Weekend Roundup [120 - 129]

Sunday, August 12, 2018

Weekend Roundup

Haven't made my transition to posting on Notes on Everyday Life: partly inertia early in the week, but my server vanished from the web Thursday evening and still (late Sunday) hasn't come back. Not being able to do anything about this -- ISP says they've had a "power problem," adding that some hard drives were damaged and "we are attempting to slave primary drives on several servers," evidently a slow process -- I went ahead and assembled a Weekend Roundup, not that I have anywhere to post it.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Jonathan Chait: Trump Invites For-Profit Colleges to Exploit Students: Sure, too late to help Trump University, but Betsy De Vos believes in the principle that if government has to subsidize education, the benefits should go to business, not students.

  • Jane Coaston: What Sunday's Unite the Right 2 rally tells us about the state of the alt-right in America: I'd just as soon ignore the whole thing (at least as long as Trump himself doesn't make an appearance, or send a personal representative, like Steven Miller or Jared Kushner). He has little need for the "bad optics" ("marching with tiki torches and chanting slogans from the Third Reich") and media hassle of associating himself with these poseurs. After all, his own stand up act at "campaign rallies" is safer and more effective, and most importantly reinforces his own movement leadership. So why doesn't he try to shut Unite the Right down? Probably because he figures counterprotests and media flak will redound to his benefit: the more his enemies attack him, the more he seems like the lord and protector of his fan base. (See Laura McGann: Donald Trump seems fine with Nazis gathering on his lawn.) So I'd skip the counterprotests as well (not that I won't be amused when the latter outnumber the former, as has usually been the case). As we've seen, targeted protests against Trump/Republican policies have drawn much larger crowds than anyone can imagine here. Still, the season is coming when the most critical protests against Trump will be at the ballot box.

  • Kevin Cook: Joe Pyne Was America's First Shock Jock: A little nostalgia here, as I watched Pyne regularly in the late 1960s. Always thought he was something of an asshole, but he wasn't stupid. I liked a few of his guests (like Paul Krassner) and didn't mind him eviscerating some of the others (like George Lincoln Rockwell and, especially, Nathaniel Branden). The article includes a Krassner story I didn't witness but read about in The Realist. I hadn't heard the Frank Zappa one, also pointing out Pyne's wooden leg.

  • Jason Ditz: Trump, Pence Again Announce Intentions to Establish 'Space Force'. So ridiculous, it looked to me like getting Pence to hold the press conerence was meant to permanently demolish his political career. (Mattis also appeared, and looked every bit as dumbfounded, but most news outlets skipped over that. I thought Jimmy Kimmel had the best line on this: "The logo for the Space Force should just be a picture of money being shredded and thrown at the moon." Actually, instead of "money" I thought Kimmel said "a trillion dollars." Although ridicule is the obvious reaction, one piece that takes this proposal seriously is Fred Kaplan: Space Farce, where among other tidbits you will find that there already is an Air Force Space Command, "founded in 1982 and headquartered in Colorado Springs, has 36,000 personnel and budget this year of $8.5 billion" -- so they'll finally have something to defend: their turf in the ensuing budget battles. There's also the even larger, $15 billion National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which runs all (or most) of America's spy satellites. Kaplan sees lots of practical issues, but doesn't raise basic ones, like what sort of message does forming an expensive Space Force sends to the rest of the world. On the one hand, it's a challenge to other countries to start deploying weapons in space, if for no other reason than to counter the US challenge. On the other, it tells the world that the US is aiming to radically expand its ability to rain devastation on every corner of the Earth, even more so than they can currently do. The hedge is that no other nation would be able to spend money on this level, but the admission is that no other nation is deranged enough to do so: that hardly makes anyone feel more secure. And while we're used to the stock line that arming ourselves preserves the peace, the temptation to use new weapons is all but irresistible: it's only a matter of time before someone like Madeleine Albright comes around and taunts you with "what's the purpose of having this magnificent army if you can't use it?"

    Kaplan cites China's test of technology means to disable satellites, but doesn't point out the obvious message: you can't secure space-based weapons, so don't bother building them. Indeed, one of the cardinal rules of war is that it's much easier to break things than to protect them. Chalmers Johnson illustrated this in The Sorrows of Empire when he showed how easy it would be for a hostile force to destroy every satellite in Earth orbit: just launch a dumptruck load of gravel, which traveling at 18,000 mph would soon shred every last one, and make it impossible to ever rebuild.

  • Adam Gopnik: The Las Vegas Massacre Report and the Rise of Second Amendment Nihilism.

  • Sam Knight: Jeremy Corbin's Anti-Semitism Crisis: Huh? I couldn't even follow the logic of the charges, which generally follow the form: over decades of activism, Corbyn associated with X who in some other context said Y which out of context could be deemed an anti-semitic slur, especially if you count any criticism of Israel as such. Making matters worse, Corbyn has tried to deny and/or explain away the charges. Of course, a conscientious reporter wouldn't bother reporting innuendo like this, much less trying to inflate it into a "crisis." Even Knight is pretty clear that there's nothing here, so why is he adding to it? This reminds me of the old Lyndon Johnson story:

    Legend has it that LBJ, in one of his early congressional campaigns, told one of his aides to spread the story that Johnson's opponent fucked pigs. The aide responded "Christ, Lyndon, we can't call the guy a pigfucker. It isn't true." To which LBJ supposedly replied "Of course it ain't true, but I want to make the son-of-a-bitch deny it."

  • Will Porter: Iran Sanctions Aren't Just Counterproductive, They're an Act of War: True enough, but when the country that proclaims and enforces them is massively more powerful and massively more terrifying, what can the victim do about it? Commit suicide? Pretend they can reciprocate with their own sanctions? Appeal to the UN or World Court? The latter might be a reasonable recourse if the power differential hadn't already rigged them. Maybe that leaves some asymmetric options, like aiding terrorists, but there's no way you can game that out as a winning strategy. In the case of Iran, the one hope is that Europe will not support the US sanctions, reducing the effectiveness of American bullying.

  • Grant Smith: Can the US Keep Lying About Israel's Nukes?

  • Michael Weiss: What Russia Understands About Trump: Putin built his career and regime on alternately coddling and cornering oligarchs. And that's pretty much all Trump is: vain and corrupt.

  • Fareed Zakaria: Looking Back at the Economic Crash of 2008: A review of Adam Tooze: Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. Tooze is a British economic historian, best known for The Wages of Destruction, a history and analysis of the German economy under the Third Reich; also The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931. One point here I never quite realized:

    What this shows is that the US power elite -- a consensus shared by Bush and Obama -- had come to put the interests of global capital above those of ordinary Americans. Indeed, this shift, which had never been debated politically, started with the post-WWII Cold War, when the US sided with capital against labor everywhere, even to the point of supporting failing empires and corrupt dictators. This was explicit with the Marshall Plan, but that could still be viewed in national terms, as a win-win deal for American and European business. What happened later was that capital flows became so free globally that the Fed couldn't stimulate the American economy without much of the cash injection crossing borders. Indeed, the 1990-92 recession mostly resulted in dollars flooding currency bubbles in Mexico and East Asia. (Conversely, aggressive stimulus spending by China after 2008 helped shore up the economies of Europe and America. European central banks were less effective because they were politically caught up in the austerity fad.)

    The second key point here is that while the technocrats did a good job of propping the banks up and halting the slide into depression, the way they did it cost them much of their political credibility -- discrediting the political center and fueling "populist" parties both on the left and the right.

  • Some Yemen/Saudi Arabia links: I don't really know what to make of these:

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, August 5, 2018

Weekend Roundup

I'm thinking this will be the last Weekend Roundup, at least in its current form. I've been going through my old notebooks, collecting my scattered political rants and writing into LibreOffice files which I hope to mine for a book (or three or five). I started the notebook in 2001, and kept it going as a backup when I refocused my writing into blog form. My first Weekend Roundup appeared on September 1, 2007, so I've been doing this pretty much weekly for more than ten years. The concept dates back even further, as I did irregular posts that were basically collections of links plus comments. (For a while, I called them Weekly Links.)

In 2014, I ran into server performance problems with the blog, and started a backup/sidecar mechanism I called "the faux blog" -- a set of flat files that a new script could organize into a LIFO (last in, first out) blog format. After that server company went out of business, I fell back to using the "faux blog" exclusively. This made it more of a conscious job to make new posts -- I basically had to update the whole website -- so I found myself falling back into a rut: Weekend Roundup on Sunday, Music Week on Monday, pretty much nothing else (except for the now-monthly Streamnotes). Anyhow, going back through the notebooks, I noticed two things after I started Weekend Roundup: the frequency and atomicity (focus on a single discrete topic) of my posts diminished; on the other hand, the overall amount of material I posted exploded (nearly doubled) -- partly, maybe even mostly, because I was quoting more.

In some sense, the latter meant that I was using the notebook as originally attended, as a repository for notes. However, now that I am finally trying to mold 15-20 years of writing into a more coherent, longer-lasting body of work, it occurs to me that I might be better off returning to a proper blog platform, where I can do short posts, on discrete points of interest, and post them immediately without having to carry the overhead of website maintenance. Fortunately, I already have a usable blog set up, Notes on Everyday Life. The name recycles a tabloid some friends published in 1972-74 in St. Louis, a mix of counterculture and new left theory. Ten or more years back I realized that my writing had two distinct audiences -- one into music, the other politics -- so I speculated that placing them in separate domains might make them more accessible. I registered the domains -- the music would go into Terminal Zone, also named for a 1970s publication -- and did some work building the websites, but neither survived my first great server crash. I've long harbored vague ideas of reviving both, even pipe dreams of hosting a community of kindred spirits, but at the moment, this seems like a sensible step. I've been finding myself caught in a bind where I'd come up with something more to say than I could squeeze into a tweet but not enough to add a whole blog post to the current website.

Needless to say, that still leaves room for posting Weekend Roundup here: basically as a weekly digest of smaller blog posts. And until I get my head into the new scheme, here's one more gathering of the links:

  • Miriam Berger: Israel's hugely controversial "nation-state" law, explained: Well before Israel declared its independence from Britain in 1948, the Zionist Settlement in Palestine (the "Yishuv") had established itself as a separate, self-contained, and exclusive society. The Israeli state established its dominance in the war that followed, Arabs under Israel's thumb have been treated as second class citizens (or worse), subject not just to inequal treatment but to separate laws. The new law doesn't change any of that, although it does promise some symbolic hardening of the lines. But more important, it sends a message to the world -- at least that part of the world that believes in civil rights, in human rights, in equal treatment, irrespective of race, religion, or creed -- that the socio-political order in Israel is fixed, unchangeable, eternal. It's not just a feature of Israel, it's its very essence. One wonders why take such an extreme stand now, especially as support for Israel is waning in Europe and the United States. I think a big part of that has to do with Trump, who supports Netanyahu unconditionally without demanding even the most token recognition of international law and norms. I'm reminded of an incident in 1937, when Britain's Peel Commission first recommended partitioning of Palestine, and went the extra mile by proposing transfer of Arabs out of the Jewish enclaves, Ben-Gurion hadn't asked for that, but given the opportunity couldn't help but endorse it. It was, after all, implicit in the Zionist program at least since 1913. With Trump proving so pliant, this must have seemed like the ideal moment for the Israeli right to show its true colors.

  • Tara Isabella Burton: Pope Francis officially updated Catholic teaching, calling the death penalty "inadmissible": When I read this, I flashed on how it might tilt our overwhelmingly Catholic Supreme Court, but then I recall how selective Republicans can be when it comes to the teachings of major religions. Actually, the case that capital punishment, at least as practiced in the US over the last 30-50 years, violates the "cruel and unusual punishment" clause of the Constitution. You'd also think that anyone with a libertarian bent would come down against letting the government execute people.

  • Stephen F Cohen: Trump as New Cold War Heretic: I don't doubt that many Americans exploit Cold War tropes and clichés when they agitate against Russia, simply because they're lazy and appealing to prejudice is often the easiest path. We've seen the same trick applied elsewhere, as when hawks played up old antipathies to Assad and Gaddafi to push for US military intervention in Syria and Libya, or the ease Israel and Saudi Arabia enjoy in turning us against Iran. Still, this only works if we can see continuity between when the prejudices were set (the Cold War) and now. That, of course, is why Russophobes make such a big deal about Putin having worked for in the KGB. We can speculate on why Clinton, Bush, and Obama made so little effort to deconflict the US-Russia relationship. One certainly suspects that sectors of the US military/security complex wanted to preserve Cold War tools like NATO, and that was easier done with Russia cast as a rival or foe. After all, had the US and Russia proceeded to effective nuclear disarmament there wouldn't be any market for a lucrative anti-missile system. It also helps that Russians have a bit of attitude -- a sense of national self that dates back to the Tsars, so they take offense when the US expects them to roll over while we depose friendly regimes in Yugoslavia and Syria, and more pointedly in Georgia and Ukraine, while moving armed forces to Russia's border. Putin's popularity is based on his ability to restore a sense of dignity and independence that had suffered badly under Yeltsin. Within Russia's spectrum, he's nowhere near the real demagogues on this point, but he gives the neo cold warriors enough rope. It shouldn't surprise us that Trump is relatively immune from such scheming -- even before the Clinton crowd jumped on the bandwagon. Trump knows that Russia changed dramatically following the collapse of the Soviet Union, mostly because he could do business with the new Russia. The old Soviet Union never achieved a state of equality, but after the fall it became even more inequal than the US, with gangsters and former officials grabbing vast swathes of state-owned property. They have, in short, created a world run by and for billionaires, a world of Trumps. Complain as you will about Putin's repression, his control of the press, his use of spies and hacks, his contempt for democracy, but there's nothing there Trump doesn't admire and crave. Conversely, Putin must have seen Trump as a Godsend: finally, an American political leader he can deal with, the old-fashioned way, with cash. On the other hand, none of this qualifies Trump as "a cold war heretic." That implies that Trump has a conscious command of historical context, when the opposite is the case. Where Cohen is most useful is in unpacking the complaints of the renascent cold warriors -- e.g., their frenzied reactions to the Trump-Putin summit. I'd go further and say that it's extremely important not to rekindle anything like the Cold War that scuttled the New Deal and the prospect of solving world conflicts through the UN. To do that we need to be clear on all sides. It's actually a good thing that Trump and Putin think they can do business together. One might wish for better leaders on both sides, but one can only change oneself. Beyond that all you can do is to respect common principles and look for opportunities that benefit all -- something that the US has never done since embarking on its post-WWII great power ego trip.

