Weekend Roundup [140 - 149]

Sunday, March 4, 2018

Weekend Roundup

Once again having to cut this short because I'm running out of time. Didn't even watch the Oscars tonight, as I tried to gather these links. Nothing terribly new below if you've been reading all along, although the Putnam/Skocpol article might help, as well as Yglesias' near-weekly posts on Republican voting setbacks. I suppose one thing that slowed me down is that this has been an above-average week for palace intrigue, even given renormalization after that's been the case for about 50 weeks in the last year-plus-a-month.

Some scattered links this week:

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, February 25, 2018

Weekend Roundup

Too late to write an intro, but you know the drill.

Some scattered links this week:

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, February 18, 2018

Weekend Roundup

Late. No time for an introduction. This is what I came up with in a day of checking the usual sources. Obviously, there's much more to report, but the framework remains the same.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Matthew Yglesias: The 4 stories that drove politics this week: A gunman killed 17 at a Florida high school; All the different immigration bills failed in the Senate; The White House's Rob Porter story unraveled; There were a bunch of other scandals: including expense abuses at EPA and VA. Other Yglesias pieces:

  • Andrew J Bacevich: The War That Will Not End: Review of Steve Coll's new book, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, effectively a sequel to his 2004 book Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001: it's oft remarked that "9/11 changed everything," but as far as America's perverse interest in Afghanistan is concerned, 9/11 was merely a convenient dividing line for two lengthy volumes on the same tale of ignorance, arrogance, and misadventure. Bacevich's opening paragraph is chilling:

    Steve Coll has written a book of surpassing excellence that is almost certainly destined for irrelevance. The topic is important, the treatment compelling, the conclusions persuasive. Just don't expect anything to change as a consequence.

    Bacevich notes that the American delusion continues past the scope of Coll's book, quoting Mike Pence's recent pronouncement, "I believe victory is closer than ever before."

    And by the way, US military forces are deployed many more places. The only reason people noticed Niger, in the central Sahara, is that four US soldiers were killed there last year. For a long report: Rukmini Callimachi, et al.: 'An Endless War': Why 4 U.S. Soldiers Died in a Remote African Desert.

  • Alexia Fernandez Campbell: This is America: 9 out of 10 public schools now hold mass shooting drills for students. As the conclusion states, "This trend is super depressing." I don't actually recall any of those "duck and cover" atomic attack drills back in the 1950s, even though we all knew that Wichita was a prime target, with military industries, an Air Force base, and a ring of Titan missile silos. I do recall drills for fires and tornadoes -- neither was very likely, but not unheard of. One thing about drills is that they tend to normalize and routinize the threat. We stopped doing atomic bomb drills not because the threat went away but because we realized such drills really didn't do any good. And while I imagine fire and storm drills have continued, the main thrust there has long been prevention: build safer buildings, and prevent fire hazards. On the other hand, mass shooting drills seem to be driven by the fear that nothing can be done to prevent such incidents -- that they are as inevitable as storms and earthquakes. That's pretty much the gist of Josh Marshall: Our Collective Impotence Feeds the Power of Guns, but it shows a lack of political will to face the mythology that's built up around guns and killing (see Taibbi, below). By the way, one of the myths is exploded in Paul Ratnet: Just 3% of Americans own more than half of the country's guns.

  • Joyce Chen: Donald Trump's Alleged Affair With Playboy Playmate: 6 Things We Learned. This is a separate story from the one Chen reported on in Stormy Daniels Details Alleged Donald Trump Fling: 8 Things We Learned, although the "things" are pretty much all of a piece. Still, some details may gross you out; e.g.: "Trump told Daniels that he believed his wealth and his power are linked to his hair."

  • Ryan Cooper: The rise and fall of Clintonism: Reviews two books -- Michael Tomasky: Bill Clinton and Amie Parnes/Jonathan Allen: Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign -- but the books themselves don't fully support the author's overarching thesis, nicely summed up in his conclusion:

    In the context of postwar politics, the upper class accommodated itself to a truce in the class war, for about three decades. But when the system came under strain, the elites launched a renewed class war, leveraging stagflation to destroy and devour the welfare state. Clintonism could work in the early stages of that process, buoyed by the economic bubble of the 1990s. But when the inevitable disaster struck, it would become an anchor around the neck of the Democratic Party -- and it remains one to this day.

    Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? provides a more trenchant critique of Clintonism, but Cooper's outline occasionally adds something.

  • Masha Gessen: Trump Has Created an Entire Class of People Who Are Never Safe:

    Many Americans understand how important it is for every person in this land to feel safe. The most commonly advanced argument for sanctuary cities (or towns, or states) is that immigrants must feel safe reporting crimes -- they must know that the police will not be monitoring their immigration status. This is the simplest expression of the thesis that none of us are safe unless all of us are safe.

    Trump seems to understand this instinctively. Tyrants -- or aspiring tyrants -- thrive when populations feel unstable and under threat. His Administration's ongoing attack on sanctuary cities is more than the belligerent demand for total compliance: it is part of an effort to insure that some of us are never safe, in order to insure that no one is ever really safe.

  • Rakeen Mabud/Eric Harris Bernstein: Does America believe in public infrastructure anymore? Yglesias explains the mechanics of Trump's infrastructure proposal above, but one thing he doesn't make clear enough is that the only real reason for designing the plan that way is to pave the way for auctioning off public works to private owners, allowing them to set up toll traps to recoup their investments and to further line their pockets. Such a scheme should be laughable but lots of people have been snowed by the argument that the public can't be trusted to safeguard let alone advance the public interest, so we're better off handing the job over to private interests. Give it a mere minute's thought and you'll realize that's nuts, yet I read an op-ed in the Wichita Eagle (some "Fox News contributor," I forget who) arguing that the TVA and other government properties should be privatized.

    Still, see Paul Krugman: Trump Doesn't Give a Dam:

    And even the $200 billion is essentially fraudulent: The budget proposal announced the same day doesn't just impose savage cuts on the poor, it includes sharp cuts for the Department of Transportation, the Department of Energy and other agencies that would be crucially involved in any real infrastructure plan. Realistically, Trump's offer on infrastructure is this: nothing.

    That's not to say that the plan is completely vacuous. One section says that it would "authorize federal divestiture of assets that would be better managed by state, local or private entities." Translation: We're going to privatize whatever we can.

    Krugman also wrote: Budgets, Bad Faith, and 'Balance'.

  • Andrew Prokop: The new Mueller indictments tell us a lot about Russian trolls: The link promised "What Mueller's new Russia indictments mean -- and what they don't." The indictments seem to show that various Russians were acting as internet trolls, spreading false information to influence the 2016 elections, but doesn't directly tie them either to Putin or to Trump. None of the Russians are likely to be arrested or tried, so I suspect this is merely the foundation to something else. There was, by the way, another new indictment, a Richard Pinedo, of which we know very little; see David Kurtz: Mueller Playing It So Damn Close to the Vest. Next on the burner, see Emily Stewart: Rick Gates is reportedly about to plead guilty to Robert Mueller.

    Also, in light of the indictments, Nate Silver tries to factor How Much Did Russian Interference Affect the 2016 Election? He doesn't come up with an answer, but he does note "the magnitude of the interference revealed so far is not trivial but is still fairly modest as compared with the operations of the Clinton and Trump campaigns" and "thematically, the Russian interference tactics were consistent with the reasons Clinton lost." In other words, "the Russians were at least adding fuel to the right fire." Still, I'm struck by how much more the Trump and Clinton campaigns spent -- $617 million by Trump and pro-Trump super PACs, $1.2 billion by Clinton. Alignment between Trump and Russia doesn't prove collusion, but it is some form of symbiosis. As for Clinton, the burning issue remains what did she do with all that money? And why didn't she get more value for what she spent? That's the same question I was left with after reading Shattered. Also, note that other Russian activities haven't been factored in here -- e.g., the DNC email hacks, which many believe to have been Russian work but haven't been proven.

    Of course, it's not just the Russians who meddle in other people's elections. For a primer, see Scott Shane: Russia Isn't the Only One Meddling in Elections. We Do It, Too.

  • Richard Silverstein: If Israeli Police Take Down Bibi, Don't Expect Much Good to Come of It: Pretty detailed explanation of the corruption case against Netanyahu.

  • Matt Taibbi: If We Want Kids to Stop Killing, the Adults Have to Stop, Too:

    Over two decades ago, I traveled to a city in the Russian provinces called Rostov-On-Don to interview a psychiatrist named Alexander Bukhanovsky.

    Bukhanovsky, now deceased, was famous. If you've seen the movie Citizen X, about the capture of serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, Bukhanovsky was the guy played by Max Von Sydow. He was the Soviet Union's first criminal profiler.

    One of the first things he said was that both Russia and America produced disproportionate shares of mass killers.

    "Giant militarized countries," he said, "breed violent populations."

    Bukhanovsky at the time was treating a pre-teen who had begun killing animals. He told me this young boy would almost certainly move on to killing people eventually. He was seeing more and more of these cases, he said.

    Nikolas Cruz, the 19 year-old just arrested for shooting and killing 17 people in Parkland, Florida, supposedly bragged about killing animals. He reportedly even posted photos of his work on Instagram.

    There will be lots of hand-wringing in the coming days about gun control, and rightfully so -- it's probably easier to get a semi-automatic rifle in this country than it is to get some flavors of Pop Tarts -- but with each of these shootings, we seem to talk less and less about where the rage-sickness causing these massacres comes from.

    The single most salient fact of life during my lifetime -- nearly seventy years -- is that the US has continuously been at war abroad. Even during the decade between the approximate end of the Cold War and the advent of the War on Terror, the militarist ethos was so imbued in American thought that we came up with "humanitarian" rationales for a half-dozen interventions (Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Colombia, Kosovo, East Timor, what'd I miss?). And since 2001, that attitude has hardened into an obsession with targeting and killing individuals. Taibbi notes:

    In an era of incredible division and political polarization, military killing is the most thoroughly bipartisan of all policy initiatives. Drone murders spiked tenfold under Obama, and Trump has supposedly already upped the Obama rate by a factor of eight. The new president apparently killed more civilians in his first seven months in office than Obama did overall, making use of our growing capacity for mechanized murder.

    "We are killing these sons of bitches faster than they can grow them now," a CIA official reportedly told a subordinate with glee some years back. Another CIA vet told the Washington Post the agency had become ""one hell of a killing machine." . . .

    These aren't just scenes from bad movies. They're foundational concepts in our society. We're conditioned to disbelieve in the practicality of nonviolence and peace, and to disregard centuries of proof of the ineffectiveness of torture and violence as a means of persuasion.

    On the other hand, we're trained to accept that early use of violence is frequently heroic and necessary (the endless lionization of Winston Churchill as the West's great realist is an example here) and political courage is generally equated with the willingness to use force. JFK's game of nuclear poker with Nikita Khruschev is another foundational legend, while Khruschev is generally seen as a loser for having backed down. . . .

    Gun control? I'm all for it. But this madness won't stop until we stop believing that killing makes us strong, or that we can kill without guilt or consequence just by being "precise." What beliefs like that actually make us is insane and damaged, and it's no surprise that our kids, too, are beginning to become collateral damage.

    Note that the Florida shooter wasn't a veteran, but was in ROTC, so war and the military were very much on his mind. Also that the gun used in the Florida shooting, and indeed in many recent mass shootings, was designed for America's wars abroad. See: Tim Dickinson: All-American Killer: How the AR-15 Became Mass Shooters' Weapon of Choice. Also related: Marcus Weisgerber: Obama's Final Arms-Export Tally More Than Doubles Bush's.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Thursday, January 11, 2018

Weekend Roundup

I've been reading David Frum's Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic, and generally finding it useful in its clear and principled critique of Trump's vanity, authoritarianism, and corruption, and how Frum's fellow conservatives have squandered whatever principles they may have had (probably not many) in becoming toadying enablers to such a public menace. Among other things, he's finally convinced me that the Russians had something to do with electing Trump, especially (not quite the same thing) by releasing the Podesta hack mere hours after the "Access Hollywood" tape. (By the way, what we need to really clarify the issue isn't a more complete record of Trump-Russia contacts, but a much better understanding of the various Trump/Republican cyber efforts, which seem to have had an outsized impact on election day. My guess is that expertise and data flowed both ways, not that I've seen any proof of that. We do have proof of high-level contacts, which suggests intent to collude, but how did that get turned into meaningful acts?)

The book is not without faults, such as his fawning over General H.R. McMaster (among other things a Vietnam War defeat denier), or his own background as a G.W. Bush speechwriter (reportedly the guy who coined the "axis of evil" phrase). Based on the intro, at some point I expected him to finally explain why Trumpism is bad for conservatives, and he finally takes a shot at that on pp. 206-207:

Maybe you do not much care about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy. The stability of American society depends on conservatives' ability to find a way forward from the Trump dead end, toward a conservatism that can not only win elections but also govern responsibly, a conservatism that is culturally modern, economically inclusive, and environmentally responsible, that upholds markets at home and US leadership internationally.

