Sunday, June 11, 2023

Speaking of Which

I see that Nathan Robinson's Current Affairs has launched a biweekly News Briefing via Substack. If the free first issue is anything to judge by, it's better than what I've been trying to do (e.g., below) over the last several years. Still, I stopped cold when confronted with the paywall (Substack's minimum $5 per month, or $50 per year). Nonetheless, I got an email within minutes saying, "You're receiving free posts from Current Affairs Biweekly News Briefing." (I did nothing more, but maybe they glommed onto a cookie, as I'm a non-paying subscriber to a couple other Substack newsletters. The way they do this makes it impossible for my wife and me to share Substack accounts, which disinclines me from doing anything with them at all.)

By the way, apologies for the paywalled content linked to below. My wife subscribes to a lot of stuff (New York Times, Washington Post, etc.), which I piggyback on, so I don't notice when it's not free. On the other hand, the titles usually work as an outline, and my comments are always visible, never joined to a shakedown or any other kind of scam. If Current Affairs (or anyone else) wants to fold stuff I write here into their own offerings, more power to them. Just don't charge me for it.

I continue to be bothered by my lack of progress on any other writing front, despite the relative ease with which this weekly compendium practically writes itself.

Top story threads:

Trump: I started collecting before the Trump indictments dropped, but that only partially obsoletes Andrew Prokop: [06-08] Trump's next indictment is looming -- and the evidence against him is trickling out. Prokop also wrote: [06-08] Trump says he's been indicted again: The Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, explained; and [06-09] The detailed, damning new Trump indictment, explained.

DeSantis, and other Republicans: I originally wanted to keep all the sociopaths together, but the Trump volume argued for a separate section. Still, the only significant difference seems to be that he got caught -- something that in happier times he derided John McCain for:

  • Jonathan Chait::

    • [06-05] The GOP's authoritarian acceleration: "Internal resistance to its anti-democratic turn has all but vanished." Kind of odd that the first illustration here (four paragraphs long) of the Republican embrace of "violations of democratic norms" is Trump's firing of James Comey: "Now every FBI director is eminently fireable," which sounds to me like an improvement over the untouchable J Edgar Hoover. (The idea that Hoover was above politics is a pretty lame and narrow view of politics.) Of course, the basic point is valid: Republicans have always had an exaggerated sense of their own indispensability, and conservatives have never trusted democracy, so the combination has proven especially eager to cut corners and rig power centers in their favor. Nixon's "dirty tricks" backfired when exposed, but Trump can be more brazen about his authoritarian aims, largely because, to quote David Kochel, "the conservative media ecosystem has built a giant wall of inoculation around everything Trump." Or everything Republican.

    • [06-08] Mike Pence says Trump can commit all the crimes he wishes: "Enforcing the law would be 'divisive.'"

  • Ana Marie Cox: [06-11] The war on drugs is getting meaner and dumber, and Texas and Florida show how bad it can get.

  • Zach Despart: [06-09] GOP donor at center of Ken Paxton scandal charged with 8 felonies as prosecutors seek $172 million: "Texas real estate investor Nate Paul charged with making false statements to financial institutions."

  • Margaret Hartmann: [06-08] Why I support Chris Christie's (doomed) 2024 presidential bid: More than a little tongue in cheek here, and "there's no chance he'll actually be president" isn't much of a reason. The one exception is that Christie's likely to be the only Republican candidate willing to talk about Trump's graft. Of course, Christie's such a sleazeball that could blow back on him.

  • Jack Hunter: [06-07] Neocon Nikki Haley rides again: Every now and then I worry that some Republican will try to outflank Biden on war, and that one issue will sway people. To some extent, Trump did that in 2016, although he was never very credible, in part because he was so inconsistent. On the other hand, Biden came into office determined to bring NATO back into American orbit, and thanks to Putin he succeeded way beyond his wildest dreams. Less noticed, he's also managed to reunite America's allies around the Pacific rim, again by pushing the spectre of threat from China. Still, one Republican I'm not worried about upsetting Biden with a turn toward world peace is Haley.

  • Ed Kilgore: [06-07] Doug Burgum bets that 2024 voters don't care about culture wars: Given the laws the North Dakota governor has signed recently, he's pretty well hedged on culture war issues. Hard to see what else he can run on, other than the once-successful "I'm a billionaire, so you know I'm honestly for you."

  • Ezra Klein: [06-11] Ron DeSantis thinks Trump didn't go far enough: A fairly close reading of the Florida governor's campaign tome, The Courage to Be Free: "It's not a good book, exactly. But it's a revealing one." What it mostly reveal is that DeSantis is a vindictive prick who will use every ounce of power he can seize to punish his supposed enemies, which very likely means you and me.