  • Jason Ditz: Congress Passes $716 Billion Military Spending Bill: "This was the single largest increase in military spending year-over-year in 15 years, and is the latest in the annual push between President Trump and Congress to see who can outdo the other in spending increases." Some more details: $716 Billion Military Spending Bill Won't Create Space Force, Limits Involvement in Yemen War.

  • Briahna Gray: Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Went to War With Partisanship in Kansas, and about 4,000 people showed up to meet them here in Wichita.

  • Naomi Klein: Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not "Human Nature" A response to the long New York Times article, Nathaniel Rich: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.

  • Nomi Prins: The Disrupter-in-Chief: I'm not going to argue against critics who think that Trump's major economic moves -- deregulation of just about everything but especially banking, tax cuts to increase inequality, tariffs to provide politically useful short-term profits, the trade war risk of said tariffs, increased bets on the arms trade (with its risk of further wars and blowback) -- aren't setting us up for another crash. I especially won't argue with Prins, who covers all these points and has an impressive track record of sniffing out looming disasters. However, before we get to Prins' bang, I figure we'll suffer through a few whimpers. The first problem is that the economic indicators Trump most likes to brag about are very weakly linked to the economic perceptions of the overwhelming majority of Americans. In a normal economy, such low unemployment rates should result in wage growth, yet we see very little of that. Similarly, virtually nothing from Trump's tax cuts has gone to higher wages (or even bonuses). Meanwhile, cost of living continues to go up -- gas prices are an obvious factor there, and housing is tight enough we're beginning to see a bubble. The statisticians may think this is a great economy, but ordinary people aren't feeling it. Second, virtually none of the bills that will eventually be suffered for increased risk due to deregulation have come due yet. That will happen, piecemeal, chaotically, over years and sometimes longer, and those costs are likely to really hurt. Same is true for other unfunded externalities, like climate change. This year's fires and storms are what you get for ignoring decades of scientific warnings, and the only direction we can see from here is worse. Inequality is another factor that hurts now and will only get worse over time.

    I should also say that I suspect that today's nominal growth rates are overstated and unsustainable. The Trump administration is actually doing a lot of things that slow the economy down. Trump's attack on immigration seeks to shrink the economy. His tariffs also constrict the economy. The only way tariffs make sense is if they're matched to a program of investment to build up protected industries that can eventually stand on their own. I'm not opposed to efforts to improve the balance of trade, but to do that you need to increase exports as well as reduce imports. I recall William Grieder proposing an across-the-board imports tax -- indeed, that's the only form of tariff the WTC allows. On the other hand, going industry-by-industry, country-by-country only increases the opportunity for (and costs of) graft. That at least is a racket Trump understands.

    Note that John Cassidy has similar reservations about the economy: The Hidden Danger for Donald Trump in the Economy's Growth Spurt. Matt Taibbi also wrote Why Killing Dodd-Frank Could Lead to the Next Crash.

  • Somini Sengupta/Tiffany May/Zia ur-Rehman: How Record Heat Wreaked Havoc on Four Continents: Stories from Algeria (124F on July 5), Hong Kong (over 91F for 16 straight days in May), Pakistan (122F on April 30), Oslo (over 86F for 16 consecutive days), Los Angeles (108F on July 6); also wildfires in Sweden and "one Swedish village just above the Arctic Circle, hit an all time record high, peaking above 90 degrees Fahrenheir." On California's fires, see Alissa Greenberg/Jason Wilson: As California burns, many fear the future of extreme fire has arrived. On the media, see: Emily Atkin: The Media's Failure to Connect the Dots on Climate Change; also: Joe Romm: Fossil fuel industry spent nearly $2 billion to kill US climate action, new study finds.

  • John Sides: What data on 20 million traffic stops can tell us about 'driving while black': Pretty much what you could have guessed.

  • Matthew Yglesias: Donald Trump is making Medicare-for-all inevitable: ACA was conceived as a political compromise that everyone could get behind, even if hardly anyone actually liked the idea. It promised that everyone could get comprehensive health insurance at a tolerable cost, without upsetting any existing business interests. And it promised to slow down rising costs without undermining quality care. Most Democrats realized that it wasn't nearly as efficient a solution as single-payer, but we were assured that it was good enough for now, and wouldn't run into the sort of political obstacles -- industry opposition and fear propaganda -- that a single-payer system would have to surmount. Of course, it didn't turn out that way: even after all the industry lobbyists cut their deals and signed off, the Republicans revolted, partly incoherent ideology (anti-government, pro-market, anti-equality, pro-business, even when the rip-offs are pure fraud), partly sheer obstructionism. And indeed, the Republicans came close to scuttling the law, partly by exploiting real flaws in its design. Even after it passed, they sued, and fought a state-by-state battle against the Medicaid expansion piece. Still, by 2016, the program was a modest success, and could have been tacitly accepted, but Trump and the Republicans decided to make its destruction a test of their power. Sure, they failed to outright repeal the law, but they've repeatedly attacked aspects of the law that threaten to throw it out of whack. Their first effort here was to limit insurance company compensation for losses due to adverse selection risk -- the effect here was to push up premium costs. Then they decided to allow junk insurance policies -- where insurance companies can refuse to pay for services that ACA had deemed to be necessary for everyone. Such policies can be sold cheaper, but only by shifting the costs to higher risk (or more responsible) people. The net effect is higher costs for less coverage, on top of all the other ways the industry has adjusted to further game the ACA system. Private insurance has never worked very well, and has gotten progressively worse as the whole industry became more intensely profit-seeking. The clearest measure of this is how health care as a share of GDP has steadily grown from 5% to 10% to 15% to 20%: if left uncontrolled, expect it to gradually devour the entire economy. ACA was as much an attempt to save an untenable system as to reform it. If Trump turns ACA into a failure, the only viable option left is socializing the system: single-payer, and a lot more regulation of the private sector. However, that assumes something we have no real reason to expect: a happy ending, where we wind up doing something that works. At least it's definitively proven that socialized medicine works: every other wealthy nation has (with minor variations) such a system, and every one of them delivers better health care results at significantly less cost. Still, American politicians have time and again refused to implement reasonable reforms, just as they've insisted on making the same mistakes over and over again. And if the election of Trump proves anything, it's that we're not getting any smarter about our problems or how to solve them. (One indication that single-payer is getting closer: Dylan Scott: The case for single-payer, explained in 3 charts.)

    Yglesias also wrote: Netroots Nation, explained. As Yglesias points out, Obama was a big hit at the precursor Yearly Kos conference in 2007, but lost all interest when he became president, leaving network-based activism in a lurch, at least in terms of influence in and for the Democratic Party. One result was that under Obama the Democratic Party largely folded up as a grassroots political organization, at the same time as Republican donors like the Kochs were plowing millions into their fake tea party noisemakers. On the other hand, having been beaten down so bad, at this year's confab they're finally looking up. Even the old Democratic Party warlords are starting to get hungry. However, do read Yglesias' major post this week: Centrist Democrats are out of ideas. Of course, that's what always happens when you spend eight years making excuses to your voters for why you can't get anything progressive implemented, while at the same time bragging to your donors about how you're keeping the riff raff in check. At this point, even what passed for ideas eight years ago -- e.g., ACA, "cap-and-trade" -- don't pass the smell test.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, July 29, 2018

Weekend Roundup

I've been wanting to write something about the liberal hawk rants over Trump's summits with Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin, his snubs of "traditional allies" like the EU, his denigration of NATO, and other acts (or just tweets) crossing the line of politically correct dogma, in some cases even eliciting the word "treason" (the one word I'd most like to vanish from the language). Still, as I ran out of time, I decided to do a quickie Weekend Roundup instead, then found myself sucked into that very same rabbit hole.

I don't know why it's so hard to explain this. (Well, I do know that everywhere I turn I run into new examples of well-meaning idiocy -- the Stephen Cohen piece below has a bunch of examples. A couple more, by Michael H Fuchs and Simon Tisdall, just showed up in the Guardian. There's that piece by Jessica Matthews on "His Korean 'Deal'" over at NYRB. The Yglesias pieces I do cite below are nowhere near the worst.) After all, a key point was written up by the late Chalmers Johnson nearly years ago and recently republished at TomDispatch as Three Good Reasons to Liquidate Our Empire.

Another key point is the cardinal rule of democracy: trust your own people to mind their own business, and trust others to mind theirs. It used to be that many Americans (including most Democrats) believed that disputes and conflicts were best handled through international law and institutions, but that notion doesn't even seem to be conceivable any more.

The fact that I missed writing up a Weekend Roundup last week no doubt adds to the eclectic and arbitrary mix below. It's been real hard to sort out what's important., especially when everywhere you look turns up new heaps of horror.

But I also neglected the one bright spot I'm aware of from the last two weeks: we had a rally here in Wichita where Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders spoke and some 4,000 people showed up. This was an event for James Thompson's campaign for Congress (the seat previously held by Mike Pompeo and, before that, Todd Tiahrt). Thompson ran for the vacant seat after Trump nominated Pompeo to run the CIA, losing by a 6% margin a district that Trump won by 28% despite getting zero outside support from the national or state Democratic Parties. Thompson vowed to keep running, and we're hopeful.

Kansas has a primary on Tuesday. Thompson has an opponent, who may have gotten a lucky break with a newspaper article today that claims the only issue separating the candidates is guns: Thompson, a former Army vet, is regarded as more "pro gun" -- not that he has a chance in hell of wrangling an NRA endorsement. Actually, I suspect there's a lot more at stake: Thompson has established himself as a dedicated civil rights attorney, while his opponent worked as a corporate lobbyist.

The Democratic gubernatorial race is a mixed bag, where all of the candidates have blemishes, but any would be better than any of the Republicans (or rich "independent" Greg Orman). Jim Barnett got the Wichita Eagle endorsement for Republican governor, but the actual race seems to be a toss-up between Jeff Colyer (former Lt. Governor who took over when Sam Brownback returned to Washington, and a virtual Brownback clone) and Kris Kobach (current Secretary of State, freelance author of unconstitutional laws, and a big Trump booster). Polls seem to be split, with a vast number of undecideds. Kobach would turn Kansas (even more) into a national laughing stock, which doesn't mean he can't win. Orman came very close to beating Sen. Pat Roberts four years ago, after the Democrat ducked out of the race, but I don't see that happening this time, making him a mere spoiler.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Matthew Yglesias: He seems to have given up on his "week explained" articles, but still writes often and broadly enough his posts are still useful for surveying the week in politics. Most recent first:

    • Closing ads from the Georgia gubernatorial nominees perfectly illustrate the state of the parties: "Stacey Abrams talks about issues; Brian Kemp says he's not politically correct."

      Abrams's ad is called "Trusted" while Kemp's is called "Offends," and they only diverge further from there. Abrams talks about issues, and she talks optimistically about making people's lives better in a concrete way. Kemp, typically for a 2018 Republican, talks exclusively about diffuse threats to the white Christian cultural order.

      Abrams says she has "a boundless belief in Georgia's future," and talks about Medicaid expansion, middle-class taxes, and mass transit.

      Kemp describes himself as "a politically incorrect conservative" and literally does not mention any policy issues. Instead, he says that he says "Merry Christmas" and "God bless you," stands for the national anthem, and supports our troops, and that if that offends you, then you shouldn't vote for him.

    • Trump's enduring political strength with white women, explained: "There are huge divides by age and education."

    • Republicans now like the FBI less than they like the EPA: "Meanwhile, most Americans have an unfavorable view of ICE." On the other hand, that 83-84% of Democrats "have confidence" in CIA and FBI shows them to be pretty gullible.

    • Donald rump is actually a very unpopular president.

    • Swing voters are extremely real: A lot of polling data here. A couple things I'm struck by: that a relatively significant number of voters saw Trump as moderate or even liberal; and that even on extremely polarized issues (like abortion) both parties have large minorities that still vote for their chosen party.

    • Trump says he's "not thrilled" by Federal Reserve interest rate hikes.

    • Trump's latest interview on Russia shows the profound crisis facing America: This piece winds up wobbling as severely as Trump does in the interview at its heart. So while this much is true:

      Trump was evasive and ignorant, relentlessly dishonest, and at turns belligerent and weirdly passive -- all in an interview that lasted less than eight minutes. It's clear that he is either covering up some kind of profound wrongdoing or else simply in way over his head and incapable of managing the country's affairs. . . . Trump and Putin sat in a room together for a long time. They presumably talked about something. No staffers were there, so it wasn't that Trump was zoning out while the real dialogue happened at the staff level. . . . And then there is Trump's relentless fishiness on the subject of Russia and hacking. . . . Trump, of course, had nothing of substance to say about this but returned to a longtime theme of his tweets -- that the investigation is a "witch hunt" and that its very existence harms the country -- that completely undermines the pose that he thinks it's bad for Russian state-sponsored hackers to commit crimes against Americans. . . .

      The problem in the US-Russia relationship for a long time now has been that while Russia does a lot that America sees as misbehavior that it wants stopped, there genuinely isn't that much that America affirmatively wants from Russia or that Russia can do for us. And Trump himself has no ideas on this front either. He likes that Putin likes his North Korea diplomacy, and doesn't see that maybe Putin likes it because it's really absurd and Putin doesn't have America's best interests at heart.

      Yglesias thinks the last line is the "best case" scenario -- others readily parrot Cold War memes claiming that Russia's intent is to do harm to America regardless of consequences for Russia. They evince a classic case of projection: attributing motives and even acts to Putin that are really their own. After all, is there any "misbehavior" that America's Russophobes have charged Putin with that American agents haven't carried out many times over? (I won't bore you with the list, but even when it comes to fomenting revolts to annex territory, Crimea is small potatoes compared to Texas and Hawaii. And don't get me started on shooting down civilian airliners.) It's no surprise when conceited, self-aggrandizing nations abuse their power, and from our perspective it's easy to fault Putin's Russia when they do. However, one should respond just as readily when America does the same, and that's a part that's inevitably missing when Yglesias and others rattle off their list of Russian "misbehavior." Also missing is recognition that there is a huge imbalance in interests and power between America and Russia, as should be clear from the areas of dispute: Ukraine and Georgia are literally on Russia's border, traditional trading partners that the US and Europe have conspired to lure away, while NATO expansion has moved American troops ever closer to the Russian border, while new anti-missile systems seek to negate Russia's nuclear deterrent, while sanctions further isolate and impoverish the Russian economy. It may be inappropriate for Russia to interfere in the political affairs of its neighbors, but that isn't a complaint that Americans are entitled to make without focusing their efforts on their own country's same violations.

