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Sunday, December 29, 2019

No intro. Didn't really feel like doing this in the first place, but had tabs I wanted to close.

Some scattered links this week:

• Zeeshan Aleem:

  • A new government study shows how Trump's tariffs have backfired.

  • What we know about a shooting at a White Settlement, Texas church.

  • What we know about the deadly car bombing in Mogadishu: "More than 70 people have been killed, and at least 100 people were wounded."

  • Mike Bloomberg has spent a staggering $100 million on campaign ads in a month. Just exercising his right to free speech, a right all of us share in "equally" (unlike his $50 billion).

  • Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu wins party primary, weeks after indictments: I guess the Republicans aren't the only political party to value opportunism more than law.

• Eric Alterman: Trump's executive order on anti-semitism isn't about protecting Jews.

• Teo Armus: A NATO expert criticized Trump on Twitter. So a US ambassador barred him from speaking at a conference. Stanley Sloan. I meant to write some about this, at least after Robert Christgau endorsed and circulated a link to Sloan's talk notes. I can't go into it here, other than to note that I thought the talk was horrible. (The extent of Sloan's delusion can be gauged by his book title: Defense of the West: NATO, the European Union and the Transatlantic Bargain. You can see from that title why he's the sort of guy who gets invites to speak at NATO conferences.)

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Does the left have any better ideas than Obama's? "The Obama era produced the most sweeping combination of social reforms, economic rescue, and regulation of any presidency in half a century." That's bullshit hyperbole, depending on a very low bar, and overlooking the much more effective "reforms" of Reagan, the Bushes, and even Trump, just because they've nearly always been for the worse. Those 50 years include 40 since Reagan's "revolution," following what now looks like prefiguring by Nixon and Carter -- a period of Democrats trying to frame their policy objectives in Republican terms (e.g., as "market reforms"), to ever less avail. Chait wants to rail against recent re-evaluations of Obama's works, but I see those as necessary steps to clear the air of zombie ideas:

    • Alex Pareene: A decade of liberal delusion and failure.

    • Ganesh Sitaraman: The colapse of neoliberalism. Sitaraman also wrote After neolieralism: "The last 10 years have seen the collapse of neoliberalism. The question now is, what comes next?"

    • Libby Watson: The hell that was health care reform.

  • President Trump's dream is to become America's Viktor Orbán: "Why the president and his supporters are following the Hungarian autocrat's blueprint."

• Elizabeth Dias/Jeremy W Peters: Evangelical leaders close ranks with Trump after scathing editorial.

• Ben Ehrenreich: California is burning -- nationalize PG&E.

• Tom Engelhardt: Is Donald Trump the second 9/11?

• Kian Goh: California's fires prove the American dream is flammable: "If we want to keep cities safe in the face of climate change, we need to seriously question the ideal of private homeownership." Not the conclusion I would draw, even from only reading this article.

• Adam Gopnik: Behind the bewildering recent incidents of anti-semitism. Later, but related:

  • Chas Danner: 5 stabbed in Hanukkah attack in Monsey, New York.

• Dalia Hatuqa: "We are living in a touristic prison": Palestinians on life in the holy city of Bethlehem.

• Astead W Herndon: 'Nothing less than a civil war': These white voters on the far right see doom without Trump. E.g., "Mark Villalta said he had been stockpiling firearms, in case the 2020 election does not go in the president's favor."

• Daniel Immerwahr: A world to win: "Decolonization and the pursuit of a more egalitarian international order." Review of Adam Getachew's book, Worldmaking After Empire: Rise and Fall of Self-Determination.

• Umair Irfan: 2019 was a brutal year for American farmers.

• Nelma Jahromi: The hidden histories in the periodic table: "From poisoned monks and nuclear bombs to the "tranfermium wars," mapping the atomic world hasn't been easy."

• David D Kirkpatrick: How a Chase Bank chairman helped the deposed Shah of Iran enter the US: "The fateful decision in 1979 to admit Mohammed Reza Pahlavi prompted the seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran and helped doom the Carter presidency."

• Carolyn Kormann: Is nuclear power worth the risk?

• Paul Krugman:

  • Big money and America's lost decade. "Yes, the rich have too much political influence." One might addd, "in both political parties," but the key event of the "lost decade" was the Republican takeover of the House in 2010, which shifted political focus away from merely serving the rich (which Clinton and Obama did more successfully, flamboyantly even, than any Republican) to impoverishing working Americans.

  • The cruelty of a Trump Christmas: "Republicans aren't Scrooges -- they're much worse."

• Nancy LeTourneau: Republicans are fiscally reckless and irresponsible: Of couse they are. But they benefit from a double standard, as the media only seems to take the charge seriously if directed against a Democrat.

• Eric Levitz:

  • The public option is politically superior to Medicare for All -- but only as a sound bite.

  • Why Trump vilifies whistle-blowers and venerates war criminals: "In Trump's authoritarian worldview, real heroes don't let the rule of law constrain their viciousness toward enemies of the cause."

  • GOP lawmaker plotted insurrections to establish Christian state.

  • Donald Trump's not-so-hostile takeover of the GOP: "Trump conquered the GOP by surrendering to its establishment."