He then spends another page expanding on what enlightened, principled conservatives believe in and should be doing -- none of which has any currency within the actual Republican Party, at least as constituted in the White House and Congress. He doesn't say this, but the closest match to his ideal conservative politician is Barack Obama. On the other hand, his beloved Republicans have already realized that they cannot win fair democratic elections, so grasp at every campaign trick and every tactical manoeuvre at their disposal: huge money, bald-faced lies, gerrymandering, filibusters, packing the courts. They know full well that their policies are extremely unpopular, but they persist in pushing them through, hoping that come election time they can turn the voters' ire against opponents who are often caught up in their own corruption and incompetence.

If you look back at how the Republicans formed their coalition -- one that has never been overwhelmingly popular, one that has often had to depend on low voter turnout to edge out narrow wins -- you'll find that they have repeatedly swapped away responsible establishmentarian (which is a form of conservative) positions to capture blocks willing to vote against their own economic interests. It wouldn't be difficult to imagine conservatives who didn't pander to racial or other prejudice, who accepted that abortion is a private matter, who favored sensible restrictions on guns, who favored a much lower profile for the military, who didn't feel threatened by immigration, who understood the need to protect and preserve the environment, who recognized that equal justice is essential for any sort of free and fair society. Republicans took those positions not out of ideological conviction but because they hoped to capture significant blocks of irrational voters. Indeed, it's not uncommon for conservatives in other countries to accept high progressive taxes and a robust social welfare net, because those policies have proven effective at building stable middle class nations. (For example, right-leaning parties in Switzerland and Taiwan were responsible for creating universal health care systems -- if only to take the issue away from left-leaning parties.)

But not only have Republicans undermined their traditional values by opportunistic demagoguery, they've surrendered control of the party to a very small cabal of extremely wealthy donors, who've imposed an extreme laissez-faire economic doctrine on top of all the bigotry and invective they've built the Party on. The problem there is not only does their ideology not work for the Party's base voters, it doesn't work as a governing philosophy. Thus far, Republican rule has blown up three times: under Nixon's skullduggery, under Bush I's corruption, and under Bush II's war and much more. And the prospects of Trump solving any of those problems are about as close to zero as you can get. The fact that Republicans keep bouncing back after each disaster is the chief political problem of our times, especially as it appears they've doubled down each time. Until they're totally repudiated, nothing in the party will get better.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Matthew Yglesias: The 4 most important stories in politics this week: The government shut down for six hours; What the bill actually does: the budget deal that ended the shutdown; DREAMers in the balance: one of the most pressing problems not addressed in the bill; Another senior White House official resigned in disgrace: Rob Porter. The first three were all tangents of the shutdown/budget deal, so I expected more. Other Yglesias pieces this week:

  • Jeff Bezos' Quest to Find America's Stupidest Mayor: So Amazon is taking bids from cities/counties/states to host their "HQ2," offering some large number of office jobs to the winner, i.e., the taxpayers willing to offer them the biggest kickback. Businesses do this all the time, and the bigger the prize they can offer, the more saliva they have to wade through. Is this a good deal, even locally? Most likely not. Of course, it's even worse for the federal government, where the zero sum game adds up to zero. There should be a federal law to either outlaw tax allowances for developments or to tax them punitively. That wouldn't end all such bidding, but it would be a good start, and taxing other enticements could follow. As for the supposed paybacks:

    However, most research indicates that the cost to state and local governments for these subsidies typically outweighs the benefits in terms of employment and tax revenue, including in the cases of Amazon's growing network of fulfillment centers.

    A new analysis by the Economic Policy Institute looking at employment in counties that managed to land a fulfillment center in the last 15 years found no evidence that overall employment increased, and in some instances employment even fell relative to comparison counties. The implication was that the commitments made to win Amazon's facilities -- subsidies likely worth over $1 billion dollars in total -- usually were enough of a drag on the rest of the economy, either by imposing a higher tax burden or diverting resources, to more than offset any jobs and spending created by Amazon.

    One side note: Contrary to the article, Amazon has collected sales tax here in Kansas (one of the highest in the country) for many years now, but in our case at least that has little if any effect on whether we buy locally or through Amazon. Price, selection, and home delivery are our main reasons for buying on Amazon. I realize some people hate Amazon on principle, but I'm not one of them. Still, doesn't mean I'm not bothered about some of the shit they pull. For instance, the reason we pay sales tax is they opened a distribution center in southeast KS, with a lot of local perks for the jobs. They closed that as soon as the initial perks expired (but they still collect KS sales tax).

    Baker also wrote: Three Percent GDP Growth and Democrats' Irresponsible Opposition to Trump Tax Cuts. Note that he's not saying that opposition was irresponsible. Just that some of the reasons Democrats gave for opposing the bill were less than helpful: especially worries about increasing federal debt, and the argument that a 3% GDP growth rate was impossible -- although he does admit that nothing in the bill gets us anywhere near 3%. He should also acknowledge that an extra $1.5 trillion in debt will place downward pressure on public spending, and that would hurt the economy, as well as the people's valuation of government services. We would, for instance, be better off if the government left tax rates unchanged and simply spent an extra $1.5 trillion, especially on infrastructure but actually on pretty much anything. He goes into more nuts and bolts on GDP growth, but the bottom line there is that lowering taxes on the rich doesn't do a thing for GDP growth. The trick there -- what is needed to get past our current sluggish recovery -- is to pay workers more, creating more demand and luring more currently unemployed people into the workforce (standard unemployment rates are exceptionally low now, but labor participation rates are still well below 2007 levels, which helps explain why this recover doesn't feel as strong as previous ones.)

  • Dan Balz: White House under John Kelly is not so calm and competent after all: That's still mostly Trump, but people who thought Kelly himself was "calm and competent" have begun to have doubts -- and, really, this dates back before the Porter/Sorensen scandals. In particular, it's been pretty clear that Kelly was instrumental in getting Trump to back down from any bipartisan DACA deal, so he seems as much an ideology-driven activist as guys he's banished like Bannon and Gorka. I think he's still safe from external cries for his head (e.g., John Nichols: John Kelly Has Got to Go) but having embarrassed the petulant president, he's suddenly on thin ice. Another Kelly piece: Heather Digby Parton: John Kelly's True Self and ICE's Mission Creep: Tyranny Is Spreading.

  • David Dayen: Senate Republicans Kept Provision to Fight High Drug Prices Out of Spending Bill, Democrats Say.

  • Leo Gerard: Donald Trump's broken trade promises:

    The U.S. Commerce Department announced this week that the 2017 trade deficit rose to the highest level since 2008. . . . The Commerce Department reported the trade deficit rose 12 percent during Trump's first year in office, that the goods deficit with China jumped 8 percent to a record $375.2 billion, that the overall non-petroleum goods deficit shot up to an unprecedented high of $740.7 billion. Those terrible numbers testify to an administration dawdling, not performing for American workers who voted for Donald Trump based on campaign promises of quick and easy action to cure bad trade.

    I note this because I'm a bit surprised by the numbers, although most likely they're a continuation of past trends. Trade deficits dropped after 2008 because the economy crashed, resulting in less trade. If nothing else changed (and damn little did), it makes sense that trade deficits would have risen with the slow recovery. On the other hand, I've heard charges that Trump's treasury has been suppressing the dollar to improve exports, and I've noticed several instances of "punitive" tariffs (one that Boeing lobbied for would have added three times the cost of competing Canadian aircraft; it has since been struck down). I wouldn't go as far as the author in crediting "right thinking" to Trump officials like Wilbur Ross or Peter Navarro, nor would I whine about China "stealing trade secrets from American companies." Trump may be trying to renegotiate NAFTA, but he's finding that he's up not just against Canada and Mexico but many US businesses (including farmers) that have a stake in the status quo. Indeed, a big part of the rationale for his tax bill was that it would make it more attractive for foreigners to invest capital in the US. For that to happen, the US will need to run higher trade deficits, so foreigners will have more capital to return to the US. And what happens then is less that the new capital will generate jobs than that it will inflate asset prices, increasing inequality, while turning more and more American businesses into siphons for the rich abroad.

  • Thomas Gibbons-Neff: Trump Wants a Military Parade. But Not Everyone Is in Step. The official story is that Trump got the idea watching a Bastille Day parade in France. He assumed that if a second-rate power like France could put on a good show, a nation which spends more than ten times as much on soldiers and high-tech gadgetry could put on something really spectacular -- something he might cite as proof that he had "made America great again." Of course, it might have just been his fetish for large crowds and high ratings. But the first image that popped into my mind was stock footage of the parades of missiles and tanks the Soviet Union used to put on -- used by the American press to whip up Cold War fears, not least by reminding us that the Soviet system was close-minded, militaristic, and sinister. (Nowadays the same footage is most often used to represent North Korea.) The second image, of course, was of Nazi parades meant to psych up the Volk to launch WWII. The third was the military parade in Egypt where Sadat was assassinated. None of these images seem fitting for a peaceful democracy -- although you can appreciate Trump's confusion, as the America he seeks to "make great again" scarcely qualifies on either count. Indeed, one wonders why France march-steps: nostalgia for their former globe-spanning empire? some kind of complex over their having been reduced to a bit role in NATO? maybe they feel some need to intimidate their revolution-minded citizens? Colbert reacted to Trump: "He knows Bastille Day is about poor people chopping off rich people's heads, right?"

    Among the reactions to Trump's parade: Jonathan Freedland: Trump's desire for a military parade reveals him as a would-be despot; Alex Ward: Ex-Navy SEAL calls Trump's military parade idea "third world bullshit".

  • Umair Irfan: Puerto Rico's blackout, the largest in American history, explained.

  • Fred Kaplan: No Time to Talk: "Trump's foreign policy is all military, no diplomacy. We're starting to see the consequences." Trump's tilt toward the military reflects a belief that force (and only force) works -- that all America has to do is act like a Great Power (which Obama manifestly failed to do) and the world will fall in line. In such a world, adding to the military reinforces US primacy, while diplomacy (successful or not) undercuts it. Accordingly, Nikki Haley's job at the UN isn't to negotiate consensus; it's to bark out threats and orders. The problem is that the only way conflicts actually end is through agreement. Sometimes this can be very one-sided, as in the German and Japanese surrenders in WWII, but usually it's more complicated, involving more give-and-take. That's a worldview Trump cannot even conceive of, and that's not likely change, as it suits the neocons in his administration. They believe that it's actually good for conflicts to fester indeterminately, as long as the only response the president can conceive of is building up more power. Obama and Kerry (if not necessarily Clinton) could occasionally see another way out, but Trump cannot.

    Kaplan also wrote on nuclear strategy: Mattis Goes Nuclear: "Trump's secretary of defense has recently adopted some dubious and dangerous ideas about nuclear strategy." This piece fits in neatly with Matt Taibbi: Donald Trump's Thinking on Nukes Is Insane and Ignorant. It's certainly the case that Mattis isn't ignorant, and it's possible he's not insane either, but he's certainly deluded if he thinks he can see any strategic use for nuclear weapons. While Taibbi makes occasional reference to Trump's mental state, his article is actually more focused on the US military's latest strategizing on nuclear weapons, including the proliferation of "low-yield" warheads as part of a trillion dollar "modernization" program -- i.e., he's at least as troubled by what "adults" like Mattis are thinking as what Trump might foolishly do. One thing Taibbi and Kaplan don't do is explain why the nuclear bomb mandarins are pushing such an ambitious program now, and why it makes sense to people like Trump (aside from the obvious points about insanity and ignorance). What we're seeing is the convergence of two big ideas: the neocon notion that world order can only be enforced by a single global power, one that forces everyone else to tremble and pay tribute, and the conservative notion that the rich are rightful (and righteous) rulers. This trillion dollar nuclear "modernization" is the sort of thing big businesses do precisely because their smaller competitors cannot afford to. This actually fits well with the neocon hysteria over other countries' "nuclear ambitions" -- how dare anyone else try to compete with us?

    By the way, one other point occurs to me. Trump has long styled himself as the consummate dealmaker, so many people assumed he'd use his skills to negotiate (and in some cases re-negotiate) deals with America's adversaries. But actually, the deals Trump has done throughout his career are a very limited subset: alliances, based on mutual greed, to be satisfied at the expense of someone else (or, rather often it seems, his investors). About the only deal he's worked so far was with the Saudis: he sold them arms (and blanket support for their imperial ambitions in Yemen and elsewhere). But even that deal only worked because the Saudis were so eager to suck up to him -- a posture he's used to in the business world, but much rarer in world affairs. Of course, even that wasn't his own work. It was, at best, something others pitched to him in ways he could understand.

  • Patrick Lawrence: A major opening at the Pyeongchang Olympics -- but not from Mike Pence: "Kim Jong-un's sister and the South Korean president have lunch, while Mike Pence rattles the sabers ever louder." Lawrence makes several points:

    First, we can discard all assertions in the American press that Moon, the South Korean president, had suddenly turned hostile toward the North in conformity with U.S. policy after his election last May. . . .

    Second, there is as of now no evident intention in Washington to approach the negotiating table, as all other nations traditionally involved in the Korean crisis urge. This appears to hold true under any circumstances. . . .