      It makes perfect sense that Putin and his cronies might see hacking as a way of leveling the playing field, or maybe just poking the beast. (It's certainly not as if the US isn't doing the same thing and then some: my book notes file has a dozen or so volumes on "cyberwar" and the NSA.) I've spent enough time looking at server security logs to know that a lot of mischief arises from .ru (and .zh) domains. And it makes sense that Putin would favor someone like Trump, and not just because they share authoritarian streaks: Putin is tight with many of the oligarchs who managed to snap up so many previously state-owned enterprises, and those oligarchs are used to doing business with billionaires like Trump. If anyone in American politics is capable of putting personal avarice above imperial hubris, it's surely someone like Trump.

      On the other hand, it was at best a long-shot, as Trump isn't smart or coherent or principled or popular enough to drive his own foreign policy, but he has shown that when he makes a conciliatory gesture on the side of peace, contrary to America's "deep state" dogma, that move turns out to be rather popular, even as it elicits furious scorn from establishment pundits. Most alarming here are the liberals/Democrats who think they're doing us a favor by attacking Trump via widespread residual prejudices against Putin and Russia -- who somehow believe that sabotaging the unholy Trump-Putin alliance is progressivism at its finest. I've been wanting to write something deeper about how wrongheaded these people are, but cannot do that here. When I see people who supposedly cherish peace and are committed to democracy throw their beliefs away just to score cheap and meaningless points, well . . . it boggles my mind.

    • Trump gave congressional Republicans the deniability they crave: The rest of Yglesias' Russia pieces are similarly worthless. Trump doesn't have a foreign policy -- what the US does is largely what it's been doing on autopilot for 20 (or maybe 60) years -- but he does have a persona, which waxes hot and cold according to Trump's intuition of how it plays to his public -- a public which relishes grand gestures while having no command of or feeling for details. And like that public, Trump takes many of his clues from how much he offends the self-confirmed experts -- especially those railing about how Trump's attacking "traditional allies" and embracing "our enemies": people who think they're scoring points by embracing all those past strategies which have repeatedly pushed America into conflicts and wars. The tell here is when critics seize on utter nonsense to put Trump down. For instance, this piece recycles the "I think the European Union is a foe" quote. I've seen the interview the quote was taken from, and clearly Trump was tricked into using "foe" for something much closer to rival.

    • It's time to take Trump both seriously and literally on Russia.

    • Asked directly, Putin does not deny possessing "compromising material" on Trump.

  • Damian Carrington: Extreme global weather is 'the face of climate change' says leading scientist: Michael Mann is the scientist, although "other senior scientists agree the link is clear." Europe seems to be especially hard hit at the moment: Patrick Greenfield: Extreme weather across Europe delays flights, ferries and Eurotunnel -- but the heat wave and fires in California rival those in Sweden and Greece.

  • Stephen F Cohen: Trump as New Cold War Heretic: More like the guy who didn't get the memo and wound up trying to wing it.

  • Elizabeth Kolbert: The Trump Administration Takes on the Endangered Species Act.

  • Paul Krugman: Radical Democrats Are Pretty Reasonable.

  • Emily Stewart: One chart that shows how much worse income inequality is in America than Europe: based on Eric Levitz: New Study Confirms That American Workers Are Getting Ripped Off. Also includes charts showing that the US ranks third in highest "share of households earning less than half the median income" (after Eurozone losers Greece and Spain), and second in "earnings at the 90th percentile as a multiple of earnings at the 10th percentile, for full-time workers" (after Israel, where the 10th percentile is almost exclusively Palestinian). These numbers come from the OECD, and don't include Russia, the only country where inequality has expanded even more radically than in the United States. Much more here (like: "only Turkey, Lithuania, and South Korea have lower unionization rates than the United States"), but here's the chart Stewart referred to:

    Note that the trend line points the same directions in US and Western Europe: that the latter still has considerable and increasing inequality. Indeed, the concentration of capital worldwide is putting increasing pressure on Western Europe, but thus far democratic institutions there have been more effective at resisting the greed and corruption that has managed to so distort politics in the United States. Note especially Levitz's conclusion:

    President Trump spends a great deal of time and energy arguing that American workers are getting a rotten deal. And he's right to claim that Americans are getting the short end. But the primary cause of that fact isn't bad trade agreements or "job killing" regulations -- its the union-busting laws and court rulings that the president has done so much to abet.

  • Matt Taibbi: Why We Know So Little About the U.S.-Backed War in Yemen:

    What the U.N. calls the "world's worst humanitarian crisis" is an unhappy confluence of American media taboos. . . . Yemen features the wrong kinds of victims, lacks a useful partisan angle and, frankly, is nobody's idea of clickbait in the Trump age. Until it becomes a political football for some influential person or party, this disaster will probably stay near the back of the line.

    Taibbi also wrote: Trump's War on the Media Should Make Us Better at Our Jobs.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, July 15, 2018

Weekend Roundup

Got a late start. Hadn't been paying much attention to the news, least of all Trump's European trip. Indeed, the pattern on domestic issues is pretty well set, with only a few details changing, so few things hold any real surprises. Disgust and outrage, sure, but none of that is surprising any more. So I mostly just went through the motions, grabbing a few links from the usual places, occasionally adding a brief comment.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Matthew Yglesias: Trump's administration can't clean house because its leader is too soaked in scandal. I've seen critics on the left (e.g., Gary Younge) worry that "we are normalising Donald Trump" by losing our capacity for continuous outrage, but the normalization we should be most worried about is from the right, as they've retreated to the stance that since everyone critical of Trump has a political agenda, everything that Trump does should be defended by attacking the critics. Therefore:

    The ethical and moral standards inside the White House have dropped so low that even on the way out the door, conservatives are painting the comically corrupt former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt as a martyred hero victimized by the hysterical liberal media.

    "I am just so disappointed in the president's failure to support Scott against the angry attacks from the loony left," Republican donor Doug Deason told Politico. "Nothing he did amounted to anything big. He was THE most effective Cabinet member by far."

    Presidential administrations are large, and it's impossible to build one that's entirely scandal-free. But you can vet people properly, you can drum-out malefactors who slip through the cracks, and you can build an institutional culture in which team members are rewarded for exposing impropriety rather than rewarded for covering it up.

    But inside the Donald Trump White House, grifters, abusers, racists, and harassers still get hired; they lurk around the Oval Office after they've been found out; and even in the rare instance where they're forced out, it's only grudgingly.

    Other Yglesias pieces this week:

    • Mueller's new indictments remind us of 2 core truths about the Trump-Russia story:

      First, regardless of the culpability of anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign, real crimes were committed in 2016 with real victims.

      Second, both as a candidate for office and then continuing onward as president-elect and president, Donald Trump has worked to shelter the people who committed those crimes from exposure or accountability.

      These points are worth dwelling on because they cut against two commonplace narratives about the case. One renders the entire issue as a question of mystery and spycraft, leading ultimately to things like Jonathan Chait's maximalist speculation that perhaps Trump has been a KGB asset for decades. The other renders it as a narrowly political question in which passionate fans of Hillary Clinton should perhaps feel robbed of an election win -- but her critics, whether on the right or the left, can feel smugly self-assured that there were other reasons for her loss. . . .

      Trump's inability to even feign anger or outrage at the real crimes committed against real American citizens is remarkable relative to the context of what's ordinarily considered acceptable presidential behavior.

      That it seems banal from Trump itself is perhaps understandable given how flagrantly and constantly he reminds us that he doesn't care about anyone outside his narrow circle of support. But that's merely a measure of how far we've fallen as a society in the Trump era -- it's not a real reason to ignore it.

    • The bizarre media hoopla over Alan Dershowitz's social life in Martha's Vineyard, explained: Opportunistic media lawyer has a new book to hype, The Case Against Impeaching Trump, a title formula he has already exploited six times in a series of outrageously deceitful books about Israel/Palestine.

    • Paul Ryan's pathetic excuse for not challenging Trump on trade, explained

    • Brett Kavanaugh and the new judicial activism, explained: Sure, I was predisposed to object to anyone Trump might nominate to the Supreme (or for that matter any other) Court, and most likely so are you, but if you do feel the urge to bone up on why such a person poses such a threat to liberty and justice, you can start reading here. Key paragraph:

      But where a progressive judge might see judicial intervention as primarily warranted in order to protect the powerless against assaults from the powerful, Kavanaugh and the conservative legal mainstream see it as a tool to protect business owners from majority rule. If one is a sufficiently unprincipled liar -- which Brett Kavanaugh certainly is, as we saw in his remarks after Trump introduced him to the nation -- one can dress this up in the language of democracy or originalism or whatever else.

      The fact of the matter is that conservatives have been grooming lawyers like Kavanaugh for 30-40 years now in the conscious realization that with the life-long terms of US judges they can build a protective wall around corporate power that will be very difficult for democratic majorities to overcome. (That is why Republicans put such emphasis on nominating unusually young judges, to extend present Republican rule and forestall any possible reversal by Democrats once they return to power.)

  • Adam Davidson: Where did Donald Trump get two hundred million dollars to buy his money-losing Scottish golf club?

    Even before the financial crisis of 2008, Trump found it increasingly difficult to borrow money from big Wall Street banks and was shut out of the rapidly growing pool of institutional investment. Faced with a cash-flow problem, he could have followed other storied New York real-estate families and invested in the ever more rigorous financial-due-diligence capabilities required by pension funds and other sources of real-estate capital. This would have given him access to a pool of trillions of dollars from investors.

    Instead, Trump turned to a new source of other people's money. He did a series of deals in Toronto, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Azerbaijan, and Georgia with businesspeople from the former Soviet Union who were unlikely to pass any sort of rigorous due-diligence review by pension funds and other institutional investors. (Just this week, the Financial Times published a remarkably deep dive into the questionable financing of Trump's Toronto property.) He also made deals in India, Indonesia, and Vancouver, Canada, with figures who have been convicted or investigated for criminal wrongdoing and abuse of political power.

    We know very little about how money flowed into and out of these projects. All of these projects involved specially designated limited-liability companies that are opaque to outside review. We do know that, in the past decade, wealthy oligarchs in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere have seen real-estate investment as a primary vehicle through which to launder money. The problem is especially egregious in the United Kingdom, where some have called the U.K. luxury real-estate industry "a money laundering machine." Golf has been a particular focus of money laundering. Although the U.K. has strict transparency rules for financial activity within the country, its regulators have been remarkably incurious about the sources of funds coming from firms based abroad. All we know is that the money that went into Turnberry, for example, came from the Trump Organization in the U.S. We -- and the British authorities -- have no way of knowing where the Trump Organization got that money.

  • Thomas Frank: It's not wage rises that are a problem for the economy -- it's the lack of them.

  • Sean Illing: Why you should give a shit about NATO: Interview with Ivo Daalder, a former US ambassador to NATO under Obama, since settled into a comfy think tank slot, and not a very convincing one. His assertion that Russia today is every bit the threat that the Soviet Union posed in 1949 is laughable. Maybe there are some countries today -- really just former SSRs like Ukraine and Estonia -- that worry that nationalists in Russia would like to recapture the Tsardom's former imperial glory, but that margin has retreated far from the partition of Germany. Even in 1949 there were options other than NATO, such as the neutrality agreements with Finland and Austria. The fact is that military alliances have historically been more likely to provoke war than to prevent it. When the Warsaw Pact dissolved would have been a good time to disband NATO and restore the UN to its intended role as the arbiter of international peace. That didn't happen for several reasons: one result being that NATO's expansion into Eastern Europe pushed Russia into an uncomfortable corner; another was that NATO became a vehicle for a new wave of neo-imperial adventures in Asia and Africa (mostly US-directed, but France and Turkey have also used it to pursue their own agendas). People like Daalder with vested interests and/or prejudices formed in the Cold War and radicalized by their GWOT conceits, have been especially vocal this week in countering Trump's disparaging comments about NATO. But as it turns out, Trump's real game is to stimulate defense spending -- especially the purchase of American weapons systems.

  • Aditi Juneja: Like Kylie Jenner, I was on a Forbest list. Here are the hidden privileges that made me a "success."

  • Robert Mackey: Live: Dispatches From the UK as Trump Stokes Turmoil. Mackey also wrote: Ahead of UK Visit, Donald Trump Praises Boris Johnson, Who Once Called Him Insane.

  • Josh Marshall: Israel Pushed Heavily for Trump to Meet with Putin: Colbert and ilk like to make jokes about Trump being "Putin's bitch," but Trump has bowed deeper and bent over far more often for Israel, even if it isn't always clear whether Netanyahu or Sheldon Adelson is calling the shots. Marshall doesn't mention this, but Netanyahu has pow-wowed with Putin recently, supposedly coming away with some sort of Syria deal which would retain Assad and marginalize Iran there.

  • Nadia Popovich, et al: 76 Environmental Rules on the Way Out Under Trump.

  • Robert B Reich: What if the Government Gave Everyone a Paycheck?: Review of two recent books on basic income: Annie Lowrey: Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World, and Andrew Yang: The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Umiversal Basic Income Is Our Future. Also in the New York Times Book Review: Emily Cooke: In the Middle Class, and Barely Getting By, a review of Alissa Quart: Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America.

  • James Risen: Indictment of Russian intelligence operatives should quell harebrained conspiracy theories on DNC hack. Risen, by the way, has a whole series of articles on Trump and Russia: Part 1: Is Donald Trump a traitor?; Part 2: A key Trump-Russia intermediary has been missing for months, as the case for collusion grows stronger; Part 3: There's plenty of evidence that Trump sought to block the Russia probe, but it will take more than that to bring him down; and Part 4: Republicans' slavish loyalty to Trump in the Russia investigation may permanently deprive Congress of its oversight role.

  • Hiroko Tabuchi: How the Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around the Country.

