Sunday, October 16, 2016

Weekend Roundup

Realizing I wasn't going to find much time, I started this early in the week, and added things when I noticed them without making much in the way of a systematic search. Since my last Weekend Roundup, much as happened, including a debate of the vice-president candidates (which failed to convince me that Tim Kaine was the smart choice), a second presidential debate (which further cemented Trump's decline), and major exposés of both candidates' dirty laundry (where Trump's smelled much fouler).

At the moment, FiveThirtyEight gives Hillary a 86.2% chance of winning based on a 6.5% popular vote advantage, with Arizona tilting slightly toward Hillary (51.0%), and progressively better odds in Iowa (62.1%), Ohio (64.8%), North Carolina (69.2%), Nevada (74.4%), Florida (74.5%), and New Hampshire (the state which for most of this election was the one that would secure an electoral college win for either candidate, now 83.7% for Hillary). Trump still looks to be solid elsewhere, although a third party candidate named Evan McMullin is polling well enough in Utah that he's given a chance of picking up the state's electoral votes (Trump's chances there are 92.7%, Clinton 4.6%, so that could leave McMullin with 2.7%). Trump's weakest leads are currently: Alaska (68.4%), Georgia (73.7%), Missouri (77.8%), South Dakota (81.2%), South Carolina (83.6%), Texas (86.1%), Indiana (86.2%), Kansas (87.3%), and Montana (87.4%).

I work out much of the logic under the Christgau link below, but to cut to the chase, I plan on voting for Hillary Clinton in November, and urge you to do so too. More importantly, I plan on voting for Democrats down ballot (even though the ones in Kansas running against Moran and Pompeo have less chance than Gary Johnson does), and hope for big gains for the Democrats in Congress and elsewhere -- in many ways that's even more important than the presidency. One thing I was especially struck by this past week was interviews with Moran and Pompeo where they casually referred to "the disaster of the Obama administration." Do these guys have any fucking idea what they're talking about? Or do they just mean Obama's been bad for them personally, like by cutting into their graft and perks? Sure, Obama has been disappointing, but mostly because he's been crippled by Republicans -- who clearly live in their own fantasy world these days.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Russell Berman: What Bill Clinton Meant When He Called Obamacare 'Crazy': Actually, there's nothing in his specific critique that couldn't be fixed by rejiggering the subsidy tables to help people with a bit more income than the current schedules allow -- but that also rewards the insurance companies for pushing premiums up. The other approach that is commonly talked about is trying to drive premiums back down by providing a non-profit "public option" to compete with the private insurers. What was really crazy about Obamacare was thinking that you could solve the problem of a growing number of uninsured people while keeping the profits of all the parts of the industry propped up, and that problem isn't going to be countered until you find a way to blunt or eliminate those profit-seeking opportunities. And the truth is that the private insurance racket, which could easily be obsoleted by a single-payer system, is just the tip of that iceberg. We may not be as far away from coming to that realization as many pundits think -- in large part because we have the examples of so many other countries that have figured that out and made health care a public service and a universal right.

    On the other hand, just because Obamacare is crazy doesn't mean it wasn't a big improvement over the previous system. And while is hasn't succeeded in making sure everyone is insured, it reversed a longstanding trend that was stripping health insurance from millions of Americans. The Republicans never had an answer to that problem, and while they conceivably could make good on their promise to repeal Obamacare, they have no clue how to fix it. Berman talks a bit about various tinkerings that might help a bit -- the sort of things that Hillary Clinton is likely to push for. Still, I take Bill's "crazy" comment as good news: mostly, it shows he's moved beyond his own even lousier 1990s health care scheme.

  • Robert Christgau: Confessions of a Hillary Supporter: 'It's Not Like We Can Breathe Easy': Returns to the Voice with a political screed, much of it rehashing Nader's role in Gore's fateful 2000 loss to Bush, as well as his still snippy attitude toward Sanders:

    I know, you can't stand [Trump] either. For you, Hillary is the hard part. . . . Hillary lacks daring as well as grace, and from Libya to Honduras, her instinct in foreign policy has always been to fetishize "democracy" in an obtusely formalistic way. But she has a long personal history of doing good for people, an unmatched grasp of policy, thousands of exploitable relationships, and a platform where Sanders taught her plenty about the expanding limits of what's progressive and what's politic.