    Third, in view of Pence's remarks in Tokyo and Seoul, we must conclude that there are no moderating voices on foreign policy left in the Trump administration -- to the extent, I mean, that there may have been any from the beginning. There had been intermittent suggestions that tempering perspectives in the executive were keeping things at least minimally civilized. Read Pence's remarks and imagine they were uttered by Mattis or H.R. McMaster, Trump's ever-belligerent national security adviser; either of the other two could have made those statements verbatim. By all appearances, these figures are now interchangeable. In short, the military runs the White House on the foreign policy side -- this without any inhibiting pressure one can detect from other quarters.

  • Dara Lind: Trump's draft plan to punish legal immigrants for sending US-born kids to Head Start: "Or getting insured through the Children's Health Insurance Program, or getting assistance to heat their homes."

  • Anna North: Trump's long history of employing -- and defending -- men accused of hurting women: Rob Porter, of course, but note the list also includes Andrew Puzder, Trump's Secretary of Labor nominee who was forced to withdraw due to assaulting his (now ex-) wife. Related: Jen Kirby: John Kelly has a history of believing men over women. And since these articles appeared, Kirby has also written about Trump speechwriter David Sorensen: A second White House aide resigns over domestic abuse allegations. Also see: David Remnick: A Reckoning With Women Awaits Trump: One reason the spousal abuse charges against Porter, Sorensen, and ultimately Kelly, blew up so fast is that they fit in perfectly with what we know and despise about Trump himself:

    Donald Trump is the least mysterious figure in the history of the American Presidency. His infantile character, duplicity, cold-heartedness, and self-dealing greed are evident not merely to the majority of the poll-answering electorate but, sooner or later, to those who make the decision to work at his side. . . . Sooner or later, Trump's satraps and lieutenants, present and former, come to betray a vivid sense of just how imperilled and imperilling this Presidency is. In their sotto-voce remarks to the White House press, these aides seem to compete in their synonyms for the President's modesty of intelligence ("moron," "idiot," "fool"); his colossal narcissism; his lack of human empathy. They admit to reporters how little he studies the basics of domestic policy and national security; how partial he is to autocrats like himself; how indifferent he is to allies. They are shocked, they proclaim, absolutely shocked. In the past few days, it has been Trump's misogyny, his heedless attitude toward women and issues of harassment and abuse, that has shocked them most. And those who know him best recognize the political consequences ahead.

  • Mark Schmitt: The Art of the Scam:

    Most American workers this month will see their take-home pay go up, some a little and a few quite a bit, as the new tax act takes effect and less money is withheld for federal income taxes.

    But for many, the gift will be short-lived. Because the law was rushed and written in a partisan frenzy, withholding may not be accurate and you might owe money to the I.R.S. next year. You might even be advised to file new forms so that more money is withheld -- and then the forms and withholding amounts are likely to change again later in the year and then again every year thereafter as the cuts for individuals head toward expiration. . . .

    It's the experience of the scam economy, where nothing is certain and anything gained might disappear without warning. It's an economy where risk is shifted onto individuals and families, financial predators lurk behind every robocall and pop-up ad, work schedules are changed without notice and Americans have endless choices about savings, education, health care and other needs but very little clear guidance about how to make those choices wisely or safely. . . .

    A proposal for paid family leave recently floated by Ivanka Trump and Senator Marco Rubio takes the policy of "give with one hand, take away with the other" to an absurd extreme: New parents could pay for leave from their future Social Security payments, trading a week of paid leave for a week of retirement benefits, as if people could make a rational, informed choice between needs that will typically fall 40 years apart in the life cycle.

    Finally, this administration has eagerly taken down the guardrails intended to protect individuals from the worst predators: the "fiduciary rule," which had required investment advisers to act in the interest of their clients; the hard-fought rules that protect students from worthless for-profit colleges and student loans they can't repay; and even the recent Labor Department rule requiring that employees receive the tips that are intended for them. Virtually every enforcement action of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been put on hold or canceled -- even the investigation of the Equifax hack that disclosed the financial records of millions of people -- exposing all of us to even more scams and tricks.

    It bears noting that all this is happening at the same time people are encouraged to grab as much money as they can now because without it their future looks increasingly bleak -- a practice increasingly free of scruples, as certain political leaders attest.

  • Alex Ward: Israel just attacked Syria. That's scary, but nothing new. I've been reading that the US military's favorite option for dealing with North Korea is what they call a "bloody nose" attack: the US swoops in, blows some shit up, causes some hurt, but in a limited way that doesn't invite the escalation of a full-scale response. This is basically what Israel has been doing to Syria, repeatedly, since well before civil war broke out, and it's happened a half-dozen times or more during the war. Syria doesn't want to fight Israel, so they don't respond in kind, let alone escalate. The assumption is that North Korea doesn't really want to fight either, so would hold back and be humiliated rather than risk massive destruction. If you believe that, you have to ask yourself why you let North Korea's missiles and nuclear bombs worry you in the first place. Of course, introspection isn't a strong trait of anyone in the Trump administration, least of all the blowhard-in-chief.

    By the way, for more on what we're risking in Korea see: Yochi Dreazen: Here's what war with North Korea would look like. Also, a reminder of the last time the US made war on North Korea: David McNeill: Unknown to most Americans, the US 'totally destroyed' North Korea once before.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, February 4, 2018

Weekend Roundup

Can't say as I really felt any energy or appetite for doing a roundup this weekend. Still, practically wrote itself:

Some scattered links this week:

  • Matthew Yglesias: 4 big stories from a very weird week in Washington: It's a "new American moment" (Trump's "state of the union" speech); we talked a lot about a memo (the Nunes memo, accusing the FBI of picking on Trump for "deep state" political reasons); Trump has an infrastructure plan ("all that's missing, basically, are the details"); Amazon is (maybe) going to revolutionize health care (maybe) -- some kind of new joint venture between Amazon, Berkshire, and JP Morgan. Other Yglesias pieces:

    • The Steele dossier, explained, with Andrew Prokop.

    • Trump's new infrastructure "plan," explained: "No money, no details, and no explanation of how it works." Well, some numbers, but they're beyond ridiculous. The federal government would pony up $200 billion, but from spending cuts elsewhere (and presumably not military), not from new revenues (which the tax bill will shrink by $1.5 trillion), so the net stimulus effect will be negative. The expectation is that the federal money would then be matched at a 6.5/1 ratio by state and local governments, despite the fact that the latter have nowhere near that kind of borrowing power -- so the key idea is to nudge them into forming "public-private partnerships," which will put tollgates on everything they do, so the public will wind up paying much more for the infrastructure development than would be the case if government did it all itself. Why?

      A more cynical view would be that the main issue here is Trump likes to talk about the idea of a big infrastructure package, but Trump doesn't actually run the Trump administration. Neither congressional Republicans nor the veteran GOP politicians and operatives who do run the Trump administration want to see a big federal infrastructure package. If they wanted one, they would have done a deal with Barack Obama when he was president and called over and over again for one.

      What they actually want is cuts in the social safety net -- cuts that Democrats aren't going to agree to and that aren't especially popular.

      Now Trump has a thing that he can say is his plan, congressional conservatives can propose paying for it with safety net cuts that Democrats won't agree to, and Republicans can try to pass the whole thing off as an example of gridlock or obstruction rather than reflecting the fact that conservatives don't favor spending more money on federal infrastructure.

    • If Trump acted normal, he'd be an unpopular president with an unpopular agenda: actually, he is, but if he acted normal, we'd be talking about how unpopular that agenda is, instead of what a boor and moron he is.

      It's worth emphasizing that the Trump Show does have some real strategic benefits for Trump.

      For starters, it ensures that all but the very biggest policy stories are deprived of oxygen. The typical American has never been exposed to a robust news cycle about the administration's move to allow broadband internet providers to sell private user data, its various assaults on non-climate environmental policy, the dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or budget proposals that starve the very job training and vocational education programs Trump touted in his State of the Union address.

      While some of Trump's antics and culture war battles are misfires that turn off even voters who might be sympathetic to his policy agenda, overall, he does better during the Trump Show. In moments when he manages to effectively fracture American society along racial lines, he regains the loyalty of the white voters who continue to make up a large majority of the electorate. Trump's actual execution of the politics of racial demagoguery is often not so deft, but the basic concept of elevating racial conflict and downplaying banal public policy debates makes perfect sense for him. . . .

      Whether his erratic behavior sinks him in the end, meanwhile, is likely to have less to do with political perceptions than with actual policy outcomes. During campaign 2016, I worried -- as did many observers -- that Trump's erratic, impulsive behavior would get the country ensnared in a disastrous war or crash the American economy. So far, he hasn't done either of those things.

      That's a low bar, to be sure. But it's not a given that a president will clear it; just ask George W. Bush.

    • In Kennedy's speech, Democrats rediscovered Barack Obama's compelling vision: "America is about equality, across all dimensions."

      Trump's game is to pit people against each other and get them so caught up in their internecine games that they don't notice the wholesale looting of America that's taking place under his administration.

    • Donald Trump as no solutions for America's big problems: Useful list here.

      The Puerto Rico saga is marginal to American politics because Puerto Rico itself is a marginal part of the country -- an island physically separated from the mainland, whose residents lack representation in Congress or the right to vote in presidential elections.

      But the sad state of that island is worth dwelling on, because the devastation of Hurricane Maria remains the one real crisis that Trump's dealt with that hasn't simply been self-inflicted. He's been inattentive, ill-informed, dishonest, and ineffective, capping it with tonight's solemn pledge of solidarity that's totally disconnected from the actual reality on the ground.

      Most of the problems Trump is ignoring are chronic rather than acute, and if the country needs to suffer through a few more years of neglect we'll make it. Puerto Rico is facing acute problems and the president is, likewise, doing nothing.

      If we're lucky, those of us on the mainland won't have to find out what it's like to live through that. But Trump makes it clear on a daily basis that if we ever do, there's no way he's going to rise to the occasion.

    • Trump's approval rating is below 50% in 38 states: Map is interesting. Note that he's below 50% here in Kansas, as well as Nebraska and Utah, Mississippi and South Carolina. He's only under 40% in one state that he actually carried, but it's a big one: Texas.

    • The truth about the Trump economy, explained: The low unemployment rates Trump touted in his SOTA, like most other growth statistics, are easily explained as extensions of trends established over the past 5-6 years, which is to say under Obama. Trump hasn't caused them, but he hasn't blown them up either. On the other hand, that growth partly masks a longer-term weakness in the economy, which is why workforce participation is still below 2000 levels: there may be a lot of jobs, but not very good ones. The one area where Trump has had a discernible effect is the stock market boom, which started under Obama but has been boosted further by Trump's deregulation agenda, and now by business tax cuts. Nonetheless, last week was a rough one for Wall Street, which has been blamed on fear of interest rate hikes, but like all bubbles is mostly a matter of the investor class having more money than it knows what to do with.

      It's largely forgotten now, but back during the mid-aughts (a time of more rapid wage growth than what we saw in 2017, incidentally), it was commonplace in conservative circles to proclaim that we were living through a "Bush Boom" touched off by his game-changing tax cuts and deregulation. That story, obviously, eventually ended in tears, as a poorly supervised financial system channeled inequitably shared growth into an unsustainable pyramid of debt that eventually collapsed.

      For another explanation of the current economy, see Dean Baker: It's Still the Yellen-Obama Economy. For a view of how it may end, see: Nomi Prins: Here Comes the Next Financial Crisis.

    • An immigration crackdown is a recipe for national decline.

    Yglesias also contributed to: The real state of the union in 2018, explained.

  • Glenn Greenwald: In a Major Free Speech Victory, a Federal Court Strikes Down a Law that Punishes Supporters of Israel Boycott: Story has a local angle, as it was a Kansas Mennonite who challenged the state law. Note that the governor who signed that law is the new US "ambassador at large for religious freedom."

  • Jacob Hacker: Trump's tax cuts are worse than fiercest critics claim: Introduces a term that's unlikely to mean anything to anyone:

    The problem isn't just that the cuts will make inequality worse -- if that were the case, then adding more tax cuts for the middle class and poor would fix things. Nor is the issue that driving up the debt will threaten popular social programs like Social Security and Medicare -- though it certainly will.

    The fundamental problem concerns not redistribution but predistribution: all the ways in which government rules and activities change how American capitalism distributes its rewards in the first place. Predistribution policies -- like public investments in infrastructure, education, research and development, and the regulation of labor and financial markets -- built the American middle class. And the collapse of such investment and regulations is the main reason that the middle class has experienced stagnant wages, plummeting bargaining power and a declining share of national income since the late 1970s. If we are going to tackle American inequality, we need to take seriously the imperative of changing how markets work. . . .

    Thus, the biggest defect of tax cuts -- any tax cuts -- is that they represent a huge lost opportunity to invest in our future. If the past generation has taught us anything, it's that tax cuts for investors and a soaring stock market do little or nothing to help most Americans. By contrast, we know that public investments in productive physical and human assets do help, and they disproportionately help the less well off. Rich people have plenty of private capital to invest. Those who aren't rich have their human capital (which rests on public investments) and the public capital that we all share as citizens: transportation and communication networks, shared scientific knowledge fostered by public R&D spending, civic institutions and so on.