  • Matt Taibbi: No, the Mythical 'Center' Isn't Sexy.

  • Adam Taylor: For South Korean conservatives, Trump adds to deep political problems:

    But almost 18 months into his presidency, many acknowledge that Trump has been a disaster for South Korea's beleaguered conservative movement.

    "I still can't wrap my head around it," Hong Joon-pyo, former leader of the country's largest right-wing party, Liberty Korea, said of Trump's meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore on June 12. "I never imagined a U.S. government would help a leftist government in South Korea."

    In a nation where the political right has long based its policies on deep animosity toward North Korea and unfailing support for the U.S. military alliance, conservatives now find themselves dealing with an American leader who is not only willing to meet with and praise Kim, but who publicly muses about withdrawing troops.

    South Korea's rightists are in the midst of a full-blown identity crisis. And the effect can be seen in electoral votes and opinion polls.

    In regional elections on June 13, the Liberty Korea Party suffered a humiliating defeat, garnering just two of 17 major mayoral and gubernatorial seats and only a little more than half the votes that the governing Minjoo Party received.

  • Nathaniel Zelinsky: The case for not publishing hacked emails. Nor is it only hackers who are guilty of indiscriminate leaking; see Peter Maass: Trump finds a new weapon for his war on journalism -- leak indictments aimed at smearing reporters.

PS: I finished this Sunday night, but didn't post until Monday, by which time the Helsinki summit between Trump and Putin had taken place, with predictable blood curdling howls of outrage from liberal pundits -- as trapped within their militant anti-Russian prejudices as those South Korean conservatives mentioned above. I might as well go ahead and link to Matthew Yglesias: It's time to take Trump both seriously and literally on Russia, just to get the nonsense out of the way before next Weekend Roundup. Yglesias starts by faulting Trump for not raising a stink over a long list of Putin sins (some real, some likely, some unclear and/or distorted), as if the sole point of the meeting is to see who can claim moral high ground. (That is, by the way, a fool's errand for any American president: you seriously want to talk about invading other countries? shooting down airliners? assassinating critics in foreign lands? how many people you've incarcerated? how badly you treat them? efforts to subvert democratic choice? I don't deny that Russia, and Putin in particular, has a checkered record on those counts, but so does Trump and America.)

The point of diplomacy is to find common ground to solve mutual problems. To do that, you need to be realistic, to show respect, to see past differences. It's actually very refreshing when Trump says that both sides have made mistakes. It's also completely clear that if you want to, say, reduce the threat of nuclear war, these are the two leaders you need to get together, to find common ground, even if you don't approve of the common traits of both. There are currently a lot of issues where constructive agreement between Russia and the US would benefit everyone. Demonizing the other simply doesn't help.

Of course, one has little hope that Trump will see his way to solving any of those disputes. He simply seems too incoherent, not to mention too morally skewed. Nonetheless, he brings something to the table that his predecessors lacked: flexibility. As with Korea, it's just possible that clear thinking on the other side(s) of the table could steer him into a breakthrough that someone like Obama or Clinton couldn't conceive of. It would be a terrible shame if Democrats scuttled worthwhile deals just to spite him. (In fact, it would be a godawful Mitch McConnell-like thing to do.)

Also, note that it isn't as if Trump hasn't been giving Democrats plenty of reasons this trip to tear him apart. The problem with Trump's disparaging of the EU, characterizing Europe as a "foe," championing Brexit in the UK, etc., is that he is deliberately, at the highest levels, attempting to interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries -- the same thing Democrats accuse Putin of (just more shamelessly).

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, July 8, 2018

Weekend Roundup

I've been hampered by another, quite maddening, computer problem this week. It helps to understand that every program has its own private piece of screen buffer memory, updating the entire image whenever it wishes to change what you see. Whether you actually see the changes depends on the layering of the windows. You usually see all of the current (active focus) window, but other windows may be partially or wholly covered by the top window, or by other windows in an overlay stack. This means that every possible view of every window is stored in memory somewhere -- either the main computer memory, or dedicated screen memory on a video controller card. The computer (or the video card) keep a display list of everything that is to be shown. What's happening on my computer is that this display list is getting corrupted, so all of a sudden I'll see some screen chunk appear when it shouldn't.

The result is very disorienting. For instance, while I've been writing this in an emacs editor window, the screen to my window's left has decided to show a big chunk of a Pitchfork review that I closed from my browser a couple of days ago. I can make it go away by moving the mouse over it and using the wheel to scroll whatever the proper window there has in it (a Wikipedia page). I'm able to work around the problem by using little tricks like that to force proper screen updates, but it's a trial, a real nuisance. This started happening a week ago when I was experiencing heavy load problems. I cut down on the loads by installing an ad blocker and rebooting. That did indeed help on performance, but within a day I started experiencing this phantom screen ghosting (not a technical term, but that's what the screen fragments feel like; just happened again).

I'm guessing that the problem is in the video card, and hoping it will go away when I replace the card (new one on order). Before I installed the ad blocker, I ran into another serious problem: I kept hearing random pops from Napster (although not from Bandcamp, which also plays through the browser, or from VLC, which is a separate ap). No such problem with the ad blocker installed, so that problem was clearly due to the added overhead of processing all those annoying ads. Good riddance to the visual distraction, as well.

I've been working on a side project this past week. I started this last year, spent a couple of days on it, and let it sit, moving on to other, seemingly more urgent, tasks. The idea is to collect all of the political notes from my online notebook. This starts back in 2001, before I started my blog, and continues to archive all of my blog posts from 2005 on. Originally I was thinking of one file for the whole roll, but as I got into 2006, I realized I need to split it into multiple volumes: one for the Bush years, a second for Obama, and probably one for Trump as long as is necessary. Prime determinant was length, but it also makes more sense subject-wise.

Of course, the writing will need a lot of editing to turn it into anything useful. And it's not clear even how it should be organized: day-by-day, or sorted out into subject areas. Good news is that compared to the jazz guides, this one is going pretty fast. Unless the computer situation deteriorates further, I should finish the first pass compilation up to 2008 this coming week. Currently have 465,000 words, up to Feb. 2007 (930 pages of 12 pt. type).

I'd like to say a few things about the material I've been reviewing, but don't have much time and the circumstances aren't conducive. Suffice it to say that the one clearest lesson is that nearly everything we've found so galling and appalling about Trump had previously appeared as a big problem under GW Bush. For instance, I have a lot of material in 2006-07 on North Korea. I have a report on a mass demonstration against ICE excesses. I even have a disgusting story about the president and the Boy Scouts. It's not that nothing never changes, but it is very much the case that Trump's agenda is a direct continuation of the shit Bush tried to pull until he flamed out in 2008, leaving the economy in shambles.

Some scattered links this week:

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, July 1, 2018

Weekend Roundup

Busy day yesterday for the anti-Trump left in Wichita. I made it to the Ice Cream Social at the Wichita Peace Center, along with about forty other people, including two candidates -- James Thompson, running for Congress, somehow escaped my attention, but I couldn't miss Lacey Cruse, running for the Sedgwick County Commission, as she was the featured entertainment. Coming at the end of a long day wrapping up my June Streamnotes, I wasn't in the mood for a folkie singalong, so repaired to a quieter nook of the Peace House. However, she mentioned two demonstrations that day: one on inequality, the other on refugee rights. My wife went to the latter, and guessed about 300 people showed up. The former seemed to be the work of DSA. About a half-dozen people in DSA tee-shirts showed up for ice cream -- only one previously known to me.

I mention this because I've been in a deep, disgusted funk all week, and expected to just go through the motions in this post today. So while my commitment and even interest are flagging, note at least that there are still others who are getting more engaged -- especially much younger ones. That is as it should be. While there are terrible things that the current regime can do to what's left of my life, it's young people today who face the real horrors of America's current political nihilism, and it's their futures that hang in the balance. I've never been comfortable thinking in generational terms, but there are massive differences from the world I grew up in to the one young people inhabit today. We saw that there were inequities that needed work and issues that needed new attention, but we still believed that America's political legacy pointed toward a fairer and more equitable world. We made some real progress on many fronts, but left the door open which allowed moneyed interests and right-wing ideologues to creep back into control.

That, in turn, led to the impoverished, disempowered, manipulated, and embittered world young people today inhabit. That world took a turn for the worse in November 2016 when Trump won the presidency and both houses of Congress. I was literally sickened by the thought. If my capacity to be shocked has since waned, it's not because Republicans have failed to deliver on their threats. It's just because what's come to pass already seemed so inevitable 20 months ago. One such prospect was that right-wing activists would strengthen their grip on the Supreme Court and increasingly use that power to advance their agenda. This week that threat became suddenly real for a lot of people, thanks first to a series of rulings where Kennedy sided with the right, then with Kennedy's retirement, allowing Trump to install yet another right-wing movement judge.

But actually that movement on the court has been growing slowly, at least since Nixon nominated Rehnquist, whose opposition to civil rights was somehow deemed less threatening without a Southern drawl. (Nixon had previously had two nominees rejected, precisely for that reason.) It hasn't gone as smoothly as conservatives wanted, but their game plan has been relentless, and focused on the branch of government that is slowest moving and least responsive to popular political opinion. Actually, until Roosevelt prevailed by outlasting the judges, the Supreme Court had always been a bastion of elite privilege. We are very fortunate to have lived during the one period in American history when the Court regularly stood up for the civil rights of individuals and minorities. Thanks to the 2016 election, the Supreme Court will be a millstone on any recovery of democracy we manage to achieve in the 2018, 2020, etc. elections -- probably for decades to come.

I don't have a citation, but I have a pretty clear memory of Lindsey Graham, back when he was in the House before he became a Senator in 2003, explaining that Republicans have to use whatever power they have to lock in long-term, hard-to-repeal changes whenever and wherever they can, precisely because they realize that they can't expect to hold power indefinitely (and possibly because they fear demographic trends might undermine their standing). The courts, with their lifetime terms, are merely the most obvious example. Indeed, for decades now they've come up with novel approaches to frustrate democracy, including feeding a steady erosion in the confidence people have that they can change lives for the better through political action.

This week has been a banner week for their cynical manipulations. The lesson Democrats should learn is that they need to defeat the Republicans so big that such schemes are overwhelmed.

Some scattered links this week:

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, June 24, 2018

Weekend Roundup

Sometime last week I got the feeling that the Trump administration has entered a new phase or level. From the start, they said and often did bad things, but they came off as confused, stupid, and/or evil, and they weren't very good at following through, so most people didn't feel any real change. The administration seemed to be collapsing into chaos, while a highly motivated resistance was scoring political points even when they fell short of disrupting Trump's agenda. It's still possible to look at last week that way, especially as public outrage forced Trump to make a tactical retreat from his policy of breaking up and jailing refugee families at the border.

Nonetheless, as I've watched clips of Trump and read stories of his cronies this week, I've started to see a potentially compelling story coming together. And as I've watched the late-night anti-Trump comics fumble and flail in their attempts to skewer the news, I'm reminded of that line about how the Democrats managed to misunderestimate Bush on his way to a second term. For me, the clearest example was how the big three (Colbert, Kimmel, Meyers) all jumped on a Trump line where he bragged about eliminating more regulations within 500 days than any previous president -- regardless of how many years they served ("4, or 8, or in one case 16 years"). All three pounced on "16 years" as the big lie, pointing out that while Franklin Roosevelt was elected to four four-year terms, he died a couple months into his fourth, so actually only served 12 years. If I didn't know better, I'd suspect Trump tossed that in just to throw them off the scent.

The real problem -- the things that critics need to focus on -- is the claim of eliminating a record number of regulations in whatever time frame you want to use: Trump's "500 days," a whole term, full tenure, etc. I have no way of checking -- it's not like anyone's been keeping records on this -- but Trump's claim is at least plausible. I suppose you might nominate Harry Truman, who ended rationing, wage and price controls, and many other regulations after WWII ended, but none of those were ever intended to last beyond wartime. But much of "deregulation" during Truman's first term was done by Congress, most extensively after Republicans won Congress in 1946, in some cases passing laws (like Taft-Hartley) over Truman's veto. Carter and Reagan did some deregulating, but mostly through Congress. Congress has helped Trump out a little, but nearly all of his "deregulation" has been done by executive order and/or through the discretionary acts of his political appointees.

Trump's boast assumes that cutting regulations is always a good thing, but that isn't necessarily the case. Each regulation needs to be reviewed on its own merits. Often they need to be revised, curtailed, or expanded, based on how effective (including cost-effective) they are at achieving stated goals. But it must be understood that some degree of regulation is necessary to protect the public from unscrupulous and/or simply sloppy operators -- especially businesses, which always feel pressure to cut corners. Trump's own motivations are twofold: first, he seems hell bent on obliterating everything Obama signed his name to; second, he's eager to shower favors on any business/lobbyist he or his cronies deem to be in their corner. In short, Trump's deregulation boast is a perfect storm of vanity, ego, ideological extremism, and graft. There's no shortage of things to criticize there. Nitpicking over when FDR died misses it all.

The thing is, unless you start tearing apart the vanity and corruption of Trump's "deregulation" record -- I'm tempted to put it into quotes because it's not just eliminating regulations, it also involves changing them to favor private over public interests, or to signal what will and will not be enforced -- will congeal into a positive story that lots of people will find attractive. (After all, few things are less favorably viewed than government red tape -- salmonella, for instance, or airplane crashes and oil spills.) Trump's trade moves and tariffs are another case. Democrats haven't figured out a workable counter to Trump's emerging story here, and if no one really seems to understand the issues, Trump's likely to score a political coup hurling a simple "fuck you" at China and Canada. Lots of Americans will eat that up.

Meanwhile, the economy is not significantly worse for most people, and is downright peachy for the very rich. It looks like Trump has scored some sort of win against ISIS, and maybe a diplomatic break with North Korea, and none of the other wars he's left on autopilot have blown up in his face yet (although the Saudis seem to be making a real mess of Yemen). And Congress has passed a few truly odious bills recently, including serious damage to Dodd-Frank and a farm bill with major cuts to SNAP. Six months ago one could point out how little Trump has actually accomplished, but it's beginning to look like quite a lot -- nearly all bad, but who exactly notices?

