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Friday, January 22, 2016

Just brief links this week. For what it's worth, about 3,000 people showed up for Wichita's edition of the anti-Trump Women's March. As someone who's always wanted politics to be boring and irrelevant, I'm clearly not going to enjoy the next four years. On the other hand, I voted for Hillary Clinton knowing full well that she, too, would bring us four years or war and financial mayhem to protest against. But she's boring enough we'd be hard pressed to get 30 people out to a march. Whatever else you think, Trump is much more effective at moving us to opposition.

• Women's March was the largest protest in US history as an estimated 3.6 to 4.5 million marched; also Millions join women's marches in an historic international rebuke of Donald Trump.

• Tom Cahill: Trump's new slogan is copied verbatim from horror film 'The Purge': The article claims "You can't make this shit up," but if the movie in question was, as the article also claims, based on Trump's 2016 campaign slogan, they already have. Of course, The Purge isn't the only imaginable Trumpian future. When I saw 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road, its fetishes struck me as so literally Trumpian I half-expected the GOP to adopt it as an infomercial.

• Ben Casselman: Stop Saying Trump's Win Had Nothing to Do With Economics

• Noah Charney: No deal for the arts: It's no surprise that Donald Trump wants to tell the arts and humanities "you're fired": Reminds me of a Facebook meme I recently saw, that pointed out that when Winston Churchill was asked to cut arts funding to help the war effort, his reply was "Then what are we fighting for?"

• William DeBuys: Election rigging 101: Donald Trump's crash course in hijacking democracy

• Jonathan Chait: Donald Trump to America: I Won, Accountability Is Over:

  It is impossible to know what course American democracy will take under Trump's presidency. The fears of authoritarianism may prove overblown, and Trump may govern like a normal Republican. But the initial signs are quite concerning. Trump believes he can demolish normal standards of behavior, like the expectation of disclosing tax returns, and placing assets in a blind trust. He has received the full cooperation of his party, which controls Congress and has blocked any investigation or other mechanism for exerting pressure. His dismissal of the news media might simply be a slightly amped-up version of the conservative tradition of media abuse, but it seems to augur something worse. Rather than making snide cracks about liberal bias, Trump escalated into abuse and total delegitimization. Will the abuse of the media be seen as an idiosyncratic episode, or the beginning of something worse to come? We don't know. His early behavior is consistent with (though far from proof of) the thesis that he is an emerging autocrat. The people have granted him license to steal and hide as he wishes. The bully has his pulpit.

  The phrase that catches in my throat here is "normal Republican." The fact is Republicans haven't been "normal" since they accepted Richard Nixon's rewriting the rules on campaign ethics. Since then they've hosted two of the most corrupt and ideologically corrosive administrations in American history, while their efforts to spoil (by any means possible) the Clinton and Obama administrations have set new standards for political cynicism. The Trump administration starts with no real popular legitimacy, and the Republican agenda has even less popular support, so the big question will be whether they can leverage their current grasp of institutional power to do things contrary to the welfare and desires of most Americans. The United States has a long and hallowed tradition of popular rule, which has never before been challenged severely as Trump and his party are doing.

• Mike Konczal: The Austerity of the Obama Years: This is an important piece. Even though it's not entirely Obama's fault, his inability either to fix the problem or properly assign blame for his failures is what let Trump in:

  The economic landscape adjusted to the missing prosperity, with economic power concentrating at the highest levels. Trillions of dollars simply went into mergers and acquisitions, leaving the economy more concentrated than at any point in decades. Yet this power also seeped into everyday life. Work became even more precarious and disintermediated towards smaller, weak firms attached through contracts to rich flagships. Over the past ten years workers in traditional employment declined slightly, with contract and independent workers driving the increases. Beyond making activism and regulations much more difficult, this shift greatly accelerated inequality as corporate profits skyrocketed. People became contract workers and took on boarders in their homes again, like those trying to survive the nineteenth century, and elites celebrated it as an entrepreneurial wonderland.

  That the Democrats could never figure out what to do about this gap in our economy showed up in the Democratic primary. An economist named Gerald Friedman argued that Bernie Sanders's proposals would fix the gap, that if his large expansion of public works, taxes, and spending had a chance, the economy would get to and go far beyond its full potential. He walked into a bandsaw of Democratic economists attacking his argument as voodoo economics. Friedman's analysis did have serious flaws, but the Democratic economists counter was that where we were was just the reality, that there was little-to-no room to grow further and faster. This output gap, introduced during Obama's years, was a permanent reduction in our potential that we would have to live with. It was the economic equivalent of the Democrats' "America is Already Great," a messaging that delivered our country to Trump.

• Richard Silverstein: America First, Israel First: the Lobby Loves Trump

• James Thindwa/Kathleen Geier: Does the Left Bear Any Blame for Donald Trump? More waffling than I'd really like. I wasn't asked, but have two answers: the first is no (if, as stated, 90 percent of Sanders supporters backed Clinton she did better on the left than she did with "locked in" constituencies like blacks, Latinos, and labor), and second, it doesn't matter, because now and in the near future the Democrats need the left even more than ever -- for activism, and for a more acute and resonant critique of what Trump and the Republicans are doing. The real shame is that there are still some mainstream Democrats who seem to be much more ready to attack the left than to stand up against the right. They need to change their priorities, and they can start by letting up on their Cold War dogma about the left.

• Zephyr Teachout: Donald Trump Will Violate the Constitution on Day One

• Nathan Wellman: Trump just deleted the White House's website on protecting people with disabilities

• China's winding down coal use continues -- the country just canceled 104 new coal plants: Meanwhile, Trump plans to ramp up coal burning in the US.

• Don't think of a rampaging elephant: Linguist George Lakoff explains how the Democrats helped elect Trump: Paul Rosenberg interviews Lakoff. Also links to Lakoff's own analysis: A Minority President: Why the Polls Failed, and What the Majority Can Do. Reiterates much of what Lakoff has been saying for several decades now. Still, I have trouble thinking of Trump as a "strict father" conservative archetype. I have to wonder if we haven't mutated into something far more ominous.

• Some Colleges Have More Students From the Top 1 Percent Than the Bottom 60

• Trump gives 'most disastrous speech ever given at CIA' says former CIA spokesman; also WH Staffers Pile on Former CIA Head for Criticizing Trump's Off-the-Rails Speech; and Robin Wright: Trump's Vainglorious Affront to the CIA.

Again, very important for readers to contribute to the project to Help Us Save the Elizabeth M. Fink Attica Archive. Please go there, read about what's being done, and contribute some money. And pass this note on to other people who might. Thanks.

Also a reminder that you can read Dean Baker's new book, Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer free, on-line.

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