    If we really want to boost growth, we need to return to the successful investment model that really made America great in the 20th century. And that requires more revenues, not less; a more effective IRS, not a weaker one; and, yes, new taxes, such as a levy on carbon emissions that threaten our planet and a surcharge on short-term financial speculation that threatens our economy.

    Two (possibly more) points here: the real sources of inequality lie outside of the tax code: the real engine of inequality is the drive for profit, which we tend to overlook by viewing it as the natural state of capitalism. In fact, inequality can be limited or even rolled back by political policies which: increase competition, which both reduces and spreads out profits; strengthen labor, which distributes gross margins more equitably to workers; and progressive taxation, which redistributes profits through public works and services. Conversely, inequality can be increased by opposite policies, as we've seen repeatedly over the past forty years. Hacker's "predistribution" policy point is important, but relatively minor -- effectively, a subset of the third point, that reducing government income is itself an intrinsic goal of the right's push for tax cuts. It's not just that the right doesn't want government to help people; the right doesn't want people to get in the habit of looking to government to help themselves. (On the other hand, they can get pretty agitated when they need help themselves.)

    Hacker's leaning against the fact that the only time we tend to talk about inequality is when considering tax bills, and even there the right likes to muddy the waters by offering chump change to the masses. It is true that strongly progressive taxation (combined with direct income redistribution) could compensate for inequality built into the private sector economy, but hardly anyone on the left is pushing for rates that would effectively cap private wealth (or, beyond occasional mentions of a "basic income" for significant income support). Rather, both sides struggle to move the scrimmage line a bit (for marginal income rates between 33-39%, although the right has been more ambitious in their proposals to eliminate estate taxes and vastly reduce taxes on capital gains and business income -- matters of import to the very rich, but esoteric to most people). [PS: Just noticed this, pace my generalization: Hamilton Nolan: The Estate Tax Should Be 100 Percent. Nolan also wrote: The Entire Rationale for These Tax Cuts Is Bullshit. Found these links by following Alex Pareene: Tom Steyer Has Too Much Money.]

  • Ezra Klein: How democracies die, explained: Ruminations based on a new book by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die.

    Demagogues and authoritarians do not destroy democracies. It's established political parties, and the choices they make when faced with demagogues and authoritarians, that decide whether democracies survive.

    "2017 was the best year for conservatives in the 30 years that I've been here," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said this week. "The best year on all fronts. And a lot of people were shocked because we didn't know what we were getting with Donald Trump."

    The best year on all fronts. Think about that for a moment. If you want to know why congressional Republicans are opening an assault on the FBI in order to protect Trump, it can be found in that comment. This was a year in which Trump undermined the press, fired the director of the FBI, cozied up to Russia, baselessly alleged he was wiretapped, threatened to jail his political opponents, publicly humiliated his attorney general for recusing himself from an investigation, repeatedly claimed massive voter fraud against him, appointed a raft of unqualified and occasionally ridiculous candidates to key positions, mishandled the aftermath of the Puerto Rico hurricane, and threatened to use antitrust and libel laws against his enemies.

    And yet McConnell surveyed the tax cuts he passed and the regulations he repealed and called this not a mixed year for his political movement, not a good year for his political movement, but the best year he'd ever seen.

    Richard J Evans has written a couple of relevant book reviews on the the most exercised of analogies: A Warning From History and Rule by Fear -- the former on a new biography of Hitler, the latter a broader history of "the rise and fall of the Third Reich." Back during the Bush years I found the analogy tempting enough that I bought a copy of Evans' own book, The Coming of the Third Reich, but I never got around to reading it. (I read Cullen Murphy's more explicitly topical Are We Rome? instead, partly because at the time I knew considerably less about Rome. Most recently I've been reading Tony Judt's essays from the Bush years, When the Facts Change, which reminds me how awful Bush was, while at the same time bringing to mind Michael Lewis' intro to the 2010 reprint of Liar's Poker, his book about financial scandal in the 1980s, a tale he finally had to deem "how quaint.")

  • PR Lockhart: Trump's reaction to the NFL protests shows how he fights the culture war. Not sure this subject is worth this much reading, but I'll note that I think the reason many conservatives take a special delight in football is that they relate to the idea of the strong dominating the relatively weak through force and violence. That's a view peculiar to fans. The players, and observers who actually watch the play and not just the markers, know that what really matters is teamwork. And while most plays are intricately planned, there's also a fair amount of leeway for improvisation. You also see teamwork in baseball and basketball, but in no other sport is it so central as it is in football. That makes the players more like workers, and helps foster solidarity -- a point which more than any (other than opportunism, I guess) explains Trump's vituperation. He's bothered less by supposed disrespect for the flag than by his disgust that the owners can't control their workers.

  • Josh Marshall: First Take: The 'Nunes Memo' Is Even Weaker Than Expected. Also see: Zack Beauchamp/Alex Ward: The 9 biggest questions about the Nunes memo, answered; Alex Emmons: Nunes Memo Accidentally Confirms the Legitimacy of the FBI's Investigation.

  • Dylan Scott: Trump's abandoned promise to bring down drug prices, explained: Something Trump mentioned in the SOTA, then gestured to Democrats that now would be a good time for them to applaud.

  • Emily Stewart: The Trump administration's surprising idea to nationalize America's 5G network, explained: "Nobody thinks it's a good idea, including the FCC." Well, as their handling of the "net neutrality" matter shown, the FCC doesn't work for the public interest any more; it's been captured by the industry it was meant to regulate. I doubt Trump's people will pursue this further, because it's a non-starter with the corrupt cabal known as the Congressional Republicans, and the communications industry has been more bipartisan than most, so they have a fair number of Democrats in their pocket as well. But on the surface, sure, why not nationalize the 5G network? It would be easier (and cheaper) for the federal government to raise the investment. They wouldn't have to engineer all sorts of cutouts and paywalls to recoup their investment. And they could make it a point to provide inexpensive, reliable service everywhere instead of having private companies cherry-pick a few lucrative markets. This sort of thing hasn't happened often in the past because it's rare for Congress to interfere in a market private companies think they can make money. (The Post Office and the TVA are two such exceptions.)

    Stewart also wrote: Paul Ryan tweets -- then deletes -- brag about public school worker who saw $1.50 pay raise. Fact check: that's a weekly pay check, so the deduction change nets out to less than four cents per hour.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, January 28, 2018

Weekend Roundup

I figured the big political story of the week was Trump going to Davos, announcing "America is open for business," and hat-in-hand begging foreign capitalists to invest in America. He'd probably tell you that the reason he's courting foreign investment is to create jobs for Americans, but that's merely a second-order side-effect. The reason capitalists invest money is for profits -- to take more money back out of America than they put in. By "open for business" Trump means "come rip us off -- we'll make it easy for you."

Trump's Davos mission effectively ends any prospect that Trump might have actually tried to implement some sort of "economic nationalist" agenda. The odds that he would do so were never very good. The balance of corporate power has swung from manufacturing to finance, and that has driven the globalization that has undermined America's manufacturing base while greatly increasing the relative wealth of the top percent. Trump himself has benefited from this scheme, not really by working the finance and trade angles as by offering rich investors diversifying investments in high-end real estate.

None of this was really a secret when Trump was campaigning. To the extent he had concrete proposals, they were always aimed at making it easier for businesses, including banks, to screw over customers (and employees), policy consistent throughout his own long career. Given that's all he ever wanted to do, it's not just laziness for him to kick back and let the Republican Party policy wonks go crazy. It's not even clear that Trump cares about his signature anti-immigration stance. Sure, the hard-liners he's surrounded himself with have been able to keep him in line (although his occasional thrashing adds confusion to the issue, and thus far camouflage -- much ado last week about his seemingly generous offer on the "dreamers" wrapped up in numerous unpalatable demands).

Some scattered links this week:

  • Matthew Yglesias: The 4 most important politics stories of the week: The government reopened (until February 8, anyhow); Trump released his hostage demands; Mueller is working on obstruction of justice; Pennsylvania Republicans got some bad news: embattled Rep. Pat Meehan is retiring, and the Supreme Court ruled against a gerrymander map which gave Republicans a 13-5 House margin. Other Yglesias pieces this week:

  • Dean Baker: The Corporate Tax Cut Bonanza.

  • Jane Coaston: In 2008, Hillary Clinton's faith adviser was accused of sexual harassment -- and was kept on: More telling, his victim was reassigned. Still, for me the more shocking (at least more dispiriting) aspect of the story is that she had a "faith adviser." Didn't that sort of role go out of fashion with Rasputin?

  • Masha Gessen: At Davos -- and Always -- Donald Trump Can Only Think in the Present Tense: Notes that Trump managed to get through Davos without making any outrageous faux pas, while media ignored anything of longer-term import:

    Reading the U.S. media, you would think that all the attendees of Davos 2018 cared about was whether Donald Trump obeyed the teleprompter and sounded reasonably civilized while inviting the moneybags of the world to invest in the United States. [George] Soros's remarks got a bit of coverage, while the more visionary conversation seemed not to register at all. This shows how provincial we have become. Our chronic embarrassment -- or fear of embarrassment -- when it comes to our President may be a new phenomenon, but our lack of imagination is not. The American political conversation has long been based on outdated economic and social ideas, and now it's really showing.

    By the way, I haven't seen this in any piece on the web, but Seth Myers, in a subordinate clause, mentioned that no American president had attended Davos before Trump since 2000. That means the last US president to take advantage of the opportunity to pander before the global elites was . . . Bill Clinton. Even there, it's possible that the lame duck was more interested in lining up contributors to his future foundation than anything else. I think I actually recall a story about Clinton in Davos: if memory serves, he skipped out on the ill-fated Camp David negotiations between Barak and Arafat -- his inattention contributing to both failure and the breakout of the so-called Al-Aqsa Intifada following that failure. Should be some sort of cautionary tale, but it's probably true that Trump had nothing better that he was capable of doing.

    For more on what Soros had to say, see: John Cassidy: How George Soros Upstaged Donald Trump at Davos.

  • Ryan Grim/Lee Fang: The Dead Enders: "Candidates who signed up to battle Donald Trump must get past the Democratic Party first."

  • German Lopez: Marshall County, Kentucky, high school shooting: what we know: For starters, two dead, eighteen others injured. Among the factoids:

    • The shooting comes a day after another shooting at a high school in Italy, Texas, where a 16-year-old student shot a 15-year-old girl, who is now recovering from her injuries.
    • This part of Kentucky has seen school shootings in the past, the AP reported: "Marshall County High School is about 30 minutes from Heath High School in Paducah, Kentucky, where a 1997 mass shooting killed three and injured five."
    • So far in 2018, there have been at least 11 school shootings . . .

  • Kali Holloway: Trump isn't crazy, he's just a terrible person: Interview with Allen Frances, the psychiatrist who wrote the DSM entry on narcissistic personality disorder. Frances also has a more general book: Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump. Such a book could be interesting, but his answers in the interview don't guarantee that it will be.

  • Patrick Lawrence: Now the US is playing spoiler role in Korea, Syria and elsewhere. But why? News items include new, arbitrary and unilateral sanctions against North Korea and Russia, and an avowal to leave US troops in Syria after ISIS has been defeated (meaning, driven from its previous territory). One can think of other cases where the US is acting aggressive arbitrarily with no evident hope or interest in advancing a diplomatic solution. Trump's mandarins seem to regard diplomacy with such phobia they can't even imagine how to accept surrender, much less consider any form of compromise. On Syria, also see Patrick Cockburn: By Remaining in Syria the US Is Fuelling More Wars in the Middle East.

  • Charlie May: The Koch brothers are "all in" for 2018 with plans to spend up to $400 million: As Charles Koch said, "We've made more progress in the last five years than I had in the previous 50."

  • Sarah Okeson: Making the world safe for loan sharks: "Trump's consumer protection office helps payday loan companies exploit borrowers." Moreover, they don't even have to try changing the law. They can just stop enforcing it: Paul Kiel: Newly defanged, top consumer protection agency drops investigation of high-cost lender.

  • Andrew Prokop: Trump's attempt to fire Robert Mueller, explained: The event in question actually happened last June, when the White House counsel threatened to resign rather than carry out the order. Trump was subsequently talked down by White House staff. Strikes me as one of many cases where Trump's default position is to think he can do anything he wants -- even something which is not a very good idea. Very likely Trump ran into problems like that even before becoming president: businessmen routinely check with lawyers before carrying out their arbitrary whims, and probably get shot down a lot. So I wouldn't make a big deal out of this particular incident, but it does illustrate that Trump thinks he's above the law, and that could well turn into a problem. For more, see: Emily Stewart: Lindsey Graham: firing Mueller "would be the end" of the Trump presidency; Esme Cribb: Gowdy to GOP Colleagues: Mueller Is 'Fair' So 'Leave Him the Hell Alone'; Jeffrey Toobin: The Answer to Whether Trump Obstructed Justice Now Seems Clear.