I'm not even sure Trump's losing on immigration. Sure, he's had a bad week with the family separation/incarceration fiasco, but even after his retreat, he's still got the incarceration part working: so the net result is that refugee-immigrants will be detained in places that look less like jails and more like concentration camps? He had a similar bad week when he ended DACA, and while he seemed to wobble for a while, he's emerged more hardcore than ever. If Democrats get stuck with the impression that they're more concerned with immigrants than with native-born American citizens, that's bound to hurt.

Nor do I have any hope that Mueller's going to come up with anything that changes the game. Sure, he's got Russian hackers, but he hasn't come up with any interaction between Trump's hackers and Russians, which is where collusion might amount to something. The higher-level meetings are mostly between idiot-functionaries -- lying for them is habitual, so catching them hardly matters. Then there is the corruption around the fringes -- Flynn, Manafort, Cohen -- which will give Mueller some scalps, but change nothing. As long as Mueller stays within the parameters of Russia and the 2016 election, there's not enough there, and Trump can keep his followers in tow with his "witch hunt" whines. The Democrats have to move beyond those parameters, which for starters means they have to realize that Russia's favoring Trump reflects the same interests and analysis as other corrupt and authoritarian regimes (notably Saudi Arabia and Israel), and that Trump's courting of crooks abroad is just a subset of his service to America's own moguls (not least himself).

One effect of this unique confluence of paranoia, fanaticism, and buckraking is that the hopes some had that sensible Republicans would turn on Trump have been shattered. The first clue, I suppose, was when Senators Flake and Cocker decided not to risk facing Trump candidates in their primaries. Then there was Ryan's decision to quit the House. Since then the tide in Trump's direction, at least within increasingly embattled Republican ranks, has only strengthened. As long as Trump seems to be getting away with his act, there's little they can do but protect and cling to him.

The highlight of Trump's week was his rally in Duluth, where he said a bunch of stupid things but seemed to be glowing, basking in the adulation of his crowd. A big part of his speech was a pitch to get more Republicans elected in 2018, so unlike Obama in 2010, he's going to try to turn the election into a referendum on himself -- instead of passively letting the other party run roughshod. I'm not sure it will work -- an awful lot of Americans still can't stand anything about the guy -- but he's showing a lot more confidence than just a few months ago.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Matthew Yglesias: The 4 most important stories of the week, explained: Outrage boiled over at family separations; Trump got ready for a legal battle (again, over family separations under Trump's "zero tolerance" anti-immigrant policy); House Republicans spun their wheels on immigration (losing the vote on a "hard-line" bill, and offering a "compromise" bill that has zero Democratic support); There were more Cabinet scandals (Wilbur Ross, yet another Scott Pruitt). Other Yglesias pieces:

  • Umair Irfan: Deepwater Horizon led to new protections for US waters. Trump just repealed them.

    The Interior Department is also presiding over the largest rollback of federal land protections in US history, opening up public lands to fossil fuel extraction and mineral mining. Plus, Secretary Zinke opened up nearly all coastal waters to drilling last year and started the process for the largest offshore lease sale ever.

  • Rebecca Jennings: Melania Trump wears "I really don't care, do u?" jacket on trip to migrant children: Some truly trivial trivia, in lieu of a story that probably doesn't make any sense anyway.

  • German Lopez: Canada just legalized marijuana. That has big implications for US drug policy.

  • Libby Nelson: Donald Trump's plan to (sort of) eliminate the Department of Education, briefly explained:

    The Trump administration wants to combine the standalone Education and Labor Departments into a new Cabinet-level agency: the Department of Education and the Workforce.

    The proposal is part of the administration's broader plan to reorganize the federal government, released Thursday. Overall, the plan would eliminate and combine government programs and give private industry a bigger role, including in the US Postal Service. It would also rename the Department of Health and Human Services to the Department of Public Welfare (and give it jurisdiction over food stamps), among nearly 30 other changes to how the federal government operates.

    "This effort, along with the recent executive orders on federal unions, are the biggest pieces so far of our plan to drain the swamp," said Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney in a statement touting the plan.

    My first reaction to the name changes is that they're designed to make the departments more vulnerable to right-wing attacks, specifically as a step in the Grover Norquist process of "shrinking the federal government to where you can drown it in a bathtub." I'm not opposed to Public Welfare. In fact, I think the government should be doing much more to increase it and to distribute its blessings more equitably, but you can pretty much predict what the right-wing propaganda mills will be spewing out. Even more pernicious is the semantic shift from Labor to Workforce. The former are people -- specifically, the people who do all the actual work producing goods and services in the economy -- but the latter is little more than a view of a cost factor from business management.

    Mulvaney's "drain the swamp" comment also took me aback. My guess is that when the American people heard Trump vow to "drain the swamp in Washington," 99% of them figured that he was talking about the pervasive and pernicious effect of money in Washington, especially as routed through lobbyists, into campaign coffers, and for greasing the revolving door between government agencies and private interests. I know that's what I thought, and I'm usually pretty good at deciphering Trumpian bullshit. That 99% has, of course, been frustrated since Trump took office, and turned his administration into a vast bazaar of corporate favoritism. But now Mulvaney is saying that the den of corruption that has flourished in Washington for decades (and to a lesser extent ever since Washington was founded in the late 1790s) isn't "the swamp" at all. It turns out that his definition of "the swamp" is simply that part of the federal government that does things to help people who aren't already filthy rich. Who could have known that?

  • Ella Nilsen: Michael Bloomberg is going all in on Democratic House candidates in 2018: The billionaire former and former Republican mayor of New York City is pledging to spend $80 million on the 2018 elections, mostly for Democrats (although I doubt you'll find many Bernie Sanders supporters on his shopping list). I've often wondered in the past whether there aren't wealthy swing voters who actually favored divided government -- one party controlling Congress and the other the Presidency -- because that keeps either party from upsetting the cart while still allowing compromises in favor of the one group both parties esteem: the rich (well, also the military). Bloomberg's a concrete example of this hypothetical niche. Indeed, it seems likely that Democrats will raise a lot of money this cycle (although note that Sheldon Adelson has already given $30 million to the Republicans, and the Kochs talk about much more).

  • David Roberts: Energy lobbyists have a new PAC to push for a carbon tax. Wait, what? Excellent piece, covering both the proposal and the political calculations behind it. For 20-30 years now, there have been two basic markets-oriented approaches to reducing carbon dioxide and therefore global warming: "cap and trade" (which by creating a market for pollution credits incentivizes companies -- mostly power plants -- to transition to non-carbon sources), and a "carbon tax" (which adds to the cost of coal, oil, and gas, making renewables and non-carbon sources like nuclear relatively more affordable). The Democrats tried pushing "cap and trade" through Congress in 2009-10, hoping that as a sop to "free market" ideology -- the idea originated in right-wing "thank tanks" -- they'd pick up some Republican support, but they didn't. At the time, companies like Exxon-Mobil decided that they'd rather have a carbon tax than cap-and-trade, but they could just as well have gone the other way had that helped defeat the proposal in play. Indeed, while Trent Lott and John Breaux are petro-lobbyists, there's little reason to think Exxon et al. are any more serious about this flier than they were a decade ago. (As I recall, Clinton proposed a carbon tax back in the 1990s, but Exxon sure didn't support it then.)

    This policy is not bipartisan in any meaningful sense, it is not likely to be political popular, it's not all that great as policy to being with, and it is naive to see it as a gambit that arises primarily, or even tangentially, from environmental concerns. It is first and foremost a bid by oil and gas and nuclear to secure the gentlest and most predictable possible energy transition.

    More broadly, it is the US Climate Action Partnership all over again. That was the effort, starting around 2006, to develop a climate bill that big, polluting industries would support. The idea was that support from such companies, combined with support from establishment green groups, would lend the effort credibility and political momentum. Instead, it yielded a compromised bill that no one loved, which died a lonely death in the Senate in 2010.

    Roberts' subheds give you an idea of the piece's points:

    • This is oil, gas, and nuclear making their opening bid on climate policy
    • The oil and gas industry is trying to get ahead of the climate policy curve
    • This proposal is aimed at Democrats, not Republicans
    • This proposal is "bipartisan" in that it lacks support from both parties
    • There's no reason to think tax-and-dividend is the most popular climate policy
    • It's time to quit pre-capitulating to garbage policy

    One interesting twist here is that the carbon tax receipts never hit the federal budget. They go straight back to the people in the form of "per-capita carbon dividends." This is presumably meant as a concession to Republicans with their "no tax increase" pledges -- but, as Roberts notes, every Republican in Congress has also signed a "no carbon tax" pledge. Still, this does offer the prospect of a small but non-trivial universal basic income ("the group estimates will start around $2,000 a year for a family of four'), which makes it one form of income redistribution (one relatively palatable to Republicans, not that they would support it). On the other hand, after 30-40 years of increasing austerity, the things Democrats desire most demand increasing tax revenues, not neutral.

  • Sam Rosenfeld: The Democratic Party is moving steadily leftward. So why does the left still distrust it? Not really a hard one to answer: the party bureaus are still dominated by people installed by the Clintons and Obama, their main focus is to raise money, and the people who bankroll them are rich, probably liberal on social issues, mostly moderate on the maintaining a viable safety net, but still concerned to protect and advance their business interests. What distinguished Clinton and Obama above other Democrats was their ability to raise money. And while both ran campaigns that promised to benefit their voters, as soon as they got elected, they started to back pedal and prioritize the interests of their donors. Even worse, on winning they put their personal interests way above those of the party. Both lost Democratic control of Congress after two years, further undermining their credibility with their voters. Moreover, Deamocratic leaders and pundits repeatedly made concessions to seek common ground with Republicans, undermining their own voter interests and legitimizing an increasingly extreme reactionary agenda. Their collusion, both with their donors and with their sworn enemies, has resulted in (among many other maladies): a vast series of perpetual wars that only serve to make the world more violent and resentful; an extreme increase in inequality to levels never before seen in US history; a drastic loss of rights and power for workers; an austerity program which has made education and health care almost prohibitively expensive while public infrastructure has decayed to a dangerous extent; general degradation of environmental protections, along with widespread denial of increasingly obvious climate change; and a systemic effort to undermine democracy at all levels. Sure, much of this can fairly be blamed on Republicans and their propaganda organs, but when, say, Hillary Clinton spends much more time schmoozing with donors than trying to rally voters, how surprised should we be when marginal voters decide that she's more problem than solution?

    Of course, this isn't something Rosenfeld wants to dwell on. He wants to commit "left-liberal activism" to working within the Democratic Party, stressing that activists can move the party to the left, even offering a few historical examples (actually, pretty uninspiring ones, even without trotting out the biggies, when establishment Democrats actively sabotaged the nominations of William Jennings Bryan and George McGovern). Still, I agree with his conclusion: the Democratic Party is the only viable forum within which to organize reversal of forty years of loss to conservatives and to get back on a progressive track, one that is sorely needed given the numerous ailments we currently face. But I would stress that that's not because recent Democratic leaders are trustworthy but because most of the people we want and need to convince have already aligned with the Democrats -- many, of course, in reaction to being maligned and hounded by the increasingly racist, reactionary, and aristocratic Republicans. Given this alternative, I think there should be some sort of compact between Democratic factions to support whoever gets nominated. In this, I'm reminded that even as dogmatic a conservative as Ronald Reagan used to talk about an "11th commandment: never speak ill of a fellow Republican." Of course, that was at a time when Republicans were a minority, when the option of running liberals like Jacob Javits and Mark Hatfield gave them a chance to pick up seats real Reaganites didn't have a chance at. Of course, those days are long gone now, with hardcore conservatives chasing even devout Reaganites like Jeff Flake out of primaries.

    Reagan's "11th commandment" didn't stop conservatives from advancing their ideas and initiatives, but it gave Reagan an air of moderation and sanity (unmerited, I should add), which made him acceptable to many people who recoiled against Barry Goldwater. Actually, hardcore conservatism has never won nationally: it snuck in shrouded in Reagan's sunny optimism; the Bushes ran moderate campaigns only to turn the reins over to Dick Cheney; and while Trump traded in rage vs. optimism, the far-right has only seized power on his coattails.

    While I believe as a matter of principle that the left should have more popular appeal than the right, I doubt that the left will ever dominate and control the Democratic Party, and while I wouldn't say that's for the best, I will say that doesn't bother me. The Party, as Rosenfeld is aware, always has had to balance competing interests, dividing between idealists and pragmatists (often just opportunists). It matters that they take care of business -- just not at the expense of everyone else and democracy itself. But the party sorely needs its left nowadays, mostly because it needs to regain its bearings as "the party of the people" (as Thomas Frank put it, using the past tense). The problem is that many establishment Democrats seem to hate the left more than they hate the right. The roots of this date back to the start of the Cold War, when liberals led the purge of the left ("communists and fellow travelers") from labor unions and the party. They made such a big show of their anti-communism that they blundered into wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, with many remaining cheerleaders for the Bush oil wars in the Middle East. Indeed, while most Democrats opposed the 1990 and 2003 wars against Iraq, the party's leaders have almost exclusively come from Bush supporters. (The popular exception, Barack Obama, went on to make his own contributions to the Bush war legacy.) Similarly, Democratic "leaders" have a long history of support for privatization schemes, deregulation, and globalization, which along with slack taxes on the rich have greatly exacerbated inequality and the many problems it entails. Even the Democrats one signature social welfare program of the last twenty years, the ACA with its partial and inadequate nod towards universal health care, was designed as a giant subsidy to the insurance industry. For decades now "new Democrats" have been lecturing us on how we can't afford to do anything better, and their failure to deliver anything better, while looking schetchy and corrupt in the bargain, has destroyed their credibility. The left in America consists of people who care, are sincere and honest, and most of whom are directly affected by real problems and have real stakes in their solution. So, yeah, the left needs the Democrats to get things done, but the Democrats need the left even more to get back into the fight.

  • Charles Silver/David A Hyman: Here's a plan to fight high drug prices that could unite libertarians and socialists: "First, attack monopolies. Second, replace patents with prizes." I don't mind the prize idea, but would put more stress on public funding of "open source" pharmaceutical research, and would pursue international treaties to ensure that other countries made comparable research grants, with the understanding that all research would be funded. I'd also consider public funding of development efforts in exchange for price guarantees, again attempting to leverage production worldwide (with reasonable regulatory standards to ensure quality). Same thing can be done with medical devices and supplies.

