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Sunday, April 24, 2016
Weekend Roundup
The New York primaries were held last week. Hillary Clinton won a
huge win with 58.0% of the vote, giving her 139 delegates to Bernie
Sanders 108. On the Republican side, Donald Trump won with his first
majority in a primary all year, a big one with 60.4% of the vote vs.
25.1% for John Kasich and 14.5% for that sworn enemy of "New York
values" Ted Cruz. Trump got 89 delegates, Kasich 4, and Cruz 0, so
this primary went a long ways to putting Trump back on track for a
first ballot win at the Republican Convention. Still, it's worth
noting that Trump only got 19.5% of the votes cast on Tuesday.
Sanders got 28.4%, and Clinton got 39.2% -- together the Democrats
got 67.7% of the total vote, a big change from earlier primaries
where Republicans generally got more votes than Democrats.
I looked at 538's
What Went Down in the New York Primaries, and one thing I checked
was the Clinton-Sanders split by congressional district. What I found
was that Clinton ran especially well in New York City, and was much
stronger in districts represented by Democrats (she won 17 of 18, only
losing around Albany). Sanders, on the other hand, won 5 (of 9)
districts represented by Republicans, and did better than his state
average in the other four (also in Democratic districts in Buffalo
and Rochester, plus the 6th in Queens and the 18th in Westchester).
What this suggests is that the party machine and its patronage
network held firm for Clinton. Of course, one thing that helped
the machine was that the primary was closed (way in advance of the
vote), so independents, which Sanders has regularly won this year,
often by large margins, couldn't vote.
I came out of this feeling pretty down, not so much because I
expected a Sanders win -- I did think it might be closer, but knew
Clinton had a lot of structural advantages there -- but because it
underscored how difficult it's going to be to dislodge the Party's
power structure. Sanders could win in Republican areas because he
appealed especially to people deprived of power, but the Democrats
so controlled New York City that the oligarchy -- especially the
nabobs of Wall Street -- owned the Party. And what made matters
worse for me was that while this smackdown was going on, I was
reading Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened
to the Party of the People?, where his big point is that the
Democrats ever since Carter had courted educated professionals
(following Chris Hedges, he calls them the Liberal Class), often
at the expense of the workers and unions who had previously been
the most effective supporters of the Democratic Party -- the net
effect is that the Democrats are as much in bed with big business
as the Republicans, making them preferable only in that they'll
try to defend certain liberties and civil rights, and work a bit
less hard at destroying the middle class. That explains the sort
of marginal differentiation that is supposed to convince us that
we need Clinton to save the world from Trump or Cruz, even though
there is no reason to think she'll even try to do the things that
need to be done to reverse the increase in inequality and the rot
in practically everything else. So while the horserace watchers saw
New York as the primary that virtually cinched Clinton's nomination,
it looked more to me like the end of any hope for change.
Next Tuesday's primaries promise to be more of the same. Clinton
is favored in Connecticut (56.2-41.3%, closest poll Clinton +6),
Maryland (63.3-33.9%, closest +13), and Pennsylvania (58.9-38.2%,
closest +6); I don't see any polling on Delaware and Rhode Island,
but I'd expect them to be similar to Maryland and Connecticut
(although there is one Delaware poll with Clinton +7, suggesting
much closer than Maryland). Trump is also expected to mop up:
45.2-31.7-21.3% in Connecticut (Kasich over Cruz), 40.3-30.6-27.1%
in Maryland (Kasich over Cruz), and 41.1-29.4-27.4% in Pennsylvania
(Cruz over Kasich -- looks like a second straight brutal week for
Cruz).
Looking further ahead, Clinton should keep on winning: 52.7-44.4%
in Indiana (May 3), 56.8-41.7% in California (June 7), 51.0-41.4% in
New Jersey (also June 7). Trump continues to lead in the Republican
races (with Cruz getting a bit closer): 38.1-37.5-22.2% (T-C-K) in
Indiana, 41.9-33.5-23.4% (T-C-K) in California, and 50.4-23.4-17.2%
(T-K-C) in New Jersey.