    • Best part of the piece is his recounting past efforts to dive into the political weeds and call on voters. He urges you to do the same this year: "we don't just want to win -- we want to win so big across the board that Clinton will feel obliged to activate her platform and that Trump's racist, xenophobic chauvinism will seem a perilous tack even to the saner Republicans who are right now scheming to deliver the U.S. to Big Capital in 2020."

    I don't want to relitigate Nader in 2000, but I find it odd that Christgau singles out Lieberman as the reason he voted for Nader over Gore. I've never been a Lieberman fan, but I don't think I gave Gore's VP pick any thought at the time. It was only later, after Sharon came to power in Israel and put an end to the Oslo Peace Process, and after 9/11 and Bush launched his Crusade (aka Global War on Terror) that Lieberman transformed into a conspicuously monstrous hawk. I don't doubt that he had long harbored that stance, just as I don't doubt that he had always been in the pocket of the insurance industry, but it's not like Gore saw those things as problems. I suspected that Gore would have tilted against peace in Israel/Palestine, and I never doubted that he would have gone to war in Afghanistan and elsewhere (including Iraq) in response to 9/11. He may have done so less crudely and less carelessly than Bush did, but those were pretty low bars. It's tempting to look back on this history and think that Gore would have avoided the many mistakes that Bush committed, but the whole DLC pitch in the 1990s (which Gore was as much a part of as Clinton) was to cut into the Republican alignment with oligarchy by showing that the Democrats could be even better for business, and they picked up a lot of conservative baggage along the way. That was Gore in 2000, and while we certainly underestimated how bad Bush would turn out, that was a pretty good reason to back Nader in 2000.

    On the other hand, I now think that Nader made a major mistake running as a third party candidate in 2000 (and 2004). We would have been much better served had he ran in primaries as a Democrat. He wouldn't have come close to beating Gore, but he would have been able to mobilize a larger protest vote, and he would have drawn the discussion (and maybe the party platform) toward the left. But then we don't get to choose our options, just choose among them. What persuaded me to give up interest in third party efforts was the fact that even in 2000, even with no campaign visibility, Gore outpolled Nader in Kansas by a factor of ten: 37.2-3.4%. I realized then that the people we wanted to appeal to were stuck in the Democratic Party. Sometimes part of that appeal means you have to vote for a poor excuse for a Democrat.

    The Nation recently ran a pair of articles on Stein vs. Clinton: Kshama Sawant: Don't Waste Your Vote on the Corporate Agenda -- Vote for Jill Stein and the Greens, and Joshua Holland: Your Vote for Jill Stein Is a Wasted Vote. I don't care for the thinking behind either of these articles, but only one has a clue what "waste" means and it isn't Sawant. If you want your vote to be effective, you should vote either for or against one of the two leading candidates, and it really doesn't make any difference whether you're positive or negative, just so you can tell the difference. On the other hand, sure, vote for a third party candidate if the following is the case: you can't distinguish a difference you really care about, and both leading candidates are objectionable on something you really do care about.

    Sawant may well be right if the one issue you really care about is "the corporate agenda" -- assuming you can define that in terms where Trump and Clinton are interchangeable, which I'm not sure you can do. (For instance, Trump wants less regulation of corporations but Clinton sometimes wants more; Trump wants the rich to pay less in taxes but Clinton wants the rich to pay more; Clinton favors a higher minimum wage but Trump doesn't.) But personally, I don't see "the corporate agenda" (or its more conceptual proxy, "capitalism") as something to get bent out of shape about. I don't have a problem with corporations as long as they are well regulated and we have countervailing mechanisms to balance off problems like inequality. Clinton doesn't go as far in that direction as I'd like, and she's much to comfy in the company of billionaires, but Trump is a billionaire (one of the worst of the breed), and he clearly has no concern for the vast majority of Americans. I can think of several issues I am so deeply concerned about that I might base a decision on them: war is a big one, racism another, inequality all-pervasive, and environmental degradation. Trump is clearly unacceptable on all four accounts (as is the political party for which he stands). Clinton is clearly better on all of those except war, and she's probably more temperate and sensible there than Trump is. Perhaps if Stein ran a campaign specifically against war and empire I might find her candidacy more compelling, but "corporate agenda" doesn't do the trick.