  • Tara Golshan/Dylan Scott: Why House Republicans' immigration debate is a shitshow, explained by a Republican lawmaker: But not explained very well. I doubt, for instance, that the real problem is that Trump doesn't know what he wants. I think he pretty clearly wants a lot of shit he can't even get his Republican House majority to give him, let alone clear the filibuster bar in the Senate. Moreover, any effort to compromise in the hope of gaining "moderate" votes automatically lops off "extremist" votes, as well as weakening Trump's own support. Nor is Trump willing to cut a deal with the Democrats that would undercut his own extreme anti-immigrant stance, even on very limited issues like DACA where public opinion is against him. But also, there's very little incentive for Trump to ever give in on any of this. He runs on rage and anger, and the more Washington frustrates him, the more rage he can cultivate from his base. That's what brought him to the White House in the first place.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, June 10, 2018

Weekend Roundup

Big news this coming week will be the Singapore summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. No one I've read has any idea what the Koreans (either North or South) are thinking going into the summit, nor do they seem to have any grasp on the Trump administration -- not just because Trump has been even cagier than usual (by which I mean his peculiar habit of masking ignorance with uncertainty and whimsy and passing it all off as unpredictability). Still, one piece I tried to read was Alex Ward: Trump just made 3 shocking statements about North Korea. I've cited Ward's pieces on Korea before, and expect something more or less sensible from him, but this isn't that. First problem here is that I can't find any statements, much less "shocking" ones, by Trump here. Actually, the most ignorant statements appear to be coming from Ward, such as: "Presidents don't habitually welcome murderous dictators to the White House"; and "Experts I spoke to said that's [a "normal" relationship with the US] something North has wanted for years because it would legitimize the Kim regime in the eyes of the world." Isn't it a little late to think that meeting with Donald Trump will legitimize anyone? Having been shunned by the Philadelphia Eagles and the Golden State Warriors, isn't Trump the one left with a desperate craving for legitimization?

The most shocking statement in the article is a subhed: "Kim has given little away. Trump has offered a lot." What exactly has Trump offered, other than his passive-aggressive willingness to meet, most recently couched in a vow to walk out of the meeting within ten minutes if he doesn't like the vibe? Ward cites an Ankit Panda tweet as "on table for June 12 should things go well, as of Trump's recent remarks":

  • declaration on end of Korean War
  • move toward normalization
  • agreement on moving toward a peace treaty
  • invitation for Kim Jong Un to the US
  • no sanctions relief until denuclearization (per Abe)

The first point is really a no-brainer. The War effectively ended 65 years ago, and nobody wants to restart it. Normalization should also be, and should move directly into some degree of sanctions relief -- certainly for trade of non-military goods. The US had diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union long before it broke up, and with China long before they adopted any market reforms, and it's certain that even the constrained degree of normalization there helped bring about reform. The US hasn't been willing to engage with North Korea because Americans bear grudges over the 1950-53 war they couldn't win, because North Korea is a useful enemy to bolster defense spending, and because (unlike China, to pick an obvious example) businesses don't forsee a lot of profit opportunity there. In short, it has, thus far, cost the US very little to perpetuate a state of hostility, and until North Korea developed ICBMs with nuclear warheads, there never seemed to be any risk.

There really isn't much risk even now: Kim certainly understands that any offensive use of his new weapons will only result in the obliteration of his country. It's become abundantly clear that the only value anyone has ever gained with nuclear weapons is deterrence against foreign attack. Still, no one likes being tested, let alone intimidated, and dread makes a fragile foundation for peace. Closed, hostile relations are lose-lose. Open, equitable relations can be win-win: most obviously by opening up free trade. What's happened over the past two years is that North Korea first put on a show of force to get US attention, then followed that up with a series of conciliatory gestures opening up the prospect of normal relations and mutual economic growth. If the US had sensible people in charge of foreign policy, this whole process would be straightforward. Unfortunately, we have Trump, and Trump has Bolton, but even people who should know better (like Ward) keep falling back into unhelpful habits.

The big question this summit faces is whether Trump and Kim can figure out a way to sequence steps they ultimately seem to be willing to agree to: ending the official state of hostilities, normalizing relations (which both includes ending sanctions and deescalating military threats). The Bolton position insists on North Korea giving up everything before the US gives in on anything, and Bolton is ideally positioned to whisper in Trump's gullible ear.

I could write something about what I think should happen, but it won't. As Trump says, "we'll see."

Still not doing full website updates, although I've been making plodding progress fixing the massive breakage from the crash. One thing of particular note is that I lost various passwords for my wife's media accounts. I've restored a couple, but not all of them, and I'm getting annoying complaints for lack of the rest. Thus far a more conspicuous problem is that I'm running Firefox without an ad blocker, so for the first time in years I'm experiencing the entire torrent of hideousness that supposedly keeps the internet free. I guess I'll chalk it up to experience, but the irritation factor is immense, and I'm not sure how long before I break down and try to defend myself. Still, I can imagine some sort of add-on short of a blocker that would make it more tolerable: some way to point at an object and either delete or cover it up.

Keyboard still giving me aggravation, but I have a replacement ready to plug in: a mechanical (brown) switch gaming thing with red LED backlighting. Certainly the most expensive keyboard I've bought since my typesetting days, or maybe my old IBM Selectric.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Matthew Yglesias didn't flag any important stories last week, but he did post some:

  • Zeeshan Aleem: The G7 summit looked like it was going okay. Then Trump got mad on Twitter. Note photo of Trump sitting meekly with his arms crossed and hands tucked away, while Angela Merkel gets in his face, with Shinzo Abe and John Bolton looking shifty in the background. [PS: Saw a tweet with this picture, captioned: 'The Persuasion of the Imbecile' by Caravaggio.] As everyone knows, Trump is a world class asshole, but he's not the sort who'll pick a fight in person. One recalls that back during the campaign he made a publicity trip to Mexico to confront the president there over his wall idea but was so polite he didn't dare ruffle any feathers, only to return to a rally in Phoenix that night where he delivered one of his most racist and xenophobic speeches. So I guess it's no surprise that he waited until he was back in his comfort zone -- tweeting from the plane as he flew away -- to trash the G7 conference and his fellow leaders' lukewarm efforts to make nice. Or maybe it just took some private time with Bolton to buck the president up. For what happened next, see: Matt Shuham: G7 Nations Respond to Trump's Rejection of Joint Statement: 'Let's Be Serious'. Given that the former G8 kicked Russia out to show their disapproval of Russia's annexation of Crimea, maybe they'll soon become the G6. Actually, I think Trump is right here: Trump wants Russia invited back into the G7. This notion that nations are entitled to shun and shame other countries because it plays well in domestic polling is hacking the world up into hostile camps, at a time when cooperation is more important than ever. And right now the biggest divider is none other than Donald Trump, although he actually gets way too much help from many Democrats. For instance here's a tweet that got forwarded to my feed:

    Popular vote winner Hillary Clinton warned everyone that Russia was interfering in the election and that, if elected, Trump would serve as Putin's Puppet.

    Trump just ruined the G7 summit and pissed off our allies . . . She was right about everything.

    Actually, she's not even right about this: the G7/8 isn't necessarily a meeting of "our allies" -- the members are supposedly the world's major economies -- and more inclusive would be better than less. On the other hand, she wouldn't have withdrawn from Paris, or from the Iran agreement, nor would she have levied steel and aluminum tariffs, which Trump turned into points of contention, not just with "allies" but with everyone. For more on this, see: Susan B Glasser: Under Trump, "America First" Really Is Turning Out to Be America Alone. You might also note this data point: a poll of Germans reveals that only 14% "consider the US a reliable partner"; the figure for Russia is 36%, China 43%.

  • Katie Annand: I work with children separated from caregivers at the border. What happens is unforgivable.

    In addition to the nearly incomprehensible suffering the United States is imposing on these children, the administration's new policy, which separates children from parents, makes it much harder for the child to make a claim for US protection. As of last month, all parents are being referred for prosecution because they crossed into the United States without documentation. The parents are placed into US Marshals custody in an adult detention facility, while the child is rendered "unaccompanied" and deportation proceedings are initiated against the child alone. Their case is completely separated from their parents and little to no communication is facilitated between the parent and child.

    Parents don't know what's happening to their children, and vice versa. This has significant implications for the child's ability to make their case for US protection. Often, adult family members have information and documents that are vital to making their case. We see children who may not know why they came to the United States -- parents and caregivers often do not tell their children the full story, lest they be scared or traumatized.

    Also see: Ryan Devereaux: 1,358 Children and Counting -- Trump's "Zero Tolerance" aBorder Policy Is Separating Families at Staggering Rates.

  • Nicholas Bagley: Trump's legal attack on the ACA isn't about health care. It's a war on the rule of law. Also: Dylan Scott: The Trump Administration believes Obamacare's preexisting conditions protections are now unconstitutional.

  • Fiona Harvey: 'Carbon bubble' could spark global financial crisis, study warns: A "bubble," here as elsewhere, is an excessively high valuation of an asset, making it likely to rapidly deflate in the future, probably damaging the global financial system. There is good reason to think that oil and gas reserves are overvalued, mostly because demand is likely to decline in favor of non-carbon energy sources (especially solar). Harvey also wrote What is the carbon bubble and what will happen if it bursts?

  • Emily Heiler: The New Yorker's Jane Mayer recommends 3 books about money and American politics: Jacob S Hacker/Paul Pierson: Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer -- and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class; F Scott Fitzgerald: The Diamond as Big as the Ritz; and Kim Phillips-Fein: Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal. I've read two of those -- not hard to guess which -- and they're pretty good, but better still is Mayer's own Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, and I should also mention Max Blumenthal: Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party, and Thomas Frank: The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule. And while it's a bit dated -- as Michael Lewis later noted on his book on 1980s financial scandals, Liar's Poker: "how quaint" -- you can still learn things from Kevin Phillips: American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (2004). For my part, I've been aware of the pervasive influence of money in politics at least since c. 1970, when I read G. William Domhoff's Who Rules America? (1967) and the Ferdinand Lundberg's The Rich and the Super-Rich: A Study in the Power of Money Today (1968, revising his 1936 America's 60 Families) -- and that was back in the golden age of American equality (Paul Krugman dubbed it "the great compression"). But once you start noticing the role money plays in politics, you find it everywhere.

  • German Lopez: Trump wants to execute drug dealers. But he granteed commutation to one because Kim Kardashian asked.

  • Jay Rosen: Why Trump Is Winning and the Press Is Losing: Sure, Trump's pre-emptive war on "Fake News" is mostly a prophylactic between Trump's supporters and the possibility that honest media might expose some of his lies and distortions, and more importantly the real effects of Republican policies on people's lives. "Nixon seethed about the press in private. Trump seethes in public." And it's not just Trump: "At the bottom of the pyramid is an army of online trolls and alt-right activists who shout down stories critical of the president and project hatred at the journalists who report them. Between the president at thetop and the baseat the bottom are the mediating institutions: Breitbart, Drudge Report, The Daily Caller, Rush Limbaugh, and, especially, Fox News." Of course, you know all that. But what about this:

    There is a risk that journalists could do their job brilliantly, and it won't really matter, because Trump supporters categorically reject it, Trump opponents already believed it, and the neither-nors aren't paying close enough attention. In a different way, there is a risk that journalists could succeed at the production of great journalism and fail at its distribution, because the platforms created by the tech industry have so overtaken the task of organizing public attention.

    Actually, there isn't much chance of brilliant journalism, for lots of reasons -- institutional biases, of coruse, but also issue complexity, received frameworks, the neverending struggle between superficiality and depth, and the simple question of who cares about what. For example, "There is a risk that Republican elites will fail to push back against Trump's attacks on democratic institutions, including the press" -- but why assume they should push back when they're leading the charge? It's always been the case that one's interests colored one's views. What is relatively new is the insistence that only views matter, that there are no objective facts worth considering. In the old days, one tried to spin the news. Now you just run roughshod over your opposition. And it's really not Trump who started this. The first real articulation of the idea came during the Bush years, when someone (Karl Rove?) made fun of "the reality-based community." From there, it was only a short step before Republicans started wondering why we should encourage people to get a higher education. Trump simply bought into the prevailing party line. As I said during the campaign, Republicans have been adept at "dog whistling" racism for many years, but Trump doesn't do that. He's just the dog.

    On the other hand, maybe you can make a case for brilliant journalism: Jon Schwarz: Seymour Hersh's New Memoir Is a Fascinating, Flabbergasting Masterpiece. Matt Taibbi also wrote: Seymour Hersh's Memoir Is Full of Useful Reporting Secrets.

  • Jeremy Scahill: More Than Just Russia -- There's a Strong Case for the Trump Team Colluding With Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the UAE: Even before you get to the question of who got the most bang for their bucks.

  • Emily Stewart: Why there's so much speculation about Starbucks chair Howard Schultz's 2020 ambitions: Well, he's a rich Democrat, and as far back as the Kennedys the party has been jonesing for candidates rich enough to fund their own campaigns. Stewart mentions other rich and often famous rumored candidates like Mark Cuban, Bob Iger, Mark Zuckerberg, and Oprah Winfrey. Clearly, the media is smitten with the idea, especially those who saw Trump's election as a popular rebuke to the Washington establishment. But hasn't Trump utterly discredited the notion that America would be better off run like a corporation? I suppose you could counter that Trump wasn't actually much good at running his business, whereas other entrepreneurs are more competent, at least to the point of recognizing when they need to hire skilled help. But frankly the record for successful businessmen moving into the presidency isn't encouraging. Stewart offers some examples:

    To be sure, Trump isn't the only US president to have experience in business. George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Herbert Hoover also had significant private sector experience on their résumés, and none, arguably, performed spectacularly well.

    Well, the Bushes were always hacks, who got set up in the Texas oil business thanks to political connections, and still didn't get much out of it. (G.W. Bush made most of his money as the front man "owner" of the Texas Rangers baseball franchise, where the money came from real oil men.) Unlike the Bushes (Jack Germond liked to refer to them as "empty suits"), Hoover and Carter were very smart, knowledgeable, dilligent, and earnest, and terrible presidents. I've been toying with the idea that American political history breaks down to four eras each with a dominant party, demarcated by elections in 1800, 1860, 1932, and 1980 (Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and [ugh!] Reagan). Hoover and Carter lost reëlection bids in two of those (James Buchanan ended the 1800-60 era, although he bears no other resemblance to Hoover or Carter). Trump will probably wind up sinking the Reagan era, but had it not been for the haplessness of the Democrats under Clinton and Obama, either Bush could have been the endpost. (The former lost to Clinton after a single term, and while the latter scratched out a second term, his final approval ratings were in the 20% range -- the worst since polling began.)