  • Mike Lofgren: [06-09] The party of pollution, disease and death: When Republicans tell you who they are, believe them. By the way, Lofgren previously wrote: [05-20] The GOP's heart of darkness: Why Ron DeSantis can never beat Donald Trump: "No Republicans can beat Trump, because no one else can command his coalition of damaged, discarded, marginal people." I've never been especially happy with deriding Trump's followers as mere miscreants, but he has something that brings to the fore those traits in lots of people, making them seem respectable and even special. (Lofgren, by the way, is a recovering Republican, author of The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.)

  • Dana Milbank: [06-09] In the House, a spectacular flameout: Speaker Kevin McCarthy, after passing his debt limit deal with considerable help from Democrats, fails to get enough Republicans to pass his purely symbolic gas stoves initiative.

  • Nicole Narea: [06-09] Why are all these random Republicans running for president? Well, it's not, as the subhed argues, because "everybody still thinks they can win in 2024." Most candidates, as ever, see it as a way to raise their political profile (a category that obviously includes Doug Burgum, and extends past Tim Scott to Vivek Ramaswamy, who will be happy just to sell more books). What's more remarkable is the absence of 2016 contenders (Cruz, Rubio, Paul, Kasich, Carson), who have more to lose than to gain by losing again. (Christie is the one back, but he has a fairly unique martyr angle. DeSantis and Pence are in, because they'd look like cowards if they didn't run, and each has an angle to claim Trump's mantle should Trump fail. Same could be said for Haley, although her angle is more oblique. And, well, while it's unlikely any Republican can beat Trump in the primaries, he could still be forced out, or simply collapse, creating an opening. [Who did I leave out? Looks like Asa Hutchinson and Larry Elder. Feel free to slot them yourself.]

  • Katha Pollitt: [06-08] The Right's latest target: no-fault divorce: "Republicans have a new way of sticking their noses in other people's business." Not to mention that their favorite game is finding fault with everyone else for the myriad sins of the world. They can't fix anything, but at least they can assign blame.

  • Alex Thomas: [06-09] The right has a vigilante fetish: "Daniel Penny takes his place in conservatives' growing pantheon of violent 'heroes.'"

  • Ken Ward Jr: [06-01] West Virginia Governor's coal empire sued by the federal government -- again: "seeks millions in unpaid environmental fines."

  • Linda K Wertheimer: [05-30] Inside the Christian legal crusade to revive school prayer.

While the following articles aren't strictly about Republicans, this seems like a good place for them:

Fire and smoke:

And other environmental disasters:

Ukraine War: Most observers are reporting that Ukraine seems to have started their "counteroffensive," albeit with little fanfare. Their only discernible victory so far is in getting journalists to say "counteroffensive" instead of "[Spring] offensive" -- we still need to make clear that Russia is the aggressor in this war. It's been pretty clear all Winter that Zelensky has no intention of negotiating until he first gives his fancy new war weapons -- especially the tanks -- a chance to tip the scales. While I wouldn't be surprised if Ukraine manages to claw back much of the territory they lost in 2022, the only solution is still negotiation, and the only reasonable basis for negotiation is the self-determination of the people involved. Until both sides realize that, the destruction continues. And if you think this week's dam destruction was a disaster for everyone, wait until the fighting overwhelms the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant (already endangered, especially denied water from the dam).

  • Connor Echols: [06-09] Diplomacy Watch: S. Africa suggests moving BRICS summit to China: The change of venue would allow Putin to attend without fear of being arrested and handed over to the ICC. The BRICS nations have nearly all floated peace initiatives, as have (noted here) Indonesia and the Vatican. Meanwhile, Anthony Blinken dismisses any ceasefire as a "Potemkin peace."

  • Ben Armbruster: [06-09] How WWII nostalgia fuels media's impractical Ukraine aims: "Yes fighting the Russians is just and Putin is a very bad guy, but analogies to the Nazi era rarely if ever apply." The most obvious difference is that Roosevelt's insistence that Germany surrender unconditionally is impossible: even if Ukraine recovered its 2014 borders, a hostile Russia would remain a persistent threat. The only way to eliminate this threat is to negotiate a deal which leaves Russia satisfied -- if not with Ukrainian territory, then with other (possibly economic) concessions.

  • Chris Baraniuk: [06-08] The Kakhovka Dam collapse is an ecological disaster.

  • Max Boot: [06-09] The Ukrainian offensive is beginning. David Petraeus is optimistic. Now, that's what I call "pathetic."