  • Daniel Rodgers: The Uses and Abuses of "Neoliberalism", plus comments Julia Ott: Words Can't Do the Work for Us, Mike Konczal: How Ideology Works, NDB Connolly: A White Story, and Timothy Shenk: Jargon or Clickbait?, plus a reply by Rodgers. I haven't sorted through all of this, but Konczal is certainly right that there is a coherent and dangerous ideology there, even if the word "neoliberalism" isn't an especially good summation of it. My own experience with the word is largely conditioned by the following:

    • I first encountered the word as used by British leftists like David Harvey -- author of A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005); also see his interview, Neoliberalism Is a Political Project, Thinking Through David Harvey's Theorisation of Neoliberalism, and (more graphically) RSA Animate: Crises of Capitalism -- so it always struck me as an Anglicism, preconditioned by the fact that in British politics the Liberal party is distinct from Labour and rooted in 19th century laissez-faire. Similar liberals once existed in the US, but they generally made their peace with labor in the New Deal Democrats, while conservatives have turned "liberal" into a broad curse word meant to cover any and all leftist deviancies.
    • Granted, since the 1970s a faction of Democrats have wanted to stress both their traditional liberal beliefs and their opposition to social democracy/welfare state, usually combined with support for an aggressive anti-communist foreign policy. Some actually called themselves neoliberals. Later the term became useful to opponents for describing so-called New Democrats, with their eager support for business interests, globalization and ("humanitarian") interventionist foreign policy -- the Clintons, most obviously.
    • Meanwhile, a group which single-mindedly promoted an aggressive, hegemony-seeking foreign policy came to call themselves neoconservatives. While they tended to support conventional conservative causes in domestic policy, they frequently styled their prescriptions for other countries as neoliberalism -- presumably to give it a softer edge, although the agenda meant to impose austerity in government while liberating capital everywhere. For a while I was tempted to treat this as a unified ideology and call it "neoism."

  • Danny Sjursen: Wrong on Nam, Wrong on Terror: Reviews a long list of books about America's Vietnam War seeking to reverse in theory the actual results of the war: failure, withdrawal, and defeat. (One book he doesn't get around to is Max Boot: The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam.) Sjursen points out that many of today's prominent War on Terror architects became officers shortly after Vietnam, so their education was formed in understanding (or more often misunderstanding) that war's lessons. That should give them a head start in rewriting imaginary Wars on Terror -- you know, the kind where we get to win.

  • Matt Taibbi: How Donald Trump's Schizoid Administration Upended the GOP: Taibbi continues to worry about the health of our two-party system.

    Pre-trump, the gop was a brilliant if unlikely coalition -- a healthy heaping of silent-majority racial paranoia, wedded to redundant patriotism and Christian family values, in service of one-percenter policies that benefited exactly the demographic the average Republican voter hated most of all: Richie Rich city dwellers who embraced globalist economics, read The Economist and may even have been literally Jewish. In other words, Jared Kushner.

    Just 12 months later, all of those groups are now openly recoiling from one another with the disgusted vehemence of a bunch of strangers waking up in a pile after a particularly drunken and embarrassing keg party. Polls show that conservative Christians, saddled with a president who pays off porn stars and brags about grabbing women by the pussy, are finally, if slowly, slinking away from the Trump brand.

    Yacht-accident victim Rupert Murdoch and other GOP kingmakers are in a worse spot. They've watched in horror as once-obedient viewers shook off decades of Frankensteinian programming and went rogue. Since 2016, the audience has turned to the likes of Breitbart and Alex Jones' InfoWars for more purely distilled versions of the anti-government, anti-minority hysteria stations like Fox once pumped over the airwaves to keep old white people awake and agitated enough to watch the commercials. An October Harvard-Harris poll showed 61 percent of Republicans support Bannon's movement to unseat the Republican establishment. . . .

    A year into this presidency, in other words, the Republicans have become a ghost ship of irreconcilable voter blocs, piloted by a madman executive who's now proved he's too unstable to really represent any of them, and moreover drives party divisions wider every time he opens his mouth.

    Taibbi misunderestimates Republicans at all levels. For the base, it would be nice to think that they flocked to Trump over fifteen generic conservative clones because they wanted a candidate who would protect safety nets like Social Security, who would "drain the swamp" of moneyed special interests, who would avoid war, and who might even have the bold imagination to replace crappy Obamacare with single payer. You can find support for all those hopes in Trump's campaign blather, but if you paid more than casual attention you'd realize he was simply the biggest fraud of all. Rather, it's more likely that the base flocked to Trump because they recognized he was as confused and filled with kneejerk spite as they were. Where they misjudged him wasn't on policy; it was in thinking that as a billionaire he must be a functional, competent sociopath -- someone who could act coherently even with an agenda that made no sense.

    On the other hand, all the Republican donor establishment really wanted was a front man who could sell their self-interest to enough schmoes to seize power and cram their agenda through. While Trump wasn't ideal, they realized he had substantial appeal beyond what more reliable tools like Paul Ryan and Mike Pence could ever dream of. Perhaps some recognized the downside of running a flamboyant moron, but even so they've managed to overcome incredible embarrassments before and bounce right back: witness the Tea Party outburst and their triumphant 2010 election just two years after GW Bush oversaw the meltdown of the entire economy. So Trump proves to be a complete disaster? They'll steal what they can while they can, maybe lose an election, and bounce right back as if nothing that happened was ever their fault.

    For more on how they do this, see: Ari Berman: How the GOP Rigs Elections.

  • Rachel Wolfe: The awards for 2018's quintessentially American restaurants all went to immigrants.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, January 21, 2018

Weekend Roundup

This week marks the first anniversary of Trump's inauguration as president, or as we're more inclined to note: one year down, three more to go. Supporters like to tout the economy, especially the record high stock market -- something which affects few Americans, but at least partially reflects things Trump has actually done, like turning a blind eye to corruption, and slashing corporate tax rates. Supporters also point to low unemployment and marginal wage growth, two trends that started before Trump but at least he hasn't wrecked yet. Also, Trump's approval ratings have seen a slight uptick over the last month, but he is still way under water, with by far the worst ratings of any first-year president since they've been measuring. I'm not sure where Herbert Hoover ranks: by the end of his first year the stock market had crashed and the Great Depression started, but even three years later, with conditions worsening, Hoover's vote share was higher than Trump's approval ratings.

Perhaps economic indicators are overrated? Or maybe it's just that most people aren't feeling part of the much touted growth? What little wage growth there has been most likely gets sucked up by higher prices -- oil, for instance, is up sharply, while help like food stamps is being cut back. But most likely most of us have yet to be hit with the full impact of Trump's regulatory and tax shifts. Moreover, much of what Trump's minions have done over the last year simply increase risk -- something you may not notice and won't have to pay for until it's too late. The most obvious risk is war with North Korea, which hasn't happened but could break out with shocking speed. Other risks, like withdrawal from the Paris Accords on global warming, will necessarily play out slower, but could be even harder to reverse. In between, it's a pretty sure bet that increasing inequality and deregulation will create financial bubbles which will burst and turn into recession. Other instances of risk increase include EPA changes which will increase pollution, changes to Obamacare which will reduce the number of people insured, and continued reduction of educational opportunities -- as the future becomes ever more dependent on people with technical skills, those skills will become rarer (well, except for immigrants, but Trump's working on curtailing them too).

Some scattered links this week:

  • Matthew Yglesias: The government is shutting down because Donald Trump doesn't know what he's doing: The basic argument is that Trump precipitated the government shutdown by rescinding Obama's DACA order, setting the enforcement clock at six months to provide pressure on Congress to do something. However, the Republicans who run Congress don't want to do anything, and their opposition makes it impossible for Democrats to advance any legislation, even when it has support of most Americans and enough Republicans to create a majority. There's little reason to think Democrats would choose to disrupt government simply to force action on DACA, but for twenty years now Republicans have routinely used the threat of shutdown to coerce concessions, and even now they have various schemes up their sleeves -- Trump, in particular, saw this as an opportunity to sneak funding for his Great Wall through. As Yglesias points out, Trump has made this worse by being totally unclear about his own goals and intentions.

    Other Yglesias pieces:

    • Trump's biggest weakness is on regular policy issues.

      And that's the reality of Trumpism. His immigration policies are contrary to the tangible interests of most Americans, and all the rest of his policies are too. Here are a few policy stories from January alone:

      • Trump is opening coastal waters to offshore drilling, even in states whose Republican governors don't want it (to say nothing of states whose Democratic governors don't).
      • Trump's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced plans to go easier on payday lenders with new, laxer rules down the road and generous waivers immediately.
      • Trump also offered waivers from full regulatory sanctions for a bunch of banks that have been convicted of crimes, including the German giant Deutsche Bank, to which he is personally in debt.
      • Three-quarters of the National Parks Advisory Board quit, citing Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke's "inexcusable" stewardship of precious natural resources.
      • We learned that America has 3.2 million more uninsured people than it did a year ago despite a growing economy, as the Trump administration rolls out a broad suite of Medicaid cuts.

      It's a fallacy to think that Trump's various antics are a deliberate effort to distract attention from these policy issues. A president who was capable of planning and executing a political master plan wouldn't be looking at a 39 percent approval rating amid good economic conditions.

      It is true, however, that discussing Trump primarily as a personality, a media phenomenon, and a locus of culture war politics puts a kind of floor under his support. By contrast, there's basically no constituency at all for Trump's anti-Medicaid agenda, with only 22 percent of Republicans saying they want to see cuts to the program.

    • Donald Trump's terrifying plan to win the 2018 midterms.

    • Congressional Republicans think Donald Trump's sloth and ignorance is a feature, not a bug: "A weak, easy-to-manipulate president is what they want." A nice rundown here of recent cases where Trump started to zag off course only to have his Republican minders turn him around.

    Some other links on the shutdown:

    A couple more thoughts, which occurred to me while reading Krugman but nothing specific there. The constitutional system of checks and balances was set up before anyone had any inkling that there would be political parties, much less that party blocs could distort or even scam the system. The first such flaw was made obvious by the 1800 election, and was quickly patched over by amendment. But later flaws have been harder to fix, especially when becomes committed to exploiting a flaw -- e.g., the Republicans have elected four minority presidents since 1860, versus zero for the Democrats. Up into the 1980s there was a fair amount of bipartisan trading in Congress, mostly because both parties had overlapping minorities -- liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. Since then, Republicans have captured nearly every right- (or center-) leaning Democratic constituency, and Republicans have adopted internal caucus rules that encourage block voting. After 2008, Republicans took advantage of every parliamentary trick Congress (especially the Senate) had to obstruct efforts by the Democrats -- getting their way almost all of the time. Now, with razor-thin majorities in Congress, they expect to get their way all of the time, even when they're trying to pass enormously unpopular programs -- something they have no qualms or inhibitions about. Those checks always favored inaction over change, which generally suited conservatives, but for the nonce seems about the only recourse Democrats have left, lest the Republicans complete their destruction of liberal democracy -- if the stakes were less you'd never see Democrats holding out anywhere near as tenaciously as Republicans did against Obama.

    The other thing I've noticed is that the Republicans have really mastered the art of being the opposition party, obstructing and haranguing the Democrats and, given the public's deep cynicism about politicians, they've managed to avoid any responsibility for their role in Washington dysfunction. I suspect that one reason Trump won was that the American people wanted to spare themselves another four years of relentless Clinton-bashing. On the other hand, what's worked so well in opposition has done nothing to prepare the Republicans for ruling responsibly. Rather, they've kept up the same old demagoguery, the only difference being that as the party in power they find it more profitable to sell off favors. A year ago some significant number of voters evidently believed that Clinton would be more corrupt than Trump -- either because Trump had no track record in politics, or because the Clinton had faithfully served their donors for decades. What this past year has proven is that Trump has not only taken over the swamp, he's made it more fetid than ever.

  • Kate Aronoff: Stunning Special Election in Wisconsin Shows Scott Walker's Foxconn Deal Isn't the Political Winner It Was Sold As: A state senate district Trump won by 20 points just elected a Democrat.

  • Anna Maria Barry-Jester: There's Been a Massive Shift to the Right in the Immigration Debate: Headline's a bit overstated. What's happened is that between Trump and the anti-immigrant faction of the Republican Party, it's become much harder to get any sort of immigration reform passed. Meanwhile, the pro-immigration faction of the Democratic Party has been forced into a corner, fighting a rear-guard battle to salvage immigration hopes for the most broadly popular segment (the "Dreamers"), often at the expense of others. But underlying views haven't shifted so much, if at all -- indeed, it's possible that the public as a whole is moving slightly more pro-immigrant, in part in reaction to Trump and his racist outbursts.

  • Nathan Heller: Estonia, the Digital Republic: By far the most successful of the former SSRs. Evidently, a big part of their success is how extensively they've "gone digital," wiring the country together and making government open and accessible through those wires. Sample sentence: "Many ambitious techies I met in Tallinn, though, were leaving industry to go work for the state." -- Which is to say, for the public. A lot of this has long seemed possible, but isn't done in the US because the essential degree of trust is inevitably lacking in a system with predatory capitalism and a coercive police state. But a tiny country on the Baltic which twenty years ago was dirt poor can get it together. Interesting.