    I find it interesting that the richest US president before Trump, relative to his time of course, was George Washington -- a president Trump bears no other similarity to whatsoever. In particular, while Washington's "I cannot tell a lie" legend is apocryphal, he did go to great lengths to make certain that he was viewed as honest and "disinterested" -- that his statements and actions as president were virtuous and free of any hint of corruption. Trump is his polar opposite, a reflexive liar who scarcely ever bothers to conceal his financial interests in his power. Moreover, although several factors have conspired lately to thrust the wealthy into public office -- Mitt Romney, for instance, has a net worth close to Washington's (relatively speaking), and John McCain and John Kerry married rich heiresses. That atmosphere lends credibility to the moguls listed in the article. On the other hand, while almost anyone else on the Forbes 400 list could mount a campaign as "a better billionaire," one doubts the American people will feel like buying another. But given the DNC's crush on the rich and/or famous, they'd most likely welcome the idea.

  • Alexia Underwood: 5 Anthony Bourdain quotes that show why he was beloved around the world: Very much saddened at news of Bourdain's death. I read three of his books -- Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Cullinary Underbelly, A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisine, and Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook. I recognized a kindred spirit not just in taste but more importantly in appreciating the work that goes into preparing good food. That isn't unusual among food writers, but time and again he surprised me with his take on people and history. I recall the Kissinger quote here from the book, or something very like it -- he wrote a lot about Vietnam and Cambodia in that book. The only one of the five quotes here that seems off is the one about North Korea, but that's because he didn't go there, didn't meet people and cook and eat with them, so all he's got is the newsreel. Maybe what he's been told is right, but elsewhere he took the bother to find out for himself. And as he's discovered repeatedly, people pretty much everywhere come up with ingenious ways of coping even with terrible hardships. No reason North Koreans should be that different. I doubt I've seen his shows more than five times, but liked them well enough to imagine watching more -- just never found the time. But the one thing I've repeatedly observed is that he's shown it's possible to appreciate good food without taking on snobbish airs. That's mostly because he respects everyone and everything that goes into a meal.

    I went back to the notebook to see what I had written about Bourdain over the years. Not as much as I thought I remembered, but there is his The Post-Election Interview. I also found a quote I had copied down, from Medium Raw, which has suddenly taken on a new chill:

    I was forty-four years old when Kitchen Confidential hit -- and if there was ever a lucky break or better timing, I don't know about it. At forty-four, I was, as all cooks too long on the line must be, already in decline. You're not getting any faster -- or smarter -- as a cook after age thirty-seven. The knees and back go first, of course. That you'd expect. But the hand-eye coordination starts to break up a little as well. And the vision thing. But it's the brain that sends you the most worrying indications of decay. After all those years of intense focus, multitasking, high stress, late nights, and alcohol, the brain stops responding the way you like. You miss things. You aren't as quick reading the board, prioritizing the dupes, grasping at a glance what food goes where, adding up totals of steaks on hold and steaks on the fire -- and cumulative donenesses. Your hangovers are more crippling and last longer. Your temper becomes shorter -- and you become more easily frustrated with yourself for fucking up little things (though less so with others). Despair -- always a sometime thing in the bipolar world of the kitchen -- becomes more frequent and longer-lasting as one grows more philosophical with age and has more to despair about.

    Some more scattered Bourdain links:

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, June 3, 2018

Weekend Roundup

Impossible to put the usual amount of work into this weekly feature, but filling out and posting something of a stub is at least a step back toward normalcy, as well as something I can look back on for a timeline to this miserable period in the nation's storied but increasingly sorry history. The main problem is that I'm still waylaid by the crash of my main working computer. I've restored local copies of my websites, but the shift to a new computer, running newer software, has resulted in massive breakage. I'm making slow but steady progress there, but this website in particular is nowhere near stable enough for me to do my usual update. So while I'm doing the usual work locally, the only files I'm updating on the server are the blog posts.

A secondary problem is that my workspace has been disrupted, which among other things leaves me facing a different (even more cluttered) desk, using a different (and less comfortable) keyboard and mouse, with less satisfactory lighting, and other minor nuisances. Among other things, expect more typos: the keyboard touch is worse (although this one is less prone to dropping 'c'), a subtle change in emacs drops spaces where I expect to have to delete them (so I've caught myself deleting first characters of words), and a spellcheck script I wrote is gone and will have to be reinvented. Also note that where I used to keep twenty-some news/opinion sites permanently open, I've yet to re-establish the practice, nor have I looked up passwords to the few sites I have such access to, so my survey this week will be especially limited. I'm also running a browser without NoScript or even an ad blocker, so we'll see how long I can stand that.

Got email from Facebook reminding me that today is Bill "Xcix" Phillips' birthday. I usually don't bother with such notices, but last year I did, only to find out that Bill had died a few months earlier. So today's email reminds me that he's still dead, and how dearly I miss him.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Matthew Yglesias: The 4 biggest political stories of the week, explained: Puerto Rico got a credible estimate of Maria's death toll (approximately 4,600 excess deaths); Trump imposed tariffs on American allies; Roseanne got canceled; Dinesh D'Souza got a pardon. Other Yglesias posts:

  • Maureen Dowd: Obama -- Just Too Good for Us: Not my line or take. One problem is that we (by which I mostly mean the liberal punditocracy) spent so much effort into preëmptively congratulating ourselves on our foresight and good nature in electing Obama, we never bothered to consider whether we shouldn't wait until he did some things. (Case in point: the Nobel Peace Prize.) We did expect him to do things (good things), didn't we? And when he didn't, shouldn't we have been at least a little bit critical? Anyone can be naïve, but if after eight years you let the Clinton campaign shame you for doubting anything about Obama, you've moved on to foolishness and irrelevance. Dowd, quoting Obama adviser and new author Ben Rhodes (The World as It Is):

    The hunger for revolutionary change, the fear that some people were being left behind in America and that no one in Washington cared, was an animating force at the boisterous rallies for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

    Yet Obama, who had surfed a boisterous wave into the Oval, ignored the restiveness -- here and around the world. He threw his weight behind the most status quo, elitist candidate.

    "I couldn't shake the feeling that I should have seen it coming," Rhodes writes about the "darkness" that enveloped him when he saw the electoral map turn red. "Because when you distilled it, stripped out the racism and misogyny, we'd run against Hillary eight years ago with the same message Trump had used: She's part of a corrupt establishment that can't be trusted to change."

  • Norman G Finkelstein: Strong as Death: "Truth is that the Israeli army has no answer to non-violence resistance. . . . Therefore, the army's reaction is to open fire, in order to induce the Palestinians to start violent actions. With these the army knows how to deal." Note that Finkelstein has two recent books: Method and Madness: The Hidden Story of Israel's Assaults on Gaza, and Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance With Israel Is Coming to an End.

  • Thomas Frank: Forget Trump -- populism is the cure, not the disease. A response to two recent books attacking "populism" as a right-wing assault on democracy: Yascha Mounk's The People vs. Democracy and William A. Galston's Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy. As a fellow Kansan, I've long sided with our populist heritage, so I agree with Frank that anti-populism is rooted in elitism, even when dressed up as an embrace of liberal democracy. After all, isn't the point of democracy to bend government to the will of the people?

  • Ed Pilkington: Trump's 'cruel' measures pushing US inequality to dangerous level, UN warns: Just to be clear, the complaint isn't about the rich getting even richer, but how Trump and his party are shredding what's left (after Reagan and Clinton and Bush) of the "safety net," making the poor more miserable and desperate.

  • Andrew Prokop: Why Trump hasn't tried to pardon his way out of the Mueller probe -- yet.

  • Ganesh Sitaraman: Impeaching Trump: could a liberal fantasy become a nightmare? Provocative title for a favorable book review of Laurence Tribe/Joshua Matz: To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment. My view is that impeachment is a purely political act, so unless/until you have the power to back it up there's no point talking about it. On the other hand, if I had a vote, and the question was put to a vote, sure, I'd vote guilty, even if the actual charges didn't exactly align with my own position (cf. Bill Clinton). By the way, I highly recommend Sitaraman's book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution. I've since moved on to start Gordon S. Wood's Empire of Liberty, and have been pleased to find the two books in general agreement.

  • David Smith: How Donald Trump is weaponising the courts for political ends. Also by Smith: Trump goes it alone: running the White House not like a president, but a CEO. This hook would make more sense if it was widely understood how CEOs have evolved over the last 30-40 years. Where once CEOs were viewed as competent general managers of vast and complex enterprises, as their rewards have expanded tenfold relative to average employees, they've become increasingly imperious, egotistical, and desperate given how much "skin in the game" they have (mostly short-term bonuses and stock options). Their obsessions with busting unions and stripping regulations are of a piece with their insatiable power grab. On the other hand, Trump is actually worse than a modern CEO. He's an owner, so he's never been constrained by a board or stockholders (let alone the SEC).

    Harry Litman uses a different metaphor in President Trump Thinks He Is a King . . . and not one of your boring constitutional monarchs, either; more like the kind who could say, "L'état, c'est moi."

  • Li Zhou: Sen. Gillibrand said Bill Clinton should've resigned over Monica Lewinsky. Clinton disagrees. Well, he certainly should have resigned for something, but one thing about the Clintons is that they've always put their personal fortunes above their party and especially above the people who support that party.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, May 27, 2018

Weekend Roundup

I started assembling and writing some of this as early as Thursday this week, shortly after Trump cancelled his much hyped Singapore summit with Kim Jong-un, and I haven't been able to catch up with such later news as Kim Jong-un Meets With South Korean Leader in Surprise Visit and US Officials Meet With North Koreans to Discuss Summit. It was a pretty good initial guess that John Bolton was at the root of the cancellation, first by poisoning the well with his insistence that North Korea surrender its nuclear weapons like Libya did in 2004, and finally by whispering into the gullible president's ear that if he didn't cancel, Kim would beat him to the punch. As I note below, if the two Koreas can proceed to their own deal, it really won't matter much what Trump and Bolton think. And by the way, I think it's safe to say that Trump's 3rd National Security Adviser won't be his last. While Bolton hasn't flamed out as fast as Anthony Scaramucci -- indeed, he may even outlast Michael Flynn (who resigned after a little more than three weeks) -- he's embarrassed Trump is a way that won't soon be forgotten.

Also on death watch is Rudy Giuliani, who's managed to make Trump look even guiltier while trying to polarize political reaction to the Mueller investigation, figuring that as long as he can keep his base from believing their lying eyes he'll survive impeachment, and as long as that happens he can pardon the rest.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Matthew Yglesias: No "4 most important stories this week," or maybe just no clue how to explain them? My nominations for the top four stories: President Trump cancelled his planned summit with Kim Jong-un; Neither North Korea nor Iran are taking Trump's rejection and threats as provocations to belligerence; Trump hatched "spygate" to further politicize the Mueller investigation; Ireland voted to legalize abortion. Still, a busy week's worth of posts for Matthew Yglesias:

    • NFL owners are stifling speech, but it's not called "no-platforming" when you're rich and own the platform: "Real power over the flow of ideas rests with the wealthy." Argues that the rich -- and when we're talking NFL franchise owners, we're talking very rich -- don't always use their wealth to promote their political interests (clearly he hasn't worked for the Kochs) they can and do when it makes sense to their bottom line.

      The good news for free speech is that rich people generally like money, and this operates as a practical constraint on the extent to which they use their control of platforms for political purposes. NFL owners are a conservative-leaning bunch, for example, but they aren't going to subject fans to pregame lectures about the merits of tax cuts because they don't want to annoy the audience.

      But one luxury of being rich is you can sacrifice some financial upside for political purposes if you want to. A recent paper by Emory University political scientists Gregory Martin and Josh McCrain found that when Sinclair Broadcast Group, a legendarily right-wing network of local TV stations, buys a station, its local news programs begin to cover more national and less local politics, the coverage becomes more conservative, and viewership actually falls -- suggesting that the rightward tilt isn't enacted as a strategy to win more viewers but as part of a persuasion effort.[*]

      Martin and Ali Yurukoglu, meanwhile, found in a separate study that without Fox News's slanted coverage, the Republican presidential candidate's share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008. The Koch brothers have started using their financial clout to buy influence on college campuses, making generous contributions in exchange for a role in hiring faculty members. Google spends millions of dollars a year sponsoring academic research that it hopes will influence both mass and elite opinion in favor of Google-friendly policy conclusions, and it's obviously not the only wealthy business that does this.

      Most cases are, of course, going to be less extreme but still significant. An old quip by Anatole France notes that "the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." By the same token, the rich and the poor alike have the right to buy a chain of local television news stations or NFL franchises, but in practice, only the rich actually can control the flow of information.

      One should note [*] that Sinclair's substitution of national for local news is also a cost-cutting (profit-enhancing) feature, as local news is generally of interest only to its local market, whereas national stories can be sourced anywhere and reused everywhere. The Kochs, by the way, have been buying academic favors at least since the 1980s, when they founded Cato Institute and bankrolled James McGill Buchanan (see Nancy McLean's Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America; by the way, I saw a line just this week insisting that the Nobel Prize for Economics isn't given out to marginal cranks, but Buchanan disproves that).

      For more on the NFL, see: Benjamin Sachs: The NFL's "take a knee" ban is flatly illegal.

    • Donald Trump's posthumous pardon of boxing champion Jack Johnson, explained: "A case where breaking norms helps get the right thing done." By all means, read if you don't know who Johnson was (or think he's a white folksinger). I learned about the first black boxing champ back in the 1960s -- not just his boxing career and taste for white women but that he was also into fast cars -- especially through Howard Sackler's 1967 play The Greate White Hope (a stage and screen breakthrough for James Early Jones), soon followed by one of Miles Davis' greatest albums (A Tribute to Jack Johnson). Johnson's Mann Act conviction was unjust, but not unique (the same law was used to jail Chuck Berry in the 1950s), and indeed the period was so full of racial injustice that it would be mind-boggling even to try to recognize it all. On the other hand, if Trump's pardon of Johnson is anything more than a cheap publicity stunt, all it signals is Trump's identity with famous people, and his sense that pardoning a black man who died 70 years ago won't ruffle his base (especially after his much more consequential pardon of racist sheriff Joe Arpaio).