  • Shane Harris/Souad Mekhennet: [06-06] US had intelligence of detailed Ukrainian plan to attack Nord Stream pipeline. Further information from the what's now being dubbed the Discord leaks, suggests that Ukraine, rather than the US (as Seymour Hersh reported) was responsible for blowing up the gas line between Russia and Germany. This follows an earlier Discord leaks piece by John Hudson/Isabelle Khurshudyan: [05-13] Zelensky, in private, plots bold attacks inside Russia, leak shows.

  • Matthew Hoh: [06-09] A war long wanted: Diplomatic malpractice in Ukraine: This provides a pretty detailed litany of the many acts seen as provocations by Russia since 1991, including the scuttling of the Minsk agreement and the military buildup in 2021 before Russia invaded in February, 2022. Part of the intent is "understanding the war through Russia's eyes," which should help open our own. Perhaps the article needs a stronger disclaimer that Putin in many cases misunderstood the provocations, and in any case had no right or even reason to invade as he did, but it's not like those are points we don't understand. Rather, they are chits that critics of US policy have to cash in order to be taken seriously on any other point. This ends with brief sections on "who profits?" and "the cost of war," as well as a couple paragraphs on the need for peace through diplomacy. All very sensible.

  • Fred Kaplan: [06-08] Ukraine's counteroffensive has begun. Now what? "Impossible to say."

  • Jen Kirby:

  • Najmedin Meshkati: [06-09] Kakhovka dam breach raises risk for Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant -- receding waters narrow options for cooling.

  • Samantha Schmidt/Isobel Koshiw/Natalia Abbakumova: [06-06] Damage to Russian-held hydroelectric plant floods south Ukraine battlefield. One possible factor is that Water level behind Russian-controlled Kakhkovka Dam was at historic high before it was destroyed. Of course, Russia and Ukraine are blaming each other for the destruction. While high water would have stressed the dam, making an accidental breach (somewhat) more likely, it more obviously made the flooding worse. Much depends here on whether Russia expected to lose the dam during Ukraine's counteroffensive, which last fall advanced to the Dnipro River. Blowing up the dam would presumably slow Ukrainian advance in the region, as well as adding to the rebuilding cost of the flooded areas. On the other hand, blowing the dam sacrifices the canal that diverts Dnipro water to Crimea -- a view that only makes sense if Russia expected to lose the dam and canal anyway. For Ukraine's spin, see Veronika Melkozerova: [06-06] Defiant Ukraine says dam carnage won't stop counteroffensive.

  • Robert Wright: [06-09] Timothy Snyder's pernicious influence: I've long admired Tony Judt, so I was inclined to give his protégé some slack. But I'm left wondering whether the influence went the other way, with Judt's late celebration of East European revolts against Soviet domination boosted by Snyder's vicious anti-Russian prejudices. In any case, Snyder has become one of the most uncritical anti-Russia hawks anywhere. I'm reminded of an old saw: that America's China experts usually fell in love with China, but the Russia experts inevitably hated Russia. Anne Applebaum has rivaled Snyder among public intellectuals turned warmongers.

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [06-08] Nord Stream revelations should chasten Ukraine dam 'hot takes': Rule of thumb: Ukraine always blames Russia, and Russia always blames Ukraine. Ukraine blamed Russia for the Nord Stream sabotage, but that never made sense, for lack of motivation. Ukraine had the motive, but how could they do it? The US and maybe Poland or Norway had lesser motives, which allowed Seymour Hersh to construct a plausible (albeit uncertain) scenario for a US operation (with help from Norway). We've since seen a plausible scenario for Ukraine (with help from Poland). Still not proven, but makes sense. As for the Kakhovka Dam disaster, I can imagine motives for both Ukraine and Russia, and while it would be easier for Russia to pull off, it certainly could have been Ukraine. Yet neither motive is convincing, as each depends on assumptions about how the counteroffensive will go under different scenarios. And, let's face it, neither side knows, no matter how confident they seem. Then there's the third possibility, that it was some kind of accident. I'd score that as Russia's fault, because they had no business being there. But also because war always leads to unpredicted disasters, and Russia -- even admitting much provocation -- launched this war.

World:

Other stories:

Dean Baker: [06-07] Owning up to mistakes and pandemic deaths: "It would be a huge step forward for both public health and US foreign policy if we could begin down the road of freely sharing health care technology rather than trying to bottle it up so that a small number of people can get very rich." Also see Ryan Cooper, below.