Meanwhile I have to share the following image. Just think, with
three-hundred million people in America, this is the best we can do?
Back in 1776 there were only four million people in America, yet
somehow we managed to find a wide range of capable leaders. Now we
find that the only possible surrogate for one Clinton is another,
and that the best the opposition party can come up with is their
former party pal. Hard to see any significant differences among
this crowd, yet both Trump and Clinton have managed to convince
most of their followers that the other is the Devil incarnate,
and those followers are hysterical as expected. Still, the odds
of a comparably jovial post-election photo are pretty high --
especially if Clinton wins and reverts to form, serving the
billionaire class.
Some scattered links this week:
Gerald Friedman: Orthodox Economics Has Become a Place Where Visions Die
and Hopes Are Banished: Subhed: "Why liberal economists dish out
despair." Friedman was the economist who analyzed Bernie Sanders'
platform and concluded that it would lead to a growth rate that the
US economy hasn't seen in over fifty years. He was, in turn, attacked
by economists like Christine Romer and Paul Krugman for suggesting
that such growth rates were even possible. Basically, they regarded
Friedman's calculations as proof that Sanders was fantasizing. (In
fairness, a few economists like James Galbraith defended Friedman.)
Much of interest here:
There is, of course, a politics as well as a psychology to this economic
theory. If nothing much can be done, if things are as good as they can be,
it is irresponsible even to suggest to the general public that we try to
do something about our economic ills. The role of economists and other
policy elites (Paul Krugman is fond of the term "wonks") is to explain to
the general public why they should be reconciled with stagnant incomes,
and to rebuke those, like myself, who say otherwise before we raise false
hopes that can only be disappointed. But this approach leaves liberals
like Hillary Clinton with few policy options to offer in response to the
siren call of demagogues like Donald Trump. And it makes the work of
self-proclaimed "responsible" elite economists that much more pressing.
They have to work even harder to persuade the public that nothing can be
done to head off the challenge of Trump and other irresponsible politicians
who capitalize on the electorate's appetite for change. They have to slap
down critics like myself. "Responsible" elite economists have to keep the
party of "good arithmetic" from overpromising at all costs.
Were the orthodox classical economists correct, then of course their
politics would follow. But what if they are wrong? What if government
action could, in fact, raise growth rates or narrow disparities? What
would be the expected value of a higher GDP growth rate? Would it be
worth some academic debate, even if it leaked into the public realm?
Might this debate even serve a socially useful function by giving voters
an alternative to the xenophobic political economy of Donald Trump? Many
Americans believe that government action can improve economic conditions,
especially for workers, and many of these support Trump because they see
him as the only candidate who is even willing to consider government
action to help working Americans. These voters can look long and hard
at the "responsible" Clinton platform for some policy, for any policy
to raise growth rates and narrow income disparities. But they won't find
it, because policy elites have closed their minds to the possibility of
change.
This reminds me that Krugman has repeatedly defended Democratic Party
compromises (e.g., ACA, Dodd-Frank) as adequate and satisfactory (even
if not ideal) solutions, while implying that little more can be done,
and that when Sanders argues otherwise, he's out on some lark beyond
anything that is economically possible. This gets me wondering whether
there were any Keynesians during the 1930s, even after it had become
clear that government spending was working to bring the economy out of
the Great Depression, who could imagine what a radical expansion --
one aimed not just as restoring the pre-depression equilibrium but
achieving a whole new level of prosperity -- might accomplish. That
experiment was (perhaps unwittingly) done with the total mobilization
for WWII. What Sanders is proposing goes way beyond repairing the
damage done by Bush's bubble. What's lacking is political will, not
the "laws of economics," and the net effect of Krugman's (and others')
naysaying is to help suppress that political will.