    Sawant's other argument is that you can only build an alternative to "the corporate agenda" by staying outside of the Democratic Party. I don't see that working for three reasons: almost all of the people who might be sympathetic are already invested as Democrats (and more all the time are being driven to the Democrats by the Republicans); your separatism demonstrates a lack of solidarity, and possibly even an antipathy to the people you're supposedly trying to help; and you're denying that reform is possible within the Democratic Party, which given the existence of primaries and such would seem to be false.

    But let's throw one more argument into the mix. Voting is at best a rare and limited option, whereas there are other forms of political action that are more direct, more focused, and more viable for people who don't start with majority consensus: demonstrations, speeches, boycotts. In these cases what may matter more isn't having politicians to lead your side but having politicians willing to listen and open to persuasion, especially based on traditionally shared values. One instance that made this clear to me was when organizers who were opposed to Israeli apartheid and occupation came to Wichita and urged us to talk to our representative and senators. They pointed out how they gained a receptive audience from longtime Israel supporters like Ted Kennedy, but all we had to work with was Sam Brownback and Todd Tiahrt -- bible-thumping end-of-times Zionists who regard us less as constituents than as intractable enemies. So while it may not be possible to turn Clinton against American imperialism and militarism in principle, at least her administration will see a need to talk to us -- if she's our leader, we're her people, and that's not something I can imagine with Trump and the Republicans. (Also not something that seems likely with today's crop of third parties, which are almost anti-political and anti-social by design.)

    Some other more or less leftish opinions:

  • Fred Kaplan: How Does Obama Respond to Russia's Cyberattacks? The Obama administration has gone on record not only declaring that Russia is responsible for recent hacks apparently meant to influence US elections, but that the US will retaliate against Russia somehow. Perhaps I'm being dense, but I've never understood what constitutes cyberwarfare, let alone what the point of it is. I was hoping Kaplan, who has written a recent book on the subject, might enlighten me, but about all I've gathered from this article is that a picking a fight here is only likely to hurt everyone. As Kaplan writes:

    If the cyberconflict escalated, it would play into their strengths and our weaknesses. Again, our cyberoffensive powers are superior to theirs, as President Obama recently boasted; but our society is more vulnerable to even inferior cyberoffensives. We have bigger and better rocks to throw at other houses, but our house is made of glass that shatters more easily.

    What's implied here but rarely spelled out is that the US does everything we've accused Russia of doing, and probably does it better (or at least does it on a much more massive scale). I don't know, for instance, to what extent the US has tried to influence Russian elections, but clearly we have a long history of doing things like that, from the CIA operations in post-WWII Italy to keep the Communist Party out of power to the recent toppling of a pro-Putin government in Ukraine.

  • Daniel Politi: Kansas Terrorists Wanted Anti-Muslim Attack to End in "Bloodbath":

    They called themselves the "Crusaders" and had a clear purpose: launch an attack against Muslims that would lead to a "bloodbath." With any luck that would help spark a religious war. But their plans were thwarted as three Kansas men were arrested on Friday for planning an attack on a Garden City, Kansas apartment complex filled with Somali immigrants that is also home to a mosque. They planned to carry out the attack one day after the November election. . . .

    The complaint also notes that during one conversation Stein said that "the only fucking way this country's ever going to get turned around is it will be a bloodbath and it will be a nasty, messy motherfucker. Unless a lot more people in this country wake up and smell the fucking coffee and decide they want this country back . . . we might be too late, if they do wake up . . . I think we can get it done. But it ain't going to be nothing nice about it." At one point Stein made it clear he was ready to kill babies: "When we go on operations there's no leaving anyone behind, even if it's a one-year old, I'm serious."

    Police say they found "close to a metric ton of ammunition in Allen's residence," which is what led authorities to believe the attack could be imminent. "These individuals had the desire, the means, the capability to carry out this act of domestic terrorism," an FBI official said.

    The article notes that "There has been an incredible increase in anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment over the past few years." The article didn't note the Donald Trump campaign, nor America's seemingly endless war in Somalia. On the latter, see Mark Mazzetti/hjeffrey Gettleman/Eric Schmidt: In Somalia, U.S. Escalates a Shadow War:

    The Pentagon has acknowledged only a small fraction of these operations. But even the information released publicly shows a marked increase this year. The Pentagon has announced 13 ground raids and airstrikes thus far in 2016 -- including three operations in September -- up from five in 2015, according to data compiled by New America, a Washington think tank. The strikes have killed about 25 civilians and 200 people suspected of being militants, the group found.