Zack Beauchamp: [06-11] How the right's defeats gave us the anti-LGBTQ moment: "The American right is returning to its homophobic roots." I figured the culture war over LGB was pretty much settled, but T opened it up again, largely, I think, because the right will embrace any non-economic grudge they can get any leverage on. (Gas stoves is an almost comical example.) Economic issues are trickier, because helping the rich get richer isn't all that popular, even among caste-conscious Republicans. Beauchamp's thesis is less convincing, but the right has few rivals when it comes to nursing grudges and stoking paranoia about vast left conspiracies. Otherwise, they might have to face responsibility for their repeated failures.

Irin Carmon: [06-06] When pregnancy is the crime: "An exit interview with Lynn Paltrow, who has spent decades representing women jailed for miscarriages and stillbirths."

Zachary Carter: [06-06] What if we're thinking about inflation all wrong? "Isabella Weber's heterodox ideas about government price controls are transforming policy in the United States and across Europe." With visions of magical markets dancing in their heads, economists hate price controls (even if coupled with wage controls, which softens the blow because economists also hate people), it's easy to see how they fell for the Volcker maneuver as the only proper remedy for inflation. But it's a very blunt, indiscriminate instrument, kind of like engineering a flood to put out a house fire. It may eventually work, but the collateral damage is immense, and may not even solve the real problem.

This recent round of inflation always struck me as caused by two things: the first is temporary supply chain kinks, which made it possible for companies to price gouge, some of which stuck given that most companies preferred profit to volume; which was possible due to increasing monopolization of damn near everything. Monopoly rents had trailed limits to competition because customers resist price increases, making companies reluctant to squeeze their every advantage, but the dam broke, companies could take whatever the market would bear. For proof, consider that most companies have been raking in record profits while others pay their premiums.

Weber has some interesting ideas for price controls -- often ones that avoid the bureaucratic overhead of the old OPA, although with modern computers you'd think that overhead could be slashed.

Ryan Cooper:

James K Galbraith: [06-09] Next time, dammit, just default: "Democrats feared a monster called 'default' -- but it's just another Washington scare story." Makes sense to me. In fact, makes me wonder why I didn't see something like this before the deal -- although parts of it are somewhat familiar. It's actually an old story where the Left (or its compromised proxies in parties like the Democratic) are called on to sacrifice their own goals in order to save capitalism, on the premise that not doing so would hurt worse.

Sarah Jones: [06-11] "It's not just the fringe who are committing these violent acts": Interview with Julie Burkhart, who runs the only clinic that provides surgical abortions in Wyoming. She formerly worked for the late George Tiller here in Wichita.

Peter Kafka: [06-07] Firing Chris Licht won't fix CNN. Licht drew flak for his efforts to move CNN toward the "center," especially the synthetic news event he billed as a "Trump town hall, but Kafka attributes his firing to the exposure in Tim Alberta: [06-02] Inside the meltdown at CNN. Alberta says "Licht felt he was on a mission to restore the network's reputation for serious journalism." I'm not sure that "serious journalism" is even possible on TV given diminished attention spans, but if one wanted to try, the obvious way to go about it would be to look beneath the headlines and start to notice the interests that corrupt and distort understanding.

Robert Kuttner: [06-09] Remembering William Spriggs: "A life devoted to pursuing economic justice." Died this week, at 68.

Dylan Matthews: [06-10] Labor unions aren't "booming." They're dying. "Unions won't come back without fundamental changes to bargaining."

Ian Millhiser:

Nathan Robinson:

  • [06-08] How the John Birch Society won the long game: Review of Matthew Dallek: Birchers: H ow the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right. Argues that "The American right doesn't need the John Birch Society these days, but that is because it's adopted the Birchers' extremism wholesale."

  • [06-05] We now know the full extent of Obama's disastrous apathy toward the climate crisis: Columbia University, with funding from the Obama Foundation, has compiled 470 interviews to form an "oral history of the Obama presidency." We also have what Robinson terms memoirs by sycophants and his own gargantuan self-exonerative autobiography, where even rose-tinted reflection fails to show Obama as concerned much less prophetic on the climate crisis (though maybe not contemptuous and imbicilic, which would be par for the Trump administration). I've always been dismayed at the lack of credit Obama got for expanding oil production (mostly through fracking, you may recall), but the media always assumed that Republicans were the oil party. Yet there is a bit here where Obama is speaking to a bunch of Texas oilmen and bragging: "You know how we became number one in the world in oil production? That was me." The oil men cheered. Then they voted for Trump.