I don't doubt that there are long-term issues with sustaining
economic growth, but it's also clear that the US economy is performing
way below what it's capable of, and a crash program of public works --
not just to fix our sorely degraded infrastructure -- would make a big
difference (even Krugman understands that much, although his argument
doesn't go nearly as far as Sanders or Friedman). The infrastructure
work would also move a huge current liability into the asset column,
and would improve future productivity, but there's much more value to
be gained from spending on public works. One area where Sanders may
be overly optimistic is how to pay for this: it's not clear to me that
simply "soaking the rich" with higher taxes will raise enough revenue
(not that that's not worth doing in its own right), especially if one
implements other reforms to reverse increasing inequality. Most likely
we would need some sort of broad-based consumption tax (in addition to
more progressive taxes on profits and estates), but that's almost a
technical issue compared to the broader question of vision.
I should also remind you of Philip Mirowski's big book, Never
Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the
Financial Meltdown (2013), which is largely about how mainstream
economists throttled (well, more like strangled) any serious political
change following a severe crisis which pretty clearly proved that
their understanding of the economy was faulty.
Emmett Rensin: The smug style in American liberalism: Much I agreed
with here, and much that rubbed me the wrong way. I believe that good
politics derives from respect for everyone, notably people who grew up
differently from yourself, who consequently have different world views.
However, that doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't disagree with some of
those world views. It's just that the ones you should reject are the ones
where respect isn't reciprocal or generalizable. Many people, for instance,
think they should be privileged over other groups of people, and that is
a creed that is based on disrespect for the unprivileged, that cannot be
generalizable. We can all, for instance, settle for equality, which is
what makes it such a fundamental principle of political society. Given
all this, smugness is inappropriate and often counterproductive. Yet it
is pretty much impossible to engage in political discourse without at
some point appearing to someone as smug. And consequently, Rensin's
examples are all over the range from sensible to outrageous. There are
some ideas -- the gold standard, for instance, or creationism -- that
are so indefensible many of us skip past re-litigating them and resort
to derision, even if that leaves the impression of smugness. Similarly
there are people -- e.g., Sen. Jim Inhofe on climate change (fresh on
my mind because I read a quote from him today) -- who having repeatedly
clung to indefensible positions have lost the right to be taken seriously,
even though such instant rejection smacks of smugness. At some point you
have to realize that it's not practical to re-argue everything from first
principles every time it comes up (though it is useful to be able to cite
someone who has thought the issue through). Still, I don't disagree with
the following:
It is impossible, in the long run, to cleave the desire to help people
from the duty to respect them. It becomes all at once too easy to decide
you know best, to never hear, much less ignore, protest to the contrary.
At present, many of those most in need of the sort of help liberals
believe they can provide despise liberalism, and are despised in turn.
Is it surprising that with each decade, the "help" on offer drifts even
further from the help these people need?
Even if the two could be separated, would it be worth it? What kind
of political movement is predicated on openly disdaining the very people
it is advocating for?
The smug style, at bottom, is a failure of empathy. Further: It is a
failure to believe that empathy has any value at all. It is the notion
that anybody worthy of liberal time and attention and respect must
capitulate, immediately, to the Good Facts. [ . . . ]
The smug style did not arise by accident, and it cannot be abolished
with a little self-reproach. So long as liberals cannot find common cause
with the larger section of the American working class, they will search
for reasons to justify that failure. They will resent them. They will
find, over and over, how easy it is to justify abandoning them further.
They will choose the smug style.
One thing that Rensin has stumbled onto here is that the relationship
between liberalism and the working class has been fraught with difficulty
throughout American history, perhaps only bound together by accident of
the egalitarian words of the Declaration of Independence and the power
shifts of the New Deal. Liberalism has always focused on individuals,
defined as free and equal as opposed to the old orders of aristocracy
(and peasantry or slavery). As such, liberals sought to advance people
one-by-one based on merit, whereas socialists sought to "level up" the
working class to share in the entire nation's wealth (mostly created
by the labor of the working class). As such liberals -- Chris Hedges
and Thomas Frank speak of a distinct "liberal class" rooted in highly
educated professionals -- have tended to accept inequities, provided
that opportunities were more or less equal -- all the more so in times
of increased inequality, such as ours.