  • Elizabeth Kolbert: The Psychology of Inequality: Reports on various sociological and psychological studies into how people think about inequality, mostly as summarized by Keith Payne in his book The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die. One thing I've noticed from extensive reading about increasing inequality is that it's easy to recite the numbers that show what's happening with money, but it's much harder to translate those numbers to changes to human lives -- and simply fleshing them out with examples still doesn't seem to work. These studies, in and of themselves, may not be convincing either, but (like the statistics) they help frame the problem. An important piece.

  • Mark Joseph Stern: An Awful Ruling From One of Trump's Worst Judicial Appointees: "John K Bush's opinion in Peffer v. Stephens will let the police ransack almost any suspect's home." Remember, Trump's judges will be around much longer than he will. Just another long-term consequence of a blind, ignorant, stupid decision last November.

  • Matt Taibbi: Forget the Memo -- Can We Worry About the Banks? Also on that memo, see Glenn Greenwald/Jon Schwarz: Republicans Have Four Easy Ways to #ReleaseTheMemo.

  • Robin Wright: One Year In, Trump's Middle East Policy Is Imploding: This makes it sound more coherent than it ever was:

    Trump had four goals in the Middle East when he came into office, beginning with energizing the peace process. The second was wrapping up the war against the Islamic State launched by his predecessor, in 2014. The third was checking Iran's influence in the region and wringing out new concessions on its nuclear program. The fourth was deepening support for a certain type of Arab leader, notably Egypt's President, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, and the Saudi royal family.

    Moreover, the people tasked with these jobs (e.g., Jared Kushner), show how little care or thought went into the plan. Actually, you could reduce these four ventures into a single directive: do whatever pro-Israeli donors tell you to do. Israel-Palestine peace prospects have been a complete bust, and Trump's vow to remember who voted against the US at the UN will further strain relationships. Even with Trump's full support, the Saudis' adventures are bogged down everywhere. Trump's sniping at Iran has provoked protests, but none of the other parties want to break or change the deal, and there is no evidence that Iran is in violation of it. The war against ISIS may seem like more of a success: the US has helped to drive ISIS out of Iraq and its major strongholds in Syria, but that just means that the conditions that allowed ISIS to emerge -- the power vacuum in Syria and the sectarian regime in Iraq -- have been reset. Maybe if Trump had negotiated a resolution to Syria's civil war the former ISIS area would stabilize, but Trump and Tillerson have failed to negotiate a single treaty -- indeed, they don't seem to have any desire, inclination or skill to do so. The result is that not just in the Middle East but everywhere US relations with world powers have become more strained and dangerous.

    For more on Yemen, see: Nicolas Niarchos: How the U.S. Is Making the War in Yemen Worse.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, January 14, 2018

Weekend Roundup

After Trump made his "shit-hole countries" comment, Matt Taibbi asked on Twitter whether any president had previously said anything comparable. Not sure what he found out. My own first thought was that Thomas Jefferson probably said something less succinct but roughly equivalent about Haiti, and such views were probably very common among American politicians -- certainly as long as slaveholders remained in power, and probably much later. Indeed, GW Bush's critique of "nation building" was pointedly directed at Haiti, and the Clinton operation Bush so disparaged was primarily instigated to stem the influx of refugees from Haiti's dictatorship. (Indeed, it was Clinton who converted Guantanamo from a navy base into a prison "holding tank" for Haitian refugees.)

But I do want to share one example I picked up from a tweet (by Remi Brulin). This is evidently from a transcript of a conversation between Nixon and Kissinger, from May 4, 1972:

President: I'll see that the United States does not lose. I'm putting it quite bluntly. I'll be quite precise. South Vietnam may lose. But the United States cannot lose. Which means, basically, I have made my decision. Whatever happens to South Vietnam, we are going to cream North Vietnam. . . . For once, we've got to use the maximum power of this country . . . against this shit-ass little country, to win the war. . . . The only place where you and I disagree . . . is with regard to the bombing. You're so goddamned concerned about the civilians and I don't give a damn. I don't care.

Kissinger: I'm concerned about the civilians because I don't want the world to be mobilized against you as a butcher . . .

Some scattered links this week:

  • Matthew Yglesias: The 4 most important stories in politics this week: Trump scuttled a DACA deal; CHIP got cheaper but still didn't pass; Trump said some things; Arizona's Senate race heated up. Other Yglesias posts:

    • Arizona's already very complicated Senate race, explained.

    • Tuesday's DACA negotiation stunt showed how dangerously we've lowered the bar for Trump.

      There's something more than a little pointless about the mental fitness debate. Trump is, for better or worse, now pursuing an utterly orthodox Republican Party approach on every policy issue under the sun. Ultimately, Trump's slothful work habits and boundless incuriosity are more a problem for that party's leaders than for anyone else. If their considered judgment is that this policy agenda is better pursued by a lazy, ignorant cable news addict than by Mike Pence, that's really their problem.

      The agenda itself, however, is a problem. . . .

      On a policy level, however, Ike Brannon and Logan Albright of the Cato Institute have concluded that "deporting the approximately 750,000 people currently in the DACA program would be over $60 billion to the federal government along with a $280 billion reduction in economic growth over the next decade."

      Of course, there is no realistic way that all 750,000 DACA recipients will be deported, but losing legal authorization to live and work in the United States will hurt them nonetheless by forcing them out of the legitimate labor market and into the shadows. A report compiled this summer by the Center for American Progress concluded that obtaining DACA protection raised recipients' wages by 69 percent on average, and it stands to reason that losing it would cause a large-scale reversal with concomitant negative effects for GDP growth, productivity, and tax collection.

      With the economy finally enjoying low unemployment (as Trump likes to brag), there is no conceivable upside to deporting a large group of young, well-educated workers who are contributing meaningfully to the American economy. Which is precisely why Republicans keep teasing their willingness to offer them some legislative relief. But instead of doing the right thing for the country, the GOP is hung up on the idea of using the DACA issue as leverage to jam up the Democrats and either extract some concessions on other immigration issues or force the party into an internecine argument about whether they are doing enough for the DREAMers.

    • Trump is mad that "Sneaky Dianne Feinstein" debunked a key Republican theory on Trump and Russia.

    • Newly released Senate testimony debunks a key conservative theory on Trump and Russia.

    • Donald Trump's phony war with the press, explained.

    • Filing your taxes on a postcard isn't going to happen.

  • Thomas Frank: Paul Krugman got the working class wrong. That had consequences: Frank's been pushing a line about how white blue-collar workers have been flocking to the Republican Party at least since his 2004 book What's the Matter With Kansas?, while Krugman has preferred to point out that base support for the Republicans comes from above-average income families. I've tended to agree with Krugman on this for two reasons: one is that the data generally shows support for Republicans -- even Trump -- is more upscale; the other is that I've felt that the urban professionals Democrats have tried to appeal to lately have been too quick to discard or ignore the white working class, and this blunts their understanding of inequality. Still, if the trend has gotten worse -- and Trump's election argues that it has -- this is largely because Frank is right about the corrosive effects of the New Democrats' appeal to urban elitism. Moreover, it matters not just because it's cost the Democrats some critical elections; it's one problem that would be relatively straightforward to fix. For instance, see: Joan C Williams: Liberal elite, it's time to strike a deal with the working class.

  • Greg Grandin: The Death Cult of Trumpism:

    Trump won by running against the entire legacy of the postwar order: endless war, austerity, "free trade," unfettered corporate power, and inequality. A year into his tenure, the war has expanded, the Pentagon's budget has increased, and deregulation has accelerated. Tax cuts will continue the class war against the poor, and judicial and executive-agency appointments will increase monopoly rule.

    Unable to offer an alternative other than driving the existing agenda forward at breakneck speed, Trumpism's only chance at political survival is to handicap Earth's odds of survival. Trump leverages tribal resentment against an emerging manifest common destiny, a true universalism that recognizes that we all share the same vulnerable planet. He stokes an enraged refusal of limits, even as those limits are recognized. "We're going to see the end of the world in our generation," a coal-country voter said in a recent Politico profile, explaining what he knows is his dead-end support for Trump.

  • Glenn Greenwald: The Same Democrats Who Denounce Donald Trump as a Lawless, Treasonous Authoritarian Just Voted to Give Him Vast Warrantless Spying Powers: The House passed a bill to renew NSA's warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens, rejecting an amendment to at least require a warrant. Among the bill's backers were Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic leadership, including many who have spent much of the last year arguing that Trump is in league with Putin. For more, see: John Nichols: Democratic Defections Allow an Assault on Civil Liberties to Pass the House.

  • Sean Illing: Richard Rorty's prescient warnings for the American left: Rorty died in 2007, and this is mostly picked up from his 1998 book Achieving Our Country, a time when what was probably America's largest "left" organization, Move On, was preoccupied with defending President Bill Clinton from impeachment charges based on lies about his consensual but inappropriate sex with a White House intern. That wasn't what you'd call a high water point for the American left. Sure, we might have found ourselves in the same lame position in 2017 had Hillary Clinton been elected president, but while her loss has been a setback for mainstream liberals, it has done wonders to clarify why we need a principled and ambitious left. As such, events have rendered Rorty's book obsolete. Two problems here: first is that Rorty's task -- to explain why the left in America had become atrophied and ineffective -- has been rendered academic by the renascent left; and second, his answer turns out not to have been a very good one. He tries to argue that the problem is that the "reformist left," which had accomplished so many important reforms from 1900 to 1964, gave way to a "cultural left," which abandoned effective politics as it retreated into academia to focus on cultural matters. He starts critiquing the latter by charging that the new left was hostile to "anyone opposed to communism -- including Democrats, union workers, and technocrats." Makes you wonder whether he was paying any attention at all: in the first place, what distinguished the new left from the old was its rejection of the Soviet Union (and its Trotskyite and Maoist critics) as the model and exemplar of socialism. Still, it is true that the new left were critical of US practice in the Cold War -- especially the practice of Democratic Party leaders like presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson. The all-important fact is that the fundamental directive of the Cold War was to undermine labor and anti-colonial movements around the world and ultimately within the US itself. The fact is that Democrats failed to support unions as business waged an unrelenting struggle to contain, cripple, and roll back labor even well before the new left -- and even more so when the New Democrats rose under Reagan and ruled with Clinton.

    I'm getting rather tired of people blaming "the left" for the rise of the right since the late 1970s. The left has never come anywhere near the levers of power in the US. At best, the labor movement in the 1930s, civil rights in the 1960s, antiwar and environment and women in the 1970s, prodded establishment liberals into making some reforms to calm down the challenge. And while Democrats have enjoyed brief periods of power from Carter in 1977 through Obama in 2016, the ones in power have done damn little to advance the quintessential left positions: toward more equality, peace, and freedom.

  • Jonathan M Katz: This is how ignorant you have to be to call Haiti a 'shithole': After overthrowing slavery in 1804, and defeating a force sent by Napoleon to reclaim the colony. France demanded "reparations" in 1825, effectively bankrupting Haiti for the rest of the 19th century. After that, the Americans entered, invading Haiti in 1915 and occupying the country until 1934, returning periodically through CIA coups and other acts, with full-scale military invasions in 1994 and 2004.

    Some more relevant links here:

  • Mike Konczal: 3 Reasons Why Republicans Will Let the Rich Abuse the Tax Code. Also by Konczal: Trump Is Creating a Grifter Economy.

  • Andrew Prokop: Wall Street Journal: Trump's lawyer arranged for $130,000 in hush money for an ex-porn star.

  • Corey Robin: If authoritarianism is looming in the US, how come Donald Trump looks so weak? Offers a cautionary note on the temptation to compare Trump to Hitler, that other notorious racist demagogue who came into power through a crooked back door deal. As Robin points out, the big difference is that a year after seizing power Hitler had consolidated his control to the point where he had thousands of opponents locked up in concentration camps, whereas Trump's most public opponents headline high-rating television shows and are looking forward to massive election wins later this year. Maybe you can liken ICE under Trump to the Gestapo, but their charter is so limited few Americans give them a second thought. I have no doubt but that the Republican Party, with its gerrymanders and voter suppression and psychological research and propaganda machine, has taken a profoundly anti-democratic turn -- I've been reading Nancy McLean's brilliant and deeply disturbing Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America -- and I'm sure Trump would score very high on Theodor Adorno's F-Scale (a measure of "authoritarian personality" developed right after WWII). And, sure, MAGA has overtones similar to Thousand-Year Reich, but Republicans are more interested in smashing and stripping the state than building it up its power. Trump may blunder his way into nuclear war, but he isn't about to conquer the world. Trump's nationalism is peculiarly hollow. Even his racism comes off more as bad manners than as a coherent belief. I'm not one to belittle how much real damage he is doing, but we shouldn't overstate it either. Still, I'm extra worried about his threats because America has already suffered (even if survived) a long series of Republican malefactors, whose repeated depredations have contributed to the toll Trump adds to. Robin does us a service to quoting Philip Roth on Nixon in 1974:

    Of course there have been others as venal and lawless [as Richard Nixon] in American politics, but even a Joe McCarthy was more identifiable as human clay than this guy is. The wonder of Nixon (and contemporary America) is that a man so transparently fraudulent, if not on the edge of mental disorder, could ever have won the confidence and approval of a people who generally require at least a little something of the 'human touch' in their leaders.

