counter the US challenge. On
the other, it tells the world that the US is aiming to radically expand
its ability to rain devastation on every corner of the Earth, even more
so than they can currently do. The hedge is that no other nation would
be able to spend money on this level, but the admission is that no
other nation is deranged enough to do so: that hardly makes anyone
feel more secure. And while we're used to the stock line that arming
ourselves preserves the peace, the temptation to use new weapons is
all but irresistible: it's only a matter of time before someone like
Madeleine Albright comes around and taunts you with "what's the purpose
of having this magnificent army if you can't use it?"
Kaplan cites China's test of technology means to disable satellites,
but doesn't point out the obvious message: you can't secure space-based
weapons, so don't bother building them. Indeed, one of the cardinal
rules of war is that it's much easier to break things than to protect
them. Chalmers Johnson illustrated this in The Sorrows of Empire
when he showed how easy it would be for a hostile force to destroy
every satellite in Earth orbit: just launch a dumptruck load of gravel,
which traveling at 18,000 mph would soon shred every last one, and make
it impossible to ever rebuild.
Adam Gopnik: The Las Vegas Massacre Report and the Rise of Second
Amendment Nihilism.
Sam Knight: Jeremy Corbin's Anti-Semitism Crisis: Huh? I couldn't
even follow the logic of the charges, which generally follow the form:
over decades of activism, Corbyn associated with X who in some other
context said Y which out of context could be deemed an anti-semitic
slur, especially if you count any criticism of Israel as such. Making
matters worse, Corbyn has tried to deny and/or explain away the charges.
Of course, a conscientious reporter wouldn't bother reporting innuendo
like this, much less trying to inflate it into a "crisis." Even Knight
is pretty clear that there's nothing here, so why is he adding to it?
This reminds me of the old
Lyndon Johnson story:
Legend has it that LBJ, in one of his early congressional campaigns,
told one of his aides to spread the story that Johnson's opponent
fucked pigs. The aide responded "Christ, Lyndon, we can't call the
guy a pigfucker. It isn't true." To which LBJ supposedly replied "Of
course it ain't true, but I want to make the son-of-a-bitch deny it."
Will Porter: Iran Sanctions Aren't Just Counterproductive, They're an
Act of War: True enough, but when the country that proclaims and
enforces them is massively more powerful and massively more terrifying,
what can the victim do about it? Commit suicide? Pretend they can
reciprocate with their own sanctions? Appeal to the UN or World Court?
The latter might be a reasonable recourse if the power differential
hadn't already rigged them. Maybe that leaves some asymmetric options,
like aiding terrorists, but there's no way you can game that out as a
winning strategy. In the case of Iran, the one hope is that Europe will
not support the US sanctions, reducing the effectiveness of American
bullying.
Grant Smith: Can the US Keep Lying About Israel's Nukes?
Michael Weiss: What Russia Understands About Trump: Putin built
his career and regime on alternately coddling and cornering oligarchs.
And that's pretty much all Trump is: vain and corrupt.
Fareed Zakaria: Looking Back at the Economic Crash of 2008: A
review of Adam Tooze: Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises
Changed the World. Tooze is a British economic historian, best
known for The Wages of Destruction, a history and analysis
of the German economy under the Third Reich; also The Deluge: The
Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931.
One point here I never quite realized:
What this shows is that the US power elite -- a consensus shared
by Bush and Obama -- had come to put the interests of global capital
above those of ordinary Americans. Indeed, this shift, which had
never been debated politically, started with the post-WWII Cold War,
when the US sided with capital against labor everywhere, even to the
point of supporting failing empires and corrupt dictators. This was
explicit with the Marshall Plan, but that could still be viewed in
national terms, as a win-win deal for American and European business.
What happened later was that capital flows became so free globally
that the Fed couldn't stimulate the American economy without much of
the cash injection crossing borders. Indeed, the 1990-92 recession
mostly resulted in dollars flooding currency bubbles in Mexico and
East Asia. (Conversely, aggressive stimulus spending by China after
2008 helped shore up the economies of Europe and America. European
central banks were less effective because they were politically caught
up in the austerity fad.)
The second key point here is that while the technocrats did a good
job of propping the banks up and halting the slide into depression,
the way they did it cost them much of their political credibility --
discrediting the political center and fueling "populist" parties both
on the left and the right. Some Yemen/Saudi Arabia links: I don't really know what to
make of these:
Ask a question, or send a comment.
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