Indeed, at this point I suspect that the only thing that keeps the
liberal class and the working class -- which is a pretty fair first
approximation of the Clinton-Sanders contest -- from splitting the
Democratic Party in two is their shared horror at the prospect of
Republican rule. It will be interesting to see whether the dominant
liberal faction makes any serious nods toward the white working class
(with Republicans like Trump and Cruz, blacks and Latinos are pretty
much locked in).
Yusef Munayyer: Wanted: A US Strategy in the Middle East:
In 2006, as Israel and Hezbollah were engaged in what would be a 34day war,
the longest of any ArabIsraeli war since 1948, US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice reflected on the region's volatile dynamics calling them
"the birth pangs of a new Middle East." She further stated, "We have to be
certain that we are pushing forward to the new Middle East not back to the
old one."
Indeed, there was something new in the Middle East that Dr. Rice was
observing then. For the first time, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan all
seemed to align with Israel in the war and condemned Hezbollah in a very
overt way. Earlier in the year, Al-Qaeda in Iraq launched the first major
salvo in what became a sectarian war in Iraq when it bombed the Shi'a
AlAskari Mosque in Samarra. The Iraq war had made this regional
realignment, which we have seen develop further in the years since,
come into fruition.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the subsequent dismantlement of the
Iraqi state had many devastating implications for the region. Perhaps
most significant was the fact that it shattered any semblance of regional
order in the Middle East and the longstanding modus vivendi
between Riyadh and Tehran. Saddam had been a bulwark against Iran and
a buffer that limited Iranian influence from reaching the Arab Gulf
countries and the Levant. With Saddam gone, the US fired the starting
pistol in a regional power struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Militias, insurgencies, sectarianism and bloodshed would characterize
this power struggle.
Today, more than a decade into this contest, the labor pains have
subsided and a demon child called ISIS, nurtured from embryo to beast
in the womb of a failed Iraqi state, has not only learned to walk but
is running amok across the Middle East, North Africa and beyond.
Munayyer's big point is that while the US thought it had all the
power in the world, it had no real idea what it wanted to do with
that power, and consequently wound up thrashing, unable to decide
on goals, or even friends and enemies (actually, both camps tended
to be defined by their opposite in ways that wound up contradicting
one another). And in this context US power turned out to be far less
than super (let alone hyper). Munayyer sees the 2003 invasion of Iraq
as pivotal, but the 1990 war was nearly as bad, and the US had made
a muddle of its strategy ever since Carter declared the Persian Gulf
a "vital US interest," or Nixon looked to Saudi fundamentalism as a
bulwark in the Cold War, or LBJ had no interest in brokering an end
to the Arab-Israeli wars despite having friends on both sides. And
all through America's Orientalists never showed the slightest interest
in the welfare of the region's people, least of all their desires for
free societies and modern economies.
Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted:
Dean Baker: Patently Absurd Logic on Budget Deficits and Debt:
Time did a cover story attempting to rile up hysteria about the
federal deficit again, so Baker knocks it down plank by plank -- stuff
you should already know by now, but I'm flad he's also talking about
patents:
There is one other point about treating the debt as a serious measure
of generational equity. Interest payments on debt are just one of the
ways in which the government makes commitments for the future. When
the government grants patent and copyright monopolies, it is also
making commitments that carry into the future. Patent and copyright
monopolies allow the holders to charge prices for the protected items
that are hugely higher than the free market price. They are in effect
a tax that is privately collected by drug companies, software companies,
the entertainment industry and others.
These payments are in fact enormous relative to the interest burdens
that get the deficit hawks so excited. In the case of prescription drugs
alone, the difference between what we pay for patent protected drugs,
compared to drugs being sold at free market prices, is in the neighborhood
of $360 billion a year. That's equal to 2 percent of the GDP, twice the
size of the current interest burden on the public debt.