  • Tierney Sneed: How Kris Kobach Has Created a Giant Headache for the Trump Administration.

  • Emily Stewart: Hawaii's missile scare "reminds us how precarious the nuclear age is": For nearly a year now Trump and Kim Jong Un have been taunting one another about nuclear war, setting an ominous context for Saturday's false alarm of a "ballistic missilb threat inbound to Hawaii." Also see (posted before the Hawaii event) Robert Andersen/Martin J Sherwin: Nuclear war became more likely this week -- here's why.

    Stewart also wrote: Gamer who made "swatting" call over video game dispute now facing manslaughter charges: This is a local Wichita story. While I believe that the guy who called in the false report that resulted in deployment of a SWAT team and the killing of a totally innocent man is some kind of criminal act, there's been no mention in the local press whatsoever of the SWAT cop who actually fired the shot. The fact that only one cop fired underscores how unclear it was that anyone needed to shoot. I've also seen no discussion of whether it's reasonable policy to dispatch an entire SWAT team to a situation where there has been no on-site investigation to determine that such a response is appropriate -- in this case it clearly wasn't. Speaking of Wichita, also note this story: Wichita Police Officer's Shot Misses Dog, Injures Girl. This was in response to a "domestic dispute," but the man and woman weren't even in the room when, for some unexplained reason (or, I suppose, none) a cop decided to shoot the dog. He missed, the bullet richocheted, and the girl was hit.

  • More fallout from Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury:

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, January 7, 2018

Weekend Roundup

Started collecting the Yglesias links and Taibbi on Wolff last night, and this is as far as I got today. Of Yglesias' big four stories, I left oil drilling, anti-pot enforcement, and the Pakistan aid cut on the floor: mostly didn't run across anything very good on those subjects, although that's partly because it seems like my source trawling has taken a big hit (especially since Paul Woodward's WarInContext went on hiatus). That leaves a bunch on the Wolff book, the unseemly end of the Kobach Commission, and some Iran links. Oh, and dumb Trump tricks, but that's a gimme.

Of the missing stories (and, of course, there are many more than the "known unknowns"), the break with Pakistan seems likely to be most fateful. Americans have bitched since 2002 that they're not getting their money's worth in Pakistan, but Pervez Musharraf's turn against the Taliban was never popular there, especially with the ISI, and only a combination of sticks and carrots made the move at all palatable. It remains to be seen whether Trump removing the carrots will tip the balance, but renewed Pakistani support for the Taliban could make the US stake in Afghanistan much more precarious -- at worst it might provoke a major US escalation there, with pressure to attack Pakistan's border territories ("sanctuaries"), with a real risk of igniting a much larger conflagration. Probably won't come to that, but Pakistan is a country with more than 200 million people, with a large diaspora (especially in the UK), with nuclear weapons, with a military which has fought three major wars with India and remains more than a little paranoid on that front.

The reasonable solution for Arghanistan is to try to negotiate some sort of loose federation which allows the Taliban to share power, especially in the Pashtun provinces where it remains popular, while the US military exits gracefully. This is unlikely to happen because the Trump administration has no clue how diplomacy works and no desire to find out. Pakistan could be a useful intermediary, so cutting them out seems like a short-sighted move. But it is a trademark Trump move: rash, unconsidered, prone to violence with no regard for consequences; cf. Syria, Libya, Somalia, Palestine, North Korea. It's only a matter of time before one of those bites back hard.

Same is basically true of the offshore oil leases, but probably on a slower time schedule. It will take several years before anyone starts drilling, and there will be a lot of litigation along the way. But eventually some of those offshore rigs will blow up and spread oil all over tourist beaches in Florida and/or California. Some people will make money, at least short-term, and some will be hit with losses in the longer term, but at least it will mostly be money. That matters a lot to Trump, but less so to you and me.

Less clear what the marijuana prosecution impact will be. In theory Sessions just kicked the ball down to local US attorneys, who can choose to prosecute cases or not. But a year ago Sessions initiated a purge and replaced all of Obama's prosecutors with his own, so it's likely that at least some of them will take the bait and try to make names for themselves. Meanwhile, politicization of the Department of Justice keeps ratcheting up. Trump and Congressional Republicans have renewed attacks on Sessions for failing to protect Trump from the Mueller investigation, and they've gone further to question the political loyalties of the FBI. Meanwhile the courts are increasingly being filled up with Republican hacks. The net result of all this is that people on all sides are coming to view "justice" in America as a vehicle of partisan patronage. It's going to be hard to restore trust in law once it's been abused so severely by goons like Trump and Sessions.

I haven't written much about the whole Russia situation. A big part early on was the fear that neocons were just using it to whip up a new cold war, which is something they were very keen on at least as early as 2001, when Bush took office and Yeltsin gave way to Putin. With his KGB background, it's always been easy to paint Putin as bearing Cold War grudges, even more so as a master of underhanded tactics -- most egregiously, I think, in his reopening of the Chechen War. The Cold War was very good for the defense industry, and generally bad for the American people (as well as many others around the world), so I regard any effort to reignite it as dastardly.

The neocons had modest success doing so during the Obama years, especially with recent sanctions in response to the Russia annexing Crimea and, allegedly, supporting separatists in eastern Ukraine. Hillary Clinton was especially vociferous at Russia-baiting, so it was no surprise that Putin favored her opponent. Trump himself had pitched numerous business ventures to Russian oligarchs, so he must have seemed to Putin like someone to deal with. Indeed, there seems to have been mutual attraction between many Republicans and Putin, possibly based on the former's admiration of strong men and contempt for democracy. It's worth noting that Russia is the only country where the ultra-rich have profited more inequally since 2000 than the United States.

The second major reason for resisting the post-election claims of Russian interference has been how it was used by Clinton dead-enders as an excuse for losing the 2016 election. Their desperation to blame anyone but the candidate has blinded them to the real lessons of the campaign's failure. (Presumably I don't need to reiterate them here.) A third reason, I reckon, is the hypocrisy of blaming Russia while ignoring Israel's much more pervasive involvement in US elections: I've seen numerous liberals describe Trump as "Putin's bitch" (most recently in Dawn Oberg's song, "Nothing Rhymes With Orange"), but if Trump's anyone's bitch, it's Netanyahu's (or more directly, Sheldon Adelson's -- who, as Philip Weiss notes in the link below put more money into the campaign than Trump himself did).

On the other hand, the "Russiagate" story is sticking, and lately the focus has shifted to culprits one feels no sympathy whatsoever for. The problem isn't really collusion: Trump's people were very sloppy about their meetings with Russians, but they were sloppy and inept in pretty much everything they did. On the other hand, it sure looks like they would have colluded had they figured out how, and they were aware enough that they were overstepping bounds to lie about it afterwards -- greatly increasing their culpability. It's also clear that Flynn and Manafort had their own Russian deals, which wound up looking worse than they initially were after they joined the campaign.

What Russia actually did to tilt the election toward Trump wasn't much -- certainly cost-wise it's a small drop in the ocean of money agents working for Adelson and the Kochs spent to get Trump elected. It would be a mistake to play up Russia's hacking genius, just as one shouldn't underestimate the effect of AFP's grassroots organizing. Elections are run in a crooked world -- even more so since the Citizens United ruling unlocked all that "dark money" -- but one thing that Clinton really can't complain about is not having enough money to compete.

On the other hand, what "Russiagate" is making increasingly clear is the utter contempt that Donald Trump and (increasingly) the whole Republican Party have for law, justice, truth, and fairness. I don't hold any fondness for James Comey, whose own handling of the Clinton email server case was shameless political hackery, and I've actively disliked Robert Mueller for decades -- ever since he prosecuted that ridiculous Ohio 7 sedition case (which my dear friend, the late Elizabeth Fink, was a successful defense counsel on). But Trump's interference in their jobs has been blatantly self-serving -- if not technically obstruction of justice easily conveying that intent. We seem to only be a short matter of time until Trump's contempt becomes too blatant to ignore, and while I doubt that will phase his Republican enablers or his most fervently blinkered base, it should at least help bury his awful political agenda.

Meanwhile, here are some other ways Trump has stunk up last week:

  • Matthew Yglesias: Trump's week of feuds with Bannon, Pakistan, marijuana smokers, and ocean waters, explained: Trump broke ties with Steve Bannon; Trump opened up huge areas to offshore drilling; Trump is cracking down on marijuana; Trump is cutting off aid to Pakistan. Trump breaking with Bannon doesn't amount to much, but Bannon will struggle for a while without the Mercers' money. Basically what happened there was that Bannon's always been a side bet for them, useful for electing Trump but unnecessary with Trump in office, able to further their graft. The oil drilling story is a prime example of graft under Trump, while the other two are cases where ideology and arrogance threaten to blow things up. Other Yglesias stories:

    • The Steele dossier, explained, with Andrew Prokop.

    • Cory Gardner showed how Senate Republicans could check Trump if they wanted to.

    • 2018 is the year that will decide if Trumpocracy replaces American democracy: Two takeaway points here: one is that despite all of the chaos surrounding him, Trump has consolidated effective power within the Republican Party, such that opposing him in any significant way marks one has a heretic and traitor; the second is that if Republicans are not rebuffed in the 2018 elections Trump's control will harden and become even more flagrant and dangerous. Yglesias gets a little carried away on the latter point, at one point noting that "even Adolf Hitler was dismissed by many as a buffoon" -- Trump's megalomania is comparatively fickle and suffused with greed, making African dictators like Idi Amin and Mobutu closer role models. He also fails to note the key point: that in all substantive respects, it was Trump who surrendered to the orthodox Republicans. Trump didn't bend anyone to his will; he merely proved himself to be a useful tool of movement conservatism, which in turn agreed to provide him cover for his personal graft. In some ways, this makes the Republicans more vulnerable in 2018, if Democrats can convince voters that the Party and the President are one.

    • The scary reality behind Trump's long Tuesday of weird tweets: "He's relying on Fox News for all his information." Of course, that was equally true before he became president. Back during the campaign, I noted that he didn't engage in didn't follow Republican custom in couching his racism in "dog whistle" terms because he wasn't a "whistler," he was a "dog." Among Republican rank-and-file, his lack of subtlety and cleverness was taken as authenticity and conviction, even though he merely echoed the coarseness he heard on Fox. Of course, one might reasonably expect a responsible statesman to seek out more reliable information, even if as a politician he chooses to bend it to his own purposes. But Trump lacks such skills, and would probably just get confused trying to sort out the truth. Sticking with Fox no doubt makes his life easier, but makes ours more dangerous.

  • Esme Cribb: Trump: 'Ronald Reagan Had the Same Problem' as Me With 'Fake News': Actually, Reagan had the same problem with facts, with truth, although even Reagan knew when to throw in the towel. After all, what was his Iran-Contra quote? "A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not." As Matt Taibbi notes (see link below), Reagan was cognitively impaired well before he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's: e.g., the CIA used to shoot movies to brief Reagan on world leaders, finding that the only way to get his attention. Still, no previous president has shown so little regard for facts or so much hostility to honest investigation so early in his term as Trump. While it's possible that age-related cognitive impairment may contribute to this, it strikes me as overly charitable to blame mental illness. From early on, Trump was a liar and scoundrel, a spoiled one given his inherited wealth, and he's only gotten worse as he's gotten caught up in his many intrigues.

    Josh Marshall (see Is President Trump Mentally Ill? It Doesn't Matter) adds this comment:

    All the diagnosis of a mental illness could tell us is that Trump might be prone to act in ways that we literally see him acting in every day: impulsive, erratic, driven by petty aggressions and paranoia, showing poor impulsive control, an inability to moderate self-destructive behavior. He is frequently either frighteningly out of touch with reality or sufficiently pathological in his lying that it is impossible to tell. Both are very bad.

  • John Feffer: Trump and Neocons Are Exploiting an Iran Protest Movement They Know Nothing About: I don't doubt that most Iranians have good reason to assemble and protest against their government, indeed their entire political system, and indeed as an American I sympathize with the rights of people everywhere to organize and petition their governments for change. But Washington pols habitually play their kneejerk games, touting dissent against so-called enemies while overlooking suppression of dissent by so-called allies, showing their own motives to be wholly cynical. Thus, American support for protests in Iran immediately taints those protesters as pro-American and anti-Iranian. (Nor are we just talking about Trump, who has become little more than an Israeli-Saudi puppet on Iran; Hillary Clinton was also quick to support the Iranian masses against theocracy, jumping to the conclusion that their goals are the same as her own.) For more, see Trita Parsi: These Are the Real Causes of the Iran Protests; Simon Tisdall: Iran unrest: it's the economy, stupid, not a cry for freedom or foreign plotters; and Sanam Vakil: How Donald Trump's tweets help Iran's supreme leader.