    The strikes have had a mixed record. In March, an American airstrike killed more than 150 Shabab fighters at what military officials called a "graduation ceremony," one of the single deadliest American airstrikes in any country in recent years. But an airstrike last month killed more than a dozen Somali government soldiers, who were American allies against the Shabab.

  • Derek Thompson: No, Not Gary Johnson: It's unfortunate that the Libertarian candidate isn't as articulate about foreign policy and war someone like Ron Paul. For one thing, that might spare us some gaffes like "what is a leppo?" or "when he failed to name a single world leader in a televised town hall" (actually, he was asked for the name of a foreign leader he admired, which frankly would have stumped me -- my response would have been that it's inappropriate for US politicians to render judgment on foreign politicians, as indeed it was for Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte to defame Obama). Thompson concludes that Johnson "suffers from an Aleppo mindset, a proud lack of curiosity about foreign affairs lurking behind an attractively simplistic rejection of military interventions." It never occurred to Thompson that if you reject in principle the whole idea of military interventions, you really don't need to know a lot of detail about places hawks want to intervene in, or the trumped up causes they think they're advancing. Still, it would have been better to have smarter answers handy -- it's not like candidates can assume that pundits won't ask stupid questions.

    Thankfully, Thompson moves past his dedication to preserving the American empire to grill Johnson over issues where his muddle-headedness is more glaring, such as the role of government in the economy, increasing the contrast by comparing Johnson to Sanders:

    But on policy, the two could not be more opposite. Sanders, a democratic socialist, proposed to raise taxes by historic sums and spend hundreds of billions of dollars to nationalize health insurance and make college free. Johnson's plans are the complete reverse: He has proposed to eliminate the federal income tax code, unwind 100 years of anti-poverty and health-insurance programs, and shutter the Department of Education. His plan would almost certainly raise the cost of college for many middle-class teenagers and 20somethings who rely on federal loans and grants, and his repeal of Obamacare would immediately boot tens of thousands of them off their parents' health plans.

    Beyond his jovial demeanor and admirably passionate anti-interventionist position, Johnson puts a likable face on a deeply troubling economic policy. Scrapping the Federal Reserve while cutting federal spending by 40 percent, while eliminating federal income taxes and trying to institute a new consumption tax would have a predictable effect: It would take hundreds of billions of dollars out of the economy, likely triggering a recession, while shifting the burden of paying for what's left of the federal government to the poor just as unemployment started to rise, all the while shutting off any possible monetary stimulus that could provide relief to the ailing economy.

    Thompson's numbers are probably understated -- certainly the number who would lose their insurance if Obamacare is repealed would be well into the millions, and the economic collapse is probably more like trillions. But these examples do help remind us how naïve and foolish libertarian economic theory is. Still, without their crackpot notions of economic freedom libertarians would just be liberals. On the other hand, if liberals gave up the war on drugs and their defense of empire, libertarians wouldn't have a prayer of siphoning off votes, as Johnson does this year.

    For a longer critique of Johnson, see Nick Tabor: Gary Johnson's Hard-Right Record.

  • Miscellaneous election links:

Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted:

  • Dean Baker: Apologies for Donald Trump:

    The white working class is right to feel that those in power are not acting in their interests. Of course they are not acting in the interests of the African American or Hispanic working classes either. Unfortunately, unless mainstream politicians stop doing the bidding of the wealthy, the white working class will continue to look to political figures who blame non-whites for their problems, since that will be the only answer they see.

  • Robert L Borosage: Inequality Is Still the Defining Issue of Our Time: Title is clearly right, worth repeating at every opportunity. Another way to make the case is to point out that the entire purpose of conservativism is to defend and secure the privileges of the rich and make them richer.

  • Patrick Cockburn: Talk of a No-fly Zone Distracts from Realistic Solutions for Aleppo

  • Jonathan Cohn: The Future of America Is Being Written in This Tiny Office: Long piece on Hillary Clinton's "policy team."