Jesse Eisinger: Why Haven't Bankers Been Punished? Just Read These Insider
SEC Emails: Follows longtime SEC lawyer James Kidney. Ends with:
Kidney became disillusioned. Upon retiring, in 2014, he gave an impassioned
going-away speech, in which he called the SEC "an agency that polices the
broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors."
In our conversations, Kidney reflected on why that might be. The oft-cited
explanations -- campaign contributions and the allure of private-sector jobs
to low-paid government lawyers -- have certainly played a role. But to Kidney,
the driving force was something subtler. Over the course of three decades,
the concept of the government as an active player had been tarnished in the
minds of the public and the civil servants inside working inside the agency.
In his view, regulatory capture is a psychological process in which officials
become increasingly gun shy in the face of criticism from their bosses,
Congress, and the industry the agency is supposed to oversee. Leads aren't
pursued. Cases are never opened. Wall Street executives are not forced to
explain their actions.
Rebecca Gordon: Exhibit One in Any Future American War Crimes Trial:
Author of a new book titled American Nuremberg: The US Officials
Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Previously wrote
Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United
States (2014, Oxford University Press). This excerpt focuses on
the torture of Abu Zubaydah, which surely qualifies although I'd say
that the decisions to invade and start decades-long wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq are far more serious crimes.
William Hartung: What a Waste, the US Military: Given all the evil
that the US military perpetrates, the fact that they do such a lousy job
of managing their bloated allowance ranks rather low on in my view, but
it's always worth a reminder that their lack of care and foresight starts
at home, well before they use it to screw up the rest of the world.
Matt Karp: Against Fortress Liberalism;
Lily Geismer: Atari Democrats;
Rick Perlstein: The Chicago School: three essays from Jacobin
magazine, which we recently subscribed to. On the other hand, they also
published a hatchet job by Jonah Walters on "hippie-hating hawk" Merle
Haggard that totally misses the boat. (Kathleen Geier fumes
here, and Eric Loomis gets down to brass tacks in a reply titled
Walking on the Fighting Side of Me.)
David Swanson: US Wars Are Not Waged Out of Generosity or for Democracy:
Interview by Mark Karlin with the author of War Is a Lie, originally
written in 2010 and now out in a 2nd edition paperback (Just World Books),
and founder of the
World Beyond War website.
In 2006, Republicans believed they'd have to end the wars, and Democrats
were elected to congressional majorities with that mandate. Rahm Emanuel
then openly told The Washington Post that the Democrats would keep the
wars going for two more years in order to run "against" them again in
2008. The Democrats took the chairs of committees and proceeded to do
nothing with them. And people who identified with the Democratic Party
in 2007 began obsessing with the 2008 presidential election, at the
expense of ending the slaughter in 2007 or 2008.
Endless, lawless war at massive expense was clearly established as a
bipartisan norm. Entire presidential debates in 2016 have passed by
without a single mention of the world outside the United States. No
candidate has been asked whether 54 percent of discretionary spending
on militarism is too much, too little or just right. Young people have
grown up in this climate and accepted in some cases -- just like most
old people -- all the propaganda or at least the part that maintains
that we are powerless to stop wars. Corruption by war profiteers and
general cultural taboos contribute: The big environmental groups won't
take on the biggest destroyer of the environment, the big civil liberties
groups won't touch the biggest cause of rights violations etc. But the
fact is that a massive movement against war is extremely active and
broad in comparison to what the media suggests.
For an excerpt from the new edition of War Is a Lie, see
Fear of ISIS Used to Justify Continued Military Intervention in Middle
East.
How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk: As Secretary of State, Clinton
was consistently more hawkish than President Obama. Indeed, she's
always been quick to resort to military force. Long story, including
a possibly apocryphal story about Clinton wanting to join the Navy.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
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