    Trump began accommodating the GOP Establishment from the moment he secured the nomination. In the early weeks of his primary campaign, Trump endorsed universal health-care, tax hikes on hedge-fund managers, and a $1 trillion infrastructure plan. After Trump won the Republican primary -- and, thus, the hearts and minds of many previously adversarial GOP donors -- he either abandoned or de-emphasized such heresies. Once in power, he outsourced his agenda to Paul Ryan. Trump could have devoted his "honeymoon" to his (broadly popular) ambitions for improving U.S. infrastructure. Instead, he let the Randian speaker try and fail to take health-care from poor people, before successfully delivering (deeply unpopular) tax cuts to wealthy ones.

• Alan Lichtman: The 2010s were the decade that bent democracy to the breaking point.

• Eric Lipton/Maggie Haberman/Mark Mazzetti: Behind the Ukraine aid freeze: 84 days of conflict and confusion: "The inside story of President Trump's demand to halt military assistance to an ally shows the price he was willing to pay to carry out his agenda."

• Alex Morris: False idol -- why the Christian right worships Donald Trump.

• Holly Otterbein/David Siders: Democratic insiders: Bernie could win the nomination.

• Adam K Raymond: Thw world's 500 richest people increased their wealth by $1.2 trillion in 2019.

• David Roberts: The Trump administration just snuck through its most devious coal subsidy yet.

• Jay Rosen: The Christmas Eve confessions of Chuck Todd: "That disinformation was going to overtake Republican politics was discoverable years before he says he discovered it."

• Aaron Rupar: Future generations will look back on Trump's latest wind turbines rant in awe and horror.

• Greg Sargent: The massive triumph of the rich, illustrated by stunning new data.

• Christine Stapleton: Why did Trump ditch his church in Palm Beach on Christmas Eve for evangelical service? I predict that by election day he'll convert to Pentecostalism. That way his gibberish will be excused as "speaking in tongues."

• Katrina vanden Heuvel: Remembering Bill Greider: "Bill was an American heretic: inquisitive, unwilling to accept conventional dogmas, and always a voice for the people." A sampling of pieces by William Greider:

  • American hubris, or, how globalization brought us Donald Trump [2018-04-19]: "It was 'free trade' mania, pushed by both major political parties, that destroyed working-class prosperity and laid the groundwork for his triumph."

  • What killed the Democratic Party? [2017-10-30]: "A new report offers a bracing autopsy of the 2016 election -- and lays out a plan for revitalization."

  • Why American democracy has descended into collective hysteria [2017-09-28]: "We are a great power in decline -- but neither party has a clue what to do about it."

  • It's Groundhog Day in Washington, with Trump peddling the same old Reaganite snake oil [2017-04-28]: "Tax cuts for the wealthy didn't increase government revenue then, and they're not going to now. It's mourning again in America."

  • Here's what you need to know about the Federal Reserve [2017-03-17]: "We demand way too much from the central bank -- but that's because our elected politicians have done almost nothing to revive the economy."

  • Whom should we blame for our deranged democracy? [2016-09-20]: "Laying it all on Trump is too easy -- both political parties are out of touch and distant from the people."

  • How Trump dog-whistles the business establishment [2016-03-18]: "He cleverly woos the GOP base on issues like trade, but this working-class hero is actually a willing agent of the 1 percenters."

  • How Donald Trump could beat Hillary Clinton [2016-03-11]: "In the general election, he could win by running to her left -- and her right."

  • Vietnam is the war that didn't end [2015-05-05]: "Forty years later, we still haven't confronted the true lesson of Vietnam."

  • How the Democratic Party lost its soul [2014-11-11]: "The trouble started when the party abandoned its working-class base."

  • Why was Paul Krugman so wrong? [2013-04-01]: "Everyone's favorite Nobel-winning Keynesian is no longer gravely deluded on the global economy. How much can we trust him now?"

  • When big business needs a favor, George Bush gets the call [1984-04-12]: "Ronald Reagan's back-door man."

  • The education of David Stockman [1981-12].

  Other recent pieces on Greider:

  • Dean Baker: Bill Greider and secular stagnation.

  • Jessica Corbett: 'A stark loss for American journalism': Reporter and author William Greider dies at age 83.

  • John Nichols: William Greider knew what ailed the Democratic Party.

  • Ilana Novick: William Greider's blistering critiques of capitalism will be sorely missed.

  • Yves Smith: Links 12/27/19: "Depicting [Greider] as a journalist diminishes his importance. Let us not forget that Marx was a journalist too. I cited a key Greider observation often, that the US operates in a system not of free trade but of managed trade, and other countries have mercantilist objectives, namely seeking to run trade surpluses or at least not deficits so as [t]o boost domestic employment and savings."

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • The telling conservative backlash to a Virginia zoning reform proposal, explained.

  • Trump really doesn't want to talk about his health care record.

  • The nuanced political impact of wine cave fundraisers. "Democratic donors are generally to the left of rank-and-file voters." Is this really true? A chart shows they're more polarized, and in a nod to Sanders, he admits that "small Democratic donors are even more left wing."

• Li Zhou: Senate Republicans were laser-focused on confirming judges in 2019 -- even the unqualified ones.

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