  • [05-31] Introducing Murray Bookchin, the extraordinary originator of 'social ecology': Interview with Janet Biehl, who wrote a 2015 biography (Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin) and edited The Murray Bookchin Reader (1999; looks like both of these are out of print). Bookchin's 1971 book Post-Scarcity Anarchism had a great deal of influence on my own thought. Of late, I've been thinking about how anarchist cooperation models could help us with international relations, given the impossibility of establishing a world order (no matter how much Washington, Beijing, etc., might try).

Greg Sargent: [06-08] How Pat Robertson created today's Christian nationalist GOP: The Christian Broadcasting Network founder died at 93. Interview with Rick Perlstein.

Jeffrey St Clair: [06-09] Infamy at sea, cover-up in DC: Israel's attack on the USS Liberty: In 1964, two American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin reported being fired on, which LBJ quickly blew up into the casus belli that justified America's escalation of war against Vietnam. Three years later, another American ship was attacked at sea, this time killing 34 US sailors and injuring 174. LBJ was still president, but the only thing he escalated this time was the amount of foreign aid sent to the attackers. This is an old piece, from a 2004 book, but perhaps the story is new to you?

Maureen Tkacik: [06-02] Days of plunder: A review of two recent books on the most malign force in modern capitalism: Gretchen Morgenson/Joshua Rosner: These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs -- and Wrecks -- America, and Brendan Ballou: Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America. Opens with more than you want to know about PetSmart, but that's just one example.

Robert Wright: [06-07] AI is at a dangerous juncture: It's hard to know just where to hook into this argument, mostly because it's unclear what AI is going to do -- the most obvious thing is to increase speed and productivity of data-intensive operations -- or more pertinently what it could do that we don't want it to do. One thing that makes that alarming is that for many years speed has been viewed as the holy grail of war (from blitzkrieg to the decision to respond to a nuclear first strike). Still, the question we should ask isn't how AI can give us (or them) an advantage in waging war, but whether our model of defense through deterrence hasn't been thorough discredited (e.g., in Ukraine).

One comment here: "AI will not be regulated properly because companies will always put profits over everything else." For all the talk about the need to regulate AI, I've never seen a concrete proposal for doing so. My best guess is that the first movers want it regulated to keep future competitors out -- that's actually a common regulation strategem. What would make more sense to me is not to regulate what AI can do but to regulate the business you can do with it, starting with how it can be monetized. A good start would be to deny any patents on it, which would disincentivize developers, especially from doing unsavory things with it. One could go a step further and require that the source code be free (in the GNU sense). For starters, that would make it publicly inspectable (and again it would disincentivize bad actors). And certainly, the products of AI shouldn't be copyrightable. (Thus far, as I understand it, they are not.) Of course, if we start talking along these lines, the current companies' push to regulate is going to evaporate. As long as politics are driven by greedy parties, this isn't likely to happen, but if the threat is real, how can we afford not to?

Abby Zimet: [06-04] A rank immunity: Henry Kissinger is still a war criminal: I thought we had flogged this not-year-dead 100-year-old carcass enough over the last couple weeks, but couldn't resist tipping you to the Wonder Wart-Hog detail used as an illustration. If you can stand more, try Jonathan Guyer: [06-08] I crashed Henry Kissinger's 100th-birthday party: "The elite love him but for some reason won't say why."

Notable tweet from @sorrelquest:

it's insane how like half of all political "arguments" boil down to one side that's universally beneficial and that everyone agrees with and one side that we need to pretend is contentious because eight people with a lot of money feel strongly about it

From Zachary D Carter:

The vagueness around whether we "need" unemployment at 4.5 percent or 5.5 percent shows how imprecise enthusiasts of this model can be, but the really extraordinary line for me is: "That's why we have central banks, is to make tough choices."

The point Furman is making is that central banks exist to do unpopular things. Democracy left to its own devices will produce too much inflation. "Too much" here being defined as about 4 percent, the "though choices" solution being millions of layoffs.

Plenty of economists agree with Furman that this is the proper role of a central bank. But that has not always been the case. It's pretty easy to create unemployment without a central bank. The U.S. had decades of deflation and persistent financial crises from 1870 to 1913.

And one of the chief arguments for establishing a central bank was to create more economic flexibility so that these crashes didn't become depressions and that deflation didn't destroy American democracy.

The idea that the Fed was supposed to handle one aspect of a full employment program was pretty common until the Volcker era. Congress passed two laws to that end, one in 1946 and another in 1978.

Managing expertise and public opinion isn't obvious or easy. But the belief that the people want too many jobs for their own good, and need to be disciplined into unemployment is not inherent to central banking. It's a very particular worldview, and one that I think is wrong.

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