    When it came to formulating her own ideas, Clinton wasn't starting from scratch, obviously. But since her last run for the White House, the Democratic Party had undergone a minor metamorphosis -- and in ways that didn't seem like a natural fit for Clinton, at least as she was perceived by most voters. The progressive wing was clearly ascendant, with groups like Occupy Wall Street and Fight For 15 harnessing populist anger at the financial system, and Black Lives Matter turning an unrelenting spotlight on racial injustice. Minority voters had come to represent a larger proportion of both the party and the population, giving Democrats an electoral-college advantage whose influence was still unclear when Obama ran for office. And there was another trend at work -- one that was less obvious, but no less important: In just a few years, the Democratic elite had quietly gone through a once-in-a-generation shift on economic thinking.

  • Thomas Geoghegan: 3 Ways Hillary Clinton Can Inspire Americans Without a College Degree: Lots of good ideas here, like "co-determination" (giving workers a vote on corporate boards). Third point lumps a bunch of good things into one:

    Third, unlike Trump, Hillary can promise to use the welfare state to make us more competitive. How? Consider what would happen if we expanded Social Security. If we get more workers over age 65 to retire, instead of hanging on because they lack a decent private pension, we could employ more middle-aged and young workers now sitting at home, or promote them sooner. We need the government to assume more of the private sector's "non-wage" labor costs. There are yet other examples where the welfare state could make us more competitive: Expand Medicare to workers between ages 55 and 65, so employers can stop avoiding payment for working people who have higher skills. Or have a fair federal system of worker compensation, instead of states' using it to bid against each other. Or have the federal government offer to take over state Medicaid in those states that promise to use the savings for public education and worker training. And isn't publicly funded childcare a way of ensuring that we use human capital more efficiently instead of trapping highly educated women at home?

  • Mark Mazzetti/Ben Hubbard: Rise of Saudi Prince Shatters Decades of Royal Tradition: The new power in Saudi Arabia is 31-year-old Prince bin Salman, seen here as extravagant and reckless, especially with his war in Yemen which has lately dragged the US into missile exchanges.

  • Richard Silverstein: Israel's Stern Gang Mailed Letter Bomb to White House, President Truman: In 1947, when LEHI was commanded by future prime minister Yitzhak Shamir.

  • Cass R Sunstein: Five Books to Change Liberals' Minds: Tries to pick out books that liberals can take seriously, as opposed to, say, the partisan paranoid crap published by Regnery. The books are:

    1. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Conditions Have Failed
    2. Antonin Scalia, A Matter of Interpretation
    3. Casey Mulligan, Side Effects and Complications: The Economic Consequences of Health-Care Reform
    4. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind
    5. Robert Ellickson, Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes

    The Scalia book came out in 1997, when he still had a reputation as a serious (albeit flawed) thinker, as opposed to the partisan crank you remember him as. Scott and Ellickson would seem to be libertarians, perhaps even anarchists. Haidt's book is a respectful probe into how conservatives think (I bought a copy, but haven't read it.) Mulligan complains that Obamacare disincentivizes work, and as such is a drag on GDP. That makes sense but doesn't strike me as such a bad thing. Moreover, it's not like there aren't any countervaling incentives to work (though it doesn't help that so many jobs suck).

  • Matthew Yglesias: This is the best book to help you understand the wild 2016 campaign: The book is Democracy for Realists, by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, and it's a depressing slog if you've ever fancied the idea that rational arguments based on real interests might persuade voters to choose candidates and parties that actually advance those interests. One argument, for instance, is that party allegiance is based on some unknowably primordial force (probably identity), and that people pick up the views of their party rather than the other way around. Another is that fluctuations in voting results are due to factors beyond any party's control, ranging from economic performance to the shark attacks and football games. I'm not sure how much of this I buy, let alone care about. One of the problems with the social sciences is that every piece of insight they reveal about anonymous behavior becomes a lever for manipulation by some interest group. That's one reason why when I was majoring in sociology, I spent virtually all of my efforts trying to expose how research incorporates biases, and thereby to increase the doubt that findings could be usurped. That's also a reason why I quit sociology. Also why I have no interest in reading this particular book, or any of the other books on how voters think -- books that I'm sure both parties (if not necessarily both presidential candidates) have been diligently studying for whatever tricks they can find.

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