    • Why did anyone ever take Trump's North Korea diplomacy seriously? Sure, there's never been any reason to take Trump's understanding of either war or diplomacy with North Korea seriously. However, most US military experts really want to avoid war with North Korea, and that group clearly includes Secretary of Defense Mattis. On the other hand, Trump has glibly promised "to take care of" the pseudo-problem of North Korea's nuclear arsenal. I say "pseudo-problem" because it's pretty clearly only meant as a deterrent and/or bargaining chip, not as the offensive threat that Trump seems to think. As long as the US and its allies don't attack North Korea, there's no reason to think that North Korea will attack us -- it would, after all, be a purely psychotic thing to do. So the simplest solution would be to just ignore the supposed provocation, but Trump and the neocon hawks won't tolerate anything that might make the US look weak, or sensible. However, it has always seemed possible that North and South Korea could work out their own deal, which Trump would be hard-pressed not to go along with. One always hopes that sanity will prevail over war, so it was tempting to humor Trump as long as he raised that possibility. Unfortunately, a lot of so-called experts in America have been taking pot-shots at the prospect, some (like John Bolton and Mike Pence) because they want to keep any agreement from happening), and some (like Yglesias) because they regard Trump as a dangerous and/or delirious buffoon.

    • DOJ is giving a special partisan briefing on the Trump-Russia investigation to GOP Congress members.

    • Most Americans don't realize Robert Mueller's investigation has uncovered crimes: "17 indictments and five guilty pleas so far." Yet the chart shows that 59% of Americans don't think the investigation has uncovered any crimes. For more details, see Andrew Prokop: All of Robert Mueller's indictments and plea deals in the Russia investigation so far.

    • 3 winners and 3 losers from primaries in Georgia, Texas, Kentucky, and Arkansas: Winners: the DCCC (defeated Laura Moser in TX-7); Medicaid expansion; black Democrats. Losers: the GOP mobilization strategy; Our Revolution; Georgia Republicans.

    • Stacey Abrams just won a shot to be the first black woman governor in America.

    • Bank profits hit a new all-time record as Congress is poised to roll back post-crisis regulations

    • The media ignored the policy stakes in 2016 -- don't make the same mistake again in the midterms: This starts out sounding like a critique of the media problem, as even the less partisan media, through a combination of sloth and greed, favors cheap clickbait over wonkish policy matters:

      The policy stakes in the 2016 elections were high -- because the stakes are high in all elections -- and yet television news coverage of the election utterly failed to convey the stakes, with more attention paid to the Clinton email issue than to all policy issues combined.

      Trump as an actual president has received more critical scrutiny than he did as a long-shot candidate, but even so, the coverage thus far of the 2018 midterms has focused very heavily on Trump drama rather than the concrete stakes. But if the GOP holds its majorities -- not currently considered the most likely scenario, but one for which the odds are decent -- there are a range of policies very likely to move forward that will have enormous consequences for the everyday life of millions of people.

      Yglesias also notes that a Democratic Congress would present Trump with a very different set of opportunities: instead of relying on Ryan and McConnell to force straight party-line votes, he'd have to make some reasonable concessions to gain at least a few Democratic votes, which would make his administration less extremist and polarizing. The problem here is that the so-called moderation or unorthodoxy of Trump's campaign really seems to have been nothing but an act, and he may have revealed his true colors in tossing it aside. (Or it may just be that his understanding of real issues is so shallow that his instinct for pomposity and cruelty is all he really has to fall back on.)

    • Trump backs away from China trade war, while a Trump development gets a $500 million Chinese loan:

      Many Republicans in Congress are clearly aware that something fishy is happening with ZTE. And journalists are clearly noting that Trump is contradicting some very clear campaign promises on Chinese trade in general.

      But while the GOP-led Congress has extensive oversight powers that could be used to check Trump's conflicts of interest, they uniformly decline to use any of them, leaving America to depend on nothing more than Trump's say-so and goodwill for as long as the GOP retains the majority.

      And journalists who cover the Trump administration's infighting and intrigue seem inordinately reluctant to so much as mention the conflict of interest when covering these issues.

  • Noah Berlatsky: The Trump effect: New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism

  • Chas Danner: Ireland Votes Overwhelmingly to Legalize Abortion; also Barbara Wesel: A triumph for women and for Ireland.

  • Tara Golshan: John McCain's shocking concession on the Iraq War: it was a "mistake": Not that he ever harbored doubts, let alone opposed, the war at any time when his opposition could have made a difference. But on his death bed, he explains his change of heart: "I sacrificed everything, including my presidential ambitions, that it would succeed." Makes you wonder whether he has any other second thoughts about the many wars he championed. For instance, is he still upset that the US didn't go to war against Russia to support Georgia's claim to South Osetia? McCain's concession is reportedly in a new book he's had ghost-written for him. There's also a hagiographic documentary film, For Whom the Bell Tolls, which Matt Taibbi reviews in John McCain's Revisionist History Is a Team Effort. Taibbi writes a lot about McCain and Iraq, but doesn't seem to have gotten the memo on what a mistake McCain thinks it was. He does, however, note other mistakes McCain has admitted, like picking Sarah Palin as his running mate, but only to show how the movie glosses them over.

  • Eric Levitz: America's Version of Capitalism Is Incompatible With Democracy: This follows up on

  • Jedediah Purdy: Normcore, which I cited previously.

  • Josh Marshall: Stop Talking about 'Norms':

    But we need to stop talking so much about norms. Because it doesn't capture what is happening or the situation we're in. In every kind of communication, clarity is the most important thing. By talking so much about "norms" and the violation of "norms" we're confusing the situation and even confusing ourselves. . . .

    I've noted something similar about the language of "conflicts of interest." I have heard many people claim that that $500 million Chinese state loan to a Trump Organization partnership development in Indonesia is a "conflict of interest." Whether or not you think that is the best example there are many others to choose from: Jared Kushner hitting up the Qataris for loans for his family business empire while supporting a blockade of their country or pressuring foreign governments and political groups to use the President's DC hotel or a million other examples.

    These are not "conflicts of interest." A "conflict of interest" is a case in which the nature of a situation makes it impossible for a person to separate their personal interests from their public responsibilities (or to appear to do so). All recent Presidents put their private wealth into blind trusts. We assume they weren't going to try to make money off the presidency in any case. But they wanted to remove any question of it and avoid situations where their own financial interests would bump up against their public responsibilities. What we're seeing now are not conflicts of interest. They're straight-up corruption. It's like "norms." Defining "conflicts of interest" is meant to keep relatively honest people on the straight and narrow or create tripwires that allow others to see when people in power are crossing the line. Nothing like that is happening here. We have an increasingly open effort to make vast sums of money with the presidency.

  • Tom McCarthy: Rudy Giuliani admits 'Spygate' is Trump PR tactic against Robert Mueller. The first I heard of "spygate" (not yet so-named) was when Trump demanded that the DOJ investigate the FBI for infiltrating his 2016 campaign "for political purposes." My first reaction was, well, yeah, everyone who suspected the FBI of infiltrating their political organizations should also demand an investigation. Like most of Trump's charges against the FBI, this resonates because this is the sort of thing the FBI is famous for doing (although usually not targeting the likes of Donald Trump -- although there is little doubt but that J. Edgar Hoover kept files on politicians, including three who routinely renominated Hoover to head the FBI: Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon). After all, when Tim Weiner wrote his history of the FBI, his chosen title was Enemies. Then I was reminded of the definition of a gaffe: when a politician inadvertently admits a truth that he isn't supposed to say. Since he joined Trump's lawyer team Giuliani has been an extraordinary fount of gaffes -- this being just one more example.

  • Jonah Shepp: Trump's Credibility Problem Is Now America's: At the end of WWII, the United States commanded fully half of the world's wealth. In a moment of extreme arrogance, George Kennan said that preserving that degree of dominance should be the goal of American foreign policy. It was inevitable that the ratio would fall, but Kennan's "containment policy" defined the Cold War and helped lead to the strangulation and collapse of the Soviet Union and its allies. By the time that happened, the US was scrambling to form NAFTA to achieve economic parity with the European Union, but the cloistered Cold War ideologues let their triumph go to their heads, proclaiming the US the World's Sole Superpower -- some dubbed it the Hyperpower -- and went on advocate strangling any would-be rivals in the crib (not that it wasn't already too late to head off China or Russia, or as we now see, North Korea). But the fact is, American power has been in decline ever since 1945 (or at least 1950, as the Korean War ground to a stalemate). Sure, the US was able to keep up a semblance of an alliance even to the present day, but that's mostly because the US pays most of the "defense" costs and runs trade deficits which help allied economies (and global corporations). Meanwhile, America's credibility suffered, first with its pro- and post-colonial wars, with its embrace of brutal and corrupt dictatorships, with trade arrangements to collect monopoly rents, and with its control of debt and imposition of austerity measures. Even America's vaunted military has turned out to be somewhere between useless and down right embarrassing. Remember when "shock and awe" was supposed to cower Iraq into submission? Those who survived discovered they could fight on, as they did, and in Afghanistan and elsewhere continue to do. Had Trump merely followed his "America First" campaign promises -- shaking "allies" down for more "defense" spending while reversing their trading fortunes -- the long-term decline already in place would have increased, but Trump's foreign policy has been astonishingly erratic and incoherent. Indeed, the only reason the world hasn't yet rejected and isolated the US as the rogue state it's become is that most "allies" are unable to grasp just what living in a post-American world might mean.

    For decades, the free world has operated under the assumption that the United States will act as its leader, using its might to advance not only its own interests but also those of its kindred nations and the international community writ large. Under Trump, the world is finding that we can no longer be trusted to engage in consultation, deliberation, or dialogue of any kind. Instead, we do whatever we want (or whatever he wants) with no real concern for the impact our decisions have on other countries, be they allies or adversaries. When other countries behave this way, we have a word for it: We call them rogue states. How long will our allies put up with this behavior before they simply stop believing a word we say? And how long will it take to repair that damage after the Trump era is over?

    Actually, the "free world" has been a myth almost from the start, and America's "leadership" has never been more than consensual ego stroking. Neither of those things are recoverable, nor really are they desirable. The problem with Trump isn't that he's shrinking America's role in the world, but that he's trying to present his retreat as arrogant self-indignation. It's sort of like the story in Atlas Shrugged, where the entrepreneurs go on strike expecting the world to collapse without them. But the rest of the world hasn't needed America for some time now. As Bush's Iraq War alliance crumbled, he coined the term "Coalition of the Willing" to describe its remaining token members. All Trump has done has been to remove America from the "Willing." Hopefully, the rest of the world will step up -- as, in fact, we see happening after US withdrawals from Paris, Iran, and Korea. Maybe, post-Trump, a chastened US will join them.

    Related to this, see Mark Karlin: "Making America Great Again" Assumes That It Once Was, an interview with David Swanson, author of Curing Exceptionalism: What's Wrong With How We Think About the United States; also by Karlin: The United States Is a Force for Chaos Across the Planet, an interview with Tom Engelhardt, author of A Nation Unmade by War. Engelhardt edits TomDispatch, where he's published more relevant articles:

    • Alfred McCoy: The Hidden Meaning of American Decline: McCoy recently published In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of American Global Power:

      As Trump has abrogated one international accord after another, observers worldwide have struggled to find some rationale for decisions that seem questionable on their merits and have frayed relations with long-standing allies. Given his inordinate obsession with the "legacy" of Barack Obama, epitomized in a report, whether true or not, of his ritual "defiling" of his predecessor's Moscow hotel bed via the "golden showers" of Russian prostitutes, there's a curious yet coherent logic to his foreign policy. You might even think of it as Golden Shower diplomacy. Whatever Obama did, Trump seems determined to undo with a visceral vehemence: the Trans-Pacific trade pact (torn up), the Paris climate accord (withdrawn), the Iran nuclear freeze (voided), close relations with NATO allies (damaged), diplomatic relations with Cuba (frozen), Middle Eastern military withdrawal (reversed), ending the Afghan war (cancelled), the diplomatic pivot to Asia (forgotten), and so on into what already seems like an eternity.

    • John Feffer: Korea's Two "Impossibles".

    • Karen Greenberg: Dismantling Democracy, One Word at a Time.

  • Richard Silverstein: Dead in the Water: Trump Middle East Peace Plan and Pompeo's Iran Plan B: I can't say that I was ever aware that Trump's minions even had plans for Israel-Palestine peace or post-JCPOA Iran. Wishes, maybe, but since Bolton (in particular) clearly involves any negotiations involving any degree of give-and-take as unacceptable signs of weakness, the question is whether they can force the solutions they prefer over the resistance of the forces they want to vanquish. In the case of Israel-Palestine, that's a moot point, because Israel doesn't want any kind of "peace process" -- in the past they've had to give lip service to American aspirations, but they've got Trump so wrapped up I doubt any pretense is necessary. As for Iran, all they have is vague hopes for sanctions and prayers for some kind of popular revolt -- as if they've forgotten that the last time that happened didn't bode well for American hopes. More links on Israel-Palestine and/or Iran:

  • Emily Stewart: Congress finally found something it can agree on: helping banks: A significant rollback of Dodd-Frank, considered "bipartisan" because 33 Democrats in the House and 16 in the Senate (plus Angus King) voted for it. Stewart also wrote:

  • Matthew Stewart: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy: Long piece (plus some video), something I've barely skimmed and need to look at in more depth, but argues that there is an aristocracy in America ("toxic, and is fast becoming unbridgeable"), but that it's bigger than the 1% made famous by Occupy Wall Street, let alone the 0.1% Paul Krugman likes to cite. The 9.9% slice simply comes from the top decile not in the 0.1%. Also from The Atlantic, not yet read but possibly interesting: Ta-Nehisi Coates: I'm Not Black, I'm Kanye.

  • Alex Ward: The Trump-Kim summit is canceled: Includes Trump's letter. Ward also wrote South Korea is scrambling to figure out WTF just happened with the Trump-Kim summit. More links viz. Korea:

Ask a question, or send a comment.

prev -- next