  • German Lopez: Trump has disbanded his voter fraud commission, blaming state resistance and Trump's voter fraud commission, explained: Presidential commissions have long been a method for addressing matters of broad and/or deep concern. Lyndon Johnson, for instance, convened two of the more famous ones: the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the Kerner Commission on domestic violence (i.e., the "race riots" of 1965-68). They've rarely proved very satisfactory, although the commission investigating the Challenger NASA disaster (famously including physicist Richard Feynman) did appear to get to the bottom of the story. But Obama's sop to the deficit hawks, the Simpson-Bowles commission, proved to be biased and useless. There were some suggestions that Trump should have appointed a commission to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election, but (not by choice) he wound up with a special prosecutor instead. One area where a commission might be useful would be to look into immigration laws and patterns, to try to clear away many of the popular myths on the subject, and try to come up with a sensible balance between all the competing interests and views. (Of course, had Trump done that, he would have stacked the deck supporting his own prejudices, thereby losing any possibility of building consensus.) Instead, the one (and only) problem Trump decided to be worthy of a presidential commission was the vanishingly tiny question of voter fraud. This was widely viewed as a vehicle for Kansas Secretary of State (and ALEC busybody) Kris Kobach, who appeared on Trump's doorstep with a folder full of schemes -- this appears to be the one that struck Trump's fancy: as the article makes clear, "the voter fraud myth has been used repeatedly to suppress voters." And few things have been more evident over recent decades than Republican efforts to undermine the popular vote. Indeed, that makes perfect sense, given that the Republican agenda heaps favors on the rich and powerful while undermining the vast majority -- people who could rise up and vote them out of office if only the Democrats offered a credible alternative.

  • Jeff Sparrow: Milo Yiannopoulos's draft and the role of editors in dealing with the far-right.

  • Michael Wolff: Donald Trump Didn't Want to Be President: An excerpt from Wolff's new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Amazon's #1 bestseller and the talk of Washington (except on Fox News) this past week. The excerpt runs from election night to a few months past inauguration -- Priebus and Bannon are still on board at the end, but probably not Flynn -- but the title focuses on election night, when "the unexpected trend" shook Trump, who "looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears -- and not of joy."

    Some other pieces on the book:

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, January 1, 2018

Weekend Roundup

As 2017 ends, I'm reminded of how sick to my stomach I was election night 2016 -- I normally stay up past 4AM, so pretty much the whole weight of the catastrophe was clear before I tried to sleep. At that point I could predict a whole series of unfortunate future events. In that regard, I haven't been especially surprised by what Trump and the Republicans have done in 2017. They've pretty much lived up to the threat they clearly posed -- the main surprises coming in the form of comic excess, like cabinet secretaries Betsy DeVos, Rick Perry, and Ben Carson. Trump himself has proven to be even more of a bloviating buffoon than he was during the campaign. And his scatterbrained reign is succeeding in one important respect where Hillary Clinton's campaign failed: through his own ineptness, he's making it clear that the real threat to most Americans these days comes from regular Republicans. One shouldn't get overoptimistic that Democrats will capitalize on that point with a resounding electoral win in 2018, but that's not as much of a fantasy as it was a year ago when Clinton et al. snatched defeat from what should have been a clearcut victory.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Umair Irlan/Brian Resnick: Megadisasters devastated America this year. They're going to get worse. The big ticket items were hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, but floods, droughts, tornadoes, wildfires, and other severe weather took their toll.

    Requests for federal disaster aid jumped tenfold compared to 2016, with 4.7 million people registering with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

    As of October, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had counted 15 disasters with damages topping $1 billion, tying 2017 with 2011 for the most billion-dollar disasters in a year to date. And that was before the California wildfires.

    Many people reflexively blame these disasters on climate change, and there is evidence that some of that is true -- the piece looks at several such arguments. But the price tag is also rising due to increasing development, and also due to infrastructure neglect -- the Puerto Rican power grid the most obvious example. The other big question (not really raised here) is what happens if/when government fails to cope with disaster costs. Unfortunately, we're bound to find out the hard way.

  • Fred Kaplan: The UN Vote on Jerusalem Was a Dramatic Rebuke to Trump That He Brought on Himself: The UN voted 128-9 (with 35 abstentions) to "declare null and void the United States' recent recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel." The US (Trump and Nikki Haley) responded by throwing a hissy fit:

    The rebuke is amplified by the fact that Trump had announced the day before that he would revoke financial aid for any country that voted for the resolution. "Let them vote against us," he said at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday. "We'll save a lot. We don't care. But this isn't like it used to be where they could vote against you and then you pay them hundreds of millions of dollars. We're not going to be taken advantage of any longer."

    Trump's U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, wrote a letter to other delegates, warning, "The U.S. will be taking names" during the roll call. "As you consider your vote," she elaborated, "I encourage you to know the president and the U.S. take this vote personally. She then tweeted, "At the UN we're always asked to do more and give more. So, when we make a decision, at the will of the American ppl, abt where to locate OUR embassy, we don't expect those we've helped to target us." . . .

    The countries that voted for the resolution -- or, as Trump sees it, against him -- include four of the five biggest recipients of U.S. aid: Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, and Jordan. They also include countries that Trump has courted since taking office -- Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and Vietnam. They also include every country in Western Europe, though Trump might not care about that.

  • Ezra Klein: Incoherent, authoritarian, uninformed: Trump's New York Times interview is a scary read. Charles P Pierce has a similar take on the same interview: Trump's New York Times Interview Is a Portrait of a Man in Cognitive Decline. Trump's becoming so incoherent it's impossible to discern any method in his madness. That may seem alarming, but it's giving too much credit to the office, assuming the myth of leadership that hasn't been true for many years. Even highly competent presidents -- Obama, most clearly, or Clinton or Johnson, or for that matter Eisenhower -- are often prisoners of their administrations, alliances and choices. Having approved a series of astonishingly bad personnel picks, Trump's already handed his administration over to its fate, something which will be increasingly clear as he continues to lose his grip. The best we can do under these circumstances is to refocus on what his staff actually do, and recognize the corruption and moral rot it's shot through with.

  • Paul Krugman: America Is Not Yet Lost: Still, it's been pretty bad:

    Many of us came into 2017 expecting the worst. And in many ways, the worst is what we got.

    Donald Trump has been every bit as horrible as one might have expected; he continues, day after day, to prove himself utterly unfit for office, morally and intellectually. And the Republican Party -- including so-called moderates -- turns out, if anything, to be even worse than one might have expected. At this point it's evidently composed entirely of cynical apparatchiks, willing to sell out every principle -- and every shred of their own dignity -- as long as their donors get big tax cuts.

    Meanwhile, conservative media have given up even the pretense of doing real reporting, and become blatant organs of ruling-party propaganda.

    Like Yglesias below, Krugman sees hope in the broad popular resistance that has risen up against Trump and the Republicans. Still:

    And even if voters rise up effectively against the awful people currently in power, we'll be a long way from restoring basic American values. Our democracy needs two decent parties, and at this point the G.O.P. seems to be irretrievably corrupt.

    Isn't that the rub? The Republicans have clawed their way back into power, after eight GW Bush years that by any objective standards should have been totally discrediting, precisely because most Americans (not just Republicans but many Democrats who supported Clinton) see avarice, greed, power, and corruption as the American value. That is what needs to be changed to restore decency to politics, to make democracy work for all. In that regard, I'd focus more on converting one party than both. The Republicans will change, as they always have, once the vast majority recoil against their corruption. But that won't happen until the people are presented with an honest alternative, which is what Hillary Clinton somehow failed to do in 2016.

    Krugman also wrote: Republicans Despise the Working Class and Republicans Despise the Working Class, Continued:

    Josh Barro argues that Republicans have forgotten how to talk about tax cuts. But I think it runs deeper: Republicans have developed a deep disdain for people who just work for a living, and this disdain shines through everything they do. This is true both on substance -- the tax bill heavily favors owners over workers -- and in the way they talk about it.

    I think one pretty obvious clue came when Ayn Rand groupie Paul Ryan gave a Labor Day speech extolling America's entrepreneurs ("job creators") without even mentioning the people who actually do the work. Such people regard jobs alternatively as charity or more often as a bottom line loss -- an expense best cut by automation or offshoring.

  • Sharon Lerner: Banned from the Banking Industry for Life, a Scott Pruitt Friend Finds a New Home at the EPA: Albert Kelly, head of the EPA's Superfund program -- a job he has no relevant experience for, unless fraud counts.

  • Maryam Saleh: One Year of Immigration Under Trump: My first thought a year ago was that of all the areas Trump could affect as president, the one he's likely to impact most directly, and most cruelly, is immigration. Plenty of competition, and some of his efforts have been partially stymied, but that fear has proven well grounded.

  • Mitch Smith: Fatal 'Swatting' Episode in Kansas Raises Quandry: Who Is to Blame? Big story here in Wichita also noted nationwide. A gamer in Los Angeles called police in Wichita reporting a murder and hostage situation. Police deployed a SWAT team to the prank address and shot and killed a resident.

  • Matthew Yglesias: The political lesson of 2017: resistance works: No week-in-review piece this week, but this is a fair note to strike to sum up the past year. Problem, of course, is that while resistance has halted or slowed down some very bad things, it hasn't won anything of note, while Trump and the Republicans have pushed lots of things through that will be hard if even possible to reverse. True, several attempts at "repeal and replace of Obamacare" failed, but Republicans still managed to sneak a repeal of the "individual mandate" -- never very popular but long touted as the cornerstone of any scheme to get to universal coverage through private insurance -- tacking it onto a bill that was already overwhelmingly unpopular. Where Democrats are easily cowed by any hint of unpopularity, Republicans just get more determined to use the power they have to enact the changes they want, always figuring they can con the public into giving them more power. That the electoral tide has shifted is a good sign, but in the short term will only make them more desperate. The tax bill is a prime example of taking what you can when you can, with no regard to public opinion. Indeed, the whole "smash and grab" operation known as the Trump administration is driven like that.

    Other Yglesias pieces:

    • How to Make Metro Great Again: Tinkering with the DC subway system.

    • The biggest surprise of Trump's first year is his hard-right economic policy: About the only "populist" move of Trump's early campaign was the scorn he heaped on big money donors, a luxury he enjoyed only so long as he could afford to self-finance his campaign. He eased off on that late in the campaign, secure that many voters would cut him some slack compared to the donor queen, Crooked Hillary. There never was any substance to his "economic populism" -- e.g., look at his tax cut proposals during the campaign -- and he wasted no time surrendering all the key economic positions to ultra-rich donors and their lackeys. Less successfully, he's let orthodox Republicans in Congress run his legislative agenda; in exchange, they haven't questioned his personal or political scandals, and more often than not tried to provide him cover. In the end, he lacks both the moral courage and intellectual depth to plot his own way. Hence he's turned himself into little more than a tool, a particularly rusty one at that.

    • The economy is normal again

  • Micah Zenko: How Donald Trump Learned to Love War in 2017: Well, seems to be an inescapable part of the job. In his first year, Obama may not have come to love war -- at least not as ardently as GW Bush in his first year -- but he was well on the way to becoming an enthusiastic participant. Hillary Clinton tried to convince us that she, and not Trump, the one truly prepared to be Commander-in-Chief, but all it takes is deference to the top brass to get passing marks in that test -- something she should have remembered as it was key to husband Bill's embrace of the military in his first war-loving year. The hope some had for Trump was that he would push his fondness for business deals ahead of the failed neocon agenda and realize that customary rivals like Iran, Russia, China, and even North Korea could be turned into business opportunities, benefiting American investors (if not workers).

    In reality, the Donald Trump administration has demonstrated no interest in reducing America's military commitments and interventions, nor committed itself in any meaningful way to preventing conflicts or resolving them. Moreover, as 2017 wraps up, the trend lines are actually running in the opposite direction, with no indication that the Trump administration has the right membership or motivation to turn things around.

    President Trump has maintained or expanded the wars that he inherited from his predecessor.

    As Jennifer Wilson and I pointed out in an appropriately titled column in August, "Donald Trump Is Dropping Bombs at Unprecedented Levels." Within eight months of assuming office, Trump -- with the announcement of six "precision aistrikes" in Libya -- had bombed every country that former President Barack Obama had in eight years. One month after that, the United States surpassed the 26,172 bombs that had been dropped in 2016. Through the end of December 2017, Trump had authorized more airstrikes in Somalia in one year (33), than George W. Bush and Obama had since the United States first began intervening there in early 2007 (30).

    The growth in airstrikes was accompanied by a more than proportional increase in civilian deaths, . . . But as the volume of airstrikes and deaths increased, the Trump administration has subsequently made no progress in winding down America's wars. Moreover, it doesn't even pretend that the United States should play any role in supporting diplomatic outcomes.

    While Obama was campaigning, he liked to say that he wants to change the way we think about war, but in remarkably short time it was he who changed his thinking. Trump scarcely had any thinking to change. His instinct to give the generals unstinting support locked him into Obama's failing wars. The Russia collusion scandal precludes any opening there. Obeisance to Israel and Saudi Arabia have reopened conflict with Iran. His own stupid bluster has turned North Korea into a potential nuclear confrontation. Meanwhile, he's tearing down the international institutions that offer the only path toward peace and stability.

  • TPM: 2017 Golden Dukes Winners Announced! Considering everything they had to choose from, a pretty lame selection: Scott Pruitt is guilty alone of more conspicuous corruption than anyone ranked here. Or maybe they didn't have that much to choose from? Maybe they only read TPM headlines? Rep. Duke Cunningham raked in millions and wound up in jail to get this award named.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

prev -- next